Latin American Nobel Laureates in Poetry: Asturias, Mistral, Neruda, Paz with Jim Moreno

For many years Jim Moreno has been inspired by the 4 Latino poets from Mexico, Central, & South America who were Nobel Laureates in Literature. Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala – 1967), Gabriela Mistral (Chile –1945), Pablo Neruda (Chile – 1971), Octavio Paz (Mexico – 1990), excelled in poetry & other writing disciplines such as education, diplomacy, fiction, playwrights, politics, and journalism.

Magic Realist Miguel Angel Asturias was both a writer and a social champion. He spent his life fighting for the rights of Indians, for the freedom of Latin American countries from both dictatorships and outside influences—especially the United States—and for a more even distribution of wealth (All Poetry). He is the first poet in this 3-hour class for beginning and seasoned poets. Magic Realism blends a style of literary fiction and art. It paints a realistic view of the world while also adding magical elements, often blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Magic realism often refers to literature in particular, with magical or supernatural phenomena presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting, commonly found in novels and dramatic performances (Wikipedia). When Asturias writes, “We were made that way/ Made to scatter/ Seeds in the furrow/ And stars in the ocean/ we are riding the sometimes thundering, sometimes whispering, waves of magic realism.”

This three-hour class for beginning or seasoned poets will be divided into two ninety-minute segments. The first segment includes poetry prompts and film clips from Asturias and Chile’s Gabriela Mistral, who was Pablo Neruda’s elementary school teacher. Mistral moved away from the Catholic and Symbolist influences of her early poems and developed a uniquely song like, limpid (clear, free of anything that darkens) style, a voice of almost maternal lullaby that murmurs through simple traditional forms (Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry). In her poem, “Close to Me,” Mistral writes, “Little fleece of my flesh/ that I wove in my womb/ little shivering fleece/ sleep close to me/ we hear the maternal murmur and we feel nurtured and at peace.”

The second class segment features poetry, film clips and poetry prompts from Chile’s Pablo Neruda, and Mexico’s Octavio Paz. By Neruda’s third book of poetry we hear an inventive verbal lushness…that enact the poems’ emotions of disintegration, despair, claustral ennui and sexual tumult (Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry). In his poem, “Tonight I Write,” Neruda’s music calls to us: “Tonight I can write the saddest lines/ I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”

Mexico’s great Octavio Paz has a history which is a track of restless formalism, ranging from tight imagistic perpetual moments…to the broader inclusiveness of poems based on Aztec models to even more universal techniques and themes. In his poem, “Mystery,” Paz writes, “Glittering of air, it glitters/ noon glitters here/ but I see no sun,/ we enter a figurative form of mystery for which the author shares few peers.”