THE POETRY OF USEFUL PROPHECY: An Interview with Ernesto Cardenal
Christ, Ronald
N ot too long ago the poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal made a rare excursion from his island retreat on the Great Lake of Nicaragua to appear at New York's Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine...
...Speaking of the Incas, I say that their socialistic economy was an economy with religion...
...Almost all South American poetry has been influenced by Europe and espcciaUy by France, but Nicaragua has been influenced by North American poetry and now the influence of Nicaragua Commonweal: 189 has extended to other countries, most notably to Cuba...
...A. I have tried not to be difficult as Pound is, I have tried to use technique but in a way that can be understood by the people...
...In these poems I'm working with a preoccupation with the religious and mystical aspect of man's life and not just the economic...
...MANAGEA 6:30 PM Neons in the evening are mellow and mercury lamps pale and beautiful . . . And the red star of a radio tower in the twilight sky of Managua is lovely as Venus and an ESSO sign like the moon tiny red lights on cars are mystical (The soul is like a girl smooched behind a car TACA BUNGE KLM SINGER MENNEN HTM GOMEZ NORGE RPM SAF OPTICA SELECTA all proclaim the glory of God...
...Church, house, cave are the security of the womb but something more than that . . . The heads are her fans, that's clear (the mass of heads in the dark below the beam of light...
...that is, poetry with images drawn from our present, real world...
...You know our dreams better than the psychiatrists...
...But the temple is not the studios of 20th Century-Fox The temple----of marble and gold--is the temple of her body where the Son of Man with a whip in his hand is expelling the money changers of 20th Century-Fox who made of Your house of prayer a den of thieves...
...She was like someone who has dialed the only friendly voice and hears just a recorded voice telling her: WRONG NUMBER Or like someone wounded by gangsters who reaches for a disconnected telephone...
...Q. How did you come to write poetry in the first place...
...My epigrams were written when I was young and they are a poetry of love and hate, some of both love and hate at the same time, because while they are political poems they are also love poems...
...That is my theme...
...They broadcast the news . . ." I don't get any other meaning I don't defend the cruelty of those lights And if I have to bear witness to my times it's this: They were primitive and barbaric but poetic 9 II I I Commonweoh 191...
...Ezra Pound has had a special influence on me...
...A. Well, yes...
...That is one of the themes I've cultivated in my poetry: the theme of the indigenous...
...But I myself have never called what I write anti-poetry...
...For me, poetry is above all prophecy in the Biblical sense of guidance...
...My poetry is not lyric...
...In the meantime, a handsome volume of his poems entitled Homage to the American Indians was issued by Johns Hopkins this past December and that, along with various of his poems in anthologies and his two books published by Herder and Herder, To Live is To Love and Psalms, will serve to introduce this former student of philosophy at Columbia University, this one-time novice under Thomas Merton at Gethsemane, this political activist who has spent time in jail for his efforts...
...A. Well, there is more to life than revolution...
...In other words, I've always been writing poetry...
...How did you come to write it...
...The technique of Pound has been the greatest lesson for me...
...A. I think that Pound's principal point, and this is very important for everyone to see today, is that the present capitalistic economy is an oppression of culture, of all aspects of man's life and we ought to liberate ourselves from this oppression...
...A. The principal influence on me, and one could say this of almost all the Nicaraguan literature of today, is the North American influence, from Whitman to the contemporary writers, the very newest...
...A. Well, Pound wrote much economic, social and political poetry--principally economic--and I also have written quite a bit of economic poetry and some of those indigenous poems also have these themes...
...Like every shopgirl she dreamed of being a star...
...And her life was as unreal as a dream interpreted and filed away by a psychiatrist...
...A frail man in his 50's with long grey hair combed back over his head, a grey beard and black-rimmed glasses framing his passionately compassionate eyes, Cardenal read his work in an oracular voice matched by nothing else but those riddling, dark eyes...
...At the same time, it was the date in the liturgy when we have the gospel about the expulsion of the money-lenders from the temple and that too gave me inspiration to write the poem...
