We are now approaching that time of year … when we wish we were elsewhere.
…I am now in the town that time forgot, San Carlos, after a night on a crazy ferry, but on my way to tropical islands presided over by Ernesto Cardenal, known as El Poeta, probably the most famous Nicaraguan, who built his own community of local primitive artists and foreign mystics. Ange should aspire to so rule.
Hasta luego,
David
I had known nothing of Cardenal’s community (described in various places on the web as Marxist-Christian and primitivist) in the Solentiname archipelago until my husband passed his friend’s email to me. It is very difficult to find any information about it on the web, and doesn’t present itself as a place one may visit.
On the other hand, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, in Scotland, is open to the public. The most famous vis-poet/gardener seems worlds apart in sensibility from Cardenal, but he too had a political vision, one that married Arcady and the French Revolution. (I am not yet an expert on Finlay, but visiting Little Sparta is one of my life goals….)
The juxtaposition of these projects seems apt to me: one a self-sustaining colony of anti-Modernist, “primitivist” artists committed to radical peace in the lush Nicaraguan wilderness; the other a Promethean attempt to individuate a garden from the cold northern landscape, with a temple to Apollo that melds an oerlikon gun with a lyre. Should poets, who usually maintain a diasporic attitude (at least until they land tenure!), create provocative destinations? Or radically refuse the idea of destination travel (and all its ecological ramifications) to cultivate a local garden that one may inhabit but never tour?
Finlay: “Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.”
If you read Spanish, Ernesto Cardenal’s recent three-volume memoir talks a lot about his years at Solentiname. (The 3 volumes are: “Vida perdida,” “Las ínsulas extrañas” and “La revolución perdida.”) He managed to attract many visiting poets from around the world until the place was destroyed by Somoza in the 1970s. The Venezuelan poet Armando Rojas Guardia, for instance, spent some time there in the early 70s and he speaks highly of the experience. Cortázar was another frequent visitor.
I’m not sure if Solentiname really could be described as “anti-Modernist,” since Cardenal is a disciple of Pound, basing his own “Exteriorismo” on Pound’s work.
Thank you for the information. My (reading) Spanish isn’t bad, but it isn’t great. I should get up to speed. I read just a brief review of a book that talked about Soltiname’s destruction by Somoza and the (to me, simply outrageous) castigation of Cardenal by the Pope for his liberation theology.
My (shallow) understanding of the Soltename aesthetic is that it is a mystical Christian-primitivism that, like say Gaugin’s primitivism, rejects the Modernist pact with technological progress and spiritual agnosticism. And that it rejects Marxist social realism as well. But this association with Pound and especially Cortazar certainly piques my interest further…
It may be worth noting that interest in “the primitive” is a modernist development itself. Wordsworth, for example, regarded the earliest-known-about cave paintings with disgust.