La casa de la noche / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
I first came across Francisco Pérez Perdomo's poetry in 2001, browsing through bookstores in Caracas. I'm just now starting to read through his book of poems La casa de la noche (Privately Printed, Caracas, 2001).
He was born in Boconó, Venezuela in 1930 and is a poet, critic, and lawyer. He formed part of the literary groups Sardio and El Techo de la Ballena. He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1980 and, as far as I know, he lives in Caracas. I hope to translate several poems from this recent collection. The following is the original Spanish version of the opening poem.
*
"En una larga noche de invierno
En una larga noche de invierno,
recogido y distante,
miraba el hombre
una neblina negra
que se cernía en el espacio.
En los cielos, el ojo brillante
de la luna se apagaba.
Y se hacían las tinieblas.
Del árbol copudo y rafagueado
por incesantes rachas
se oían atormentados quejidos
en mitad de la plaza.
Se escurría por el mundo
un inmenso sollozo terrestre
que a todas las cosas anegaba.
Los terrores nocturnos,
encadenados, dejaban de pronto
sus refugios secretos y ocultos
en los pantanos del patio;
erizados trepaban por los aires,
le rodeaban el cuello
y con sus dedos flacos y sombríos
le apretaban duramente la garganta.
Por los lados del viento
aullaban los espectros del huracán.
Amarrado por sus tejidos mentales,
íngrimo y reflexivo, el hombre
se enfrentaba a la tempestad.
Temblaban sus manos otoñales.
La lluvia con violencia
arreciaba y desbordaba
los límites de la tierra.
Los relámpagos de la revelación
alumbraban por instantes su cara.
Casi sin darse cuenta,
mucho había envejecido
en los últimos años
y las marcas profundas de la edad
con rigor lo flagelaban.
A cántaros,
desde su balcón en ruinas
el hombre veía caer la lluvia,
ensimismado, y en los molinos
agitados de la muerte
sentía ahora rodar sus propios pasos."
11.30.2003
"Every day is like Sunday"
Was it from Morrisey's first solo album? Nice reading last night by David Perry, Mike County, and Nick Piombino in Cambridge. Haven't had a chance to read other blogs yet, too much "work" for work to do just now.
Enjoyed talking w/ Mark Lamoureux & hearing poems. Thanks, Nick, for the books. I read your Two Essays last night:
"The truth is what we must repeat. The facts are what we must accept. This is why the truth is poetic and the facts journalistic."
*
This week has been spent listening to Julieta Venegas, Sí (BMG Entertainment, México, 2003).
*
And wondering if Sonic Youth's magnificent song "Schizophrenia" could be read as an allegory:
"I went away to see an old friend of mine
His sister came over she was out of her mind
She said Jesus had a twin who knew nothing about sin
She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I'm in
Her light eyes were dancing she is insane
Her brother says she's just a bitch with a golden chain
She keeps coming closer saying: 'I can feel it in my bones'
Schizophrenia is taking me home
My Future is static
It's already had it
I could tuck you in
And we can talk about it
I had a dream
And it split the scene
But I got a hunch
It's coming back to me"
{Sister, SST Records, 1987}
*
The rest of the week and now, of course, spent thinking about Venezuela, hoping there can be a peaceful transition. I have no energy right now to write about it, but the news I hear is good so far.
*
Reading Elizabeth Schön, Eileen Tabios, and Francisco Pérez Perdomo.
Was it from Morrisey's first solo album? Nice reading last night by David Perry, Mike County, and Nick Piombino in Cambridge. Haven't had a chance to read other blogs yet, too much "work" for work to do just now.
Enjoyed talking w/ Mark Lamoureux & hearing poems. Thanks, Nick, for the books. I read your Two Essays last night:
"The truth is what we must repeat. The facts are what we must accept. This is why the truth is poetic and the facts journalistic."
*
This week has been spent listening to Julieta Venegas, Sí (BMG Entertainment, México, 2003).
*
And wondering if Sonic Youth's magnificent song "Schizophrenia" could be read as an allegory:
"I went away to see an old friend of mine
His sister came over she was out of her mind
She said Jesus had a twin who knew nothing about sin
She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I'm in
Her light eyes were dancing she is insane
Her brother says she's just a bitch with a golden chain
She keeps coming closer saying: 'I can feel it in my bones'
Schizophrenia is taking me home
My Future is static
It's already had it
I could tuck you in
And we can talk about it
I had a dream
And it split the scene
But I got a hunch
It's coming back to me"
{Sister, SST Records, 1987}
*
The rest of the week and now, of course, spent thinking about Venezuela, hoping there can be a peaceful transition. I have no energy right now to write about it, but the news I hear is good so far.
*
Reading Elizabeth Schön, Eileen Tabios, and Francisco Pérez Perdomo.
11.28.2003
Recently Read
"Who seeks a spot to sit, to let the unease flow
Which needn't be let, nor does it flow, but stammer.
A meanwhile tonal musics play in private space
Which is the public's right, routine, to route your wills.
Mall. (does it matter?) Chairs, on its western borders.
Incessant. And there's two people taking surveys.
What stores (as in a store, of) do you wish, to see?"
{Rodrigo Toscano, The Disparities, Green Integer, 2002}
"Who seeks a spot to sit, to let the unease flow
Which needn't be let, nor does it flow, but stammer.
A meanwhile tonal musics play in private space
Which is the public's right, routine, to route your wills.
Mall. (does it matter?) Chairs, on its western borders.
Incessant. And there's two people taking surveys.
What stores (as in a store, of) do you wish, to see?"
{Rodrigo Toscano, The Disparities, Green Integer, 2002}
Hip-hop-ology
"I wrote it in the dark so I could feel it like braille"
{De La Soul, Stakes Is High, 1996}
"I wrote it in the dark so I could feel it like braille"
{De La Soul, Stakes Is High, 1996}
11.26.2003
Armando Rojas Guardia, etc.
(Translation of an excerpt from the opening lecture for his workshop "Escritura y Ciudad," a few months ago at the Fundacion Para La Cultura Urbana in Caracas.)
"I don't have to reiterate that for a city to reach the level of personal myth it's not essential for our first years to have been spent there. Nor is it essential that the memories we carry of our earliest sense of self-awareness blend with its streets, its public squares, its trees, or its birds. All that is required is that a significantly symbolic event--such as an accident, falling in love, a sexual encounter, the death of a loved one--unleash in us the living, enduring, archetypal force of the mythical. And for this mythical element to be precisely linked to that place and not another, transforming the setting into the symbolic geography of a psychic moment that distinguishes itself from the rest, separating that moment from the regular flow of our daily routine."
*
For various reasons, I've fallen into the habit of mythologizing certain cities. Or, to be more specific, certain experiences or "seasons" that I've gone through in Tampa, Mexico D.F., Caracas, and Boston. Nomadism forces you to observe and memorize your surroundings, lest they disappear from your mind, too.
*
During my last year in Tampa, for instance, I remember the pixel vision film that A. made of her and L. driving through West Tampa, talking about their experiences as young Latinas in that city. The blurred images and their conversation in that film resonate within me everytime I drive through West Tampa nowdays. I can still remember watching it late at night at A.'s apartment off campus, feeling the city transforming me, as though I were a silent passenger in the back seat of that car.
*
In 1999, when Claudia and I were in Mexico D.F. for a week, I found a copy of Ernesto Cardenal's Salmos at a bookstore near Parque Alameda. While I had been browsing, the soldier armed with a machine gun next to the cash register had followed me throughout the bookstore, trained as he had been (I assume) to keep an eye on indios and mestizos (just like him) closely. Reading Cardenal's re-interpreations of the Psalms, later that night, was a lesson in poems as amulets, prayer, protection.
*
Boston and Caracas, parallel cities.
(Translation of an excerpt from the opening lecture for his workshop "Escritura y Ciudad," a few months ago at the Fundacion Para La Cultura Urbana in Caracas.)
"I don't have to reiterate that for a city to reach the level of personal myth it's not essential for our first years to have been spent there. Nor is it essential that the memories we carry of our earliest sense of self-awareness blend with its streets, its public squares, its trees, or its birds. All that is required is that a significantly symbolic event--such as an accident, falling in love, a sexual encounter, the death of a loved one--unleash in us the living, enduring, archetypal force of the mythical. And for this mythical element to be precisely linked to that place and not another, transforming the setting into the symbolic geography of a psychic moment that distinguishes itself from the rest, separating that moment from the regular flow of our daily routine."
*
For various reasons, I've fallen into the habit of mythologizing certain cities. Or, to be more specific, certain experiences or "seasons" that I've gone through in Tampa, Mexico D.F., Caracas, and Boston. Nomadism forces you to observe and memorize your surroundings, lest they disappear from your mind, too.
*
During my last year in Tampa, for instance, I remember the pixel vision film that A. made of her and L. driving through West Tampa, talking about their experiences as young Latinas in that city. The blurred images and their conversation in that film resonate within me everytime I drive through West Tampa nowdays. I can still remember watching it late at night at A.'s apartment off campus, feeling the city transforming me, as though I were a silent passenger in the back seat of that car.
*
In 1999, when Claudia and I were in Mexico D.F. for a week, I found a copy of Ernesto Cardenal's Salmos at a bookstore near Parque Alameda. While I had been browsing, the soldier armed with a machine gun next to the cash register had followed me throughout the bookstore, trained as he had been (I assume) to keep an eye on indios and mestizos (just like him) closely. Reading Cardenal's re-interpreations of the Psalms, later that night, was a lesson in poems as amulets, prayer, protection.
*
Boston and Caracas, parallel cities.
"30 September 1939
[...]
After that in the world today is the desolation of ideas. In times of war and revolution, the great comfort has always been that in place of home there is the idea. One goes out into the street and finds people friendly , everyone is a brother or sister of everyone else because England is threatened. Patriotism, revolutionary fervor, can knit people together into a spasmodic unity. But today, for hundreds of people, even that consolation is denied them. There is confusion of ideas. Many can no longer fight with any conviction for their country, because it represents the Past. And the idea of the future, Revolution, is so compromised that only the most ideological thinkers wish to fight for that either. Suddenly the world appears a desert. There is no woman, there are no children, there is no faith, there is no cause.
The moon shines above the London streets during the blackouts like an island in the sky. The streets become rivers of light. The houses become feathery, soft, undefined, aspiring, so that any part of this town might be the most beautiful city in the world, sleeping amongst silt and water. And the moon takes a farewell look at our civilization everywhere. I have seen it in Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid, also. Only the houses are not plumed, feathery, soft there. The moon was brighter and they seemed made of white bone. [...]"
{Stephen Spender, Journals 1939-1983}
[...]
After that in the world today is the desolation of ideas. In times of war and revolution, the great comfort has always been that in place of home there is the idea. One goes out into the street and finds people friendly , everyone is a brother or sister of everyone else because England is threatened. Patriotism, revolutionary fervor, can knit people together into a spasmodic unity. But today, for hundreds of people, even that consolation is denied them. There is confusion of ideas. Many can no longer fight with any conviction for their country, because it represents the Past. And the idea of the future, Revolution, is so compromised that only the most ideological thinkers wish to fight for that either. Suddenly the world appears a desert. There is no woman, there are no children, there is no faith, there is no cause.
The moon shines above the London streets during the blackouts like an island in the sky. The streets become rivers of light. The houses become feathery, soft, undefined, aspiring, so that any part of this town might be the most beautiful city in the world, sleeping amongst silt and water. And the moon takes a farewell look at our civilization everywhere. I have seen it in Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid, also. Only the houses are not plumed, feathery, soft there. The moon was brighter and they seemed made of white bone. [...]"
{Stephen Spender, Journals 1939-1983}
"3 October 1980
[...]
I said I knew very well what he meant, because I had been reading Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads that morning. Wordsworth wrote in 1800: 'A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.' Wordsworth felt as Harry does.
Harry is at the centre of things. Paranoia means that he thinks incessantly about the outward forces that are destroying inner peace. His 'madness' consists (a) of thinking that the disturbance of the world is all directed at one person--him, and (b) of taking what is really poetic metaphor as poetic truth. If poets are associated with madness it is because some poets have inhabited a world of their own metaphors, taking them quite literally. Perhaps, in ancient times, poets were holy madmen.
I found the conversation tiring, because I understood it so well. Harry was talking about the realities I know and run away from. [...]"
{Stephen Spender, Journals 1939-1983}
[...]
I said I knew very well what he meant, because I had been reading Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads that morning. Wordsworth wrote in 1800: 'A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.' Wordsworth felt as Harry does.
Harry is at the centre of things. Paranoia means that he thinks incessantly about the outward forces that are destroying inner peace. His 'madness' consists (a) of thinking that the disturbance of the world is all directed at one person--him, and (b) of taking what is really poetic metaphor as poetic truth. If poets are associated with madness it is because some poets have inhabited a world of their own metaphors, taking them quite literally. Perhaps, in ancient times, poets were holy madmen.
I found the conversation tiring, because I understood it so well. Harry was talking about the realities I know and run away from. [...]"
{Stephen Spender, Journals 1939-1983}
I have wasted much of my life on anger and fear. An early awareness of the hypocrisy and evil of Empire. Hearing Johnny Lydon scream w/ PIL: "Anger is an energy!" in a car on Clearwater Beach one afternoon in middle school years.
"Thanksgiving" always a reminder of dead Indians and dead Africans.
I'm now thankful for those who led me to these two LPs when I was in 8th grade:
1. The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks
2. The Clash, Sandinista!:
"It's up to you not to heed the call-up
I don't wanna die
It's up to you not to heed the call-up
I don't wanna kill"
"Thanksgiving" always a reminder of dead Indians and dead Africans.
I'm now thankful for those who led me to these two LPs when I was in 8th grade:
1. The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks
2. The Clash, Sandinista!:
"It's up to you not to heed the call-up
I don't wanna die
It's up to you not to heed the call-up
I don't wanna kill"
11.25.2003
A Statement by Venezuelan Intellectuals Against Chavismo
Today, the newspaper Tal Cual published a statement signed by more than one hundred Venezuelan intellectuals urging all Venezuelans to vote "Sí" against Hugo Chávez at the Reafirmazo, which begins on Friday, November 28. I include their statement and my translation of it below, along with a partial list of the writers and artists who signed the document.
(Accents didn't all come through in the Spanish version. I still can't figure out accents and ñs on this blog.)
*
"Nosotros, escritores y artistas, queremos sumar nuestra voz a la mayoria de los venezolanos para llamar a firmar con decision y contra toda amenaza la solicitud del referendo revocatorio del Presidente de la Republica, a partir del proximo 28.
