Mary Michaels’poetry collection The Shape of the Rock was published by Sea Cow in 2003. sof 71 May 2005 Mary Michaels reviews The Lion in the Forest by Kathleen McPhilemy Katabasis, 2004, 85 pages. £7.95. ISBN 0904872408 Poetry For Our Times reviews sof 71 May 2005 22 A spokeswoman for Harvard University told the Guardian (4th March 2005) that the University was ‘very disappointed’ that Dora María Tellez had been refused a visa to enter the US to take up her post as the Robert F. Kennedy visiting professor in the Faculty of Divinity, on the grounds that she was a ‘terrorist’. Dora María joined the Sandinista Front to overthrow the brutal dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, that lasted from 1936 until July 1979. A US President famously said, ‘Somoza’s a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch.’ Dora María was ‘Comandante Dos’ (‘Number 2’) in the Assault on the National Palace on 22nd August 1978. ‘Borrowing’ the uniforms of the dictator’s gruesome son ‘Tacho’ Somoza’s elite Special Force troops, 25 Sandinistas took over the National Palace, held the deputies hostage for two days, and negotiated the release of sixty political prisoners. The Assault sparked uprisings all over Nicaragua and the dictator was finally toppled a year later on 19th July 1979. In the Final Offensive, Dora María led the brigade that took the city of León.
Dora María was involved in the Sandinista reconstruction of the country, becoming Minister of Health after the 1984 elections. Sandinista health policies introduced vaccination campaigns, eliminated polio and in this very poor country reduced infant mortality to one third of its former rate. They set up many community health posts, including in remote rural areas.
In continual raids the US-backed Contras, mainly based in Honduras, killed 50,000 Nicaraguans and specialised in targeting villages, co-operatives, schools and health posts. John Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, supporting the Contras and the Honduran death squads. He supervised the creation of the El Aguacate base in Honduras, where the US trained the Contras and prisoners were tortured. From September 2001-June 2004 Negroponte was US ambassador to the UN. After that he became US ambassador to Iraq and in February 2005 Bush appointed him US Director of National Intelligence.
Torture has not stopped. Truth is not forgetting.
Ministry Publishes ‘Rules for Writing Poetry’ Like many in the Sandinista cabinet, Dora María was a poet. Immediately after the triumph of the Revolution in 1979, the newly formed Ministry of Culture under Ernesto Cardenal (one of the most famous poets in Latin America) set up poetry workshops all over the country and published ‘Some Rules for Writing Poetry’ in the national paper Barricada. This strikes us as comical and Tessa Jowell almost certainly wouldn’t dare do such a thing! However, as bad poetry, especially bad religious poetry, can sound like one of those greetings cards (some news agents even have verse-writing machines!) , it is worth briefly summarising these ‘rules’ for readers’ consideration, changing the Nicaraguan examples to English ones: 1. Verse need not rhyme. If one line ends with Sandino do not try to end another with destino (in English we might say moon/June). 2. Prefer more concrete terms to vaguer ones. To say ‘tree’ is vaguer and more abstract than saying e.g. oak, willow. Good poetry is usually made out of very concrete things. 3. Poetry has added appeal if it includes proper names of people, cities etc. 4. Rather than being based on abstract ideas, poetry needs to be based on things which reach us through our senses, which can be touched, tasted, heard, seen and smelt. 5. Write as we speak with the natural plainness of the spoken language. 6. Avoid clichés and hackneyed expressions. 7. Try to condense the language as much as possible. All words which are not absolutely necessary should be left out.
These ‘rules’ are introductory, not exhaustive; apart from rhyme, they say nothing about sound, rhythm or shape and, of course, ‘Rule 4’ does not mean poetry should not contain ideas. Ernesto Cardenal’s own 581page Cosmic Canticle is full of enormous ideas. The ‘rule’ is saying that in poetry ideas should be embodied, fleshed out in images and concrete details.
Ernesto’s own short poem ‘Meditation in a DC-3’ reprinted on page 23, arrives at the abstraction ‘communism’ (which he equates with ‘the kingdom of heaven’ - he does not mean Soviet communism) through an accumulation of concrete examples, some of which may surprise readers, considering he is a Catholic priest! Incidentally, the attractively written prose piece on Gujarat on page 11, by SoF Chair David Paterson, does something similar in describing a scene full of details we can both see and hear, before reflecting at the end on the abstractions ‘life’ and ‘quality of life’. Naturally, all these ‘rules’ can and should be broken by poets with good reason. For example, not all contemporary poetry is ‘free verse’; Sebastian Barker’s incantatory love poem on page 16 is in a strict form with rhymes, metre and repeated lines.
There’s no room to say more here but comments are very welcome.
Regular 'Mayday Notes' column. This instalment discusses Dora María Téllez being refused a US visa to take up the Robert F. Kennedy visiting professorship at Harvard Divinity Faculty, her role in the Sandinista Front and the 1978 Assault on the National Palace, and the Nicaraguan Ministry of Culture's 'Rules for Writing Poetry'.