Petropoetry as Edaphology: Crude Materials and Subsoil Energies in Venezuelan Poetry Open Access

Abstract

This article reviews Venezuelan poetry from the early twentieth to the twenty-first century, with a specific focus on instances where oil serves as a central reference. By analyzing the works of various Venezuelan poets, this article aims to interpret Venezuelan poetry through the lens of edaphology, identifying how poetry conceptualizes and references oil and subsoil materials. It posits the subsoil as a semiotic entity whose subterranean position and complex texture make it a potent metaphor for life as a blend and labor force awaiting exploitation. Specifically, this essay explores how oil permeates the language and aesthetic structures of poetry, thereby engendering diverse poetic interpretations of the subsoil in Venezuela. By scrutinizing this neglected relationship between poetry and oil extraction, this article seeks to identify the bodies, voices, landscapes, and memories represented through the evocation of petroleum.

Introduction

The poetic corpus of the subsoil can be regarded as verbal geology that delves into the earth, driving words into the deepest and most unfamiliar darkness to diagnose not only the minerals and resources that lie therein but also the changes and consequences of their extraction, exploitation, and use in our lives and the environment. On this basis, this article seeks to review literary representations of the subsoil in Venezuelan poetry from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, framed through the concept of poetry as “edaphology,”¹ or poetry as the study of the subsoil, its organisms and energies. In a semiotic sense, poetry as edaphology describes, imagines, and dramatizes underground resources and materials and their transformation into fuel and commodities within capitalist structures. This edaphological approach to poetry implies an affective perspective that conceives matter as a living and vibrant body with agency and autonomy concerning the human that exploits it for their well-being. In this sense poetry functions as micropolitics—that is, as a form of intervention of the dominant power into a minor sphere of culture to give visibility to other living bodies, unmasking the complicities between political and economic interests and forces. In Venezuela the subsoil is predominantly associated with petroleum, which has been referred to by various names: stone oil, black gold, the matter of the underworld, the devil’s excrement. Oil not only captures the extractive interest of foreign powers but is also associated with technical modernity, affecting everyday practices and the dreams it fosters in people. Soil and subsoil play crucial roles in Venezuela’s modernization processes as “powers of nature” and as “agents associated with it, including the State exercising sovereignty over a national territory.”²

In that regard, Manuel Silva-Ferrer has explored the intricate relationship established between the subsoil, society, and culture in Venezuela since the 1900s.³ According to Silva-Ferrer, oil in Venezuela has historically been a transformative force, shaping different aspects of modern life. Culture, particularly literary representation, has played a key role in this transformation process. Early in the history of petroleum extraction in Venezuela, literature became an essential narrative and poetic platform to make visible the changes in mentality, new sensibilities, and novel expectations and affects adopted by Venezuelan society, as well as the dramatic alteration of urban and natural landscapes due to the rapid development of this Latin American oil-export nation in the twentieth century.⁴

I will analyze the impact that oil had on Venezuelan society at the beginning of the twentieth century, which caused an alteration of the environmental and cultural sensitivity existing before its exploitation. It infiltrated the aesthetic ecosystem of the nation, imbuing with black oil the ways of feeling, expressing, and imagining life, development, work, and future expectations in the country. Thus a spill was unleashed like boiling magma, seeping into the aesthetic and literary regimes that birthed various expressions of Venezuela’s petropoetics. Addressing the question of the subsoil in the current context necessitates relating it to the ongoing debate on the Anthropocene, global warming, climate catastrophe, pollution, monocultures, agrochemicals and their impacts on human health and the environment, extractivism, deforestation, plastic waste, industrial waste, ocean acidification, and species extinction, among others. These are examples of the violence humans have inflicted on our planet. This ecological and cultural crisis has elicited responses across different fields of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, leading to the expansion of their disciplinary boundaries. These disciplines are seeking solutions to address the environmental collapse and are expanding the conceptual and ethical paradigms of understanding and analyzing life and living beings. They aim to reorder the sociocultural hierarchies of industrial society that have precipitated the crisis. In that regard the environmental and energy humanities question the humanist paradigm and how its anthropological and speciesist mechanisms have administered, managed, and dominated life throughout history.⁵ As Serenella Iovino shows, the emergence of the environmental and conservationist movements in the 1970s raised awareness of humanity’s responsibility for the preservation of the environment.⁶ This brought forth the need to elaborate a more inclusive vision of the world, one that would not only deconstruct the imperialist ideology implicit in the society-nature relationship but also, within the same category of society, give space to subjects, cultures, languages, and nonhumans discriminated against by forms of intellectual and Eurocentric colonialism.

