In 1962, Luis Garcia was dating Wefe Langhorst whom he had met while they were both students at Contra Costa Community College. Wefe had been raised in Europe and was two or three years younger than Luis. Her parents, Fred and Lois Langhorst, were prominent architects in the Bay Area, although by 1962, Fred, in his early 60s, was divorced from Lois. Lois was in her 40s, still very beautiful, and held a position in the UC Berkeley School of Architecture. Wefe lived with her mother and her younger sister, Lothian, in a house on Magnolia Street, near Ashby and Claremont in Berkeley. Lu spent all of his time at the house. He was given permanent accommodation on the living room sofa. The entire Magnolia Street household was gifted, artistic, and musical. Lothian played the harpsichord and piano. A young cellist friend of Lothian's, who went by the name of "Uitti" (her name was actually Frances Marie Uitti, but everyone called her "Uitti" as if that were her first name) inspired Lu's poem, "The Cellist" in The Calculated Lion.

THE CELLIST
For Uitti

Unexpectedly this music,
this sunlight arrived.
The sky turns
suddenly clear;
flowers sprout in my head;
deep in my body
gardens begin;
the most suburban
cells april.
Your fingers move
over cello strings;
the sunlight falls
breeding flowers.

I had been long unfamiliar
with greenness:
for a long time contentment
had been only a distance.
Then
unexpectedly
this sunlight.

Fred Langhorst was awarded a Fulbright to spend 1963 in Santiago. He took Wefe with him and invited Lu to come along. They flew to Chile in January 1963. Chile in 1963—these were the good years. The Christian Democrats were in power. Lu was 24 years old.

Luis enrolled in the Universidad Católica de Chile. He lasted two weeks. It was difficult to understand lectures taught entirely in Spanish. He and Wefe broke apart; she took a new Chilean lover, and Luis fell in with the surrealist painters and writers who frequented the cafes of Santiago. Soon Lu was spending long hours with his new friends, drinking coffee, wine, taking over-the-counter dexadrine, and trying to write poetry. Sometimes he slept in hotels; the rooms cost less than $1/night. Sometimes he crashed at the apartments of his new friends. Many times the parties in the cafés lasted all night.

He met the poet and physicist, Nicanor Parra, whose "Anti-Poemas" had been discovered by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg the year before. Nicanor Parra became a mentor. Parra was 50 years old at the time and maintained a residence on the outskirts of Santiago, in the foothills of the Andes Mountains, where he lived with a very beautiful Chilean woman. The late revolutionary singer, Violeta Parra, had been Nicanor's sister; her children&mdas;his niece and nephew—were the musicians Isabel and Angel Parra. Lu would often visit him.

Also very important during this year was Stella Diaz Varin, a powerful feminist and a Communist, who had gained fame in her 20s with "The Autobiography of a Tree." Lu and Stella would talk for hours on end. Luis learned a great deal of Spanish from her. Through Stella, Lu met a group of artists who created works involving giant puppets. These left-wing artists were fond of referring to the right wing as "las mumias" or the mummies.

Luis spent considerable time in the Parque Quinta Normal, one of Santiago's most beautiful parks, visiting its galerias to study the work of the Chilean Surrealist painter, Roberto Matta. Luis was reading Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, and was very influenced by the "Generation of 27"—Luis Cernuda, Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali—who had all lived at or been associated with Madrid's "La Residencia de Estudiantes" in the 1920s and 1930s. During this year Luis, struggling very hard to get the sound, the images, playing with fragments, wrote the poems in The Calculated Lion.

He returned to Berkeley near the end of 1963. Nicanor Parra had given him the address of Fernando Alegría, a Chilean poet who would become a cultural attaché with the Allende government, but who was then teaching at UC Berkeley. (Alegría later took a position at Stanford University.) Sometime in early summer 1964, James Schevill set up a poetry reading for Luis at San Francisco State's Poetry Center. Lennart Bruce came up afterward and introduced himself. Lu became lifelong friends with Lennart, and with George Hitchcock, the founder of Kayak Magazine and Press. Later Lennart Bruce and Matthew Zion would translate Fernando Alegría's Instructions for Undressing the Human Race. Lu still considers this a unique jewel of a book.

In 2007 Luis describes himself as an "atonal cynic" who is just trying to put together a small body of his own work. "As age encroaches, I'm in a hurry to get nowhere," he says. "I realize the hour is getting late." From his forthcoming collection, A Message from Garcismo (Tangram Press, 2008), he reiterates this sentiment in his poem, "Happy Birthday."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY
(1/10/2006, the poet's 67th)

He's all dressed up
and he's got

some place
to go—

but no time

to go there.

(Notes taken by Gail Chiarello in conversations with Luis Garcia in March & October, 2007.)

Postscript: His mother was born Blanche Mertins and was raised in Missouri, but moved to California in her teens and went to high school in Long Beach, California. Blanche later graduates from UC Berkeley. Her father, Louis Mertins, was a poet, and a biographer and bibliographer of Robert Frost's, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. Louis Mertin's wife, Esther, was the Registrar at the University of the Redlands. They had a 5-acre ranch with orange groves where Lu spent many summers. He remembers writing his very first poems in their house, when he was 14 or 15. [NI067] Old bible passed from grandmother Jane Murray Woolem to her oldest daughter, Bertha Wercham who passed it to her sister Lois Langhorst our (Jewel) mother's sister Nov. 14, 1924. Aunt Lois passed it to Jewel Flynn after her death and Uncle Fred's death in Aug. 1982. Signed Jewel M. Flynn 2/20/83 Nicanor Parra born 1914 Fred Langhorst born June 30, 1905 Luis Cernuda born September 21, 1902 in Spain, died November 5, 1963 in Mexico City of a heart attack. Teaches June-July 1960 at UCLA. Teaches at SF State 1961-1962. Teaches September 1962-June 1963 at UCA.