FICTION AND POETRY FROM ZYZZYVA

The Blue That Sustains The Song

by John Oliver Simon

      Living in this multiplex Estados Unidos of North AmÈrica, where the majority is the sum of the minorities, the particular originality of the Native poets is subsumed in a tapestry of communities of color with equally dramatic historical claims. The African-American diaspora overflowed the Caribbean basin to reach down along the western coast of South America as far as Lima, and via Brazil, as far south as Montevideo on the Atlantic side. A traveller making his way down through Latin America will find chifas, or Chinese restaurants, all the way from the Calle Dolores, in the center of Mexico City, to Buenos Aires, while the apellido of the president of Per™ is Fujimori. But by the time you get to the long coastline of Chile, the only morenidad, brown skin, that stands out from the homogeneity of the Chileans, who proudly name themselves ìthe English of South America,î is that of the people who have always been there, the Mapuche, which means ìpeople of the earth.î
      The tough resistance the Mapuche put up against the rapacious conquistadors was immortalized in La Araucana, the Chilean Iliad, 17,000 lines of ottava rima, by Alonzo de Ercilla, a contemporary of Spenser and Tasso. Its hero was Lautaro, a Mapuche orphan who turned up in the Spanish camp at the age of eleven, charmed Governor Pedro de Valdivia and his compaÒera InÈs Su·rez (the only white woman on the expedition and herself the protagonist of a terrific new novel, Ay Mam· InÈs, by JorgÈ Guzm·n). Lautaro was christened Felipe and given a job as a stable boy because he loved horses. At 16, riding like a god, he ran off with a ramada of horses and put himself at the head of a Mapuche rebellion which succeeded in slaying his godfather Valdiviaóone version has it by forcing him to drink molten gold.
      After a stray arrow killed Lautaro, his rebellion was finally put down, but, in 1599, the Mapuche rose again and expelled the Spanish from all of southern Chile. Riding Lautaroís horses, they kept the Winka at bay for three hundred years, until they were finally ìpacifiedî in 1883. Today, half a million Mapuche eke out a living on marginal farmland or crowd into poblaciones around cities like Temuco. Very different from the Mesoamerican megaculture, which extends in a long gradation from Arizona to the Atacama, Mapuche artwork blazes up into radial and vertebral patterns: heavy, clattering necklaces and grand cascading earrings, and brilliant, thick cloaks and blankets, red, white, and black and the sacred color blue, kallfu. Wool and silver. Reflecting a long resistance to, and coexistence with, the European invader, the Winka.
      On the Paseo Ahumada in downtown Santiago, a Mapuche family performs traditional dances. While the grandmother blows eerie blasts on the kultr™n, a sheep horn extended with loops of reed tubing, and the nephew pounds the deep sheepskin drum, two teenage sisters gallop with long wooden staffs carved into a suggestion of a horseís head, first round and round, then diagonally at each other, buffeting each other with blows.
      Mapuche poet Elicura Chihuailaf, born in 1953, writes:

Galloping, galloping, dreaming I go
along the paths of the sky
From all sides the stars come to greet me

Look at that one in Mapundungu, the speech of the earth:

Wiraf, wirafgen, pewmantulen amun
Wenu Mapu rupu mew
Wallke pule chalipaenew ti pu wagulen

Pewma is dream. Wenu Mapu is the sky-earth. Wagulen are the stars. I buy a textbook of Mapundungu and learn the numbers. KiÒe, epu, kula, meli, kechu, kayu, regle, pura, aila, mari. You can count up to 999,999 without loan-words. Roots pile up prefixes and suffixes in agglutinative fashion, as in German. The word kavallu, horse, was introduced to the language of the earth, one imagines, by Lautaro, about the moment when he ceased to be the stable boy Felipe. For verbs of movement, Mapundungu has no present tense. Either the arrow is coming toward you or it has already gone by. This culture is not vulnerable to the stroboscopic parable of Achilles and the tortoise.
Jaime Valdivieso, introducing Elicura Chihuailaf at a reading in the Centro Cultural de EspaÒa in the upscale Providencia neighborhood of Santiago, tells us that only recently has Chilean society begun to get any notion of the harmonious Mapuche cosmogony and spiritual and ethical tradition, which has survived completely outside the mainstream of Chilean thought. Valdivieso, who recently published a provocative dialogue on poetry and cosmology with physicist Claudio Teitelboim, son of Nerudaís biographer, suggests that we approach Elicuraís work by learning the significance of the color blue: ìThere are long silences and long stories which speak to us of the first Mapuche spirit who was hurled down from the Blue.î

The Blue that sustains the song: Ti Kallfu nunieymaenew Òi ul. As Elicuraís voice moves gravely from Spanish to Mapundungu, a deep, listening, unavoidably uncomprehending silence fills the Cultural Center of Spain. Blue is the place where weíre going. The original language of this place ripples like a fish shining through deep water, falls like sunlight penetrating needled branches. Surrendering myself to the blue horse of the word.

