Contemporary Authors

• Neruda: The Poet's Calling Ecco (New York, NY), 2018

1. Neruda : the poet's calling https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037496 Eisner, Mark, 1973- author. Neruda : the poet's calling / Mark Eisner. New York : Ecco, 2018. pages cm PQ8097.N4 Z6167 2017 ISBN: 9780062694201 (hardback)9780062694218 ()

• Pen America World Voices Festival - https://worldvoices.pen.org/speaker/mark-eisner/

  Biography

  Mark Eisner has spent most of the past two decades working on projects related to Pablo Neruda. In March 2018, Ecco will publish Neruda: The Poet’s Calling. Library Journal has described it as a “definitive biography, an instant classic.” Previously, he conceived, edited, and was one of the principal translators for City Lights’ The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. He also wrote the introduction to City Lights’ first-ever English translation of Neruda’s venture of the infinite man, a project Eisner developed. He is now producing a documentary on Neruda, with support from Latino Public Broadcasting. An initial version, narrated by Isabel Allende, won the Latin American Studies Association Award of Merit in Film.

  Eisner holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. He earned an MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University, where he later served as a Visiting Scholar. Eisner was involved with the founding of the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco’s Mission District and continues to help lead Red Poppy, the literary-non profit “dedicated to the power of Latin American poetry to not only evoke emotions, but to shift social consciousness, sparking both individual and collective change.” They recently created a multilingual anthology of Latin American resistance poetry, which Eisner coedited.

  Buy Mark Eisner’s forthcoming book, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling
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• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mark-eisner

  Mark Eisner is the editor and co-translator of The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (City Lights, 2004). He heads Red Poppy, a nonprofit focused on promoting socially conscious Latin American poetry. He is producing a documentary on Pablo Neruda and recently coedited a multilingual anthology of Latin American “Poetry in Resistance.” His translation of Tina Escaja’s book-length poem “Caída Libre / Free Fall” is forthcoming from Fomite Press. Eisner earned a BA from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and an MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University, where he subsequently served as a visiting scholar in poetry.

QUOTED: "Eisner's exacting and evocative prose will compel readers through each stage of the poet's life."

Neruda: The Poet's Calling
Diego Baez
Booklist.
114.12 (Feb. 15, 2018): p17. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Neruda: The Poet's Calling.
By Mark Eisner.
Mar. 2018.608p. Ecco, $27.99 (9780062694201); e-book (9780062694225). 861.
As author, translator, and filmmaker, Eisner has devoted most of his creative and intellectual career to the work of Pablo Neruda, editing The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (2004) and producing a documentary biopic narrated by Neruda's Chilean comadre, best-selling writer Isabel Allende. In this comprehensive biography, Eisner covers Neruda's life from baby steps to final breath, charting the poet's childhood and adolescence, emergence into literary fame and on the public stage as well as his numerous setbacks, including affairs, drug use, and eventual exile from his homeland. While a hefty volume, Eisner's exacting and evocative prose will compel readers through each stage of the poet's life. The influence of a strong-headed, hard-working, absentee father on little Neftali, as Neruda was called, is just one facet of the gemstone Eisner unearths from the past of Chile's best-known icon. A lifelong scholar of Neruda, a dedicated advocate of the poetry, and a scrutinizing critic of the man himself, Eisner succeeds in sharing the story of the "People's Poet" and his life's many callings in this new standard-bearer among Neruda biographies. --Diego Baez
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baez, Diego. "Neruda: The Poet's Calling." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2018, p. 17. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531171501/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=d60f894f. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531171501

QUOTED: "This efficient and moving study should delight scholars and poets with its depth of detail and excellent translations."

