Poems from quebrada de la virgen / Armando Rojas Guardia (Caracas, 1949)


Poemas de quebrada de la virgen (Caracas: Fundarte, 1985)


19

Unsought, they arise today
the bread without the table's support,
the clear water without the cup,
the tree without the letters that write or pronounce it,
the punctual bird in the sleeping city.
The rain stepping on the grass and resucitating
virgin perfumes. The new lime
glows on the wall of the belltower
where Sunday calls me in.
That piece of moss on the pavement
reminds me that the World (subversive)
eventually defeats History. And with him,
this day conquers, complete and silent,
surrender within its glut, trash
accumulated on the sidewalk yesterday.
There's a holiday in the entrails of silence
and even the motorcycles sound today
in the festive emptiness, like a circus
of prehistoric animals playing
in the ear's sylvan childhood.
The ever-present street is another street:
a stamp written from behind
in the first calligraphy of light.
There are no butterflies but instead
that dog's eyes, under the porch,
are thankful, watery, in the warm sun.
They watch me, ignoring their own sweetness
in the ecstatic prayer of instinct.
How did this hour's myth crystalize
within the liquid atheism of time?
Someone draws the day for us.
Someone loves me today, secretly.

Pobrecito poeta que era yo / Roque Dalton


translation from Roque Dalton, Pobrecito poeta que era yo (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1994). Dalton concludes the novel with the following dates: "San Salvador, 1964 / La Habana, 1971-1973."

"Fuck off but listen: we're that type of person that's always condemned to be nothing more than a foreigner. In any part of the world and even more so in this, our heavy and miniscule nation. [...] I'd like to drink now. I think that with a couple of drinks I could end up writing all of it. In other words, that single purpose that I never end up designing, and which eludes me without being able to write down its outline. Is this another fear?" (321)


"Early, near dawn a guard came by and turned on the light for a moment. He brought me several newspapers to make my bed with on the floor and (Latin American surrealism is life itself!) a little novel by Rafael Perez y Perez. While handing me the novel he said that early in the morning a ray of sun entered the cell for one or two hours and that I could read at that time, since the frightened colonel prohibited the use of lights at night. He also asked me to say, if another guard caught me with the novel, that I had brought it with me from the street. It sounded dreadful to have to go on saying that one is carrying one of those little novels by Rafael Perez y Perez around, but I wasn't about to get stuck in a literary discussion with that friendly son of God. Besides, before leaving me alone again, he explained that he'd brought me things to read because he knew that imprisoned artists went crazy or died without having anything to read, as had happened last year with a certain violinist, in this very cell." (373)

Poemas de quebrada de la virgen / Armando Rojas Guardia


"19

No buscados, hoy amanecen
el pan sin el soporte de la mesa,
el agua regia sin el vaso,
el árbol sin las letras que lo escriben o pronuncian,
el pájaro puntual en la ciudad dormida.
La lluvia pisa la grama y resucita
vírgenes perfumes. La cal nueva
fulge en la pared del campanario
donde el domingo me convoca.
Ese trozo de musgo en el asfalto
me recuerda que el Mundo, subversivo,
derrota a la Historia finalmente. Y con él,
vence este día, cabal e impronunciado,
rendimiento en su fasto la basura
acumulada ayer sobre la acera.
Hay asueto en la entraña del silencio
y hasta las motocicletas braman hoy
en el vacío festivo, como un circo
de animales prehistóricos jugando
en la infancia silvestre del oído.
La calle de siempre es otra calle:
una estampa escrita por detrás
en la caligrafía primera de la luz.
No hay mariposas, pero en cambio
los ojos de aquel perro, bajo el porche,
agradecen, acuosos, el sol tibio.
Me miran ignorando su dulzura
en la extática plegaria del instinto.
¿Cómo cristalizó el mito de esta hora
en el ateísmo líquido del tiempo?
Alguien dibuja el día por nosotros.
Alguien me ama hoy, secretamente.

(A Alberto Barrera)



25

Así como a veces desearíamos
que Karl Marx y Arthur Rimbaud
se hubiesen conocido en una mesa
de algún Café de Londres,
mientras en el agua sorda del Támesis
-ahíta de grumos aceitosos
que flotan entre botellas y colillas
y ropa gris de gente ahogada-
espera el Barco Ebrio, ya sin anclas,
a que el fantasma que recorra Europa
suba también, para zarpar
(Karl, vestido con blue jeans marineros
se despide de Engels en el muelle
y Tahúr hace lo propio con Verlaine
-los sueños insolentes hasta ahora enfundados
en la gorra que usó él mismo en la Comuna);
así como, a estas alturas, quisiéramos
que Hegel, apeado del estrado de su cátedra,
hubiese visitado a Hölderlin un día
en su manicomio oculto de la torre
para escuchar cómo el demente
-sin reconocerlo tal vez en su delirio-
le habla de un viejo amigo de Tubinga
con quien, en mitad de una fiesta adolescente,
bailó una mañana, junto a un árbol
por ellos mismos levantado
(“Libertad”, lo llamarían)
tan fieros y felices como niños orinándose,
con el impudor de los puerros, frente al rey
(en la siesta monocorde del verano,
recordando novias suavísimas de Heidelberg,
los dos compañeros se confiesan:
la razón deben pedirle a la locura
su danza irreductible, la inocencia
con que el loco Hiperión, desde su torre,
enseña al profesor de la luz blanca,
la rosa de los vientos del Espíritu,
no termina en el Estado de los Césares,
se burla de las Prusias de los Káiseres);
así querría yo hoy que a William Blake
lo hubiesen dejado predicar un solo día
sobre el púlpito labrado de una iglesia
-la catedral de Westminster, por ejemplo-
en presencia de arzobispos y presbíteros
y de una multitud de feligreses
harta, como todas, de sermones.
Imagino el viento sagrado resonando,
por primera vez, junto a los mármoles,
mientras los cuerpos, desnudados por fin
como a la hora del agua o del amor,
se erizan con el paso del Dios vivo
y tiemblan ante el olor de Cristo el Tigre
devorando las ingles de las almas,
ahora tan intactas, tan ebrias y tan vírgenes
como la de aquel niño canoso viendo ángeles
a la hora en que arde Venus sobre Lambeth
y hasta las prostitutas de Soho profetizan."

(1985)

Rafael Cadenas / Entrevistas

Interviews with the author 1966-1999.


“Really, I think that the writer can, at any time, sit down to write. In the poet’s case, it doesn’t happen like this. It’s easier to tell someone: ‘I’m going to write an article’ than to say: ‘I’m going to write a poem.’ This doesn’t mean that prose is not difficult. Good prose is rare.” (132)


“What is poetry for you?
Something that is in poetry in the form of writing and outside of her, in the theater, in the novel, in the essay, in painting, in music, in conversation, in class, anyplace where the mechanical is broken and life enters the scene.

In cultural terms, poetry is a form of expression. It constitutes a subsidiary orb, never fundamental. The foundation is reality, that which we don’t know, which radically exists. I still believe that poetry can get us closer to the silence in which this reality is felt.” (249)


Rafael Cadenas, Entrevistas (Caracas: Ediciones La Oruga Luminosa, 2000)

Telenovela II


Scenes also sketched out for inclusion of car rides throughout East and West Caracas, into Catia through Plaza O'Leary, the massive blocks of 23 de Enero buildings on the hill, past the Biblioteca Nacional. An entire chapter dedicated to the malls that sprang up in Venezuela Saudita's 1970s wealth years while we were there, between 1976 and 1982. Miami, then, was an extension of that Caracas so identified with concrete and forested by mountains. Robberies on the outskirts of the plot, in newspaper pages or tele-reportajes.

While this novel is primarily diaristic in its measurement of travels in perpetuity.

"Stephen, to avoid getting into a futile argument in defence of his politics, asked, 'What about the conventional Capitalist views you have reverted to as you have grown older. Are you happy with them now?'
'No, not happy. But what else is there?'
'There is Marxism, which you have rejected in spite of the fact that present day Capitalism is in just the kind of crisis that Marx so well understood and explained.'
Peter said nothing. He gave the impression that he would be bored by any further discussion on this subject."
{Edward Upward, An Unmentionable Man, 1994}

Telenovela

Part of the novel (letters sent across Europe or the Atlantic) would be scenes at Cesar Vallejo's grave in the Montparnasse cemetery. They had originally gone out to Montrouge on the metro, passing into the (postcolonial) sidewalks through the Gare du Nord, after having seen Peruvian musicians in the echoed, arched in blue tiles hallways. As in The Autograph Man Zadie Smith describes a "cat-faced" Peruvian musician, one reads, an aspect of travel. For music.