Convencidos como estamos de que no hay otra salida civilizada a la dramatica e insostenible situacion del pais que darnos la posibilidad de decidir nuestro futuro. Confiados en que la sociedad venezolana encontrará las claves de la paz y la reconciliacion, la transparencia democratica y el desarrollo material que hoy se nos niegan. Igualmente queremos decir, porque es nuestro oficio y destino, que, despues de estos años marcados por el dolor, atisbamos la reconstruccion de una cultura consustanciada con el devenir nacional y deseosa de una distinta espiritualidad colectiva, sin exclusiones. Que deje atras la abulia y el desprecio, el aldeanismo y la miseria sectaria de la actual administracion cultural cuyos emblemas mas visibles podrian ser los desmanes contra el personal calificado de la Biblioteca Nacional, la destruccion del patrimonio artistico urbano o la conversion de nuestros teatros mayores en degradados escenarios partidistas.
Firmar es afirmar los más pristinos valores civicos y democráticos."
(English translation)
We, writers and artists, want to add our voice to that of the majority of Venezuelans to make a call to sign, firmly and against all threats, the solicitation for a recall referendum for the President of the Republic, beginning on the 28th.
Convinced as we are that there is no other civilized solution to the dramatic and unsustainable situation of the country, aside from allowing us the opportunity to decide our future. We are confident that Venezuelan society will find the keys to peace and reconciliation, democratic transparency and the material development that are denied us today. Likewise, we want to say, because it is our job and our destiny, that after these years marked by suffering, we envision the reconstruction of a cultural sphere directly tied to the nation's future and inspired by a different type of collective spirituality without exclusions. A sphere that will leave behind the apathy and hatred, the provincialism and sectarian misery of the present cultural administration, whose most visible emblems could be the excesses committed against qualified personel at the National Library, the destruction of our cities' cultural patrimony, or the conversion of our theaters into degraded partisan stages.
To sign is to affirm the highest civic and democratic values.
*
Partial list of signatures:
Edda Armas
Rafael Arráiz Lucca
Alberto Barrera Tyszka
Oswaldo Barreto
Elizabeth Burgos
Rafael Cadenas
Israel Centeno
Carlos Cruz Diez
Jacqueline Goldberg
Patricia Guzmán
Sofía Imber
Ana Julia Jatar
Oscar Marcano
Ibsen Martínez
Milagros Mata Gil
William Niño Araque
Maria Fernanda Palacios
Yolanda Pantin
Armando Rojas Guardia
Elizabeth Schön
Milagros Socorro
Guillermo Sucre
Ana Teresa Torres
Adriana Villanueva
Pedro León Zapata
Today, the newspaper Tal Cual published a statement signed by more than one hundred Venezuelan intellectuals urging all Venezuelans to vote "Sí" against Hugo Chávez at the Reafirmazo, which begins on Friday, November 28. I include their statement and my translation of it below, along with a partial list of the writers and artists who signed the document.
(Accents didn't all come through in the Spanish version. I still can't figure out accents and ñs on this blog.)
*
"Nosotros, escritores y artistas, queremos sumar nuestra voz a la mayoria de los venezolanos para llamar a firmar con decision y contra toda amenaza la solicitud del referendo revocatorio del Presidente de la Republica, a partir del proximo 28.
Convencidos como estamos de que no hay otra salida civilizada a la dramatica e insostenible situacion del pais que darnos la posibilidad de decidir nuestro futuro. Confiados en que la sociedad venezolana encontrará las claves de la paz y la reconciliacion, la transparencia democratica y el desarrollo material que hoy se nos niegan. Igualmente queremos decir, porque es nuestro oficio y destino, que, despues de estos años marcados por el dolor, atisbamos la reconstruccion de una cultura consustanciada con el devenir nacional y deseosa de una distinta espiritualidad colectiva, sin exclusiones. Que deje atras la abulia y el desprecio, el aldeanismo y la miseria sectaria de la actual administracion cultural cuyos emblemas mas visibles podrian ser los desmanes contra el personal calificado de la Biblioteca Nacional, la destruccion del patrimonio artistico urbano o la conversion de nuestros teatros mayores en degradados escenarios partidistas.
Firmar es afirmar los más pristinos valores civicos y democráticos."
(English translation)
We, writers and artists, want to add our voice to that of the majority of Venezuelans to make a call to sign, firmly and against all threats, the solicitation for a recall referendum for the President of the Republic, beginning on the 28th.
Convinced as we are that there is no other civilized solution to the dramatic and unsustainable situation of the country, aside from allowing us the opportunity to decide our future. We are confident that Venezuelan society will find the keys to peace and reconciliation, democratic transparency and the material development that are denied us today. Likewise, we want to say, because it is our job and our destiny, that after these years marked by suffering, we envision the reconstruction of a cultural sphere directly tied to the nation's future and inspired by a different type of collective spirituality without exclusions. A sphere that will leave behind the apathy and hatred, the provincialism and sectarian misery of the present cultural administration, whose most visible emblems could be the excesses committed against qualified personel at the National Library, the destruction of our cities' cultural patrimony, or the conversion of our theaters into degraded partisan stages.
To sign is to affirm the highest civic and democratic values.
*
Partial list of signatures:
Edda Armas
Rafael Arráiz Lucca
Alberto Barrera Tyszka
Oswaldo Barreto
Elizabeth Burgos
Rafael Cadenas
Israel Centeno
Carlos Cruz Diez
Jacqueline Goldberg
Patricia Guzmán
Sofía Imber
Ana Julia Jatar
Oscar Marcano
Ibsen Martínez
Milagros Mata Gil
William Niño Araque
Maria Fernanda Palacios
Yolanda Pantin
Armando Rojas Guardia
Elizabeth Schön
Milagros Socorro
Guillermo Sucre
Ana Teresa Torres
Adriana Villanueva
Pedro León Zapata
Chicanismo
At hilaritas, Heriberto Yépez reprints a recent article he wrote for the newspaper Reforma in Mexico City about the U.S.-Mexico border during the last decade. Very interesting discussion of the Americanization of the border and the Chicano-ization of Mexicans.
Making me think about what has always been a central element of my life, deracination. For many Latinos in the U.S. (whether we were born here or elsewhere) life is a slow bleed, a continual loss of _______________. How many Latin Americans have I encountered in academic settings who dismiss the Chicano and the U.S. Latino as pariahs, as incapable of creating culture? (A= Many) Of course, plenty of U.S. Latino literature is easily dismissable. And yet.
I am not a Chicano but I am. Writing in languages that do not "belong" to me. Impure, misspelled, we pochos are maybe ghosts from the future sent to frighten Latin Americans.
What is undeniable is the sheer destructive force of the United States as an unprecedented empire, as it makes its way through the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Arab world. And we colonial children, here inside the U.S., have been recolonized countless times. Part of my desire for writing and reading is that it allows me a space for travel, where I can organize my scattered ancestries. With no illusion of ever being completely "Venezuelan," "American," "Venezuelan-American," "Latino," etc. Thinking and living in pieces.
At hilaritas, Heriberto Yépez reprints a recent article he wrote for the newspaper Reforma in Mexico City about the U.S.-Mexico border during the last decade. Very interesting discussion of the Americanization of the border and the Chicano-ization of Mexicans.
Making me think about what has always been a central element of my life, deracination. For many Latinos in the U.S. (whether we were born here or elsewhere) life is a slow bleed, a continual loss of _______________. How many Latin Americans have I encountered in academic settings who dismiss the Chicano and the U.S. Latino as pariahs, as incapable of creating culture? (A= Many) Of course, plenty of U.S. Latino literature is easily dismissable. And yet.
I am not a Chicano but I am. Writing in languages that do not "belong" to me. Impure, misspelled, we pochos are maybe ghosts from the future sent to frighten Latin Americans.
What is undeniable is the sheer destructive force of the United States as an unprecedented empire, as it makes its way through the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Arab world. And we colonial children, here inside the U.S., have been recolonized countless times. Part of my desire for writing and reading is that it allows me a space for travel, where I can organize my scattered ancestries. With no illusion of ever being completely "Venezuelan," "American," "Venezuelan-American," "Latino," etc. Thinking and living in pieces.
11.24.2003
Del río hondo aquí / Elizabeth Schön
Born in Caracas in 1921, Elizabeth Schön's poetry is distinguished by its mystical and philosophical tendencies. Schön's collection Del río hondo aquí was published in 2000 under her own editorial imprint, Editorial Diosa Blanca. Last summer, the Semana de la Poesía (a week-long series of lectures, readings and conferences in Caracas) was dedicated to her work.
I want to thank my friend the poet Yelimar Becerra for lending me her copy (autographed!) of Del río hondo aquí, from which the following four translations are based.
*
From the Deep River Here (excerpts)
"Ah del río completo"
Ah, the complete river
with Andromeda between prows
and Ulysses between his anchors!
"Hay un río semejante al cielo"
There's a river resembling the sky
at the bottom of the mountain
Upriver, in the tree and summit
and another, likewise, in the dream
dream of beings
"Ágil el alma"
The soul is agile
if it follows the inimitable spaces
of those golds, those blues
ready to rescue the ephemeral in our origin
"Ángeles opacos en la extension"
Opaque angels on the landscape
blue reflections from an above
equally blue over waters
The afternoon, the day
The tracks wait for dark
The gold has a strange skin like sable
Born in Caracas in 1921, Elizabeth Schön's poetry is distinguished by its mystical and philosophical tendencies. Schön's collection Del río hondo aquí was published in 2000 under her own editorial imprint, Editorial Diosa Blanca. Last summer, the Semana de la Poesía (a week-long series of lectures, readings and conferences in Caracas) was dedicated to her work.
I want to thank my friend the poet Yelimar Becerra for lending me her copy (autographed!) of Del río hondo aquí, from which the following four translations are based.
*
From the Deep River Here (excerpts)
"Ah del río completo"
Ah, the complete river
with Andromeda between prows
and Ulysses between his anchors!
"Hay un río semejante al cielo"
There's a river resembling the sky
at the bottom of the mountain
Upriver, in the tree and summit
and another, likewise, in the dream
dream of beings
"Ágil el alma"
The soul is agile
if it follows the inimitable spaces
of those golds, those blues
ready to rescue the ephemeral in our origin
"Ángeles opacos en la extension"
Opaque angels on the landscape
blue reflections from an above
equally blue over waters
The afternoon, the day
The tracks wait for dark
The gold has a strange skin like sable
11.23.2003
Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003)
This past Thursday at dawn, Juan Sánchez Peláez died from cancer in Caracas. Horrible news in an already dreadful year. A beautiful poet, whose words accompany me everywhere.
*
"IX
Soplo el grano, paso el dedo en la llama. Me envanece la palabra que hallo, que busco en vilo, riberas arriba o abajo, absorto, pleno (de mí, del rumor), ahíto y solo.
X
Yo voy por mi laúd, descalzo
El poeta se ausenta en el arbol de mi mudez.
recoge a la zaga, en confines, mis fetiches vacíos.
La ciega de amor en su cima no ve mis giraflores.
Miseria en mis viajes por tan exiguo equipaje.
El ímpetu, la evidencia abrupta de mi ausencia.
Por el náufrago ruega mi bella de brazos cruzados."
{"Otra vez otro instante," Filiacion oscura, 1966}
This past Thursday at dawn, Juan Sánchez Peláez died from cancer in Caracas. Horrible news in an already dreadful year. A beautiful poet, whose words accompany me everywhere.
*
"IX
Soplo el grano, paso el dedo en la llama. Me envanece la palabra que hallo, que busco en vilo, riberas arriba o abajo, absorto, pleno (de mí, del rumor), ahíto y solo.
X
Yo voy por mi laúd, descalzo
El poeta se ausenta en el arbol de mi mudez.
recoge a la zaga, en confines, mis fetiches vacíos.
La ciega de amor en su cima no ve mis giraflores.
Miseria en mis viajes por tan exiguo equipaje.
El ímpetu, la evidencia abrupta de mi ausencia.
Por el náufrago ruega mi bella de brazos cruzados."
{"Otra vez otro instante," Filiacion oscura, 1966}
11.22.2003
Jean Grae!!
Her new EP is fantastic. She pulls off a chorus that consists of "Fuck you" repeated so beautifully on the opening song. She is one of those raw, jagged and intellectual rappers that one hardly sees nowdays. The song "My Crew" is on continuous rotation here in my mind:
"I represent for a Nation
Thought we was in it together
But I guess it gets strange
When money reigns in sunny weather
Tougher than leather..."
Her new EP is fantastic. She pulls off a chorus that consists of "Fuck you" repeated so beautifully on the opening song. She is one of those raw, jagged and intellectual rappers that one hardly sees nowdays. The song "My Crew" is on continuous rotation here in my mind:
"I represent for a Nation
Thought we was in it together
But I guess it gets strange
When money reigns in sunny weather
Tougher than leather..."
Entrevista / Rafael Cadenas
translated from Rafael Cadenas, Antologia (Madrid: Coleccion Visor, 1999)
Interview
In his final days
the old poet
reached the Great Uncertainty;
but since he had become reticent
he gave no details about his state.
He only felt--he declared--
that he had lost his life.
I would rather know what he didn't say
over any one of his poems.
Perhaps he, too, couldn't see
where the mistake was;
but throughout the conversation
a dilemma emerges between the lines: art
is an offering
or vanity.
translated from Rafael Cadenas, Antologia (Madrid: Coleccion Visor, 1999)
Interview
In his final days
the old poet
reached the Great Uncertainty;
but since he had become reticent
he gave no details about his state.
He only felt--he declared--
that he had lost his life.
I would rather know what he didn't say
over any one of his poems.
Perhaps he, too, couldn't see
where the mistake was;
but throughout the conversation
a dilemma emerges between the lines: art
is an offering
or vanity.
My Boston & Fanny Howe
A frantic pace with work, city, family and words innundating me. Autobiographical impulses. I was born in Boston in 1970 and left when my parents moved to Caracas in 1976. Although I returned here regularly, including 3 years of high school in the 1980s, when I settled here in 1998 (again, for "school") it was a complete shock for me to realize how little I knew about Boston. I do feel "at home" here, but living in Boston has made me realize how nowhere is completely home for me. No lament, just an awareness of melancholy, displacement, etc.
There have been certain poets whose work has helped me understand my place in Boston. One of these poets is John Wieners, who I feel lucky enough to have met briefly. One memorable reading he gave was at the now-defunct Waterstone's Bookstore, off Newbury street in 1997 or 1998. Fanny Howe read with Wieners that night, and since then I've found pieces of my Boston in her work as well. This afternoon, I've been reading the introduction to her recent book of essays The Wedding Dress (2003). The Boston she remembers (from the 1960s to the present) in her introduction, is one that in many ways remains the same:
"Encircling this rather quiet and interior domestic quest was the city of Boston and its racist and violent rejection of progress, desegregation, dialogue. Louise Day Hicks and the vociferous Boston Irish were like the dogs and hoses in the South. No difference. Boston, always segregated into pockets of furious chauvinism--from the North End to the South--from rich white sections of Cambridge to poor working-class areas there--did not know how to separate issues of race and class. The poor were set against the poor, while the rich continued to glide around the periphery dispensing moral judgements."