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Neruda: The Poet's Calling
Publishers Weekly.
265.1 (Jan. 1, 2018): p48. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Neruda: The Poet's Calling
Mark Eisner. Ecco, $27.99 (608p) ISBN 978-006-269420-1
Neruda scholar and translator Eisner (The Essential Neruda) provides a bracingly comprehensive and authoritative account of the "poetry, personality, and politics" of one of the 20th century's most revered poets. The heavily researched narrative illustrates how Neruda's formative years in Chile, volunteer role on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, frequent travels as diplomat and cultural ambassador, marriages and affairs, and "ambition and belief in his own greatness" shaped his poetry. Claiming to be "neither unbiased nor hagiographie," Eisner doesn't let the enchantment of the verse soften his disapproval of the poet's serial adultery or mistreatment of women, and questions Neruda's self-appointed "people's poet" status. Nevertheless, the thematic arc of Neruda's poetic vocation is invitingly presented; several of his books are given a patient and thorough analysis, including the "monumental cultural event" of the early work Twenty Love Poems, published in 1924. Meanwhile, the descriptions of places where Neruda lived and traveled are poetry themselves, such as Eisner's description of how the young Neruda would "watch the light blue ocean pulse its universal heartbeat." This efficient and moving study should delight scholars and poets with its depth of detail and excellent translations, and may even draw new admirers who share Neruda's belief that "poetry is like bread; it should be shared ... by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity." (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Neruda: The Poet's Calling." Publishers Weekly, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 48. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522125005/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=2a3aa210. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522125005

QUOTED: "thoroughly researched, respectful, and evenhanded biography."
"Perceptive readings of Neruda's poems are contextualized by an absorbing historical, cultural, and political chronology."

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Eisner, Mark: NERUDA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Eisner, Mark NERUDA Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 3, 27 ISBN: 978-0-06-269420-1
An empathetic biography of the Chilean Nobel Prize winner.
For more than 20 years, Eisner (The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, 2004) has steeped himself in the life and works of Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), resulting in a newly translated edition of his poetry, a documentary film, and this thoroughly researched, respectful, and evenhanded biography. Born Ricardo NeftalAaAaAeA Reyes Basoalto, the poet began to use his p name in 1920 in order to hide his publications from his father, who vehemently disapproved of his son's vocation. Fame came early: by the time he was 19, "such was his stature," Eisner writes, "that he had disciples who would dress like him, copy his metaphors, and...follow him around the city." Neruda's reputation and popularity grew with his prolific output, and he became "the public poet, a people's poet." As a young man, though, needing to earn more than poetry could provide, he joined the Chilean diplomatic corps, taking assignments in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Buenos Aires, and Spain. His outspoken political liberalism was contradicted by a "pattern of disturbing misogynistic behavior" and sense of entitlement and superiority. In his memoirs, for example, he admits to raping a Tamil servant, whom he perceived "as inhuman, a piece of stone." Sexually, "he was comfortable with the role of aggressor--even predator," and he often juggled more than one lover at a time. Lauded for his humanitarian views, he nevertheless neglected his first wife and their daughter, who was born with a birth defect and died at the age of 8. As a senator representing the Communist Party and champion of Stalin, Neruda finally "saw the errors of Stalinism and was emboldened enough to reject them." Some detractors criticized him as a "Champagne Communist," who enjoyed luxury; admirers praised his fervent opposition to Franco. Beginning in 1949, when Neruda denounced Chile's president for his oppression of workers, he was forced into hiding and, finally, exile.
Perceptive readings of Neruda's poems are contextualized by an absorbing historical, cultural, and political chronology.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Eisner, Mark: NERUDA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520735750/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=b5527257. Accessed 3 June 2018.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A520735750

QUOTED: "sweeping and exhaustively researched biography."
"Eisner earnestly tries to give his subject the benefit of the doubt, and there are times when he indulges gushing elegy. ... Such flattering assessments aside, one finishes The Poet's Calling with a sense that it was better to read Pablo Neruda than to be around him."

