https://letralia.com/ciudad-letralia/fechado-en-panama/2026/04/17/poetas-sin-voz/
https://muckrack.com/rolando-gabrielli
Poetry has almost always been a shooting star on the publishing horizon, yet it continues to occupy a secret, hidden, special corner in the hearts of its readers. It is difficult to find pages devoted to poets in the scarce literary supplements of newspapers. Poetry magazines have become objects of cult interest. Internet pages spread the word, but there is no lively, vibrant dialogue between authors and audiences. Some competitions, it is true, encourage and stimulate the more daring writers. It has become a genre for emotional survival, a kind of spiritual amulet in this mercantile, digital society, where life unfolds on autopilot. Poetry requires attention, a love of words, passion, curiosity, and above all, I would say, complicity. Poets have been left voiceless, and humanity without poetry. The facts do not contradict these words; they reaffirm them.
For a long time now, poets have not made the news; they do not speak out in the face of universal chaos and misery, even though poetry is an essentially humanistic genre—its very skin is humanity itself, its voice millennia-old, whose echoes still resound in the 21st century.
For publishers, publishing a poet is a high-risk economic venture, immediately and pragmatically classified as a loss of money and time. Poets have no audience, no platform; their stage is verbal clandestinity, as if the word itself had been proscribed and forgotten. It is more entertaining to waste time on a network, watch a movie, amuse oneself with a video game, chat endlessly, gamble in a casino, learn the rules of entrepreneurship, survive in this dystopian universe.
Poets such as Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, Neruda, Borges, Dalton, Benedetti, Parra, De Rokha, Bolaño, Oliverio Girondo, Gelman, Heraud, Cisneros, and so many others have disappeared from the scene, leaving poetry in a kind of aphonia. Bertolt Brecht left a formidable legacy for human commitment in any era, because humanity’s challenges repeat themselves cyclically. In his poem praising the indispensable person, he says:
There are men who fight for a day
and they are good. There are others who fight for a year
and are better. There are those who fight for many years
and are very good. But there are those who fight all their lives:
they are the indispensable ones.
The poem is well known, quoted, repeated, and has not lost its relevance—especially in volatile times.
The book, in general, is an object that may decorate a wall, but it is not part of people’s everyday lives, and it would be considered odd for someone to quote an author in a conversation or meeting—let alone a poet. Pulling out a book in a group, mentioning a philosopher, are things of the past. One must operate with programs and technologies, at the pace of algorithms, in the shortest possible time. Very soon, people with higher incomes will be able to buy their own personal robot that, in their free time, can recite a poem suited to the occasion.
Curiously, even people who have never been interested in reading poetry say in their daily lives—often marked by supreme banality—“this lacks poetry,” “it has no poetry,” “add some poetry to it.” It seems as though this kind of casual refrain were a reminder of the splendor, importance, and essential nature that poetry once had since time immemorial. Poetry is not the cherry on top.
This reflection, in these times when reading often becomes a heavy burden, arises from the fact that in the Chilean imagination—at least in my time—it was said that Chile is a country of poets. Not without reason: two Nobel Prize winners and dozens of extraordinary poets throughout its entire geography—nearly 4,500 kilometers of fine poetry. Mountain, maritime, desert, urban, social, popular poets—the full range of possible adjectives. This year, without going any further, 81 years after Gabriela Mistral received the Nobel Prize, a monument has been erected in her honor in Plaza Italia, the site that divides Santiago into north and south. The work of artists Mariana Silva and Norma Ramírez presides over that emblematic place for Chileans through “16 vertical steel prisms that combine images of the poet with excerpts from her poem ‘We Were All Going to Be Queens,’ one of the most well-known in her body of work.” There are mixed opinions about the piece; Gabriela was always immersed in controversy, and an anonymous critic even coined the following phrase in reference to the monument: “When politics fails, politicians resort to myth and poetry.”
Poetry seems to be a kind of cosmetic resource—at least it serves some purpose amid so much prosaic prose. This spontaneous note has emerged, unsurprisingly, after an interview with the Chilean National Poetry Prize winner of 2016, my friend Manuel Silva Acevedo, who at 83 tells us that he has knocked on the doors of various Chilean publishers; three refused him with different excuses about prior commitments. Silva Acevedo, with 60 years of poetic practice, a recognized body of work, and a hard-earned place in Chilean poetry, has wandered for months through the publishing market without reaching port. This is a stark example of the state of interest in poetry in Chile. The jury that awarded him described his work as a “key poetic presence in our literature, from his prophetic and multivalent poem Wolves and Sheep (1976),” as reported by Diego Quivira, the interviewer. “There are only 50 poems,” the poet notes, under the title Shards and Impertinences.
Marisol Vera, director of Editorial Cuarto Propio, puts it bluntly regarding the publication of poetry: “Publishing poetry in a country where every activity is expected to be profitable is extremely difficult, because poetry—even by renowned poets—does not generate economic returns.” Vera recalls that since the founding of Cuarto Propio in 1984, “the only (poetry) book that has covered its costs and generated income for the publishing house has been, in recent times, the work of Stella Díaz Varín.” I’m glad for the fiery Stella Díaz Varín, whom I met in the wild nights of Santiago’s bohemian scene, alongside Teillier, Barquero, Cárdenas, and Poli Délano.
