From The Road to Iguazu: "Nicaragua: The Children of Ruben Dario"

Simon, John Oliver

FIRST VISITED NICARAGUA in I985, in the heyday of the Sandinista government and of the dirty little war that Ollie North was running out of the White House basement. At that time the American Left, and especially the poetic Left, was in love with Nicaragua. Lawrence Ferlinghetti came down for a week and came out with a book entitled Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre. It was part of the mystique of this gutsy little country that had made a revolution and was hanging on against unequal odds, that it was a country of poets. The poet we knew best was the militant priest Ernesto Cardenal, who was Minister of Culture in the Sandinista government. But it also moved us that as an integral part of the alfabetizacion, the massive literacy effort that followed on the Triumph of the Revolution (always capitalized) in I979, Cardenal organized poetry workshops, talleres, in schools, factories, poor neighborhoods and the army. Illiteracy dropped from over 70 percent in I979 to I2 percent in I985, and the talleres gave the newly literate the opportunity to express their experiences and perceptions in poetic form.l

The revolutionary process came to an abrupt halt in I990, when the Nicaraguan electorate, fatigued by the unending contra war and frustrated by economic privation, repudiated the Frente Sandinista and gave a decisive majority to Violeta Chamorro, running for president on a center-right coalition. In recent years there hadn't been much news from the Nicaraguan poets. Typical was a selection offered by Mexican Revista de la UNAM in October 1995: the youngest poet was Michele Najlis (b. I948), and none of the poems included had been written within the last fifteen years. So as I backpacked down from Mexico toward Argentina in the fall of I995, I was particularly anxious to return to Nicaragua and see what was happening now that there wasn't a Revolution anymore.

An occasional mule-cart leans out of our way as the Ticabus zooms north from the Costa Rican border along a highway haunted by a piercing silver afternoon light. We enter the commercial outskirts of Managua in a drizzling dusk. Billboards that ten years ago proclaimed revolutionary slogansNICARAGUA NO SE VENDE NI SE RINDE -Nicaragua won't sell out or surrender-now advertise whiskey and cellular phones. By the time we pull into the terminal, it's dark and pouring. A dozen hotel-touts are trying to capture the passengers, leading us this way and that. I'm impressed by the calm voice of the middle-aged woman walking by our side: "My name is Doris. I have a small dean hotel, one block up and half a block toward the mountain, behind the sign that says PELUQUERRIA UNISEX." I charge fifty cordobas a night [about six and a half dollars]." So that's how Doris became my landlady in Managua.

Streets in Managua have no names, houses have no numbers. Directions are from landmarks, some of which no longer exist. Doris's Peluquerria Unisex, for example, is de donde fue el Cine Dorado, tres arriba y media a la montana-from where the Cine Dorado used to be, now it's the Star Club, but the locals know-three blocks upward, east, and half a block south, toward the mountain. East is up, west is down, it's a pre-Colombian orientation. Everybody understands this system, and if the visitor gets confused, it's his problem.

Until December 1972, the crowded urban grid of Managua extended to the shore of the lake that bears its name. Practically the entire city fell down in the earthquake. Howard Hughes, who was living on the top floor of the pyramidal Hotel Intercontinental, flew away to Las Vegas in the night. Roberto Clemente went down, together with a planeload of relief supplies, into the blue waters of the Caribbean. Tacho Somoza (Somoza III) pocketed the international reconstruction money, didn't rebuild, and channeled development out to the periphery where he and his cronies were quietly buying up farmland. So the erstwhile center of Managua resembles the aftermath of a nuclear war, with a few structures standing lonely among grassy wastelands.

It's Opening Night of the baseball season, and baseball, brought to Nicaragua by the United States Marines, is a religion that transcends politics and even poetry. Shirtless guys in hard hats play ball on their lunch break in the windy plaza in front of the ruins of the National Cathedral, throwing sidearm curves with a lopsided ball wrapped in black electrical tape. Little kids, using a eucalyptus branch for a bat, play ball in the empty fields where downtown Managua used to be. I've got a seat on the first base side at the Estadio Rigoberto Lopez Perez, named for the student poet and revolutionary who dressed up as a waiter in order to get into an exclusive dinner club in Leon, and shot down dictator Anastasio Somoza (Somoza II). Rigoberto Lopez Perez (I935-I957) wrote:

The first pitch. Ball outside. The home-town pinstriped Boer club is entertaining San Fernando in orange and black. In the top of the third, Boer second-baseman Gonzalez fumbles a routine grounder. The next batter slaps a double-play ball to short and Gonzalez heaves the relay into the home dugout. The manager stumps out to replace, not the pitcher, but the second-baseman. Gonzalez trots to the bench in shame. By the time the inning ended it's four-zip, and San Fernando never looks back. A couple of fans sitting nearby ask for my verdict on the quality of Nicaraguan baseball. Thinking of the eight Boer errors this evening, I start to talk about the Class A Northern League. Their faces fall. I should be more diplomatic.

Jaime Sotomayor, Doris's oldest son, tells me the family history: his uncle Uriel was the first student martyr of the resistance to Somoza Uriel was picked up by the National Guard one day in April I948 from a sidewalk cafe in Leon, where he was sitting with his friends talking about poetry, women, and the revolution, not necessarily in that order. The Guardia slammed him around, took him bleeding to a cell, refused him medical attention, and later released his body to his mother, Jaime's grandmother. By an irony of history, Uriel's brother Narciso was killed in battle the very next day at Codo del Diablo (the Devil's Elbow) in the Costa Rican civil war.

Jaime has spent twenty of his thirty-two years as a fighter for the Sandinistas. He started running messages for the Frente when he was seven. How could they suspect a little child? His father, Humberto Sotomayor, taught at the University in Leon, and it never attracted attention when he rented out rooms to students. But the students were all militants in the Frente, and Humberto, who had been a lieutenant of cadets, took them into the mountains to train. Doris married Humberto when she was sixteen, a child bride in her flowery innocence, and he was past fifty, a venerable, militant old man, who would not live to see the Triumph of the Revolution he had helped to bring about.

Jaime and I catch a micro to Leon, still a cobblestoned colonial pueblo, centered on its plaza. We walk down into the barrio of Subtiava, the Indian town which was here before the Spaniards came, where Jaime knows the little kids and the old aunts and the baker who doesn't need a sign over his door in order to sell all the bread he bakes. Jaime knows the woman beggar with the shaved head. "Why did you shave it?" he asks her affectionately. "?Por qui te peleonaste?"

Jaime takes me to meet Marvin el Chanclazo, one of the original poets of Subtiava: a grand untaught humble Buddha who left school after sixth grade and memorizes his own poems. Marvin is a huge round brown man, whose broad fingers are kind to the intimate reconstruction of shoes, spreading glue like marmalade across the leather, trimming the excess skillfully with a small blade. He recommends his favorite poem in the world to me: "If," by Rudyard Kipling. His shop, in a garage a block and a half below the plaza of Leon, is an informal intellectual and philosophical center, with people always standing around kibitzing.

It's siesta time, Marvin won't lose any business if he shuts up shop, everybody knows him, it's not like they won't come back-and we set off on an informal tour of the Revolution in Leon. "We were coming up this way-" Marvin waves his hand down the street-"and the Guardia was holed up in that house on the corner. I felt a bullet slam into this doorway right by my head. iAh, la inocencia del hombre! The innocence of man! I checked myself out to see if I was all right! I didn't realize that if it had hit me, ipa. it would already be all over . . ."