Surca el mar / Juan Sánchez Peláez

The sea furrows

My face observed by
the sun and moon
beside a memory of Valparaiso

profound, beautiful desire
for youth's drunkenness
ondulates far off
in the distance there

the sea furrows
a sail
brings unknown melodies
with the years’ rough sound,

in twilight’s mist
inside autumn afternoons
dreams undulate, arrive
returning from Valparaiso

and the insomniac port
remains dreaming
its eyes staying
close to my eyes




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Verbigracia, El Universal, 28 April 2001 }

"career
career
career
career
career..."
{Crooked Rain Crooked Rain}

Albatross

"Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant tide
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine

And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the wheres or whys
But something stirs and
Something tries
And starts to climb towards the light

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me"
{Pink Floyd, "Echoes", Meddle, 1971}

Journals

One of the books I've often returned to in the past decade is Allen Ginsberg's Indian Journals. I love its chaotic, crowded snapshots of Benares, and the hours described sitting with saddhus smoking and listening. It seems one of the few times that Ginsberg slows down his own ego and offers the reader clear glimpses of the material world around him. I get the sense that the fractured nature of his prose is enhanced by Ginsberg's New Yorkese language being surrounded by other alphabets. I also appreciate his candor when facing horror in the suffering and poverty on the streets and alleys of Benares. There are, of course, the inevitable moments of hippie Orientalism, but for the most part he stays true to the notebook and the material & spiritual landscapes around him. I always laugh at his (jealous?) dismissal of Octavio Paz spending his time in India playing tennis.

It was this book that first taught me to appreciate the wider possibilities of notebook writing, as opposed to the "static" existence of a single poem, or collection. The tension between prose and verse seems productive to me. So, this might be what draws me to all these blogs floating around in the machine. Nick Piombino's journal poems & entries, spanning the last three decades, always offer me what I feel is a privilged glimpse into that mythical and mundane object, a poet's notebook. His post today on our responsibility to the political sphere as poets is, for me, an important one. Eileen also has some crucial things to say about the sometimes counterproductive qualities of irony, or "hipness," in (post-whatever) poetry. After all, how "hip" can it be to live under a president who can barely read.

As for my own politics, I think I'm a nihilist more than anything (what is this, The Big Lebowski?). I have an apocalyptic mindset at the moment. I'm not proud of this, and I do still believe in the primacy of Spirit and Vision.

"Sadness is and sadness was
And sadness will always be because"
{Thurston Moore, Psychic Hearts, 1995}

Spiderland

In 1993 I was living in Boulder, CO for the summer when I came across the music of Slint. Since being introduced to them by a fellow writer (who at the time was editing the zine Basura--I remember only his first name: Bob. Hello out there, Bob Basura.), I've considered their album Spiderland as a (poetic) bible of sorts. Sitting in Bob's living room one July afternoon, surrounded by trees, he pulled an LP out of its sleeve while he handed me the album cover with it's black & white band photo. I was floored by what I heard that day. We must have listened to it several times. The album never wears out its mystery for me. The whispered and spoken lyrics with semi-sinister undertones vibrating within the narratives. The sudden shifts between acoustic melody and massive walls of electric guitar fuzz. Always the weird poetry sweetness of the lyrics.

Based in Louisville, Kentucky, they split up soon after releasing this LP in 1991. Plenty of rumors and myths surrounding them (did they really spend time in mental hospitals after recording Spiderland?). Their final recording was an untitled EP released in 1994 with two blistering instrumentals that always come close to shredding the speakers.

If I had audioblog I'd post one of their songs. Spiderland is a great country. Below are the lyrics to the first song on the album.

"Breadcrumb Trail

I stepped out onto the midway. I was looking for the pirate
ship and saw this small, old tent at one end. It was blue,
and had white lights hanging all around it. I decided to check
out the tent, it seemed I could hear music coming from inside.
As I walked toward it, I passed a crowd of people at the sideshow.
I couldn't figure out why they would want to wait in line. I
pulled back the drape thing on the tent. There was a crystal
ball at the table, and behind it, a girl wearing a hat. She
smiled, and asked me if I wanted my fortune read. I said okay,
and sat down. I thought about it for a minute, and asked her
if she would rather go on the roller coaster instead.

Creeping up into the sky. Stopping, at the top and,
starting down. The girl grabbed my hand, I clutched it
tight. I said good-bye to the ground.

Far below, a soiled man. A bucket of torn tickets at his side.
He watches as the children run by. And picks his teeth. Spinning
'Round, my head begins to turn. I shouted, and searched the sky
for a friend. I heard the fortune teller, screaming back at me.
We stuck out our hands, and met the winds.

The girl falters as she steps down from the platform. She
clutches her stomach, and begins to heave. The ticket-taker
smiles, and the last car is ready. Who told you that you
could leave?

The sun was setting by the time we left. We walked across
the deserted lot, alone. We were tired, but we managed to smile.
At the gate I said goodnight to the fortune teller. The
carnival sign threw colored shadows on her face, but I could
tell she was blushing."

"Finally the hieroglyph is edible"

"Wordsworth's hopes are faint and delicate, arising out of anxiety and doubt, and so tinged by them. His hopes seem so airy because they represent a merely intellectual or psychological shift. The material situation that necessitated them, the world they attempt to reengage, remains the same. Only one question is left: whether or not the speaker can readjust his attitude, so as to mollify himself. All the activity, and all possibility of movement, occurs within his own mind, which is at once the seat of his trouble and the only available source of remedy. What makes the struggle so fine, and so tricky, is that paradox. The speaker confronts an insoluble dilemma: how are adequate hopes to be found that shall coexist with, and even emerge from, the same material as the despairs that they are needed to counteract?"
{Laura Quinney, The Poetics of Disappointment: From Wordsworth to Ashbery, 1999}

"It's so real when we come through
Sunshine be on my sidewalk when i come through
Schoolly D like family reunions
Midday may, it's all lovin'
Take a walk down to D dot C
The war's tuggin'
And ain't no druggin'
My credit's a gain
While you searchin for some trick
To put the shit in her name
I be spendin on Wall Street
And buyin' boardwalk
Dodging problems of the world
Drawn out in white chalk
Peace, Mr. War
I'm seein' all dimensions
But unlike your eye extensions
My vision don't blur
'What' 'when' and 'word's
Where the gossip occur"
{De La Soul, Stakes Is High, 1996}

Jean Grae

"Never easy but it takes time to realize your own worth
Come into your own, played mental re-birth
She start penning some better poems
Straightened up a bank account
Like to take herself out
I'm getting better at it"
{Jean Grae, Attack of the Attacking Things, 2002}

" 'My grandmother was a storyteller; she knew her way around words. She never learned to read and write, but somehow she knew the good of reading and writing; she had learned how to listen and delight. She had learned that in words and in language, and there only, she could have whole and consummate being. She told me stories, and she taught me how to listen. I was a child and I listened. She could neither read nor write, you see, but she taught me how to live among her words, how to listen and delight. "Storytelling; to utter and to hear..." And the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing...' "
{N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 1968}

Dissolution

"But it makes the immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears--dissolution, disappearance."
{Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 2000}

Last April, Claudia & I went to see Derek Walcott read at Harvard's Sackler Museum. His reading was part of the Black Writers Read series, which included wonderful readings by Edwidge Danticat, Zadie Smith, Elizabeth Alexander and Caryl Phillips. Walcott read from an unpublished manuscript that in part deals with visits he made to Italy. Claudia jotted down a couple fragments from his comments during a question and answer session after his reading:

"The horrors you have as a colonial are silent ones."

"I don't feel colorful."

A few years earlier, while I was studying with Walcott at BU, he left an open invitation to those of us in his poetry workshop to sit in on his playwriting workshop. I won't go into the petty politics of the poetry workshop that year, but it's enough to mention that none of my colleagues took up Walcott's invitation. In his playwriting workshop, one piece of advice he gave his students was in relation to stage design and props. He advocated using as few materials as possible.