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'Neruda' plumbs the man behind the
legend
Danny Heitman
The Christian Science Monitor.
(Apr. 10, 2018): Arts and Entertainment: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Christian Science Publishing Society http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Danny Heitman
The Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, who lived between 1904 and 1973, is known to many readers as the inspiration for "Il Postino," the 1994 film, based on a novel by Antonio Skarmeta, that fictionalized a portion of Neruda's political exile in Europe in 1950.
Neruda was a Chilean political figure as well, serving in several diplomatic posts for his country throughout much of his life. He was an ardent Communist, which complicated his life as Chile's political pendulum swung back and forth. Neruda died shortly after Augusto Pinochet, with US support, staged a military coup against elected Chilean President Salvador Allende. In recent years, suspicions that Neruda had been poisoned in the wake of the coup prompted officials to exhume his body and test it for toxins. Forensic scientists found no compelling evidence of foul play regarding Neruda.
Neruda's presence in "Il Postino," as well as the bizarre speculation concerning his death, underscore the degree to which his life and work are shrouded in myth, especially in his native Chile, where his homes are venerated as shrines.
In his sweeping and exhaustively researched biography, Mark Eisner plumbs the man behind the legend, a task for which he's well-suited. Eisner has spent the past two decades working on projects related to Neruda, including a documentary about the poet's life and work. With such an extensive grounding, Eisner doesn't so much document his subject as inhabit it. Although his fascination with the celebrated poet sometimes lapses into hagiography, he frankly chronicles Neruda's dark side, including his rape of a servant.
As Eisner was writing "The Poet's Calling," he couldn't have known how Neruda's sexual misconduct, which included a cruel criminal offense, would achieve heightened relevance in the midst of the #MeToo movement. Neruda's actions invite the reader to revisit questions that rest at the heart of recent revelations about various figures in the film and television industry who have been accused of abusive behavior. To what degree can we separate a person's work from his morality? Is it possible to admire the work while abhorring the deeply flawed creator behind it?
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That dilemma looms over the legacy of Neruda, who wasn't the benign old man of letters depicted in "Il Postino." In the most disturbing passage of Eisner's book, he details Neruda's time as a diplomat in Ceylon, where he raped a woman deemed an "untouchable" by the caste system. She was responsible for cleaning out his latrine, and it's obvious from his own account of the incident that Neruda felt he could commit the assault without legal consequences because the woman's social status made it impossible for her to hold him accountable.
"In his and others' writings, there is no evidence that Neruda ever committed another assault of this nature, but ... he describes his exercise of power and privilege with little shame," Eisner tells readers. Eisner documents other aspects of Neruda's relationship with women that point to a pattern of misogyny.
Neruda's political views present another moral quagmire. His embrace of communism wasn't unusual among intellectuals coming of age in the first half of the 20th century, and it had particular currency among Latin American revolutionaries reacting to oppressive right-wing regimes. Even so, Neruda could be almost willfully blind to the depravities unleashed by Joseph Stalin, publishing a fawning poem about the Kremlin leader after he died. As Eisner points out, between 1936 and 1938, Stalin "had arrested over a million of his own party members in his Great Purge. At least 600,000 were killed, many from torture.... Estimates range from five to fifty million deaths caused by the famine that resulted from Stalin's ill-conceived policies." Yet Neruda lionized Stalin effusively, hailing him as "the noon, the maturity of man and the peoples."
Neruda's poems could be memorably sensual, particularly in "Odes to Common Things," a series of compositions in which seemingly prosaic household items such as scissors and soap, a table, chair or pair of socks achieve, through the power of language, a life of their own. Here, in a stanza from "Ode to the Dictionary," Neruda reflects on the presence of a venerable volume in his childhood:
Ancient and weighty, in its worn leather coat,
the Dictionary
held its tongue,
refusing to reveal its secrets.
Neruda's odes to his "common things" reflected an abiding fascination with personal possessions, a passion expressed in his flair for kitsch. "In a Neruda house," writer Joyce Maynard observed, "you may find a taxidermied flamingo overhead, or a life-size bronze horse, or a 50-times-larger- than-life-size man's shoe."
Perhaps the governing contradiction of Neruda's life was his tendency to see humanity in objects while too often objectifying humans. Eisner earnestly tries to give his subject the benefit of the doubt, and there are times when he indulges gushing elegy, as when he writes that Neruda is "one great body, still, in all its fullness, stretching across the world, to all its famous and hidden
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corners."
Such flattering assessments aside, one finishes "The Poet's Calling" with a sense that it was better to read Pablo Neruda than to be around him.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Heitman, Danny. "'Neruda' plumbs the man behind the legend." Christian Science Monitor, 10
Apr. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534146649 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=715c8dd7. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534146649

