Romance Studies, Vol.

25 (4), November 2007

PARODY AND METAPOETRY IN TWO

POEMS BY GLORIA FUERTES
Hilde ten Hacken
Department of Spanish, University of St Andrews, UK
Like many of her contemporaries, the Spanish poet Gloria Fuertes (19171998) explores metapoetic
themes such as the essence of poetic language, the purpose of poetry and the role of the poet and the
reader in her work. This article considers metapoetry and the closely related concept of parody in two
of her poems, El vendedor de papeles o el poeta sin suerte, first published in 1954, and Maletilla,
from Poeta de guardia (1968). Both poems reveal her experience of being sidelined by literary critics,
which she responds to by including deliberately non-poetic language in her work, thus emphasizing
her aim of reaching ordinary people and her rejection of litist writing. On the basis of these two
poems, references to some other poems and the critical context, the article points to the different purposes
that define Fuertess poetics. One important consequence of her use of parody and metapoetry was
that she was able to include a message about the need for social change in her poetry without being
overtly didactic. In doing so, she succeeded in reaching an audience where some of the other politically
committed writers failed.
Many critics have commented on the prevalence of parody often focusing on the
intertextuality this involves and metapoetry in the work of Spanish poets writing in the
1950s and 1960s. They establish a link between a perceived crisis in poetry at the time, and
the use of such strategic tools as a vehicle to expose and confront what were regarded as
outmoded poetic conventions, which no longer attracted an audience. Gloria Fuertes
(Madrid, 19171998) was one of the poets who used parody and metapoetry to explore
new ways to express herself and engage the reader. Following a brief rsum of some
aspects of poetry from that period, the terminology used, and some characteristics of
Fuertess poetry, this article will discuss two of her poems in detail, and examine the role
and effect of parody and metapoetry in her poetics.
There were various reasons why poetry was perceived to be in a state of crisis. The
state-promoted poetry of the garcilasistas, which emerged in the early 1940s, was criticized
for its artificial aesthetics and lack of substance. The poetry that had come to be known as
poesa social was partly a critical response to that of the garcilasistas, but was increasingly
thought to be lacking in quality as it was based on imitation of the first authors of this
kind of verse, such as Celaya, Crmer and Otero. As Payeras Grau explains, a fuerza de
extenderse y repetirse la poesa social se pobl de tpicos que la empobrecieron, y el
lenguaje directo y sencillo utilizado por ella acab por ser intolerablemente prosaico.1
Address correspondence to: Hilde ten Hacken, hildetenhacken@hotmail.com
2007 Swansea University

