ABSTRACT
Using the figure of the “islote” (islet) in Antonio S. Pedreira’s Insularismo ([1934] 1973), this essay reflects on the representation of outlying islands of the Puerto Rican archipelago in two innovative small-press poetry books: Joanne Kyger’s Desecheo Notebook (1971) and Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s Amoná (2013). In doing so, it seeks an alternative both to traditional nation- and island-centered approaches to Puerto Rican and Caribbean poetics and to important contemporary figurations of an archipelagic Caribbean (Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel). Both Kyger and Delgado link the craggy and inhospitable space of the islote to the materiality of the page and the book, stressing the irreproducible and embodied dimensions of space and ultimately critiquing the monumentality and exteriority of the largely masculinist, urban, and homosocial political poetry communities with which they have been uneasily associated (for Kyger, the New American Poetry of the 1960s, and for Delgado, the poesía urbana or urban poetry of 2000s Puerto Rico). The formal experiments and gendered remappings of colonial space in their writings pose important challenges for the burgeoning field of ecopoetics, which has largely focused on narrative approaches as it struggles to confront and rewrite geographies of empire. It concludes with two of the author’s own poems that creatively theorize an islote poetics. Both poems are transcriptions of video improvisations recorded while walking along the northern tip of Randalls Island, off the South Bronx, a setting that tests the limits of islote poetics by highlighting the author’s complex diasporic position.