"Think poor."

"And me just another dream theory
Lost inside your eyes"
{Sonic Youth, Murray Street, 2002}

no poem to the diligent crowd
attentive in our absence
the warmth of our memoirs
for your fear to uncover
a re-telling of this century's
mis-adventures in radical poetry
for the savoir masses
(11/22/02)

Walking through the watery snow
back to our apartment
with static encompassing my silence
a flawed voice drawn quietly
must wait for songs
(2/2/03)

Teresa de la Parra

In his excellent essay on the Venezuelan novelist Teresa de la Parra (Paris 1889- Madrid 1936), Arturo Uslar Pietri quotes from one of her letters to a friend. The excerpt (translated into English) is:

"Do you know, Carias, that since I've been sick, a 'slave to the snows,' I do nothing but think of Caracas with an infinte sweetness? She seems so beautiful to me from here and I wish so much I could return!"

Uslar Pietri discusses how de la Parra became very focused on the influence of Caracas on her soul during her later years. Again, I come to this correspondence between my own experience of Caracas and that of many Venezuelan writers. The idea that an entire universe exists in that valley. My continual devotion and love for that inimitable, enthralling city. Despite its daily horrors.

Uslar Pietri quotes her again in his essay (my translation):

"I think that over there, in our countries, we live poisoned by disharmony. We are injected with false culture from Europe and North America, which has been poorly assimilated and which gives all of us a type of dangerous barbarism. My novel, Ifigenia, is suffused with that spirit. I wish I could write the reverse of Ifigenia."

"Nunca se puede hablar, en la literatura hispanoamericana, de influencias unicas. Uno de sus caracteres fundamentales es, precisamente, su amplitud para lo heterogeneo, lo mestizo, lo impuro."
{Arturo Uslar Pietri, "La novela venezolana," Letras y hombres de Venezuela, 1948}

Green for green
my detective
notebook dry
tooth, weeds
of earth-lit
sentience--
will our crops
converge or
surface in
Afghanistan
old chinese flu
meditative
imitation
(10/25/02)

"
3 September [1939]

[...]
I feel as if I could not write again. Words seem to break in my mind like sticks when I put them down on paper. I cannot see how to spell some of them. Sentences are covered with leaves, and I really cannot see the line of the branch that carries the green meaning.

It so happens that the world has broken just at the moment when my own life has broken..."
{Stephen Spender, Journals 1939-1983, Faber: 1985}

Watching (last year) the 5-minute excerpt of Miguel Piñero (& Miguel Algarín) reading at Naropa during the late 1970s (in Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds, 1978) has been a revelation for me. Piñero reads from his poem "Seekin' the Cause" and I'm now convinced of his genius as a poet and orator. The words that seemed rudimentary on the page, when I first read them, are infused with such power and grace and subtlety when he reads them aloud. Mixes in a doo-wop tune ("Goodnight sweetheart, we'll it's time to go...") with his verses--he also ends with this line from the song, as he slips away from the podium so gracefully.

"No veo apenas en toda vida noble sino un fracaso profundo. El mio viene de tan lejos que data de antes de mi nacimiento."
{Cesar Moro, letter written in Mexico 1944, Vida de poeta: Algunas cartas de Cesar Moro, (Caracas: Editorial Pequena Venecia, 2000)}

"...mientras musita, bajo una lluvia fina, que su historia ha sido muy larga, muy triste; una historia cinematografica con demasiados episodios, pero sin un final feliz."
{Sergio Pitol, Un largo viaje, 1999}

"Now I've got the room I wanted so much. Looked at like that, he was glad to be alone, and to read, and write notes by himself in his room. To be a poet, he thought, I must be alone."
{Stephen Spender, The Temple, 1988}

In his post today, Heriberto Yepez includes a poem by a Wayuu (Guajiro) poet named Jose Angel Fernandez Silva. My grandfather was from the Wayuu tribe, born in Maracaibo. The poem is great.

"Distracted from all reality
Now I'm let out on a minor technicality"
{Cypress Hill, Temples of Boom, 1995}

"The difficulty of poetry is its democracy."
{Geoffrey Hill, at a reading in Boston a couple years ago}

For Julien

"But it is as though the shopping mall is the spatial and architectural wedge into this immense topic. Few forms have been so distinctively new and so distinctively American, and late-capitalist, as this innovation, whose emergence can be dated: 1956; whose relationship to the well-known-decay-of-the-inner-city-rise-of-the-suburbs is palpable, if variable; whose genealogy now opens up a physical and spatial prehistory of shopping in a way that was previously inconceivable; and whose spread all over the world can serve as something of an epidemiological map of Americanization, or postmodernization, or globalization. So the mall focuses the inquiry..."
{Fredric Jameson, "Future City," New Left Review 21, May/June 2003}

No sleep, ever drawn toward weeping
This was our 4th try at the tables
The curtains trembled by our bed
A fantasy strolled ambiently
......into our common vision
I was untangled by Christ
She forced my hands to write
(7/1/03)

"As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea..."
{Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Mask of Anarchy"}

"Yo, De La Soul is here to stay like racism"
{De La Soul, "Intro," Stakes Is High, 1996}

Ernesto Cardenal, etc.

Still reading through Armando Rojas Guardia's (Caracas, 1949) lecture notes for his workshop "Escritura y ciudad." I have only read a handful of Rojas Guardia's poems, so I'm still very unfamiliar with his work.

I first heard about him while reading the second volume of Ernesto Cardenal's autobiography, Las insulas extranas (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2002). Cardenal is currently working on the third volume of his memoirs, which will cover the period from 1979 (when he & his fellow Sandinistas defeated Somoza in Nicaragua) to the present. He is allegedly calling volume three La revolucion perdida. Volume 1 is called Vida perdida (Madrid: Seix Barral, 1999). Now that Nicaragua has lost its revolutionary chic aura, Cardenal is rarely mentioned here in the US. His Cosmic Canticle was recently published in paperback by Curbstone, so he hasn't completely disappeared in English.

In volume 2 of the memoir, Cardenal mentions a visit he made to Caracas in the 1960s. While in Caracas, he stayed with the poet (and founder of the newspaper El Nacional) Miguel Otero Silva. He mentions Rojas Guardia as a young poet who eventually visited Cardenal at his religious community in Nicaragua, Solentiname. Rojas Guardia's work has a religious/spiritual element to it that perhaps coincides with Cardenal's mystical tendencies.

*

Thinking about Jack Kimball's lament or observation on changes in poetry blogging.

I think I will always be an un-"original," imitative (invisible?) and late-arrival blogger, poet, reader, writer. I think sometimes that I am, above all, a reader. I'd much rather read than write. But I feel I have no choice, since writing imposes itself on me. In an interview, Heriberto Yepez described writing as an addiction. I agree. "Kick junk, what else can a poor worker do?" (Ginsberg/The Clash) His recent post at Real E.T. ("Quien Redacta?") is brilliant. Describing the multiplicity of voices that inhabit us: "Redactan en mi los chamanes yaqui desangrados y esta lengua que ya no me fue transmitida..."

Perhaps what will happen with these poetry blogs is that they'll end up splintering off into subsets. Clusters of like-minded poets writing to and for each other. It seems only Physics that the number of poetry blogs will increase as time goes on. I enjoy reading all sorts of these blogs, from the "mainstream" to the esoteric to the self-centered to the confrontational to the etc.

As Barbara Jane Reyes commented: "...expand your horizons a bit more." Is it a mystical tendency to want to live inside texts? To inhabit their words/worlds? "The world is kinda cold / so the rhythm is my blanket" (A Tribe Called Quest)

Sci-fi


I'm a big believer in synchronicity, especially within reading. Fredric Jameson has an excellent essay in the New Left Review (#23, Sep/Oct 2003) on William Gibson and sci-fi writing in general. The closest I've ever come to reading sci-fi has been the Tolkien series of books when I was twelve (and which I still love). But last night's reading and Jameson's comments on sci-fi have caught my attention:

"In any case, the representational apparatus of Science Fiction, having gone through innumerable generations of technological development and well-nigh viral mutation since the onset of that movement, is sending back more reliable information about the contemporary world than an exhausted realism (or an exhausted modernism either)."

