(More than) a few year's ago, the movie that was ALL THE RAGE with the snotty film set was Il Postino. & I will grant you, it is a lovely film (the trailer is dreck, just trust me about the movie). The story revolved around a postman who is hired because a lofty exile has settled in the remote area & needs someone to bring his mail as his communication with the rest of the world is, in a word, VAST. That exile was better known as Pablo Neruda. He died 40 years ago & earlier this month, they dug him up. Because there has long been concern that Pinochet may have had a hand in his death (Neruda was quite ill & planning & going back into exile...again. Then he died, in hospital).
As with so many stories about poets, that one interesting & odd angle on a life is just a small slice of the pie. It rather amazes me they have the reputation of being soft, fluffy bits of flotsam with no foothold in the real world. Every active poet I ever met was manically obsessed with something (or things) & it was rarely socially acceptable. About the nicest thing I ever heard of a poet doing in the last ten years or so was to get arrested for smoking in a nonsmoking restaurant & it just goes downhill from there (it turns out they only give tickets for smoking in non-smoking restaurants & then the police leave you there to finish your meal...& your cigarette. It is up to the establishment to evict you). I am not absolutely certain but I think the-poet-I-know was already mostly done with his meal, so he ditched the check & went to the movies. I know he went to the movies, because that's where I heard the story (during the opening adverts, poets don't talk through movies).
But don't take MY word for it (& no poet would want you to either. Get off your lazy slacker ass & do your own damn research). A few years ago, & really just a few. Less than ten. Probably. SOME years ago, I picked C****** up after school & she told me they were on to poetry in her English unit (I hate how schools talk) & she was quite sure she hated all poetry, ever written. I almost had a coronary right there, behind the wheel.
We went to the library & I started pulling (she had spent the afternoon with his true love's hair being like wire & was completely sonneted out). So I yanked every 20th century poet I thought might have something short enough to get in there like a blade & cut this outdated notion from her thoughts. I don't remember the whole list but I know it included Lucille Clifton, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke & Wallace Stevens. It also included the poet that did the job: Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ginsberg was not on my list, nor was Whitman. I was worried they might have been included in her crash course & already ruined; I should not have been concerned they spent a WEEK on effing sonnets & never touched anything else. Also not on my list Maya Angelou & Emily Dickinson; I looked but they were checked out YAY.
So they are digging up Pablo Neruda. I am not sure how I feel about that (& not being Chilean nor a revolutionary, I am not sure anyone should care what I think). It is interesting that when they buried him, despite a two month delay & Pinochet's refusal to hold a public funeral & general ban on all public gatherings, THOUSANDS showed up.
This past week I took the time to revisit what is probably his best known poem. & the one I refer to the most: A Dog Has Died. & I cannot help but look at the past week, the Boston Marathon & the ricin letters & know that is no way to win a revolution. No one wins when the only stakes are random undiscriminating death; Neruda lived a life of life & by every measure, including immortality, he won.
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