Mark Eisner

I believe in compassion, that truth is simple, that la poesia es la paz and that poetry is peace. I also really believe in love.
I believe in non-violent revolution and the beauty of natural art and the art we ourselves can create.
I've lived a life blessed by la buena onda or whatever name you care to call it, and I am so grateful, and intend to simply do my best to pass it on.
Soy mucho y soy unico asi como el mar, but principally I like to think of myself as a friend, traveler, and writer. I have a lot of first-person creative non-fiction I'm working on. I am in between SF, DC (where I got a great creative writing gig,) and all over Latin America, where among other things I've got a couple projects going on from poesia to a ecoconcious community and fair-trade organic spiritual blueberries and wine, as well as a biodiesel conversion project.
Ademas, so much of the past years has been all about Pablo. After three years backpacking through Latin America from Cuba to Patagonia I found spiritual communion with the Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda.
A public poet, statesman, and pacifist activist who attained mythic stature in his lifetime, Neruda was an incurable romantic, incorrigible womanizer, and unrepentant militant communist, He invented a new poetic voice, distinctively Americano, fired by raw passion and the struggle for justice.
“Poetry is like bread;” he wrote, “It should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.”
Neruda is one of history's greatest heroes of championing the power of the pen over the sword in the fight for the people's betterment. He is one of history's greatest example of a “people's poeta,” el poeta del pueblo.
His poetry is nourishment, substance. It is ours for eternity. We must continue to pass it on.
When I first really got really deep into writing and reading literature, the beats were my idols. The way they led their lives led me to jump off into this big big world after graduating from the univeristy of michigan and down all these trails on my path which has led me to where I am now, realizing my dreams, and enjoying it so much.
While a poster of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in front of City Lights hung above my bookshelves above my mattress on the floor of my San Franciscan mission apartment, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his City Lights published my baby, in April, 2004, National Poetry Month right before Neruda's centennial, which we celebrated in a fantastic festival which the SF Chronicle called “a perfect birthday party” for Pablo.
My baby, the amapola roja that is ”The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems”, is the bestselling book of Neruda's translations in the States.
“The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems”
"What better way to celebrate the hundred years of Neruda's glorious residence on our earth than this selection of crucial works - in both languages! - by one of the greatest poets of all time. A splendid way to begin a love affair with our Pablo or, having already succumbed to his infinite charms, revisit him passionately again and again and yet again." -- Ariel Dorfman, Pulitzer-prize winner
" ...The Essential Neruda will prove to be, for most readers, the best introduction to Neruda available in English. In fact, I can think of few other books that have given me so much delight so easily." -- The Austin Chronicle
Tim Robbins named it his "Favorite Beach Read" in the June 2006 issue
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It includes some of my own translations along with those of an all-star group of poets, including Robert Hass, Jack Hirschman, Stephen Mitchell, and Forrest Gander. Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a introductory note. For more info on the book "click here.” Please consider buying it for yourself and all your friends through Red Poppy, our non-profit dedicated to furthering Neruda's commitment to humanitarianism. It's $16.95, and half of that goes straight to funding Red Poppy's projects, especially right now our documentary, Pablo Neruda: The Poet's Calling.
The morning of Neruda's 100th birthday, July 12th, 2004, I read his poem “The Potter” to millions on NPR's Morning Edition, interviewed by Renee Montaigne. That night at the Theater Artaud in San Francisco we had an incredible kick-off to our Festival Neruda, with a reading with Ferlinghetti, former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass, current SF Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman, and others, and premiered the rough cut of the first version of our documentary on Neruda. The gathering&n was so great, we had to pipe out the audio to the crowd in the lobby who couldn't get into the theater.
This gave me chills as the same thing happening when Neruda read for the first time in the States, in new york city in 1966.
Though the rough-cut went got great reviews in the Chronicle and even Variety, and won the Latin American Studies Association Award of Merit in Film, we never received the additional funding or distribution offer to finish it.
Then another blessing of la buena onda came to me in the form of a contract with W.W. Norton to write a book on the life, times, and poetry of Pablo. I left SF and lived in front of a snow-capped dark blue volcano in southern chile and wrote the book (for one month with mi true companero Thomas Kohnstamm while he was writing the first pages of his book on sex, drugs, and travel which will now be published by Random House as soon as he finishes it!) Also did a lot of research in the bibilioteca nacional and neruda's archives in his casa la chascona en santiago where i felt so at home.
Now, with the first draft of the mansucript into my editor, and the paycheck of the creative writing gig, I am putting the movie back into motion,having recently assembled a new dream team of loving, brilliant, experienced indie filmmakers, and I could really use your help. This is a grassroots film. Just as Pablo was a poet of the people, this film will be of the people.
Please help us complete a film worthy of the subject. And Suzanne Vega, a huge Pablo lover, is our narrator! Hopefully the documentary and book will be released simultaneously. For more information on the film project and how you can help spread more peace, passion, love, and Pablo's poetry and fight for social justice around the world, please click here.
and thank you for reading this
gracias a la buena onda,
paz, pan, flores, y amor
mark