Lance Larson’s poem takes place against the backdrop of Chile’s politics. Salvador Allende was the first democratically elected Marist in the Americans when he came to power in 1970. Although he greatly improved the lives of poor Chileans, the United States was not pleased with having a second Marist country besides Cuba in the Western Hemisphere.

In 1973, with the help of the CIA, General Pinochet staged a military coup and declared himself leader of the country. Later that year, Allende committed suicide. During Pinochet’s reign, many people were tortured and killed. His military rule lasted until 1990, when democratic rule returned. He was arrested in the UK in 1998 and was brought to trial in Chile in 2004, but died in 2006.

Larsen’s title refers to the pluperfect tense, which can be understood as an event which takes place before another event. I think this poem takes place during Pinochet’s reign, before democracy returns to the country.

Besides the poverty described in the first line, the poet’s choice of the word “bejesus” also suggests that extreme poverty drives Christian love out of people. However, the expression “What we drink it drinks us” offers hope. Seeing the poor urchins, the melon man pushes a cracked melon off this stand. While he can sound fierce by telling the boys to go the hell as they pick up the melon, what the man is really doing is feeding the boys.

The narrator, a Mormon sent to Santiago to gain converts to his religion (“pastoral chance”) sets out to discover if “What we dream dreams us” applies to him as well. He seems to become part of many different aspects of the city’s life. On his way home, one part of him “hangs with the newspaper kite / caught in the power line,” suggesting not only kids having some cheap fun, but also his awareness of how Pinochet’s regime controls the press. Another part understands the poverty that leads to cement coffins “stacked six high.” A third part joins two girls perhaps hoping that mutilating coins with Pinochet’s image will lead to his downfall (the "paradise" embedded in Valparaiso).

The narrator mentions that he had “shopped for bread / and accents this morning,” another example of a pluperfect action, since the morning shopping took place before the afternoon shortcut. I haven’t the slightest idea what “accents” refer to. The last one and one-half lines refer, I think, to those daily events that, if we are lucky, bring us temporary transcendence. I can see how that might apply to the melon man, the kite-fliers, the girls at the railroad, but I’m not convinced that the narrator, by telling their stories, has achieved any transcendence in this poem. He carries home exactly what he bought that morning, nothing more.

This poem had little or no effect, intellectually or emotionally, on me. And truly, no poem should have the word “pluperfect” in its title.

As usual you give a detailed and erudite analysis. But your critique is more interesting than the poem itself. Much of the information you give can not be gotten from the poem. While every poet assumes there are basic facts and idioms known commonly to all the readersand therefore need no explanation, still there are limits to that assumption. In this poem there is no way a reader can know about all that references that you cite. How would we know from the four corners of the verse that the poem describes the coup in chile? How would we know the narrator is a Mormon from just reading the work?There is simply too wide a gap between what the poem actually implies and what you infer. I am well aware of the brutal Pinochet coup in chile and suspected that might be one of the themes; nevertheless, it would be too great a stretch to make the connection from what is

the poem itself.

MA, Richard brings up a good point: when does the 'supporting material" brought to a poem out weigh the poem itself? I think this poem wobbles badly without it's support, though in some sense it's saved a bit by its own internal construction. I am reminded of being in grad school and doing a very long intesne study of the the poet H.D. After her Imagist phase H.D. wrote long, deep, complicated poetry born out of her deep complex mythology of ancient Egypt, 19th century spiritualism, her Moravian past, Freud, and the afterlife. It took a stack of reference books to get thru just a couple of poems. At first it was like a dectective story, unraveling the mystery, then , after awhile, it got to be more like peeling an giant onion: the layers were endless and your eys teared more and more with each layer. Anyway....here I think I agree with Richard: your analysis is spot-on, but wouid seem to imply that this poem can't stand on its own, which I think you would agree with???

Dear Richard and OneArt, I used this poem as an excuse to remind myself the history of Chile, but I think you can omit all that history and still get a pretty good feel for the poem.

The poem describes a typical poor South American or African city in a country in which the "liberator" (fill in the blank) has not liberated the people from their poverty.

Even if we didn't know the poet teaches at BYU (and is probably a Mormon), the poem does use the phrase "an hour / of pastoral chance," which can be an ironic description of scenes that aren't "pastoral" in the usual sense but also a reference ((though slight) to his pastoral (evangelical) duties. The second sense of "pastoral" is reenforced in the reference to angels in the last couple of lines.

Regardless of the politics of a country, I think the poet wants us to concentrate on the small details involving humans who carry on with grace -- the melon man who "gives" a melon to some starving boys, the kids who create toys from a milk carton or newspapers, the girls who dare to destroy the face on a coin.

I'm not saying I totally understand the poem. For example, I wish I better understood ""What we dream dreams us." But I don't think a reader needs to know Chilean history to get the gist of the poem.

Now, "pluperfect" -- that's a horse of another color. I really don't think that word should have been used in the title......

