https://letralia.com/ciudad-letralia/fechado-en-panama/2026/03/05/poesia-parentesis-silencio/
Poetry in a Mad Geography
Memory is the birthplace of the word. It travels, transforms itself, creates atmospheres, and bears witness to what it sees—what it selects, connects, and ultimately lives. Poetry breathes, and in that breath it founds something enduring.
From where I stand, Chileans have been extraordinarily fortunate. Few countries have known such a wealth of poets—voices we have been able to read, hear, and encounter—throughout the twentieth century and now into the first quarter of the twenty-first. A century that refuses to collapse even as chaos, stupidity, and the perverse digitalization of everyday life threaten to flatten human experience.
Not everything has been lost in our fragile paradise, the only one we have. Poetry is not merely part of the landscape; it changes the landscape of the arts themselves. A work either contains poetry or it does not. The distinction is absolute. Within the human spirit, the poem either takes root—or disappears.
Do not search for it, reader, in empty corners where words never arrive and nothing ever blossoms.
I remain drawn to the overlooked: the talented losers, the silent guests, those forgotten despite their merits, those postponed and only reluctantly accepted. I think of the disappeared—how terrible forgetfulness is. And of those who never stopped writing. And of those who, regardless of years, distances, or eras, I sense are still present.
Once again we find ourselves walking toward the abyss, ignoring the words that defend life.
Poetry, however, remains a light in the tunnel of history.
Beyond Words
A poem is more than words in their pure state. It carries the imprint of the person who writes it, the circumstances of its birth, the readers it seeks—or unexpectedly finds—and the strange durability that allows it to endure in time.
A poem survives when its language remains clear, fluid, and alive, when its message resists the distortions of fleeting interpretations or opportunistic readings.
As I write these lines, I am not consulting books or archives. Instead I turn to my own inner oracle, pressing memory and lived experience for what they still contain. Inevitably there will be arbitrariness, unconscious bias, personal taste. But poetry is not an exercise in taxonomy. We are not arranging specimens in a cabinet of curiosities.
Nor can we know everything or square the circle.
Poetry remains an enigma—even when it appears transparent, objective, or realistic, as though it were merely tracing the contours of human nature or landscape.
Every poet inhabits a different dimension: a particular depth, a particular historical moment, a particular resonance with readers. Ultimately, each possesses a singularity that cannot be replicated.
I remember an observation made years ago by the Chilean critic Jaime Concha during the era of the Quimantú publishing house. Concha compared poets to Chile’s geography.
And Chile is, indeed, a “mad geography,” as Benjamín Subercaseaux famously called it.
From childhood I have felt the force of that landscape. Santiago itself—dry, austere—lies beneath an enormous snow-capped mountain. A dark river crosses the city without ceremony, while the valley around it fills with restless lives resisting routine and imagining new futures.
“Santiago—capital of what?” the poet Gonzalo Rojas once asked.
He had every right to ask. Born in Chillán, widely read, widely traveled, Rojas belonged to that rare category of poets who resist classification altogether.
There are many such figures. Poets from the provinces—especially the south—though never provincial in spirit. Poets from the north, from the frontier where Chile begins after Peru and Bolivia. Urban poets from the capital. Wanderers, expatriates, exiles.
In the end, poetry is inseparable from reading.
For proof, one need only think of Borges.
The Baptism of a Country
Concha’s metaphor extended further. The poets of Chile, he suggested, resemble the features of the Andes themselves: towering summits, volcanoes, lakes, coves, rivers, even delicate threads of crystalline water.
Chilean poetry has always been tied to the land.
Gabriela Mistral. Pablo Neruda. Pablo de Rokha. Nicanor Parra. Efraín Barquero. Jorge Teillier. Juvencio Valle. Violeta Parra. Rolando Cárdenas. Alfonso Alcalde. Floridor Pérez. Raúl Zurita. And surely others I fail to mention.
In many of them there is a powerful telluric force—a poetry rooted in earth, weather, and distance.
Yet Chile’s poetic tradition stretches even further back. Its founding poet is the Spanish soldier Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, author of La Araucana, the epic that first named the country in verse. In its opening lines he describes a land both distant and formidable, a place of proud and warlike people who had never bowed to a foreign king.
With that gesture, Chile entered literature.
The country that Ercilla measured—from north to south, in its astonishing length—became a geography not only of mountains and rivers, but of language.
Nicanor Parra, who delighted in paradox, once offered a warning that remains unforgettable:
Woe to those who read only one book.
A Seductive Diversity
Some readers may feel that looking backward risks nostalgia. Yet memory in poetry is not regression—it is a form of knowledge. It sharpens the present and helps us imagine the future.
What makes Chilean poetry so compelling is its extraordinary diversity. Before and after the political rupture of 1973—what many remember as a cultural blackout—the tradition persisted with surprising vitality.
The coup scattered artists across the world. A diaspora emerged whose significance has yet to be fully recognized in Chile’s cultural history. Yet through exile, displacement, and silence, the word survived.
The fracture extended beyond poetry. Cinema, painting, fiction, journalism, philosophy, theater, music—every branch of culture was splintered. What once seemed a unified artistic landscape broke into fragments dispersed across continents.
The rupture was total. Horizontal. Vertical.
The spine of a culture snapped.
Those who lived through those years remember a silence that seemed almost physical: a blackout in broad daylight. The longest night in Chile’s history.
Chance Encounters
Reading poets is always a conversation across time. In recent years, those conversations have sometimes continued in my dreams.
Not long ago I dreamed of Gonzalo Millán, one of the most original voices of his generation. In the dream he left me a note—warm, generous, though written in unfamiliar handwriting—speaking about life and love. He had overheard me mention a woman and suggested I visit him. A typewriter, he said, was waiting for me.
In another dream the poet Waldo Rojas appeared like a character from Proust, patiently immersed in the craft of language. I have also dreamed of Enrique Lihn, of Parra, of Teillier, even of Neruda—whom I never met. Rolando Cárdenas appeared once in the distant landscapes of Chiloé, and Antonio Skármeta, who was once my teacher.
Such dreams are consoling. They remind me that poets do not entirely disappear.
They remain present in the pages we return to, in the conversations we continue with them long after they are gone.
Epilogue
I count it among the privileges of my life to have known many of these writers in person—to share with them workshops, classrooms, conversations, and the early atmospheres of literary discovery.
Those years now feel irretrievable: an unforgettable Chile.
More than half a century has passed. We are distant now not only in time but also in experience. In a sense, we ourselves have become part of memory.
And yet poetry endures.
Sooner or later, it calls us back.