A boxing school is using the premises of the old National Guard prison. Teenagers are running laps around the concrete walls of the cell-block. "I was a prisoner here," Marvin says. "They kept me in this room, with about thirty guys. Right here was the shitter. The captain made me clean it out with my bare hands." Moss is growing on the damp walls. aThis is the room where they pulled out people's fingernails. Like this-ihup! Or maybe pull out one fingernail today, another one tomorrow Make you think about it. I was lucky. They let me go after a couple of days." Marvin went on to fight against the Sandinistas also, along the Costa Rican border under Eden Pastora, Commander Zero, in I92. Now Marvin says he's beyond all that warfare. "I learned a lot from the hippies. And marijuana helped me a lot. I'm not violent any more. There are other ways to resolve things."

Below the altar of the Cathedral of Leon, a marble lion weeps over the tomb of Nicaragua's greatest poet. Two blocks down is the house, now a museum, where Ruben Dario (I867-I9I6) was born. A plaque set in the wall reads THE POET CUT WITH HIS HANDS BOUQUETS OF STARS." Dario wrote his first poem, a flawless sonnet, at the age of twelve in I879, and the museum has his handwritten manuscript of Poesia y Articulos en Prosa, compiled at the age of fourteen. He went to Managua and attracted patronage by writing an elegy for a deceased politician, then returned to Leon where he was busted for vagrancy at age seventeen. Already he was drinking heavily. He spent some time in San Salvador, where he was subsidized by the current tyrant, meanwhile developing the ideal of a free, united, and democratic Central America.

Ruben married a girl named Rosario Murillo after he heard her sing at a party. They weren't any happier than his own parents had been. He lived most of his life abroad. In still-extant cafes like La Blanca in Mexico City and the Tortoni in Buenos Aires, Dario sat down with local poets like Juan Jose Tablada and Leopoldo Lugones and plotted the future of Modernismo, the poetic movement he inculcated like a virus wherever he went. His sense of Latin American self begins with an identification of its nemesis, the Colossus of the North. Here Ruben addresses Teddy Roosevelt:

Our own America, asserts Dario, has had poets since the time of the Aztec philosopher-king Nezahualcoyotl. Ours is the America of Moctezuma, of the Inca, "trembling with hurricanes and living with love.... Dreaming, loving, vibrating, the daughter of the Sun." And he warns the barbarian Hercules/Mammon "professor of energy" to take care: "Spanish America lives!"

Dario's political writing was emphasized in the Sandinista years, but more typical of the atmosphere of Modernismo is "It was a Gentle Air," which takes place to a sound-track of minuets upon terraces inhabited by shepherdesses, a hypnotic erotic decorative landscape whose only tangible reality is the cruel eternal golden laughter of Eulalia:

Modernismo, of course, was anterior to, and not to be confused with, the Joyce-Pound-Eliot revolution in English that we also name "modernism." Colombian poet William Ospina explained the Modernista transformation to me: "what Ruben Dario did was to untangle the language of poetry in Spanish, which had developed a completely transposed and twisted syntax, so that even when his subject matter is completely frivolous and trivial, he was writing in the language in which ordinary people thought." But the power of his obsessive vision created its own reaction; Mexican poet Enrique Gonzalez Martinez began a sonnet this way: "Wring the swan's neck..."

Ruben edited a luscious little magazine in Paris. In Madrid, he fell in love with Francisca Sanchez, wrote her wonderful poems, and she had two daughters-the museum is careful to point out "hijas bastardas"-who bore him a striking resemblance. He was Nicaraguan envoy to the Royal Court of Spain, and he appears sculpted as a Napoleonic caballero in the playground of the LaSalle School catty-corner from his boyhood home, with a decorative diplomatic sword. He made a triumphal tour of Nicaragua in I907, and returned home again in I9I5, this time to die. Cirrhosis of the liver, occupational disease of poets. He lay in agony in this same house. There is a photograph of him, raw and unshaven, clutching the pillow; his plaster death-mask gives a facade of calm. They took out his brain and pickled it, as Jorge Eduardo Arguello (b. I939) retells the story:

Nicaragua, pais-poeta, they say, the Poet-country. Nicaragua, with three and a half million people, three-quarters of them illiterate before the Revolution, has produced a galaxy of major poetry in this century at least equal to that of Mexico, with ninety-five million.4 Alfonso Cortes (i893-I969) may have been the best of them; one day in I927 he went permanently crazy, and they chained him to a window seat in the same house on the corner where Ruben Dario grew up. You can still see where he twisted the iron bars in his rage. "A fragment of blue has more/ intensity than the whole sky." Seen from that window, it does indeed. Or maybe the best poet was Salomon de la Selva (I893-I958), who volunteered to fight in the trenches in France during World War I and came back to write The Unknowe Soldier, a series of poems of poignant clarity.

Jose Coronel Urtecho (I9o6-I993) lived in San Francisco for three years and brought back the fresh winds that were blowing through the new North American poetry, translating (with later help from his young friend Ernesto Cardenal) a whole anthology of gringos: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams. In 1929, Coronel Urtecho founded a group of poets in Granada who called themselves La Vanguardia. It was a strange moment of cultural amalgamation or schizophrenia: the United States Marines were occupying Nicaragua, looking for a pesky revolutionary named Augusto C. Sandino who was holed up in the mountains. All the kids in the street were playing baseball. And every bright young poet of La Vanguardia was reading Eliot and Pound along with "the divine Ruben."

In those days there were two cousins in Granada named Joaquin and Pablo Antonio. They were thirteen and fifteen years old and they belonged to rival gangs, the Black Hand and the Scarlet Hand. This was an innocent time; think Tom Sawyer rather than Zoot Suit. One day the Scarlet Hand raided the clubhouse of the Black Hand and stole their treasures. Pablo Antonio got to read Joaquin's private poetry notebook. He was so impressed that he started writing verses too. Two years later, they both joined the Vanguardia.

Pablo Antonio Cuadra (b. I9I2) has written poetry for seventy years. He is best known for editing the newspaper La Prensa, in which he courageously opposed the Somoza dictatorship, and in turn, with equal and inflexible dignity, opposed the Sandinistas. Although he came to be identified with the Nicaraguan Right, Cuadra is in no way a purist apolitical poet. Indeed, his work travels "by third class," among the poor, celebrating "these faces that appear among the multitude":

Pablo Antonio Cuadra's cousin Joaquin Pasos (Igr4-Ig47) never travelled, so he wrote a series of travel poems under the title Poems of a Young Man Who Has Never Travelled. He wrote "Norway" when he was fifteen years old:

Joaquin's playfulness was facilitated by the iconoclastic openness of the new futuristic poetry that swept the continent in the 1920s. In Buenos Aires, a myopic young fellow named Jorge Luis Borges was cranking out manifestos and little magazines under the banner of Ultraism. In Chile, Vicente Huidobro labelled his inspired ravings Creationism. The young Mexican poets called themselves Estridentistas and Contemporaneos. Since he was always in love, Joaquin gathered his love poems under the title of Poems of a Young Man Who Has Never Loved. But his poems show. more of a timeless, preadolescent joy in being alive than the presence of any specific beloved:

Joaquin never studied English, so of course the Poems of a Young Man Who Does Not Speak English are written in a glorious indefinable English that could never be achieved by a native speaker. The unmistakable political edge is sharpened as we hear the hostile voices of bored Marines rejecting the smiling young Nicaraguan who was only hoping to practice his English on them:

Joaquin Pasos, my favorite Nicaraguan poet, smiles from the present moment of his past, forever innocent, forever A Young Man. He never grew up; he spent his health on wine and song. He was always going to become a lawyer but he never wrote his thesis. He was always going to get married but he never got married. He was always going to publish a book of poems but he was correcting galleys on his death-bed. When news of the death of Joaquin Pasos reached far-away Madrid where Carlos Martinez Rivas (b. I924) was studying, the younger Nicaraguan poet stayed up all night writing until the voices of the dead were more present than the voices of the living.