(xii)
"There is very little cross-cultural exchange even at the most privileged level in Boston. From that point down, the divisions have enlarged and darkened and continue to enlarge and darken."
(xiv)
"I quickly learned that white people are obsessed with race, and the subject comes up at least once in any three- or four-hour gathering. One night I went to a small town in Massachusetts to give a reading, and when I entered the room where an all-white group of people had gathered afterwards, they were saying, "If the lines ever get drawn, and the situation gets seriously violent, I know which side I will be on." And then they began to speak (liberals, all of them) about their fear of blacks, and their judgements of blacks, and I had to announce to them that my husband and children were black, before hastily departing.
This event has been repeated so many times, in multiple forms, that by now I make some kind of give-away statement after entering a white-only room, one way or another, that will warn the people there "which side I am on." The situation most recently repeated itself about a hundred times in my presence over the subject of O.J. Simpson. His name was like the whistle of a train coming down the line, and I knew what was coming--vindictive racialized remarks, coming from otherwise socially progressive white people. You would think that he had organized mass murders and guerilla warfare on American streets. Louis Farrakhan is the only other public person who produces the same reaction. On these occasions, more than any others, I feel that my skin is white but my soul is not, and that I am in camouflage."
(xviii-xix)
My Boston is mapped by color, and I too often feel "camouflaged." Thinking about the mestizaje in my own family, in this city I am a camouflaged being, a mixture of white, Indian, Black, "Spanish," Venezuelan, "Mexican," etc. Sometimes "passing" for a few moments but usually trying to navigate Boston's class and racial map as unnoticed as possible. Ellison's "invisibility" as a method.
Howe's daughter, Danzy Senna, has written so much of this "mixed" and Black Boston in her amazing first novel, Caucasia. At one point, the book's narrator, a teenage girl named Birdie, mentions how the subway map of Boston effectively graphs the racial divisions of the city: blue line, orange line (Black and Latino), red line (poor and wealthy whites), etc. Reading her novel, at times, for me was a way of finding out what city I had been living in as a child.
What I love about Boston is the presence of so many writers whose work I admire. I find the city to be as divided as Howe describes it, yet in some way the books I encounter are part of that other, intellectual city I aspire to live within. I can't imagine staying here permanently, but for now it works. What I dread about Boston is the dull repetition of the same situation Howe is referring to and how these politics of race and class get played out on a daily basis. At work, on the street, with my white family, etc. Many dramas with no resolution in sight. But I'm grateful for Fanny Howe's attempts at writing a different city, for her poetic Vision.
*
Reading Nick Piombino's wonderful comments today on Walter Benjamin in relation to blogging.
*
Also, Leny Mendoza Strobel's comments on Barbara Jane Reyes' work-in-progress "Poeta en San Francisco":
"How wide does an angel's
Wingspan have to be to
Carry all your sorrow?"
A frantic pace with work, city, family and words innundating me. Autobiographical impulses. I was born in Boston in 1970 and left when my parents moved to Caracas in 1976. Although I returned here regularly, including 3 years of high school in the 1980s, when I settled here in 1998 (again, for "school") it was a complete shock for me to realize how little I knew about Boston. I do feel "at home" here, but living in Boston has made me realize how nowhere is completely home for me. No lament, just an awareness of melancholy, displacement, etc.
There have been certain poets whose work has helped me understand my place in Boston. One of these poets is John Wieners, who I feel lucky enough to have met briefly. One memorable reading he gave was at the now-defunct Waterstone's Bookstore, off Newbury street in 1997 or 1998. Fanny Howe read with Wieners that night, and since then I've found pieces of my Boston in her work as well. This afternoon, I've been reading the introduction to her recent book of essays The Wedding Dress (2003). The Boston she remembers (from the 1960s to the present) in her introduction, is one that in many ways remains the same:
"Encircling this rather quiet and interior domestic quest was the city of Boston and its racist and violent rejection of progress, desegregation, dialogue. Louise Day Hicks and the vociferous Boston Irish were like the dogs and hoses in the South. No difference. Boston, always segregated into pockets of furious chauvinism--from the North End to the South--from rich white sections of Cambridge to poor working-class areas there--did not know how to separate issues of race and class. The poor were set against the poor, while the rich continued to glide around the periphery dispensing moral judgements."
(xii)
"There is very little cross-cultural exchange even at the most privileged level in Boston. From that point down, the divisions have enlarged and darkened and continue to enlarge and darken."
(xiv)
"I quickly learned that white people are obsessed with race, and the subject comes up at least once in any three- or four-hour gathering. One night I went to a small town in Massachusetts to give a reading, and when I entered the room where an all-white group of people had gathered afterwards, they were saying, "If the lines ever get drawn, and the situation gets seriously violent, I know which side I will be on." And then they began to speak (liberals, all of them) about their fear of blacks, and their judgements of blacks, and I had to announce to them that my husband and children were black, before hastily departing.
This event has been repeated so many times, in multiple forms, that by now I make some kind of give-away statement after entering a white-only room, one way or another, that will warn the people there "which side I am on." The situation most recently repeated itself about a hundred times in my presence over the subject of O.J. Simpson. His name was like the whistle of a train coming down the line, and I knew what was coming--vindictive racialized remarks, coming from otherwise socially progressive white people. You would think that he had organized mass murders and guerilla warfare on American streets. Louis Farrakhan is the only other public person who produces the same reaction. On these occasions, more than any others, I feel that my skin is white but my soul is not, and that I am in camouflage."
(xviii-xix)
My Boston is mapped by color, and I too often feel "camouflaged." Thinking about the mestizaje in my own family, in this city I am a camouflaged being, a mixture of white, Indian, Black, "Spanish," Venezuelan, "Mexican," etc. Sometimes "passing" for a few moments but usually trying to navigate Boston's class and racial map as unnoticed as possible. Ellison's "invisibility" as a method.
Howe's daughter, Danzy Senna, has written so much of this "mixed" and Black Boston in her amazing first novel, Caucasia. At one point, the book's narrator, a teenage girl named Birdie, mentions how the subway map of Boston effectively graphs the racial divisions of the city: blue line, orange line (Black and Latino), red line (poor and wealthy whites), etc. Reading her novel, at times, for me was a way of finding out what city I had been living in as a child.
What I love about Boston is the presence of so many writers whose work I admire. I find the city to be as divided as Howe describes it, yet in some way the books I encounter are part of that other, intellectual city I aspire to live within. I can't imagine staying here permanently, but for now it works. What I dread about Boston is the dull repetition of the same situation Howe is referring to and how these politics of race and class get played out on a daily basis. At work, on the street, with my white family, etc. Many dramas with no resolution in sight. But I'm grateful for Fanny Howe's attempts at writing a different city, for her poetic Vision.
*
Reading Nick Piombino's wonderful comments today on Walter Benjamin in relation to blogging.
*
Also, Leny Mendoza Strobel's comments on Barbara Jane Reyes' work-in-progress "Poeta en San Francisco":
"How wide does an angel's
Wingspan have to be to
Carry all your sorrow?"
11.20.2003
Oraciones para un dios ausente / Martha Kornblith
three versions from Oraciones para un dios ausente (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1995)
*
"Mi universo tematico"
My thematic universe
only encompassed
three meager phrases:
I think that you
say that I
say that he
thinks of me
in a bad way.
*
"La calle esta llena"
The street is full
and there's a woman
at the bottom of a room
weeping alone.
She loves a man
who writes theory.
She remembers that day
full of last goodbyes.
It's night,
and outside
I'm raining.
Because it's Friday,
December
and you're leaving.
*
"A veces"
At times
one must
return to memories
to annul memory,
annihilate vestiges,
other lives,
salute old links,
decapitate ancient papers,
stumble again,
so they come back to say
and not have,
not possess anything.
three versions from Oraciones para un dios ausente (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1995)
*
"Mi universo tematico"
My thematic universe
only encompassed
three meager phrases:
I think that you
say that I
say that he
thinks of me
in a bad way.
*
"La calle esta llena"
The street is full
and there's a woman
at the bottom of a room
weeping alone.
She loves a man
who writes theory.
She remembers that day
full of last goodbyes.
It's night,
and outside
I'm raining.
Because it's Friday,
December
and you're leaving.
*
"A veces"
At times
one must
return to memories
to annul memory,
annihilate vestiges,
other lives,
salute old links,
decapitate ancient papers,
stumble again,
so they come back to say
and not have,
not possess anything.
11.19.2003
Conjunto residencial / Rafael Cadenas
Residential Grouping
You can listen to the wind again here.
It passes through the buildings, sways
the pine trees, freezes the drive-in theater.
Dweller from nowhere,
I can’t say to you: “Listen, listen,
be my spirit.”
There is only a waiting
at night,
but no one has the strength to speak to you
as they did in enthusiastic times.
You are what you are, a solitary voice
that resounds in the city suburbs.
The words they directed at you have also disappeared
like the hallucinatory leaves.
This is another world, there is no direction.
The wind, when it strikes,
punches into chaos.
{ Rafael Cadenas, Antologia, Madrid: Colección Visor, 1999 }
You can listen to the wind again here.
It passes through the buildings, sways
the pine trees, freezes the drive-in theater.
Dweller from nowhere,
I can’t say to you: “Listen, listen,
be my spirit.”
There is only a waiting
at night,
but no one has the strength to speak to you
as they did in enthusiastic times.
You are what you are, a solitary voice
that resounds in the city suburbs.
The words they directed at you have also disappeared
like the hallucinatory leaves.
This is another world, there is no direction.
The wind, when it strikes,
punches into chaos.
{ Rafael Cadenas, Antologia, Madrid: Colección Visor, 1999 }
11.18.2003
Wilson Harris
Discoveries in reading potentially changing the course of our lives. Often revealed through intuition and pleasure while reading, "wasting" time reclined, or home from work (what is work?), or at work, or sleeping. I read the first novel from Wilson Harris's Guyana Quartet in the fall of 1998, as an assignment for a class. But I still haven't finished reading the Quartet, stopped mid-way through for years now to re-arrange these ideas (an interest in quantum physics ties Harris to the poetics of Latin American writers such as Ernesto Cardenal. Harris, however, is completely unlike any other writer.). His digressive, quantum prose is "more English than the English," while creating a space in that English for the Black, the Asian, the Indian, the mestizo. Like Walcott, or Cesaire, or Brathwaite, or Mutis, Harris has re-written Homer to fit his own Guyanese dimensions. The first novel of this quartet, Palace of the Peacock was published in 1961, two years after Harris left Guyana to live in England.
*
"The map of the savannahs was a dream. The names Brazil and Guyana were colonial conventions I had known from childhood. I clung to them now as to a curious necessary stone and footing, even in my dream, the ground I knew I must not relinquish. They were an actual stage, a presence, however mythical they seemed to the universal and the spiritual eye. They were as close to me as my ribs, the rivers and the flatlands, the mountains and heartland I intimately saw. I could not help cherishing my symbolic map, and my bodily prejudice like a well-known room and house of superstition within which I dwelt. I saw this kingdom of man turned into a colony and battleground of spirit, a priceless tempting jewel I dreamed I possessed.
I pored over the map of the sun my brother had given me. The river of the savannahs wound its way far into the distance until it had forgotten the open land. The dense dreaming jungle and forest emerged. Mariella dwelt above the falls in the forest. I saw the rocks bristling in the legend of the river."
{The Guyana Quartet, p. 24}
*
"The solid wall of trees was filled with ancient blocks of shadow and with gleaming hinges of light. Wind rustled the leafy curtains through which masks of living beard dangled as low as the water and the sun. My living eye was stunned by inversions of the brilliancy and the gloom of the forest in a deception and hollow and socket. We had armed ourselves with prospecting knives and were clearing a line as near to the river as we could."
{p. 28}
Discoveries in reading potentially changing the course of our lives. Often revealed through intuition and pleasure while reading, "wasting" time reclined, or home from work (what is work?), or at work, or sleeping. I read the first novel from Wilson Harris's Guyana Quartet in the fall of 1998, as an assignment for a class. But I still haven't finished reading the Quartet, stopped mid-way through for years now to re-arrange these ideas (an interest in quantum physics ties Harris to the poetics of Latin American writers such as Ernesto Cardenal. Harris, however, is completely unlike any other writer.). His digressive, quantum prose is "more English than the English," while creating a space in that English for the Black, the Asian, the Indian, the mestizo. Like Walcott, or Cesaire, or Brathwaite, or Mutis, Harris has re-written Homer to fit his own Guyanese dimensions. The first novel of this quartet, Palace of the Peacock was published in 1961, two years after Harris left Guyana to live in England.
*
"The map of the savannahs was a dream. The names Brazil and Guyana were colonial conventions I had known from childhood. I clung to them now as to a curious necessary stone and footing, even in my dream, the ground I knew I must not relinquish. They were an actual stage, a presence, however mythical they seemed to the universal and the spiritual eye. They were as close to me as my ribs, the rivers and the flatlands, the mountains and heartland I intimately saw. I could not help cherishing my symbolic map, and my bodily prejudice like a well-known room and house of superstition within which I dwelt. I saw this kingdom of man turned into a colony and battleground of spirit, a priceless tempting jewel I dreamed I possessed.
I pored over the map of the sun my brother had given me. The river of the savannahs wound its way far into the distance until it had forgotten the open land. The dense dreaming jungle and forest emerged. Mariella dwelt above the falls in the forest. I saw the rocks bristling in the legend of the river."
{The Guyana Quartet, p. 24}
*
"The solid wall of trees was filled with ancient blocks of shadow and with gleaming hinges of light. Wind rustled the leafy curtains through which masks of living beard dangled as low as the water and the sun. My living eye was stunned by inversions of the brilliancy and the gloom of the forest in a deception and hollow and socket. We had armed ourselves with prospecting knives and were clearing a line as near to the river as we could."
{p. 28}
11.17.2003
Reader III
"House made of dawn." I used to tell him about those old ways, the stories and the sings, Beautyway and Night Chant. I sang some of those things, and I told him what they meant, what I thought they were about. We would get drunk, both of us, then he would want me to sing like that. Well, we were up there on the hill last night, and we could hear the drums and the flute away off, and it was dark and cool and peaceful. I told him about the plan we had, and we were getting pretty drunk, and I started to sing all by myself. The others were singing, too, but it was the wrong kind of thing, and I wanted to pray.
