Chilean Poetry Under Inclement Skies
The picture I have of Chilean poetry is like my memory of my first dog, Duke, a mongrel who was part St. Bernard, German shepherd, and Alsatian. He lived with us for many years, and when I was lonely he was like father, mother, teacher, and brother all in one. To me, Duke is Chilean poetry and I have the vague suspicion that Chileans see Chilean poetry as a dog, or as dogs in their various incarnations: sometimes as a savage pack of wolves, sometimes as a solitary howl heard between dreams, and sometimes — especially — as a lap dog at the groomer’s. I think of Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Huidobro, Parra, de Rokha, but I also think of Pezoa Véliz and his poem about the hospital, a poem that deserves a place in the annals of Latin American melancholy, and about the songs of Violeta Parra — straight out of the repertoire of Archaic Greece — that speak unflaggingly of the tragedy of Latin America.
So it is for us Chileans: this seems to be our fate and our particular splendor. And that’s how I think of Lihn, as an undeserved luxury, who throughout his work tried to teach us to avoid melodrama, and that’s how I think of Teillier, who retreated to one of Santiago’s most miserable neighborhoods to die, accepting his fate as a poet and alcoholic. After Lihn and Teillier, nothingness or mystery offers us its little paw and even wags its tail. Zurita creates a wonderful body of work that marks a point of no return for the poetics of the previous generation and for which he stands out among his generation, but his eschatology and his messianism are also the pillars of a mausoleum or a funeral pyre toward which almost all the poets of Chile marched in the 1980s. That dolce stil novo tried to be fresh and epic, and in some ways it was, though its fringes were bitter and pathetic.
The poetry of Gonzalo Millán, as consistent and lucid as anything on the Chilean and even the Latin American scene, has stood for some years as the only secular poetry in the face of an avalanche of sacramental verse: it’s a relief to read Millán, who doesn’t present himself as the voice of the nation or of the oppressed. Juan Luis Martínez makes a fleeting study of Duchamp (the perfect study, in a way) and disappears. Rodrigo Lira blazes a path and is lost. But one must reread Lira. Instead of trying to be Dante, he tries to be the cartoon bird Condorito. Instead of trying to gain entrance to the House of Handouts (which for so long was the House of Poets), he tries to gain entrance to the House of Destruction. Diego Maquieira writes just two brilliant books, and then opts for silence. What, I ask myself sometimes, was Maquieira trying to tell us? Did he wag his tail, did he growl, did Chilean poetry toss him a little stick to fetch and he never came back? With Maquieira anything is possible, good or bad. And yet the ultimate rebel of my generation is Pedro Lemebel, who writes no poetry but whose life serves as an example for poets. In Lemebel there’s tenderness, a sense of the apocalypse, fierce bitterness. With him there are no half measures; to read him requires deep immersion.
Chilean poetry is a dog and now it lives out under inclement skies again. Bertoni, who gathers seaweed on the coast, is the perfect example.
On Bruno Montané
His poems are brushstrokes suspended in the air. Sometimes they’re only jottings, other times miniatures, occasionally long existentialist works shrunk to eight or twelve lines. His poems are blood suspended in the air. His intent, or his attitude toward the world and culture, vacillates between irreconcilable poles. From this prolonged struggle he has been able to extract paradoxical verses. He writes like a naturalist who believes in very little and who nevertheless continues to stubbornly do his work, his stubbornness at times confused with indifference. I believe that he’s one of Chile’s best contemporary poets.
Eight Seconds With Nicanor Parra
There’s only one thing I can say for sure about Nicanor Parra’s poetry in this new century: it will endure. This means very little, of course, as Parra would be the first to acknowledge. Still, it will endure, along with the poetry of Borges, Vallejo, Cernuda and a few others. But this, it must be said, hardly matters.
Parra’s wager, his probe into the future, is too complex to be explained here. And it’s too dark. It possesses the darkness of motion. The actor who speaks or gestures, however, is perfectly visible. His features, his trappings, the symbols that accompany him like tumors are familiar: he’s the poet who sleeps sitting in a chair, the beau who gets lost in a cemetery, the lecturer who tears at his hair until he pulls it out, the brave man who dares to piss kneeling, the hermit who watches the years go by, the anguished statistician. In order to read Parra, it’s worth asking the question that he asks himself and that Wittgenstein asks us: is this hand a hand or isn’t it a hand? (The question should be asked as one gazes at one’s own hand.)
I wonder who will write the book that Parra planned and never wrote: a history of World War II told or sung battle by battle, concentration camp by concentration camp, exhaustively, a poem that somehow became the instant antithesis of Neruda’s Canto general and of which Parra retains only one text, the Manifiesto, in which he expounds upon his poetic credo, a credo that Parra himself has ignored whenever necessary, among other things because that’s exactly what credos are for: to give a vague sense of the unexplored territory into which one is heading, and — infrequently — to single out the real writers. When it comes to concrete risks and dangers, credos aren’t worth much.
