Carlos Edmundo de Ory
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Carlos Edmundo de Ory was born in 1923 in the Spanish city of Cadiz and is a Spanish avant-garde poet.
Ory was fundamental in modernizing post-Spanish Civil War poetry by creating work that engaged major twentieth-century European avant-gardes such as Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. He, along with Eduardo Chicharro, was the founder of the Postism movement.
Postism consisted of a loose group of writers creating work that valued language play and was set against the neo-romanticism of Spain’s official literary culture. Among the writers associated with the movement are Ángel Crespo, Gloria Fuertes, Juan Eduardo Cirlot, and Gabriel Celaya. Ory twice tried to bring out a literary journal to advance the work and tenets of Postism, but on both occasions the journal was censored by the fascist government of Franco and not allowed to be distributed.
In the face of so much opposition, Postism was short lived and faded into obscurity with Ory himself continuing to write and publish far from the public view. He ended up leaving Spain for France in the 1960s to escape the suffocating literary and political environment. It was only in the 1970s that poets and critics (particularly Catalonian poet and critic Jaume Pont) essentially re-discovered Postism and Ory. Since that time, both Ory and the movement have been increasingly recognized and influential on the Spanish literary landscape.
Ory’s role in Spain is analogous to that of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets in the United States: he opened Spanish poetry up to new possibilities of poetic language and content. In fact, Ginsberg, along with Edith Grossman, translated a volume of Ory’s poetry, though the book never made it into circulation. Ginsberg also dedicated a poem to Ory in his book Cosmopolitan Greetings. For almost six decades Ory has been one of Spain’s most innovative and original writers, publishing numerous works of poetry and criticism. He currently lives with his wife, artist Laura Lachéroy, in the village of Thézy-Glimont in France. His English-language translator is Steven J. Stewart.
[edit] Selected works
- Melos Melancolía (Ediciones Igitur, 2003)
- Antología (de Bolsillo, 2001)