DOI: 10.1179/174581507x235651

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Hilde ten Hacken

Furthermore, although it addressed social injustice, it had not been able to gain a readership
among the working classes. The new generation of poets, including ngel Gonzlez,
Claudio Rodrguez, Jos ngel Valente, and also Gloria Fuertes, began to reintroduce more
personal elements in their writing, and they used their work to explore metapoetic aspects
such as the purpose and unique quality of poetry.2 Such metapoetry, which can be defined
as poetry that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact3
and explores poetic theory through the practice of writing it,4 contributed to the process
of redefining poetry. This kind of self-conscious writing was a consequence of poets search
for poetic language that would attract a readership,5 and also of what Mandlove describes
as the mistrust of language perceived by poets and readers: a deep skepticism of the
capability of language to break the barriers separating one human being from another.6
The other strategy relevant here is that of parody, which, if we follow Hutcheon, is a form
of metapoetry, as it is self-referential and involves critical commentary, and therefore has a
metadiscursive level. It consists of two texts: the new composition and the parodied text
in the background, against which the new creation is implicitly to be both measured and
understood.7 The parodied text, which will be referred to as the intertext, can be another
poem, a genre, a speech act, or any other form of discourse.
Parody is a particularly useful strategy when the poet wishes to engage the reader and
give him or her a more active role in the poetic process. As Hutcheon points out, readers
have to decode the poets encoding intent, and therefore are active co-creators of the
parodic text (1985: 93). In the poetry that Gloria Fuertes writes in the 1950s and 1960s,
she frequently uses parody to draw attention to her metapoetic concerns and appeal to the
reader to participate in her poetry. The texts she imitates and then subverts are usually
non-literary, alternative discourses, such as informal letters and dialogues, forms, questionnaires, advertisements and telegrams, while she also uses the conventions of childrens verse
and fairytales. Debicki regards such intertextuality, and the surprising effects it often involves,
as the most characteristic feature of her poetry. He claims that by undercutting conventional
texts and attitudes, she reverses reader expectations, and that all of these poems depend on
the readers horizon of expectations to furnish these conventional notions, making the
reader anticipate attitudes which are then dramatically undercut within the text (1982: 87).
Two examples of such poems which are interesting for comparison, as they have
some features in common but were written at different points in Fuertess career, are El
vendedor de papeles o el poeta sin suerte, an early poem, included in Antologa y Poemas
del suburbio (1954), and Maletilla, from Poeta de guardia (1968).8
In El vendedor de papeles o el poeta sin suerte (01:52), she parodies a market vendors
street language, which functions as the intertext:
Muy barato,
para el nene y la nena,
estos cuentos de risa
y novelas de pena
aleluyas a diez!
Vendo versos,
liquido poesa,
se reciben encargos
para bodas, bautizos,
peticiones de mano ,

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341

aleluyas a diez!
No se vaya,
regalo poesa,
llvese este cuarteto
que an no me estren!
Para la madre,
para la novia,
el mejor regalo
un verso de amor!

Desperate to sell his goods, the luckless poet reduces the price of his merchandise, and
when he notices he is losing his audience, he even offers his work free of charge. Extolling
the virtues of his wares and using street-market clichs such as the notion of liquidar a
range of goods and selling unique products que an no me estren, the speaker offers
a mixture of products which are all equally cheap: childrens books, popular genres
such as novelas de pena and the aleluyas, but also the cuarteto, associated not only with
high culture but also with the traditional verse forms cultivated by the state-promoted
garcilasistas. The spoken or shouted language is interpolated with the three lines
starting with the advertising convention se reciben encargos / para, a text one might
expect to find on a placard on the vendors stall. In spite of the non-poetic vocabulary,
there is no doubt that we are dealing with a poem: the text is presented as such in a poetry
collection, it has the verse form associated with the genre, and it uses the traditional poetic
devices of rhythm and rhyme.
The effect of Fuertess metapoetic use of the street vendors words as the parodic frame
for her poem is that it debunks the special status of poetry. By setting off the mundane
market scene against the poetic structure of the text, and referring to the tradition of
selling cheap love poetry on a market, she challenges the elevated status of Poetry. While
the cuartetos may refer to what was thought of as official poetry, the poem can also be
seen to ridicule poesa social: although the poems social context is that of the working
classes, the use of parody introduces an element of light-hearted humour which is the
complete opposite of the solemn and often pompous tone of much social poetry. Although
the poem can be seen as a reference to the unpopular status of the genre in general at the
time, the luckless poet using the market as a venue is also an indirect autobiographical
reference to her own experience of being a poeta sin suerte. As a working-class,
self-taught woman poet with a completely unconventional style, she was aware of being
excluded from the select almost exclusively male world of poetry at the time. She
was still a virtually unknown writer, and the speakers idea of selling his work cheaply or
even giving it away, reflects her own wish to be read. Although the poetic persona created
in this poem is an anonymous male poet, the speaker may nevertheless be associated
with Fuertes. Both Fuertes and other commentators have frequently remarked upon the
deliberately autobiographical aspect of all her work,9 and in this case some of the poems
specific elements make it clear that Fuertes indirectly refers to herself here: she starts the
poem by mentioning childrens literature, and she herself wrote many childrens poems and
stories, while it concludes with a remark on a love poem; love both personal love and
the importance of love and friendship in the world is the overall most important theme
in her work. Finally, the texts boisterous tone reflects her own exuberant personality. By
using parody, she is able to express her discontent with being neglected as a writer in a
way that avoids sentimentalism and self-pity.

