Of Poets and Poetry

By Rolando Gabrielli

The city I inhabited was inhabited by poets. We drifted through bars, the university, and the chance encounters the day would occasionally place in our path. No one went around trying to write poetry. Poems were born in the solitude of private rooms and in those moments each of us reserved for ourselves. Without ever intending it, we became a kind of brotherhood. Chance brought us together, and those idle hours—so indispensable to art—were woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Stories became experience; they were part of the quiet grace of those singular gatherings.

Poetry has its own unmistakable breathing. It creates its own stage as it unfolds. Sometimes it was enough simply to listen, to follow the echo of words. In the end, poetry and life reveal themselves to be one and the same adventure.

And yet, in striking contrast to this way of living, I vividly remember Nicanor Parra as a tireless poetic engine. His weapons were an ordinary notebook and a humble Bic pen. Then the performance would begin. He wrote in large letters—half childlike, half unruly—covering the page with lines, crossings-out, and relentless revisions. Anything that failed to convince him disappeared without mercy. I have never seen anyone engage the blank page with such ferocity. He gave it no respite. His method was to conduct his search in full view of whoever happened to witness it, pursuing each breath of language until exhaustion, even suffocation, if necessary.

A shadow accompanied that endless Parrian quest to wring every last possibility from language, stripping words of their adjectives, reducing them to bare bone, freeing them from every ornament. That shadow was Neruda. The obsession deserves a book of its own, one capable of revealing both the true significance of antipoetry and the hidden struggle that unfolded behind the curtains of Chilean poetry.

The other way—perhaps the bohemian way—was to embrace carpe diem: to read, to absorb the atmosphere of the world, and then to face the blank page alone. That is not to say that Parra did not have his own version of carpe diem. He did, while maintaining at home the rigorous discipline of the physicist and mathematician he also was.

Neruda, by his own account and by the testimony of those who knew him, worked with the punctuality of an office clerk. He kept regular hours, filled notebook after notebook in his various homes—above all at Isla Negra—and wrote throughout his long sea voyages. Yet he also left us the unforgettable line: "Out of loving so much, books are born."

Poets are far more disciplined than they appear. Even the most bohemian among them labor over every line, every poem. Gonzalo Millán sometimes produced as many as nine versions of a single poem, polishing each one like a jeweler cutting a precious stone.

One evening, as twilight settled, I watched Enrique Lihn quietly excuse himself from the conversation in his own home and retreat to a small room at the back of the garden, where he could continue indulging his incurable vice: poetry. In a poem addressed to Rimbaud, Lihn confronts his own demons as a poet: "He threw this rubbish away; I envy his refusal of this exercise." Rimbaud left for Africa and abandoned poetry. By the age of nineteen, he had already accomplished what he came to accomplish—a genius. Lihn, on the other hand, accepted his sentence: to keep writing, to continue writing poems and whatever else his imagination demanded. Fortunately for poetry.

Gonzalo Rojas wrote according to the rhythm of his breathing. That was the measure he trusted, as he often said. Rolando Cárdenas was present at nearly all our gatherings. There was something rain-soaked in his gaze. He came from southern Chile, and his poetry carried that southern landscape within it—intimate, everyday, deeply austral. He himself embodied extraordinary simplicity and generosity. He was a close friend of Jorge Teillier, the poet of Araucanía, of nostalgia, of the lar, of the lost paradise. Jorge also rewrote his poems, however spontaneous they seemed when read.

It was an extraordinarily fertile period for poetry in that far southern province. Poets breathed freely, and I have often thought that Neruda's immense international prestige served as a protective canopy over Chilean poets and over poetry itself. There was a dignity then that has all but disappeared in today's digital world—and in everything surrounding it.

Outstanding literary journals flourished: Norte, Tebaida, Centro Sur, Arúspice, and Trilce. Groups of gifted young poets published their work, organized readings, and sustained the living tradition of poetry. What united us was more than official fellowship; it was a genuine community of spirit.

When the publishing house Quimantú—"Sun of Knowledge"—was founded in February 1971, it unleashed a remarkable cultural awakening and nothing less than a revolution in books. Poetry, forever living close to the edge, shared in those generous years. It was a golden age, crowned by Neruda's Nobel Prize, and from then on Chile became known throughout the world as a country of poets. Gabriela Mistral had opened that path in 1945.

Huidobro, De Rokha, Díaz Casanueva, Rosamel del Valle, Arteche, Alberto Rubio, Anguita, Uribe, Barquero, Óscar Hahn, Waldo Rojas, Omar Lara, Oliver Welden, Manuel Silva Acevedo, Floridor Pérez, Zurita, José Ángel Cuevas, Hernán Miranda, and many others belong to the living geography of Chilean poetry. I have written of them often. Some reflected deeply on the nature of poetry itself—Huidobro, Teillier, Parra, De Rokha, each from a different perspective. Some spoke from public platforms; others from the margins. All left enduring traces. They plowed their furrows across the length of Chile.

Behind each of them stands an entire lineage of reading that cannot be overlooked, for poetry never exists in isolation from literature. No poem is orphaned. The family tree of poetry is vast, reaching back thousands of years, beyond writing itself to the age of oral tradition. In many respects, poetry is the childhood of all literature.

Tradition remains tradition. Poetry follows paths of its own; it never springs from nothing. Borges understood this perfectly. Few remember that he loved going to the cinema, driven by an inexhaustible curiosity. Above all, he was an inexhaustible reader, and I suspect he regarded that as his finest introduction to the world.

Poets speak through the adventure of language. More often than not, they are better read than heard.

These poems, entrusted to the sovereignty of words, are children of our own age of diaspora—fragile and elusive as Alice's looking glass.