{N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, p. 129}
*
Jean Grae's EP The Bootleg of the Bootleg EP (New York: Babygrande Records, 2003)
*
H. Yepez:
"technically speaking, we lost vision"
*
Margarita Valencia:
"Mis ojos no creen tanto infinito."
*
Dolores Dorantes:
"El mal del siglo es esa febril necesidad por ser escuchado..."
*
"JUAN JULIAN: I discovered books one summer. My father owed a lot of money to a creditor and we had to close ourselves up in our house and hide for a while. For my family, keeping up appearances was important. We had to pretend that we had gone away on a trip. We told neighbors that my mother was ill and she had to recuperate somehwere else. We stayed in that closed-up house for more than two months, while my father worked abroad. I remember it was hot and all the windows were kept closed. The heat was unbearable. The maid was the only one who went out to buy groceries. And while being closed up in our own home my mother read books to the family. And that's when I became a listener and I learned to appreciate stories and the sound of words."
{Nilo Cruz, Anna In the Topics, Theater Communication Group, 2003}
"House made of dawn." I used to tell him about those old ways, the stories and the sings, Beautyway and Night Chant. I sang some of those things, and I told him what they meant, what I thought they were about. We would get drunk, both of us, then he would want me to sing like that. Well, we were up there on the hill last night, and we could hear the drums and the flute away off, and it was dark and cool and peaceful. I told him about the plan we had, and we were getting pretty drunk, and I started to sing all by myself. The others were singing, too, but it was the wrong kind of thing, and I wanted to pray.
{N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, p. 129}
*
Jean Grae's EP The Bootleg of the Bootleg EP (New York: Babygrande Records, 2003)
*
H. Yepez:
"technically speaking, we lost vision"
*
Margarita Valencia:
"Mis ojos no creen tanto infinito."
*
Dolores Dorantes:
"El mal del siglo es esa febril necesidad por ser escuchado..."
*
"JUAN JULIAN: I discovered books one summer. My father owed a lot of money to a creditor and we had to close ourselves up in our house and hide for a while. For my family, keeping up appearances was important. We had to pretend that we had gone away on a trip. We told neighbors that my mother was ill and she had to recuperate somehwere else. We stayed in that closed-up house for more than two months, while my father worked abroad. I remember it was hot and all the windows were kept closed. The heat was unbearable. The maid was the only one who went out to buy groceries. And while being closed up in our own home my mother read books to the family. And that's when I became a listener and I learned to appreciate stories and the sound of words."
{Nilo Cruz, Anna In the Topics, Theater Communication Group, 2003}
Vispera / Jacqueline Goldberg
(translation of opening poem)
I've become ceremonious
noises have lost their interest for me
the silence of others
I prefer a cup of wine as I walk the house
eating breakfast without appointments
sinking into complete solitude
completely old after all
although I may not have travelled enough
nor do I have sharpened fingernails
maybe we'll recover desire
somewhere else
for now
I aspire to no routine other
than my bed unmade and redone again
a certain excitement that will lead to
closed windows
to the mouthful of salt that tarnishes
my teeth begging for a brush
after many days
many lock-ups
too many ceremonies
(translation of opening poem)
I've become ceremonious
noises have lost their interest for me
the silence of others
I prefer a cup of wine as I walk the house
eating breakfast without appointments
sinking into complete solitude
completely old after all
although I may not have travelled enough
nor do I have sharpened fingernails
maybe we'll recover desire
somewhere else
for now
I aspire to no routine other
than my bed unmade and redone again
a certain excitement that will lead to
closed windows
to the mouthful of salt that tarnishes
my teeth begging for a brush
after many days
many lock-ups
too many ceremonies
Hotel Monserrat
Can be seen from a park bench in Altamira, on the east side
of Plaza Francia, below the fountain coiling stairwell from
the subway entrance, all from memory, as the character
from a 1940s film of Caracas walks beside the saman tree
gnarled, threshold roots along the sidewalk, but now sit
to library rest try reading for the prose compositions afterwards,
a favorite prologue. These trying to be songs under spring branches.
Can be seen from a park bench in Altamira, on the east side
of Plaza Francia, below the fountain coiling stairwell from
the subway entrance, all from memory, as the character
from a 1940s film of Caracas walks beside the saman tree
gnarled, threshold roots along the sidewalk, but now sit
to library rest try reading for the prose compositions afterwards,
a favorite prologue. These trying to be songs under spring branches.
11.16.2003
Two Venezuelan Poets
"Y uno no olvida estar triste"
{Patricia Guzman, Canto de oficio, 1997}
Representing a contemporary generation of Venezuelan poets, Patricia Guzman and Jacqueline Goldberg have published masterful collections of poetry in recent years. Guzman's chapbook La boda (Casa Nacional de las Letras Andres Bello, 2001) and Goldberg's Vispera (Editorial Pequena Venecia, 2000). They work with minimalist forms, discarding titles beyond the collection's. Their work is often amplified through the city's speech. Exile forms, or, that traveller's rendition.
*
Possible titles for a Caracas poem:
Hotel Monserrat
Plaza Francia
Driving Through Los Palos Grandes to Photograph el Edificio Atlantic
The Doctors
Alo, Bolivar
*
drive books to new hampshire computerless
library funded the poetry readership winter
reading Eileen Tabios' prose poems delights
and Jacqueline Goldberg, Patricia Guzman
"Y uno no olvida estar triste"
{Patricia Guzman, Canto de oficio, 1997}
Representing a contemporary generation of Venezuelan poets, Patricia Guzman and Jacqueline Goldberg have published masterful collections of poetry in recent years. Guzman's chapbook La boda (Casa Nacional de las Letras Andres Bello, 2001) and Goldberg's Vispera (Editorial Pequena Venecia, 2000). They work with minimalist forms, discarding titles beyond the collection's. Their work is often amplified through the city's speech. Exile forms, or, that traveller's rendition.
*
Possible titles for a Caracas poem:
Hotel Monserrat
Plaza Francia
Driving Through Los Palos Grandes to Photograph el Edificio Atlantic
The Doctors
Alo, Bolivar
*
drive books to new hampshire computerless
library funded the poetry readership winter
reading Eileen Tabios' prose poems delights
and Jacqueline Goldberg, Patricia Guzman
Vispera / Jacqueline Goldberg
Jacqueline Goldberg, Vispera (Caracas: Editorial Pequena Venecia, 2000)
"me he vuelto ceremoniosa
han dejado de interesarme los ruidos
el silencio de los demas
prefiero una copa dando vueltas por mis casa
desayunar sin asuntos pendientes
regodearme en eso de ser absolutamente solitaria
absolutamente vieja despues de todo
aunque no tenga andares suficientes
ni siquiera unas cuarteadas
quizas en otro lado
el animo se recupere
por lo pronto
no aspiro a mas rutina
que mi cama deshecha y vuelta a armar
una cierta efusividad que conduzca a ventanales cerrados
al bocado de sal que me hostiga
a mis dientes suplicando cepillo
al cabo de muchos dias
muchos encierros
demasiadas ceremonias"
(5)
Jacqueline Goldberg, Vispera (Caracas: Editorial Pequena Venecia, 2000)
"me he vuelto ceremoniosa
han dejado de interesarme los ruidos
el silencio de los demas
prefiero una copa dando vueltas por mis casa
desayunar sin asuntos pendientes
regodearme en eso de ser absolutamente solitaria
absolutamente vieja despues de todo
aunque no tenga andares suficientes
ni siquiera unas cuarteadas
quizas en otro lado
el animo se recupere
por lo pronto
no aspiro a mas rutina
que mi cama deshecha y vuelta a armar
una cierta efusividad que conduzca a ventanales cerrados
al bocado de sal que me hostiga
a mis dientes suplicando cepillo
al cabo de muchos dias
muchos encierros
demasiadas ceremonias"
(5)
11.14.2003
Modernism
Maybe the answer is: pathetically modernist in tone and intent. Or, stubbornly stuck to narratives that have long ago outworn their own frames. It did all "begin" in a clearing of trees one winter afternoon in the forests of Essex, MA, mid-1980s. My friends had wandered back to the house and I stood there for a while listening and talking to the trees. That thrill of Nature's languages was too much to resist. It was also unwriteable, and therefore had to be translated. Learning evasion tactics for writing as a form of "work."
That forest (interlude from Southborough) makes more sense when understood as one of the "seasons," or "houses," that Rimbaud taught ("O saisons! O chateaux!"). Filtered as it was in between dreadful hours at "school," learning the subtleties of white supremacy and its crude discourse. Memorizing escape routes. One of which was (what else?) poetry. Autobiographical conceit. Morrisey's: "I wanna go home, I don't want to stay / Give up education as a bad mistake / Mid-week on the playing fields..."
But even those trees in that now-nearby forest had a prologue. The Asterix & Obelix and Tin Tin comic books I collected passionately throughout the 1970s (in English and in Spanish). Or, in late summer (Indian summer) of 1982 when Isabel, Ramiro and I left Mexico with our father to return to Caracas. That journey that included an interlude at the house of other Venezuelan hippies (friends of our father) at the edge of town, several nights in a Mexico City hotel, eating dinners at a pharmacy/cafeteria somewhere downstairs in what seemed to be El Centro of that vast grey/green metropolis.
Early intuition taught me to map out these various cities, each with their own distinct scale/tone. As in Baraka's: "Harlem is vicious modernism." Boston (Cambridge, Somerville, Southborough), Caracas (Chuao, Caurimare, La Trinidad, El Hatillo, Santa Paula), Colonia Tovar, Woods Hole, West Falmouth, San Miguel, Indian Rocks Beach, Largo, Clearwater, Dunedin, Tampa (North Tampa, Palma Ceia, Ybor City), Manhattan, Providence. The names piled on top of each other in lament or elegy. Which is why Basquiat's lists have always been such a comfort, or at least they've seemed familiar.
The incongruous nature of this list, as well as its speed, make it a prime candidate for postmodernity's "jump-cuts." But each of these locations only helped to construct a lament in my hands, maybe now reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's backward-looking angel. Lament for all the people and places lost. Only those that one memorizes remain. Like the prajnaparamita sutra our father occasionally recites aloud: Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha. How that sounds when recited onto the jungle in San Jose de Rio Chico or amid Caracas' endless paranoias.
For me, the cities are always the best locations, no matter how dysfunctional or dangerous. They offer some sense of future travel, as opposed to the green mountain stillness of el campo or remote towns. That stillness I can never fully decipher, although I imagine I could learn to listen if necessary. That sense of movement is also what I like about reading novels. Poems seem to be like that green mountain, quite often much too slow or singular. Still, slowness is probably what we need.
Maybe the answer is: pathetically modernist in tone and intent. Or, stubbornly stuck to narratives that have long ago outworn their own frames. It did all "begin" in a clearing of trees one winter afternoon in the forests of Essex, MA, mid-1980s. My friends had wandered back to the house and I stood there for a while listening and talking to the trees. That thrill of Nature's languages was too much to resist. It was also unwriteable, and therefore had to be translated. Learning evasion tactics for writing as a form of "work."
That forest (interlude from Southborough) makes more sense when understood as one of the "seasons," or "houses," that Rimbaud taught ("O saisons! O chateaux!"). Filtered as it was in between dreadful hours at "school," learning the subtleties of white supremacy and its crude discourse. Memorizing escape routes. One of which was (what else?) poetry. Autobiographical conceit. Morrisey's: "I wanna go home, I don't want to stay / Give up education as a bad mistake / Mid-week on the playing fields..."
But even those trees in that now-nearby forest had a prologue. The Asterix & Obelix and Tin Tin comic books I collected passionately throughout the 1970s (in English and in Spanish). Or, in late summer (Indian summer) of 1982 when Isabel, Ramiro and I left Mexico with our father to return to Caracas. That journey that included an interlude at the house of other Venezuelan hippies (friends of our father) at the edge of town, several nights in a Mexico City hotel, eating dinners at a pharmacy/cafeteria somewhere downstairs in what seemed to be El Centro of that vast grey/green metropolis.
Early intuition taught me to map out these various cities, each with their own distinct scale/tone. As in Baraka's: "Harlem is vicious modernism." Boston (Cambridge, Somerville, Southborough), Caracas (Chuao, Caurimare, La Trinidad, El Hatillo, Santa Paula), Colonia Tovar, Woods Hole, West Falmouth, San Miguel, Indian Rocks Beach, Largo, Clearwater, Dunedin, Tampa (North Tampa, Palma Ceia, Ybor City), Manhattan, Providence. The names piled on top of each other in lament or elegy. Which is why Basquiat's lists have always been such a comfort, or at least they've seemed familiar.
The incongruous nature of this list, as well as its speed, make it a prime candidate for postmodernity's "jump-cuts." But each of these locations only helped to construct a lament in my hands, maybe now reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's backward-looking angel. Lament for all the people and places lost. Only those that one memorizes remain. Like the prajnaparamita sutra our father occasionally recites aloud: Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha. How that sounds when recited onto the jungle in San Jose de Rio Chico or amid Caracas' endless paranoias.
For me, the cities are always the best locations, no matter how dysfunctional or dangerous. They offer some sense of future travel, as opposed to the green mountain stillness of el campo or remote towns. That stillness I can never fully decipher, although I imagine I could learn to listen if necessary. That sense of movement is also what I like about reading novels. Poems seem to be like that green mountain, quite often much too slow or singular. Still, slowness is probably what we need.
On Ghosts
Or, spirits, specters, shades, traces, shadows. Carrying my grandfather's name (he was Guillermo Alberto) is one avenue that takes me through ghost-hood. I never had a chance to see him after I left Venezuela in 1982. He died shortly before I returned in 1990. His death belongs to another text, but I'll mention that it was self-imposed. At a certain point, he woke up one morning and refused to speak, eat, or move from the bed. This refusal extended through several weeks, during which he lost more and more weight and, despite medical interventions and a stay in the hospital, he eventually died in his bed on the third floor of my family's house. Every time I've returned to the house since his death I've been aware of his presence. My grandmother died in 1998, and she too is a part of that house now.
Jean-Michel Basquiat painted in an effort (at times) "to repel ghosts." It's almost irreleveant that these ghosts might have been his own addictions, the white art world, fame, etc. What concerns me is his evocation of ghosts on the same plane as words and brushstrokes. Wilson Harris's masterpiece novel Jonestown (Faber, 1996) is told by a ghost named Francisco Bone. The novel is in the form of a manuscript he sends to Harris, recounting his journeys after dying in the Jim Jones Guyana massacre/suicide. Francisco tries to understand how his ghostliness had existed even before his death, by virtue of his own "Indianness," and its history of genocide during European colonization of the Americas.