Junot Díaz

Went to Cambridge this afternoon to see Junot Diaz read from his current project, a sci-fi/futuristic novel tentatively called The Guilty Country. After reading from the novel, he spoke about his ideas for the manuscript. Mentioned a recent interest of his in "extinction theory"--the novel being a dystopian, near-future allegory for race in the Americas (among other possible readings). He mentioned wanting to address the impact of white supremacy and its ideologies on people of color/colonized people--the effects of white supremacy on black & brown minds but also on white minds (as Frantz Fanon began to map out in his writings). The "City" of the novel is based on New York but it's a New York that includes other cities superimposed onto its frame, a multiple city, maybe reminiscent of Burroughs' Interzone, or Cortazar's Paris/Buenos Aires. The cities Diaz mentioned as being superimposed onto NYC were Santo Domingo, Mexico D.F., Bogota, La Habana--a Third World within the First.

Diaz's relatively long silence, since publishing Drown in 1996, has been productive. It has involved research with survivors of prison during the dicatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. For several years now I've been waiting--despite the novel's "death" etc--to read the great US Latino novel, that semi-mythical foundational Latino text (in the manner of Invisible Man or House Made of Dawn) that would help counter our continuous invisibility within the language (and its institutions) that we write in. There have been glimpses of this recently, with Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman and Sandra Cisneros' Caramelo. I'm looking forward to reading this novel, whenever it ends up coming out.

Reading lecture notes (downloaded from internet) by Armando Rojas Guardia for his writing workshop "Escritura y ciudad" (funded by the Fundacion Para la Cultura Urbana). He speaks of Heidegger's concept of "verhalteheit," which he translates into Spanish as: "discrecion, reserva, circunspeccion," or "callar, hacer silencio."

Idea of contemplating the city from within that silencing, that "callar." To "make" silence.

group somnambulism

what would one write
in the best of circumnstances
how would Geometric Abstraction be?

Maybe writing as a means of fighting off sleep.

La boda / Patricia Guzmán

Patricia Guzmán was born in Caracas in 1960. She attended the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello and researched Venezuelan literature as a graduate student at the Sorbonne. Her doctoral thesis was a study of the work of three Venezuelan poets, Vicente Gerbasi, Ramon Palomares and Luis Alberto Crespo. For several years now, Guzmán has been the editor of Verbigracia, the literary supplement for the newspaper El Universal. Her books of poetry include: De mi lo oscuro (Caracas: PEN Club, 1987), Canto de oficio (Caracas: Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1997) and La boda (Caracas: Casa Nacional de las Letras Andres Bello, 2001). Aside from her work as an editor and poet, Guzmán is also a critic who writes about contemporary Venezuelan poetry.

The translated lines below are excerpted from Guzmán’s most recent work, the long poem entitled “La boda” (The Wedding).

*

[…]

I’ll find solace in the rose

(Roses are good

Fill the garden with prayers —I said)



I’ll find solace in the rose

(I lie down so as to not see her die —I said)



The rose will be my accomplice

The rose—even when dead—will be my accomplice

I contemplate her

I praise her

I force her to look in the mirror



She should know she smells of Sainthood

She should know she spills silence

She should learn to lean

She should learn to sanctify herself



My Husband Thinks that the rose died

I placed a gold rose in the Husband’s hands—do you remember?—



I illuminate the Husband with the rose

I prepare the Husband for the Wedding

I teach the Husband to pray for her

I teach the Husband to pray with her



I am the guard and caretaker of the Virgin of the Rose

I am the guard and caretaker of the Praying Virgin

[…]

Juan Sánchez Peláez and Mandrágora

In the early 1940s, Juan Sánchez Peláez lived in Chile where he was sent to study at the university by his family. During his four years in Chile, Sánchez Peláez came into contact with several young poets who identified themselves as the grupo Mandrágora. They modeled their work, in part, after the precepts of the French surrealists and published seven issues of the magazine Mandrágora between 1938 and 1943. The Mandrágora poets were also influenced by their immediate Latin American elders, including César Moro in Peru and Rosamel del Valle in Chile (Sánchez Peláez eventually edited a selection of Rosamel Del Valle's work in Caracas for Monte Ávila Editores in 1976). Sánchez Peláez published his first poems in Mandrágora in 1943. The poets associated with this group included Braulio Arenas, Enrique Gomez-Correa, and Teofilo Cid. In a recent text, published in 2001 in the literary supplement of El Universal, Sanchez Pelaez recalls his time spent in Chile:


Surca el mar...

Me miran a la cara
el sol y la luna
junto al recuerdo
de Valparaíso

deseos profundos, hermosos
de ebriedad juvenil
ondulan lejos
allá en lo lejano

surca el mar
un velero,
trae melodías ignotas
con el sonido ronco de los años,

en la bruma del crepúsculo
en tardes de otoño
llegan, ondulan sueños
de regreso a Valparaíso

y quédase soñando
el puerto insomne,
quédanse sus ojos
junto a mis ojos.


Juan Sánchez Peláez, Verbigracia, N° 30 Año IV
Caracas, sábado 28 de abril de 2001

"kinfolk will play this in stereo"
{De La Soul, De La Soul Is Dead, 1991}

"Hallare consuelo en la rosa

(Las rosas son buenas

Llena de oraciones el jardin --dije)



Hallare consuelo en la rosa

(Me acuesto para no verla morir --dije)



La rosa sera mi confidente

La rosa--aun muerta--sera mi confidente

La contemplo

La venero

La obligo a verse en el espejo



Debe saber que huele a Santidad

Debe saber que derrama silencio

Debe aprender a inclinarse

Debe aprender a santiguarse"

{Patricia Guzman, La boda, Caracas: Casa Nacional de las Letras Andres Bello, 2001}

El club de los inocentes / Adriana Villanueva


On Saturday October 11, the writer Adriana Villanueva published an essay in the editorial section of El Nacional, in response to certain North American and European intellectuals who support Hugo Chavez's project. In her recent columns Villanueva has also written about the poet Armando Rojas Guardia and his writing workshop entitled "La escritura y la ciudad" (Writing and the City). She chronicled readings and conversations about Caracas that emerged in the workshop earlier this year, at the Fundacion Para la Cultura Urbana, a non-profit research and educational center under the direction of the poet and critic Rafael Arraiz Lucca.

Villanueva writes frequently on Venezuelan cultural and political matters for El Nacional. In this essay she's referring to the recent government raid of the offices and studios of the private news channel Globovision. The Venezuelan government recently seized equipment from Globovision, an action that has drawn criticism from various international observers, including the OAS and the Jimmy Carter Center. Villanueva also makes reference to Chavez's habit of describing his government as "la revolucion bonita" (the beautiful revolution).

*

The Innocents' Club (excerpts):

"Today, when the shadow of a totalitarian government wants to become a reality in Venezuela, I get in the mood to recommend novels, and not the ones on TV that tend to have happy endings, but instead novels of novels like Sefarad by the Spanish writer Antonio Munoz Molina, stories that intermingle with threads of hopelessness, unhappiness and desolation. [...]

Today, when they raid a TV station in Venezuela, when the government disobeys rulings from the Supreme Court, when entire families are thrown from their homes while red-shirted invaders are given a warm welcome for political reasons; my instinct is to recommend Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita's author, who melancholically evokes his idyllic childhood in Imperial Russia's autumn. The son of a rich but anti-Czarist intellectual, in 1919 the young Vladimir and his family were forced to emigrate to Western Europe because of the Bolshevic revolution, hoping to return in a couple months. Nabokov's exile lasted twenty years, between London, Paris and Berlin before emigrating to the United States, twenty years during which he had to live with the contempt of European intellectuals who saw him as a traitor to the Bolshevic cause. It was impossible to convince idealists such as Wells that: 'Bolshevism was nothing more than an especially brutal and complete form of barbarous oppression--so ancient within itself as desert sands--and it didn't have anything to do with the attractive new revolutionary experiment that so many foreign observers have mistaken it for.'

In the year 2003, the Gauche Caviar set applauds the Irish documentary: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised;" which beneath a mask of a foreigner's objectivity idealizes Chavismo and the events of April 11 [2001], as though this were an all-out war between a classist minority opposition and a messianic leader who, supported by the masses, defends the beautiful revolution.

It sounds pretty, it sounds Romantic, even I would clap if I was watching the film from the comfort of a movie theater in Oxford and not from the trenches of a country where an increase in unemployment, misery and intolerance are the main accomplishments of a revolution that few people think to call pretty at this point."