Among elegies by young poets for poets dying young, "Canto Funebre a la Muerte de Joaquin Pasos" is right up there with "Lycidas" and "In Memoriam." What do we know about the great poets who died young? so little; that they loved a girl, and dung to that love so hard they forgot about the girl, and they wrote about that, made many corrections, and died. But you, Joaquin, we know so much about you . ., and here Martinez Rivas, through an intense act of imaginative analysis, enters the process of becoming-poet in the child Joaquin from the moment, in the arms of his nanny, when he realized he existed, into the irreverent age of painting moustaches on the Mona Lisa. And then, darkly, the calling: as all beings come into the garden to be named, so the young poet realizes that everything he perceives can only be handled through words, "through which/ you never after might look at the earth freely./ A bad business, Joaquin. . ."

It is the post-modern dilemma. After the fall. There is no direct way to apprehend all the world's freshness. All is mediated through the resistance of language:

What a wonderful, painterly list! All of it is corrupt information, unreliable. It sure would have been a lot easier to be a painter, at least they give you brushes you can clean every day, and you can paint puppydogs. Or carve wood, and sculpt a dancing nymph so that the air makes her vestment actually tremble. But all the poet is handed to work with is "words,/ verbs and a few vague rules. Nothing tangible."

What Martinez Rivas honors in Joaquin is his honorable surrender to the harsh task. Like a carpenter, touching the saw's edge, he chooses the adjective. Like a criminal, he waits in ambush for the rhythmic footsteps of the line. "To make a poem was to plan the perfect crime." The final image of the elegy is deeply sexual and eerily disturbing. The song perches like a great bird on the dead poet's breast, and its beak wounds his lips sucking fire, its wings furiously beating and weaving an invisible crown.

Carlos Martinez Rivas returned from studying in Europe to confront the suicide of his mother. He published one book of poetry in I953, La Insurrecci.on Solitaria, The Solitary Insurrection, and then retreated to his house in a Managua suburb with many books and many bottles of Flor Negra rum. My Costa Rican friend Habib Succar told me that he was invited to a big poetry festival in Managua in I9g9 in which Carlos Martinez Rivas was supposed to read. The reading was cancelled without explanation. Next morning, Habib got directions to the poet's house and went out there. Nobody answered his knock. He stood in the street, shouting "i Carlos!" making a big scandal. Then the curtains barely parted. With a furtive gesture, Martinez Rivas motioned him inside. They drank all day. They talked brilliantly about poetry. They finished two bottles of rum. Of course, Habib's forgotten everything they said.

"Go see Carlos Martinez Rivas!" another Costa Rican friend, Osvaldo Sauma, told me. "He's the only true poet in Nicaragua! Everyone hates him! He hates everyone!"

Carlos Martinez Rivas was one of three major poets to come out of what was called the "generation of the forties." This making of a generation every ten years or so is a way of telling time in every Latin American country. The second was Ernesto Mejia Sanchez (I923-I988), a limpid philosophical poet who lived most of his adult life in exile in Mexico. The third member of the generacion de los Qo, and probably the only Nicaraguan poet most of us have heard of in the United States, is Ernesto Cardenal (b. I925).

Born in Granada, first cousin-another first cousin-of Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Cardenal was a timid romantic youth with right-wing sympathies when he arrived in Paris in I949. The Latin American poets on the Left Bank nicknamed him "the little fascist." But the young Nicaraguan was on the brink of an epic political and spiritual journey. Cardenal went to New York to study at Columbia, where he memorized Ezra Pound's poetics and rejected his politics. A blonde salesgirl shot a smile through his heart as he passed the open door of Woolworth's at It)2nd Street and Broadway. Might everything have been different? "I could have hung around outside for her until closing time./ I continued along Broadway. Down Broadway." By I954 Cardenal was back in Nicaragua, conspiring in an abortive rebellion against Somoza II. In I957 he entered the Gethsemane Trappist monastery in Kentucky under the spiritual direction of poetmonk Thomas Merton; in I965 he was ordained a priest. In 1966 he organized a revolutionary contemplative artistic community on the island archipelago of Solentiname in Lago Nicaragua.

Cardenal was the one Nicaraguan poet who became an international star. By the mid-eighties, he was the most widely-read poet in the Spanish language. In long, epic lines, using the logopoeia he learned from Pound, he lamented the horrors of imperialism, and articulated a utopian vision of Communism which would be one and the same as the simplicity of the primitive Church. Cardenal developed a poetics he called Exteriorismo, explaining that "Exteriorism is poetry created with images from the outside world which we see and touch. . . . Exteriorism is objective poetry: narrative and anecdotal, made with elements of real life and concrete things, with proper names and precise details and exact data and figures and facts and acts."6

With the Triumph of the Revolution in I979, Cardenal was named Minister of Culture. Naturally, he hoped to apply on a national scale what had been done on a personal level in Solentanime. Mayra Jimenez, a Costa Rican poet who had worked with Cardenal on the islands, took over the task of organizing the talleres in neighborhoods throughout Nicaragula. By November I982, sixty-seven workshops were functioning nationwide, working with a total of 627 poets, most of them young, recently alphabetized, working-class folks: farmers, bakers, nurses, soldiers.

To give some coherence to the poetics of the talleres, Cardenal wrote a brief handout entitled "Some Rules for Writing Poetry (Algunas Normas para Escribir Poesia)." It begins with the confident sentence: "It's easy to write good poetry, and the rules for doing so are few and simple." Cardenal came up with seven normas:

Ernesto Cardenal will probably go down in history less as the great poet he has been than as the cultural promoter who tried to impose these seven rules on Nicaraguan poetry. The congruence with his own poetics of exteriorismo is obvious, but in and of themselves, as a basis for a poet-teaching curriculum, these normas are hardly objectionable. Let go of rhyme, use natural speech, use the senses, be specific, avoid cliche, trim the fat: anybody got a problem with that?

