Chumacero, Alí (1918–)

Alí Chumacero, born on 9 July 1918, is a Mexican poet, editor, and essayist. Early in his career Chumacero was associated with the literary journals Tierra Nueva (1940–1942) and El Hijo Pródigo (1943–1946) and subsequently with México en la Cultura and La Cultura en México, among others. He has held important positions with the publisher Fondo de Cultura Económica, has edited works of nineteenth-century Mexican Romantic poets and of Alfonso Reyes and Xavier Villaurrutia, and has collaborated with Octavio Paz, José Emilio Pacheco, and Homero Aridjis in the preparation of the influential anthology Poesía en movimiento (1966). Since 1964 he has been a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. His essays range across the fields of poetics, literary history and criticism, and contemporary Mexican art. Chumacero's poetry, almost all of it written before 1956, is a very carefully crafted, subtle exploration of existential desolation, solitude, and the inadequate consolations of love. The earlier poems (Páramo de sueños [1944] and Imágenes desterradas [1948]) are quite hermetic, bearing traces of his predecessors, the Contemporáneos (most notably José Gorostiza and Villaurrutía). The later poems (Palabras en reposo [1956]) are more accessible, though no less complex. He has won many prizes for his poetry, including the Premio Javier Villaurrutia (1984), the Premio Inter-nacional Alfonso Reyes (1986), the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes (for Language and Literature, in 1987), the Premio Estatal de Literatura Amado Nervo (2003), and the Medalla Belisario Domínguez del Senado de la República in 1996.

See alsoReyes Ochoa, Alfonso; Villaurrutia, Xavier.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marco Antonio Campos has edited the Poesía completa (1980). Miguel Angel Flores presents a fine selection of Chumacero's essays in Los momentos críticos (1987). For an extended discussion of the poetry and additional bibliography, see Frank Dauster, The Double Strand (1987).

Gordon, Samuel, ed. Poéticas mexicanas del siglo XX. Mexico: Ediciones y Gráficos Eón, Universidad Iberoamericana, 2004.

Pacheco, Cristina, and Mauricio Sanders. Al pie de la letra. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001.

Paz, Octavio, et al. Poesía en movimiento. Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1980.

Villarino, Roberto. Catorce perfiles. Mexico: Coordinación de Difusión Cultural, Dirección de Literatura/UNAM, 1997.

                                 Michael J. Doudoroff