Getting a rare glimpse into a poet’s notebooks

O’Hara uses computer to bring scattered work to students, scholars

A UW professor donated the fruits of his research project to Allen Library last week, creating the Luis Hernandez Poetry Archive in the Special Collections unit. Edgar O’Hara, an associate professor in Spanish and Portuguese Studies, had received a Royalty Research Fund grant to transfer images of the elusive poet’s notebooks to compact disk and also to make color copies for use by students and scholars.

Edgar O’Hara holds a collage containing some pages from the notebooks of the late poet Luis Hernandez, together with a Paul Klee artwork that Hernandez was fond of. O’Hara recently completed a project to preserve the poet’s notebooks.

Hernandez, O’Hara explains, is legendary in his native Peru, where he was known not only as a poet but also as a physician and unfortunately, a substance abuser. In 1977, he died under mysterious circumstances while supposedly undergoing treatment in a clinic in Argentina. He was only 35. Hernandez left behind only three slim volumes of poetry, but after 1965 he wrote in notebooks, which he gave away to friends and strangers alike.

“The notebooks are full of poetry, but also of drawings, quotes and even music that he wrote,” O’Hara says. “We wanted to preserve all the contents of the notebooks, not just the poems.”

The archive contains 18 CDs recorded from 54 notebooks, as well as physical reproductions of the notebooks themselves. Recording the notebooks in this way allows the user to see not only their full contents, but also the way in which the poet worked. Hernandez used markers in different colors for his poems, and also wrote in different styles of handwriting.

“I have done two collections of his poetry, one of which concentrated on a particular notebook, but it’s a different experience to see the original material,” O’Hara says.

O’Hara has been interested in Hernandez since his college days in Lima. Also a native of Peru (“My great-grandfather was Irish,” he says), he was among a group of students who wrote and studied poetry and idolized Hernandez. In 1976, when they heard the poet was giving a reading, they joined a packed audience at the National Institute of Culture. Hernandez appeared flanked by two bodyguards because his behavior was so unpredictable, O’Hara says. It was the only public reading the poet ever gave.

After Hernandez’s death, someone interested in his poetry gathered some of his notebooks and put together a 1978 collection that O’Hara says was not very carefully done. A second edition in 1983 contained more poems but was otherwise no different. O’Hara, meanwhile, wrote about Hernandez several times while working as a journalist, and later, as a graduate student at the University of Texas, wrote a long essay about the poet. But it wasn’t until 1994 that he had his first glimpse of some of the notebooks.

“At that time I had the green light to do the first collection of his poetry that I worked on,” O’Hara said. “It was an incredible experience, to see the actual notebooks.”

He noticed, however, that the notebooks were not being kept in ideal circumstances. The poet’s brother had donated five of them to Peru’s National Library, another 40 were in a box in someone’s home, while at least nine were scattered about with various friends and acquaintances of the poet. Copying the notebooks’ contents onto CDs seemed to O’Hara to be a way to make sure they were preserved and accessible.

The research fund grant freed O’Hara from teaching for the spring 99 quarter. He used the time to go to Peru and Argentina with a photographer, a digital camera and a laptop computer to get images from each page of the notebooks. While there, he was interviewed by newspapers and television, and the resulting stories led to the discovery of more notebooks. From one quarter, the project stretched out to a year.

Last week, the library held a special ceremony, attended by the Peruvian consul, to receive the CDs and reproductions from O’Hara. Library officials say they plan to make the material searchable through “Content” multimedia software.

O’Hara’s students will be among the first people to use the archive. This fall he’s teaching a 400 level class on - what else - the poetry of Luis Hernandez. ¶

Nancy Wick