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A lesbian Jewish woman who suffered from schizophrenia, Pizarnick experimented with language to trace the open wounds of her daring choices and the contradictions that tormented her inner self. However the beauty of her poetry exceeds the bounds of the merely biographical. The difficulties of writing and the permanent gap between words and things give Pizarnik’s verses, shocking strength and allow the reader to step into an existence circumscribed by silence.Pizarnick writing reveals an awareness of the separation that language implies. At the same time, it is marked by the stubborn wish, that poetic language could bridge the gap between the language and its referents.
Poetry is often invoked as a kind of promise land that could counteract a sense of exile from world self and language, but the vain effort of such an invocation soon becomes apparent. Pizarnik at times regards writing as potential asylum for “unspeakable silences” at other she sees it as the place where the poet is held hostage by the impersonal forces of language and by un undefined memory that refuses to be silenced. Fuentes (1974) writes “could there be anything more Argentine than this necessity to verbally fill these empty spaces to fill the blank book of Argentina?” (p.25).

In order to illustrate how the universal stories which the world libraries set the standard for Argentine selfhood, I have choose Part III of a group of short poems entitled, "Los Pequenos Cantos," published in December of 1971 (Pizarnik 234) to illustrate Fuentes’ claim.

el centro de un poema
es otro poema
el centro del centro es la ausencia
en el centro de la ausencia
mi sombra es el centro del centro del poema

the center of a poem
is another poem
the center of the center is absence
in the center of absence
my shadow is the center of the center of the poem (my trans.)

http://pages.slc.edu/~mnegroni/pizarnik/index.html

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