Thinking Revolution: The Decolonial Instant in Ernesto Cardenal's Documentary Poems

This essay offers an engagement with Ernesto Cardenal's documentary poems and analyzes the tension between the yearning for instantaneous social change and temporal development, as well as the larger question about how poetry (in this case documentary poems)-beyond the sterile debate of its status as knowledge-can help us think of revolution as both an immediate event and historical process. The decolonial instant, rather than positing an "eternal moment" of lyric encounter, is conceptualized instead as the moment when the continuum of history convulses, ruptures, and is thereby dialectically remade. Far from being eternal "spots of time" (to borrow Wordsworth's influential formulation), decolonial poems that exhibit sudden temporal eruptions call attention to the genesis of historical consciousness. We may refer to this bursting forth as the collapse of the poem's historicity-its diachrony or horizontality-onto the poem's synchrony or verticality, an eruption that thus foregrounds both its situatedness in history and its lyric immediacy. This is particularly true for documentary poetry, a genre that is intimately concerned with the production of history and the creation of convulsive revolutionary structures.