Ivan Argüelles (January 24, 1939 – April 28, 2024) was an American poet whose work moved from early Beat- and surrealist-influenced forms to later epic-length poems.
His mother returned with Ivan and his twin brother Jose to Mexico City, where they resided until 1944 when they moved to Mexicali and shortly thereafter to Los Angeles.
Ivan's older sister Laurita was responsible for much of his upbringing and care while they lived in Mexico, and during the period their mother was in the sanitarium and convalescing.
While in college and during the decade of the 60s he continued to write however sporadically, chiefly efforts at experimental prose works on the model of James Joyce and William Burroughs.
So it is no accident that much of his earlier poetry is infused both with the surrealistic style he then adopted and with themes relating to his own Mexican background.
Married since October 27, 1962, to Marilla Calhoun Elder, artist and activist, they have two sons, Alexander, a noted linguist, and Maximilian.
During the late 70s and into the 80s his poems were frequently and widely published through many small press and poetry journals in the United States.
He also founded, with Andrew Joron, Pantograph Press, which in 1992 published the first volume of his epic, the long poem "That" Goddess.
His selected early poems, The Death of Stalin, was published in 2010 (American Book Award Winner, Before Columbus Foundation).
The unexpected death of his identical twin, José Argüelles, on March 22, 2011, prompted the rush of elegiac poems published in 2012, A Day in the Sun.
[2] As a young poet in the late fifties and early sixties, Argüelles felt the influence of the Beats, but also immersed himself in the literature of the Romance languages and High Modernism.
"[4] While Argüelles's early writings were rooted in neo-Beat bohemianism, surrealism, and Chicano culture, in the nineties he developed longer, epic-length forms, and eventually returned, after the first decade of the new millennium, to shorter, to often elegiac works exemplary of romantic modernism.