VERSE
Cardenal, Ernesto
has extended to other countries, most notably to Cuba. Current revolutionary poetry from Cuba has been greatly influenced by Nicaraguan and North American poetry. Q. But unlike The Cantos,...
...Q. Do you have a guiding esthetic /or your own work...
...And her life was as unreal as a dream interpreted and filed away by a psychiatrist...
...They're straightforward and simple in their diction...
...A. Well, there is more to life than revolution...
...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...
...I also have other poems about the Mayas and they too touch greatly on the economic, political and social themes...
...Tahuantinsuyo is the Quecha name of the Inca Emperor...
...Like every shopgirl she dreamed of being a star...
...How do you feel about that comparison...
...The poem is called "The Economy of Tahuantinsuyo...
...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...
...My poetry is not lyric...
...Q. But you haven't tried to write in a specifically revolutionary diction, have you...
...A. I was actually referring to the poetry that I'm writing right now, poetry with a revolutionary theme, for example...
...She hungered for love and we offered her tranquilizers...
...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...
...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...
...For me, poetry is above all prophecy in the Biblical sense of guidance...
...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...
...Forgive her Lord and forgive us too for our 20th Century for this Super-Colossal Production we've all worked on...
...All she did was act out the script we gave her w The script of our own lives--and it was an absurd script...
...In what sense is the Marilyn Monroe poem not lyric...
...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...
...I have a poem about the Inca culture which is principally an economic poem about the socialism of the Incas...
...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...
...Speaking of the Incas, I say that their socialistic economy was an economy with religion...
...Q. How about your epigrams...
...Q. But unlike The Cantos, your poems are easy to read...
...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...
...I am not interested in an economic liberation of man without the liberation of the whole man...
...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...
...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...
...But I myself have never called what I write anti-poetry...
...And her dream became reality (but like a Technicolor reality...
...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...
...Well, some anti-poets say they are...
...A. A friend of mine from Nicaragua, Jos6 Coronei Urtecho, told me that for Pound poetry was "poetry containing history...
...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...
...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...
...For her sadness because we are not saints we suggested analysis...
...It was much later that I developed a different kind of poetry-social, political and prophetic...
...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...
...Q. What about gra~iti and slogans such as you find in Parra's work...
...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...
...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...
...Q. But not [rom such a fixed point o/ view as Pound's...
...that is, poetry with images drawn from our present, real world...
...Pound was not interested in being understood by them, so yes, there is that difference between his poetry and mine...
...A. I think there is something in common between his poetry and mine, something that consists in our trying to write realistic poetry...
...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...
...I am not interested in poetry for poetry's sake...
...Sloganmaking is not poetry...
...Kiss me beneath the luminous signs oh God) KODAK TROPICAL RADIO F&C REYES they spell out your Name in many colors...
...There is also love...
...And the detectives couldn't find out who she was going to call...
...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...
...In these poems I'm working with a preoccupation with the religious and mystical aspect of man's life and not just the economic...
...and he told me that my poetry was "poetry containing history and wisdom...
...the reception in the mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor seen in the tiny livingroom of her miserable apartment...
...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...
...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...
...The movie ended without the final kiss...
...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...
...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...
...That is my theme...
...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...
...The epigrams are lyric hecause they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric...
...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...
...Q. Some people have compared your work to the anti-poetry of Nicanor Parra...
...You know our dreams better than the psychiatrists...
...They are neither about revolution nor economics...
...A. No, I'm not interested in those, because they are not poetry...
Vol. 100 • April 1974 • No. 8
