Poets of the people’s life and word. Regarding an epistolary exchange between José Portogalo and José Pedroni in 1953

Abstract

Based on an epistolary exchange between the poet from Santa Fe, José Pedroni, and the Buenos Aires artist José Portogalo at the beginning of 1953 and from two notes that Portogalo later published in Noticias Gráficas and in Propósitos, first, this work aims to investigate this meeting between the two poets within the framework of the formation in the 50s of a group of communist poetics that brought together poets from the provinces and the metropolitan center and had an impact on the reconfiguration of the central and peripheral spaces of the sector of the communist left of the literary field. Secondly, it will seek to analyze the mechanisms of self-figuration that are put into play in the autobiographical story that Pedroni makes in the framework of the letters, which tend to emphasize his place as “poet of the people” and “rural poet”, and the selection that Portogalo makes of the “data” that Pedroni provides him in the notes that he subsequently publishes according to an imaginary of the relationship life and work in which the experience of poverty, humility and effort is affirmed as the foundation of work’s value.