¿Why am I talking to you, impossible lover? Pita Amor and her imagined God

Abstract

Guadalupe Teresa Amor, known as Pita Amor (Mexico City, May 30, 1918 - May 8, 2000), was a poet of great sensitivity who emerged in the mid-20th-century Mexican literary scene with a unique poetic style for the time, which paradoxically challenged modern forms of writing and feeling poetry. With her love for rhyme and her obsession with form, she became the finest exponent of classical poetics, which she claimed aligned with her way of feeling. Through the sonnet, the décima, the lira, and the tercet, Pita revealed her life’s journey, allowing us to glimpse a woman who knew anguish and the fear of solitude, who embraced both bitterness and pleasure, and who was unafraid of life. In this journey, another fundamental aspect was the existence of God, a question she addressed in almost all her works but made more evident in two collections of poems. The first, Décimas a Dios, was originally published in 1953 by Fondo de Cultura Económica (Letras Mexicanas) and reprinted with Tezontle in the same year. The second, Sirviéndole a Dios en la hoguera, was written in 1958, five years after Décimas a Dios. The verses included in these collections reveal her exploration, as well as her greatest concern: God. Pita Amor was a seeker. Her writing represents the journey of this exploration, and the doubts generated by the notion that matter defines and explains everything. Her persistent pondering of the existence of God opens the possibility for a writing that exposes the contradiction and oscillation between mysticism and sacrilege