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Another reason why this poem is particularly effective as a parody, is that Fuertes saw
herself as an oral poet, and like several of the exponents of poesa social gave many
public readings of her work in bars and at local events. Reading aloud to an audience,
Fuertes would take on the role of the vendor, and the audience would be forced to act as
the vendors target and possible customers, and so become part of the text. This would
have had a shock effect on those expecting a different kind of poetry, while working-class
people would have identified immediately with the situation and have felt included in the
poem, the parodic text. Yndurin, in his Prlogo to Fuertess Antologa potica (19501969)
emphasizes the importance of the oral aspect of her poetry and the impact of her public
readings, saying that es la suya, inevitablemente, una poesa oral, y esta Antologa no puede
ser sino muy lejano eco de su verso, al faltar su interpretacin recitada.10 Elsewhere, he
discusses what he calls her madrileismo, which refers to her use of the vernacular of
Madrid and her specific sense of humour, giving local colour to many of her poems (1979:
3435). Two other poems that, in a similar tone, evoke street scenes in Madrid are Puesto
del Rastro (OI, pp. 6667) and El sacamuelas (OI, p. 240). Puesto del Rastro consists
of a vendor pronouncing a long list of objects for sale, and is reminiscent of Ramn Gmez
de la Sernas treatment of used objects in El rastro (1915); according to a footnote added
by Fuertes, el poema es una especie de autntico pregn (OI, p. 66). The speaker of El
sacamuelas uses similar commercial jargon as that in the above poem to try to sell his goods
which include pldoras mensuales, hojas de afeitar and a crecepecho to the
women walking past. As, like the vendedor, he has no luck and is ignored by the public,
the poem ends with the aside placed between brackets: y recogo y me marcho ...
An important characteristic of El vendedor ... is that it involves what Hutcheon (1985:
6) refers to as ironic inversion, which she defines as a characteristic of all parody: a specific
convention, genre or poem is replaced with its opposite, which is adapted in such a
way that it provides an ironic comment on the practice or text it refers to. She later
mentions Bakhtins theoretical observations on carnivalesque and social inversions (such as
the crowning of fools) in Rabelais and his World as a specific example of this (1985: 74).
Although Bakhtins study focuses on folk humour and carnival in the Renaissance, some
aspects of his discussion, such as the emphasis on the culture of the marketplace, the folk
parody associated with carnival, and its participative element in the above poem, the
readers involvement or the audiences participation in the poem seem particularly
relevant to Fuertess poetry.11 Sherno, who has explored the relevance of Bakhtins theory
on carnival to many of the aspects of the work of Fuertes, establishes a link between
folk humours purpose of rebelliously inverting the official order, and its relevance within
Francos oppressive regime.12 In the above poem, by encoding her message of protest
against official culture and her marginalization as a working-class woman poet within a
parodic structure, she is able to challenge prevailing ideas about poetry in general and about
her own work and role as a poet in particular.
To conclude the discussion of El vendedor ..., it is interesting to consider how its
effects are enhanced by its position within the book. As we have seen, it is irreverent in
its treatment of poetry because of its non-poetic language and the suggestion of poems as
cheap merchandise. In addition, the rhythm of the short lines and the exclamation marks
suggest a declamatory voice. Both the poems that precede and follow it carry a contrasting
message, as they both deal with poetry in a more reverential tone and refer to its special
purpose and meaning. The preceding poem, Inesperada visita (OI, pp. 5152), gives a list