QUOTED: "It is, undeniably, a great story. But it is a story that has been told before - most satisfyingly, perhaps, in Adam Feinstein's 2004 biography, "Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life." The need for a new biography is not entirely obvious; and unfortunately, the man who lies at the heart of all these turbulent personal and political maelstroms remains oddly and frustratingly distant in Eisner's telling. ... Eisner's prose, moreover, is on the whole, fairly pedestrian, except for a few unfortunate occasions when it strives, unwisely, for a kind of Nerudaesque poeticism."
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Book World: The messy, brilliant life
of Pablo Neruda
Troy Jollimore
The Washington Post.
(Apr. 18, 2018): News: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Troy Jollimore Neruda: The Poet's Calling By Mark Eisner
Ecco. 640 pp. $35
---
Few poets offer their biographers as rich a vein of material as the Chilean Nobel Prize-winner Pablo Neruda. Born in Parral, Chile, in 1904, Neruda transcended his modest origins and provincial upbringing to achieve success and significance far beyond the dreams of most writers. Books like "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair," "Residence on Earth" and "Elemental Odes" have sold tens of millions of copies. Nearly 45 years after his death, Neruda continues to be regarded as one of the most significant poets of the 20th century. In his home country, he remains a beloved and potent national symbol.
Mark Eisner's new biography, "Neruda: The Poet's Calling," explores the complex confluence of factors that accounts for Neruda's extraordinary fame and success. Far more than most modern poetry, Neruda's body of work is quite accessible - a fact that reflects not only his personal preferences but also his political views. Moved at an early age by the exploitation of the disadvantaged, he viewed poetry as existing for the benefit of the common people. "Poetry is like bread," he famously wrote. "It should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity." When it was not overtly political, his poetry tended to concern itself with matters of quotidian existence, finding love and beauty in the commonplace, ordinary objects of daily human life.
Politics was never far from Neruda's mind, and the story of his life is largely concomitant with the political history of the 20th century. The Chilean capital of Santiago, when he arrived there in 1921, was the center of an active student movement that hungered for progressive poetry. In the 1930s, he watched Spain fall into civil war from his post as a diplomat in Barcelona. Neruda
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already leaned toward socialism as a result of his Chilean experiences; now, watching as the Soviet Union stepped in to support the Spanish Republicans against Franco's fascists while the rest of the world remained largely indifferent, he became a loyal communist and supporter of Stalin.
The origins of Neruda's esteem for Stalin, then, are largely understandable. But his loyalty would persist for decades, long after reports of the brutal reality of Stalin's dictatorial regime began to emerge, and though he did eventually repudiate that loyalty, it is not entirely clear why it took him so long. (Of course, Neruda was far from the only leftist intellectual of whom this could be said.)
Closer to home, his political activities were easier to admire. In Chile, he always managed to be on the side that opposed the dictators. When, in the late 1940s, the country's Communist Party was outlawed and protests by coal miners were brutally suppressed, Neruda criticized the government in the international press and on the floor of the Chilean Senate. When the government tried to arrest him, he made a dramatic escape on horseback across the border into Argentina.
He returned to Chile in the mid-1950s and would spend most of the rest of his life there. His death from cancer, on Sept. 23, 1973, occurred a mere 12 days after the U.S.-backed coup in which Augusto Pinochet's forces seized control from the democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Neruda's funeral became a spontaneous public demonstration of defiance against the new regime. While soldiers looked on, armed with machine guns but holding their fire, the crowd chanted, "He isn't dead, he isn't dead! He has only fallen asleep!"
