Residence on Earth (New Directions Paperbook)

Genius always leaves us wishing the meal could
continue. Why didn’t that layabout Shakespeare produce twice as much? How grand it
could have been if Dostoevsky had written a novel about what happened after he died. We
were severely cheated when Caravaggio and Mozart fled earth so early in their lives.

Neruda achieved his full dimensions if any poet did. He led a whole life both publicly
and privately. It is boggling to read his
Memoirs
and try to map his exterior
and interior voyages, from the rawest perils to the Stockholm ceremony that reminded him
oddly of a school graduation, to his transcendent Buenos Aires “poetry slam”
with Federico Garcia Lorca which will raise the hairs on your body as if they are
throwing off infinitesimal lightning bolts. That evening both poets stood athwart
poetry’s third rail.

I lost my first copy of Neruda’s
Residence on Earth
in Key West in the
mid-seventies. I left it in one of a dozen possible bars on a verminish hot night during
May tarpon season with the air dense with flowers, overflowing garbage cans, the low
tide deliquescing crustaceans, and where, while swimming before dawn off a pier, the
moonlight illumined a fatal shark whose face looked like a battered Volkswagen. I
retraced my steps the next day but found nothing. I had underlined too much of the book
anyway.

At that time back in the twentieth century I was addicted to Spanish-speaking poets such
as Neruda,Vallejo, Hernandez, Lorca, Parra, Paz, whenever I could find translations, but
also Yesenin, Rilke, and Yeats. What a sacred mishmash. In northern Michigan I was far
from a good library but my brother John was a librarian first at Harvard and then at
Yale at the time and could send me anything. Naturally I read our own poetry on both
sides of the farcical Beat-academic sawhorse, and all of those poets in the Midwestern
middle like myself, but then nationalism in literature is stifling indeed as are our
varying fads of poetry. Earlier in my life it was fashionable to spend your life and
career not being particularly enthused about anything, and now there is an affectation
of artless sincerity where after the high adventure of graduate school poets settle down
in a domestic trance. On my rare visits to colleges and universities I keep expecting to
see men carrying caskets out of the welter of brown brick buildings. Of course any poet
is semi-blind to the ocean of trivialities he swims through and basks in like a nurse
shark, the important magazine publications, the books and chapbooks, the readings, the
awards, the miniature parades he organizes for himself in the backyard among the
flowerbeds and housepets, and then finally on nearing the empty pantry of death he sees
clearly the formidable odds against any of his poems surviving. This is all to create
the atmosphere in which I continue to read Neruda.

• • •

It’s important to offer here what
constitutes Neruda’s credo:

S
OME
T
HOUGHTS ON
I
MPURE
P
OETRY

It is worth one’s
while, at certain hours of the day or night, to scrutinize useful objects in repose:
wheels that have rolled across long, dusty distances with their enormous loads of crops
or ore, charcoal sacks, barrels, baskets, the hafts and handles of carpenter’s
tools. The contact these objects have had with man and earth may serve as a valuable
lesson to a tortured lyric poet. Worn surfaces, the wear inflicted by human hands, the
sometimes tragic, always pathetic, emanations from these objects give reality a
magnetism that should not be scorned.

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