Parody and Metapoetry in Two Poems by Gloria Fuertes

343

of poets who once came to see the speaker. The visit was important, as Todos venan
para salvar el mundo!. Written at a time when many poets were still confident that their
work could have a significant impact on the social and political situation in Spain, poetry
here is described as something sacred. The poem concludes with the lines: Encendimos la
lumbre del misterio / y yo los recib en mi misma celda. The association of poetry with
mystery, the seclusion of her cell, and the religious connotations of both clash with the
content of El vendedor .... The poem that follows the vendors words provides a similar
contrast. Its title, A lo mejor un da ..., has a dreamlike quality; its content deals with
the abstract, transcendent meaning of poetry, and its structure of long lines suggests a softspoken, thoughtful reading, rather than the market vendors shouting. While the concluding lines of Inesperada visita associate poetry with misterio, both the first and last lines
of A lo mejor un da ... (OI, p. 53) describe poetry as a milagro. The poem opens with
the abstract comment, apparently beginning in mid-sentence, Porque la poesa es un
milagro. / Algo que puede ser y no sabemos en qu consiste, which again clashes with
the tone and context of El vendedor .... Thus, the three poems, in spite of their colloquial
language and apparently simple messages, together make a complex metapoetic statement
about Fuertess purpose, experience and definition of poetry.
In the poem Maletilla (01:168), published fourteen years after El vendedor ..., Fuertes
again uses parody to comment on her poetry and her experience as a poet:
Maletilla de las letras
por los caminos de Espaa;
sin hacer auto-stop a los catedrticos,
ni a los coches oficiales
ni a las revistas que pagan ...
slo a los camioneros y las tascas ;
... y no me dieron ninguna oportunidad
por ser nieta de puta y basta.
Ya toreo por mi cuenta,
sin permiso salto vallas,
siete corridas ya tengo, toreadas,
quiero decir siete libros
igual que siete cornadas ,
maletilla de las letras
por los atajos de Espaa.

While El vendedor ... refers to a specific intertext, Maletilla can be regarded as a parody
of the poetic genre in general. Using colloquial language and convoluted sentences suggests
that these are thoughts that have been penned in haste rather than a well-planned structure
and complex language that are based on learning and intellect. However, a careful reading
of the poem shows that it is far from straightforward, and that it constantly requires the
reader to adjust his or her expectations. Her defiant use of language underlines the poems
metapoetic theme of her independence as a poet and her rebellious attitude towards cultural
authority. If the first poem challenged art as an elevated system, in Maletilla the special
status of those who have the power to take decisions on art are challenged.
The semantic complexity of the first line shows that we are dealing with a poem which
is not as simple as its linguistic register might suggest. The word Fuertes has chosen
to describe herself, maletilla, is well-suited to define her career and personality, and to

