José Miguel Ibáñez and the Poetics of Dogma

Is it possible to write a good poem about the evils of birth control? That, in a sense, is the question at the heart of Poemas dogmáticos (Dogmatic Poems, 1971), a slender volume by Chilean poet and priest José Miguel Ibáñez (b. 1936). Ibáñez’s verse reflects an unapologetically traditionalist Roman Catholicism, attacking abortion, contraception, moral relativism, liberation theology, and the Cuban Revolution. Yet his poems are not simply clumsy versifications of doctrine. Instead, they embody what I call “a poetics of dogma”: a vision in which theological commitments shape not only his own practice as a poet but also the very conditions of poetic meaning. Taking as case study a dense poem on birth control, I show how Ibáñez forges a symbolic link between poetic creation and biological procreation, suggesting that contraception is, symbolically, a refusal of the creative impulse upon which poetry itself depends.