Poems, Poems, We Want Poems

Toward 1969 he was a presidential candidate, and I had the opportunity to see him during the political campaign in a shantytown on the outskirts of Santiago. It had rained, and the nearly two hundred people who heard his speech stood with their feet deep in the mud. They were very poor, and their situation certainly had not allowed them to go beyond the first grades of primary school. The poet concluded his harangue half-heartedly and was getting ready to descend from the wooden stage, when the people stopped him, shouting: “Poems, poems, we want poems!” Neruda let himself be coaxed for a minute, and then he took a book out of his pocket.

The image of those two hundred people, shivering from the cold, who most likely had not had breakfast, demanding “poems, poems,” made a deep impression on me, and I knew that I would not forget it as long as I lived. Perhaps this is another of the modest clues that led me to the book The Postman.

That was from the memoir of Antonio Skármeta on Pablo Neruda. Skarmeta is one of Latin America’s most revered novelists and he received international acclaim when his 1985 novel El cartero de Neruda became the Oscar-nominated film Il Postino.