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introduce the poems subject: the figure of a bullfighter suggests a strong, defiant personality ready to fight, while a maletilla also suggests a self-taught bullfighter coming from the
margins, who has had to make his own way.13 However, by combining the word
with letras, she also hints at a poets struggle to subdue language in her poetry, while the
suggestion of travelling evokes a completely different meaning of the word: that of a small
maleta. The reference to travelling is relevant in that Fuertes from the 1960s onwards
gave many recitals of her work in rural parts of Spain, in order to reach those who would
otherwise be excluded from poetry.14 Finally, the word letras suggests the study of
literature, and therefore points forward to the catedrticos of the third line.
The three types of vehicle that might take her further along the road both the road
she is travelling literally and that of her career as a poet and which she wishes to ignore,
represent the three established routes towards success: recognition by academic critics,
promotion and support provided by the regime, and publication in commercially based
journals. As all three have scorned her15 because of her supposedly inferior poetic style, her
defiant language and her poor background, she turns her back on them and instead opts
for the working-class lorry drivers and the tascas, cheap bars which, like Fuertess poetry,
are often frequented by prostitutes. The angry outburst that ends the first sentence contains
the taco a word she would later use to refer to the kind of slang words she included
in her poetry16 nieta de puta. She thus confirms the prejudices against her poetry
voiced by some critics, but at the same time creates the parodic intertext of a verse line
with perfectly regular rhyme and rhythm.17 In the second sentence she elaborates the
metaphor of the self-made maletilla referred to in the title and the first line. Having
rejected established, cultural authorities, she now works independently, and can therefore
jump across the barriers set up by such authorities without being held accountable. She
continues the bullfighting metaphor18 to comment on her experience of writing poetry,
implying that although the seven books she has published so far have been a positive
achievement, siete corridas [...] toreadas, the creative process has also been a painful struggle that has left its mark: the siete cornadas. In addition to including this metaphor, this
part of the poem again makes careful use of rhythm and rhyme, and the last two lines in
particular, which refer back to the opening lines, affirm the text as a poem, in spite of the
inclusion of non-poetic register and vocabulary. By replacing the caminos of the second
line with atajos, Fuertes again makes sophisticated use of different meanings of a word.
In its meaning of shortcut, the atajos suggest back roads rather than the main road caminos, and could therefore be associated with the poets sense of being sidelined, while it
could also refer to the alternative route she takes and the different audience of los que
no compran libros (see note 14) she seeks to address. On the other hand, an atajo is also
a word or sentence crossed out in a text, which at the time would have been linked
to censorship. The suggestion here is that by reading her poetry to working-class people
in provincial backwaters, she can avoid the atajos associated with official, mainstream
culture. The poem, through its use of language, the parodic references to the poetic genre,
and its challenging vocabulary that reverses the readers expectations of the genre, derides
the special status of poetry, promoted and upheld by specific cultural institutions.
Hutcheon raises an interesting point about the link she perceives between parody and
cultural sophistication, and which is relevant in the light of the discussion of the above
poems. As she explains, historians of parody agree that parody prospers in periods of
cultural sophistication that enable parodists to rely on the competence of the reader (viewer,

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345

listener) of the parody (1985: 19). Later, she further clarifies this by saying that parody
is a sophisticated genre in the demands it makes on its practitioners and interpreters.
The encoder, then the decoder, must effect a structural superimposition of texts that
incorporates the old into the new (p. 33). What this implies, of course, is the potential
for litism in parody (p. 94). Fuertes, however, in the above poems subverts the notion
of parody as an elitist form of writing by applying this sophisticated process to texts
that are from everyday, non-intellectual situations. Rather than writing language that only
academics can comprehend, she uses street language, the parodic connotations of which are
immediately clear to the non-educated reader. Fuertes, then, seems to include parody itself
associated with elitist, high-brow erudition among the targets of her parody. If, as
Hutcheon claims, the frequent use of parody indicates a period of cultural sophistication,
this could add another facet to the subversive nature of the poets work: she not only turns
on its head the assumption that poetry and parody are for sophisticated, academic readers,
but also, in a sense, ridicules the rhetoric of the Franco regime and its claims that the peace
brought about by Franco had allowed the arts and learning to flourish, by writing parody
which alludes to the opposite of intellectualism and cultural sophistication.19
Although Gloria Fuertes developed her own, recognizable style, her use of apparently
non-poetic language, reflecting her challenging stance towards both traditional, elitist poetic
conventions and social standards, is a characteristic of the work of many of her contemporaries, not only in Spain, but also in Spanish America. One poet worth considering in this
respect is the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, who developed the poetics of antipoetry. Fuertes
herself refers to this term in two of her poems, and several critics have drawn parallels
between her work and that of Parra.20 The word antipoetry itself suggests opposition
towards poetry expressed within a poem, and, therefore, parody as it is referred to here.
Other characteristics of Parras antipoetry, such as its orality, its colloquial language and
emphasis on mundane reality are also prevalent in Fuertess poetry, and indeed she herself
refers to the term in two poems. In spite of such similarities, however, I would argue that
her work and that of Parra are very different, in terms of both style and purpose, and would
therefore be reluctant to describe Fuertess work as antipoetry. Parra avoids any devices
associated with traditional lyric poetry, while Fuertes uses them in order to parody
the poetic genre. As we have seen, Maletilla incorporates many elements traditionally
associated with poetry, which make the non-poetic language stand out. Such elements
include the metaphors of the bullfighter to refer to herself and the bullfights to represent
the process of writing, the inclusion of different types of rhyme and rhythm, and repetition.
An even more important difference between the two poets is that of their intent. Both
agree that the poet has to put himself or herself at the same level as the reader, what Parra
refers to as bajar del Olimpo, but according to Parra, poetry has no other function than
to expose the banality of life:
El antipoeta [...] es todo menos un visionario; es, por fin, el hombre de la calle a quien le pasan
las cosas, es el hombre de hoy y de ayer, el hombre de medio siglo que ve lo absurdo, lo feo
y lo brutal de todo lo que le rodea y que es existencialmente incapaz de darle sentido al
caos. Hace, por tanto, lo que hacemos todos: encogernos de hombros y seguir adelante.21