"How peculiar are the proportions of the split mind of my age, hell...How peculiar are the challenges ingrained into original epic, modern epic...My invisibility--his difficulty to see me for what I was, who I was, neither damned nor saved but drifting somewhere between the two realms in their archetypal intercourse--was the price I must pay to suffer the anguish of addiction to American classics of anger that ran through my mixed ancestries and his puritan logic. I was linked to him in self-understanding within my Dream-book because of the humour, the elemental humour, of savage gods and goddesses though he was unaware of it."
(119)
Francisco ends up referring to the "Dream-book" he has sent to Wilson Harris as a "translation." While acknowledging the impossibility of a satisfactory translation, Francisco feels that it is his only way of communicating. The translation he writes embraces failure as its starting point. In his narrative, he quotes an apparition of a Virgin Goddess who speaks to him about his situation:
"Oracles are steeped in hidden texts that may scarcely be translated. But still translations in your own tongue (let me say), orchestrated fabrics imbued with music--are necessary. Again such translations are the price you must pay, Francisco, to see the Dead alive after knowing them Dead..."
(130)
I'm currently reading Nilo Cruz's play, Anna in the Tropics (2003), which is set in the cigar-making industry of Ybor City, Tampa in the late 1920s. I lived in Ybor City for two years in the mid-1990s, while I was finsihing my university studies. That section of Tampa had long ago ceased to be a center for the cigar industry, but there were traces of that world everywhere. For a time, I lived in a converted warehouse with several other writers, next to what remained of the Manilasco Cigar Factory. Much of the action in Cruz's play takes place in a warehouse as well. As I read his text, I am surprised to find so much of Ybor City's past seem familiar to me in some way. Cruz is concerned with documenting the end of the era of the lectores, individuals who were paid to read (novels, plays, poems, newspapers, magazines) to the workers while they rolled cigars.
There were countless nights when I would walk through Ybor City, alone or with friends. It seems to me now that there was always a heavy presence of "ghosts," traces from those thousands of Cuban, Spanish and Italian cigar workers and their families, who had settled in that part of Tampa. One of the most famous of these lectores was, of course, the great poet and Cuban patriot Jose Marti. One can still see his figure in the park that bears his name, located next to a former cigar factory that is now a mall (we are in Florida, after all).
As an "American," I am always aware of the absences that have been essential to the creation of this unprecedented empire we now live within. When I saw him read in Providence several years ago, Amiri Baraka recited a poem that references the "railroad" of bones on the floor of the Atlantic ocean. Those water-bound ghosts lead directly to the remains of however many of us the Europeans killed as they moved through this continent. This is not a polemic, since that genocide is undeniably at the core of this country's foundation. But, every time I hear Bush II & co. speak about this current "war" we are engaged in, all I end up thinking about is ghosts. More specifically, I think about how many of them are always here beside us, a warning or a reminder.
Or, spirits, specters, shades, traces, shadows. Carrying my grandfather's name (he was Guillermo Alberto) is one avenue that takes me through ghost-hood. I never had a chance to see him after I left Venezuela in 1982. He died shortly before I returned in 1990. His death belongs to another text, but I'll mention that it was self-imposed. At a certain point, he woke up one morning and refused to speak, eat, or move from the bed. This refusal extended through several weeks, during which he lost more and more weight and, despite medical interventions and a stay in the hospital, he eventually died in his bed on the third floor of my family's house. Every time I've returned to the house since his death I've been aware of his presence. My grandmother died in 1998, and she too is a part of that house now.
Jean-Michel Basquiat painted in an effort (at times) "to repel ghosts." It's almost irreleveant that these ghosts might have been his own addictions, the white art world, fame, etc. What concerns me is his evocation of ghosts on the same plane as words and brushstrokes. Wilson Harris's masterpiece novel Jonestown (Faber, 1996) is told by a ghost named Francisco Bone. The novel is in the form of a manuscript he sends to Harris, recounting his journeys after dying in the Jim Jones Guyana massacre/suicide. Francisco tries to understand how his ghostliness had existed even before his death, by virtue of his own "Indianness," and its history of genocide during European colonization of the Americas.
"How peculiar are the proportions of the split mind of my age, hell...How peculiar are the challenges ingrained into original epic, modern epic...My invisibility--his difficulty to see me for what I was, who I was, neither damned nor saved but drifting somewhere between the two realms in their archetypal intercourse--was the price I must pay to suffer the anguish of addiction to American classics of anger that ran through my mixed ancestries and his puritan logic. I was linked to him in self-understanding within my Dream-book because of the humour, the elemental humour, of savage gods and goddesses though he was unaware of it."
(119)
Francisco ends up referring to the "Dream-book" he has sent to Wilson Harris as a "translation." While acknowledging the impossibility of a satisfactory translation, Francisco feels that it is his only way of communicating. The translation he writes embraces failure as its starting point. In his narrative, he quotes an apparition of a Virgin Goddess who speaks to him about his situation:
"Oracles are steeped in hidden texts that may scarcely be translated. But still translations in your own tongue (let me say), orchestrated fabrics imbued with music--are necessary. Again such translations are the price you must pay, Francisco, to see the Dead alive after knowing them Dead..."
(130)
I'm currently reading Nilo Cruz's play, Anna in the Tropics (2003), which is set in the cigar-making industry of Ybor City, Tampa in the late 1920s. I lived in Ybor City for two years in the mid-1990s, while I was finsihing my university studies. That section of Tampa had long ago ceased to be a center for the cigar industry, but there were traces of that world everywhere. For a time, I lived in a converted warehouse with several other writers, next to what remained of the Manilasco Cigar Factory. Much of the action in Cruz's play takes place in a warehouse as well. As I read his text, I am surprised to find so much of Ybor City's past seem familiar to me in some way. Cruz is concerned with documenting the end of the era of the lectores, individuals who were paid to read (novels, plays, poems, newspapers, magazines) to the workers while they rolled cigars.
There were countless nights when I would walk through Ybor City, alone or with friends. It seems to me now that there was always a heavy presence of "ghosts," traces from those thousands of Cuban, Spanish and Italian cigar workers and their families, who had settled in that part of Tampa. One of the most famous of these lectores was, of course, the great poet and Cuban patriot Jose Marti. One can still see his figure in the park that bears his name, located next to a former cigar factory that is now a mall (we are in Florida, after all).
As an "American," I am always aware of the absences that have been essential to the creation of this unprecedented empire we now live within. When I saw him read in Providence several years ago, Amiri Baraka recited a poem that references the "railroad" of bones on the floor of the Atlantic ocean. Those water-bound ghosts lead directly to the remains of however many of us the Europeans killed as they moved through this continent. This is not a polemic, since that genocide is undeniably at the core of this country's foundation. But, every time I hear Bush II & co. speak about this current "war" we are engaged in, all I end up thinking about is ghosts. More specifically, I think about how many of them are always here beside us, a warning or a reminder.
11.13.2003
"...transparent traffic..." (Spender re: Upward)
"Upon us in this restless and awakening mood came Isherwood's friend Chalmers [Edward Upward], on his way back to England from an Intourist Tour of Moscow. Very much the emissary of a Cause he seemed, with his miniature sensitive beauty of features, his keen-smiling yet dark glance, his way of holding the stem of his pipe with his finely formed fingers of a chiseller's or wood-engraver's hand. [...] Two days after his arrival, he and I went for a walk. I remember that we went through that part of Berlin where roads connect the Tiergarten, the Bahnhof-am-Zoo, and the Gedaechtniskirche--a church on a road island, with the traffic streaming all around it. The pressure of what Chalmers said to me was not just his words, but a consciousness of Berlin, of unemployment and Fascism, and, dimly beyond that day, of the day fifteen years later when I would walk along the same road and see the Gedaechtniskirche, which had looked (on the occasion of our walk) like an absurdly ornate over-large inkstand set down in the middle of the traffic, transformed into a neo-Gothic ruin, having about it something of senile dignity. What Chalmers was really asking me was (as though we both looked through the transparent traffic on to the ruin) how to stop this happening? How prevent this Europe being destroyed in the war which--as he analysed the situation--was certain to arise from recrudescent German nationalism, supported by American and British capitalism, and flung (as he thought it would be) against Russia? I gave my stumbling answers: I desired social justice; I abhorred war; I could not accept the proposition that to resist evil we must renounce freedom, and accept dictatorship and methods of revolutionary violence. Chalmers who had listened intently, smiling slightly to himself, observed quietly, when I had finished speaking: 'Gandhi'."
{Stephen Spender, World Within World, 1951}
"Upon us in this restless and awakening mood came Isherwood's friend Chalmers [Edward Upward], on his way back to England from an Intourist Tour of Moscow. Very much the emissary of a Cause he seemed, with his miniature sensitive beauty of features, his keen-smiling yet dark glance, his way of holding the stem of his pipe with his finely formed fingers of a chiseller's or wood-engraver's hand. [...] Two days after his arrival, he and I went for a walk. I remember that we went through that part of Berlin where roads connect the Tiergarten, the Bahnhof-am-Zoo, and the Gedaechtniskirche--a church on a road island, with the traffic streaming all around it. The pressure of what Chalmers said to me was not just his words, but a consciousness of Berlin, of unemployment and Fascism, and, dimly beyond that day, of the day fifteen years later when I would walk along the same road and see the Gedaechtniskirche, which had looked (on the occasion of our walk) like an absurdly ornate over-large inkstand set down in the middle of the traffic, transformed into a neo-Gothic ruin, having about it something of senile dignity. What Chalmers was really asking me was (as though we both looked through the transparent traffic on to the ruin) how to stop this happening? How prevent this Europe being destroyed in the war which--as he analysed the situation--was certain to arise from recrudescent German nationalism, supported by American and British capitalism, and flung (as he thought it would be) against Russia? I gave my stumbling answers: I desired social justice; I abhorred war; I could not accept the proposition that to resist evil we must renounce freedom, and accept dictatorship and methods of revolutionary violence. Chalmers who had listened intently, smiling slightly to himself, observed quietly, when I had finished speaking: 'Gandhi'."
{Stephen Spender, World Within World, 1951}
11.12.2003
Thank God for Nas
"Be, be, 'fore we came to this country
We were kings and queens, never porch monkeys
It was empires in Africa called Kush
Timbuktu, where every race came to get books
To learn from black teachers who taught Greeks and Romans
Asian Arabs and gave them gold when
Gold was converted to money it all changed
Money then became empowerment for Europeans
The Persian military invaded
They learned about the gold, the teachings and everything sacred
Africa was almost robbed naked
Slavery was money, so they began making slave ships
Egypt was the place that Alexander the Great went
He was so shocked at the mountains with black faces
Shot up they nose to impose what basically
Still goes on today, you see?
If the truth is told, the youth can grow
They learn to survive until they gain control
Nobody says you have to be gangstas, hoes
Read more learn more, change the globe
Ghetto children, do your thing
Hold your head up, little man, you're a king
Young Prince that's when you get your wedding ring
Your man is saying "She's my queen" "
{Nas, "I Can," God's Son, 2002}
"Be, be, 'fore we came to this country
We were kings and queens, never porch monkeys
It was empires in Africa called Kush
Timbuktu, where every race came to get books
To learn from black teachers who taught Greeks and Romans
Asian Arabs and gave them gold when
Gold was converted to money it all changed
Money then became empowerment for Europeans
The Persian military invaded
They learned about the gold, the teachings and everything sacred
Africa was almost robbed naked
Slavery was money, so they began making slave ships
Egypt was the place that Alexander the Great went
He was so shocked at the mountains with black faces
Shot up they nose to impose what basically
Still goes on today, you see?
If the truth is told, the youth can grow
They learn to survive until they gain control
Nobody says you have to be gangstas, hoes
Read more learn more, change the globe
Ghetto children, do your thing
Hold your head up, little man, you're a king
Young Prince that's when you get your wedding ring
Your man is saying "She's my queen" "
{Nas, "I Can," God's Son, 2002}
11.11.2003
Priego re: Sebald
I wish I could be in Guadalajara later this month to hear Ernesto Priego talk about "...Sebald and the poetic, melancholic experience of travelling..."
I wish I could be in Guadalajara later this month to hear Ernesto Priego talk about "...Sebald and the poetic, melancholic experience of travelling..."
In 1968
Broadcasting today from Providence, RI (courtesy of Veterans Day off from work). My situation is relatively bare, or basic. For writing, I work with a black Blueline notebook, a Pilot G-2 pen (fine black ink) and whatever texts I might need at the time (book, pamphlet, chapbook, manuscript, newspaper, magazine, etc.). Add to these the physical and mental habits (coffee, trees, beer, music, incense & whatnot), along with a place to sit to read and write. I read somewhere (in an interview) that John Ashbery prefers to write in public places, so that sometimes the conversations or words around him seep into his writing. Words (particularly writing them down onto paper) serve as a vortex for protection, warmth in any city. Words in this blog context seem somehow to be that protection, while also representing the weight of self-centeredness and a form of undressing over time.
Writing here has definitely had an effect on my notebooks, taking precedence for the moment. I don't always like that feeling of disrobing in public. I chuckle whenever I think about the anecdote of Ginsberg in Los Angeles in the late 1950s at a reading. When someone in the audience asked him what he meant about being "naked" in his poetry, he proceeded to disrobe, finishing the rest of the reading unclothed. We "Third World"ers are often portrayed as being naked savages (see The Tempest). The nakedness here in blogging is not complete (obviously). The editor inside the poet is always in control, more or less. Perhaps the liar within the poet is also here, behind the scenes. Along with the person who always says: "But enough about me. What about me?"
Stephen Spender's The Year of the Young Rebels (Random House, 1968) is overdue back at the BPL, so I'm rushing to finish it. Today, I came across two interesting excerpts:
"Society is arranged in concentric circles so that the inhabitants of each circle talk only to one another, like voices in a whispering gallery, but never reach the inner circles of power. The intellectuals speak to other intellectuals, the poets read the poems of other poets. No phrase has more mocked at the imagination than Shelley's about the poets being the unacknoweldged legislators of mankind.
American writers are perhaps at heart Shelleyans and have never quite accepted the idea that the imagination has nothing to say about public affairs. They may not, like Walt Whitman, want to guide the democracy, but all the same they wish to feel that poetic consciousness in some sense represents the whole democracy, and, even if hiddenly and secretly, influences it. With part of his mind the American writer has been driven to regard himself as a member of an elite, and as such he has acquired a certain arrogance. Yet he never forgets that the penalty of being a member of a literary elite is exclusiveness which means being excluded as well as excluding. He would like, on some existential plane of his expressed consciousness, to be equal to the whole breathing conscious acting democracy."
(pp. 102-103)
"The Third World is called in then to provide the revolutionaries of the west with the revolutionary situation which is lacking in their own countries. As [Daniel] Cohn-Bendit remarked in the interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, from which I have quoted, the conditions for revolution, which are those of serious economic crisis, converging with an active movement of workers as well as students, do not exist today, and, as a consequence 'we have to struggle forward on the basis of a global challenge.'
