Photograph by Kgbo, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Are there any actual poems in Distant Star?

“The three poems were short; all less than ten lines,” Arturo B., our poet-narrator, says of the early verse of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, the mysterious autodidact who one day appears, as if from nowhere, in the poetry workshop Arturo attends. “One described a landscape: trees, a dirt road, a house in the distance, wooden fences, hills, clouds.” No part of the poem is quoted; we’re given none of the text or texture. According to Marta, another young poet in their orbit, these weren’t Ruiz-Tagle’s “real poems” anyway; even the poems withheld from us are only stand-ins. Where, then, in Distant Star, are the “real poems”? One fateful night soon after Pinochet seizes power, the Garmendia sisters—“identical twins and the undisputed stars of the poetry workshop”—read their poems to Ruiz-Tagle (right before he’s revealed to be the murderous aviator Carlos Wieder), but they don’t read them to us; we’re just told their poems are “wonderful.” They “often described painters lost in the wilds of southern Chile, embarking on hopelessly ambitious works and hopelessly in love.” (The poems we don’t see are about impossible works of art.) Again and again, poems are characterized in a way that only makes them more opaque: “the opening lines were worthy of Isidore Isou, while the unexpected ending would not have been out of place in a Chilean folk song,” or “a narrative poem, which … reminded me of John Cage’s poetic diary spliced with lines that sounded like Julián del Casal or Magallanes Moure translated into French by a Japanese psychotic,” and so on. Read More