The messiness of Neruda's personal life, which was as eventful as his public one and which serves as evidence of his passionate, somewhat impulsive nature, does not always display him in a wholly admirable light. He neglected and then abandoned his first wife, barely acknowledging the existence of their daughter, who was born severely disabled. He seemed very much in love with his second wife; still, while they were together, he began an affair with the woman who would become his third. Toward the end of his life, he would cheat on her as well, with her niece.
It is, undeniably, a great story. But it is a story that has been told before - most satisfyingly, perhaps, in Adam Feinstein's 2004 biography, "Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life." The need for a new biography is not entirely obvious; and unfortunately, the man who lies at the heart of all these turbulent personal and political maelstroms remains oddly and frustratingly distant in Eisner's telling. Despite his ongoing work on a documentary about Neruda and his work as a translator of "The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems" (2004), in this biography Eisner tends to keep his subject at arm's length. Outside of the excerpts from Neruda's own poetry, one gets little sense of the man's inner life.
Eisner's prose, moreover, is on the whole, fairly pedestrian, except for a few unfortunate occasions when it strives, unwisely, for a kind of Nerudaesque poeticism. Describing his first sexual experience, for instance, Eisner writes Neruda "attempted to plow through her and reach the depths of the earth." And his criticisms of Neruda tend to be articulated using what are by now rote, cliched terms that make them feel like empty, obligatory gestures. Thus, Neruda is
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labeled as an "aggressor - even predator" in his sexual relations; an apparent sexual assault is identified as an "exercise of power and privilege"; and his general sexual behavior is at one point characterized as "imperialism perpetrated on a human scale."
Ultimately, "Neruda: The Poet's Calling" is not as satisfying as one might have hoped. Still, Neruda's life remains a source of fascination, and his work remains vital. Any book that is likely to help bring new generations of readers to it is to be valued for that reason alone.
---
Jollimore's most recent book of poetry is "Syllabus of Errors."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jollimore, Troy. "Book World: The messy, brilliant life of Pablo Neruda." Washington Post, 18
Apr. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535167389 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6ea8d1c6. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535167389
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Baez, Diego. "Neruda: The Poet's Calling." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2018, p. 17. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531171501/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d60f894f. Accessed 3 June 2018. "Neruda: The Poet's Calling." Publishers Weekly, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 48. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522125005/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2a3aa210. Accessed 3 June 2018. "Eisner, Mark: NERUDA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520735750/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=b5527257. Accessed 3 June 2018. Heitman, Danny. "'Neruda' plumbs the man behind the legend." Christian Science Monitor, 10 Apr. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534146649/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=715c8dd7. Accessed 3 June 2018. Jollimore, Troy. "Book World: The messy, brilliant life of Pablo Neruda." Washington Post, 18 Apr. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535167389/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6ea8d1c6. Accessed 3 June 2018.

