Sunday, December 10, 2017

It has been quite a while since we've posted anything here, but we are looking forward to engaging with anew, engaging with you. Posts on Neruda, post on what we're dedicated to: the power of Latin American poetry to not only evoke emotions, but to shift social consciousness, sparking both individual and collective change. 

Towards that, we have recently finished editing a multilingual anthology of Latin American resistance poetry, featuring forty poems that arose from the sustained periods of activism throughout that region. The book explores the nature of political poetry’s effectiveness through the power and aesthetic beauty of language. Furthermore, the anthology addresses a diverse spectrum of issues including indigenous, feminist, queer, urban and ecological themes, along with the more historically prominent protests against imperialism, dictatorships, and economic inequality. Every Latin American country is represented by at least one poem. Four indigenous languages are included and translated: Mestizo, Mayan, Quechua and Mapundungun (from the Mapuche in Chile). The book features thirty translations crafted just for this project, composed by an all-star team of translators, including recent US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera as well as emerging talent. We hope to find the right publisher soon. Updates and previews to come.

The new version of the documentary has a new name: Pablo Neruda: The People's Poet. It is an up-close, visually poetic portrait of the complex man behind some of the world’s most popular and enduring poems. But it is still in progress. The bestselling novelist Julia Alvarez recently said, “This documentary will give us our Neruda, vigorously, diversely, enchantingly brought back to life.”

We also have some exciting news: Mark Eisner's Neruda biography, Neruda: The Poet's Calling, will be published in March 2018 by Ecco/HarperCollins! Mark helps lead our non-profit, he is a co-editor of the resistance anthology and a producer of the documentary (and also editor of City Lights' The Essential Neruda). There's already some great buzz:

"Mark Eisner's definitive biography of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda reads like a beautifully written novel: attentive to scene, momentum, and rich with evocative details.”
— Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban and Here in Berlin.

“What a joy to have this big-hearted, exuberant biography of Neruda, infused with all the grandeur that the man commanded! What particularly commends the book is its mise-en-scène—the wider worlds of art, nature, politics, and social justice in which Neruda moved. A spirited and satisfying journey.”
—Marie Arana, author of Bolívar: American Liberator and American Chica

                                                          pre-order it now!

We are working on a grass-roots impact campaign in which we can take the biography, along with what we have of the film, into community organizations, cultural organizations, classrooms, any room, any field, again, all trying to communicate poetry's power to not only evoke emotions, but to shift social consciousness, sparking both individual and collective change.

We will keep you up to date on this project, all our projects, as well as a renewed stream of posts on a variety of related matters, thoughts, creativity.

Gracias!