...But he did speak with a publisher about his work, and another book of his prose, In Cuba, will appear within the year and most likely, another volume of his poems as well...
...Remember Lord her growing dread of the camera and her hatred of makeup--insisting on making herself up for each scene and how her horror was growing greater and greater her lateness at the studios...
...They are neither about revolution nor economics...
...Forgive her Lord and forgive us too for our 20th Century for this Super-Colossal Production we've all worked on...
...She hungered for love and we offered her tranquilizers...
...A. I read fragments of the last poem I've written about Managua--about the city in general, but the poem ends with the earthquake...
...Well, some anti-poets say they are...
...It was in this sense that he understood the word "wisdom"--in the Biblical sense of wisdom, in the sense the prophets gave to the word...
...and he told me that my poetry was "poetry containing history and wisdom...
...STARS The starred sky is like a nighttime city seen from a plane: the stars are like streets like lit-up supermarkets/neon signs like motels nightclubs movies and lights mwhite and red--from cars---come and go__ along dark highways . . . and they burn for nothing: a waste of energy lost here below in the void in streets stores cafes nightclubs motels movies showing a Clark Gable superproduction...
...My poetry is less known here than in other countries, and it is better known in Germany, for example, and in Europe in general...
...He called it usury, the oppression of money, of the power of money, and I try also to treat this theme in historical poems of indigenous cultures as well as in some poems touching upon the theme of imperialism...
...But now Johns Hopkins Press is bringing out a book of mine called Homage to the American Indians, which is a collection of poems on the theme of the indigenous cultures of America-North America, South America and Central America...
...Still a child she dreamed herself naked in a church (according to the story in TIME) before a prostrate multitude, with their heads to the floor and she had to tiptoe so as not to tread upon their heads...
...It's about the wisdom, the mysticism and the spirituality of the indigenous tribes...
...I would call it--in trying to find the solution for our problems, a poetry that serves for something in the construction of a new society, poetry that would be useful and poetry that might be more than just a vehicle for communicating something...
...Q. What about gra~iti and slogans such as you find in Parra's work...
...Q. Do you have a guiding esthetic /or your own work...
...All she did was act out the script we gave her w The script of our own lives--and it was an absurd script...
...Q. But unlike The Cantos, your poems are easy to read...
...A. No, I'm not interested in those, because they are not poetry...
...Lord in this world contaminated by sins and radioactivity surely You will not punish just a little salesgirl, Who like all salesgirls dreamed of being a movie star...
...and since some monks and contemplatives of different religions were taking part, it seemed to me that it was a sufficiently important event to come here, in spite of the fact that 1 seldom leave my island...
...John the Divine on behalf of the earthquake victims of Managua...
...A. A friend of mine from Nicaragua, Jos6 Coronei Urtecho, told me that for Pound poetry was "poetry containing history...
...I also think that my poetry should not be PRAYER FOR MARILYN MONROE Lord receive this child known the world over by the name of Marilyn Monroe though that was not her real name (but You know her real name, the name of the little orphan raped at 9 of the salesgirl who tried to kilt herself at 16) and who comes before You now without any makeup without her Press Agent without photographers and without signing autographs like a lone astronaut facing the galactic night...
...The movie ended without the final kiss...
...Q. Exactly why are you in New York now...
...the reception in the mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor seen in the tiny livingroom of her miserable apartment...
...How do you feel about that comparison...
...A woman told me she thought he looked like a modern-day Christ and that is certainly how many Nicaraguans regard Cardenal ---especially those who live on the Isla de Solentiname in the community he founded there to serve the poor...
...I don't like to leave my retreat there...
...Her romances were a kiss with closed eyes and when her eyes open she discovers that she was under the lights and then they put out the lights...
...They're straightforward and simple in their diction...
...The poem is called "The Economy of Tahuantinsuyo...
...Current revolutionary poetry from Cuba has been greatly influenced by Nicaraguan and North American poetry...