My bus rolls through the hills of southern Chile in the morning light. The highway winds among rows of pine and eucalyptus, neither of them native, farmed to be clearcut. The feeling is Pacific Northwest: the farmhouses are weathered wood, with stained roofs of corrugated zinc that have seen many rainy winters. Horses graze in an interval of sun, in a verdant pasture among a few grand oaks and cypresses.
Elicura Chihuailaf and his middle daughter Claudia TamurÈ pick me up at the bus station in downtown Temuco and drive me to their house, which is painted a deep sky-blue. ìKallfu,î I tell him, proud of my few words of Mapundungu. When Elicura was a little boy in his grandparentsí house, life was centered around the hearth of the ruka in a vast communal kitchen, or out under the stars where his grandfathers, both of them longkos, traditional spiritual and temporal chiefs of the community, would tell him stories.

Elicura canít remember when he first began to write poetry, but there was always song. Ul is the song, the canto, the poem, poetry; Ulkantun is to sing, to intone, to recite a poem; and Ulkantufe is the singer, the poet. ìI believe that poetry is universal,î Elicura tells me. ìThe poetís role is rather similar in all cultures.î
When Elicura was a little boy, his parents only spoke to him in Spanish. They had come in from the country to Temuco speaking only Mapundungu, and the transition was hard for them. Elicura is fascinated by my accounts of teaching school in the Chicano community, and there is a parallel: the Mapuche have recapitulated the immigrant experience of a racial and linguistic minority in the territory they have inhabited for ten thousand years. At one point Elicuraís father, a middle-school teacher, was jailed for his union activity, though he was later honored with a diploma for his 30 years of service to the community. But Elicura spent more time out in the campo with his grandparents, who spoke to him in Mapundungu. His maternal grandmother never learned Spanish, as a matter of principle.

