Unbounded Flight

Octavio José Oliverio Girondo (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1891 / Buenos Aires, 1967), known as Oliverio Girondo, born in the same decade as Alfonsina Storni and Jorge Luis Borges, is one of the most noteworthy Argentine poets of the 20th Century. He was a key figure in the twentieth century Bonaerense avant-garde, specifically he was part of the Grupo Florida that worked together on the literary journal Martín Fierro. He was a poet of modernity, big cities, travel, technology, and modern alienation who always strove to renew poetry and find new modes of expression. He experimented with form and language itself and sought ways to sing about the mundane modern world in lyrical language. Huidobro, Vallejo, and Girondo push language to its very limits, its disintegration. His collections of poems are: Twenty Poems to Be Read on a Streetcar (1922), Decals (1925), Scarecrow (Within Everyone’s Reach) (1932), Persuasion of Days (1942), Our Countryside (1946), and In the Moremarrow (1952).