This environmental turn across various areas of scientific thought makes visible the existing relationship between capitalism, development, production, consumption, and the dynamics of extraction, exploitation, and hoarding of natural and human resources and energies. In this relationship, the colonial model and its power dynamics over the land and labor force, subjected to exhausting and unfair working conditions, are reiterated. As José Manuel Marrero Henríquez puts it, the relationship between literary criticism and sustainability can serve as a fruitful avenue for understanding these dynamics, as well as for renewing analytical and hermeneutical practices through the study of literary corpora that represent the ecological crisis and related issues such as sustainability, biodiversity, conservationism, or ecological justice. In that sense, Marrero Henríquez explains, the landscapes that populate nature claim their right as real and tangible beings when it comes to the ethical and aesthetic consequences of their incorporation into a literary work.⁷ Nature has stopped being merely a literary sign or an artistic motif and has instead assumed a role of greater relevance when weighing the symbolic value of its presence in a poem.

As a Eurocentric-Western paradigm, the opposition of nature-culture-technology served as a model for founding Latin American nations. The necessity to dominate, domesticate, and catalog nature, transforming it into data, merchandise, value, and knowledge, underpinned this model. Against this extractivist and capitalist logic, certain Indigenous and Afro-descendant perspectives associate nature with cosmologies that do not distinguish humans from animals and plants; they recognize them as living beings coexisting in processes of mutual influence.⁸

Latin American cultural criticism has been key to these efforts too. Contemporary critics such as Jens Andermann, Gisela Heffes, Gabriel Giorgi, and Carolyn Fornoff, among others, have incorporated ecocritical, biopolitical, and postnatural perspectives to their readings of Latin American twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and artistic expressions, problematizing foundational narratives by focusing on “new agencies and assemblages,” “trances,” “becomings,” and politics of preservation and destruction.⁹ These positions dehierarchize human life with respect to other existences discriminated against by racial, ethnic, gender, class, or interspecies causes, and they understand it not from hierarchical and taxonomic classifications at the base of humanist epistemology but from a tentacular thinking that prioritizes links and interconnections of the human with the nonhuman. This stance reorders living bodies in logics of cooperation and tension where the threshold, interval, passage, transit, and becoming, due to their indeterminate condition, become propitious places for the transformation and creation of new possibilities of life. In these exchanges, the human is just one more agent among interspecies participants.

In that regard Donna Haraway ponders how to live-with and how to do-with, and she counters the patriarchal logic of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. She proposes the Chthulucene as an era of distinct temporalities and materialities that link beyond the biogenetic and genealogical kinship relationship through “aberrant” and “unnatural” threads and compositions in “unexpected collaborations and combinations.”¹⁰ Haraway raises questions, such as, “What shape is this kinship, where and whom do its lines connect and disconnect, and so what? What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance?”¹¹

Based on these debates of contemporary political and aesthetic thought, I understand the subsoil as semiotic matter, whose underground location and juxtaposed texture make it a powerful image of life as a blend of compost, energy and vibration, intensity, and transformation. Historically it has been represented through a utilitarian and extractivist gaze seeking to determine to what extent earth, soil, and subsoil are raw material, source, resource, progress, capital, and wealth.

Reading Venezuelan Petropoetry as Edaphology

In the following I will trace a journey through some passages of Venezuelan poetry of the twentieth century, concluding with a brief stop in the twenty-first century, in order to analyze different languages of the subsoil. These include what I will call petropoetics, which explicitly register and name the oil matter and its impact on nature, landscapes, work, and daily life, as well as more elusive and oblique references to the subsoil through mentions of earth, energy, and the transformative capacity of natural materials. These references often serve as a way of representing both the changes wrought by progress in various aspects of life and the role of poetry as a means of cultivating new possibilities of meaning.