• The Paris Review
  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/26/pablo-nerudas-poetry-of-resistance/
  Word count: 2834

  QUOTED: "When I first embarked on writing a biography of Pablo Neruda over a decade ago, I wanted to explore the political power of poetry and its capacity to inspire social change. Neruda’s social verse was an integral part of the humanity he expressed; even without pen in hand, he boldly inserted himself into direct action."
  "I happened to finish the book—Neruda: The Poet’s Calling—at the end of Trump’s first hundred days in office. As a result, the questions that I’d been exploring for years suddenly took on new urgency. As resistance increasingly becomes the operative word in our current political reality, what can one of the most important and iconic resistance poets of the past century offer us? What might he give us as we continue to shape the next chapter in our own cultural story?"
  "Some answers, or at least perspectives, can be found in the vivid details of Neruda’s life and work."
  "As we face our own era of rising authoritarianism and new sets of complexities and injustices to resist, the question remains: Does poetry have the power to effect change? We can write “drop poetry not bombs” on fliers, but the hard truth is that one poem alone cannot protect dreamers from being deported or restrain an unfit president. And yet, Neruda illuminates how poetry’s poignant nature—its unique power of distillation—can create change through a cumulative, collective effort."

  What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance
  By Mark Eisner March 26, 2018
  Arts & Culture

  When I first embarked on writing a biography of Pablo Neruda over a decade ago, I wanted to explore the political power of poetry and its capacity to inspire social change. Neruda’s social verse was an integral part of the humanity he expressed; even without pen in hand, he boldly inserted himself into direct action.

  I happened to finish the book—Neruda: The Poet’s Calling—at the end of Trump’s first hundred days in office. As a result, the questions that I’d been exploring for years suddenly took on new urgency. As resistance increasingly becomes the operative word in our current political reality, what can one of the most important and iconic resistance poets of the past century offer us? What might he give us as we continue to shape the next chapter in our own cultural story? Some answers, or at least perspectives, can be found in the vivid details of Neruda’s life and work.

  Neruda’s legacy was directly shaped by the historical events in which he played a part. In his early youth, during Chile’s revolutionary student movement, he played the role of an activist-writer, the voice of a young generation challenging the country’s controlling aristocracy. In his final years, he vigorously defended Chile against U.S. intervention and, as ambassador to France, represented Salvador Allende’s historic socialist government. His relationship to readers and to his own writing was shaped by these periods of acute political crisis and authoritarianism.

  When the Cold War hit Chile in 1947, Gabriel González Videla—the country’s devious, unpredictable president—turned against Neruda and the others who had helped elect him. He enacted oppressive measures against workers and the left: he shut down the communist newspaper, jailed three hundred striking coal miners on an island of Patagonia, and sent labor leaders and other “subversives” to a concentration camp directed by a thirty-three-year-old army captain named Augusto Pinochet. Neruda, a senator at the time, denounced the situation, both through his writings and his actions. He took to the senate floor and raised his voice: “Now even Congress is subject to censorship. You can’t even talk now … There have been murders in the coal-mining region!” González Videla would hear no more. He accused Neruda of treason and ordered his arrest, forcing him into exile.

  Neruda responded by developing an aesthetically and conceptually daring new poetic voice, which would narrate his monumental book Canto General. It recasts and reclaims the history of the Americas in a new way, as an epical, lyrical story of resistance. Fifty years later, in 2003, a construction engineer working on Santiago’s metro told me that the importance of Canto General is that it “shows us the history of the Americas … [from] the point of view of the people themselves, not the history told by the conquerors.”

  At no time was the relationship between Neruda’s poetry and his experience of social upheaval so directly on display than at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Neruda arrived in Madrid in 1934, as a Chilean consul, just before his thirtieth birthday. The Spanish monarch had finally fallen just three years earlier, and an idealistic, progressive spirit invigorated the writers and intellectuals, especially the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who Neruda had met the year before. Lorca was waiting at the train station for Neruda when he first arrived in Madrid.

  Neruda, emerging from the tortuous period of depression and isolation—“luminous solitude,” as he described it—that he underwent while serving in a series of consular posts in East Asia, was thirsty for this fraternity. His poetry became deeply introspective during that period, though he wasn’t just focused on his inner life: while serving his consular posts, and off the written page, he actively participated in denigrating and subjugating women, native people of color, and the poor. Years later, in his memoirs, he even described raping a Tamil servant in Sri Lanka, adding a disturbing layer to his future legacy as an activist on behalf of the oppressed.

  When he arrived in Madrid, Neruda’s spirits were invigorated by a thriving, exciting fellowship of activists and artists. But Spain’s social and political situation was tense and complicated. As the historian Gabriel Jackson wrote, Spain in 1930 was “simultaneously a moribund monarchy, a country of very uneven economic development, and a battleground of ardent political and intellectual crosscurrents.” As Hitler and Mussolini gained power nearby, Spanish Fascists asserted themselves more directly and violently. The progressive government struggled to survive. Beginning in March, 1936, members of the Fascist group Falange rode ostentatiously through Madrid in squads of motorcars, wielding machine guns and firing at alleged Reds in working-class neighborhoods. By June, many members of the Communist, Socialist, and Anarchist parties were publicly promoting a revolution, while the right-wing press was instilling in the middle class a fear of a Communist state and promoting the idea that only a military coup could save Spain. Rumors of a Fascist revolution swirled, petrifying Lorca, who was gay and a leftist and had become increasingly outspoken in defense of the republic. He fled to his hometown of Granada, hoping his influential, conservative family would protect him.