Let's give Padre Ernesto the benefit of the doubt and say he was thinking of these seven points as a loose, but helpful set of guidelines to give the timid beginning writer some structure. Well and good: but you've got sixty-seven workshops running simultaneously around the country. Cardenal delegates to Mayra Jimenez who delegates to poets out in the field, and how long can it be before the seven rules become an unbreakable orthodoxy in the hands of zealous, insecure workshop leaders? Cardenal himself blurred the line between prescription and proscription with some glee. When a group of sympathetic leftist foreign poets sat in on a workshop, he proclaimed, "It is forbidden to write sonnets." "But-but-but," they burbled. "But what about Borges?" "Yes indeed," Cardenal agreed, as if there were no contradiction, "I have read some excellent sonnets by Borges lately."7

More troublesome than what's in the seven Normas is what isn't in them. Imagination isn't mentioned. Metaphor isn't a possibility. The randomly playful spirit of Joaquin Pasos is not-evident. The best poems of the talleres achieve a naked, poignant testimonial, as in this one by Mario Olivas:

It wasn't until I opened an anthology of Costa Rican women, to the poetry of Mayra Jimenez, that something unfortunate in the pedagogy of the talleres clicked for me. Mayra addresses the Sandinista comandante Lumberto Campbell in these terms:

We not only see the revolutionary warrior dancing in full combat gear-and his English last name, and the locale of the scene,,in Bluefields, would suggest to a Nicaraguan reader that Lumberto is a Black man-but despite the perfectly orthodox Exteriorist compilation of details (the "574I75 pistol" is a classic touch), we are somehow brought inside his dancing, where the movement expresses sorrow and joy and determined struggle. The death of Lumberto's wife in combat not only lends motivation to his dance, but creates the expectation that it is right and proper for the silently observing poet to become, in turn, his lover, "as if love, under your appearance/ with your Browning g-mm. and your camouflage suit/ was all that was real for me that night/ in Bluefields."

Despite the arsenal of heavy weaponry, it's a heck of a poem. And by the time I read it I had seen a hundred earnest carbon copies of it in the Ministry of Culture publications. Assignment number eight, perhaps, in each of the sixty-seven talleres: read and discuss "Lumberto Campbell" by companera Mayra Jimenez, and then write your own poem about how you met your boyfriend or girlfriend. Observe the seven Normas, please. This is by Javier Cruz:

Vidaluz Meneses (b. I944), who worked with Cardenal in the Ministry of Culture, explained to me that Padre Emesto's idea was simply that newly alphabetized people don't have the depth of literary tradition to appreciate metaphor, and that the exterior is more accessible; it's a way into poetry that deals with people's lives. I had worked for fifteen years with California Poets In The Schools and I found something terribly condescending in the notion that workers and soldiers and farmers-any more than children-just aren't deep enough, complex enough, to appreciate and to write anything beyond the absolutely linear literal level. Poet and novelist Gioconda Belli agreed with me. While she was in exile, she said, she taught a workshop with third-graders in Costa Rica using Kenneth Koch's Wishes, Lies and Dreams, and she thought children -or the newly literate-were perfectly capable of using metaphor, if encouraged to do so.

As I went around in the summer of I985, asking Nicaraguan poets about the talleres, I began to feel that I was opening a can of worms. Jorge Eduardo Arguello said the talleres were creating poetry according to a formula: "How to make a poem, like making a chocolate cake. Describe this and that, don't use metaphor. This exteriorismo, it's just Cardenal's idea. Nicaraguan poetry is not exteriorist -it's Indian, it's mystical, it's religious, and it's anti-imperialist. Exteriorismo will blow away on the wind."

Donaldo Altamirano, editor of the literary supplement to the Sandinista newspaper Barricada, said that it was a mistake to assume that the masses can become poets just like that. "Poetry is a vocation. You have to study the tradition and then go beyond it. You can't treat the production of poetry as if it were the production of corn or coffee. Padre Ernesto analyzed his own development as a writer and tried to recapitulate it blindly as a method." Poet Ivan Uriarte told me bitterly, "Cardenal is a has-been. The talleres are a lavamanos, a washbasin, into which he put his own poetic failure. Describe from the outside: the sky is blue, the grass is green. Forbid metaphor, which is the key to poetic thought. All this populism. This rubbish. Poetry as pure political propaganda."

Jorge Eduardo Arguello said the talleres were on their way out, but they weren't a bad idea. "They were oral history. They recorded important experiences that otherwise would have been lost. But you have to remember that Nicaragua has always had a very high tradition of poetry. You showed your work to a master, to Coronel Urtecho or Pablo Antonio. They didn't let any shit go by; they told you to go home and try again. Then, after twenty years, you began to be accepted as a poet. So all of a sudden there were all these thousands of people coming out of the talleres and announcing "I'm a poet. ."

In any case, the talleres perished in advance of the death of the Revolution that created them. Under the pressure of economic necessity, in the face of the kind of criticism I was hearing from the poets, and in a thicket of political infighting, the Ministry of Culture was quietly shut down in I988, two years before the Sandinistas lost power.

Back at the Peluquerria Unisex, I drag a chair outside in the sunny patio to read El Habla Nicaraguense, a book about Nicaraguan speech by Carlos Mantica, who argues that the national language is actually Nahuatl spoken with a Spanish vocabulary.8 Y la mujer jodiendo todo el dia,jiqui,jiqui, hasta que se la encampanen. And that woman messing around all day, jiqui, till they got on her case. Jiqui from Nahuatl Xiquinaca, to buzz around like a fly. Marta, Jaime's eleven-year-old half-sister, is laughing and chattering with her six green wing-clipped parrots. The television, as always, is murmuring some telenovela. Don Beto, Marta's father, complains from deep within the caverns of the rented rooms. "I'm an old man! I'm blind! I never wanted it to come to this!"

Beto went blind suddenly when he had a stroke three months ago. Surgery might help, but he's on a long waiting list. Doris pauses in her furious mopping to confide that she has no sympathy for him. When Beto had his sight, he was always getting infatuated with some young chippie. He went through seven of them in the twelve years they've been together. Now that he's blind, he wants Doris to take care of him. Well, she'll do what has to be done when she gets around to it; meanwhile, let him complain! Her voice has risen from a whisper to a defiant shout. Marta must hear everything, but she never shows a reaction, only laughs lovingly with her parrots. The gilded actors on the screen simulate violent emotions. Doris and Beto sleep at opposite ends of the hall. Jaime, trained as an exterminator, sprays a neurotoxin down the cracks. Cockroaches waddle out disoriented, and we find them dead in the patio in the morning.

Jaime speaks in an immensely fluid and onomatopoetic Nicaraguense, which he is not really capable of slowing down. As I get up to speed, I realize what a proportion of sound-syllables punctuates his syntax, jpafj ipaf ipaf and jflas! jfias! as gunshots echo or running feet go by in what he's telling me. Ernesto Cardenal's translator John Lyons does a fair job with the vernacular of the martyred Sandinista comandante Laureano, who talked like Jaime:

Jaime is immensely gentle in the way of good men who are extremely dangerous, having dedicated two-thirds of his life to violent survival in an unforgiving human and natural environment. When he and his men were camped in the selva, they would forage for dinner with their AKas, their AK-47s. If they were lucky, they ate chango and guasupo-monkey and armadillo. Or they'd handgrenade a pool in the river to stun fish. If they didn't kill anything, they didn't eat. Next door, one house toward the mountain, lives Oscar, a former Contra, or, as it is politically correct to say these days, an ex-resistente. He and Jaime, the former Sandinista militant, get along famously; he comes over to watch TV and they both laugh cynically at the politicians and their promises.

We eat dinner at Dona Pilar's, in a converted driveway two blocks down, picking and choosing among refritas (grilled potato patties mixed with cheese), the inevitable gallopinto (white rice mixed with black beans), and maduro (fried plantain), there are goat-ribs, chicken, and white cabbage salad, all washed down with a couple of beers: it makes a terrific meal. Stout Pilar is assisted by some neighbor girls including lithe Yolanda, whom Jaime comes very little short of eating up with our supper. Proud and intrigued, she flings her head and gives pert repartee. With all the teasing, Jaime gets away with about eight cordobas, little more than a dollar, while I'm paying nineteen or twenty. "I know how to order here," he vaunts, but I notice the difference: he consumes less protein.

