Neruda: The Language of Love and the Poetry of Desire

Hola mi Gente,

I need to get new friends. My one remaining single friend is getting engaged today and will be marrying soon. Yuck. And no, I am not interested in getting married.

Today, an essay…

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Neruda

1904 - 1973

Whether sun-struck mornings, rainy weekends odorous with the alkaline smell of sex, or starry nights, poetry has been with me -- like a beacon -- and I've used it to illuminate other lives, other worlds. In discovering others (in discovering you), I discovered myself and I have lived with these poems until they have become a part of the very air I breathe.

I remember the first time my father, a dabbler in poetry, tossed me a dog-eared little book and told me, “You want to know poetry? Read this.” 

I was barely fourteen and Neruda swept through my soul with the impact of a tsunami. I would never be the same -- ever. After Neruda, there is no one. He is the greatest poet of the 20^th century, in any language.

Period.

Pablo Neruda, magnificent poet of Chile and eventually of the world. Internationally recognized, he was a figure larger than life, like a Picasso or a Chaplin. He is one of the most widely read and beloved poets in history. I once made love to a woman who pleaded for me to read her Neruda while connected together.

Gawd… I was young.

Occasionally, whenever the need to quiet the inner dialog arises, I make a pilgrimage to the beach. I take my little Neruda book, raggedy with years of use. What could be more fitting than to go to the beach and read Neruda aloud? He loved the playfulness of the sea -- creative as it is destructive, forever in flux -- moving. He loved and celebrated the rejuvenating marriage of wind, water, and sand, and found his inspiration in the crashing fury and freedom of the waves, the seabirds, the seemingly endless infinity of a blue sky.

He loved how the sea was forever renewing itself, a renewal reflected in his work and his life. He felt that creating poetry was like constantly being reborn. So I head for the sea to recite and celebrate his poems and to return once again refreshed, deepened, reborn.

In one of his most emotionally motivated and sublime associations, Neruda linked womanhood to the regeneration of the earth and the cycles of nature. It is one of the most powerful associations in all of poetry.

He never knew his own mother, who died two months after his birth, but he adored his stepmother, who he called la mamadre (“the more-mother”). At age fourteen he wrote his first lyric for her. He later wrote, “… it was at that age… poetry arrived / in search of me.”

Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes y Basoalto, he later took on the pen name of Pablo Neruda in order to conceal his poetry from a disapproving father. But he quickly found approval elsewhere, when he published his second collection, the amazing Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, in 1924. The collection would make him a literary celebrity and is still revered throughout Latin America. This was the book my father gave to me for my fourteenth birthday.

Neruda’s is the first poetry in Spanish that celebrates erotic love in sensuous, earthy language -- without shame. He would later say, “Love poems were breaking out all over my body.”

As I read these poems for the first time, I immediately recognized the archetype of the adolescent lover -- at the same time a child and an adult -- being schooled in the art of longing and obsession. “Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” Neruda declared in the twentieth love poem. “I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her. / Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” I’m still profoundly affected by my memory of reading the first poem in this collection. I see it as an initiation, a ritual introduction into to the language of love and the poetry of desire:

Body of a Woman

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs.
You look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant's body digs into you
and makes the son leap from the depths of the earth.

I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself, I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.

But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breasts! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

(translated by W.S. Merwin)

Neruda would travel the world and his first stop was in Rangoon, Burma where he would find himself estranged from his language, his culture, and his history. It was here he would begin to write harsh, ferocious and surreal poems that would flower into the three volumes, Residence on Earth. These poems reflect terrors and modern anxieties.

Neruda would marry several times in his life which makes me wonder about those who mourn the supposedly scarcity of romance. Who more romantic than Neruda? And what would they think of him once he left them? 

He would eventually turn to politics and forge within his vision of an unalienated humanity, of justice and equality, a new poetry reflecting this growth. His political and social commitments were central to his life. He was elected senator for the Communist Party in Chile in 1945. Eventually, he was accused of disloyalty and declared dangerous. Neruda went into hiding, then fled to Argentina, and traveled to Italy, France, the Soviet Union, and Asia. It was his stay on the island of Capri during his exile that was fictionalized in the touching film Il Postino. If you do anything today, at least rent the film, you’ll enjoy it (click here). It’s not time travel, nor knights in shining armor, nor even all that chivalrous, but it damn sure is romantic.