...There is also love...
...Q. How about your epigrams...
...Q. What did you contribute to the gathering...
...Q. Who are the poets you most read and admire...
...THE POETRY OF USEFUL PROPHECY RONALD CHRIST An interview with Ernesto Cardenal i have come out of our isolation to recognize this remarkable writer who is one of the best known poets of his generation, both in his native South America and in Europe...
...A. I was actually referring to the poetry that I'm writing right now, poetry with a revolutionary theme, for example...
...Lord whoever it was she was going to call and didn't call (and maybe it was nobody or Somebody whose number is not in the Los Angeles Directory) You answer the telephone...
...A. They invited me for a gathering being held in the Cathedral: some showings of art to benefit the injured in Managua...
...A. I think there is something in common between his poetry and mine, something that consists in our trying to write realistic poetry...
...Q. Do you think most readers in the United States are missing the lull scope of your work by knowing just that one poem...
...Q. Your best known poem here is probably "Prayer/or Marilyn Monroe...
...You could say that "Prayer for Marilyn Monroe" is a lyric poem, but it is not properly a poem about an individual since there was no individual relation between her and me...
...Q. But not [rom such a fixed point o/ view as Pound's...
...Sloganmaking is not poetry...
...In what sense is the Marilyn Monroe poem not lyric...
...A. Well, I began to write poetry when I was about four years old...
...I have a poem about the Inca culture which is principally an economic poem about the socialism of the Incas...
...For her sadness because we are not saints we suggested analysis...
...I also read a story in Time magazine about her and that inspired the poem...
...Q. But you haven't tried to write in a specifically revolutionary diction, have you...
...Cardenal didn't see many people while he was in New York, living here in almost the same isolation he commands in his native country...
...And her dream became reality (but like a Technicolor reality...
...Pound was not interested in being understood by them, so yes, there is that difference between his poetry and mine...
...and they take down the two walls of the room (it was a movie set) while the Director walks away with his script because the scene had already been shot...
...In reality, what I would have wanted to say is that my preoccupation--and that, also, of Jos6 Coronel Urtecho---is that of writing a poetry which serves others in communicating its meaning...
...The Cantos, yes, The Cantos, not the earlier poems...
...A. I was in the seminary, studying to be a priest in Colombia when one of the teachers gave us the news of Marilyn Monroe's death...
...The epigrams are lyric hecause they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric...
...I also have other poems about the Mayas and they too touch greatly on the economic, political and social themes...
...It was much later that I developed a different kind of poetry-social, political and prophetic...
...It's about thirty pages long and students are preparing an edition that they're going to distribute among the people, and in Argentina some people are issuing it in book form...
...And the detectives couldn't find out who she was going to call...
...I am not interested in an economic liberation of man without the liberation of the whole man...
...Q. Some people have compared your work to the anti-poetry of Nicanor Parra...
...I am not interested in poetry for poetry's sake...
...And when that introduction has at last been accomplished, we will finally RONALD CHRIST is the Editor of Review, published by the Center 1or 4nter-American Relations...
...Rather, with her as my subject, I speak of the current civilization and I consider her not as a symbol but as victimmvictim, really, of the commercialization, of the falsification of this real world...
...Tahuantinsuyo is the Quecha name of the Inca Emperor...
...Or like a trip on a yacht, a kiss in Singapore, a dance in Rio 26 April 1974:190 only known as the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal but rather as Nicaraguan poetry...
...She was found dead in her bed, her hand on the phone...
...Later, when I met him in a walk-up fiat in the middle West Side near the river, he greeted me in baggy black trousers, a loose-fitting, wrinkled white shirt cut like a peasant blouse and a black beret slouched to the right side of his head, and 1 said to myself, yes, a kind of Castro-Christ...
...Kiss me beneath the luminous signs oh God) KODAK TROPICAL RADIO F&C REYES they spell out your Name in many colors...
Vol. 100 • April 1974 • No. 8