"Because there's no death only life
on that side of song, on that side of flight
on that side of time."
{Fernando Paz Castillo, "El muro: XI," 1964}

*

"But repetition is the basis of identification. Thus, if repetition alters, it has to be faced that alteration identifies and identity is always impure. Thus iterability--like the trace structure--is the positive condition of possibility of identification, the very thing whose absolute rigor it renders impossible. It is in terms of iterable (rather than repeatable) identities that communication and consensus are established:[...]"
{Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Revolutions That As Yet Have No Model," 1980}

*

Preface


Salvadoranness : that second : reclamation : that (distant) act, experience : Latin American imperfection : condition amplifying the particular, transferable meanings of El Salvador within and beyond Central America : that (imminent--) serviceable abstraction by El Salvadoreans, Salvadorans, Salvadorians, Salvadoreans--understood solely through violence, poverty, natural disasters, illegality, smallness : that (lingering) ambiguity that mirrors Latinness, Latina/o, Latin@ : that impermanent (yet seemingly static) state of being an other Latina and Latino current--, of arriving too late to historically situate : this pretext : lateness which intentionally precedes Salvadoran : untimely entrance : this second thought : inventory : sight of continuous clarification : this augmentative, incautious non-fiction : portrait : undigital North and Central American present, pausing, tracking, forwarding fragments : this transitionless geography : dissent : unignorable collection of short stories : these scattered consequences, with continuance : Salvadorans relate lately, Salvadorans lately relate : late arrival does not equal death

(CM)

Wordsworthian IV


"I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering. Gatherings of exiles and emigres and refugees; gathering on the edge of 'foreign' cultures; gathering at the frontiers, gatherings in the ghettos or cafes of city centers; gathering in the half life, half light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another's language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. Also the gathering of people in the diaspora: indentured, migrant, interned; the gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal statues, immigration status--the genealogy of that lonely figure that John Berger named the seventh man. The gathering of clouds from which the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asks 'where should the birds fly after the last sky?' "
{Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994}

Wordsworthian III / Fernando Paz Castillo (1893-1981)




El muro

Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, that is all
Ye know on hearth, and all ye need to know
John Keats


Un muro en la tarde,
y en la hora
una línea blanca, indefinida
sobre el campo verde
y bajo el cielo.

II
Un pájaro –en hoja y viento–
ha puesto su canción más bella
sobre el muro.

III
Enlutado de su propia existencia
–detenida entre su breve sombra
y su destino–
un zamuro, bello por la distancia y por el vuelo,
infunde angustia en el alma profeta:
una fría angustia, cuando
certero, como vencida flecha
–oscura flecha que aún conserva su impulso inicial–
cae tras el muro.

IV
La vida es una constante
y hermosa destrucción:
vivir es hacer daño.

V
Pero el muro,
el silencioso blanco muro
parece que nos dice:
“hasta aquí llegan tus ojos,
menos agudos que tu instinto.

Yo separo tu vida de otras vidas
pequeñas; pero grandes cuando el ocaso,
el oro insinuante del ocaso llega”.

VI
Acaso tras el muro,
tan alto al deseo como pequeño a la esperanza,
no exista más que lo ya visto en el camino
junto a la vida y la muerte,
la tregua y el dolor
y la sombra de Dios indiferente.

VII
Dios –muro frente a recuerdos y visiones–
está solo, íntimamente solo
en nuestros ojos
y en el menudo nombre
que lo ata a las cosas;
a la seda del canto del canario
fraterno
y a la noche que vuela en el zamuro:
fúnebre, pulido estuche de cosas ayer bellas
o tristes
que habrán de serlo nuevamente
del lado acá del muro,
con el temor reciente de volver al origen.

VIII
¿Morir?...
Pero si nada hay más bello en su hora
–frente al muro–
que los serenos ojos de los moribundos,
anegados por su propio silencio;
perdido ya, por entre frescas espigas encontradas,
el temor de morir,
y de haber vivido, como hombre, entre hombres,
que apenas –oscurecidos en su existir–
los comprendieron.

IX
Entonces el muro
parece allanarse entre el olvidado rencor
y la esperanza:
Es súbito camino, no límite de sombra y canto,
ante un nuevo Dios que nos aguarda
–que nos aguarda siempre–
y no conoceremos
a pesar de que marcha en nuestras huellas;
que nos llega de lejos,
del lado de la luz,
y que vamos dejando en el camino,
como algo que no es tierra,
atado, sin embargo, a nuestros pies.

X
El muro en la tarde,
entre la hierba, el canto y el fúnebre vuelo:
presencia del dolor de vivir
y no morir;
consuelo de volver, en tierra y oro,
con la inquietud de haber sido;
polvo y oro que regresa eternamente,
como la muerte cotidiana,
bajo el granado trigal de la noche insomne,
rumorosa de viento alto
y de luceros.
El sediento corazón siente Leticia:
el corazón y las queridas, tímidas palabras
huelen, como el muro en la tarde,
a cielo y tierra confundidos,
cuando el morir es cosa nuestra
y, como nuestro, lo queremos.
Lo queremos pudorosos,
en silencio, sin violencias,
mientras los otros temen –aún distantes–
la sensitiva soledad naciente
para el hombre, no humano, y su destino
confuso.

XI
Porque no hay muerte sino vida
del lado allá del canto, del lado allá del vuelo,
del lado allá del tiempo.

XII
Vaga intuición de perdurar
frente a la muerte ambicionada
y oscura...
Porque la muerte, imagen de nosotros
y criatura nuestra,
es distinta a la no vida
que jamás ha existido.
Ya que el verbo de Dios, que todo lo ha dispuesto
en la conciencia del hombre, no pudo crear la muerte
sin morir Él y su callada nostalgia
de pensar y sufrir humanas formas.

XIII
El muro de la tarde –atardecido en nuestra tarde–,
apenas una línea blanca junto al campo
y junto al cielo.
Misteriosa cruz que sólo muestra
su brazo horizontal.
Unida, por la oscura raíz,
a la tierra misma de su origen confuso;
y al cielo de la fuga
por el canto y el ala:
la noche impasible del zamuro
y el camino de oro del canario
hacia el ocaso.

XIV
¡El muro!
Cuánto siento y me pesa su silencio
–en mi tarde–
en la tarde del musgo
y la oración
y el regreso.

XV
Sólo sé que hay un muro,
bello en su calada soledad de cielo y tiempo:
Y todo, junto a él, es un milagro.

XVI
Sólo temo en la tarde –en mi tarde– de oro
por el sol que agoniza; y por algo, que no es sol,
que también agoniza en mi conciencia,
desamparada a veces
¡y a veces confundida de sorpresas!
Sólo temo haber visto algo:
¡lo mismo!
el campo, el césped;
la misma rosa sensual que recuerda unos labios
y el mismo lirio exangüe
que vigila la muerte.

XVII
Y sólo siento frente a Dios y su Destino,
haber pasado alguna vez el muro
y su callada y espesa sombra,
del lado allá del tiempo.


Fernando Paz Castillo




Antología poética, Editorial Monte Ávila

Caracas, 1979, (1964)

"You deciphered that code for me,
ignoring my desired translation:"
{Eileen Tabios, Footnotes to the History of Fallen Angels}

"Por el brillo de la corriente
conocemos lo anunciado en la palabra
y el palpito que crece"
{Elizabeth Schon, Del rio hondo aqui, 2000}

"(tus manos:
par de estrellas abiertas)"
{Dolores Dorantes, in Kenning #13}

"IV

Cuida la plenitud de estar contigo,
timidamente lejos de los hombres
que reciben del numen que te guia
un destello sagrado;
y no lo entienden
porque de ti viviendo, ya son otros,
promesa y calma del atardecer,
como el vuelo de un ave en el ocaso."
{Fernando Paz Castillo, "La soledad perfecta", El otro lado del tiempo, 1971}

Satchidananda

When I was growing up in Cambridge in the early 1970s, before my family moved to Caracas, my parents used to go see Swami Satchidananda lecture around Boston. Some of my earliest memories involve me running down a sidewalk toward one of these lectures yelling excitedly "Satchi! We're here!" Or, sitting with him and my parents (and countless other hippies) on wooden benches, listening to people chatting before his lectures. After we moved to Caracas when I was five, my parents eventually drifted away from their interest in Yoga, etc. (though not completely) and I never thought too much about any of that. I found out about Satchidananda's death by chance in August of 2002, when I noticed his obituary in the New York Times. My mother had clipped the notice, intending to give it to me, but I had come across it among other magazines and newspapers.

