Poetic Democracy in Nicaragua

36 the minnesota review Kent Johnson (Introduction and translations) Poetic Democracy in Nicaragua In Latin America, Nicaragua has long been known as the "Land of the Poets." Nicaraguans take the title seriously. In the streets of Managua, Granada and Leon, writers are matter-of-factly greeted as "poeta" in the same way that physicians are greeted as "Doctor" or priests as "padre." The country of Ruben Darío (the father of the Modernist Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) has produced over the years such poets as Salomón de la Selva, Jose Coronel Urtecho, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Carlos Martinez Rivas, and Leonel Rugama— writers who although little known in the U.S. are highly regarded throughout the Spanish-speaking world. To this list we must add, of course, the name of Fr. Ernesto Cardenal, Latin America's most famous living poet and presently Minister of Culture of the revolutionary Government of Nicaragua. Following the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution over the Somoza dictatorship in July of 1979, the new Ministry of Culture, under Cardenal's direction, launched an orginal and ambitious program: To establish "Talleres de Poesía" — Poetry Workshops—across Nicaragua, in poor neighborhoods, factories, agricultural cooperatives, police headquarters and military barracks. The idea had an antecedent. In 1976, at Cardenal's commune of Solentiname on the island of Mancarrón in the Lake of Nicaragua, the Costa Rican poet Mayra Jimenez decided to try out a poetry workshop for the inhabitants there. The experiment achieved surprising success. Many beautiful poems, since collected and translated into many languages, were written by the campesinos of Solentiname prior to the commune's destruction by the National Guard in 1977. Similarly, the post-insurrection experiment surpassed even the most optimistic of expectations. As many as 70 workshops have functioned throughout Nicaragua at one time (the per capita equivalent in the U.S. of about 7,000), where hundreds of machinists, peasants, carpenters, street vendors and soldiers, under the direction of a Ministry delegate, have met on a weekly basis to discuss, criticize and write. Fairly regular contests and public readings are held, as well as a weekly national radio show devoted to the workshops, where invited poets read and discuss their writing. Their best work is published every three months in Poesía Libre (Free Poetry), the national magazine of the Poetry Workshops, as Johnson 37 Ernesto Cardenal. well as in local mimeographed workshop publications and various periodicals and newspapers. But the U.S. — sponsored aggression has cut deeply into all areas of Nicaraguan life; poetry is no exception. Since mid-1983, when the "contra " war intensified, the number of regularly functioning workshops has been reduced to around 30. As Ernesto Cardenal has explained: To defend the Revolution is to defend poetry as well . . . Without the Revolution, there would be no possibility of a real grassroots literary movement in this country. And of course, the war has hurt the Workshop program greatly. Many of our best writing instructors have volunteered for the front as have large numbers of the participants. This has brought the number of workshops down to around half the number we usually had in the three years of relative peace following the triumph. In the past year, a number of the workshop poets have lost their lives defending the Revolution . . . (Conversation with the author - 12/84) In the mid-1950's a circle of poets, led by Cardenal and Urtecho, gave the name of "Exteriorismo" to the style of poetry they had been writing, deeply influenced, ironically enough, by 20th-century U.S. poetry—notably that of Ezra Pound and the Imagist movement. By the late 1960's, Exteriorismo had become the dominant poetic style in 38 the minnesota review Nicaragua, its leading proponents directly associated with the rising antidictatorial movement. In defining Exteriorismo Cardenal has said: It is poetry made of the images of the exterior world, the world which is seen and palpable, and which is in general, the specific world of poetry. Exteriorismo is objective poetry: narrative and anecdotal, made with the elements of real life and with what is concrete, with personal names and precise details, exact occurrences and numbers, facts...