We are now approaching that time of year … when we wish we were elsewhere.

…I am now in the town that time forgot, San Carlos, after a night on a crazy ferry, but on my way to tropical islands presided over by Ernesto Cardenal, known as El Poeta, probably the most famous Nicaraguan, who built his own community of local primitive artists and foreign mystics. Ange should aspire to so rule.

Hasta luego,
David

I had known nothing of Cardenal’s community (described in various places on the web as Marxist-Christian and primitivist) in the Solentiname archipelago until my husband passed his friend’s email to me. It is very difficult to find any information about it on the web, and doesn’t present itself as a place one may visit.

On the other hand, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, in Scotland, is open to the public. The most famous vis-poet/gardener seems worlds apart in sensibility from Cardenal, but he too had a political vision, one that married Arcady and the French Revolution. (I am not yet an expert on Finlay, but visiting Little Sparta is one of my life goals….)

The juxtaposition of these projects seems apt to me: one a self-sustaining colony of anti-Modernist, “primitivist” artists committed to radical peace in the lush Nicaraguan wilderness; the other a Promethean attempt to individuate a garden from the cold northern landscape, with a temple to Apollo that melds an oerlikon gun with a lyre. Should poets, who usually maintain a diasporic attitude (at least until they land tenure!), create provocative destinations? Or radically refuse the idea of destination travel (and all its ecological ramifications) to cultivate a local garden that one may inhabit but never tour?

Finlay: “Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.”