note books

  El Salvador. War Peace and Poetry Notes. 1988 The El Salvadoran poet and revolutionary, Roque Dalton produced a landmark biography of Miguel Mármol, a prominent Salvadoran communist who participated in the 1932 Salvadoran peasant uprising and was living in exile in Prague. The Matazna , the massacre of 1932. Its memory is still branded deep on the memory of El Salvador. And the stench of the squadrons of death still fecund and foul in the land. Miguel Marmol is a small Indian looking man and he wears a gray fedora. He is at least eighty years old when we meet at a book signing in Manhattan. He was a shoemaker, a trade union leader a revolutionary. He was left for dead after a mass execution called the Matanza of 32. He crawled out from beneath the stiffening bodies and the Latin American historian, Eduardo Guiliano wrote: “…the lives of Miguel Marmol, maestro of the art of resurrection, are the most perfect metaphor for the history of Latin America.  Marmol’s thick book of t...

PREFACE: I was composing a series  of radio documentaries called War,Peace and Poetry, a commission for Australian Broadcasting. I wanted to travel to the places writers and poets wrote about. It was the late eighties and the worst of the violence was in  Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua so that’s where I went. I chose poets because of the distilled quality in their words. Journalists look for facts and poets look for truth.  Poets saw it, tasted it, smelt it, shed tears, felt the fear of it, the gut-wrenching, cold-sweating stinking fear of it. My traveling companion was Victoria Vega Schultz. We first met at almost legendary WBAI 99.5 FM New York City.   She reported the Nicaraguan revolution from Managua for Scandinavian Radio and WBAI and was writing a book about the Sandinistas.                                               ...