Spring 2015
This Latin new world carries also the legacy of Simon Bolivar and his vision of the emergence
of Latin America as a unified cultural and political force in the world. José Martí of Cuba and Pedro
Albizu Campos of Puerto Rico advanced that view, and today we can see stirrings with the formation
of ALBA and CEPAC as organizations that share the political struggles for independence from US
corporations and the development of socialism appropriate for contemporary Latin America. Poetry
has an important role to play in these developments.
The Neruda Seminar was formed in San Juan, Puerto Rico to study the modern poetry of the
New World. The goal is to understand Latin America culture as a shared phenomenon as well as to
honor the brilliance of Spanish New World poetry and make it better known. In the 20th C. popular
media has swamped the legacy of the past -- Santa Claus revered, Three Kings forgotten. Reviving
the poetry reminds us who we are and what has mattered other than getting and spending. Neruda
preserves that history in Canto General (1950), as does his countrywoman Gabriela Mistral’s
Desolación (1922), and the work of Mexican poet Octavio Paz – all three Nobel Prize winners. These
celebrated writers, however, represent but a small slice of Latin America’s riches.
Neruda grew up near the jungle world of southern Chile. His was a lonely childhood, and he
found the wilds to be his special kin. Neruda would later live in Rangoon and spend formative years
in Spain and France during the 1930’s among the leading European artists of his time, then return
to Chile to serve as a Senator (as a Communist) before fleeing for his life from a counter-revolution.
His Communism barred him from the United States; and then, when that world turned in the
1960’s, US readers made him famous for his political poetry at the expense of the rest.
Neruda found fame early with Veinte Poemas de Amor (1924) published when he was twenty.
These love poems continue to be his most popular. For example, “Poem XIV” already shows daring
in form, voice, and metaphor. Holding his beloved’s “small white head” violates the romantic dignity;
the closing image of the cherry tree is brilliant but indeterminate, inviting us into a cluster of
possibilities. The form is open, too, as if these thoughts rush on with their own impetus rather than
obeying the sonnet machinery. The sexual explicitness -- “even your breasts smell of it”; “the sunned
mother-of-pearl of your body” -- was a shock within the lyrical tradition of Spanish poetry.
The poem is an adventure of unexpected figures – “the rain takes off her clothes”; boats “moored
last night to the sky” suggesting Emily Dickinson – but also some banal effusion -- “my savage, solitary
soul”. But the triumph is the closing remark—‘I want to do with you/ what spring does with the
cherry trees.” The voice comes from outside poetry, a wish expressed naturally but that hasn’t had
time to find poetic decorum or be justified by the poem’s logic. The poem has Whitman’s exuberance
and the veracity. Its energy and common-day truth outranks the demands of the poem and is true
only to itself.
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a bunch of flowers, every day, between my hands.
The Linnet's Wings