Throughout this period he was writing love poems for Matilde Urrutia, who became his third wife. Those blossomed into The Captain's Verses (1952), and 100 Love Sonnets (1959), which features my all-time, favorite Neruda poem:

XI

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing at the twilight,
hunting for you, your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens if Quitratue.

It’s infinitely better in Spanish, but how can one even think of writing poetry after reading something like that?!

Everything was magical for Neruda. Nothing ordinary was alien, or for that matter, ordinary -- everything was magical. He wrote separate odes to tomatoes and wine, to an artichoke and one to a dead tree, to conger chowder, to a fuckin' large tuna in the market, to his socks and his suit, to birds, to light on the sea, to the dictionary, to a movie theater. He wrote an ode to time and another to the Earth, an “Ode to Everything.”

Eventually, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Neruda would write prolifically to the end. Ill with cancer and retired to his home in Isla Negra, he would write of entering “the silence into which everything falls / and, finally, we fall.” Heartbroken over the (US-sanctioned) coup that ousted Allende and the impending darkness that would eventually envelope his country, Neruda died eleven days later, on September 23, 1973, in Santiago.

Neruda remains a giant in poetry. His work contains multitudes, like his poetic ancestor, Walt Whitman. He was a poet of freedom and of the sea, a wondrous love poet, and a necessary voice of social consciousness.

In Neruda’s own words:

Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and also the content of religions. The poet confronted nature’s phenomena and in the early ages called himself a priest, to safeguard his vocation… Today’s social poet is still a member of the earliest of priests. In the old days he made his pact with darkness, and now he must interpret the light.

Radiantly impure, stubbornly humane… RIP Neruda.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Resources

Brittanica entry for Neruda (click here)

Wikipedia entry for Neruda (click here)

Site with many of Neruda’s poems (click here)

Labels: essays, Neruda, poems, poetry, aesthetics

Guest Blog: Racism and White Denial in “Post-Racial” America

¡Hola! Everybody...
I was struggling (a bit) with a simple essay on the works and life of Arturo Schomburg, when I came across this little gem of a book review. it’s by someone I consider a friend, Karen. Reading Karen is often like reaching a safe harbor in a sea of roiling with tumult. I love the way she puts her thoughts together, her grasp of logic and her ideas. But most of all, I love her passion and she always reminds me that there is true hope. Clearly, this is the mind of a critical thinker at work. Here, she offers an excellent book review of Time Wise’s Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama. Enjoy...

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-=[ Racism and White Denial in “Post-Racial” America ]=-

Wise’s book is small, but its 149 pages are densely packed with information and ideas. I strongly recommend it, and I believe that absolutely everyone should read it, but I am going to admit something up front: It is a hard read.

That’s not because it’s difficult going in terms of language, structure, or even complexity of ideas. It’s because it contains so much information, so many plain facts, that are crazy-making. Repeatedly, I found that I had to put it down, to walk away for a while and process what I had just read and, honestly, calm the hell down -- because I was too angry to focus on what I was reading. I would read one section, or even part of a section, and find that I was reading words without taking them in because my mind was awash with rage. Rage and sadness both, actually. Be prepared, if you read it, no matter what your beliefs about race and racism are, to find yourself confronted by facts that, whether they are reminders, totally new to you, confirmation or contradiction of your beliefs, are, in the sheer aggregate weight of their accumulated horror, likely to evoke a strong emotional response.

I am torn as to how much of the information that made me so angry to include as examples, because I don’t want to weaken the book’s impact on anyone who might read it. I think I will make three assertions that derive from sets of specific facts in the book, so that whether people are inclined to agree or disagree, they will find the specifics in the book.

We have not risen above the kind of racism that leads some white people to shoot black people, for “safety” or for “sport” -- without facing any punishment -- when circumstances become difficult.