In Piedra de aceite,¹² Ramón Ordaz compiles work from a group of poets who, from various perspectives and styles, address oil and the changes that its exploitation brought to their country. Among the texts of the Venezuelan poetic tradition, there is no doubt that the precursors of the oil theme can be found in the turbulent 1920s. This decade—marked by the tension and fecundity of the Latin American avant-garde—saw significant changes in the Venezuelan economy. As the oil culture began to take hold, rural Venezuela was left behind, leading to the emergence of new urban lifestyles. During this time writers and poets recorded in their works the unease that eroded customs and the ways the landscape began to lose its traditional face. A review of this anthology reveals a series of indicators that allow us to identify variations and obsessions on the oil theme. I will focus on works that forcefully display what I term the edaphological will of poetry, those that employ poetic language to problematize the subsoil and its exploitation or devastation by humanity. These poetry collections, despite their specificities and differences, can be regarded as micropolitics, in the sense given to the term by Félix Guattari as “small-scale politics”¹³ that challenge dominant power structures by revealing the existence of other bodies, affects, and agencies.

In Persistencia del desvelo (1976), Venezuelan poet and critic Hesnor Rivera reinterprets the petropoetics of oil engineering and the extraction-destruction of the soil by situating himself within a temporal context of evocation and transfiguration, where concrete and recognizable references take on surreal and dreamlike forms: “It is all I remember of the struggle / to return to the beginning of the beginning / of that other beginning, of the lost beginning” (Es todo lo que recuerdo del combate / por regresar al comienzo del comienzo / de aquel otro comienzo, del comienzo perdido),¹⁴ “a journey to the entrails” (un viaje hacia la entraña).¹⁵ In this context, poetry serves to take us back to the dawn of time, to the era of stones and caves, of fire and serpents, when the “jungle . . . struggled to enter the room/to negotiate its furious secrets” (la selva . . . pugnaba por entrar en la sala/para negociar sus furiosos secretos)¹⁶ and “to evoke many days / and many nights of desolation thrown / on the grass that concealed the oil” (para evocar muchos días / y muchas noches de desolación tiradas / sobre el césped que encubría el petróleo).¹⁷ Amid this geographically delocalized landscape—more apparition than reality, delirious and dreamlike—the poem brings forth the oil city of Cabimas on the east coast of Lake Maracaibo in western Venezuela: “snake-Cabimas” (culebra-Cabimas)/“heat-Cabimas” (calor-Cabimas)/“insects-Cabimas” (insectos-Cabimas), the poetic voice calls it, where “the green eye of oil / loose around the houses” (el ojoverde del petróleo / andaba suelto alrededor de las casas) and “His enchanted lizard whistle could be seen / when it entered to burn in the living rooms” (Se veía su silbo de lagarto encantado / cuando entraba para arder en la salas).¹⁸

Here we witness an animalistic incarnation of oil, embodied in a prehistoric beast that alludes to the geological past and the process of sedimentation of organic matter in the subsoil and at the bottom of the seas, necessary for the formation of oil. The prospective vision of the poetic voice returns from the future with the certainty of a loss: thus the crude oil loses its material density to become a spectral substance that anticipates a crossroads between the time of origin—of childhood—and the time of exodus, the American invasion, and death. Here poetry stirs a political reflection on the Anthropocene as a devastating creature that destroys nature.

Cabimas appears again in another pivotal poem from the Venezuelan petropoetic archive. In “Cabimas Zamuro” (1977) by Carlos Contramaestre the association of the oil city with an animal is reiterated—this time a scavenging bird that frequents garbage dumps and feeds on decomposing matter. The association of this city with a bird of prey reasserts two common motifs of these petropoetics: the first relates to the voracious plundering of the country’s resources by foreign companies and the second to the ruin, the residue, the abandonment these companies inflict on the country.

If the writers of the first part of the twentieth century insist on a vertical landscape of towers, burners, and drills, where the extractive machinery works at full speed, Contramaestre shows the flip side of that image: the failure of this mechanism of modern efficiency, its radical deterioration as registered in the physical environment. The poetic speaker, “I, the Guaco, unemployed old man, rescuer of dead pipes” (Yo el Guaco / viejo desempleado, / rescatador de tuberías muertas) “one who knows the sweet processes of corrosion” (conocedor de los procesos dulces de la corrosión), “the aquatic plants that irritate the eyes of the Lake” (de las plantas acuáticas que irritan los ojos del Lago),¹⁹ is part of this process of the devastation of space and life caused by the barbarism of oil extractivism. In his role as an expert in dead pipes, the poetic speaker presents a depiction of Cabimas as a city turned into carrion, slowly rotting away.²⁰

