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| Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > 2005 > May-June 2005 | ||||||||
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5/5/2005
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| Todd Temkin in Valparaiso. Photograph by René Véliz |
Temkin founded an organization called Fundación Valparaiso, which is revitalizing the once-thriving seaport. “It's the most extraordinary city you could ever imagine,” he says. “It lived a spectacular golden age from 1848, when the California gold rush caused a mushrooming of intercontinental shipping, until 1914, when the Panama Canal was opened.” Expatriate communities put an unmistakably European stamp on Valparaiso's architecture and city design, on its great cultural tradition, and on the seven universities that still exist there. But for 80 years, the city of 280,000 people had been gradually sliding into disrepair. “When I arrived there, Valparaiso was a poor, decadent, forgotten place,” Temkin explains. “But it had all this character and oozed charm. The 20th century just sort of jumped over Valparaiso. Somebody had to do something.”
Temkin's route from suburban Milwaukee to Valparaiso resulted from a “long history of making unobvious choices,” he says. Temkin began college at Indiana but quit a semester short of a degree in English to work in a foundry in Sedona, Arizona. Attracted by the Twin Cities' progressive reputation, he came to Minnesota in 1987 to finish his degree. A master's in poetry followed. In 1992, Temkin moved to Chile to teach English. A hilly, west coast port city in the southern hemisphere, “Valparaiso has been called an inverted San Francisco,” Temkin explains. “Moving to San Francisco would have been the obvious choice [for a poet], so I moved to Valparaiso.”
Temkin spent a few years teaching and writing while falling in love with Valparaiso. The idea of creating an organization to promote a cultural revival in Valparaiso was already brewing in his mind. Temkin's break came when teaching English to business students at the prestigious Universidad Adolfo Ibañez. “I was so excited about this idea that I got my students and some of my colleagues excited,” he recalls, “and they taught me how to put together a business plan.”
At the time, charitable giving was rare in Chile, in part because of well-founded concerns that the government controlled most nonprofits. So Temkin declared the foundation “an ideology-free zone,” and convinced a supermarket mogul to give him $500,000 to start the organization in 1998. International grants and corporate gifts followed. The foundation publishes a tourist newspaper; broadcasts a weekly radio show called Dissidents' Cemetery (after an actual graveyard in Valparaiso) that debates all sides of cultural, development, and current affairs; and organizes cultural festivals: film, jazz, opera, ethnic music, and more.
By the time the foundation had completed its first major revitalization project (restoring 23 homes and three public spaces in a historic neighborhood in 2001) the Chilean media had latched onto Temkin. “I became famous as the gringo who began to bring money into Valparaiso,” he says. In 2003, central Valparaiso was named a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and became the de facto cultural capitol of Chile when the new national Ministry of Culture was established there.
And tourism has boomed, especially among Chileans. “People from Santiago [90 minutes away by car] say to me, 'We've been spending money to go to Europe all these years and we could have just been coming to Valparaiso.'”
But with all the successes (Temkin has twice been nominated Person of the Year in Valparaiso by the newspaper El Mercurio de Valparaiso), running the foundation has, at times, been as much burden as joy. “The foundation has become this huge holding company that has 20 smaller companies,” he says. “It's way beyond the ken of an M.A. in poetry. . . . I had a lot of personal projects I'd put on hold. I started to realize things were getting out of control personally.”
Last year, Temkin decided the Chilean government was sufficiently dedicated to revitalizing Valparaiso, and he took a step back to spend more time with his wife, Pilar Silva, a native of Chile, and their two young children. He also finished Crazy Denizens, his first book of poetry, working with a colleague to translate the poems in a collaborative fashion that held to the English meaning while capturing the “authenticity, cadence, and music” of Spanish.
Michael Dennis Browne, a University English professor Temkin credits with discovering his poetic gift, introduced Temkin at the Coffman reading. The book has “several worlds layered,” Browne said. There is a hint of the Latin American “intensity and range and ferocity. But there's also a plainer quality in there of someone born and raised in Milwaukee.”
The works in Crazy Denizens are at times autobiographical, at times profound, and sometimes wholly unexpected (such as a poem about his dog's breath). From “The Capital of Nothing”:
My life could be summed up
the day the city paved over my favorite creek:
it's about good drainage and waste removal, little lives
that dare to step out of their silent shelter and
into the light. . . .
Copernicus was right: it is better to be starry-eyed
and insignificant, a dot in an infinite field, the capital
of nothing, than to cling tenaciously to our own delusions
whose deaths will go unnoticed by the stars.
“Poetry is the foundation of everything,” Temkin said after the reading. “Poetry is the art of seeing what's not there. I don't think the foundation could have existed had the poet not existed first.”