Stormy Storni

Congrats to 40 Forever for answering the last post correctly! You are the bomb. The answer was Alfonsina Storni. I know, I know... I reference Wikipedia way too much. It's quick and easy. Plus, the info is usually right. Well, a lot of the time. Some of the time? Nah. Most of the time.

Alfonsina Storni (May 29, 1892 – October 25, 1938) was one of the most important Ibero-American poet of the postmodernism movement.

Alfonsina was born in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland to an Argentine beer industrialist while in Switzerland for a few years. There Alfonsina learned to speak Italian. Back in Argentina the family had to, after the business failed, to open a tavern in the city of Rosario, where Alfonsina would work at a variety of chores.

(Lots happened in between these two paragraphs. To entire article, please go hyperlink yourself Wikipedia).

She taught literature at the Escuela Normal de Lenguas Vivas, and she published Ocre. Her style now showed more realism than before, and a strongly feminist theme. Solitude and marginality began to affect her health, and worsening emotional problems forced her to leave her job as teacher.

Trips to Europe changed her writing by helping her to lose her formal models, and reach a more dramatic lyricism, loaded with an erotic vehemence unknown in those days, and new feminists thoughts in Mundo de siete pozos (1934) and Mascarilla y trébol (1938).

A year and a half after her friend Quiroga committed suicide in 1937, and haunted by solitude and breast cancer, Storni sent her last poem, Voy a dormir ("I'm going to sleep") to La Nación newspaper. The following day she committed suicide, by walking into the sea at the La Perla beach in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

Storni once referred to men as el enemigo, "the enemy." Much of Storni's work focuses on what she sees as the repression of women by men. This often takes the form of personal insults directed at men in general, which sometimes reach psychotic proportions. For example, in "Tú me quieres blanca" (You want me white), she wrote, Dios te lo perdone, "God forgive you," even though the poem is about male hypocrisy regarding the chastity of women. In other words, she viewed hypocrisy by men as a mortal sin.

For more information, please read the complete Wikipedia article. Or, Google it. It's their 9th birthday today, you know. How festive.

Back to Ms. Storni... There is a Monument to Alfonsina Storni in Mar del Plata, Argentina. A picture of it can be seen in this post.