In another poem, entitled “El gas-plant saluda a la metrópoli,” “El Guaco,” an oil-plant worker, reappears, reiterating his willingness to give “misery to the United States” (la miseria a Estados Unidos) and to send “several prefabricated fires” (varios incendios prefabricados), “its damned supermarkets” (sus malditos supermercados), and “all its plastic-wrapped buzzards and its shitty gringos” (le enviaremos todos sus zamuros envueltos en plástico / y sus gringos de mierda).²¹ The poem creates an “inventory” of ruins and debris, preparing a plot, a clandestine plan, to dismantle the gringo engineering of extraction using the “saw” of indignation. The shark-hound-self dismantles “the fences of the fields,” founds “the country and its misery,” and looks at “those funereal tankers through the gas-oil smoke”: “I move in all directions of death.”²² Once again the poem portrays wear and tear, the exhaustion of vital energy, and the “grand finale” of the age of black gold that drains the country’s blood, leaving it lifeless, poor, and agonizing.

The 1960s in Venezuela were marked by the vengeful spirit of the actions and publications of El Techo de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale), a militant art collective that “scavenges in the garbage to use the materials that the environment offers us. Our answers and actions arise from the very nature of things and events”²³ and call for “restoring the atmosphere.”²⁴

This collective and its provocative and controversial gestures serve as a way of bringing art back to the underground, to the lava of the erupting volcano: as an urgent claim to recover the vitality and rebelliousness of the magma atrophied by the extractive technologies and logics of modernity. In this sense the manifestos of El Techo de la Ballena constitute a valuable material to think from an edaphological perspective about the topic of resources and energies of the subsoil without necessarily associating it with oil. If, up until now, the poems analyzed crude oil as sedimented material within the earth or under the sea, it appears related to violence, disaster, and poverty caused by its exploitation by North American companies. However, in the “Primer Manifiesto” (1961) of the members of El Techo de la Ballena there is another approach to the energy that here is called magma, boiling matter, and the lust of lava.

With these resonant and at the same time indeterminate names, creation is alluded to as the ultimate purpose of the aesthetic gesture associated with the “burst,” the “impact,” the “shudder,” the “vertigo,”²⁵ and “the germ of rupture.”²⁶ These are sensitive states caused by the irruption of the energy that springs from the earth. Poetry and art seek to “restore the magma in its fall,” to give visibility to “the full activity of creating,”²⁷ to the process and not to the result, to the formless and arbitrary energy in its full emergence and outpouring. Here the flow of crude oil is not captured and tamed by the modern refinery that processes it into fuel. On the contrary, the magma remains raw, clinging to the earth’s core from where it bursts and gushes forth incessantly, and therefore is unconquerable.

The proposal of El Techo de la Ballena also resorts to the animal—the whale—as another way of alluding to the force of disarticulation of the forms and codes that hold life and language together. This embodies the group’s desire to “breathe vitality into the placid environment of what is called national culture” through the breathing of the whale that wants to “restore the oxygen,” “the atmosphere,” and cleanse the toxic air of the culture of the 1960s.²⁸ The references to the whale and the magma that run through the manifesto serve as an invitation closely tied to the idea of a return to the subsoil as a place where the combustion and mixture of living organisms take place, of a trip to the entrails where what is defecated is lodged: “This poetry is an invitation to travel inward, . . . that the daily sensitive crust is thrown away, that man shows his guts . . . ‘the house has a tumor, fleshy and putrefying excrescence blooms from the Roof.’”²⁹

The image of the subsoil as a place of incalculable energies due to its capacity for mutation and becoming, despite the domestication that human beings have tried to enforce on its resources, acquires a notable presence in the poem “Esto ya fue una vez” (1980) by Juan Liscano. As in other texts mentioned above, Liscano proposes a counterpoint between the colonial era of pearl exploitation and the modern era of oil exploitation in Venezuela.³⁰ From the title, the poetic voice says “Esto ya fue una vez” (This was once before)³¹ and constructs a historical account of Venezuela with documents of barbarism reiterated and updated throughout the centuries. Liscano uses the repertoire of plant, animal, and mineral life to mix them and transform them into humus of decomposing organic matter that becomes poetic language. Poetry here becomes edaphology through a language composed of diverse materials and species that give an account of the swarming life of the subsoil. With this complex and vibrant language, the poet looks inside the earth and records each particle disturbed by the invasive machines that devastate both the land and its depths. This text is intriguing because of its verbal fabric saturated with resonances, echoes, and rhythms that hint at the vital underground ferment, assaulted by human drilling and plundering. This fermentation of living molecules, subjected to the aggression of their natural habitat by human labor, is followed by a section titled “El reventón.” Here Liscano conducts a sort of petroleum archaeology and names the different phases and layers through which the subsoil passes to generate fossil oil. As “the diggers” penetrate the earth to find “the buzzing and greasy down of the oil beast,”³² the poem burrows into language to find the verbal eruption necessary to name the swarming and restless “material body” of crude oil: “The hidden flow of a multiple and powerful energy like blood / which no one sees except when it spills through the gash of a wound” (el fluir oculto de una energía múltiple y poderosa como la sangre / que nadie ve sino cuando se derrama por el tajo de una herida).³³