As the final poem of Poemas y antipoemas concludes: Pero no: la vida no tiene sentido
(1998: 116). To Fuertes, however, life does have meaning, as is clear, for example, from
the many references to her faith in her poetry,22 and her poetry does have a moral and

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didactic purpose, pointed out, for instance, in the poem Inesperada visita, referred to
above, where the poets have gathered para salvar el mundo. Although she sides with an
uneducated, working-class audience, she nevertheless sees herself as a visionary, who interprets the milagro mentioned in the poem A lo mejor un da .... Therefore, while
Fuertess work has elements of Parras antipoetry, rather than shrugging her shoulders and
turning away from the ugliness she sees around her, she uses her poetry to expose and
challenge what she perceives as injustice, whether this is social or personal. Ultimately,
poetry is sacred to her, and through her parodic sacrilege of established notions about
poetry and its reception, rather than merely bringing it down, she purifies it.
As the above discussion of El vendedor de papeles o el poeta sin suerte and Maletilla
has shown, Gloria Fuertes uses parody and metapoetry in order to involve the reader in an
artistic process that confronts the critical situation of poetry, sides with the working classes,
and addresses her personal experience of being marginalized as an uneducated woman poet.
In other poems her purpose is to expose social injustice, or deal with themes such as the
divine and the all-importance of love. Because her poetry has such specific objectives, and
therefore often takes on the role of an instrument aimed at bringing about change, it is at
risk of becoming overtly didactic. This was, in fact, one of the main objections against
writers of social poetry such as Celaya and Otero in the 1940s and 1950s, and therefore
one of the causes of the perceived demise of poetry. As Debicki (1982: 12) points out, it
is exactly the kind of artistic use of their apparently common language consisting of
strategies including parody and metapoetry that prevented the work by Gloria Fuertes
and others such as ngel Gonzlez from becoming too plain and prosaic. He later says
about Fuertess poetry that it is the use of intertextuality and the reversal of reader
expectations that prevent the poem from becoming a didactic message, and instead turn it
into a vivid poetic experience (1982: 87). Cooks (2000: 428) adds to this that, while poets
were seeking to engage an audience which, in general, had turned its back on poetry,
unlike Fuertes, most poets continued to maintain a metapoetic discussion amongst
themselves (2000: 430). Presenting the poet as a market vendor or a self-made bullfighter
who shuns mainstream poetry and its critics, then, Fuertes parodically transgresses the limits
of traditional, accepted poetry, and invites the reader educated or not to become
part of the creative process.
1 Mara Payeras Grau, Poesa espaola de postguerra (Palma de Mallorca: Prensa Universitaria, 1986), p. 59.
Many critics have dealt with the subject of poesa social and post-war poetry in general. An interesting
approach is that of Eleanor Wright, The Poetry of Protest Under Franco (London: Tamesis Books, 1986), as
it seeks to distinguish between different kinds of socially and politically motivated poetry. Leopoldo de
Luiss anthology, Poesa social espaola contempornea. Antologa (19391968) (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2000),
provides a comprehensive picture of the rise, development and end of poesa social.
2 Although Gloria Fuertes was born earlier than the other poets, she is generally included in the Generacin
de los 50, or the Generation of 19561971, as Debicki defines it, because she did not start publishing poetry
until the 1950s and her poetry has some of the characteristics of the other poets mentioned. See Andrew
P. Debicki, Poetry of Discovery: The Spanish Generation of 19561971 (Kentucky: The University Press of
Kentucky, 1982), p. 18.
3 As there is little agreement among theorists about the exact meaning of the terminology referred to
here, I will use the definitions that I have found most useful. The one quoted here is in fact an adaptation
of Patricia Waughs definition of metafiction. Although her study deals with fiction rather than poetry,
much of it is useful for an understanding of other forms of metadiscourse and parody. See Patricia Waugh,
Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2003),
p. 2.

