José Manuel Poveda

Cuban writer, author of the poem "El grito abuelo", included in the book Versos precursores (1917), considered as the precursor of Negrismo.

He was born in Santiago de Cuba. He completed primary school in Santo Domingo (República Dominicana), where his family had moved during the War of Independence, in Guantánamo (Oriente) and in Santiago de Cuba. At eleven years of age he wrote the manuscript weekly publication titled Cuba.

His first printed work, of political humor, was probably published in La Voz del Pueblo or El Managüí. In 1902, already in Santiago de Cuba with his family, he began high school. With Marco Antonio Dolz and other students, he founded that same year the magazine El Estímulo. He moved to La Habana in 1904. At the Institute of the capital he continued high school and republished El Estímulo (1905), where he published his first printed poem. He also collaborated in Arpas Cubanas.

Returning to Santiago de Cuba that same year of 1905, he edited Ciencias y Letras, in which he held the position of editor-in-chief, the organ of the Santiago institute, and worked as an agent of El Estímulo from La Habana. He collaborated in El Progreso (Gibara, Oriente), Urbi et Orbe (La Habana) and La Liga (Santiago de Cuba), and was correspondent for El Moderado (Matanzas) and La Opinión (Cienfuegos, Las Villas).

He edited, in 1906, El Gorro Frigio, a comic-satirical weekly. That same year he works as editor-in-chief of the magazine Oriente in which he oversees the section "Baturrillo" and graduates as a bachelor. A year later he is editor-in-chief of Revista de Santiago, collaborates in Cuba y América and begins his interesting and fruitful epistolary relationship with Regino E. Boti.

He was in charge of editing Heraldo Nacionalista. In 1908 he began working in Dr. Rovira's law office to acquire professional experience. That same year he moved again to La Habana. He collaborates in El Pensil (1908-1910) and later in Renacimiento (1910), from Santiago de Cuba, through the sections "Vida literaria" and "Página extranjera", in which he published his unsigned works and made known news from other authors or translations of foreign writers.

During that time he was the main animator of a literary circle made up of writers with renovating intentions who met in a house located at Calvario No. 18, in Santiago de Cuba, where the Dominican Sócrates Nolasco lived. Besides the already mentioned, Fernando Torralba, Alberto Giraudy, Luis Vázquez de Cuberos, among others, were part of this group.

He collaborated in La Independencia (1909-1911). In La Habana, in 1912, Poveda founded the Society of Literary Studies, in which he delivered lectures. Two years later, with this society gone, he founded the National Group of Art Action, in which he also spread culture through his lectures. He also collaborated in Camagüey Ilustrado, Oriente Literario, Minerva (La Habana), El Estudiante (Matanzas), Orto (Manzanillo) from its beginnings in 1912, El Fígaro, Letras, El Cubano Libre, Juvenil, Mercurio (Cienfuegos), Heraldo de Cuba, Cuba Contemporánea, El Estudiante (Santa Clara), El Sol (Marianao, La Habana), Labor Nueva (La Habana), La Defensa (Manzanillo).

That last year he suffered brief imprisonment accused of disrespecting the president of the Republic in one of his "Crónicas". In 1921, after having pursued his university studies irregularly, he graduated as Doctor of Civil Law from the University of La Habana. That same year he set up his professional law office. In mid-1923 he devoted himself entirely to the practice of his profession. He worked as alternate judge in Manzanillo.

For years, through the periodical publications with which he was more or less linked and through his enthusiastic work as lecturer and translator, Poveda carried out extensive work in the dissemination of literature and culture in general and addressed topics of the country's political current events in multiple journalistic chronicles.

He died in Manzanillo, on January 2, 1926. After his death, his wife burned all of Poveda's unpublished works, including some translations and a novel.

Active Bibliography
His lyrical work, together with that of Regino Boti and Agustín Acosta, constitutes the most important legacy of the first years of the Republic.

Of his books: Versos precursores (1917) and Proemios de cenáculo (1918), the first was the most significant, and marked a decisive moment of renewal in Cuban poetry, where his best poem "Sol de los humildes" is included. With "El trapo heroico" he dealt in a non-triumphalist way, but with deep national sentiment, the matters of the War of Independence. In "El grito abuelo" many have wanted to see an antecedent of the later current of "negro poetry" or "Afro-Cuban poetry".

His interest in singing about urban environments stands out, a trend in vogue in Cuban poetry in the 1910s.

He left important works of an essayistic character. His poems have appeared in various national and foreign anthologies. Some have been translated into English, German and Russian.

He is the author of several short stories. The manuscripts of his novel "Senderos de montaña" were destroyed by his wife.

He translated texts by Henri de Regnier, Lorrain, Rodenbach, Bonville, Augusto de Armas, Stewart Merrill, among others.

He used the pseudonyms Mirval de Eteocles, Filián de Montalver, Darío Notho, Raúl de Nangis, Fabio Stabia and Alma Rubens, the most important of all, with which he signed a group of poems under the title "Poemetos de Alma Rubens".

