The Poet Who Wasn't

Carlos Fuentes died last week, a writer with a poet’s heart who didn’t write poetry.

In 1986, as part of a master’s program, I took a course at Washington University in St. Louis entitled “The Latin American Novel.” Cretin that I was, the only Latin American author I was familiar with was Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his One Hundred Years of Solitude. That happened to be the first book assigned in the course, and while most of the class (largely adults in their 40s and 50s; I was the kid at 35) were dismayed by “magic realism,” I wasn’t. Reading One Hundred years of Solitude was like reading some of my own history, growing up in New Orleans.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.