this is Duende

This elusive, beautifully artful Duende.

I tell you, it's everywhere here -- I'm surrounded by the term. Consequently, I have to write it out.
First everyone's talking about Lorca in my workshop. Then the chair of the English dept. mentioned it at a memorial service for Patricia Goedicke last month. Then I see it on a license plate in town. And, finally, I came upon a Jack Gilbert poem titled "Duende" (in Refusing Heaven).

The theory of Duende, from Lorca's essays (and also, it seems, entire collections of poetry) seems wonderfully evocative. I mean well, I just haven't gotten past first paragraphs of any essays describing the term and its usage. Perhaps it will remain in the ponderous recesses of my mind for a while... I'll get around to it.

May I divulge my impulse to quote other people in lieu of discovering Duende myself? Below, a selection from "More Theories of the Duende & Teaching the Inexplicable" by Terrance Hayes, http://www.uidaho.edu/fugue/Duende.htm, includes talk of Wallace Stevens -- so it seems that I and Duende will get along fantastically:

It's also ironic that much of Stevens' poetry reflects a cool (damn-near cold-blooded) sense of Duende. (That is, if Duende can be cool.) Here are the closing stanzas of “God is Good. It is Beautiful Night” from his 1947, book Transport to Summer :

In your light, the head is speaking. It reads the book.
It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial
Rendezvous,

Picking thin music on the rustiest string,
Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump
Of summer.

The venerable song falls from your fiery wings.
The song of the great space of your age pierces
The fresh night.


Words like and “scholar” and “celestial” and “venerable” might cool the fires the Duende present here, but they don't stamp it out. He seems to have found his way to Duende not through spontaneous passion or social conviction but through language. “In your [moon] light, the head is speaking.” The way syntax allows him to shift from image to image building elaborate associations in lines like “It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial /Rendezvous, // Picking thin music on the rustiest string, / Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump / Of summer.” Perhaps this makes him a kind of surrealist, but his frequently dark tones and images make him a kind of (unlikely) disciple of Duende.