      Elicura was the name of one of the heroic companions of Lautaro in La Araucania; the name means ìtransparent stone.î Down the road, in Rosario, Argentina, the local poets tell me that the longko who resisted the exterminating soldiers was named Kallfukura. Argentines have an irrational need to believe that the native inhabitants of their own country were primitive savages. I amaze my friends by telling them that his name means Blue Stone.
      ìMapuche people only had first names, not apellidos,î Elicura tells me. ìWe took last names under pressure from the Chilean system.î Chihuailaf means ìfog extending over the lake,î and his maternal last name, Nahuelpen, means ìtiger- puma.î His three tall teenage daughters and baby son have Spanish names and also Mapuche names. The scrawny black poodle, Kuri Kuyen (Black Moon), whines to be let in. The family speaks Spanish 99% of the time. ìI donít believe in being an absolutist. The girls, well, I didnít want to stuff Mapundungu down their throats. Theyíve started to learn it as it interests them. And theyíve participated in the rituals.î
      Long-legged Gabriela Millaray is the under-15 400-meter hurdles champion of the Ninth Region of Chile, and Iím sleeping in her room, while the girls double up across the hall. Gabi has a typical teenage collage on her dresser: rock groups and babies and fluffy puppies and Shaq dunking, but not one Native American image. But even in Elicuraís case, it wasnít until he graduated from the Universidad de la Frontera, after some heavy-duty political militancyóhe was beaten so badly by Pinochetís police that he still has the use of only one lungóthat he began to work back to his roots.
      Elicura says he never knows what language heís going to write in. Sometimes the translation goes from Spanish to Mapundungu, sometimes vice versa. I say for me Spanish and English are like different hemispheres of the brain, and he agrees. He writes on newsprint, on yellowing paper, with a blue fountain pen, so that the ink spreads from the line of the words. We agree that part of the rhythm of a poem is in the muscles of the hand.
      When heís finished, he lays the paper somewhere in the cosmic disorder of the rukaóbaby clothes, letters from poets, the blue reef of Machu Picchu, the Sunday El Mercurio from a month ago, blue glass, yellow membrillo fruits rotting on a tray, diplomas of awards and prizes, blue scarves, the remote control, and, when Kawi or Gabi or Malen or his wife, Beti, finds a poem, they stick it carefully on a known shelf. At some point Elicura comes upon these treasuresóaah!óand they find their way into his work. On the other hand, he can sit down at the Mac and knock out prose. ìIím a Native American poet with a computer,î he says. ìGot a problem with that?î
      Elicura sets up a reading for me in the CafÈ RaÌces Indo-americanas in Temuco. After the reading, a nervous young man hands me a magazine of poetry entitled Pewma (Dream). He says heís Jaime Huen™n. People in Santiago had mentioned his name to me. I want to know when can we get together. Huen™n says, ìI donít know, I donít get on very well with Elicura...,î and he fades into the crowd. Elicura invites some local writers over to dialogue with me. There are some middle-aged white guys, including Guido Eytel, a philosopher who writes light folkloric sonnets, and Bernardo Reyes, grandnephew of that NeftalÌ Reyes who became better known under the pseudonym of Pablo Neruda. And then thereís 21-year-old Jacqueline Caniguan, granddaughter of a machi, a woman shaman, who wants to run a controlled experiment for her thesis in pedagogy in the Universidad de la Frontera. Her hypothesis is that there are certain poets out there with Mapuche surnames who have little to do with the culture and the community; she will present samples of various Mapuche poets to various audiencesóurban high schools, rural middle schoolsóto see if they prefer the more authentic poetry. Who are these inauthentic Mapuche poets? Well, mostly, it would appear, Jaime Huen™n.
      Huen™n, characterized by Elicura as ìthe boy who has kept the language but lost his soul,î expresses the self-hatred of a mestizo who is accepted by neither side and who gathers his meaning on a thin ironic path between hatred and self-destruction. In Huen™nís most realized poem, ìThe Swans of Raquelmo,î the poet is gathering medicinal herbs at nightfall. He and his friends go down to the river and ask for a ride. The boatmen give them clubs and a few swallows of pisco for the cold. In the reeds they find the birds like ìtwo bodies of sweet water/white as two moons.î They break the necks of the swans and throw them into sacks.

rancheras

Jaime Huen™n started off writing just like CÈsar Vallejo, Elicura tells me. Wait up. Isnít it permissible that a young Mapuche poet would allow himself to be influenced by the very profound Andean presence of Vallejo? ìWell, sure,î says Elicura, ìbut at that time there was really nothing Mapuche about his work. Now he wants to be more Mapuche than the Mapuche. Now heís writing like me. Heís even copying my little verbal tics, like ëme digoóI tell myself.í He doesnít come around to see me anymore. Iím just about ready to confront him.î
Jacqueline Caniguan is very young, of course, and her poems remind me a little too much of Elicuraís. To mature as a poet she will have to find some distance from her mentor. Here she writes:

