Leonel Góngora (1932-1998)
 If Ajeno is an unknown poet, appropriately one of his inspirations was an unknown painter, fellow countryman Leonel Góngora. Born in Cartago, Colombia, in 1932, Góngora studied art in Bogotá and then in America at the University of St. Louis, Missouri. He lived in Italy for a while at the end of the 1950s, and from 1960 to 1963 in Mexico City, but he's mainly associated with the Rhino Horn group of artists who pursued the figurative aspect of German Expressionism with its angst and violence in the United States. They chose a rhino horn to symbolise the strength and virility of their work, as they perceived it.
In an interview, the painter Luis Caballero has emphasized the "temas sexuales y sensuales violentamente agresivos" (the violently aggressive sexual and sensual themes) of Góngora's painting. Góngora liked to view himself as an incarnation of the legendary Secret Painter of Spain who painted, seduced and abandoned virgins (no longer virgin) in every village. Góngora's often acidic eroticism obviously appealed to Ajeno, although we don't know when or where Ajeno saw the works. Góngora has been described as woefully overlooked -- maybe this aspect of the painter also struck a chord in Ajeno.
From El grupo Mito y Los Nadaistas by Tomás Angel Espinosa
in Jornadas de la Poesía Colombiana del siglo XX (Medellín, 2001):
Despite some similarities to the Mito Group and the Nadaistas [see note below], Miguel Ajeno belongs to no school of poetry, except perhaps to his own, which we might call Ajenísmo since it rejects most ordinary values of society and concepts of beauty, yet does so in an eroticised semi-frenzy. Indeed, the central obsessions of his poetry are lust and morbidity allied to rage at poverty and at exploitation -- by which he nevertheless seems attracted, as a moth to a flame, just as he is simultaneously attracted to the Marilyn persona yet rails politically at what she represents.
To what extent does Ajeno identify himself with Guillermo in Death of an Unknown Poet? Did Guillermo exist, or not? We cannot say, since Guillermo remained unknown. However Ajeno clearly (or obscurely) regards himself likewise as unknown and maybe unknowable too, perhaps even to himself. Which is why he wrote his paradoxical poetry, to express in passion and anguish contradictions and impossibilities.
note: The poetry magazine Mito, established in 1955 during the dictatorship of Rojas Pinilla, published poetry influenced by Borges, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Genet. The Nadaista group of poets, in turn, used extreme experimentalism to attack the élite status of poetry which seemed irrelevant in the face of the violence which afflicted the whole nation.
Short biography of Sándor Weöres
 Sándor Weöres (1913-1989) is one of the most important lyric poets in 20th century Hungarian literature, his work being strongly surrealistic and mystical. Besides travelling in the Far East and Italy, he translated nearly every major European poet. Weöres who wrote lines such as Let the beasts whine at your grave my father or The Dazzling is always coming to earth to beg for mud or The Muddy Drink is Going Down and the Bottom of the Glass Shows Through was evidently very sympathetic to Ajeno's poetry. In an interview in 1963 Weöres said that one should explore everything, including those things which will never be accepted. Sometimes Weöres created imaginary languages, and not many readers can distinguish between the names he invented and real names.
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