María
Negroni

María Negroni is one of the most daring, original, and prolific writers in Argentina today. She is part of a rather small cohort of poets, novelists, and essayists bent on defying the surprisingly stable and narrow aesthetic boundaries of the established national literary tradition. Her literature expands our understanding of forms, archives, and writerly practices, placing them in close relation to music, the visual arts, the natural sciences, urban itineraries, and the histories of political activism and feminism. She is decidedly interested in exploring the limits of poetic language in order to reveal its precarious and unsettled potential before, beyond, underneath, and after the page, the book, and even the literary as social event. Without a doubt, over the last three decades, Negroni has produced one of the most consistent and singular literary projects across genres in Latin American letters. 

Negroni’s books are conceived as sites of radical experimentation and generic dislocation. In her novels, poetic musicality and metaphoricity provide the structure of narrative plots (for example, her latest novel, the impeccable El corazón del daño, is written in epigrammatic fragments articulated through the prosodic logic of the long poem). Her essays, from Museo negro to El arte del error, probe aesthetic and cultural questions, reframe texts and traditions, and invite readers to engage in modes of knowing and experiencing mediated by imagination and sensible experiences. Negroni’s measured, precise, subtle poetry (never crowded or profuse) interrogates the caesura where subject and language dislocate one another, because, for her, “the house of poetry is made of absolute and bleak forcefulness” (El testigo lúcido). Her poems and poetic prose heed the echoes of the voices that haunt them, whose phantasmatic presence delineates the aesthetic space where Negroni’s literature finds its home: Mary Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Marianne Moore, H.D., John Cage, Alejandra Pizarnik, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Susana Thénon, Anne Sexton, Juan Gelman, Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, Louise Glück, and many others. 

But perhaps her most original books are the miscellaneous, hybrid, strange, bewitching, and unclassifiable projects, artifacts, boxes, display cabinets, and Wunderkammern that showcase archaic, minute, unsubmissive, queer, or misplaced objects, images, and linguistic forms; they are galleries of excentric pieces she collects, rearranges, and resignifies. In some of them, like Pequeño mundo ilustrado, Archivo Dickinson, or Objeto Satie, rather than varied and heterogeneous collections, she creates the aesthetic, imagined archives of some of her beloved precursors. Rather than monumentalizing and deifying these modernist heroes, her sophisticated formal experiments dislocate their authorial figures and open up a space for the interaction between the ghostly afterlives of the avant-garde and contemporary inquiries into the potential of aesthetic experimentation. 

Of all the modernist artists Negroni has appropriated and reinvented to produce new verbal and visual poetry on her own terms, the one that has most affected her conception of literary form—and whose conceptual art and urban affect has helped her occupy the uniquely decentered and decentering place she has in Argentine literature today—is the New York visual artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell. In Elegía Joseph Cornell, she translates, rewrites, appropriates, illustrates, and repurposes scenes from Cornell’s films made with found footage (with one recurring photogram of a long-haired, Godiva-like girl on a horse); his wooden shadow boxes containing assembled surrealist, non-narrative, childhood, aviary, and hotel scenes; his mail art; his biography; and his haphazard urban walks looking for thrift shops, in search of forgotten, obsolete, ruinous objects, discarded photographs, and sheer refuse with dormant aesthetic potential. Negroni explains that she fell in love with Cornell’s transformation of everything New York City discarded into “boxes that he assembled, peripatetically, as poetic theaters one could inhabit, places where I could stay and live.” In Elegía (but also in a great number of books and projects before and after Elegía), Negroni turns Cornell’s practice of intervening and repurposing found, scrapped objects into the grammar of her own poetic project; into a melancholic constructive principle of montage and rewriting that she activates time and time again in her extraordinary novels, poems, translations, and aesthetic inquiries into literary forms. 

Text: Mariano Siskind