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!

Why Red Poppy

The first time I really connected to Pablo Neruda's poetry was the summer before my junior year of college. Reeling after a bad breakup, I was going through the Spanish section of the library when I came across a black book with gold lettering on the front - Residencia en la Tierra. At this point I was familiar with Neruda's poetry but just barely. The poems I knew were the ones that, if there was a billboard chart for poetry, would be considered Top 40 material, the types of poems that are anthologized in the intermediate level Spanish lit readers. Don't get me wrong, these are great poems, iconic poems like “Poema XX.” But they only show the side of Neruda that most people are familiar with - his romantic poems. And while, say, “Poema XX,” with its heart on its sleeve, with its “another’s. She will be another's,” may seem like the perfect break up elegy, I shortly found out that the poems in Residencia express a whole other level of anguish. For example. The heartbroken man in “Poema XX” can sing the saddest verses on this night. Whereas the man who is tired of being a man in “Walking Around” in Residencia finds the atomic film separating his skin from the horrible space around him melts away, leaving him wide open to the onslaught of reality. Poema XX is a lyrical sublimation of heartache. Walking Around is a howl at the moon. And sometimes a howl at the moon is what you need.

When I first looked over Red Poppy’s Neruda documentary footage something clicked when one of the interviewees said that Neruda himself was going through a break up when he wrote the Residencias, (as well as feeling estranged, depressed, lost in solitude). I didn't know this beforehand but it made perfect sense. While the poems are not overtly about a long gone lover, the undercurrent of loss is there, a loss of human contact, and what more is a break up than losing your closest human contact you have? Neruda gives voice to that loss. And that voice, that articulation, is exactly the answer I have started to give to my friends working as engineers and lab techs when they ask me, Why Poetry? or its sister question, that resilient New York Times Op-Ed impetus, Why the Humanities? Poetry can be a great many things and defies definition. It can be puzzle to unlock with another person. It can be an epic story. It can be a historical testament. But to me, most of all, poetry is just a human voice that refuses to fade away.

Red Poppy’s important work focuses on collecting these outspoken voices. At present the nonprofit is engaged with projects including a documentary on Pablo Neruda's poetic activism, and an anthology entitled Poetry in Resistance that challenges readers to consider art as a vehicle for demanding social justice. Every day we can read about the civil war in Syria, about turmoil in the Ukraine, about genocide in the Sudan, about Pussy Riot being shipped to the gulag, about mortgage holders illegally foreclosed upon and every single person oppressed by these forces needs a voice beyond the sterilized sentences of The News. That is where poetry comes into play. Poetry can bridge contexts and cultural divides because emotions are universal. Neruda's poem indicting the United Fruit Company, for example, is just as much an indictment of subprime lenders, because the cannibalistic effects of unregulated capitalism endure, and so does our outrage. Similarly, the poets featured in Poetry in Resistance voice dissent against oppressive and authoritarian forces which still persist to this day. And one day we hope to listen to the Syrians voice their own laments over the conflict. Because that should be the project of poetry. Understanding human conflict, and fighting for social justice. That's Why Poetry. And that's also Why Red Poppy.

by David Shames