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ABSTRACT This study analyzes the myriad ways in which Carlos Monsiváis incorporates poetry and song verse into his literary journalism. Whether this genre of the chronicle is a serious denunciation of criminal and inhumane acts in Mexico or a satiric jab at sociopolitical realities, its author does not refrain from inserting verses into his discourse, a custom which both entertains and challenges readers to actively construct the text's meaning. This essay includes a summary of the major Mexican movements and poets from which Monsiváis takes most of his poetic subtitles and puns, and also a comment on the author's disheartened assessment of today's educational system and society's emphasis on the image. These dull the citizen's perception of the poetic or indeed of any appreciation of language. Still, ever the utopian, Monsiváis keeps the torch for poetry's survival.
If you read Carlos Monsiváis with sustained attention over a long period, you discover an explanation in the roots of popular culture for his ad hoc possession of the epithet Cronista de México. The chronicle genre, most commonly characterized as literary journalism, is "literary" in large part because of the poetic nature of its language, a discourse of indirection that prefers to suggest by symbol rather than to announce, to imprecate by metaphor rather than to denounce.1 In this study I want to elaborate on a statement I make elsewhere about Monsivais's career-long engagement with poetry:
The prelude to his decision to develop a career in journalism was a long apprenticeship in poetry. That figurai substratum tones the referential assertiveness of his discourse, giving it music and flexible muscle. Its fusion of fact with poetic speech produces a rhetorical register of seductive, and often aggressive, complexity. (Carlos Monsiváis 231)
If Monsiváis is a commentator of the daily, he is also always, "hable de lo que hable, el poeta, el novelista y el erudito" (Aylwin and Monsiváis 78). 2 To this must be added his immersion in the lyrical and metaphorical prose of the Bible since early childhood and continuously throughout his life. In a church- run elementary school, where he alone constituted the Protestant minority, he committed a great deal of the Bible to memory and could even, he claimed, "en dos segundos encontrar cualquier cita bíblica"...