Not sure where to place this, since I seem to have read it differently from every top poster thus far, but will do so here partly cuz i have a few more bones to pick with your analysis, MA :-)) [old times] than I perhaps do with others although a close call and moot point ..

First, I personally had no problem with "pluperfect" in the title and, of course, you didn't mean "should" to be an edict for universal taste, right? :-)) ... To me, from the outset, it led me into the poem as "how it was before it was" -- exploring a time before a time already gone by ... And it led to echoes of a grammar class, which also sets the scene for the pov of a foreigner to the landscape and people narrated because, presumably, the narrator is in the throes of heightened awareness of grammar (his own, English, as well as Spanish, given that there's nothing like learning another language and verb tenses more complex even than our own to have to be reminded in the process of terms like "pluperfect").

Second, I think that - along lines Richard and OA have already addressed in different words - you have said "narrator" in your analysis where perhaps you meant the poet himself?? We can suspect (or perhaps from some further googling, even know) that the poet may have been a Mormon missionary given his BYU connection, but there is nothing in the poem that dictates this is intended as being narrated from such a perspective.

And, as such, I for one had a MUCH more neutral reading of the poem, politically speaking (ironies abound, eh? me the ole politics-everywhere interpreter) than any of you so far - you or bf or falcon anyway ... I didn't think it was set in Pinochet's time (which your own discovery of the coins being recast with O'Higgins after the Pinochet dictatorship would seem to suggest - that the setting is more recent - although the coins may have had O'Higgins image pre-Pinochet as well) nor necessarily positioning itself pro- or con- past military regimes there except that I understood him to be partaking readily in the 'native' pleasure of seeing an ole dictator get smashed by a railroad into a melted hot visage - he seemed to share the two girls' bemusement at least in the pasttime.

And i was actually going along quite fine with the poem until its last two sentences, which I found a tad jarring and disruptive of a flow for reasons I may not yet fully be able to articulate but perhaps in part because they seem rather didactic, telling rather than showing - after a poem's worth of showing - but then thinking we the reader needed to be hit over the head with the message before the narrator's exit...

To falcon, I rather thought the use of "bejesus" coming from a presumably Mormon poet was not meant condescendingly - least I didn't read it that way ...

I found the poem full of paradox/irony... "Shortcuts" added an hour to his hurry ... "What we drink in drinks us" ..."What we dream dreams us"... It gradually built up for me a sense of an observer/narrator who was having to rethink his givens ... because of so much paradox ... and indeed he, the foreigner, finds himself wanting to try out the pasttime of the "wild-haired sisters" (without knowing whether he was there to 'convert' them or simply there, which is all the poem actually tells us) and seemingly "a stranger in a strange land" to him as he reacts with strong impression to an array of daily activity that his noticing suggests, no surprise, is unfamiliar to him ... Despite a few adjectives like "grabby," I didn't get a whole lot of 'judgment' or condescension from it - although i could be reacting slowly to something i'll yet perceive differently.

I rather liked several phrases like "rechewing their boredom" ... and how pieces of the narrator are found both aloft (and tangled) and also adrift and asleep ...

Third, MA, to me "accents" referred to the dialectic accents of the people the narrator observes - he is shopping literally for bread and figuratively for acquisition of that rarest of second-language acquisitions, a native-like accent for speaking the language ...

The more I've thought about it, since reading in wiki of the "liberator" O'Higgins exit via Valparaiso, i'm not so sure anymore that that inclusion is coincidental... Perhaps the narrator is invoking a foreigner before him who exited the country ("retreated into hiding" might even apply - angels, devils, ....one person's angel another's devil?) as perhaps he now is, although indeed we do not know what the narrator's ultimate destination is in presumably taking the train that is arriving, the one bound for Valparaiso - even that requires a tad bit of presumption but that would seem a reasonable expectation as to why he is at the train tracks himself...

All for now ...

p.s. to my earlier post in this thread which i wrote before yours here was posted...

To respond to your new query and to elaborate on my comment already: I think "What we dream dreams us" works analogously with "What we drink in drinks us" ... and the latter, to me, refers to the reciprocality of impact - in this case cross-culturally but i read it more globally than that even ... It reminds me in a way of a shamanistic principle (one of 7) - Where our attention goes, our energy flows. (the "If angels..." final line might be seen to be heading the same direction message-wise.)

And thus what we attend to - "drink in" - determines a direction of energy (which cannot help but be two-way - energy's travel impacting both directions, both ends of its flow ... and thus, similarly, with dreams ... It's a bit mystical but then that would be in keeping with a Latin American culture that produces a Gabriel Garcia Marquez - and many others who 'do' mystic realism... And i sense that these 'koans' of sorts that the narrator recites "what we drink..., "what we dream..." are capturings of his own learnings (from paradoxes? - see my other post) from having tasted of such a different culture from what he knows as familiar...

my two c's...

z

I think "What we dream dreams us" works analogously with "What we drink in drinks us" ... and the latter, to me, refers to the reciprocality of impact -

I agree, z, the two phrases are basically the same. But the first refers to the poor kids who bother the melon man, who then relents and give the kids a melon. I don't see that reciprocity with the narrator and the people he encounters (perhaps that's why he uses the word "dream").

