Myth, Vision and Transtierro in Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza’s El Cangrejo Ermitaño

Abstract

This article focuses on Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza’s poetics as manifested in El cangrejo ermitaño (2020), a gathering of both previously released texts and abundant new materials showing the author´s abandonment of his initial exteriorista style, characteristic of Venezuelan poets in the 1980s. In his mature poetry, on the one hand, a dialogue between daily life and myth has special relevance; on the other hand, diverse rhetorical strategies in dealing with referentiality are also essential, ranging from the most direct and anecdotical to meta-discursive, highly experimental pieces. Both its frequent connection to a mythical sphere and its extreme ways of relating to reality through words produce similar results, since the lyrical voice becomes transpersonal either by diluting its identity into the collective realm of language or by placing itself among numinous archetypes and therefore verging on the metaphysical. 
either by diluting its identity into the collective realm of language or by placing itself
among numinous archetypes and therefore verging on the metaphysical.