I had always kept Satchidananda in my mind as some sort of ideal of peace or calm, even though I tend to mistrust so much of the Orientalism that surrounds the practice of Yoga, Buddhism, etc. in the US. Now when I mention his name to my parents it seems like we're discussing another planet, one that perhaps only existed in our minds. I've always had a tendency toward nostalgia, which I acknowledge as serving no useful purpose. I think I mention all this because it seems to emphasize how fucked up our current era seems. I enjoyed reading Nick Piombino's comments at fait accompli today, because they remind me that our troubles now are not necessarily so new. Fascism has, after all, been among us for a long time. I think my interest in poetry might have begun with those fragments in my memory of seeing Satchidananda in Boston. It all seems very hippie and unreal to me now, but nonetheless, there it is.

Notes for a novel

The novel would have to include the poems I heard Edda Armas read at the Libreria Macondo in the Centro Comercial Chacaito, right off Boulevard Sabana Grande. Earlier that week, Isabel and I had bought cards with prayers to La Virgen de la Rosa Mistica, with her image on the flip side, rose in her chest, from a street vendor, one of the thousands of buhoneros that now crowd the sidewalks around the remaining outdoor cafes and restaurants, the mini-malls where I would go for internet connection, next to the plaza with domino and chess tables set up alongside benches under trees to watch the processions in & out of the subway entrance stairwells.

I've seen a photograph of Salvador Garmendia and Juan Sanchez Pelaez sitting at these outdoor cafe tables, taken probably sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Isabel and I, and the summer before Claudia & I, sat at one of these for beautifully cold Polares and juice, after having walked most of the day.

We also saw the shrine for the Virgen de la Rosa Mistica as we drove up to Jorge and Julieta's house and restaurant in Naiguata, on the Caribbean side of Monte Avila. It was a small, dark chapel built of rough stones and lit from the inside by dozens of candles, with incense and fresh flowers.

At the reading that evening, one of Edda Armas' verses spoke of her language/poetry "tribe" (which that night seemed to include all of us in the room). I rode the subway back to Caurimare after the reading, blessed and educated.

"There are holy orders in life.
I was born to be a priest
defrocked as Spender says,
an Epiphany to make manifest
..................................mysteries."
{John Wieners, Selected Poems: 1958-1984}

Michael Hofmann

...has a great essay on Lowell in the recent London Review of Books , "His Own Prophet" (11 Sep 2003):

"Working from prose, and a compatibility with prose--the copious vocabulary, the full sentences, the endless array of construction, the spry, pluperfect diction, the willingness to quote or invent speech and to describe at length, the effort to set scenes and tell stories--are things that characterize Lowell pretty much throughout. The proximity to prose, and the continual revising--though the two are almost opposites; when was the last time you were offered a 'revised and expanded' novel?--together argue an almost avant-garde or experimental tenacity in Lowell. It is a stranger and more distinctive project than is generally believed."

"Poetry has lost so much ground in the years since Lowell started out in it, it's easy to feel a somewhat preposterous sympathy for him. There is nothing at the end of the rainbow. In Lowell's 'mid-century', poetry still belonged in every well-stocked library and mind. There's little reason to read it anymore--though apparently the Queen manages a book a year. Poetry in America has declined to a civil war, a banal derby between two awful teams, and in Britain to a variety show (a royal variety show). The last apotheosised poets are the generation of the 1910s and 1920s, Eliot and Frost and Stevens and Pound and Yeats and Bunting. They have had no successors, or the succession has not been allowed."

*

I don't share Hofmann's regret for lost days. Besides, global apocalypse, the current rise of neo-fascism, this ludicrous endless war the US is entangled in, and the collapse of the planet's ecological system make laments for a past poetry irrelevant to me.

However, one of the best nights I can remember in recent years was taking the T down Commonwealth Ave last year to see Hofmann read his poems in a small room at BU. Ever since coming across his Approximately Nowhere (Faber, 1999) when it came out, I've been an assiduous reader of his work. I enjoy his Mexico poems in Corona, Corona and his Nights in the Iron Hotel is brilliant. I can relate to his use of an English that is supplemented (or undermined) by another language, in his case German. I've seen him lecture on translation as well. On both occasions Hofmann was humble and generous with the audience, reading with us rather than at or for us. At the reading last year, he seemed to become bored with his poems and asked if anyone had any requests before he stopped. I mentioned his poem "XXXX", which begins with a an epigraph from Cesar Vallejo, just so I could hear him read the last stanza:

"I'm quarrelsome, charming, lustful, inconsolable, broken.
I have the radio on as much as ever my father did,
carrying it with me from room to room.
I like its level talk."

Signos primarios / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Primary Signs

I

At the doors of your life there is a single house. Between your image and the horizon, eagle on no centinel’s shoulder, she lets herself be. At times unruly against your love, she transcends the created, the flower and the water. She rectifies, with multiple bifurcations points out the today of your yesterday. She scrapes out the crazy bite of the scar and the dust. You open a crack in the mist to touch the inside, with no guilt, the pulp of your fleece. You float directly toward her flanks and her walls, you walk through immobile hallways with your gold ring that belongs to the dream. Who wants to float up the stairs to make a chain link of time within specific space, who clothes you and doesn’t exile the angel on your forehead in the immense morning, under the weight and deaf rumor of your real and invisible house?



II

Did your grandparents kindle timber, gifts, or legends here? In their moment, they were chosen to live another form and, even in their hours emptied for us, their sadness is amorous unconscious. Our adhesion, which is made of bones, marrow, and visceral foam, wakes them from the longest dream. We have two options when we face them: faithfulness and candor and, during the dialogue, to shake up memory at the mercy of our yesterday or show them a thin volume of errant stars here on earth, or fanatical dead roses with the dark fire that borders the precipices.



III

As one who erases a phrase from an
endless manuscript,
large, arboreous window shades rain,
spring and youth run, a river
slides very lazily in the grass.

The lips on a crevice over our root.

We pass.

               (The red mouth is muteness.)

               (Without a tear we eat the dead.)

Time still passes.

               (The last rose that our exclusive sister brings.)



IV

We filled a basket with hard stones and we saw that it was a white or black steppe, where wild desires trot, we later forged through the great river they name destiny like in a dream, through the wall of sunflowers and the glitter of song, very happy to follow and to elapse.



V

My shadow belongs to no one. The open road is yours and no one’s.

My light belongs to no one: it curves in my pockets like just another shadow, the sunflower’s nothingness in common.



VI

No one sees these eyes, desperate eyes like things written in dreams. No one sees me seated on a gold chair playing the universe with only the tide that grazes lip to lip, while I tune my flute to the law of the birds.



VII

                                                       to Juan Liscano

You have your own name
if you excavate within
and reject your fear of dying
that leads to dying
and if you accept the verb that guides
toward silence.
Written time stone tossed here
at our side
with the fragile stalks in which the spirit revives.
Free me by my hunger, from my hunger
and by my thirst, from my thirst.



VIII

Echo of a disobedient rumor
a rose secretly segregates
and carries me, insomniac,
                                             within real or illusory living
without a soundless north, Rose Selavy.



IX

The words sound like gold animals.

Scaring off the limits, you will drench the all and nothingness to suffocate vertigo, and they will become girls made of cotton.



X

We have begun with a speech and

with oblique phrases we love

and their silvery blue rooster heads.

We have begun, or not, sweet and

growling lady, and the secret enumeration

runs in the wind, over the purest

and incomprehensible errand, as we

walk by blurred, more or less mutilated.



XI

Less oblique than my dead man’s face, and desirous, a fish plunges; in the nebulous tower of the sea goes the fish, without the roseate eye of my guilt. One hundred times I clamor like the seizable diamond fish, with the nocturnal strangeness in my mouth.



XII

I sustain the tree that I grow. And the round star is covered by the jungle of spells. You walk by barefoot, like the lightning inside the heart of the crust. I polish lamps with my index finger on your breast. A visionary girl looks for me in the sun of the blonde flowerpots and I focus the utmost attention on her until I inscribe her name within reality and cultivate my desire.