  On July 17, 1936 the Fascist general Francisco Franco led a military uprising, sparking the Spanish Civil War. Mussolini and Hitler supplied him with planes and weapons. The insurgents, known as the nationalists, advanced quickly toward Madrid, where Neruda and his friends were living. Those friends had recently formed the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals and were determined to wield their intellect and creativity in support of the Republic. They brought popular theater to the people—plays from Cervantes to Lorca that espoused their ideology while invigorating culture in a demoralizing time. The Alliance also published a small magazine, written primarily for Republican soldiers. One member of a unit would read it out loud for those who were illiterate. The list of contributors was extraordinary, including Antonio Machado and Rafael Alberti.

  A month into the war, nationalists arrested Lorca. When asked what crime Lorca committed, the officer in charge answered, “He’s done more damage with a pen than others have with a pistol.” Three days later, Lorca and three other prisoners were shot beside a stand of olive trees.

  The news shook Neruda to the core. Beyond the horror of a friend’s assassination, Lorca’s death represented something more: Lorca was the embodiment of poetry; it was as if the Fascists had assassinated poetry itself. Neruda had reached a moment from which there was no turning back. His poetry had to shift outwardly; it had to act. No more melancholic verse, love poems dotted with red poppies, or metaphysical writing, all of which ignored the realities of rising Fascism. Bold, repeated words and clear, vivid images now served his purpose: to convey his pounding heart and to communicate the realities he was experiencing in a way that could be understood immediately by a wide audience.

  This is nowhere better exemplified than in his poem “I Explain Some Things.” The title alone conveys the poem’s urgency to be heard and understood, as was evidenced when, on Martin Luther King Day this year, the writer Kwame Alexander read the poem on NPR:

  You will ask: And where are the lilacs?
  And the metaphysics laced with poppies?
  And the rain that often beat
  his words filling them with holes and birds?
  I’ll tell you everything that’s happening with me.

  I lived in a neighborhood
  of Madrid, with church bells,
  with clocks, with trees.
  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  My house was called
  the house of flowers, because everywhere
  geraniums were exploding: it was
  a beautiful house
  with dogs and little kids.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Federico, you remember,
  from under the earth,
  do you remember my house with balconies on which
  the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
  Hermano, hermano!

  And one morning everything was burning

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  and ever since then fire,
  gunpowder ever since,
  and ever since then blood
  Bandits with airplanes and with Moors,
  bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
  bandits with black friars making blessings,
  … kept coming from the sky to kill children,
  and through the streets the blood of the children
  ran simply, like children’s blood.

  You will ask why his poetry
  doesn’t speak to us of dreams, of the leaves,
  of the great volcanoes of his native land?

  Come and see the blood in the streets,
  come and see
  the blood in the streets,
  come and see the blood
  in the streets!

  Neruda went on to write a total of twenty-one poems in reaction to the war, contained in his book España en el corazón (Spain in the Heart), which would form part of The Third Residence. This poetry was meant to reach outside the cultured, intellectual readership of his prior, more hermetic books. Now, Neruda’s poetry was printed by frontline soldiers who used old clothing and, supposedly, an enemy flag to make the pulp. Republican soldiers set the type, printed the finished copies, and delivered them to those fighting. Poetry, in other words, was fuel for the resistance, and Neruda was only one part of a sweeping movement: so many poets had such deep impact on the Spanish Civil War that it has been called the “Poets’ War.”

  As the Fascists’ bombs fell over Madrid, Neruda moved to Paris, where he helped organize a monumental gathering of writers to express solidarity for the Republic. Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes were among the participants. Neruda also embarked on a number of activist publishing ventures in support of the Republican cause. Along with the British activist Nancy Cunard, he published The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People. Cunard had a printing press in her house; Neruda helped set the type. The money from the sale of the magazine went to support the Republican soldiers battling Franco’s troops. The funds raised were not significant, but the dedicated, unabashed support from contributors spoke volumes.