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347

4 See Waugh (2003: 2) and Leopoldo Snchez Torre, La poesa en el espejo del poema: La prctica metapotica
en la poesa espaola del siglo XX (Oviedo: Departamento de Filologa Espaola, 1993), p. 99.
5 Maria L. Cooks, The Humanization of Poetry: An Appraisal of Gloria Fuertes, Hispania, 83 (2000),
42836, p. 428.
6 Nancy Mandlove, Used Poetry: The Trans-Parent Language of Gloria Fuertes and ngel Gonzlez,
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispnicos, 7 (1983), 30106, p. 301.
7 See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York and
London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 1 and 31.
8 Both poems are included in Gloria Fuertes, Obras incompletas (Madrid: Ctedra, 1999), pp. 52 and 168,
which contains all her poetry collections published between 1954 and 1973. Further references to this
book will be made as OI, followed by the page number.
9 In Obras incompletas, for instance, she claims that mi obra, en general, es muy autobiogrfica, reconozco
que soy muy yosta, muy glorista (OI, p. 22). Jos Luis Cano, who knew her personally, asserts that
conocer su poesa es conocerla a ella en persona, porque la poesa de Gloria Fuertes es fiel reflejo de ella
misma, and Gonzlez Rodas says that una caracterstica primordial de la obra de Gloria es el elemento
autobiogrfico; para conocer su vida basta leer su obra. See Jos Luis Cano, La poesa de Gloria Fuertes,
nsula, 296 (1969), 89; and Pablo Gonzlez Rodas, Introduccin, in Historia de Gloria (Amor, humor y
desamor), by Gloria Fuertes (Madrid: Ctedra, 2004), p. 33.
10 Francisco Yndurin, Prlogo, in Gloria Fuertes, Antologa potica (19501969) (Barcelona: Plaza y Jans,
1979), pp. 945.
11 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Massachusetts: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
1968), pp. 37.
12 Sylvia Sherno, Weaving the World: The Poetry of Gloria Fuertes (Mississippi: University of Mississippi,
2001), p. 198.
13 The RAE dictionary gives the following definition of maletilla: Persona joven que, desasistida de
medios y de ayudas, aspira a abrirse camino en el toreo comenzando a practicarlo, a veces, en las ganaderas o procurando intervenir en tientas, capeas, becerradas, etc. The image of the maletilla recurs in the
poem Ella pide una oportunidad in Mujer de verso en pecho. Here, the figure of the maletilla personifies
paradoxically la Paz. Referring again to the forlorn, self-made and marginalized aspects of the
maletilla, the poem opens with the lines:
Como un maletilla, ella.
(Ella es la Paz.)
Va destrozada,
mal vestida,
delgada,
acerico de balas,
rasguo de metralla.
It concludes with the comment
La Paz,
como un maletilla
slo peda una oportunidad.
Like Fuertes, for whom world peace became an increasingly important theme in her later work, La Paz
is marked by her past of poverty and war experience, and feels a compelling need to be noticed. See
Gloria Fuertes, Mujer de verso en pecho (Madrid: Ctedra, 2003), p. 161.
14 In her Prlogo to Obras incompletas she says: Voy por los pueblos, aldeas y provincias de Espaa. A
los que no compran libros (porque all no llega el libro, o el dinero, o la alfabetizacin), yo, humildemente,
les llevo mi libro vivo, en mi voz, cascada rota, en mi cuerpo, cansado y gil (OI, p. 31).
15 Although this was the case when she started publishing in the 1950s, she was in fact increasingly
recognized as a poet in the 1960s, due to the inclusion of her first anthology, ... Que ests en la tierra
(Barcelona: Jaime Salinas Seix y Barral Hnos., 1962) in Castellets prestigious Colliure series of poetry
books.