Unemployment in Nicaragua is running fifty, maybe seventy percent. Jaime, at thirty-two, with a distinguished military record, is helping out Mom back at the motel. Doris is happy with my fifty cordobas a day, but her bread and butter is the onenight Ticabus travellers, salesmen and couples from Guatemala and El Salvador who rise in the dark to catch the dawn bus on to the next capital. They never fail to wake me up in process. "DEAR, DID YOU PACK THE TISSUE?" The walls of the Peluquerria Unisex are ' masonite. One night, at half past three, I politely ask some people to pipe down, and the woman, on the john, yells WHAT DID HE WANT, DEAR?" and her husband bellows back, HE WANTS US TO TALK IN LOWER VOICES."

Finally one morning the back bathroom definitively refuses to flush. Jaime burps it to no avail, and then runs a metal snake down the toilet bowl, with Don Beto loudly criticizing and second-guessing his every move. "It's the desag*e, man," he exclaims, as if we didn't know it was the drain that was the problem. "Stick that fucking thing all the way down the inodoro."

Jaime's soon covered with slime and sweat and exasperated with Don Beto's sidewalk superintendent act. "I'd like to shoot that old hijueputa," he hisses. I try to be as useful as I can without actually exposing my epidermis to the black fecal gunk choking the tubes; I move beds and shelves out of the path of the expanding excavation, and hand tools to Jaime. But it's not until Beto decides to get physically involved that we make any progress. He lies down on his rather ample stomach and sticks his arm all the way to the shoulder down the hole where the laundry basin drains into the tube from the offending shitter. He tugs and wiggles and something begins to give. Finally there's a fresh run of water under the patio grate: first gray, then clear.

The Municipal Cultural Center, in the ruins of the Gran Hotel in what used to be downtown Managua, has arranged a reading for me, and I'm getting promoted in all the media. Pancake is applied to my whiskery cheeks to be interviewed live on Good Morning Nicaragua by Ximena Jimenez, a former Miss Nicaragua with the startling long-necked beauty of a gazelle. I'm interviewed by all the newspapers, from La Prensa to Barricada. Down the hall, I say hello to Julio Valle Castillo, who was number two man in the Ministry of Culture back in 1985. He's landed on his feet, writing literary criticism in front of a computer screen. Julio gives me a big hug and assures me he'll be there for my charla. And how would I like to go out afterwards for lunch with Ernesto Cardenal?

Julio hands me the hard-bound English version of Padre Ernesto's new epic 484-page poem, Cantico Cosmi.co, from Curbstone Press. The book jacket features an admiring blurb from Allen Ginsberg, who writes that Cardenal "interweaves brilliant political-economic chronicle with panoramic spiritual information, updating post-Poundian verse for late 2oth Century narration of the Americas' last half-millenium." Robert Bly finds Cardenal's poetry "impure, defiantly, in that it unites political ugliness and the beauty of imaginative vision." Amiri Baraka puts Cardenal up there with Pablo Neruda and Nicolas Guillen, the great Afro-Cuban poet (Neruda and Guillen never spoke after an incident in 1965). As usual, what the eminent quotees come up with says much more about themselves than it does about the object of their admiration. Every poet I talk to in Nicaragua wants to know what I think of Cantico Cosmico, and I get less diplomatic as I go along. Padre Ernesto is rewriting the opening verses of Genesis in the light of contemporary physics:

I'm a sucker for popular science, and for me this "hydrogen in love" is a page-turner. Cardenal has read his Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, and a synthesis of theology and cosmology is eminently plausible. But if Cardenal wanted to make a poetic version of cutting-edge scientific thought, he didn't go far enough. He hasn't read Stephen Jay Gould on evolution, which would carry us through to the making of the birds and the fishes and the beasts of the field. And the physics is dumbed down in its transition to verse: there is more poetry in Hawking and Sagan than in Cardenal's star-struck rendition. It's as if we're stuck for nearly five hundred pages in a cosmic classroom with the wise, kind, endlessly explaining voice of an old teacher who loves his subject but can't quite make it sing. "You really want to know what I think of Cintico Cosmico?" asked Carlos Martinez Rivas. "I think Cardenal ought to receive the Nobel Prize-for physics!"

Take the next step from theological physics to political theology with Cardenal: "Communism and communion are the same." Further on, revolution is in tune with enlightenment: "The Great Harmony Mao called it./ The kingdom of heaven on the blue earth." Cantico Cosmico was published in Spanish in I989. The tanks were rolling through Tienanmien Square. The Berlin Wall was coming down. Is there any downside to the Socialist verities? The only left-wing dictator Padre Ernesto includes in his litany of atrocities, along with Somoza, the Nazis, and the Argentine generals, is Cambodia's Pol Pot. Cardenal toured the killingfields museum in Phnom Penh and was suitably horrified. But the moral is not far to seek: "And the U.S. now supports Pol Pot." The hardest case is Soviet Russia, the great failed experiment. Cardenal's assessment comes only to this: "Political crimes/ because of the personal traits of Stalin." Fifteen million dead because Stalin had some personal problems? I am disappointed: if the Left is to retain any intellectual honesty, we poets must offer more authentic criticism.

The great Nicaraguan poets of the early generations were all men. Nobody thought there was anything unusual about that. But the struggle against Somoza was the doorway into expression for a powerful pulse of women poets. Idealistic daughters of the privileged classes, they cast their lot with the guerrillas, worked clandestinely for the revolution, took up arms. Vidaluz Meneses's father was a general under Somoza. Gioconda Belli (b. I948) used the cover of her upper-class status to become a heroine of the Revolution, and tells the story in a novel available in English, The Inhabited Woman. Here she encapsulates that history into the opening of a poem:

These women were much stronger poets than their male contemporaries. Most of them went on to take public roles in the Sandinista regime. Rosario Murillo (b. Ig50), namesake of Ruben Dario's wife a century before, married President Daniel Ortega, and served as a flaming First Lady, a jetset revolutionary in black leather mini-skirts. The moment of the Triumph, July Ig, I979, was a transcendental culmination of many a lifetime. Time stopped. Every dream came true. Daisy Zamora (b. I95o), who studied abroad at Tulane and came home to be the anchorwoman for clandestine Radio Sandino, has a long poem which is basically the edited transcript of her broadcast on the eve of t the Triunfo:

Daisy Zamora read this poem at the Naropa Institute in 1990, and she got a standing 0, although not more than ten percent of the audience understood Spanish. Well, she earned it, she was there, and we North Americans do love a good cheerleader. All the major comandantes of the Triumph rate admiring mention in her poem, with the interesting exception of Marvin's old leader Eden Pastora, who commanded the Southern Front. In the best Soviet style, Comandante Cero has been airbrushed out of the picture, snip snip, because he later turned against the Sandinista regime. But at this instant of glory on the 19th of July, the frame freezes. Where to take Nicaraguan poetry from this blazing dawn? In another poem Daisy tries to raise the political consciousness of La Chanita, an old family servant:

What could Chanita answer to her sympathetic poet-employer, so full of herself and her cause? "If you say so, se*ora . . . shall I pour the tea now?" And if a stoic skepticism about the glowing future remained behind that toothless smile, wouldn't it have been justified, as things turned out?

