Nicolás Guillén
Quick answer: Study Nicolás Guillén, Cuba's national poet: son rhythm on the page, invented sound words and refrains that organise a poem. Craft advice included.
When Nicolás Guillén published Motivos de son in 1930, he did something structural rather than decorative: he took the son, the Afro-Cuban musical form behind so much Cuban dance music, and made it the skeleton of written poems. Born in Camagüey in 1902, the son of a journalist, Guillén trained as a typesetter and journalist himself before those eight short poems announced a new music in Spanish verse.
He went on to become Cuba's national poet, and his career shows a rare thing: poems that are simultaneously singable, politically serious and technically exact. For any writer wondering how to get the music of their own community onto the page without cliché, Guillén is the essential case study.
Who he was
Guillén wrote at the meeting point of two currents: the international movement of Black consciousness that also produced the Harlem Renaissance and négritude, and the specifically Cuban question of a nation built from African and Spanish roots. He called that mixture mulatez and made it his subject, insisting Cuban identity was the blend itself, not either strand alone.
Books such as Sóngoro cosongo (1931) and West Indies, Ltd. (1934) widened his range from street scenes to anti-imperial satire. He met Langston Hughes in Havana, reported from the Spanish Civil War, spent years in exile under Batista, and returned after 1959 to preside over Cuba's writers' union.
Signature moves
Guillén's technique is audible before it is analysable, which is exactly the point.
What you can learn from him
Find the son of your own place. Every community has a rhythm, a bhajan, a football chant, a skipping rhyme, and you can borrow its stress pattern as a stanza engine. The result will sound like home rather than like the poetry you have been reading.
Try one poem containing a word you invented for sound alone, and build a refrain that repeats three times while meaning something new each time. Rhythm, structure and language are separate scoring criteria on Writory's judging sheet, and Guillén is proof they can be one decision.
Notice also his economy: many Motivos poems are under twenty short lines. Musical form forgives nothing baggy.
Where to start reading
Begin with Motivos de son (1930) and Sóngoro cosongo (1931) to hear the method at full strength, then West Indies, Ltd. (1934) for the political widening. The much-anthologised 'Sensemayá', a chant for killing a snake built on hypnotic repeated syllables, shows the jitanjáfora at work. Bilingual selected editions are easy to find and worth reading aloud.
What poets can take from this
- Borrow a stress pattern from music you grew up with, not from other poems.
- Invent one pure-sound word and place it where meaning would be weakest.
- Make every refrain return changed by the stanza before it.
- Read drafts aloud and cut any line your mouth stumbles on.
- Keep song-shaped poems short; the form exposes padding instantly.
Try it yourself
Write a poem built on a chant or rhyme from your childhood street or schoolyard. Keep its rhythm exactly, replace its words entirely, and let a refrain return three times with a darker meaning each time.
Questions
What is Nicolás Guillén known for?
He is Cuba's national poet, famous for fusing the Afro-Cuban son musical form with written poetry in Motivos de son (1930) and for politically engaged collections such as West Indies, Ltd.
What is a jitanjáfora?
A word invented for its sound rather than its meaning, used as verbal percussion. Guillén's 'Sensemayá' and the title Sóngoro cosongo are celebrated examples.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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