explicit, concrete, partisan

Politically conscious poets tend to be more profound, not less. Look again at the record. In our own time the three most formidable poets, it seems to me, were intensely "political": the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, Vallejo and Brecht (as poet). Political in the most explicit, concrete, partisan way. What's more, their aesthetic achievement is because of their politics, not in spite of it. The most credible, full, caring love poetry has been written by one of the most expressly political poets. I refer, again, to Hikmet. In part this is because he can, and does, write of the other—who is never merely an excuse for self-immersion, and who is not reduced, either, to the condition of a delicious ahistorical object.

—James Scully, "Remarks on Political Poetry," Line Break: poetry as social practice (Bay Press, 1988)

dada drop

The arts (painting, poetry, etc.) are not just these. Eating, drinking, walking are also arts; every act is an art. The slippery slope toward dadaism.

—César Vallejo, Aphorisms (Green Integer #52), translated by Stephen Kessler

contemporaries

Of course. This very day, there’s Bernard Shaw, Stravinsky, Picasso, Chaplin.

—César Vallejo, “Roundabout Artistic Freedom,” Autopsy on Surrealism (Art on the Line #3, Curbstone Press, 1982)

new taken for old

The ‘new’ poetry based on new words or new metaphors distinguishes itself by its pedantic novelty and by its baroque complication. The new poetry based on new sensibility is, on the contrary, simple and human and, at first glance, might be taken for old, or not even invite speculation as to whether it is or is not modern.

—César Vallejo, “New Poetry,” Autopsy on Surrealism (Art on the Line #3, Curbstone Press, 1982)