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We are a team of associated artisans who create for you high quality products and gifts that are uniquely crafted in the remote lands of  CHILE. A territory of breath-taking contrasts. Our ancestors told us that God, when finished creating this magnificent world, arranged the many gems and creatures he had left, between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, for us to live as poets, and craft what we are given into beauty for the delight and  marvell of those from every other land ... (as you might get to find if you browse in this website too!)

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Chile is a land where many not only write poetry just as you might secretly do, they also live as poets. Two of our citizens have been honored as Nobel Laureats for their poetry, and many more are Giants of Poetry too!

• Links to Chilean Poetry translated to English.

Poetry used to impregnate everything in Chile: politics, teaching, the cultural life... the people themselves lived immersed in poetry. This was due itself to the temperament of Chileans and more particularly to the influence of five of our poets which became a sort of archetypes. They have molded the existence of many young people at their beginnings. The best known of them is nobody else but Pablo Neruda. He was a very active man in politics, exuberant, very prolific in his writing and, most noticeably, a man who lived as an authentic poet.

Five giants of poetry where not only contemporary writers, but were living poetically in Chile during the 50�s: Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, -both were awarded Nobel prices-, Pablo de Rokha, Vicente Huidobro, and Nicanor Parra (still writing anti-poems). These poets were engaged in passionate public polemics with each other about art and life. Legions of students, housewives, blue and white collar workers, teachers, etc., not only followed and took party in their lively polemics, but were aspiring to become poets and recited their own verses like them.

And they were not only writing poems but also accomplishing acts. Huidobro said "Why do you sing the rose, oh Poets! Make it flower in the poem". 

Neruda seduced a modest women promising her a marvelous gift, then exhibiting to her a lemon as big as a gourd. They had started to go out of literature to participate in the every day acts of life with the esthetic and revel�s posture of a poet.

What is it to live poetically?

"In the first place, live without fear, dare to give, have the audacity to live in a certain outrageous way", says Alejandro Jodorowsky, himself a Chilean poet, and versed in many arts. Neruda built a castle-like house were he gathered collections of prow masks, the most beautiful marine shells from all over the world, many bottled ship, all sorts of navigating instruments, artistic hand crafted bottles, and many other of his grown up toys. (He legated his three houses, "La Sebastiana", "La de Isla Negra" and "La Chascona" with his splendid collections to the people of Chile and the . He congregated around him an entire pueblo, was elected senator, and almost became the president of the republic... He risked and gave his life to the Chilean Communist Party, for idealism, because he really desired to operate a social revolution, build a more equitable world... and his poetry marked all the Chilean youth. In Chile even the drunks at full alcoholic meetings would recite verses of Neruda! His poetry was recited in schools as well as in the streets. Everybody wanted to be a poet like him. I don�t mean only the students, but blue collar workers and even the drunken spoke in verses! He knew how to capture in his texts the foolish atmosphere of the country.

"Poesia" by Pablo Neruda, (translated from Spanish):

POETRY
And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

Vicente Huidobro. 

Huidobro�s family was of means most rested than those of Neruda�s rather poor family. His mother was known of all the French literary saloons, and he received a very deep artistic education, therefore his poetry was of great formal beauty, impregnating of elegance all the country. We all dreamed with Europe, with the culture ... Huidobro gave us a great lesson in esthetics. As an example allow me to reproduce an extract of a conference of the poet in Madrid, in December 1921, three years before the surrealist manifest.

"Apart from the grammatical significance of language, there is a further one, a magic signification, that is the only one we are interested in. [...] The poet out of the world that exists creates the world that should exist. The value of the language of poetry is in direct relationship to his parting from the spoken language. [...] Language becomes a ceremonial of conjuration and presents itself in the luminescence of it�s original nakedness, detached from all initial conventional wardrobe fixed beforehand. [...] poetry is nothing else but the last horizon, which, in turn, is the verge where the extremes touch, where there is nor contradiction nor doubt. Upon approaching that final boundary, the customary sequence of the phenomena breaks its logic, and at the other side, where the lands of the poet begin, the chain redoes in a new logic. The poet tends his hand to conduce you beyond the last horizon, more up to the top of the pyramid, in the field that extends beyond what is real and what is untruthful, beyond life and death, beyond space and time, beyond spirit and matter. [...] There is in its throat an inextinguishable fire."

Gabriela Mistral: her appearance was that of a dry lady, austere, very far from sensual poetry. She taught in public schools, and this little governess became a symbol of peace. She taught us the ethic stance in regard to the pains of the world. Gabriela Mistral (Nobel prize 1953) was for Chileans a sort of gurou, very mystical, a figure of an universal mother. She spoke of 'God' but giving such a testimony of rigor... Lest listen to a few extracts of her "Prayer of The Teacher" (the teacher was naturally the governess):

Pablo de Rokha was also an exuberant being, a sort of boxer of poetry about whom the most foolish rumors circulated all over. He was attributed anarchist's attempts, swindles... In fact he was a dadaist expressionist that brought to Chile the cultural provocation. He was turbulent, capable of indulting, and had among the writers a terrible black aura. These chosen pieces that resonate as bullets should be enough to give an idea of his furibund ardor:

Nicanor Parra is originary of the pueblo, he climbed the university steps, made himself a teacher in a large school and embodied the figure of an intellectual, of the intelligent poet. He made us learn Wittgenstein, the circle of Vienna, the intimate journal of Kafka. Apart from his intellectual influence, he brought humor to Chilean poetry, he was the first to introduce comic elements into poetry. In creating the anti-poetry, he de-dramatized this art form.

Young Poets
by Nicanor Parra (trans. by Miller Williams)

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

A poetical act is a call to reality: one must face one�s own death, what is unforeseen, our shadow, the worms that swarm within us. This life that we want logic is, in reality, insane, it crashes you, it is wonderful and cruel. Our behavior, that we intend logical and conscious, is, in fact, irrational, insane, contradictory. If we observed with lucidity our reality, we would verify that it is poetic, illogic, luxuriant. Poetry does not observe a stereotyped classification of the world ... No, poetry is convulsive, it is bound to the quakes of the land! She accuses the appearances, crosses with his sword lies and conventions. The so called reasonable people, those who believe in the solidity of this world do not figure foolish acts. But in Chile the earth trembles every six days!  Even the soil of the country is, as to say, convulsive. This makes many to be subjected to a physical and existential trembling. We do not inhabit a massive world governed by a supposedly well implanted order, but a trembling reality. Nothing remains fixed, everything quakes ... ja ja ja!

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