After the grand bouquet of poems celebrating the struggle and victory, relatively few poems emerge out of everyday existence during ten years of Sandinista power. Vidaluz Meneses cut coffee with a brigade of writers and intellectuals in I985 and wrote a cheerful poem about how these artistic "antiheroes, verbal terrorists" cut 7 cans of red berries a day, while the two girls named Socorro cut 9 1/2 each and the real coffee cutters cut I9 to 25, lost from sight ahead; meanwhile, "3 kilometers from us the Contras/ opened fire and then ran . . ."

It is not easy to find much written after 1990by any of these women. Michele Najlis has become an apolitical Catholic mystic: "Fire of my fire, flesh of my flesh/ bless the Lord." Gioconda Belli is living in the United States in the style to which we are accustomed, and who can blame her? Daisy Zamora's most recent book takes up women's issues and family history in a pedestrian, exhausted style, as if the Revolution never happened, except for one enigmatic poem tacked on as an epilogue:

This is all the great women Sandinista poets have to offer in terms of taking in the meaning of the defeat and going on, and it is cold comfort. The twin whammies of triumph and fall from power have left a vast silence and aching loss where there once was a powerful generation of poets. Juan Sobalvarro, editing the magazine 400 Elefantes, at the center of a lively group of young Managua poets we'll meet shortly, writes that the poets confused a commitment to the revolution with a commitment to the government that came to power, a government that had fallen in love with power, and so the poets lacked the necessary space to be properly critical. But how can we blame the poets, asks Sobalvarro, when we look at the attitude of the United States government, which could only react with economic and armed aggression?

As for the women poets, they got stuck in Cardenal's schema: poetry has a political function, and that function is to support the party, therefore poetry has to be simple and objective and exterior. "Besides, these women were not able to abandon their bourgeois condition," Sobalvarro argues. "They spoke of the poor in their poems, but they gave us the poor seen from a bourgeois point of view, the invented poor and not the lived poor; the common idea that the poor are to be pitied."

One discovers after all, concludes Sobalvarro, that there's a lot more to being a revolutionary than speaking about the poor or shouting Viva la Revoluci6n. "So these women have returned to their original world, writing about their marital problems [Zamora], reconciling themselves with God [Najlis], or writing bad commercial novels like Gioconda Belli. What we can't deny is that they introduced a woman's voice into Nicaraguan poetry, and made it possible to argue about politics and gender in a new way."

One Nicaraguan woman poet who might have supplied a continuity is living on the far side of the planet. I met Alba Azucena Torres (b. 1959) when I crashed a luncheon sponsored by the Sandinista Cultural Workers Union in I985; we shared a table with Vidaluz Meneses and Gioconda Belli, whose pale skin, blue eyes, and chestnut hair gave them away as upper-class white girls, "traitors to their class" who had defected to the Frente. Alba Azucena looks like Jaime: she has the nut-brown complexion and gleaming, frizzy curls of the vast majority of the Nicaraguan population, in which Native, African, and European genes have happily mingled for five hundred years. She was on summer break from Moscow University, with a poem telling her Russian lover about what it means to grow up Nicaraguan.

Alba Azucena captures the timeless details of a country child's autobiography with unforced tenderness: the circus came every April, and the fortune-teller always saw a handsome stranger in her cards. In the afternoons, they went to catechism and told God their sins. Then "some of the girls I knew/ began to run away at night/ and became mothers as if they were playing/ as if there was nothing to it." Inevitably, Alba Azucena left her little town.

There it is at the end, the Revolution, like a foreboding, a line of fire in the future or the past, a secret hope. Nevertheless, you can't go home again: Alba Azucena Torres married her Russian friend, and she stayed on to live in Moscow. Her young son speaks Russian better than he does Spanish.

Managua taxis are a case study in how much scrounging and tinkering will keep a car barely running for tens of thousands of kilometers past the junkyard. Taxistas circulate, picking up anyone who's going in the same direction as their first fare; and if they must tell a woman they can't take her where she wants to go, particularly an old se*ora, they say "no, mi amor" or "no, mi reina," so sweetly that your heart wants to burst into poetry. Jaime and I and the taxi driver have to ask a crowd of street kids how to find the Mala Nota bar, hidden deep in the far eastern suburbs of Managua. La Mala Nota is a grassy acre that must have been a Somocista estate; a candlelit gazebo fills up with a poetry audience.

Juan Chow, poet and master of ceremonies, cracks them up with Tio Coyote stories that were told around a campfire a thousand years ago. By the late seventeenth century, in the oldest surviving Nicaraguan text, the animal mask has been transformed into the leering snout of the Gueguence, who mocks the Spanish Governor with outrageous wordplay delving deep from Spanish into Nahuatl for double or quadruple meanings. But the only animals reading tonight are the Four Hundred Elephants.

Los Cuatrocientos Elefantes (the phrase is from a line by Ruben Dario) are the most vital group of young poets in town. Carola Brantome (b. 1961), a bouncy little person, hair shagged short except for a rat-tail, reads a luminously impenetrable poem:

Say what? Who ordered the lemons, and was that with or without anchors? Where do we stash those vast sails once they're drained? Where is all this heating and rising and growth and drainage and charging and floating supposed to take place? Between the sheets? Or somewhere within, someplace interior? Even if the signs of disaster's identity are nearly illegible, and even if Carola's finally generating more heat than light, there must be a certain satisfaction in writing a poem that breaks every one of Padre Ernesto's rules at once.

There is an air of experimentation among the Elefantes, of working out beginnings. As if the Revolution, which was programmed as a poetic door to the future, was in its own way a dead end. The only approved path was exteriorismo and the poetics of the talleres, and these young poets are refusing to go down that road. So now they are starting over, inventing poetry from scratch. Their little magazine, of which they proudly give me a full archive, is neatly laid out, modestly xeroxed, saddle-stapled, irreverent and uneven. Carola Brantome's introduction to issue number 3 cops to the uncertainty of the whole enterprise, and couldn't be more different in tone from the militant slogans in vogue a decade back:

Juan Sobalvarro (b. 1966) was a Sandinista soldier on the northern front in the late eighties, by which time the whole country was sick to death both of the unending Contra war and the government's "heroic combatants" rhetoric. Sobalvarro's troubled authenticity may make us uncomfortable. His anti-war poems read like the best work of Vietnam veterans such as Yusef Komunyakaa and Doug Anderson. But hold on a second: wasn't soldierboy Juan on the side we were supposed to be cheering for?

But the hottest poet among the Elefantes, at least for my money, is a young woman named Marta Leonor Gonzalez (b. I972), who's the forerunner of a decidedly post-revolutionary generation. Marta Leonor was just seven years old at the blinding moment of the Triunfo. In grade school in Boaco, in southern Nicaragua not far from the Costa Rican border, her teacher made her memorize Ruben Dario and she hated it. By the time she came to Managua to study journalism at the Universidad Centroamericana at the age of eighteen, the Sandinistas had already lost power. Marta Leonor felt lonely in the big city, so she started going to poetry readings, where she met Carola Brantome. They decided to form a group, which they called IMAGEN, acrostic for Inmadura generacion de escritores nocivos-Immature generation of obnoxious writers.