Poveda was a mestizo who revealed himself not only as a poet but as a critical observer of his time, reflecting it from his social condition as a marginalized and maladjusted person in a system that alienates and frustrates him:
"After all it would be useless: I could not dispense with myself. And for now, there is really no possible action. We are shackled by double chains. We are not independent. We are but a colonial factory, forced to work, and to give its harvest and its fruit compelled by the whip. We are disorganized and debased like a bad retinue; we cannot defend ourselves. A breath of dispersal has swept away consciences, and all that had dignity, purity and valor in consciences; a breath of disillusionment has disrupted all the creative energies of the national soul. We are the shadow of a people, the dream of a democracy, the longing for freedom. We do not exist."

His rebelliousness tried to find a course of action through the National Group of Art Action, an intellectual association that aspired to preserve the highest values of national culture, as a premise for forming a new homeland supported by the revolutionary thought of Antonio Maceo, which had criticized the autonomists for the type of society that precisely ruled in the Republic of the first twenty-five years, an exclusive society, that did not give participation to the humble, nor allowed independence to be total.

The clarity of Poveda's ideas remains in his writings as a continuation of this line of thought of frustration and rebellion before the reality he lived, which is why he expresses himself in hard and bitter terms, although without finding a solution:
"Foreign intervention, frustrating the sacrifice, frustrated the homeland. 'Among us' there is distance and 'above us' influences. The sacrifice was frustrated and only the autonomists have triumphed. The Peace of San Juan is equivalent to the Peace of Zanjón. With the difference that in Baraguá no one has protested this time"

This is the revealing testimony of a man "(…) that expresses, (…) the state of uncertainty and unease in which the national consciousness was struggling after 1912, beyond the partisan passions of the era"

Despite his brief existence, he left an interesting poetic legacy that, sustained by his constant innovative concerns, anticipated some of the main aesthetic currents that would later flourish brilliantly in Cuban literature, such as negrista poetry (or Afro-Antillean), prosaicism and conversational tone lyric. Because of the sum of these genuine poetic intuitions, united with his prolific journalistic production, José Manuel Poveda is considered one of the great renovators of Cuban Letters of the 20th century, in company with other relevant authors such as Regino Eladio Boti and Agustín Acosta.

Inclined from his early youth to literary creation and the study of humanistic disciplines, he pursued higher studies in Law at the University of La Habana and graduated as a lawyer, although he barely practiced this profession, partly due to his enthusiastic dedication to writing, and partly also because of the dissolute life he led during his turbulent youth, a dissipation that considerably weakened his physical strength and led him to a premature death.

José Manuel Poveda's first poetic compositions, clearly influenced by the lyrical accent of Rubén Darío, fit within that post-modernism (or "twilight modernism") that spread throughout the entire creative scope of Spanish America during the first two decades of the 20th century, with lucid and brilliant exponents such as the Mexican Ramón López Velarde, the Argentine Baldomero Fernández Moreno or the Colombian Luis Carlos López. Inherent in this extended wake of modernism, Poveda's poetic creation was distinguished by its marked symbolist character, heir to the best French tradition that, in his day, the modernist poets properly so-called had known how to take advantage of. However, the greatest interest of his work lies in the compositions that, alongside the recently mentioned ones, escape the powerful influence of preceding Spanish American poetry to glimpse new aesthetic possibilities that, in the end, will triumph in the various manifestations of the Avant-Garde or in later poetic tendencies. All of this inserted in an admirable formal finish of free verse, the prose poem and other innovations that, little by little, moved him away from the themes and molds proper to modernism.

Particularly significant may be, within the inspired anticipations of Poveda's poetry, the procedure of inventing a series of apocryphal authors in whom the Santiago writer projected his greatest renovating efforts, anticipating -without knowing or intending it- that wizard of heteronyms that was the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa. Thus, for example, the supposed poetess Alma Rubens -"discovered" by José Manuel Poveda in 1912- stands out both for her uninhibited and transgressive lyric, capable of attacking without prejudice the most musty values of established morality, and for her impetuous anticipation, by two years, of the birth of the first heteronyms of the Lisbon bard.

The early disappearance of José Manuel Poveda meant that the Cuban poet only published in his lifetime one volume of verses, presented under the intentional and significant epigraph of Versos precursores (Manzanillo: Imprenta el Arte, 1917). The rest of his poetic work, as well as much of his more extensive prose production, appeared in different works published many years after his death, intended to gloss the figure of the poet and disseminate his writings that had remained unpublished. Thus, in the middle of the 20th century the book titled Proemios de cenáculo (La Habana: Ministerio de Educación, Dirección de Cultural, 1948) saw the light, in which the evocation of the poet of Santiago de Cuba is carried out by Rafael Esténger. A quarter century later, the volume titled Órbita de José Manuel Poveda (La Habana: UNEAC, 1975) came off the press, with a selection of his best texts made by Alberto Rocasolano, who also signs a biographical sketch and a bibliography of Poveda. At the beginning of the eighties, the aforementioned Rocasolano introduced the critical edition of his Prosas (La Habana: Ed. Letras Cubanas, 1980 and 1981), and a few years later did the same with his Obra poética (La Habana: Ed. Letras Cubanas, 1988).

Source: MCNBiografias.com