Today’s poem is “Ode to Acario Cotapos.” The gentleman in
question seems to be a political revolutionary, a leader, a teacher or a
prophet for Neruda. I did try briefly, in the five free seconds I had today, to
look him up, but Wikipedia failed me! Even the Spanish Wikipedia didn’t help. Now
there’s probably some discussion of this in the long lovely introduction to the
book that I haven’t read yet, but obviously, I haven’t read it yet.
So this becomes a good opportunity for me to remember what
it feels like when, as a student, you have absolutely no idea what the heck is
happening in a poem. In fact, I really just enjoyed it while having no clue who
any of these people are or what they’re actually doing, or even if they’re
real. But I know that enjoying without understanding is something of a luxury—I
don’t have to know. Students always feel they’re performing, and mostly they
are, just like I’m performing in teaching, and they often fear not knowing—but
the play, the not knowing and wondering is such a lovely part of my own
intellectual life that I wish I could figure out how to help students feel more
comfortable with that sort of freedom. I wish I could tell you, students—we all
don’t know. We all feel like somebody’s going to find out we’re not smart
enough to be here. Every one of us.
Now, I could find out all about this poem—who are these “diminutive
Bolivians”? I could—but not today. And to tell the truth, I’m a little leery of
knowing. What if Acario Cotapos is some awful person and then I can’t love
Pablo Neruda anymore? (This happened recently when I found out that Michelle
Shocked, a musician whose work I loved, is not somebody I can respect or
admire. Now what?) Instead, for now, I’m going to enjoy the play of the words
and the crazy looseness of following along without fully understanding, just
enjoying that loopy image of that “irascible corpulence”—and especially “Ramón with
his serious squid.”