      ìThis experiment of yours,î says Guido Eytel, ìwhat would happen if you gave them a good Chinese poem?î ìI suppose they would like it,î admits Jacqueline. ìThereís no good young poet who doesnít read poetry from other cultures,î says Guido. ìLook at Pound reading the Chinese! Look at us reading Pound!î Bernardo Reyes brings it around to his granduncle Pablo Neruda. ìëColor azul con pÈtalos y paseos al maróColor of blue with petals and walks by the sea.í That blue. Where did he get it? From kallfu? Or what about the horse that is erased by the rain and reconstituted when the rain is over? Thatís a Mapuche concept.î
      Neruda grew up right here in Temuco barely 20 years after the territory was pacified. How well did he know Mapuche culture? Not very well, despite the fact that he remembered going to school with kids with Mapuche surnames that ìshone with dark light, smelling of wood and water.î At that time there were few Mapuche who spoke Spanish and very few Winka who spoke Mapundungu. Chilenos walked around with revolvers on their belts. It was the Wild South. ìChiapas could happen here,î says Elicura.
      When Elicura parks his Honda in a lot downtown, sometimes the attendants ask him where the owner is. ìObviously Iím Mapuche, therefore I must be the chauffeur.î Guido was talking with a painter in Santiago who insisted that Mapuche culture died out 50 years ago. Jacqueline has to confess that it bothers her to see a really ugly Mapuche man. ìI want us all to live up to my ideal of la raza. Or am I ashamed of what a white person might think?î
      ìHey, they tell me Iím not really a Mapuche, because I have a university degree,î says Elicura. ìPart of Chilean identity,î says Guido, ìis to want to be something other than what we are.î Bernardo wonders why we keep looking for identity. ìIíve sifted through the family traditions, all that baggage, thatís all very well. But itís another question of trying to be something else. PaíquÈ pue? For what? So we can say weíre the English of South America?î
      A fascist poet named Miguel Serrano superimposed the swastika on the kultr™n. He had it all spun up with hollow-earth theories. Hitler is buried in Antarctica and will rise again. The Mapuche are the dark Greeks who survived Atlantis. Or they are Tibetans. Or a lost tribe of Israel.
      Elicura and Beti and I drive west of Temuco into a rolling country of muddy roads. Elicura says he loves the way the trees, the coilg¸es, the gualles and the laurels, shine after the rain. His mother taught him all the plants of the field, their names and uses. We visit a farm heís a partner in, where skinny dogs rush out savagely, eager to tear us to pieces. Farther on, Elicura pulls the car over by an angle of trees and fence. ìVoy a escribir un poema,î he tells me with an impish smile. ìIím going to write a poem.î He goes over to piss into the grass.
      Returning to town, trafficís halted at a roadblock. During the military dictatorship this would have meant trouble, but itís just some students from the Universidad de la Frontera studying infrastructure, asking people questions about their commuting habits. The bearded youth interrogating us frowns. ìArenít you Elicura Chihuailaf the poet?î The boyís face kindles in a great grin. ìI love your work!î And he gives him a big thumbs-up.
      Elicura shows me an anthology they put together in Holland, a nice bilingual Spanish-Dutch production, one or two poems each from a dozen Latin American poets, including himself, the great Argentine political exile Juan Gelman and MarÌa Elena Cruz Varela, the Cuban dissident. I tell him how I lost friends on the Left in the Bay Area for taking up her defense after she was brutalized in Havana by a ìspontaneousî mob. Elicura says, well, yes, of course, we must condemn such an occurrence in any case, but he was in Cuba in 1994 as a member of the jurado for the important Casa de las AmÈricas prize, and ìI saw the children, black and white and mulatto, in their modest uniforms. They had transparent gazes such as I have never seen anywhere.î
      Since his oldest daughter Laura Malen is a flautist, Elicura asked to see a colegio de m™sica in Havana. ìThey had so many pianos there! Here, in Temuco, they have one piano for the whole school, and whoever lacks an instrument doesnít play. So, en fin, I concluded that Cuba is the heart of the world, and whoever wants to destroy it, itís because they arenít comfortable with that example of love and cooperation. As for the United States, they have the least right to chide Cuba on human rights, considering how they treat illegal immigrants.î
      With the stress of relationships, sometimes Elicura has difficulty with his digestion. The CafÈ RaÌces Indoamericanas offers us a free meal, because they were happy with my reading, but Elicura doesnít feel comfortable eating away from home, so we go by the supermercado, an immense outlet on Safeway scale, to get a little fish and a bottle of wine. Above the aisles, huge posters show blond consumers smiling to the Muzak as they pour orange juice or milk. ìI anticipated that writing poetry would be a tranquil way to lead my life,î Elicura says, leaning back in the driverís seat and closing his eyes.
      Both of Elicuraís grandfathers were longkos. In a very real sense he is the longko of Mapuche poetry, whether he consciously chooses that role or not. This prominence inevitably brings him jealousy and envy. Everybody projects their problems onto him. Elicura starts the motor. ìI am not who I am in the city,î he says.
      We drive up into the hills, beyond the Temuco I know, where dark muddy lanes slope down between dingy wooden houses. These poblaciones are full of drugs and gangs. I feel like Iím back in East Oakland. ìTo walk through this neighborhood,î says Elicura, ìyouíve either got to be from here or know someone.î Does he have readers in this neighborhood? Well, sure, heís given readings up here in festivals. ìOn the other hand,î he recognizes bleakly, ìthose of us who publish bilingually are just saluting the flag, as they say, because our people donít read, and those who speak Mapundungu really canít read it. It would make more sense to produce cassettes.î

