Wandering Writing and the Poetics of Failure in Ángel Ortuño's Gas lacrimógeno y otras cosas que no son poemas

Abstract

The generation of Mexican poets born at the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s is a generation that shares as a life history the experience of the recurrent economic and institutional crises of the 1970s and 1980s, while at the aesthetic level it inherits the critical and experimental spirit of the avant-garde. The result is a group of poets whose writing seeks to desacralize the status of the poem as an expression of distrust in the discourses of a failed institutionality. This type of writing, which relies on putting the legibility of the poetic object into crisis, poses a challenge to critics, so this paper explores Julio Prieto's concept of "wandering writing" as a tool for studying this type of expression. The book Gas lacrimógeno y otras cosas que no son poemas, by the writer Ángel Ortuño, whose work, as we try to demonstrate, configures a particular poetics of failure, characterized by a self-ironic discourse that exhibits and celebrates its own deviation from the institutionalized poetic norm.