While our society condemns people of color for not having pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Housing discrimination alone deprives families of color of nearly $4 billion of actual wealth each year. Not over time, each year.

Children of color are all too often “tracked” to fail or even to land in jail beginning at young ages, and classroom teachers are not just complicit in, but essential to, this pressure that pushes lives in tragic directions.

The assertions and facts I’ve listed are general, and because they are, they lack both the impact and the credibility of Wise’s book. My goal is not to rival Wise in his impact or to persuade you that he is right; it is to arouse enough curiosity, enough belief or disbelief, enough interest, enough expectation of finding what I say confirmed or of being able to dispute it effectively after looking at the facts, enough anything at all -- to move people to read 149 small pages. Believe me, the hard facts are there; the 149 pages of ordinary print are followed by ten pages of tiny-print citations of sources from all over the political spectrum; Wise does not rely on people who confirm his beliefs for information.

This solid grounding in specific fact from sources that range from the ACLU to people who have committed violent hate crimes and are proud of having done so, from Michael Eric Dyson to the Red Cross to The American Journal of Cardiology that gives it such credibility. It is the facts that make it nearly impossible to ignore the ideas, that provide a foundation of solid support which cannot be lightly dismissed. There will always be people who are too emotionally invested in their beliefs to be swayed by facts; for the rest of us, Wise has provided a collection of facts which, without any commentary or interpretation, provide powerful evidence that the U.S. is not even close to being a “post-racial” society.

And yet, the facts are not the point. They are the support for Wise’s assertions, the raw material from which he draws his conclusions, the warrant for and the cause of the ideas he puts forth, so they are integral. More important than the facts, though, are his ideas, his thoughts on the meaning of the facts, his ideas about where we need to go from here and the dangers we face if we choose to go somewhere else.

[Note: In trying to explain Wise’s ideas, I have stated them as I understand them, explaining them in my own words and in my own way, and I make no apology for having done so, because I can only understand another’s ideas as myself. Please be aware, though, that the quotes from Dr. King and even some of the facts used in explanation were contributed by me, not Wise. Wise wrote his book; I am writing this review. The book is much better than the review; if you’re only going to read one or the other, read the book.]

Wise agrees that, #1 above notwithstanding, virulent, overt, white-supremacist bigotry is no longer what it once was in this country, and he conceded that, were not the case, Barack Obama could not have been elected. He cautions, though, that the narrative about the election of the country’s first black president is a dangerous one, because it is a false narrative of the death of racism.

In fact, he suggests, Obama’s election may be evidence of a shift in the form of racism. We did not elect Obama because he is black, as some assert, or even without caring about his skin color, but because, as we all have heard so many times, Barack Obama “transcends race.” In other words, the election of Barack Obama was possible because he is a black man who does not “seem” black.

Like the fictional Cliff Huxtable, Barack Obama is a black man who “seems like one of us” to many white people. He can be viewed as comfortably “non-racial” by the majority of white people, who tend to think that whiteness is a null category and nothing white is “racial.” Some people, Wise asserts, like Barack Obama precisely because he seems to embody the “post-racial” and “colorblind” ideal that we are all judged by “the content of [our] characters” and the “color of [our] skin” does not matter. In fact, what that idea says is that the color of our skin matters very much, because we do not, as a society, point to a white man and say that we like, support, or vote for him because we don’t care about what color he is.

In other words, white America is ready to accept any person of color, as long as that person of color is sufficiently “non-racial” -- that is, sufficiently like the white idea of “normal,” which is white. Such people are acceptable because they have “transcended” race.

The unavoidable implication, the ugly doppelganger, of that idea is that any person of color who is not accepted, not deemed acceptable, has failed to “transcend” race; in other words, such people are insufficiently similar to white people.

I was reminded forcefully of Wise’s ideas at a recent small-group ministry event in which the white man sitting next to me began a long dissertation on everything he dislikes about the president with the words, “I don’t hold anyone’s skin color against them, but... ” We all know what any statement that begins “I’m not a racist, but... ” really means. But there is more to what my fellow congregant said than that. Yes, he clearly does hold people’s skin colors against them, or he would discuss the president’s policies without reference to his “race” -- and not during an evening when the topic was, in fact, race.

