Carlos Pezoa Véliz
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Carlos Pezoa Véliz (July 21, 1879 – April 21, 1908). Chilean poet, educator and journalist born in Santiago, Chile. His poetry was written within the post-modernist Latin American movement, which broke with the Symbolism, and the Parnassian schools of Rubén Darío’s modernism. The poetry of Pezoa Véliz constituted a conscious use of language as a basis for a new vision of the World and in particular a novel way of observing the cultural and psychological roots of all things Chilean. Pezoa Véliz could be considered a founding poet and fundamental figure in the history of Chilean poetry – which has given the World of literature figures like Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Gonzalo Rojas and Nicanor Parra.
During his lifetime his body of work was published in journals and non-conventional publications which were compiled in 1911 - four years after the poet’s death - by Ernesto Montenegro under the title of “Alma Chilena”/The Chilean Soul – the name of one of Pezoa Véliz’s most renowned and cited poem. Subsequently, in 1927, Armando Donoso published a new book including new poems, short stories and journalistic articles under the title “Campanas de Oro”/The Golden Bells, which were later on broadened by Nicomedes Guzman in his “Antología de Carlos Pezoa Véliz”/Anthology of Carlos Pezoa Véliz (1957; 2 ed 1966).
A poet representative of the roots and voice of the Chilean people; his themes and subject matter are constituted by rural and urban life, impoverished peasants, renegades, marginalized people, the humiliated and fallen, with the use of both a colloquial and ironic language, which is interrupted at times by despair and melancholy. His work constitutes poetry of rebellion, of denunciation, of irony, of parody, and in addition, a lyricism that is both simplistic and profound, in which some critics have seen antecedents of Nicanor Parra.
At the end of the 19th Century, he began to publish poems and chronicles on the “El búcaro santiaguino”, which he did whilst he was a teacher at the San Fidel School, a position from where he was ultimately fired for his intensely bohemian life-style.
His major literary influences were Manuel Gutierrez Nájera, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Edgar Allan Poe, Rubén Darío and a taste for modernism for its “oddities” which was influential in the era; but in his work there is also a social element which could have been derived from reading Maxim Gorki and Leo Tolstoy. Subsequently, at the beginning of the 20th century, he took a position as a journalist in the “El Chileno”, “La comedia humana y la voz del pueblo” newspapers. This journalistic occupation served as a medium that allowed Pezoa Véliz to get close – albeit, as reporter - to the workings and customs of the offices of nitrate mines of the north of Chile, which was vividly documented in his short story: “El taita de la oficina”/The office daddy.
These publications appeared regularly in the press and began to give him notoriety within the national public opinion, as was his prominent appointment in the Ateneo de Santiago. Later on he was designated Municipal Secretary of Viña del Mar, a city that with Valparaíso played a fundamental role in his cultural and personal life. He continued publishing poetry, verse and narratives in the magazine “La lira chilena"/The Chilean lyric poem, “Pluma y lapis”/Writer and pen/ y “Luz y sombra”/Light and shadow among others. From anthologies compiled posthumously, “El perro vagabundo”/The vagabond dog, “Nada”/Nothing, “El pintor pereza”/The lazy painter, “El organillo”/The Hand Organ inter alia, remain his most prominent poems.
