In Ita ha'eñoso / Ya no está sola la piedra Formerly and Again Known as
Pyambu / Dream Pattering Soles a voice mournfully asserts "I appear"
and the world begins. Miguelángel Meza's words are signifiers without
hierarchy within the lyric structure that reference the cosmological
Mbyá Guaraní narratives. Thus, the origin of earth is traced to the
utterance of the first ñe'ë, or word-soul. Meza's authorial style and
references to a millenary Amerindian culture jointly point to another
way of conceiving the world. The counterintuitive way that he renders
the individual out of the communal is reminiscent of the Paraguayan
embroidery technique, ñandutí, which means spider's web. Threads
extracted from, rather than woven into, a fabric trace a geometric
pattern. He imitates this practice by claiming authorship through his
lyric synthesis of a communal narrative. The poet seems to say through
those that came before him: identity lies in erasure, not mark-making.
This is #17 in UDP's Señal series for contemporary Latin American
poetry.