  Meanwhile, Chile’s foreign minister said he “disapproved” of Neruda’s partisan activities in France. The poet was ordered home; he returned in October, 1937. Franco declared victory on April 1, 1939. His final offensives to capture Barcelona and all of Catalonia had forced over half a million Spanish refugees to flee across the Pyrenees into France, where they languished in camps, subject to starvation and disease. Neruda’s friends in Paris wrote him of the situation, begging him to do something. The poet sought help from the newly elected leftist Chilean president, who appointed him as consul to Paris.

  In Paris, Neruda secured an old cargo ship, the Winnipeg, and organized an immensely ambitious transport of over two thousand refugees to freedom in Chile. The feat was lauded in headlines across the world. As recently as February 2018, Ariel Dorfman, alarmed by the strong anti-immigration sentiment behind Sebastián Piñera’s victory in Chile’s presidential election, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on Neruda’s legacy. While rising xenophobia and nativism isn’t unique to Chile, Dorfman noted that its history holds a model of “how to act when we are confronted with strangers seeking sanctuary.” He recounted the experience of the Winnipeg and ended the piece asking, “Where are the Nerudas of today?”

  As we face our own era of rising authoritarianism and new sets of complexities and injustices to resist, the question remains: Does poetry have the power to effect change? We can write “drop poetry not bombs” on fliers, but the hard truth is that one poem alone cannot protect dreamers from being deported or restrain an unfit president. And yet, Neruda illuminates how poetry’s poignant nature—its unique power of distillation—can create change through a cumulative, collective effort: one by one, like gathering drops, each time a poem comes into contact with a person’s consciousness—whether read by a 1930’s Spanish Republican soldier or heard on the radio or penned afresh—it incites the possibility for a shift in perspective or an urge toward action. Poetry can energize, inform, and inspire. This alone won’t stop bombs, but when taken together with all the direct actions of a social movement—marches, relentless grassroots organizing, seven thousand shoes placed on the U.S. Capitol lawn—Neruda has shown us how poetry can be an emotionally potent ingredient in the greater transformative efforts of resistance.

  The effectiveness of Neruda’s poetry is proven by its endurance, how often people reach for and evoke his works as a tool to galvanize, to awaken, to sustain. In San Francisco, during the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Neruda’s words were draped on banners over the streets: “Tyranny cuts off the head that sings, but the voice at the bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth and out of the darkness rises up through the mouth of the people.” Nearly a decade later, the Egyptian art historian Bahia Shehab spray-painted Neruda’s words on the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring: “You can cut all the flowers, but you can’t stop spring.” Five years later, during the January 2017 Women’s March, those same words of Neruda that had appeared in Cairo would grace posters bearing the original Spanish:“Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrá detener la primavera.”

  Instances of social injustice, war, and the los of liberal democracy call us off the sidelines and into action. Neruda drastically adapted his poetry in response to crisis. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, he abandoned his desolate, introverted experimental poetry in favor of a decisive style, one that would compel others into action.

  Whether we’re poets, teachers, readers, activists, or ordinary citizens who care about the world, we, too, can transform the way we express ourselves. In the era of social media, we don’t need to make pulp out of flags to transmit our message to the troops of resistance. We can all speak. We can all be part of the dialogue. And poetry can be part of the collective way we, in Neruda’s words, “explain some things.” From Neruda and others we can see how the act of expressing ourselves, and the act of hearing, are core components of resistance—and of poetry’s unique, enduring power.

  Mark Eisner is the author of Neruda: The Poets Calling. He conceived, edited, and was one of the principle translators of The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. He is producing a documentary film on Neruda, with support from Latino Public Broadcasting. An initial version, narrated by Isabel Allende, won the Latin American Studies Association Award of Merit in Film.

  Translations from The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda. Copyright (c) 2004 by City Lights Publishers.

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