I first heard about Antonio Cisneros in late March 1972. I had just returned to Piura after a short vacation in Lima and came across the author of Como higuera en un campo de golf in an interview with César Hildebrandt for Caretas magazine, precisely because of the publication of that book under the National Institute of Culture (INC) imprint. It was really cool for me to see Toño with his huge hippie wig and baggy pants, answering questions from the famous journalist. One question in particular caught my attention: talking about his peers, Cisneros mentioned Hinostroza, whom I had never heard of until that moment.
The interview was a kind of revelation. It was the first time I had met a young poet: Toño was almost 29 years old, and I felt a strong attraction to his personality. I was just a couple of months away from turning 16 and was getting ready to start my senior year of high school and finish my studies. However, it is true that I had had the opportunity to see and hear a group of Peruvian poets who had arrived in Piura the previous year (1971) as part of what was then called the San Marcos Cultural Embassy, an artistic delegation from the oldest university in America that visited different cities in the provinces and departments of Peru.
That was how I got to see and hear Francisco Bendezú, who almost brought down the roof of the Municipal Cinema-Theater of Piura with his poem to Che Guevara, as well as Winston Orrillo, Reynaldo Naranjo, Arturo Corcuera—who made an impact with his text that ends with “Rico Mc Pato Rico Mc Pato / we can’t wait to see you cooked on a plate”—and above all José Watanabe, the brand-new winner of the Young Poet of Peru award the previous year, who dazzled me with his beautiful “Advice for Girls.” I turned fifteen that year, 1971, and having started writing poetry shortly before the arrival of the San Marcos Cultural Embassy in Piura, I was deeply impressed by the poets I saw and heard that unforgettable night.
But the poet who really impressed me was Javier Heraud. I discovered him during one of my first dives into my father’s library at our home in Santa Isabel. It was that little brown book with the title Javier Heraud / Poesías completas y homenaje, published by La Rama Florida e Industrial Gráfica in Lima in 1964. I was fascinated by my discovery. First of all, learning about the heroic sacrifice of the young poet dazzled me and filled my heart with a great sense of purpose in life: that of a boy who was not yet seventeen and had just left school. As I entered the poems, the rhythm appeared before my eyes in this way: “I am a river, / I flow down / the wide stones, / I flow down / the hard rocks, / along the path / drawn by the wind.”
I was imbued with the spirit of an irrepressible verbal beauty. Naturally, the book became my favorite companion, day and night, for all my free time. I had just entered the University of Piura and while I was studying, I read Heraud’s poems incessantly, even composing a short collection entirely under his influence called “Waiting for Certainty,” obviously emulating his “Waiting for Autumn,” which I reread with relish every lonely afternoon in my room. The certainty I was looking for was that of a Catholic teenager who begins to question his beliefs when faced with the reality of the world and his own inner musings.
The cool thing is that 1973 marked the tenth anniversary of Heraud’s assassination in the jungle of Madre de Dios when he had entered Peru—coming from Cuba—to start a guerrilla movement based on Che Guevara’s theory. There were special newspaper articles alluding to that date and a new edition of his collected poetry edited by the poet Hildebrando Pérez, with a beautiful, multicolored cover by Claude Dietrich, which I bought as soon as I could get to Lima during the mid-year vacation and national holidays.
It was a delight for me to return to Piura with this book in my hands. On the other hand, on that occasion, I made the trip from Piura to Lima accompanied by my copy of Estos 13, the unsurpassed anthology of the generation of the 1970s, compiled by José Miguel Oviedo, which I had obtained at the Studium bookstore in my hometown in March 1973. I have already recounted several times how I was dazzled by this book with its orange cover, designed by the great Emilio Hernández. Suffice it to say here that it deserves a tribute because its assiduous, joyful, and admiring reading was one of the first and most important moments of my formation in the delineated yet chaotic fields of poetry.