And despite what you and others say, I don't see the narrator going on a train trip. In the second stanza, he speaks of "shortcuts home [ that] add an hour." And in the last stanza, he mentions shopping for bread and accents (thanks for the help, z) in the morning, and carrying them home later in the day. So I assume he's living in Santiago.

(the only verb tenses I know are past, present, future, and that other one -- conditional??)

Re-reading the last line, I think I see humility there -- he thought maybe he could connect with the people, but once the details are gone, our better angels "retreat into hiding."

The poem still doesn't move me, intellectually or emotionally.

I wasn't thinking of bejesus but of soccer - that when he'd arrived the street kids' version wasn't the real thing to him, that the narrator hadn't even known they don't call it soccer like he had. (Pluperfect enough for ya, Pilgrim? I think we called it past perfect in school) The pigs recycling holds for me a similar smirky tone. Whether he actually catches the train or is transformed by it, the important thing is it's bound for the Valley of Paradise. I think his meaning is that he came here thinking to transform the spiritually needy, and found his own spiritual need, and was himself transformed.

Hi, MaryAnn, You wrote a wonderful critique, but I think you may be over-extrapolating ... I'm OK reading the poem without knowing the details of the political history of Chile :-) I don't even think I care to assume the narrator is a Mormon missionary. Generally when I read a poem where the narrator is walking down a foreign street in a far-away country, I like to keep the character very neutral because I want to transplant myself into his body and experience the poem as if I were there myself. I was OK smashing coins on the train rails, but I didn't want to get into any proselytizing.

I'm realizing i shouldn't have tried to address your points outside of your thread cuz I probably had forgotten your wording enough that i seem to have misrepresented your focus of attention ... I can see your point about soccer as opposed to 'futebol' ...

When I read the poem, I'm pretty sure - because i am SO used to seeing people who know the correct term for it outside the US nevertheless say 'soccer' to an American audience just so they'll get the picture faster of what they're depicting. So I perhaps gave the poet an unconscious 'benefit of the doubt' and/or that it wasn't a "political" choice exactly.

But I see your point in that what comes next indeed includes an untranslated word 'feria' and so, by that token, why didn't he also use futebol. I agree with IT that if he is going to use and also italicize 'feria', it seems odd both that he didn't use 'futebol' in ital. but then why is Valparaiso in italics for that should not be ...

I didn't get the same smirkiness you did at the outset and perhaps because of that i also didn't get the spiritual transformation to the extent you did. Plausibly, my loss. But i just didn't - and still don't quite - get those readings. Nor that the train is bound for the "Valley of Paradise" ... Maybe i'm on the slow train today...

Hm. For me, the "drinks in ..." line refers to more than the melon man and kids ... I saw it more as an eyes on the horizon taking-in-the-totality-of-the-­experience-before-him kind of observation ... So it wasn't so different for me than the level the "dream" line ...

You're right that i lapsed into referring to him probably being there to take that train, but in fact that isn't how i had read it the first time - and your counterarguments are exactly the features that i think influenced my initial assessment too, but i'd forgotten or lost track of those features by the time i wrote that post in this thread.

I never learned so many names for verb tenses in English as when I took classes in French or Portuguese - but, yeah, pluperfect is a tense. As well as perfect. Methinks you've just shelved your inner grammar book, teach'.

Perhaps because I have lived in South America and seen lots of scenes on a daily basis somewhat in the vein of those the poet captures, that may have put me into the setting more readily.

Re "pastoral chance," I hadn't read it with dual meaning as you did, but i've come to think you may be right about that - I mean that it was intentional double-meaning. However, I still think it's speculative that the poet was actually ever a missionary there, much less the narrator. Aren't there profs at BYU who aren't Mormon? There must be one or two. No? I certainly have friends who prof'd in other Utah universities and survived despite being a rare non-Mormon there ... (I know why it was tempting to put BYU together with Chile and get Mormon missionary experience, but I just think it's built on presumption and not poem-based fact.)

This answers all questions. Well, all your questions.

<link>

Indeed. And it lends credence to your reading of it in that (still in the realm of some degree of extrapolation) he was a mere kid of 19 to 21 while he was there (unless he subsequently returned on vacation?) and, likely, all the more prone to the stereotypical superciliousness of "worldly wise" 20 yr olds (in their own self-opinion).

(I will refrain from commenting on what i think of sending 19-21 yr olds on global missions - military, missionary, or otherwise) ...

:-)

and, indeed, to pre-empt MA's "I told you so" :-)) [sorry, MA] it also positions the poet (if not the narrator or the poem) in full center of the Pinochet regime ...

You want realms of degrees of extrapolation? How about....my interpretation is supported by his semi-finalism in the Joseph Campbell Poetry Award race....I'm not making this up...well, maybe just a little.