But more, he is implicitly acknowledging that “holding... skin color against” a person is, in fact, a common practice. Skin color, he admits without realizing it, is something that can and might and often is “held against” people.

And he is trumpeting the fact that he (believes he) does not hold people’s skin colors against them as a virtue, without ever seeing that that is akin to claiming proudly, “I don’t poison my dinner guests” or “I don’t beat up other people’s children when no one can see me” or “I don’t cut the beaks off of birds so they can’t eat.” In his mind, not holding someone’s skin color against is not something that meets the barest standards of human decency; it is an actual virtue. Sadly, his mind is a pretty good reflection of society, which is why his comment made me think of Wise’s book.

Wise also discusses the way in which Obama’s success is used to deny the existence of racism. “How,” we seem to hear constantly, “can racism exist in a society which has elected a black man to lead it?” As Wise points out, that is like asking how anyone could say that sexism might exist in Pakistan because Benazir Bhutto was elected there. He also points out that there have always been successful people of color in this country, and white America has always pointed to them as evidence that all is well when it comes to race and ask questions like “what more do they want?” That question should sound familiar to people living in the U.S. in 2010, because it is the question asked all the time by people who assert that the real racism in this country is anti-white and that any other racism is only kept alive by the “complaining” of people of color and white liberals, who “complain” in defiance of the clear “fact” that, now that we have elected a black president, racism is dead.

That argument, that question, the idea they embody are not new, simply resurgent. To share two specific facts that Wise provides, in 1963, roughly two-thirds of white people surveyed in a Gallup poll said that black people were treated equally in white communities; and in 1962, nearly 90% of white people polled said that black children were treated equally in terms of educational opportunity. For the ahistorical, the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. The years in which white people indicated, via those polls, their view that racism was dead and everything was rosy -- were Jim Crow years. If we believed the polls, we would have to view Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as a lot of inexplicable whining about non-existent problems.

Wise suggests that the openly expressed, virulent bigotry based in feelings of personal hatred which he calls Racism 1.0, is in decline, and that the election of Barack Obama does confirm that it is. He asserts, however, that Obama's election may signal the ascendancy of Racism 2.0, in which people of color are accepted only if they “transcend” race. Worse, Racism 2.0 says that people of color who do not “transcend” race can reasonably be blamed for their own problems, which are attributed to “black culture” or “Mexican culture” -- in short, to any culture not “normal,” by which is meant “not white enough” -- or two character deficits such as laziness, lack of personal responsibility, a preference for welfare over work, and so on.

Wise's ideas were easier for me to read than his facts. That may be because they are not so very far from my own ideas; in fact, I used the example of Cliff Huxtable in almost exactly the same way Wise does a few days before reading the book. Some people may find the ideas to be more challenging. I was more troubled by the facts -- not because those kinds of facts are new to me, but because every new instance of such facts is a reminder of why I am angry as well as a reason to be just a little angrier.

This book will be something different for each person who reads it. For me, it was a brilliant articulation of the issues on every level, a bringing together of facts and ideas in a way that makes it almost impossible to deny the problem -- and a collection of numerous facts each of which, on its own, would be rage-provoking and which, presented all at once, often had the effect of making me too angry to focus or even think.

I am largely in agreement with Wise, but there is one area in which the book falls short. Probably because it covers the campaign and election of Barack Obama but not his presidency, it does not look at the way Racism 1.0 has found new (if sometimes more subtle) expression and a new foothold as a reaction to the election of our country’s first black president. We’re a country running two versions of the racism virus at once, and unfortunately, they do not weaken each other.

I do not mean to end on a note of pessimism or fatalism, and Wise does not do so, either. In addition to making the problems clear beyond doubt, he talks about what we can do to address them. He talks about what white people can do to fight racism, and he makes it clear that white people need to be involved in the struggle, that denying or ignoring the problem is a form of complicity -- but fighting the problem is an option for everyone. We are not, he argues, doomed to remaining racist as a society if we can admit that change means more than ceasing to be racists as individuals. Since racism hurts people of all colors, he demonstrates that fighting it is in the best interests of white people as well as people of color. And the fight against racism can be won, although that victory is anything but a foregone conclusion.

