Materiality and (off)cue: the shapes of the Contemporary in the work of Dario Canton

Abstract

Since the publication of his first book, La saga del peronismo (1964), the Argentine poet Darío Canton (9 de julio, Buenos Aires, 1928) has travelled the margins of the Argentine intellectual field of the 1960s and 1970s, without ceasing to be a contemporary poet, in the sense that Giorgio Agamben thinks about the temporality of artistic productions. Rara avis and solitary, Canton modulated the tone of his poetry throughout successive publications. Both the poem “Corrupción de la naranja”, read and recovered by the objectivist poets of the nineties, and La mesa. Tratado poeti-lógico (1972) are reluctant to fit into the categories of the 1960s and 1970s poetics; on the contrary, these poems have more points of contact with the poetics of Francis Ponge (although neither of them ever read the other) than with those of Canton's "chronological contemporaries" or "generation companions". The materiality of the writing and the archive, which the author himself makes available to readers through the autobiographical series De la misma llama (2000-2017), functions as a key device for thinking about the complex temporality that runs through his work.