Rasgos comunes (1975)




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Poesía, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }

"I remember the fragrance of
the Caribbean
A scent that anchors into the
ports of technology."
{Victor Hernandez Cruz, "Snaps of Immigration", Red Beans, 1991}

At the end of spring's rainy branches
in a summer idyll--one must travel

poems written for afternoon's address
the flushed leaves filling windows

afterwards, in the middle years of life
learn to wear anonymous green shirts

learn to read for days or weeks
at a time, dias seguidos de lluvia
(5/30/03)

"the walls are jagged and expanding
but you are there to feed them air"
(Stephen Malkmus)

could have been a mis-translation
a wrong word to start the rhythm
what lower frequencies
inhabited city/forestry
how influential was Florida
on his imagery, the sound
of his stanzas--

up the stairs to the writing
as one allows a river's current
to make the glow a standing

Cafe Tacuba's EP Vale Callampa
my traffic in musical antecedents
the "green room" of thought
written 10 years ago
I've served a long apprenticeship
to nothingness, the value of loss
a distance in the defeat of modernism
while the poet reads, a torrential
rain outside yesterday's green shirt

how was it? was a drift of cities
I slept in Clearwater, Tampa,
Caurimare, El Hatillo in Caracas,
Rio Chico in Barlovento, Ybor City /
(5/29/03)

"I'm crying everyone's tears
And there inside our private war
I died the night before
And all of these remnants
Of joy and disaster"
{Sade, "King of Sorrow," Lovers Rock, 2000}

Edward Upward

"At last Frederick spoke again.

'How beautiful, how beautiful,' he said, 'but the rainbows don't belong to this Garden City. They are part of the outside world, and we are deluding ourselves if we hope to exclude that world from here. In spite of Jason Johnson's truly heroic struggle, that world with its multiplying wars and its racist exterminations and its poisoning of the air and the seas for centuries to come--that world is what you are going to wake to, Maurice. And look, already you can see straight ahead of you the railway station you left two hours ago, and the signal is at green, and you are going to catch the train which will enable you to be in time to meet the school governors who will offer you the better job you wanted. And the influence this job will give you will help you to rally resistance among the people to the reactionaries, who if unopposed would bring about the horrors I have warned you of in your dream.'

*

'Do not despise dreaming, Maurice. In the battle you must face you will be strengthened by an awake dream of a future in which the whole human world has become one United Garden City.' "
{Edward Upward, "A Better Job," The Coming Day and Other Stories, London: Enitharmon Press, 2000}

Spectacle

"According to the basic interests of the new system of domination, the dissolution of logic has been pursued by different, but mutually supportive means. Some of these means involve the technology which the spectacle has tested and popularised; others are more linked to the mass psychology of submission.

At the technological level, when images chosen and constructed by someone else have everywhere become the individual's principal connection to the world he formerly observed for himself, it has certainly not been forgotten that these images can tolerate anything and everything; because within the same image all things can be juxtaposed without contradiction. The flow of images carries everything before it, and it is similarily someone else who controls at will this simplified summary of the sensible world; who decides where the flow will lead as well as the rhythm of what should be shown, like some perpetual, arbitrary surprise, leaving no time for reflection, and entirely independent of what the spectator might understand or think of it. In this concrete experience of permanent submission lies the psychological origin of such general acceptance of what is; an acceptance which comes to find in it, ipso facto, a sufficient value. Beyond what is strictly secret, spectacular discourse obviously silences anything it finds inconvenient. It isolates all it shows from its context, its past, its intentions and its consequences. It is thus completely illogical. Since no one may contradict it, it has the right to contradict itself, to correct its own past. The arrogant intention of its servants, when they have to put forward some new, and perhaps still more dishonest version of certain facts, is to harshly correct the ignorance and misinterpretations they attribute to their public, while the day before they themselves were busily disseminating the error, with their habitual assurance. Thus the spectacle's instruction and the spectators' ignorance are wrongly seen as antagonistic factors where in fact they give birth to each other."
{Guy Debord, "X", Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie, London: Verso, 1990}

Fragmentary

A big thank you to Chris for offering me a space at texfiles for audblogging my poem "Caurimare" tonight. That noise at the beginning of part IV is the T going by my apartment (it shakes the whole floor).

If the internet existed in the 1930s, would Benjamin have composed the Arcades Project on a blog?

More fragments found:

"...the Cadillac of winter"
{Stephen Malkmus, Pig Lib, 2003}


"No devoraras mas tiza en Trinidad o Maturin."
{Juan Sanchez Pelaez}


"Por que no llegas, fabula insomne?"
{Juan Sanchez Pelaez}


After reading Shin Yu Pai and Aaron Tieger's posts on The Smiths, I'm thinking of Morrisey's songs that helped me survive teen years:

"And so I checked all the registered, historical facts
And I was shocked into shame to discover
How I'm the 18th pale descendant
of some old queen or other
O has the world changed or have I changed?
O has the world changed or have I changed?"
{The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead, 1986}


"La escritura

de hoy

pre-dice

la escritura

de manana.

Todo texto

es profetico."
{Heriberto Yepez}


"Did education mean an addiction to history on a linear, one-track plane of which none was aware?"
{Wilson Harris, The Mask of the Beggar, 2003}

"Una rosa de agua es la tiniebla"
{Juan Sanchez Pelaez}

"...mellifluous inheritance..." / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Below, two more poems from Juan Sánchez Peláez's first book Elena y los elementos (1951):

"Aparición"
"Posesión"

*

Apparition

Acclimate the blessed carriage of your breasts,
earth of my first voices,
their open wounds, their punished gavilanes
in the snow storm.

A woman named Blanca manipulates
mystery's scarlet cage
Overcomes limits, an obscure power.
She screams, imagines, feels?
She weaves a thick shell of sea breeze, alleviates
decrepid stones.

The pale girl leads me to a ruined garden.
I see her naked, beneath a grand suburb of palm trees,
exporting the sunset's gold toward a miraculous country.

The heavy hour has returned.
The heavy harbors of your eyes orbit me.

You must disseminate yourself, body and spirit,
in the mellifluous inheritance of the roses.

Laundry women in their white tunics pass by
my side with their innocence cloth
and their hands given over to ceremony.

*

Possession

Seagulls devour thick slabs in my caresses.
The world weighs maliciously and solemnly in my roots.
I accept your hands, your grace, my delirium.
If you return, if you dream, your image at night will recognize me.
I place you on the path toward the bell-ring talud of my veins.
Drenched in magic, my blood flows
toward you beneath dawn's prophecy.

Cuatro caminos

"se necesita fe
saber que alguien escucha alla
yo tampoco se si existes en realidad"
{Cafe Tacuba, Cuatro caminos, 2003}

Casi un pais / Elizabeth Schon


Elizabeth Schon was born in Caracas in 1921 and continues to live and work there. During the summer of 2003, Schon was honored at the Semana de la Poesia, a series of readings, conferences and book fairs held once a year in Caracas. In 1972, she published the collection of prose poems Casi un pais (Almost A Country), which includes the narrative of a young girl from the provinces of Venezuela ("el interior"), arriving and discovering the universe of Caracas. These translations were based on the excerpts from this book included in her selected poems, Antologia poetica (Monte Avila Editores, 1998). Schon is a prolific writer whose recent collections have been published on her own press, Editorial Diosa Blanca.

Although she has sometimes been overlooked in anthologies of Venezuelan poetry, Schon is a poet of philosophical resonance whose current work intuits a secret Caracas in tune with Monte Avila's incomprehensible stillness, a vast green wave frozen over the valley.

*

Almost A Country (selections)




Next to the El Calvario stairs, I say to Juan: --Let's not descend the steps too quickly. --Lucia, if you want to know this city you have to hurry. Caracas is too big, so much that I almost mistake her for a country.
We descend quickly. Since I'm happy I stay quiet. Juan has told me not to speak when I'm content; it's better to stay quiet, and this way the happiness doesn't end. It actually remains intact, like certain gifts that are stored so as to not be damaged or broken.




We're finally in front of the San Francisco ceiba tree! And it looks so much like a friar who continually listens to the rain, the breeze, the wind, the birds, and who never ceases to be protected by the sky's ceiling.




Am I a descendant of Humboldt, that man who discovered rivers, jungles, mountains, caves?