I couldn't agree more. And part of the hope I see is that people like Wise are leading the way. This book is an invaluable weapon for use in fighting racism, precisely because it is filled with, grounded in, and supported by facts, and its ideas are the result of an examination of facts.

Karen K's writes her own blog (click here)

James Baldwin on Obama?

¡Hola! Everybody...
I've beebn terribly busy this summer. This summer's been no fun at all and if it weren't for the Russian Kitten from Little Odessa, it would've gone down as a compolete utter fail.

Anyway, I wanted to leave a quick note...

Today I bought my first Ebook ever (I purchased a Nook) and it's the book I've been waiting for all year: Baldwin's "The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings." (stay tuned for a post next week on my ebook/ Nook experiences)

I am a HUGE Baldwin fan, the man has been a life-long mentor. In any case I came across the following passage (written in the early 60s):

"Bobby Kennedy recently made me the soul stirring promise that one day -- thirty years, if I'm lucky -- I can be president too. It never entered this boy's mind, I suppose -- it has not entered the country's mind yet -- that perhaps I wouldn't to be and in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro "first" will become the first Negro president. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he'll be president of."

MUTHAFUCKA!!!

La Reina, La Gran Tirana, La Lupe

Hola Everybody!
It’s an amazing day today – bright sunshine, tolerable temperature, a soft breeze. I have to go get an apartment! LOL!

* * *

"El dia en que te deje, fui yo quien salio ganando."
(The day I left you, it was I who came out winning)
-- La Lupe, La Tirana

The other day, one of my friends left a comment asking what a bolero was and I wasn’t able to respond because it was one of those hectic work days. However, the question left me thinking about boleros, which led me to think of one of its greatest interpreters, La Lupe.

I first saw La Lupe barely into my 20s and before then, I wasn’t a big fan. I viewed boleros as a musical genre that parents enjoyed and sang to one another. I think it’s a common enough occurrence among Puerto Ricans, but my parents would sometimes have arguments via songs. You know: my father would sing some lyrics of a certain song, and then my moms would reply with lyrics from a song of her own, that type of thing.

Anyway, one of the songs my mother would sing to my father was her favorite bolero, La Gran Tirana, by the inimitable La Lupe. Its opening line was like a rallying cry for women all over El Barrio and sung by La Lupe, they ooze with irony. The opening line goes something like this:

"Segun tu punto de vista
yo soy la mala
vampiressa en tu novela
la gran tirana... "

(According to your point of view
I am the bad one
The vampiress in your soap opera
The great tyrant... )

I still get chills whenever I hear those opening lines. The great Spanish director, Pedro Almodovar, uses the song in one of his films; I believe it’s Women on the Verge.

In the hands of a lesser artist, La Tirana could easily sound melodramatic and trite, but as sung by the La Lupe, it’s a powerful claim to liberation, of doing away with oppression.

I saw La Lupe perform only once, many years ago in NYC’s cavernous Madison Square Garden. There were thousands of screaming fans, the noise level distracting, and the sound acoustics horrible. There were many acts that night in the early 70s, the main one being The Fania All Stars, a group of NYC Latino/a musicians that would storm the international circuit and bring the phenomenon known as salsa to the world. But that night, salsa was ours and ours alone. No one knew what the hell salsa was, and even less of La Lupe.

When La Lupe came on stage, the audience, composed mostly of young Latino/as, went into frenzy, screaming her name and screaming for dedications. To this day, I can’t say I have witnessed a more powerful performance and I have seen many, many performers. I believe it was Frank Sinatra who said that it was dangerous for a performer to give everything, that a performer must, for their own survival, save something for themselves.

Well, La Lupe, bless her soul, gave everything that night. She left nothing, not one thing, for herself. Halfway through her performance she was sitting on the edge of the stage and all of sudden, it didn’t feel like Madison Square Garden anymore, it was as if we were all transported to La Lupe’s intimate world. She sang as if it were the last time she would sing, throwing everything into every song, every note, every syllable. Each movement was imbued with meaning and energy and she laughed and cried. Her ability to create that connection was remarkable. You could feel her life force reaching out to you, taking you in, seducing you. She would claw at her clothes, scratch herself – she gave so much, and I sat there totally transfixed. She called herself an empress and I'd be a damned if she really wasn’t.

Finally, she came to that point in her performance – she sat on the edge of the stage her clothes by now gone – torn apart by her own hands – scratched and bleeding, she sat there in her bra and lingerie, and she managed to look like some reincarnated Taina Queen.

You could hear a pin drop...

And that’s when she sang the opening lines to La Tirana:

Segun tu punto de vista,
yo soy la mala…

And it was too much; she had us – all of us -- eating out her hand. At that very moment, I fell in love with that woman’s soul, because she possessed so much spiritual power and she was so willing, even in the face of annihilation, to share it. You actually feared for her, screamed for her, felt her pain.

Unfortunately, I never got to see her again and due to poor management and bad career choices, she would fall into relative obscurity. La Lupe would eventually die living destitute in the Bronx. When news of her death became known, tens of thousands of the people that loved her grieved. Money was collected for her funeral. An Off-Broadway play was written and in that way her music was revived for a new generation.

She was one of those that flared brightly if too briefly and gave all she could, throwing caution to the wind. To me, she was woman incarnate that night on that stage. I would never forget her.

A bolero is a ballad, Amy, and with that, I give you, ladies and gentlemen, La Lupe. Que Dios te tenga en la luz:

Neruda: The Language of Love and the Poetry of Desire

¡Hola! Everybody...
It’s all come to a head; I can no longer ignore it. I have arrived at a fork in the road. It’s unfamiliar terrain and I have to adjust my map. So I went to the waters yesterday to soak in the wisdoms of the Sea, to feel her tender caress and I sat on a splashed rock that took a millennia for it to fashion itself into a seat for me. Today, the answers still evade me but I am reminded that I must love the questions themselves, knowing that Change is here already.

Today, an essay…

* * *

-=[ Neruda ]=-

July 12, 1904 - 1973

Whether sun-struck mornings, rainy weekends odorous with the alkaline smell of sex, or starry nights, poetry has been with me – like a beacon – and I've used it to illuminate other lives, other worlds. In discovering others (in discovering you), I discovered myself and I have lived with these poems until they have become a part of the very air I breathe. I remember the first time my father, a dabbler in poetry, tossed me a dog-eared little book and told me, “You want to know poetry? Read this.”

I was barely fourteen and Neruda swept through my soul with the impact of a tsunami. I would never be the same – ever. After Neruda, there is no one. He is the greatest poet of the 20^th century, in any language

Period.

Pablo Neruda, magnificent poet of Chile and eventually of the world. Internationally recognized, he was a figure larger than life, like a Picasso or a Chaplin. He is one of the most widely read and beloved poets in history. I once made love to a woman who pleaded for me to read her Neruda while connected together.

Gawd…

Yesterday, needing to quiet the inner dialog, I decided to make a pilgrimage to the beach. I took my little Neruda book (still faintly smelling of sex). What could be more fitting than to go to the beach and read Neruda aloud? He loved the playfulness of the sea -- creative as it is destructive, forever in flux -- moving. He loved and celebrated the rejuvenating marriage of wind, water, and sand, and found his inspiration in the crashing fury and freedom of the waves, the seabirds, the seemingly endless infinity of a blue sky.

He loved how the sea was forever renewing itself, a renewal reflected in his work and his life. He felt that creating poetry was like constantly being reborn. So I headed for the sea to recite and celebrate his poems and to return once again refreshed, deepened, reborn.

In one of his most emotionally motivated and sublime associations, Neruda linked womanhood to the regeneration of the earth and the cycles of nature. It is one of the most powerful associations in all of poetry.