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16 In the metapoem ... Si a veces hablo mal she explains her use of tacos as a response to being ignored
as a poet:
... Si a veces hablo mal,
es porque me dejan
como un mueble,
como una mesa cojitranca me dejan,
sin equilibrio
me tambaleo,
y me tengo que calzar con un taco
Coo!
Aunque se horroricen los eruditos
Leche!
Gloria Fuertes, Historia de Gloria (Amor, humor y desamor) (Madrid: Ctedra, 2004), pp. 14748.
17 She was frequently criticized for her non-poetic, apparently simplistic style by reviewers of her poetry
readings. Although such reviews are now difficult to trace, an example I found in Gloria Fuertess
own collection of articles about her readings which, as is understandable, mainly consists of positive
reviews is an article by Juan Carlos Molero in a Madrid newspaper, published in November 1967. It
summarizes the negative criticism of many contemporary critics: according to his judgement, her poetry
es una poesa muy irregular. Junto a poemas francamente buenos tiene otros que ..., en fin, que no lo
son tanto. Falta criba, rigor, seleccin. Gloria Fuertes tiene, adems [...] mucha, demasiada, facilidad
versificadora y ello le lleva, cuando se descuida, al retrucano y al juego de ingenio. The rhythm and
rhyme of the line por ser nieta de puta y basta would deliberately confirm and therefore parody and
subvert such criticism (source: Fundacin Gloria Fuertes, Madrid).
18 In addition to the maletillas referred to in this poem and in note 13, Fuertes frequently refers to
bullfights in general in her poetry. According to Sherno, in her discussion of carnival mentioned above,
such references have special significance in her work, as they enable her to refer to an alternative world
with its own set of rules, removed from officialdom, where she can express her rebellion: They represent
the enactment of communal spectacles which sustain their own rules while momentarily suspending those
of the official social structure (2001: 208).
19 An example of such rhetoric can be found in Luis Lpez Angladas anthology of poetry, published as
part of the celebrations of the veinticinco aos de paz in 1964. In the highly propagandist introduction
to his anthology, he claims that the peaceful, stable environment created by Franco had facilitated a climate
of hope and possibilities in which poetry had been produced that is of a far better quality and much more
sophisticated than that of, for instance, the Generacin del 27, o de la Dictadura, or that of the poetas
de la Espaa viajera. Luis Lpez Anglada, Panorama potico espaol (Historia y Antologa 19341964) (Madrid:
Editora Nacional, 1965), pp. 78.
20 One of her poems has the title Antipoema? (OI, p. 273), and in another, self-descriptive, poem,
Minicursi, se refers to herself as antipoeta (OI, p. 329). The influence of Parras work on Fuertess poetry
is suggested in Chris Perriam et al., A New History of Spanish Writing 1939 to the 1990s (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 158, and by Sherno (2001: 8891).
21 Ren de Costa, Para una potica de la (anti)poesa, in Poemas y antipoemas, by Nicanor Parra (Madrid:
Ctedra, 1998), pp. 20 and 38.
22 The God she refers to in her work mirrors the colloquial, everyday setting of her writing. Like the
poet, He puts himself at the same level as ordinary people. One Oracin (OI, pp. 4748), for instance,
which is a respectful parody of the padrenuestro, begins with Que ests en la tierra Padre nuestro, and
recognizes the presence of God in everyday, mundane situations.