Introduction

This chapter focuses on recent Spanish poetry in print and online that responds in a sociopolitically committed manner to the post-2008 situation in Spain. In part it is intended as a brief recapitulatory contribution to the study of the cultural discourse of crisis – and its concomitant, austerity – in this context. A great deal of work has now been done on Spanish film, drama and narrative and crisis, austerity or precarity, but less on poetry. Like so many recent studies in this vein, this chapter is informed by Lauren Berlant's notion of the intensification, but also the extended experience, of crisis in the neo-liberal age; in this sense it is concerned as much with the post-crisis as with the moment of crisis. It also concerned with the notion of the critical not only in its immediate sociopolitical sense but as a key feature informing a tradition in Spanish poetry (and song) going back at least as far as the mid-1980s and the emergence of poesía de la conciencia crítica. The idea of a recent dissident, critical tradition in Spanish poetry is taken up very clearly in the title of one of the three anthologies to be looked at here, Disidentes: Antología de poetas críticos españoles (1990–2014). Such poetas críticos are many and they engage in creative dissent across a range of different print formats and online platforms, representing a demonstration and perpetuation of the idea encapsulated by the renowned poet of refined social critique, Ángel González (1925–2008), that ‘la poesía es un hecho eminentemente social […] la palabra poética no puede […] dejar de ser común, compartida’. They write, variously, against uncertainty, imposed silence, exclusion and exclusiveness, against power and the effects of globalising and neo-liberal cultural politics; directly or indirectly (as will be seen) they build a common cause against damages caused publicly, or psychologically by neo-liberalism's push towards the private and towards personal responsibility. In line with Ángel González's vision of ‘la palabra poética’, this collective voice in Spanish poetry is wary of the inwardness of lyric, pure, private utterance and forms an idea of responsibility, an ethical recognition that ‘Lo que llamamos intimidad es la huella, o la herida, que deja en nuestro espíritu la realidad que contemplamos o vivimos.’