He never knew his own mother, who died two months after his birth, but he adored his stepmother, who he called la mamadre (“the more-mother”). At age fourteen he wrote his first lyric for her. He later wrote, “… it was at that age… poetry arrived / in search of me.”

Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes y Basoalto, he later took on the pen name of Pablo Neruda in order to conceal his poetry from a disapproving father. But he quickly found approval elsewhere, when he published his second collection, the amazing Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, in 1924. The collection would make him a literary celebrity and is still loved throughout Latin America. This was the book my father gave to me for my fourteenth birthday.

Neruda’s is the first poetry in Spanish that celebrates erotic love in sensuous, earthy language -- without shame. He would later say, “Love poems were breaking out all over my body.”

As I read these poems for the first time, I immediately recognized the archetype of the adolescent lover -- at the same time a child and an adult, being schooled in the art of longing and obsession. “Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” Neruda declared in the twentieth love poem. “I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her. / Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” I’m still profoundly affected by my memory of reading the first poem in this collection. I see it as an initiation, a ritual introduction, into to the language of love and the poetry of desire:

Body of a Woman

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs.
You look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant's body digs into you
and makes the son leap from the depths of the earth.

I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself, I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.

But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breasts! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

(translated by W.S. Merwin)

Neruda would travel the world and his first stop was in Rangoon, Burma where he would find himself estranged from his language, his culture, and his history. It was here he would begin to write harsh, ferocious and surreal poems that would flower into the three volumes, Residence on Earth. These poems reflect terrors and modern anxieties.

Neruda would marry several times in his life which makes me wonder about the women who mourn the supposedly scarcity of romance. Who more romantic than Neruda? And what would they think of him once he left them?

He would eventually turn to politics and forge within his vision of an unalienated humanity, of justice and equality, a new poetry reflecting this growth. His political and social commitments were central to his life. He was elected senator for the Communist Party in Chile in 1945. Eventually, he was accused of disloyalty and declared dangerous. Neruda went into hiding, then fled to Argentina, and traveled to Italy, France, the Soviet Union, and Asia. It was his stay on the island of Capri during his exile that was fictionalized in the touching film Il Postino. If you do anything today, at least rent the film, you’ll enjoy it (click here). It’s not time travel, nor knights in shining armor, nor even all that chivalrous, but it’s damn sure romantic.

Throughout this period he was writing love poems for Matilde Urrutia, who became his third wife. Those blossomed into The Captain's Verses (1952), and 100 Love Sonnets (1959), which features my all-time, favorite Neruda poem:

XI

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing at the twilight,
hunting for you, your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens if Quitratue.

It’s infinitely better in Spanish, but how can one even think of writing poetry after reading something like that?!!

Everything was magical for Neruda. Nothing ordinary was alien, or for that matter, ordinary -- everything was magical. He wrote separate odes to tomatoes and wine, to an artichoke and one to a dead tree, to conger chowder, to a fuckin' large tuna in the market, to his socks and his suit, to birds, to light on the sea, to the dictionary, to a movie theater. He wrote an ode to time and another to the Earth, an “Ode to Everything.”

Eventually, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Neruda would write prolifically to the end. Ill with cancer and retired to his home in Isla Negra, he would write of entering “the silence into which everything falls / and, finally, we fall.” Heartbroken over the (US sanctioned) coup that ousted Allende and the impending darkness that would eventually envelope his country, Neruda died eleven days later, on September 23, 1973, in Santiago.

Neruda remains a giant in poetry. His work contains multitudes, like his poetic ancestor, Walt Whitman. He was a poet of freedom and of the sea, a wondrous love poet, and a necessary voice of social consciousness.

In Neruda’s own words:

Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and also the content of religions. The poet confronted nature’s phenomena and in the early ages called himself a priest, to safeguard his vocation… Today’s social poet is still a member of the earliest of priests. In the old days he made his pact with darkness, and now he must interpret the light.

Radiantly impure, stubbornly humane… RIP Neruda.

Love,

Eddie

Resources

Brittanica entry for Neruda (click here)

Wikipedia entry for Neruda (click here)

Neruda Site with many of his poems and an essay on his work (click here )