Born in 1945, he published two books before the coup, one in Concepción (with a print run of five hundred) and another in Santiago (five hundred copies again). Together, they came to less than fifty pages. His poems were short. Like most of the poets of his generation, he was influenced by Nicanor Parra and Ernesto Cardenal, but also by Jorge Teillier’s home-grown imagism, although Stein recommended we read Lihn rather than Teillier. His tastes were quite often different from and even opposed to our own: he didn’t care for Jorge Cáceres (the Chilean surrealist who had become our cult hero) or Rosamel del Valle or Anguita. He liked Pezoa Véliz (and knew some of his poems by heart), Magallanes Moure (a foible for which we compensated by dipping into the verse of the dreadful Braulio Arenas), the geographical and gastronomical poems of Pablo de Rokha (which we, and when I say we, I realize now I am referring only to Bibiano O’Ryan and myself; as to the others, I can’t remember a thing about them, not even their literary loves and hates; in any case we kept well clear of de Rokha, as if he were a bottomless pit, and anyway you’re better off reading Rabelais), Neruda’s love poetry and Residence on Earth (which we, having suffered from Neruditis since early childhood, could not so much as look at without breaking out in hives).