Let the brave follow Parra. Only the young are brave, only the young are pure of heart among the pure. But Parra doesn’t write juvenile verse. Parra doesn’t write about purity. He does write about pain and loneliness; about pointless and necessary challenges; about words fated to drift apart just as the tribe is fated to drift apart. Parra writes as if the next day he’ll be electrocuted. As far as I know, the Mexican poet Mario Santiago was the only one with a clear understanding of his work. The rest of us have just glimpsed a dark meteor. First requirement of a masterpiece: to pass unnoticed.
There are moments in the journey of a poet when he has no choice but to improvise. He may be able to recite Gonzalo de Berceo from memory and he may have expert knowledge of Garcilaso’s heptasyllables and hendecasyllables, but there are moments when all he can do is throw himself into the abyss or stand naked before a clan of ostensibly polite Chileans. Naturally, one has to know how to accept the consequences. First requirement of a masterpiece: to pass unnoticed.
A political note: Parra has managed to survive. It’s not much, but it’s something. He has survived the Chilean left, with its deeply right-wing convictions, and the memory-challenged, neo-Nazi Chilean right. He has survived the neo-Stalinist Latin American left and the Latin American right, now globalized and until recently the silent accomplice of repression and genocide. He has survived the mediocre Latin American professors who swarm on American university campuses and the zombies who stagger through the village of Santiago. He has even survived his own followers. And I would go further — probably carried away by enthusiasm — and say that Parra, along with his comrades (Violeta at the head) and his Rabelaisian forefathers, has achieved one of poetry’s greatest goals of all time: to wear out the public’s patience.
Lines picked at random: “It’s a mistake to think the stars can help cure cancer,” said Parra. Right he is. “Apropos of nothing, I remind you that the soul is immortal,” said Parra. Right again. And we could go on like this until the room was empty. I remind you, nevertheless, that Parra is a sculptor too. Or a visual artist. These explanations are perfectly useless. Parra is also a literary critic. He once summed up the e
ntire history of Chilean literature in three lines: “The four great poets of Chile / are three: / Alonso de Ercilla and Rubén Darío.”
The poetry of the first decades of the twenty-first century will be a hybrid creation, as fiction has already become. We may be heading, with terrible slowness, toward new earthquakes of form. In this uncertain future, our children will watch as the poet asleep in an armchair meets up on the operating table with the black desert bird that feeds on the parasites of camels. At some point late in his life, Breton talked about the need for surrealism to go underground, to descend into the sewers of cities and libraries. Then he never spoke on the subject again. It doesn’t matter who said it: THE TIME TO SETTLE DOWN WILL NEVER COME.
The Lost
It’s hard to talk about emblematic figures, figures who might serve us as totem or bridge between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Especially in Latin America, where disastrous, tragic, and caricaturish models have abounded, among them the founding fathers of both the right and the left, who have plunged the continent into something like a cross between a swamp and Las Vegas. But it occurs to me now that Rodrigo Lira could be such a figure, and also that if Rodrigo Lira read this he would laugh. He certainly lived a modest life, but modesty, in Rodrigo’s case, didn’t mean what it does elsewhere on the planet or at least in Latin America, where it’s synonymous with silence and also castration. Modesty, in Rodrigo Lira’s case, was a dangerous mix of elegance and sadness. An elegance and a sadness that could be extreme, that often were extreme, and that in public (and also in private, I suppose, which here means in the most boundless solitude) appeared clad from head to toe in the most caustic humor, as if Rodrigo were a medieval knight lost in a dream that suddenly became a nightmare. He was a poet, of course. Sometimes it’s tempting to think that he was Chile’s last poet, one of the last poets of Latin America. He was born in 1949, which means that he was twenty-four at the time of the coup. From what he wrote, the reader sometimes gets the sense that his world, the geography through which he moved, was limited to a few university departments and a few libraries in Santiago, the city of his birth. Many of his poems are commentaries on the work of older Chilean poets whom he frequented and whose patience he tried: at first glance they seem like jokes, frivolous glosses, insults proffered by a younger man who refuses to grow up, who refuses to enter the adult world. Behind the invective, behind the poet’s laughing response to the frozen carnival of literature, one can find other things, among them horror and a prophetic gaze that proclaims the end of the dictatorship but not the end of stupidity, the end of the military presence but not the end of the quicksand and silence that came with it and that will presumably last forever or for such a long time that, in human terms, it’s an eternity. Prophetic and visionary as he may be, however, it’s other things that really interest Lira. He’s interested in a few women who invariably leave him or even refuse to talk to him. He’s interested in his hair, which he’s losing (as his bald spot grows, so do his sideburns, from tiny to big and bushy, the sideburns of an Independence hero). He’s interested in flowered shirts. He’s interested