The students in the west do well to concern themselves with the Third World. Indeed, they can be criticised for not doing so seriously, when they simply invoke the concept of vast areas where there is a real revolutionary situation and class struggle in order to provide their own struggle in quite different circumstances with the context of a global 'revolutionary situation.' If they were really concerned with the Third World they would talk more about problems which concern it and less about tactics of guerrilla revolutionary war which they may borrow from it. They would discuss nutrition, illiteracy and population, in which they seem to take very little interest."
(pp. 108-109)
Broadcasting today from Providence, RI (courtesy of Veterans Day off from work). My situation is relatively bare, or basic. For writing, I work with a black Blueline notebook, a Pilot G-2 pen (fine black ink) and whatever texts I might need at the time (book, pamphlet, chapbook, manuscript, newspaper, magazine, etc.). Add to these the physical and mental habits (coffee, trees, beer, music, incense & whatnot), along with a place to sit to read and write. I read somewhere (in an interview) that John Ashbery prefers to write in public places, so that sometimes the conversations or words around him seep into his writing. Words (particularly writing them down onto paper) serve as a vortex for protection, warmth in any city. Words in this blog context seem somehow to be that protection, while also representing the weight of self-centeredness and a form of undressing over time.
Writing here has definitely had an effect on my notebooks, taking precedence for the moment. I don't always like that feeling of disrobing in public. I chuckle whenever I think about the anecdote of Ginsberg in Los Angeles in the late 1950s at a reading. When someone in the audience asked him what he meant about being "naked" in his poetry, he proceeded to disrobe, finishing the rest of the reading unclothed. We "Third World"ers are often portrayed as being naked savages (see The Tempest). The nakedness here in blogging is not complete (obviously). The editor inside the poet is always in control, more or less. Perhaps the liar within the poet is also here, behind the scenes. Along with the person who always says: "But enough about me. What about me?"
Stephen Spender's The Year of the Young Rebels (Random House, 1968) is overdue back at the BPL, so I'm rushing to finish it. Today, I came across two interesting excerpts:
"Society is arranged in concentric circles so that the inhabitants of each circle talk only to one another, like voices in a whispering gallery, but never reach the inner circles of power. The intellectuals speak to other intellectuals, the poets read the poems of other poets. No phrase has more mocked at the imagination than Shelley's about the poets being the unacknoweldged legislators of mankind.
American writers are perhaps at heart Shelleyans and have never quite accepted the idea that the imagination has nothing to say about public affairs. They may not, like Walt Whitman, want to guide the democracy, but all the same they wish to feel that poetic consciousness in some sense represents the whole democracy, and, even if hiddenly and secretly, influences it. With part of his mind the American writer has been driven to regard himself as a member of an elite, and as such he has acquired a certain arrogance. Yet he never forgets that the penalty of being a member of a literary elite is exclusiveness which means being excluded as well as excluding. He would like, on some existential plane of his expressed consciousness, to be equal to the whole breathing conscious acting democracy."
(pp. 102-103)
"The Third World is called in then to provide the revolutionaries of the west with the revolutionary situation which is lacking in their own countries. As [Daniel] Cohn-Bendit remarked in the interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, from which I have quoted, the conditions for revolution, which are those of serious economic crisis, converging with an active movement of workers as well as students, do not exist today, and, as a consequence 'we have to struggle forward on the basis of a global challenge.'
The students in the west do well to concern themselves with the Third World. Indeed, they can be criticised for not doing so seriously, when they simply invoke the concept of vast areas where there is a real revolutionary situation and class struggle in order to provide their own struggle in quite different circumstances with the context of a global 'revolutionary situation.' If they were really concerned with the Third World they would talk more about problems which concern it and less about tactics of guerrilla revolutionary war which they may borrow from it. They would discuss nutrition, illiteracy and population, in which they seem to take very little interest."
(pp. 108-109)
11.10.2003
Splendour
"Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
......We will grieve not, rather find
......Strength in what remains behind;
......In the primal sympathy
......Which having been must ever be;
......In the soothing thoughts that spring
......Out of human suffering;
......In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind."
{William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"}
"Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
......We will grieve not, rather find
......Strength in what remains behind;
......In the primal sympathy
......Which having been must ever be;
......In the soothing thoughts that spring
......Out of human suffering;
......In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind."
{William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"}
Leny Mendoza Strobel
quotes Richard Sennett, via Simone Weil's notion of "rootedness":
"Every human being needs to have multiple roots."
quotes Richard Sennett, via Simone Weil's notion of "rootedness":
"Every human being needs to have multiple roots."
Gold Soundz
"Go back to those gold soundz
And keep my advent to yourself
Because it's nothing that I don't like
Is it a crisis or a boring change
When it's central, so essential
It has a nice ring when you laugh
At the low-life opinions
And they're coming to the chorus now
I keep my address to yourself
Cause we need secrets [...]"
{Pavement, Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, 1994}
Amidst early 20s uncertainties, some real some self-created, I saw this group play a concert at the Ritz theater in Ybor City, Tampa while they were touring for the above album. It was a psychedelic evening that I watched from a ledge at the back wall of the theater (semi-cliched attempts at Romantic excess). I had run into H. earlier in the hallway and he had mentioned how very few people can just come up with a poetic masterpiece in one stroke, "Unless, of course, you're Rimbaud!" he shouted over the noise as we parted.
A guitar edge, maybe zeitgeist, glimsped through these soundz that I only heard in one other place, Sonic Youth when they played on campus a few months earlier. Their ragged collage of bass & 2 guitars a digital wall of shredded noise & endless meditation. Maybe, also glimpsed during The Pixies' concert (their last tour) around the same time.
Overall, I think of the early 1990s as a dark period, maybe a preface to our current dread. The 1992 uprising in Los Angeles set the tone for my education at college, mid-way through my studies. River Phoenix's death around that time was another tragedy I found much too sad to bear. That night, Pavement proved my friend J. at Naropa right. She had told me, the summer before, how "some people consider Pavement as poets." Their bratty, feedback-filtered, Ashbery imitations were cavernous in the old Ritz theater, guitar drones & waves of pulsing light, etc.
In the documentary Slow Century there's footage of them taken from this same tour in the spring of 1994, when they played in Athens, GA. There's a rare moment of this "magic" captured on a video taken from the crowd of Malkmus & co. desperately intoning: "Fight this generation!" while loping into a sharp, apocalyptic guitar staccato that fills the entire club. So it was on that evening in Ybor City. Only ten years ago and already a distant country.
"Go back to those gold soundz
And keep my advent to yourself
Because it's nothing that I don't like
Is it a crisis or a boring change
When it's central, so essential
It has a nice ring when you laugh
At the low-life opinions
And they're coming to the chorus now
I keep my address to yourself
Cause we need secrets [...]"
{Pavement, Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, 1994}
Amidst early 20s uncertainties, some real some self-created, I saw this group play a concert at the Ritz theater in Ybor City, Tampa while they were touring for the above album. It was a psychedelic evening that I watched from a ledge at the back wall of the theater (semi-cliched attempts at Romantic excess). I had run into H. earlier in the hallway and he had mentioned how very few people can just come up with a poetic masterpiece in one stroke, "Unless, of course, you're Rimbaud!" he shouted over the noise as we parted.
A guitar edge, maybe zeitgeist, glimsped through these soundz that I only heard in one other place, Sonic Youth when they played on campus a few months earlier. Their ragged collage of bass & 2 guitars a digital wall of shredded noise & endless meditation. Maybe, also glimpsed during The Pixies' concert (their last tour) around the same time.
Overall, I think of the early 1990s as a dark period, maybe a preface to our current dread. The 1992 uprising in Los Angeles set the tone for my education at college, mid-way through my studies. River Phoenix's death around that time was another tragedy I found much too sad to bear. That night, Pavement proved my friend J. at Naropa right. She had told me, the summer before, how "some people consider Pavement as poets." Their bratty, feedback-filtered, Ashbery imitations were cavernous in the old Ritz theater, guitar drones & waves of pulsing light, etc.
In the documentary Slow Century there's footage of them taken from this same tour in the spring of 1994, when they played in Athens, GA. There's a rare moment of this "magic" captured on a video taken from the crowd of Malkmus & co. desperately intoning: "Fight this generation!" while loping into a sharp, apocalyptic guitar staccato that fills the entire club. So it was on that evening in Ybor City. Only ten years ago and already a distant country.
11.09.2003
Reader II
Also reading through Rodrigo Toscano's The Disparities and Platform (& eventually, Partisans). Reading is best when multiple. I've always got half a dozen books going at one time. Many of the books that I pick up I end up not finishing (The Prelude). I look for fragments, pieces, moments, branches for nourishment. And then there's magazines, etc. The other day I was interested to find The New Republic advertised briefly on my blog banner. Their "Books & The Arts" section is one of the best literary reviews around (James Wood, Glyn Maxwell, Leon Wieseltier, Jed Perl), which helps to balance out their often reactionary political stances in the 1st half of the magazine. James Wood's reviews in particular I always look forward to. His essays on W.G. Sebald and Zadie Smith are both classics in my notebook world.
But every time I do manage to finish a book I make sure to add it to the list at the end of my notebook. Then, sometimes I go over the list, as though revisiting old friends. Lots of solitary pleasure from paper & ink. What I like about blogging is that it's forcing me to be more economical with my reading.
The "Venezuela Analysis" web-site currently advertised at the top of my blog is a Chavista propaganda site. It annoys me to see it listed up there. It also annoys me to see you-know-who's name up there. Best to keep reading.
My obsession with reading was a major factor behind my last two visits to Venezuela. Seeing family was my principal reason for going. But my visits to bookstores and newsstands all over Caracas became a running joke around my family. They would say: "Guillo, what bookstores did you visit today?"--knowing I'd always have at least one or two places to list. Perhaps reading is for me a passion equivalent to my nephew's meticulous collection of Pokemon cards.
Also reading through Rodrigo Toscano's The Disparities and Platform (& eventually, Partisans). Reading is best when multiple. I've always got half a dozen books going at one time. Many of the books that I pick up I end up not finishing (The Prelude). I look for fragments, pieces, moments, branches for nourishment. And then there's magazines, etc. The other day I was interested to find The New Republic advertised briefly on my blog banner. Their "Books & The Arts" section is one of the best literary reviews around (James Wood, Glyn Maxwell, Leon Wieseltier, Jed Perl), which helps to balance out their often reactionary political stances in the 1st half of the magazine. James Wood's reviews in particular I always look forward to. His essays on W.G. Sebald and Zadie Smith are both classics in my notebook world.
But every time I do manage to finish a book I make sure to add it to the list at the end of my notebook. Then, sometimes I go over the list, as though revisiting old friends. Lots of solitary pleasure from paper & ink. What I like about blogging is that it's forcing me to be more economical with my reading.
The "Venezuela Analysis" web-site currently advertised at the top of my blog is a Chavista propaganda site. It annoys me to see it listed up there. It also annoys me to see you-know-who's name up there. Best to keep reading.
My obsession with reading was a major factor behind my last two visits to Venezuela. Seeing family was my principal reason for going. But my visits to bookstores and newsstands all over Caracas became a running joke around my family. They would say: "Guillo, what bookstores did you visit today?"--knowing I'd always have at least one or two places to list. Perhaps reading is for me a passion equivalent to my nephew's meticulous collection of Pokemon cards.
11.08.2003
Reader
I'm a very slow reader, and a very slow writer. From western Connecticut, where I spent most of today (work-related), driving from and back to Boston on a bus, reading fragments from Geoffrey H. Hartman's essay "A Poet's Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa" (1962):
"Thus Nature is not an 'object' but a presence and a power; a motion and a spirit; not something to be worshiped or consumed, an immediate or ultimate principle of life, but--and here it becomes most hard to find items that preserve the poet in the thinker--something whose immediacy, like that of a poem, is not separable from the work of perfect mediation. Wordsworth fails to celebrate his sunset because poetry is not an act of consecration and Nature not an immediate external object to be consecrated."
That "presence" and "power" was clearly evident for me outside the bus windows in the white-capped rush of a river's current alongside the road, in the full moon framed behind foothills with bare branches.
Place always influences how I read a specific text. The author's location and, more importantly, my own location when finding or reading a particular text. Every time I pass through Connecticut I feel very little connection to that place. No particular reason I should, except that my mother was born and raised in Connecticut. Today's "vision" of the trees (always, trees are holy for me) and moon coincided with my recent efforts to start reading Wordsworth's Prelude again--see if I can actually finish it this time. His longer poems usually excite me so much that I end up leaving the book and going outside to see friends or walk around, anything besides reading.
Standing in rural Connecticut most of today (for a x-country running race, our students won their division) I was constantly distracted by the trees, the cold wind, the sunshine, the foothills. Thinking of my mother's childhood in that state, closer to the city (in Greenwhich) but still the same physical place, give or take some miles. It's like a movie I glimpse, with no further connection after it's over.
Last year, when Isabel and I were trying to get our immigration problems with the Chavistas resolved, our mother's maiden name became this heavy presence we had never thought about much before. Our parents had not added her maiden name to ours on birth certificates but, being Latin America, every time we were addressed by Venezuelan immigration officials and US Embassy officials it was by our full last names: Parra Washburn. The first time I heard it over the loudspeakers at the US Embassy ("Mr. Parra Washburn, please.") I looked at Isabel and we laughed. The strangeness of those two names together. If the Chavistas needed proof that we were nothing more than "oligarchs" or "gringos," there was that "Washburn" for them to identify us with as not-quite Venezuelan enough for the "revolution."
But that name I've always felt so distant from, so outside of, has now been returned to me. So, looking at the moon from Connecticut, seeing that river flow by at dusk beside our bus--they could have happened anywhere. But it was there, a reminder of the Parra Washburn gulf/crisis/dialogue/misplacement/confluence. My full name then (all four names) takes a long time to say out loud. Just as I am a slow reader and a slow writer.
I'm a very slow reader, and a very slow writer. From western Connecticut, where I spent most of today (work-related), driving from and back to Boston on a bus, reading fragments from Geoffrey H. Hartman's essay "A Poet's Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa" (1962):
"Thus Nature is not an 'object' but a presence and a power; a motion and a spirit; not something to be worshiped or consumed, an immediate or ultimate principle of life, but--and here it becomes most hard to find items that preserve the poet in the thinker--something whose immediacy, like that of a poem, is not separable from the work of perfect mediation. Wordsworth fails to celebrate his sunset because poetry is not an act of consecration and Nature not an immediate external object to be consecrated."
That "presence" and "power" was clearly evident for me outside the bus windows in the white-capped rush of a river's current alongside the road, in the full moon framed behind foothills with bare branches.