Gioconda Belli made it to a reading of IMAGEN and wrote that the poets were a little immature all right, but something was happening here, a different kind of poetry, erotic, ritual, brutal, unafraid: "a sign of new times in Nicaraguan poetry." Already there were tensions within the group, a power struggle. Marta Leonor wanted to take on more leadership and Carola, a decade older, was resistant, already having been singled out by la Gioconda as one of the distinctive new women's voices of the eighties, along with Tania Montenegro and Milagros Teran, for whose poetry, says Marta Leonor with a little snarl, "I wouldn't pay one peso." IMAGEN was dissolving, so the young poets decided to publish a magazine instead. Some of them weren't sure, everything is so expensive, but Marta Leonor insisted. "Even if it's only one page!" she cried. "Even if I have to do it myself!" So they drew ants and photocopied them and pasted them up on the page between the poems, and that was the first issue.

Marta Leonor's poems exude anger at an abusive, moribund father, "the silly playful way you call me Little Girl/ and when you pat my head don't you paw me/ with a dying father's breath." She wants larger answers for the whole national and cosmic mess, which her poem intimately details and resolutely refuses to resolve:

It doesn't even occur to Marta Leonor to ask, or tell, which side the three sons were fighting on. Perhaps, in an epoch where Oscar the ex-Contra and Jaime the ex-Sandinista jeer together at the politicians, the question is no longer relevant. Picking up where we left off:

In the poems of Marta Leonor Gonzalez I hear Don Beto complaining in his darkness and Doris hopelessly mopping. Nicaraguan poetry at the turn of the millenium is precisely located in this domestic debris, and who knows where it's headed.

When Marta Leonor began hanging out at the poetry readings, the most significant person she met was Carlos Martinez Rivas. He wouldn't talk to hardly anyone, but he would spend two hours going deeply into three lines of one of her poems. "If an important poet like C.M.R. can be interested in my poetry," she thought to herself, "it must be worth something."

"Have you been to Carlos's house?" Marta Leonor asks me. I shake my head. "To enter his house is to enter hell. You cannot imagine. I went over there the other day and he was naked. They had robbed his dressing robe and his electric typewriter. There was nothing left but the poems written on the walls." It's true, I haven't seen Carlos Martinez Rivas. But I've been reading a book by a Brazilian blonde bombshell named Berenice Maranhao-a leftist from the ruling class in love with a Sandinista comandante-who marched into C.M.R.'s life in Ig Bg with the idea of organizing and arranging, transcribing and editing, publishing and bringing to light the more than two thousand poems that are supposed to be either sitting in cardboard boxes or scrawled on the walls of the Poet's house.lo

Martinez Rivas was all for it, he thought it would be a great idea to get his work in order, but somehow it keeps proving unexpectedly difficult for him to get down to work with Maranhao on the task at hand. He could be charmingly erudite over a glass or two or three of Flor Negra, talking about literature, take Hamlet, for example, never mind the Prince fooling around with Ophelia, the play is about revenge. Or the Poet would be in a crisis because there was nothing to eat in the house. He was living on a tiny pension from the government which could not stretch to cover chicken, bread, and rum. At Christmas there would be a basketful of exotic goodies from the Sandinista comandantes, little French cheeses. But soon enough C.M.R. was asking credit again from the woman at the corner store.

"Let's go out and get ice cream!" exclaims Berenice, what a great idea, banana ice cream, we'll get the Poet his potassium! But somehow from saying an elaborate goodbye to the cats, to getting a menu torn up in their face at an exclusive restaurant, to running into an arts promoter who wants C.M.R. to come to his exposition, "and that's exactly why I won't come, because I don't want to hear them destroy my poetry," it's one-thirty in the morning and in the hot Managua night the ice cream is soup in the back seat. The next time Berenice comes over, Martinez Rivas tells her, "today..I don't want to talk about poetry. I want you to tell me about your polvos, your sexual experiences."

Berenice squirms her way out of that one, but the time after that the Poet holds his dressing gown open to reveal his enormous stomach and his tiny manhood, and she has to push her way past him to get to the door. She keeps coming back, though, and his next move is to lock the door from the inside, stuff the keys in his pocket, and announce, "tonight you're going to sleep with me." After considering and rejecting violence, the kitchen knives, wrestling for the keys, she calls his bluff. "Okay, I'll sleep with you," she agrees, "but this is going to be interesting, because all the guys I've slept with are real hunks, real Adonises, and I've always wanted to see how a fat old man like you could make it with a woman."

The Poet and Berenice finally go to sleep, naked, chaste as children, each of them defeated, unutterably desolate. Another scene follows-that same night? another? I admire Maranhao's charmingly inexact continuity-wherein Martinez Rivas, naked, reads her his poetry that plunges into the megalomaniac monologue of self-torturing insomnia.

"Did you hear that, Berenice, high drizzly vaults, have you ever heard anything greater than that? extraordinarily beautiful, very beautiful," the Poet muses as his captive audience trembles. "Have you ever heard a better poet than me?" She knows the correct answer: "!Claro que no, Poeta!"

Maranhao finally knows when she's had enough, and writes a book called Traciones a Carlos Martinez Rivas (semblanza no autori.zada), Betraying Carlos Martinez Rivas (unauthorized portrait) which the Poet's friends intensely dislike, and whose authenticity they can't begin to refute. But there is a level on which my reaction or Berenice's reaction or the reader's reaction of outrage or horror or disgust or compassion is misplaced. "Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it," replies Mephistopheles. The poeta maldito has already entered the company of the damned-he locates the "high drizzly vaults" in the Third Circle of Hell-and has rejected any possible salvation in advance.

Writing in his twenties, in his one and only book, La Insurreccion Solitaria, Martinez Rivas absolutely anticipates this fate. What is Mastery, what is the achievement of a lifetime? With disdain he quotes Emerson: "a well-realized physiognomy is the true and only goal of all Culture." What face would you want to have at the age of eighty? What if the true face were "the face of the Man/ with the Rag round his head, he who cut his/ ear off with a shaving knife/to give it to a slender prostitute?" If a selfmutilation analogous to Van Gogh's is what's required to be true to the anti-hero's task, so be it. It becomes a game of denial: not this, not this.

A little sexual aggression was all it took to foil Berenice Maranhao's plan to bring light and order out of all the dusty cardboard boxes where the poems may be hiding. But the Poet is over seventy years old, and half a century's alcohol has left his internal organs resembling those of a typical Managua taxi. One day soon, Carlos Martinez Rivas will die, and the editors will descend. Perhaps they will reconstruct his Masterpiece out of the shards.

After all this publicity, all there is for audience at the hour announced for my charla in the Municipal Cultural Center is a couple of Elefantes, but forty minutes later, when we finally get started, the audience swells to a grand total of maybe twenty. Julio Valle Castillo does not show; so much for my luncheon date with Padre Ernesto! A few days later, saying my goodbyes, I run into Julio. On his way to my reading, he says, he stopped to put gas into his car; there was a short-circuit and his car exploded. His chauffeur-evidently, literary mavens at a certain level have chauffeurs in Managuaburned his hand, and it was by merest chance that Julio hadn't brought along his son, who would have been sitting in the back seat. I find this story altogether too explosive, as an excuse for not getting to a poetry reading, not to be true.