in a few books that are like black holes, or pretend to be. He’s interested in sociability: imagine someone friendly, attentive, cultured, sensitive, a good son and a good friend, a young man always ready to lend a hand, although this young man is really a time bomb, this young man listens in a different way, this young man is driven by a different kind of loyalty. He’s interested in street talk, argot, the Chilean slang that is our poverty but also one of the few riches we have left (argot, sex, automatic excess), though hidden behind his argot, like a cornered terrorist, is the ultimate vision of what those who own the nation call nation: a territory that was once snatched away from death and that death is now reconquering with a giant’s slow strides. And he writes, and, sometimes — rarely — publishes, but he gives readings, and in this sense Rodrigo Lira is like so many of the Latin American poets of the 1970s and ’80s who drift along and give readings, except that Rodrigo Lira, unlike most of his contemporaries, isn’t an involuntary inhabitant of an incomprehensible dream, but a voluntary resident, someone with his eyes open in the middle of a nightmare. His modesty, however, the modesty that makes him a rare bird, also causes him to soften as much as possible the otherness that the well-intentioned try to pass off as normality. He likes to walk, he likes to give readings, he tries to dress well or at least look as groomed as possible. In 1981 he decides to kill himself. To play it down, in his suicide note he explains that he’s killing himself to protest the recent increase in the price of bread. Or sugar. I can’t remember which. I’m writing this without access to reference books. Enrique Lihn is one of the few who’s written anything about Rodrigo Lira, after Lira was already dead, and I don’t have Lihn’s piece at hand. I seem to remember that he got into a hot bath and slit his wrists. That’s always struck me as a brave and contemplative way to die. Death comes not suddenly but slowly and there’s plenty of time to think: to remember the good moments and the bad, to bid a silent farewell to the beloved and the despised, to recite poetry from memory, to weep. In Rodrigo Lira’s case, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d also had time to laugh. The best thing about Latin America are its suicides, voluntary or not. We have the worst politicians in the world, the worst capitalists in the world, the worst writers in the world. In Europe we’re known for our complaining and our crocodile tears. Latin America is the closest thing there is to Kafka’s penal colony. We do our best to fool a few naive Europeans and a few ignorant Europeans with terrible books, in which we appeal to their good nature, to political correctness, to tales of the noble savage, to exoticism. The only thing our university graduates and intellectuals want is to teach at some college lost in the American Midwest, just as the goal was once to travel and live on neo-Stalinist handouts, which we thought of as an unprecedented achievement. We’re experts at winning scholarships, scholarships that are sometimes awarded more out of pity than because we deserve them. Our discourse on weath is the closest thing there is to a cheap self-help book. Our discourse on poverty is an imaginary discourse in which the only voices are those of madmen speaking of bitterness and frustration. We hate the Argentines because the Argentines are the closest thing in these parts to Europeans. The Argentines hate us because we’re the mirror in which they see themselves as what they truly are — Americans. We’re racists in the purest sense: that is, we’re racists because we’re scared to death. But our suicides are the best. Take Violeta Parra, who wrote some of our continent’s best songs and fought with everyone and everything and shot herself next to the tent where every night she sang and howled. Take Alfonsina Storni, the most talented woman in Argentina, who drowned herself in the Río de la Plata. Take Jorge Cuesta, gay Mexican writer, who — before he put a bag over his head — castrated himself and nailed his testicles to the door of his bedroom, as a final unreciprocated gift. These great suicides and all their brethren, those who refuse to come in out of the storm (not because they like it out there but among other reasons because they have no place to go), give reason to believe that not everything is lost, as preached by the rise of neoliberalism and the resurgence of the church. We’re children of the Enlightenment, said Rodrigo Lira as he strolled through a Santiago that more than anything resembled a cemetery on another planet. In other words, we’re reasonable human beings (poor, but reasonable), not spirits out of a manual of magic realism, not postcards for foreign consumption and abject national masquerade. In other words: we’re beings who h
ave the historic chance of opting for freedom, and also — paradoxically — life. To the countless number of those killed by the repression one must add the suicide victims who killed themselves for the sake of reason, in the name of reason, which is also the abode of humor. Like so many Latin American poets who died without ever publishing a thing, Rodrigo Lira knew that. In 1984, a small publishing house put out a collection of his poems titled Proyecto de Obras completas [Plan for a Complete Works]. Now, in 1998, it’s impossible to find. And yet no one has taken the trouble to reissue it. In Chile quite a number of books — most of them bad — are published. Rodrigo Lira’s elegance, his disdain, make him off limits for any publisher. The cowardly don’t publish the brave.
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 Page 9