Place always influences how I read a specific text. The author's location and, more importantly, my own location when finding or reading a particular text. Every time I pass through Connecticut I feel very little connection to that place. No particular reason I should, except that my mother was born and raised in Connecticut. Today's "vision" of the trees (always, trees are holy for me) and moon coincided with my recent efforts to start reading Wordsworth's Prelude again--see if I can actually finish it this time. His longer poems usually excite me so much that I end up leaving the book and going outside to see friends or walk around, anything besides reading.
Standing in rural Connecticut most of today (for a x-country running race, our students won their division) I was constantly distracted by the trees, the cold wind, the sunshine, the foothills. Thinking of my mother's childhood in that state, closer to the city (in Greenwhich) but still the same physical place, give or take some miles. It's like a movie I glimpse, with no further connection after it's over.
Last year, when Isabel and I were trying to get our immigration problems with the Chavistas resolved, our mother's maiden name became this heavy presence we had never thought about much before. Our parents had not added her maiden name to ours on birth certificates but, being Latin America, every time we were addressed by Venezuelan immigration officials and US Embassy officials it was by our full last names: Parra Washburn. The first time I heard it over the loudspeakers at the US Embassy ("Mr. Parra Washburn, please.") I looked at Isabel and we laughed. The strangeness of those two names together. If the Chavistas needed proof that we were nothing more than "oligarchs" or "gringos," there was that "Washburn" for them to identify us with as not-quite Venezuelan enough for the "revolution."
But that name I've always felt so distant from, so outside of, has now been returned to me. So, looking at the moon from Connecticut, seeing that river flow by at dusk beside our bus--they could have happened anywhere. But it was there, a reminder of the Parra Washburn gulf/crisis/dialogue/misplacement/confluence. My full name then (all four names) takes a long time to say out loud. Just as I am a slow reader and a slow writer.
11.07.2003
11.06.2003
11.05.2003
Pais portatil
If there is one novel I would want to try to translate into English it would be Pais portatil (1968) by Adriano Gonzalez Leon (Venezuela, 1931). Tonight in Caracas there is a ceremony scheduled to honor the 35th anniversary of this novel, which won the Seix Barral Premio Biblioteca Breve prize in 1968.
The novel centers on the journey of one man through Caracas in a single day, from east to west. He is on an errand for the Leftist guerrilla group he belongs to, delivering items from one end of the city to another. The novel vividly captures the shift into postmodernity that Venezuela underwent during the 1960s, a period which was marked by the rise of various guerrilla movements throughout Venezuela. Many of these guerrillas were recruited from the Universidad Central de Venezuela and other universities, and several of the groups were funded and trained by Cuba. For anyone who came of age in Venezuela in the 1960s, the guerrilla movements would have affected their lives in one way or another. My father occasionally has mentioned people he knew at UCV in the early 1960s who ended up joining clandestine guerrilla groups.
Interestingly enough, many of these idealistic young people later abandoned their weapons and returned to Venezuelan society. The founder and current editor of the newspaper Tal Cual, Teodoro Petkoff, for instance, was one of the most hunted-after guerrilla leaders of that time period. When I was in Caracas last year, I remember a conversation I had with a neighbor who is in his 80s. We were, as ever it seems, talking about the Chavez problem. He pointed out the differences to me between that earlier generation's attempt at revolution and the current Bolivarian telenovela. He mentioned how he still had a great deal of respect for the way in which that older generation had at least followed a set of moral standards, even if their methods were mistaken. As for his thoughts on Chavez & co. he was hoping like the rest of us for a way out of their "revolutionary" clutches.
Gonzalez Leon's masterful novel intersperces two narratives throughout its pages. In one, the protagonist moves through Caracas on foot, and by car and bus, reflecting on the oil-rich boom of Venezuela Saudita and its effect on the city's landscape and language. The presence of English in Venezuelan Spanish, through phrases and words that have been adopted and spanglified or Venezuelafied. I remember Caracas hippies in the 1970s, for instance, always calling each other "brother" (Epa, brother!"). The second narrative recounts certain events surrounding the protagonist's ancestors in the state of Trujillo during the late 19th century. Gonzalez Leon brings the era of caudillismo alive quite well, when much of the country was split into distinct regions that were ruled by caudillos, or local chieftans/warlords.
Now, as the 21st century begins, it often seems as though the current government is insisting on taking us all back to the days of caudillismo. As far as I know, Gonzalez Leon is still a Professor in the Escuela de Letras at UCV. I've spoken with friends and acquaintances who studied with him at UCV and they commented on his love of French symbolist poetry. To my knowledge, Pais portatil has never been translated into English. Yet another symptom of Venezuela's relative invisibility on the global literary map. I consider this novel to be one of the best of the Boom.
If there is one novel I would want to try to translate into English it would be Pais portatil (1968) by Adriano Gonzalez Leon (Venezuela, 1931). Tonight in Caracas there is a ceremony scheduled to honor the 35th anniversary of this novel, which won the Seix Barral Premio Biblioteca Breve prize in 1968.
The novel centers on the journey of one man through Caracas in a single day, from east to west. He is on an errand for the Leftist guerrilla group he belongs to, delivering items from one end of the city to another. The novel vividly captures the shift into postmodernity that Venezuela underwent during the 1960s, a period which was marked by the rise of various guerrilla movements throughout Venezuela. Many of these guerrillas were recruited from the Universidad Central de Venezuela and other universities, and several of the groups were funded and trained by Cuba. For anyone who came of age in Venezuela in the 1960s, the guerrilla movements would have affected their lives in one way or another. My father occasionally has mentioned people he knew at UCV in the early 1960s who ended up joining clandestine guerrilla groups.
Interestingly enough, many of these idealistic young people later abandoned their weapons and returned to Venezuelan society. The founder and current editor of the newspaper Tal Cual, Teodoro Petkoff, for instance, was one of the most hunted-after guerrilla leaders of that time period. When I was in Caracas last year, I remember a conversation I had with a neighbor who is in his 80s. We were, as ever it seems, talking about the Chavez problem. He pointed out the differences to me between that earlier generation's attempt at revolution and the current Bolivarian telenovela. He mentioned how he still had a great deal of respect for the way in which that older generation had at least followed a set of moral standards, even if their methods were mistaken. As for his thoughts on Chavez & co. he was hoping like the rest of us for a way out of their "revolutionary" clutches.
Gonzalez Leon's masterful novel intersperces two narratives throughout its pages. In one, the protagonist moves through Caracas on foot, and by car and bus, reflecting on the oil-rich boom of Venezuela Saudita and its effect on the city's landscape and language. The presence of English in Venezuelan Spanish, through phrases and words that have been adopted and spanglified or Venezuelafied. I remember Caracas hippies in the 1970s, for instance, always calling each other "brother" (Epa, brother!"). The second narrative recounts certain events surrounding the protagonist's ancestors in the state of Trujillo during the late 19th century. Gonzalez Leon brings the era of caudillismo alive quite well, when much of the country was split into distinct regions that were ruled by caudillos, or local chieftans/warlords.
Now, as the 21st century begins, it often seems as though the current government is insisting on taking us all back to the days of caudillismo. As far as I know, Gonzalez Leon is still a Professor in the Escuela de Letras at UCV. I've spoken with friends and acquaintances who studied with him at UCV and they commented on his love of French symbolist poetry. To my knowledge, Pais portatil has never been translated into English. Yet another symptom of Venezuela's relative invisibility on the global literary map. I consider this novel to be one of the best of the Boom.
Apariciones
The online literary journal Kalathos (link added at left) has just published a recent text by Elizabeth Schon, entitled "Apariciones."
The online literary journal Kalathos (link added at left) has just published a recent text by Elizabeth Schon, entitled "Apariciones."
Song
"Oh, but supposing that i climb
......Alone to a high room of clouds
Up a ladder of the time
And lie upon a bed alone
......And tear a feather from a wing
And listen to the world below
And write round my high paper walls
......Anything and everything
Which I know and do not know!"
{Stephen Spender, from "Song," Collected Poems: 1928-1985}
"Oh, but supposing that i climb
......Alone to a high room of clouds
Up a ladder of the time
And lie upon a bed alone
......And tear a feather from a wing
And listen to the world below
And write round my high paper walls
......Anything and everything
Which I know and do not know!"
{Stephen Spender, from "Song," Collected Poems: 1928-1985}
11.04.2003
Translationese
From this point on, my translations will often be leaning more toward drafts, versions. I've got longer projects with translation that need time rather than posting. Just received in the mail today Chain 10 issue on translation that, from the editors' note and the index, I look forward to reading soon.
Part of what's good for me about translation is the enhanced reading aspect of the mode. Reading so slowly and getting acquainted with repetition techniques and styles. Also, the travel aspect of translation is exciting--fits nomadic curse/blessing.
Hope to translate the first two poems below by Martha Kornblith soon. The third one ("Ese poeta que me mira") I lost in English, stuck with meaning. But the Spanish of the original is Caracas for me, its beautiful lure. Of course Kornblith was also quite adept at writing that city's failures and fears. But it's her sounds in this poem that I love--the water bubbling from the water fountain at night alongside the crickets in the UCV hallways ("bebe un sorbo").
From this point on, my translations will often be leaning more toward drafts, versions. I've got longer projects with translation that need time rather than posting. Just received in the mail today Chain 10 issue on translation that, from the editors' note and the index, I look forward to reading soon.
Part of what's good for me about translation is the enhanced reading aspect of the mode. Reading so slowly and getting acquainted with repetition techniques and styles. Also, the travel aspect of translation is exciting--fits nomadic curse/blessing.
Hope to translate the first two poems below by Martha Kornblith soon. The third one ("Ese poeta que me mira") I lost in English, stuck with meaning. But the Spanish of the original is Caracas for me, its beautiful lure. Of course Kornblith was also quite adept at writing that city's failures and fears. But it's her sounds in this poem that I love--the water bubbling from the water fountain at night alongside the crickets in the UCV hallways ("bebe un sorbo").
Oraciones para un dios ausente / Martha Kornblith
Martha Kornblith, Oraciones para un dios ausente (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1994)
"A veces
es preciso
volver a los recuerdos
para anular la memoria,
aniquilar vestigios,
otras vidas,
saludar viejos lazos,
decapitar antiguos papeles,
zozobrar de nuevo,
para que vuelvan a decir
y no tener,
no poseer nada."
*
"Si mis ropas mueren
con el ocaso de mi cuerpo
y la rendicion de mis pasos,
si las cosas oscurecen
con la opacidad del dia.
Si las horas pierden su agilidad:
Habra minuto capas de definir
la estaticidad del tedio?"
*
"Ese poeta que me mira.
Todas las noches,
sale de clase,
dilucida un verso,
espanta las moscas del bebedero,
bebe un sorbo,
sacude su blue jean.
Y lo sigue haciendo, siempre
triste,
laconico.
A veces
el publico lo aplaude,
el solo merodea en su bolsillo,
hunde su frente en el palco
mientras yo pienso:
El
y la pagina en blanco."
Martha Kornblith, Oraciones para un dios ausente (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1994)
"A veces
es preciso
volver a los recuerdos
para anular la memoria,
aniquilar vestigios,
otras vidas,
saludar viejos lazos,
decapitar antiguos papeles,
zozobrar de nuevo,
para que vuelvan a decir
y no tener,
no poseer nada."
*
"Si mis ropas mueren
con el ocaso de mi cuerpo
y la rendicion de mis pasos,
si las cosas oscurecen
con la opacidad del dia.
Si las horas pierden su agilidad:
Habra minuto capas de definir
la estaticidad del tedio?"
*
"Ese poeta que me mira.
Todas las noches,
sale de clase,
dilucida un verso,
espanta las moscas del bebedero,
bebe un sorbo,
sacude su blue jean.
Y lo sigue haciendo, siempre
triste,
laconico.
A veces
el publico lo aplaude,
el solo merodea en su bolsillo,
hunde su frente en el palco
mientras yo pienso:
El
y la pagina en blanco."
"As if Kafka..."
An excerpt from the latest installment of Armando Duran's weekly column in El Nacional, "Contra esto y aquello" (Monday, Nov 3):
"[...] What has been unusual about Chavez's regime is its capacity to play two sides simultaneously. That of a dictatorship and that of a democracy. With a single and obsessive purpose: to stay in Miraflores until the day of the flood. To accomplish this, his management as President has become unbearably authoritarian with each day, always bordering the elastic limits of legality, but without breaking the constitutional thread.
This is why his actions, no matter how devious they might be, have developed within a presumably democratic field. Without ever allowing the habitual impunity of his behavior to create an irreversible break. The violent expulsion of families from Los Semerucos, the political prisoners in the state of Tachira, the harassment of which Globovision has been a victim, for example, are obscene attacks on liberty and democracy.
All of these actions, however, have been carried out under the protection of a scatological justice administered by judges that respond exclusively to the political interests of Miraflores. As if Kafka, brought to life again by the accomplishments and grace of the Bolivarian revolution, were strolling now, calmly and without anxieties, through the crippled political geography of Venezuela, while Chavez, step by step, makes us submit to the bureaucratic nightmare of his Process.
Through the halls of this labyrinth, Chavez and his advisors have managed to cover up the antidemocratic efforts of the government with a very thin, but sufficient, layer of legality. It matters very little that the clearly totalitarian nature of his intentions is recognized everywhere.
In official terms, what matters for the National Armed Forces and for the international community is the apparently democratic aspect of the Venezuelan government. As long as the government does not flagrantly violate the artificial mechanics of that appearance, Chavez is safe. Something that, as the government's most recent reactions allow us to suspect, can change in an instant if, at the hour of facing the reality of El Reafirmazo [November 28], Chavez decides to transgress constitutional norms and to attack the rights of Venezuelan citizens. [...]"
*
Also from Monday's El Nacional, Ibsen Martinez comments on the propaganda documentary "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised":
"[...] A recently-released Irish documentary film takes as its subject the convoluted events of April 11, 2002 and the days that followed. It uses the same title as the song by [Gil] Scott-Heron. It is directed by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, it has received international awards, and it drives certain Chavistas, of the type who like to refer to themselves as 'illustrious', crazy, l-i-t-e-r-a-l-l-y crazy with moral validation.
More information about the documentary can be found at www.chavezthefilm.com. I've seen it a couple times and, frankly, I find it to be Eurocentric, Rousseauian, naive, sentimental, and fallaciously impartial. [...]"
An excerpt from the latest installment of Armando Duran's weekly column in El Nacional, "Contra esto y aquello" (Monday, Nov 3):
"[...] What has been unusual about Chavez's regime is its capacity to play two sides simultaneously. That of a dictatorship and that of a democracy. With a single and obsessive purpose: to stay in Miraflores until the day of the flood. To accomplish this, his management as President has become unbearably authoritarian with each day, always bordering the elastic limits of legality, but without breaking the constitutional thread.