      We stay up late, the whole family, incongruously watching Gremlins II. It seems very early when we pull ourselves groaning out of the sack. Everybody hugs me good-bye, and Elicura drives me to the bus station. ìNext time,î he says, ìyou should come in summer, in January or February, there would be more time to go to the campo, we could visit my parents.î The bus carries me north from Temuco, through green rolling country: lumber farms, vast ranches, and small Mapuche holdings with unpainted wooden cabins.
      My final conflicting take on Mapuche poetry comes as I return to Santiago, frantically talking to all the Chilean poets I can find in the narrow week before I leave for Argentina. In the smoggy, bustling capital, the whole vast rainy south of Chile is a half-remembered dream. But everybody I talk to has an opinion about the Mapuche poets. On my way to a reading at the Universidad AndrÈs Bello by Ra™l Zurita, the most famous Chilean poet of the generation now approaching maturity, a loud voice halts me in the street. ì°SAIMON!î Itís Jaime Valdivieso, whoís released his students for the reading, but personally, Valdivieso says, heíll take a rain check.
      ìZuritaís programmed himself to write an epic,î Valdivieso tells me. ìHeís trying to set himself up as a mini-Neruda; he wants to rewrite Canto General. What is such ambition worth, compared to the work of an authentic master such as Elicura Chihuailaf, who is so deeply rooted in Mapuche culture?î
      I ask Valdivieso about Huen™n and Elicura. He shakes his head sadly. ìItís the same old story. Huen™nís an excellent poet, but heís eaten up by envy because Elicura seems to have an effortless entry into the larger world. Then people snipe at Elicura for his success and call him an honorary winka, and Elicura feels wounded.î
      Ra™l Zurita looks like a gnomish Frank Zappa, with a long nose poking out of a trollís beard, and a high bald dome amid an aureole of curly brown hair. ìGod is born out of the human word,î he says, ìand not vice versa. It is the primitive UAAGH.î His voice, from whisper to tuba, turns the room crowded with students into a grand echo chamber. ìPadre, padre, øpor quÈ me has abandonado? If Christ came to the world, it was to fill the tremendous void in those words. But we are unsatisfied with the world that is constructing itself. The dead, the disappeared, how many tens of millions in shanty towns? The signifier cannot bear the weight of so much death. The language is dying.î
      With this sentence, the power fails, the microphone goes dead. Zurita adjusts the power in his voice. ìShall I go on?î Everyone cries YES. ìThe TV- simultaneous replaces the future tense. The abolition of poetry implies the disappearance of the least possibility of transformation. The sacred language which spoke for volcanoes and trees died thousands of years ago.î Mapundungu, I am thinking, has not lost the power to speak for volcanoes and trees, but even Elicuraís family does not speak it among themselves.
      ìThere are new poets among you,î affirms Zurita, searching the studentsí eager faces with his extraordinary gaze. ìThird-world Homers and Rilkes, who will find that to construct a single poem in this world is almost a heroic act. Yet behind the risks, the incomprehension, the loneliness, there is a great hope: that one day we will be worthy of the universe in which we are living. We live in a landscape filled with ten billion cans of Coca-Cola supplied by North American imperialism; but one day they will vanish and we will realize that we are here in the desert, where we have always been, looking for meaning in words as in the flight of birds.î
      Six months pregnant, VerÛnica Zondek immediately lights a cigarette as we sit down in a cafÈ. ìThe more the doctors tell me I canít smoke, the more I want to smoke.î VerÛnica carves her words into smoke, loving such aspects of literary history as backstage brawls, backstabbing, and gossip. But she disagrees with my formulation that you can divide Chilean poetry into Santiagoand the South. ìThatís an optical illusion that the poetas sureÒos maintain to work against. Weíre more provincial than they are! All the greatest Chilean poets came from la provincia. So there you are.î VerÛnica gives me phone numbers of Argentine poets; she tells me about the shaman on the Island of the Sun who predicted her current unplanned and unexpected pregnancy at the age of 43; she tells me how poet Gonzalo Mill·n went to the International Poetry Festival in MedellÌn, fell in love with a Colombian woman, and stayed there. She ran into Mill·n on the street. He told her, ìTheyíre going to publish me in Colombia.î ìTo publish him,î VerÛnica cackles. ìThatís one way of putting it!î