When I transferred from the Private University of Piura to the National University of San Marcos in 1975, I met the poet Hildebrando Pérez, my Spanish poetry professor, who shaped—or rather, deepened—my admiration and appreciation for Heraud. Hildebrando spoke to me countless times about the immolation of the author of Estación Reunida, recounting in great detail Heraud’s encounter with the police in Puerto Maldonado and his subsequent death in the waters of the Madre de Dios River. He also told me about the days of the magazine Estación Reunida, published between November 1966 and June 1968 by a group of young poets led by José Rosas Ribeyro, and how the publication belonged to the National Liberation Army (ELN), the party of Heraud, who had been assassinated just three years earlier, on May 15, 1963, and was a tribute to his noble sacrifice and the legacy of his great poetic and revolutionary myth.
Infected by that sensitivity, I have remained to this day with this conviction instilled in me at San Marcos by my dear friend and teacher Hildebrando Pérez. And I am convinced—after reading the poems Heraud wrote during his European tour in 1961—that if it had not been for his early death, his poetry would have developed a conversational tone similar to that of his contemporary Antonio Cisneros in his book Canto ceremonial contra un oso hormiguero, which won the 1968 Casa de las Américas Prize and was so innovative in the language of Peruvian and Latin American poetry at that decisive moment.
In May 1976, I don’t know how—I think it was through Hildebrando—I received an invitation to participate in a tribute to Javier Heraud to be held at the José Obrero parish in Barranco. I got into my little car, the Fiat 600, the Chechento that my father had sent me from Piura in a truck to the door of my aunt Emma’s house in Villacampa, Rímac, where I lived, and I arrived at the parish. I was greeted by Luis Enrique Huamán, then an architecture student at the UNI, who was very friendly and the organizer of the event at which I was to read some poems and give a short speech about Heraud.
That night I met Manuel Miranda, an extraordinary flutist and member of the folk music band Canto Libre, and Jorge (Coco) Salazar, a storyteller and journalist who would soon publish the book Piensan que estamos muertos, written in collaboration with José María Salcedo about Heraud’s exploits. I hit it off with Salazar and ended up chatting over a glass of wine in the living room of his boarding house in Jesús María, on Costa Rica Street, near the San Felipe residential complex, even though Salazar was not well liked by Hildebrando and the people of the 1960s generation because, they claimed, in voices that indiscreetly ran through the corridors of the San Marcos Faculty of Arts, he had behaved badly by betraying his comrades involved in the expropriation of a bank with a view to financing the guerrilla movement of the sixties. They said that, as the son of a military man, Salazar, who was involved in some way in the subversion, escaped prison by denouncing others involved and then left the country. Who knows? Jorge was always very kind and gentlemanly to me; that is the testimony I can offer about the author of the excellent novel La medianoche del japonés (The Japanese Midnight). And our friendship began that night in Barranco at a concert and tribute to the great poet of Palabra de guerrillero.
Coco Salazar was a close friend of Luis Hernández, so much so that he introduced him at the unique recital given by the author of Vox Horrísona in 1976 in the auditorium of the National Institute of Culture (INC). Their friendship dated back to the 1960s (they were from the same generation). Salazar had met Hernández on a minibus in the mid-1970s and, as a result, published an article in the newspaper Correo entitled “El poeta enmascarado”, a copy of which he gave me during one of our many encounters at the Wony bar-restaurant on Jirón Belén.
I discovered Lucho Hernández’s poetry when I was fascinated by Heraud. In his book Viajes imaginarios, I came across a very beautiful and meaningful quote by Hernández that read: “journeys not taken, / traces of fingers / silent on the map,” which I later found again in Las constelaciones. Shortly afterwards, during the mid-year vacation I spent in Lima in 1973, I got hold of the magazine Hipócrita Lector, in whose second issue there was a photo of the great American poet Ezra Pound looking terrible, very old, and the caption was made up of the famous verses by Luis Hernández: “Ezra: / I know that if you came to my neighborhood / the boys on the corner would say: / Hey, old man, che su madre.”
Tremendously impressed by the freedom with which Hernández had managed to insert what is perhaps the most obscene expression in our colloquial language into poetic discourse, I became deeply interested in learning as much as I could about this great poet named Luis Hernández.