I'm spending one last weekend in Leon and giv, ing a reading at the Museo y Archivo Alfonso Cortes, where the impeccable white suit of the mad poet hangs in a dusty glass case. The Museo y Archivo occupies a longitudinal slice of what was once a grand colonial house. "This place is a shrine," says Bayardo Efren Garcia, who has been holding down the fort on a shoestring for seventeen years here, "a temple, consecrated by the great poetry of Nicaragua." Bayardo has the Thomas Merton translations of Alfonso Cortes, but no budget to reprint them.

The volcano Cerro Negro is in full eruption, and we can see it clearly from the rooftops of Leon, a column of fire by night, a steady chorro of black smoke by day. A bleak snow of volcanic ash is falling on Leon. People have tied white handkerchiefs over their mouths. Rag-tag bands-a drum, a trumpet, a guitar-march here and there through the streets with giant goddesses sashaying ahead of them, swirling their dresses. These enormous puppets are the gigantonas, and they're practicing for the festivities of Purisima, the Immaculate Conception, only a few days off. Little rockets whisk up into the ashy air, explode, and then explode again higher up.

The eruption reminds me of the ending of Castigo Divi.no (Divine Punishment), a wonderful novel -inexplicably unavailable in English-by Sergio Ramirez, who used his spare time from being the Sandinista Vice-President of Nicaragua to craft this deep detective story set in Le6n in i932. A dandified Guatemalan poet, Oliverio Castaneda, fleeing the dictator's secret police back home, arrives in Leon with a young wife and a suitcase full of the latest fox-trot records. He is taken into the good graces -and several of the feminine beds-of a local aristocratic family. Soon people begin dying, poisoned by strychnine. First the young wife, then the patriarch, then the sister who played the piano so nicely. Practically every male character in the novel, including the principal suspect and the judge assigned to solve the case, considers himself a Vanguardist poet. The one thoroughly nasty figure, a Somocista cop, sneers "ipueta!" blurring the vowel between poet and whore. Nothing is solved in the end, power does its crude work, and the volcanic ash rains down on the just and the unjust.

At six-thirty, when my reading's supposed to begin, there are only a couple of people sitting in the white plastic chairs along the narrow corridor of the Museo y Archivo Alfonso Cortes, but by now I'm in a Nicaraguan time zone and don't panic, and eventually we fill up every seat. As an entr'acte between my poems and my little talk on North American poetry, a little girl in a red dress gets up and strikes a dramatic pose. "!Golondrina! iGolondrinita!" she exclaims. "Swallow! Little Swallow!" She's Paola Celeste Torres, from Subtiava, just seven years old, and she goes on, declaiming "The Prince and the Swallow" by Oscar Wilde, from memory, for twenty minutes, with exaggerated expression. What a show! And then a grownup Subtiava poet, Uriel Benito Sanchez Galo (b. I967), stands up and belts out a furious poem about the street-kids, the clamor of his rhyme-stream making a poetry slam, rap rhythm performance with an angry, compassionate political edge:

I asked Juan Sobalvarro and Marta Leonor Gonz*lez, back in Managua, if they could think of any poets who had come out of the talleres. They said no, but then they're in frank political reaction against that whole experience. Raul Quintanilla, who edits the extremely hip neo-Sandinista art magazine ArteFacto, insisted that the talleres were completely valid. They were something undreamedof, a mass exercise in literacy and popular culture. I asked him the same question: any poets? Raul said sure, definitely, there are some. Could he suggest any names? He wet his lips with his tongue and said he couldn't think of any.

But Uriel Benito Sanchez Galo participated in the talleres, and remembers them fondly for the mutual constructive criticism, take this out, put this in, but in the end it was always up to the poet. "There are lots of poets and writers who were in the talleres," Uriel tells me, "and we're out there, anonymous, but I know we're still working." Uriel teaches auto mechanics by day and studies business at night. I ask for a copy of his poem and he writes it out for me by heart.

Uriel went to a seminar in Managua this year that was put on by Mayra Jimenez, and he couldn't believe it. "It was the same focus on Ernesto Cardenal just like years back, and I scared them when I got up and said that Cardenal may be an important poet but not to me. It was amazing, a little poet nobody ever heard of saying such a thing about the Master, what a shock! And then I read my long poems, ah, no, they have to be short, as if long poems were the property of established poets only."

The Subtiava poets have a group, they call themselves Raza Rebelde (Rebel Race), but they feel invisible in the larger Nicaraguan poetry scene. The Municipal Cultural Center in Managua gave them a night, but none of the Managua poets showed up, the audience was entirely from Leon. "Do you think that was racism or classism?" I ask Uriel, and he says classism, but maybe he's being diplomatic; these guys are a definite shade darker than the Elefantes, and considerably more working-class. And there may be a touch of the world-wide opposition of province/outskirt versus capital/metropolis going on here as well.

In any event, here in Uriel's performance blast, and not in the static, discredited, write-by-numbers talleres formula that Mayra Jimenez still hopes to impose top-down, is a true populist alternative to the self-involved interior experimentation of the 4o0 Elefantes. Naturally, these tendencies are going to despise each other, ignore each other, and go after each other hammer and tongs. Without opposites is no progression, said Blake. Perhaps the Nicaraguan poet has already been born-could it be little Paola Celeste Torres, in her red dress? -who will pick up something from Raza Rebelde, something from the Elefantes, and combine their polarities into a seamless whole. She would be the true daughter of Ruben Dario, who asked in despair, and then answered himself out of the mouth of a Modernista swan:

- We wade through the sifting ash up the street to a sidewalk bar so all the poets can go on talking. There's an old oral poet from Subtiava who nods and says, "well done, well done," but still he isn't satisfied. He wants me to drink a beer to seal our friendship. I'm feeling like I'm coming down with some bug, and I refuse. "iQue el poeta gringo tome una cerveza!" the old Indian poet insists. "Let the gringo poet have a beer!"

NOTES

I. The most accessible bilingual selection of poetry from the talleres is in Kent Johnson, trans. and ed., A Nation of Poets: Writing from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua, West End Press, Los Angeles, I985. 2. All English translations are my own unless otherwise credited.

3. Translation by Lysander Kemp, from Stephen Tapscott, ed., Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, University of Texas, I997.

4. The great Nicaraguan poets of this century are well represented in Stephen F. White's Poets of Nicaragua: A Bilingual Anthology 1918-1979, Unicorn Press, I982. 5. Original in English.

6. Karyn Hollis, Poesia del Pueblo para el Pueblo: Talleres Nicaragiienses de Poesia, CSUCA, San Jose, Costa Rica, I99I, P. 37.

7. Cuban poet Fina Garcia Marruz tells this story in Nicarduac no. Ii, Ministry of Culture, Managua, May, I985.

8. Carlos ll*antica, El Habla Nicaraguense, Editorial Hispamer, Managua, 1994 (4th edition). 9. from Ernesto Cardenal, trans. John Lyons, Cosmic Canticle, Curbstone Press, New York, I993. Io. Berenice Maranhao, Traiciones a Carlos Martinez Rivas (semblanza no autorizada), Editorial Vanguardia, Managua, Nicaragua, I99I.

II. Translation by Thomas Merton, from Tapscott, Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry.

JOHN OLIVER SIMON'S most recent book is Son Caminos, a selection of poems in Spanish from Hotel Ambosmundos in Mexico City. He is a contributing editor to Poetry Flash and The Temple and teaches sixth grade in Berkeley. This chapter is excerpted from The Road to Iguazu, a journal of a year's travel through Latin America seeking poets and poetry.

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