Liscano’s text recounts another oil fable through baroque language that is compelled to soak itself in that constant “pumping” pulsing in the remote depths of the subsoil when black gold starts to ferment “under layers of flax and rubble,” “because the swift spider that weaves its web underground like vertiginous ivy / the ivy that spreads like a vegetable and climbing sea/is Oil.”³⁴ Oil is also “Padre Crudo”—roughly translated as “Crude Father”—“the skin we step on,” the “leather left out in the open,” the “rotten little animal and putrefying algae and stinking mud and nauseating acid.”³⁵ At the poem’s conclusion, a question arises for the future, for the country of the future that the present times anticipate, as literature often does: “What homeland or what disaster what future or what atonement what archangel or what beast awaits us in the last waves of sumptuous oil?” (¿Qué patria o qué desastre qué porvenir o qué expiación qué arcángel o qué bestia nos esperan en las últimas olas del petróleo suntuoso?).³⁶ In this poem Liscano proposes to examine certain concerns of current environmental and socioecological critical theory, which seeks to dehierarchize human superiority over other forms of life and open, with the drill of words, the womb of the earth to consider oil as a process of cooperation, contagion, and contamination of materials that inhabit the subsoil.

Sensualist Energies

In the cases analyzed so far, there is a trend toward long, historical, and retrospective poems that reference the commonplaces of oil and represent the counter-epic of oil through images of petroleum companies’ intervention in the country, the working conditions of employees, the exodus, the extractive machinery, life in the camps, and poverty and death. Throughout the last century, this perspective reduced the reading of oil literatures to a merely referential level, in which the political, economic, and sociological aspects were in the foreground of analysis.

Next I will focus on other ways of constructing landscapes that account for the subterranean manifestations of nature and their way of embodying themselves in people’s daily practices, the consumption of imported goods—mainly from the United States—and the Americanized fantasies that start to circulate in the Venezuelan imagination. With the aforementioned reflection and this example I aim to indicate other ways of referencing black gold and subsoil resources in Venezuelan poetry. The question of how poetry “feels” the energy of living organisms that exist within the earth, water, and stone constitutes a central axis in the poetic work of Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva and Luz Machado, particularly in the book Canto al Orinoco (1964).

Building upon the Spinozist concept of “affect,” as inherited and reimagined by Gilles Deleuze, Jane Bennett proposes the idea of a “material vitalism”—a vibrant materiality of the nonhuman living that is a source of action because it possesses an active power. In this sense, Bennett speaks of “a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such,” where the vibrant matter encompasses the human body, waste, and worms, the “not-quite-bodies of electricity and stem cells.”³⁷ This ability of the nonhuman living to “make things” is very present in the ecopoetics of the authors I analyze next.

In El cristal nervioso(1922–1930) (1941) and Voz aislada (Poemas1930–1939) (1939), Arvelo Larriva places the Venezuelan plains at the center of representation and observes them from above and within, through “the finest slits” (de las más finas rendijas).³⁸ Here soil and subsoil are living materials that the poetic voice sows with its song. There is an intimate relationship between poetry and territory, where “my new voice . . . sprouts firm, motorized / because my heart softened the seed” (mi voz nueva . . . Brota firme, motorizada / porque mi corazón ablandó la semilla),³⁹ and the poetic self-plants it “in the deaf heap” (en el montón sordo)⁴⁰ of the savanna to fertilize its aridity with the melody of the song. This self-woman speaks to the plain and waits for the plain to speak back to her: “Tell me, plain, what in you is most tender / . . . / You have a soul bleeding alive. You are sleeping and alive / . . . / Speak to me, plain. / Sink your accent into me.”⁴¹ There is a relationship of exchange between two bodies: one geological and the other human-female. Both are isolated and unsupported, marked by the lack of provincialism, yet safe due to the voice that arises from the mouth of the poem, speaking “an extraordinary language.”⁴² This language respects birds and flowers, and seeks to expand in its wild vastness: “I only know how to cultivate hard soil . . . / Learn to sow in the soft ground” (Sólo sé cultivar tierra dura . . . / Aprender a sembrar en lo blando).⁴³