In a doorway, a boy plays with a perinola. Its string bends, lengthens, curves nimbly, while the stilled boy doesn't laugh, doesn't speak, remains alert to the string that stretches, retracts, forming a circumference that is pierced by the clarity and that the wind does not destroy.

"Maybe I'm a lonely kind of man
A rapper with a 40 in his hand"
{Sean Lennon, Into the Sun, 1998}

Poema / Juan Sanchez Pelaez

Poem

The red jungle murmurs, murmurs, and suddenly becomes the heart’s entire reality, my red jungle. And she, who is a pendulum that swings in the moans, my red jungle, and she who exclaims with quick leaps of kindness, my red jungle, on the route that leads to that deeper forest beyond the anonymous earth allowing us to be nowhere and to forget ourselves, allowing us to not slip on the evaporating thing, allowing us the mediumistic voice of our certainty, and in peace, with no major errors, my red jungle.




Rasgos comunes (1975)




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Poesía, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }

Against Degradation

In today's (Thursday) El Nacional, the poet Joaquin Marta Sosa has an essay in the editorial section of the paper, entitled "Contra la degradacion" (Against Degradation). Some excerpts:


"I think that the politics of liquidating one's enemy without a second thought (whatever the enemy's nature might be) are the serpent of the fascist, stalinist egg, and they are also reactionary.

Finally, I notice that the one similarity between Bush and Chavez is that both of them take the laurels for having produced the most terrible increase of people in poverty. With Bush, 1.7 million in the past year; with Chavez, 2.3 million. They can both give each other a heartless handshake in honor of this unprecedented flowering of poverty."

"And I read the Romanian Adam Boder, jailed early on by a self-centered, repressive and 'leftist and revolutionary' regime. He writes that 'those regimes harm a people in such a terrible manner by getting them used to a primitive and meaningless existence, by producing helpless people who cannot determine their own destiny, and whose only action is resignation or uncondicional surrender.'"

"The conversation with my acquaintance ended when I said to him, 'this is the most reactionary and retrograde government that I have ever seen and we have no option but to prevent it from ransacking our present and future.' After three seconds of silence he answered, 'you're right.' Well then, the referendum, I say now, is not a means of escaping Chavismo but instead it is a means of stopping another retrograde revolution from ruining another country and its people."

"Who live under the shadow of a war,
What can I do that matters?
My pen stops, and my laughter, dancing, stop,
Or ride to a gap.

How often, on the powerful crest of pride,
I am shot with thought
That halts the untamed horses of the blood,
The grip on good;

That moving, whimpering, and mating, bear
Tunes to deaf ears:
Stuffed with the realer passions of the earth
Beneath this hearth."
{Stephen Spender, Poems, 1933}

what does tone do?
slow hair growth
dissolution silence
such very trite words
such very triste words
I always have wanted
apocalypse for the
effort to dissolve my
deluded anger

why SHOULD the line be stranger?
that was one's ancient feeling
now I must discard your
grace, this (pattern) glow
I drove across Caracas at night
drunk for pleasure's street
found Las Mercedes a canopy
watched my deserved city
wanted always to look at books
wanted maybe sadness to still
be there for show or to work
as a cashier at the bookstore
wanted fluidity of boxes full
of poetry worn by the ship's
financial team--this is read
in a very desolate place
whose airs discomfort /

I often sound the worst
this reflected our future's
growth alongside weep vibrations
didn't mean any line's
approach to memory ruin
found floating--a cloud watcher
but what will they say?
(7/21/03)

at a certain point in one's life
one tires of melodrama
this familiar insomnia strides
eloquently into our room
takes me for T rides throughout
the spoken city, worried
for my children's education--
where will an empire adhere
to pre-established codes of
discourse--now your "poem's"
ruined by the need to write
even when there's no thing to say /
(7/7/03)

old and littered, the banks of our river
honed by repeated transactions
tired flower
overland preacher
you who walk with space
.......................in your fingers

taken for blessings
the night watch
this was often true
woke to nothingness
only books, food &
sometimes music, calm
(6/30/03)

Recuerdos y lluvias / Ludovico Silva (1937-1988)

Ludovico Silva was a philosopher, literary critic, poet, and for many years a professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. During the 1980s he wrote a weekly column for El Nacional. This is the only poem I have read by Silva and I should note that my translation does not do justice to the frantic, despairing tone of the original, which was first published in the literary supplement of El Nacional in the summer of 1986.

Silva's main work as a writer was in the field of Marxist philosophy. His books include: Anti-manual para uso de marxistas, marxólogos y marxianos (1976), La alineación en el joven Marx (1979), Contracultura (1980), and La alineación como sistema: teoría de la alineación en la obra de Marx (1983).

*

Memories and Rain

One evening, in Saint Germain of the Fields
already so long ago, Paris, so long ago
that it strayed from my memory
and has become a chunk of quartz,
a night in which the streets of Paris
were full of poet corpses
rotting in the Metro vents,
I emerged trembling from my shelter on Cuyas Street
and went out to find death.
Dragging myself, I arrived like an ancient marble
at the café of Saint Germain of the Fields
where skeletons accumulated
alongside the moribund bodies of revolutionaries and the bourgeoisie.
The bomb’s explosion had been atrocious, molecular,
and the only things left standing were
the bottles of wine and an old waiter
who sadly poured my bottle.
I couldn’t take any more.
Strange messages came to me from the galaxies,
from a region where beings are made purely out of gas,
terrifying messages, such as this, came to me:
“Everything, everything is ultimately fatal, even chance!”
Then, accompanied by my bottle
in whose depths sang Baudelaire
I grabbed my notebook and wrote:
“My great torment is: I want to live eternally!”

I thought I was going to die from life itself or from premonitions
on that night of my twentieth year.
I was in love with a blue-eyed woman,
a small French woman from Melun.
I had been happy with her until I fell in love.
From that moment on
she mistreated me, used me and left me like a dog.
I cried so much at the Monsieur Le Prince,
I walked so much, like a lunatic,
without wanting to return to my shelter. I had no money,
but, regardless, I had to give a few Francs
to a hallucinating Algerian who asked for them,
gun in hand.
Suddenly, it began to rain like shit from the skies
and I remembered the rains in my distant country,
where the universal flood is reborn every year
and where we have to build Noah’s Ark
each year. My poetic metaphors
say absolutely nothing
in the face of those vertical rivers,
those crying storms
that fall from the heights
and later roll through the eyes of the miserable,
the homeless, who own nothing besides death.
I was like that on this rainy night of St. Germain,
falling through the streets of Paris.
Paris! City or coin fallen from those heights
like a piece of gold
stained with divine trash.
I never knew you, city, and I never will
because you were too cruel to me,
like a woman with a whip and fangs.
I loved, suffered, died, wrote transcendental stupidities there,
but nothing remains aside from pure, fragmented memory,
the remembrance of a remembrance.
I’ll never see you again,
but you still hurt me
and above all those blue, murderous eyes.

Now, after so many years
since escaping St. Germain and the St. Michelle,
I find myself in a city of red rain storms
and in a city full of corpses.
But not poet corpses,
because the poets here protect themselves very well,
but instead the corpses of the shirtless, the miserable, the unemployed.
This hematopoetic poem is for them,
made of blood and spleen.
For them, whom I have never truly fought for
despite having written many violent books
that should be burned
so as to produce so much as a smoke signal
that says: “I want to live eternally!”

In that tenebrous season of St. Germain of the Fields
a wise friend said to me: “If you only write about shadows,
your only memory will be of shadows.”
He was right. It’s my only option.
I don’t recognize any metaphor beyond death.
She’s like a prism
that illuminates every angle of my life.
Dying is less important,
what’s important is learning how to die.
I will go on dying like a snail,
walking until the end, without hurry or pause,
and I only ask of Sister Death
that she allow me to arrive with my funereal prose
at the fixed terminal set for me
by those three women who weave up there.
Everything else is pure sound and color.
I see mountains that crumble,
I see poets screaming under the mud of the cliffs,
I see volcanoes that vomit God’s irony,
I see how time approaches like an iron bull,
I see Mozart and Glück singing in my fields,
I see myself at last like a specter,
like a sign for those around me,
an ivory body with a hint of gold in the sick eyes,
a few broken poems, a few good verses,
some jewel smiling in the darkness.
Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem.