A Poet Returns to His Muse : Literature: Nicaraguan editor Pablo Antonio Cuadra has given up journalism and is refocusing his attention on poetry. He will participate in the Los Angeles Festival this weekend.

A small wooden sentry stands guard near the front door of Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s home in Managua’s exclusive Las Colinas neighborhood. The statue, carved at the art commune of Solentiname, center of Nicaragua’s cultural renaissance, depicts Jonah in the belly of a whale.

“For me,” Cuadra explains, “it represents the Resurrection of Christ.”

But for others, the statue is just as likely to symbolize the resurrection of Cuadra. After a decade of fighting the censors and cultural hierarchy of Nicaragua’s deposed Sandinista government, Cuadra, who many consider to be one of the most important literary voices of the 20th Century, is returning to his poetry full time.

The Sandinistas’ defeat in last February’s national elections ended a bitter period in Cuadra’s life. As editor of La Prensa, Nicaragua’s supermarket tabloid-style afternoon newspaper, Cuadra directed a fierce campaign against the government. That led to tight censorship and eventually a yearlong publishing ban of La Prensa, and a short period of self-exile for Cuadra. But it also produced a presidential victory for Violetta Barrios de Chamorro, the paper’s publisher.

And after that final victory, Cuadra, 78, stepped down as editor to become an adviser to La Prensa, freeing valuable time for poetry.

“I feel more free now,” he said. “Journalism and poetry are not good friends.”

Cuadra will demonstrate the fruits of that new-found freedom this weekend in the Los Angeles Festival. Cuadra and Peruvian poet Blanca Varela, whose work offers a similar attack on the powerful, open the La Terra Nova 1990: Pacific Poetry Festival at 8 p.m. Saturday at Occidental College’s Keck Auditorium.

Cuadra may be finished with journalism, but it’s unlikely he’s through with politics. Inevitably, Nicaragua’s writers have always found themselves drawn into their country’s turbulent politics and Cuadra’s career certainly offers no exception.

He began writing during the charged atmosphere of the 1920s--when U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua--and he soon became active in the political and cultural projects of la Vanguardia. The movement--whose ranks included poets Jose Coronel Urtecho, Joaquin Pasos and Octavio Rosas--was deeply influenced by European fascism and fervently backed the U.S.-imposed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Garcia.

Stylistically, poets of la Vanguardia were influenced by fledgling trends in North American literature. The result--a poetry built around conversational language, free verse, dialogue and satirical humor, among other devices--is a distinctly Nicaraguan poetry.

“We were never a group of provincial poets writing about church steeples,” Cuadra told cultural historian Steven White. “We wanted to see what was going on in the world, assimilate it, and then create our own poetry. And we did that instinctively.”

Among those most inspired by the new approach was Cuadra’s cousin, Ernesto Cardenal, perhaps the most widely read Nicaraguan poet since Ruben Dario.

But by 1934, when “Poemas nicaraguenses” (“Nicaraguan Poems”), Cuadra’s first collection of poems, was published, the author was already beginning to question the political orientation of la Vanguardia. Three years later, Cuadra was jailed by Somoza for demonstrating against the dictatorship.

Whether by choice or by circumstance, Cuadra has never strayed far from politics since. Jailed twice and continually harassed by the government during the Somoza family’s 33-year reign, Cuadra worked clandestinely with the Sandinistas during the Nicaraguan revolution. But shortly after the guerrilla army came to power, Cuadra found himself again leading the opposition, only this time he was tilting at a different windmill.

The one constant since his break with la Vanguardia, Cuadra insists, has been his promotion of Nicaraguan nationalism, democracy and self-determination. But he has insisted on doing so outside the rigid constraints of party politics.

“You need freedom to create,” he says. “When an artist uses (partisan) politics in his work, he makes propaganda. And when an artist does that, he loses the ability for self-criticism.

“The artist and the poet must become personally engaged in the political struggle but he must not compromise his art.”

Which is not to suggest that Cuadra’s poetry is apolitical; indeed, many of his poems are just the opposite. In an early work, “Poem of the Foreign Movement in the Jungle,” Cuadra rails against the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua, a nationalistic stand he repeated a few years ago in “The Calabash Tree.”

But there are other themes and inspirations, as well. An enthusiastic student of Nicaraguan history and indigenous culture, Cuadra has compiled an extensive collection of books on ethnography and archeology. He is also widely read in mythology and linguistics and speaks fluent French. He may be the closest thing Nicaragua has to a Renaissance man--and each of these interests have made their way into his poetry.

With his thick-rimmed glasses, gray hair and mustache, Don Pablo Antonio--he prefers the traditional formal address--even looks the part of an intellectual, or college professor, which he has been at various times in his life.

And despite some impressive--and unlikely--political victories, Cuadra insists his most lasting contribution to Nicaragua has been his poetry.

“The poet creates the language of the future,” he says. “Art is one of the messages that transcends the human condition.”