      ìThere are some people who tell you everything all the time,î says VerÛnica, ìbecause they live on the surface and are terrified of what lies underneath.î What does she think about the Chilean poets? ìItís the temptation to be a prophet, a vate, a sage, that gets all these guys. They all want to create the masterpiece, the total poem. Myself, I prefer Vallejo to Neruda. I like that twisting of language.î VerÛnica says Elicuraís first book was panfletario, standard political verse, but heís improved as he goes along. ìThe Mapuche poet I really like is Jaime Huen™n,î she muses. ìBut you canít find his work anywhere.î
      My final weekend in Santiago, I go out bar-hopping with the poets under the dark bulk of the Cerro Santa LucÌa. I ask them about all the put-downs and gossip and mutual rivalries that reveal fault-lines within Chilean poetry going all the way back to the thirties, when th grand seminal protagonists Pablo Neruda, Vicente Huidobro, and Pablo de Rokha fought a war to the death. Iíve been in Valdivia, where I fell in among the poets who hang out at the CafÈ Paula, who are sworn enemies of the poets who hang out down the block at the CafÈ Fertil Provincia. Iím not sure what the ideological or aesthetic battleground is meant to be, but all the way from ConcepciÛn to Santiago Iíve met poets who wonít speak to other poets who are allies of somebody else. Jaime Valdiviesoís lips tighten when I mention B, C says that D ìis not exactly a saint of my devotion,î B says that E is lazy and won all those prizes because people feel sorry for him, and VerÛnica Zondek says that B ought to stop trying to compete with Zurita. What about it?
      Sergio Parra, whose poems mine the hard-edged urban vein of the alcoholic loser, a style common to young writers in Santiago, Lima, and Buenos Aires whose most salient influence is Charles Bukowski, says, nah, itís nothing, only the bad poets complain. ìLike C!î somebody snickers to a general round of hilarity. ìSo thatís how you tell a bad poet,î I ask, ìwhen you hear somebody complaining?î
      ìWhatís going on between Elicura Chihuailaf and Jaime Huen™n,î says Sergio, ìisnít that Huen™n is envious of Elicuraís success. I actually think Huen™n is better than Elicura. Itís just internal cultural politics.î
      Lovely Marina Arrate, who writes luminous erotic poetry, agrees that it may be politically correct to like Elicuraís work, but she doesnít think itís that good. Rigid AndrÈs Ajens, whose footnotes eat up his text and who casts no shadow, thinks Jaime Valdiviesoís sponsorship of Elicura is paternalistic, and Sergio agrees, ìYeah, that introduction he gave him in Providencia was really embarrassing.î
      ìAll this Mapuche poet stuff,î says AndrÈs, ìMapuche, Aymara, woman, gay, Chileno, Boliviano, all these labels are meaningless. All we are is human beings. Itís absurd to give special consideration based on belonging to some supposed group.î
      ìJust a minute, huevÛn,î says Marina, waggling her cigarette in his face. ìStop right there, asshole. Thereís a question of power here.î Marina wants to vindicate a certain distinctiveness for women writers, and naturally she finds it suspicious that the white male old-boy network comes out with this marvellous universalism just when itís a question of publishing somebody else for a change.
      AndrÈs has something to defend here, he talks louder and stops listening. Itís almost midnight, time to make my getaway. ìYouíre leaving?î Marina looks up at me. I am not supposed to have been told the reason for the smoldering vulnerability in her gaze. ìSerÌa rico si nos viÈramos. It would be great if we could get together.î
      ìWe will,î I tell her, keeping my smile shallow. ìWeíre having lunch with Jaime Valdivieso on Monday, no?î I walk out into the night. If I turn back to look, I will turn into a pillar of salt.
      Of course, Jaime Huen™nís torn, angry sensibility is closer to these city poetsí urban postmodernism than is Elicuraís calm authenticity. But the game goes deeper than that: the Santiago poets are using the figure of Huen™n to undercut Elicura. If they sponsor the young, underpublished Mapuche writer, they donít have to come across as racist when they bar the door to the mature, articulate, powerful, and inevitably politically threatening figure of Elicura Chihuailaf.

John Oliver Simon (ZYZZYVA 15) teaches sixth grade in Berkeley. His most recent book of poems is Son Caminos (Hotel Ambosmundos, Mexico City). He notes: ìFor nine months in 1995-1996, I traveled through Latin America looking for poets, the culmination of 15 years of briefer visits, study, and translation. On my return, I wrote my experiences up into a book, The Road to Iguaz™, which is currently seeking a publisher.î Email: josimon@lanminds.com

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