In this essay I should like to propose a reading of Pizarnik's textual production and aesthetic preoccupations which links all aspects of her output. An examination of her ‘diarios de lectura’ (henceforth DL), which contain notes and critical analyses of her eclectic reading from Quevedo to Blanchot, and the notebooks of the ‘palais du vocabulaire’ (henceforth PV), in which she carefully records phrases from other writers’ work for her own poetic process, reveals a pattern which seems to underlie the apparently divergent facets of her work. The pattern relates to what I see as the central problem in Pizarnik's entire output and indeed attitude: a constant tension between the external and the internal. The forms this tension takes are multiple, and in different modes of expression (diary, essay, note-taking, poetry) the ways in which it manifests itself become more or less metaphorical. In some poems the external–internal tension gives rise to a nexus of contradictory images, and in some of her readings the sense of an internal– external dialectic provides a strong interpretive strategy. The occasional sterility of this binary is alluded to in a droll phrase which Pizarnik quotes from the Real Academia Española dictionary definition of ‘círculo vicioso’: ‘Abrir es lo contrario de cerrar, y cerrar es lo contrario de abrir’ (Princeton, box 3, folder 9, p. 188).

A few examples will suffice to indicate the prevalence of this interior/exterior dialectic in the whole spectrum of her writings, from DL and diaries to poetry: