After the Zero Hour: Notes on Ernesto Cardenal Upon His Death

I purchased Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems back in the 1980s. I had no idea who Cardenal was, but the idea of a “documentary poem” was intriguing. This was well before I started to see my own poetry in the documentary mode. The poems are cinematic, but not in the way we usually use the word. They are not full of broad vistas, but instead use the poetic form like a camera, panning across the wreckage of the Nicaragua under Somoza, zooming in on the tiniest details, and relying sharp Eisensteinian cuts to create a tableau of exploitation, brutality and resistance that I think still speaks to us today.

Cardenal was a priest and a revolutionary. As the AP wrote yesterday in its obituary, he built an arts commune of sorts on the Solentiname Islands in Lake Nicaragua that “came to symbolize artistic opposition to the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.” Somoza’s National Guard ultimately demolished the community, not long before Somoza himself was overthrown by the Sandinistas.

Cardenal’s support for the Sandinistas proved to be both a revolutionary act and something unsustainable. The Sandinistas routed the Somoza dictatorship but then turned dictatorial itself. Cardenal served as culture minister under Daniel Ortega, but turned away from Ortega when it became clear that Ortega was only interested in personal…