Poetic Anarchism

Abstract In 1966, the Colombian poet Gonzalo Arango published the article “Jazz para una misa negra por el alma de André Breton” [Jazz for a Black Mass for the Soul of André Breton] in Bogotá. In the text, he paid homage to the French poet and declared him “an impossible corpse”. Arango was the founder of the literary and artistic avant-garde movement called Nadaísmo that surfaced in Colombia in the 1950s. Its members were self-declared “cultural guerrillas” and established as their target moralism in politics, aesthetics, and social issues using the arts as their weapon. This article explores Nadaísmo’s ideological links to French Surrealism and its revolutionary spirit by examining the life of the group and the ideas exposed in the first and second nadaist manifestos.