If what lives underground in Arvelo Larriva’s work is the simple and humble seed that sprouts, requiring the energy of the song and the attention of governments that should sow education and irrigate the parched land, in Luz Machado’s writing it is the Orinoco River as a source of life and energy that propels the poem. The Orinoquía region is one of the most significant in the country for its natural gas and oil reserves. However, this wealth appears in Machado’s book in a less explicit and more opaque way through images that allude to the violence and power of this body of water. The riverbed represents the remote origin of beginnings, “the deepest root.” Like Liscano, who descends underground with the poem to record the movements and flows contributing to the formation of energy, Machado delves into the river to examine it from within: “Your bottom boiled with animals / . . . / They were flowers of water, they were suns of water, / they were jungles of water and mineral beaches. / A word then floated” (el fondo tuyo hervía de animales/ . . . / Eran flores de agua, eran soles de agua, / eran selvas de agua y playas minerales. / Una palabra entonces flotaba).⁴⁴ To submerge oneself in the river’s waters is to enter a womb pulsating with “hidden” life in constant transformation: “This becomes skin, and becomes entrails / And trees become trees inside the earth / The hard salamander of the metal and diamond” (Se hace piel y se hace entraña / Y se volvieran árboles dentro de la tierra / La dura salamandra del metal y el diamante).⁴⁵

These images represent the river as a living energy that animates any matter it encounters along its path, the “exact site of all birth” (sitio exacto de todo nacimiento), “living mystery” (misterio vivo), “humidity and omen” (humedad y augurio). It’s a place of resistance and fertilization where one can experience “everything at once” (todo de una vez).⁴⁶ Arvelo Larriva and Machado portray another way of imagining the germinating power of nature, a perspective closer to a vision of the living, where the implication of human and nonhuman bodies and their ability to be affected, to be infected, and to engage follows the underpinning logic of the poetics and politics they propose.

Oil drips into the lives of Venezuelans as a grease stain, shaping their tastes, daily routines, modes of transportation, dreams, and aspirations. Oil’s presence in the international stock market is echoed in Venezuelan society in a variety of ways. To the cases of Arvelo Larriva and Machado, who write about the subsoil from a perspective that emphasizes the energies of nature as a germinating force, I wish to add two others that focus more on the impact and changes oil modernity inflicts on everyday life. I refer to Eugenio Montejo and Igor Barreto, who, in their unique poems and distinctive manners, allude to the alterations oil modernity stamps on the country without directly referencing crude oil or processes of extraction and exploitation of this resource.

The poems “Caracas” and “Adiós al siglo XX” from Montejo’s homonymous book are farewells: to childhood in the first and to a century of transformations propelled by energetic modernity in the second. In the first poem the poetic self recalls the past and registers what has been lost—his name, his house—through vivid references to the city’s dizzying verticality—buildings, scaffolding, towers—that hide the playground where he played as a child and the mountain that was once the horizon. There are places where “noise grows to a thousand engines per ear / to a thousand cars per foot,” and the voice of men drifts,⁴⁷ swallowed up by urban traffic and noise pollution. Faced with such misdirection, the poet states, “Only my story is false.”⁴⁸ As in Machado’s poems, Montejo’s poetry is a space where the transformation of the senses is apparent; a place where nature is tamed by culture, and its resources and energies are converted into comfort and convenience. This transformation introduces a new distribution of the sensible and a new logic in the ways of working, living, using time, displacement, and the relationship between memory and people. The second poem traces a system of streets named after influential figures of the twentieth century—for example, Marx, Freud, Mondrian, Mao, Stalin, and Hitler—that the poetic voice traverses through to decipher some lost meaning, “fallen vowels, small pebbles,” remnants of a century “vertical and full of theories”⁴⁹ of wars and postwars that has lost its gods. The passerby crosses these to bid farewell and witness the terrestrial domain of the next millennium emerge.

On the other hand, the Venezuelan city, acting as a marketplace for brands imported from the United States and thereby altering the material life of its people, can be observed in Igor Barreto’s poems “Ciudad Alianza” and “Poema para un Cadillac negro” from his book ¿Y si el amor no llega? (1983). These imports transform domestic practices and the execution of daily rituals. The first poem introduces us to Ciudad Alianza, an urban development in the state of Carabobo, located in the north-central region of the country, where the poetic “I” and his family reside. This poem speaks to the presence of the North American cultural industry in Venezuela and its dissemination and consumption through television. It also references the Sears department store, an American enterprise that established branches in cities like Caracas and Valencia, selling cutting-edge home appliances, technological devices, and kitchen products. The family’s attitude toward the store’s collector highlights a dichotomy between the quantitative logic of credit sales, which requires the consumer to keep up with payments due, and the logic of gratitude and affection displayed by the mother and children who welcome the emissary of consumption into a clean house as an esteemed guest.

Life in Venezuela in the 1980s is reflected in this house where sardines are consumed with mayonnaise and ketchup and where fantasy and desire are enacted through radio and TV programs that soothe familial and personal sorrow and difficulties with their heroic tales and fables. Cars, too, form part of the genealogy constructed by the poem. The father’s first car, a Pontiac, serves not only as a mode of transportation but also as a family member: “They called it Uncle Pontiac / Igor kissed its headlights / and spent hours sitting in front of the radio talking to it” (llamaban Tío Pontiac. / Igor le besaba los faros / o pasaba horas sentado frente al radio conversándole).⁵⁰ In “Poema para un Cadillac negro” this emotional connection with the vehicle resurfaces, alluding to a Cadillac hearse that transports the mother “to her grave,” but “its bodywork / no longer reflects the agency’s neon lights / the satisfied face of the owner offering it in thirty installments” (su carrocería / ya no refleja las luces de neón de la agencia, / el rostro complacido del dueño ofreciéndolo en treinta meses).⁵¹ The capitalist doctrine’s emphasis on the new and novel, which utilizes desire as a means to invigorate its production, loses its relevance in this text, where the car morphs into a vessel of memory and nostalgia for the departed mother. Simultaneously the melodies of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix reverberate inside the vehicle. This thread of poetic exploration captures a Venezuela touched by the “Made in USA” label and an industrial development fueled by petromodernity, crafting new forms of spectacle and consumption—cinema, food, games, commodities, transportation, shopping malls—that reshape the image of the cities and the country. The poems of Montejo and Barreto underscore how Venezuelan and Caribbean popular culture intertwine with foreign references and imported lifestyles, unmasking the contradictions and misunderstandings intrinsic to the national modernization process.

Conclusion

Poetry offers an account of the subsoil and oil in Venezuela, from the historical recollection of the Conquest of America to the second foreign-American exploitation-invasion. These petropoetics verify the records of barbarism that the oil epic stores in tanks and barrels, related to work, exodus, loss, disease, poverty, death, and the ecological and environmental disaster that petroleum consumption instigates. This disaster impacts fauna, flora, lakes, and territories as well as towns and regions of the country that are hit by tragedies and explosions. Petropoetics also celebrates the vitality of lava, the seed that germinates under the plain, and the river teeming with living organisms, recognizing the sensitive dimension of nonhuman domains. Moreover, it underscores the transformation the oil industry introduces into daily life as it fosters dreams of owning a washing machine or becoming an Arizona cowboy.

These scenarios construct landscapes of the subsoil that employ a repertoire of references associated with petromodernity as a tentacle of the Chthulucene, unfolding them in the poem and assessing their impact and despoiling effect on Venezuelan territory. From different operations such as archaeology, inventorying, archiving, the use of an affected and affective language, and the reference to energy as something perceived and felt by the people and by language itself, Venezuelan poetry shows an edaphological will that responds to different needs throughout different moments of Venezuelan history. Poetry as edaphology presents alternative methods of examining and naming the extractive processes of petroleum. It also proposes another way of writing and documenting the Venezuelan oil boom, using a language that serves as a compost of macerations, oxidations, and contaminations of materials from the underworld. Poetry as edaphology activates a poetic expression of contagion among subsoil organisms that reflects other ways of understanding and knowing the depths of Venezuelan soil.

Notes

References