This is why his actions, no matter how devious they might be, have developed within a presumably democratic field. Without ever allowing the habitual impunity of his behavior to create an irreversible break. The violent expulsion of families from Los Semerucos, the political prisoners in the state of Tachira, the harassment of which Globovision has been a victim, for example, are obscene attacks on liberty and democracy.
All of these actions, however, have been carried out under the protection of a scatological justice administered by judges that respond exclusively to the political interests of Miraflores. As if Kafka, brought to life again by the accomplishments and grace of the Bolivarian revolution, were strolling now, calmly and without anxieties, through the crippled political geography of Venezuela, while Chavez, step by step, makes us submit to the bureaucratic nightmare of his Process.
Through the halls of this labyrinth, Chavez and his advisors have managed to cover up the antidemocratic efforts of the government with a very thin, but sufficient, layer of legality. It matters very little that the clearly totalitarian nature of his intentions is recognized everywhere.
In official terms, what matters for the National Armed Forces and for the international community is the apparently democratic aspect of the Venezuelan government. As long as the government does not flagrantly violate the artificial mechanics of that appearance, Chavez is safe. Something that, as the government's most recent reactions allow us to suspect, can change in an instant if, at the hour of facing the reality of El Reafirmazo [November 28], Chavez decides to transgress constitutional norms and to attack the rights of Venezuelan citizens. [...]"
*
Also from Monday's El Nacional, Ibsen Martinez comments on the propaganda documentary "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised":
"[...] A recently-released Irish documentary film takes as its subject the convoluted events of April 11, 2002 and the days that followed. It uses the same title as the song by [Gil] Scott-Heron. It is directed by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, it has received international awards, and it drives certain Chavistas, of the type who like to refer to themselves as 'illustrious', crazy, l-i-t-e-r-a-l-l-y crazy with moral validation.
More information about the documentary can be found at www.chavezthefilm.com. I've seen it a couple times and, frankly, I find it to be Eurocentric, Rousseauian, naive, sentimental, and fallaciously impartial. [...]"
11.03.2003
"In the future! In the future!"
Funny moment earlier today laughing at myself. Reading Laurable, I came across her link to Steve Evan's recent summary of blogworld, which includes: "Venepoetics continues with the case against Chavez."
Moment of clarity where I can already see myself as a very old man, continuing with the "case against Chavez" long after anyone has stopped listening. A good reminder for me of the danger of focusing too much on one idea. And what a horrible idea to expend my brain on.
*
My friend Juan Cruz (poet and musician), who's gonna be touring with Yusef Lateef starting in January, always hates saying the word "Jazz", since it has been so overused. So, whenever we talk about his playing he calls the music "J-A-Z-Z" in order to emphasize the irrelevance of the term. Whenever he mentions the word, I often mistake it for the rapper Jay-Z.
Juan's gig playing with Lateef (starting in January) will take him to Japan, Brazil, Italy, France and parts of the East and West coasts (USA). Juan can also write one hell of a "P-O-E-M." So, Juan, either start a blog or send me some more "P-O-E-T-R-Y" to post here.
*
In the near future, tonight, Eileen is reading in Brooklyn w/ Barry Schwabsky. Wish I could go.
Funny moment earlier today laughing at myself. Reading Laurable, I came across her link to Steve Evan's recent summary of blogworld, which includes: "Venepoetics continues with the case against Chavez."
Moment of clarity where I can already see myself as a very old man, continuing with the "case against Chavez" long after anyone has stopped listening. A good reminder for me of the danger of focusing too much on one idea. And what a horrible idea to expend my brain on.
*
My friend Juan Cruz (poet and musician), who's gonna be touring with Yusef Lateef starting in January, always hates saying the word "Jazz", since it has been so overused. So, whenever we talk about his playing he calls the music "J-A-Z-Z" in order to emphasize the irrelevance of the term. Whenever he mentions the word, I often mistake it for the rapper Jay-Z.
Juan's gig playing with Lateef (starting in January) will take him to Japan, Brazil, Italy, France and parts of the East and West coasts (USA). Juan can also write one hell of a "P-O-E-M." So, Juan, either start a blog or send me some more "P-O-E-T-R-Y" to post here.
*
In the near future, tonight, Eileen is reading in Brooklyn w/ Barry Schwabsky. Wish I could go.
Caliban
Over the weekend I've been re-reading Roberto Fernandez Retamar's essay "Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America" (1971). I find that reading poets such as Fernandez Retamar, or Ernesto Cardenal, recently, brings up a wide range of conflicting emotions in me.
I read today, for instance, an excerpt from an interview with Ernesto Cardenal in Mexico last week, where the Fondo de Cultura Economica is publishing 2nd editions of the first two volumes of his autobiography("Vida perdida" and "Las insulas extranas"). In this interview (with the literary news agency Librusa), Cardenal mentions: "I didn't participate in politics, I participated in a revolution. I supported a revolution and the revolution failed. [...] The last volume of my memoirs is called "La revolucion perdida" and it discusses the theoretical struggles of the revolution up to its triumph, and later the years of the [Sandinista] revolutionary government, which were beautiful, and lastly the sad defeat, which was due to the corruption of the central leaders of the revolution."
For many years now, Cardenal has not been a member of the Sandinista political party, choosing instead to focus on his poetry, and claiming differences with party leaders such as Daniel Ortega. Fernandez Retamar's book Caliban and Other Essays (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989 / trans. Edward Baker) ends with a great essay on Cardenal's poetry:
"In the active reading his poetry demands--and here we can see the author's clear ideological evolution--the universe is real and is now and is beautiful and is love and is struggle." (109)
I find Fernandez Retamar's analysis of language in the Americas to be insightful:
"While other colonials or ex-colonials in metropolitan centers speak among themselves in their own langauge, we Latin Americans continue to use the language of our colonizers. These are the linguas francas capable of going beyond the frontiers that neither the aboriginal nor Creole languages succeed in crossing."
What I'm conflicted about is perhaps unclear even to me. It has to do with my many years of wanting to believe in certain ideals of liberation. I find events in Venezuela (the rise of Chavez, etc.) have brought this idea of Leftist "revolution" to my doorstep. And of course, what I find is that "revolution' ends up being just as bad as capitalism, if not worse.
The conlflict I have is with learning to balance my affinity for many of the literary and political ideas in the work of writers such as Fernandez Retamar, Cardenal and Cintio Vitier, while watching in horror as a "revolution" destroys Venezuela. I see the hypocrisy of writers such as Fernandez Retamar and Vitier, who seem oblivious in public regarding the inconsistencies of leaders such as Castro or Chavez.
First lesson is one I should have learned much earlier: "Don't follow leaders..." Invariably, the idea of Leftist revolution in recent years has always brought with it the specter of Stalin. We could go into a footnote here about tyranny in general, how power corrupts, etc.
So, I find myself hoping (more or less, powerlessly) that the "revolution" in Venezuela fails as soon as possible. I will continue to read and admire writers who support this idea of revolution in Latin America. However, there's a sense of vertigo, or sickness, in my stomach when I think about day to day events in Caracas. When I realize that a large part of this postmodern moment we're living involves the corruption of all political spheres.
But this is so naive. Political spheres have always been corrupted. And ideas of Left or Right at the moment are almost meaningless, since they are constantly being re-defined. Too much to analyze and I'm not up to the task of disentangling these strands (work, living, rent calling me). The "revolution" I read about in Fernandez Retamar and Cardenal is not an ideal I am dismissing as completely untrue. I'm merely pointing to the immense disaster "revolution" is creating in Cuba and Venezuela right now. It is a dead end, and for intellectuals to support such destruction seems ludicrous.
Over the weekend I've been re-reading Roberto Fernandez Retamar's essay "Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America" (1971). I find that reading poets such as Fernandez Retamar, or Ernesto Cardenal, recently, brings up a wide range of conflicting emotions in me.
I read today, for instance, an excerpt from an interview with Ernesto Cardenal in Mexico last week, where the Fondo de Cultura Economica is publishing 2nd editions of the first two volumes of his autobiography("Vida perdida" and "Las insulas extranas"). In this interview (with the literary news agency Librusa), Cardenal mentions: "I didn't participate in politics, I participated in a revolution. I supported a revolution and the revolution failed. [...] The last volume of my memoirs is called "La revolucion perdida" and it discusses the theoretical struggles of the revolution up to its triumph, and later the years of the [Sandinista] revolutionary government, which were beautiful, and lastly the sad defeat, which was due to the corruption of the central leaders of the revolution."
For many years now, Cardenal has not been a member of the Sandinista political party, choosing instead to focus on his poetry, and claiming differences with party leaders such as Daniel Ortega. Fernandez Retamar's book Caliban and Other Essays (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989 / trans. Edward Baker) ends with a great essay on Cardenal's poetry:
"In the active reading his poetry demands--and here we can see the author's clear ideological evolution--the universe is real and is now and is beautiful and is love and is struggle." (109)
I find Fernandez Retamar's analysis of language in the Americas to be insightful:
"While other colonials or ex-colonials in metropolitan centers speak among themselves in their own langauge, we Latin Americans continue to use the language of our colonizers. These are the linguas francas capable of going beyond the frontiers that neither the aboriginal nor Creole languages succeed in crossing."
What I'm conflicted about is perhaps unclear even to me. It has to do with my many years of wanting to believe in certain ideals of liberation. I find events in Venezuela (the rise of Chavez, etc.) have brought this idea of Leftist "revolution" to my doorstep. And of course, what I find is that "revolution' ends up being just as bad as capitalism, if not worse.
The conlflict I have is with learning to balance my affinity for many of the literary and political ideas in the work of writers such as Fernandez Retamar, Cardenal and Cintio Vitier, while watching in horror as a "revolution" destroys Venezuela. I see the hypocrisy of writers such as Fernandez Retamar and Vitier, who seem oblivious in public regarding the inconsistencies of leaders such as Castro or Chavez.
First lesson is one I should have learned much earlier: "Don't follow leaders..." Invariably, the idea of Leftist revolution in recent years has always brought with it the specter of Stalin. We could go into a footnote here about tyranny in general, how power corrupts, etc.
So, I find myself hoping (more or less, powerlessly) that the "revolution" in Venezuela fails as soon as possible. I will continue to read and admire writers who support this idea of revolution in Latin America. However, there's a sense of vertigo, or sickness, in my stomach when I think about day to day events in Caracas. When I realize that a large part of this postmodern moment we're living involves the corruption of all political spheres.
But this is so naive. Political spheres have always been corrupted. And ideas of Left or Right at the moment are almost meaningless, since they are constantly being re-defined. Too much to analyze and I'm not up to the task of disentangling these strands (work, living, rent calling me). The "revolution" I read about in Fernandez Retamar and Cardenal is not an ideal I am dismissing as completely untrue. I'm merely pointing to the immense disaster "revolution" is creating in Cuba and Venezuela right now. It is a dead end, and for intellectuals to support such destruction seems ludicrous.
11.01.2003
not much time to post, less read
enjoyed saying hello to Eileen at AAWW this afternoon
hearing her & Arthur Sze's discussion on poetry
New York skyline as seen from New Jersey from across
the Hudson is as though in August, short-sleeves
here in Bergenline Ave. Saturday noise
translation below is muddled, from misunderstandings
misreadings of mine, while only having read Rojas Guardia
in fragments, never a complete collection
haunt bookstores or find cds to listen to in the car
cassette Boston through Merritt's tree tunnel, read
essay on "Translation as Mother Tongue" by H. Yepez
in Chain 9: "Text, Lies, and Role-Playing (Translation as
Mother Tongue)" summer 2002
think to Juan E. Cruz's poem "Maya Linda Apart (ments)",
the mother saying "our whole lives have been a translation"
as curse? or natural displacement of sounds
across a geography, arrayed
enjoyed saying hello to Eileen at AAWW this afternoon
hearing her & Arthur Sze's discussion on poetry
New York skyline as seen from New Jersey from across
the Hudson is as though in August, short-sleeves
here in Bergenline Ave. Saturday noise
translation below is muddled, from misunderstandings
misreadings of mine, while only having read Rojas Guardia
in fragments, never a complete collection
haunt bookstores or find cds to listen to in the car
cassette Boston through Merritt's tree tunnel, read
essay on "Translation as Mother Tongue" by H. Yepez
in Chain 9: "Text, Lies, and Role-Playing (Translation as
Mother Tongue)" summer 2002
think to Juan E. Cruz's poem "Maya Linda Apart (ments)",
the mother saying "our whole lives have been a translation"
as curse? or natural displacement of sounds
across a geography, arrayed
Poems from quebrada de la virgen / Armando Rojas Guardia
Poemas de quebrada de la virgen (Caracas: Fundarte, 1985)
25
Just like at times we'd like to have seen
Karl Marx and Arthur Rimbaud
meet at a table
in some London cafe
while in the Thames' deaf water
--clouded by oily patches
floating between bottles and stubs
and the grey clothing of the drowned--
the Drunken Boat awaits, already unanchored,
waiting for the specter to cover Europe
and to get on at last, to sail off
(Karl, dressed in blue jeans for sailing,
says goodbye to Engels at the dock
and Tahur does the same to Verlaine
--the insolent dreams stored until now
in the cap that he wore at the Commune);
just like, at this stage, we'd like it
if Hegel, honored by the platform of his seminar,
could have visited Holderlin one afternoon,
at his hidden tower hospital
to listen to the demented poet
--without recognizing him, perhaps--
speak to him of an old friend from Tubinga
with whom, in the middle of an adolescent party,
he danced one morning, next to a tree
they had planted and grown
(They'd call it "Liberty")
as fierce and happy as children peeing
with the audacity of dogs, in front of the king
(within the monochord summer's sleep,
remembering the sweetest girlfriends from Heidelburg,
the two companions confess:
Reason must ask Madness for
her irreductible dance, the innocence
with which the mad Hyperion, from his tower,
explains to the professor about the white light,
the rose of the Spirit's winds,
it doesn't end in the Cesar's State
mocking the Prussians's Kaisers);
I would wish that William Blake were allowed
one single day to preach today
above the carved pulpit of a church
--Westminster Abbey, for example--
in the presence of Archbishops and priests,
and a multitude of worshipers
sick, as everyone is, of sermons.
I imagine the sacred wind resonating
for the first time, next to the marble slabs,
while the bodies, naked at last,
as in the hour of water or love,
bristle with the passage of this living god
and they tremble at the aroma of Christ the Tiger
devouring the soul's edges,
now so intact, so drunk, such virgins
as when that greying child saw angels
at the hour in which Venus burns over Lambeth
and even the prostitutes of Soho are prophets.
Poemas de quebrada de la virgen (Caracas: Fundarte, 1985)
25
Just like at times we'd like to have seen
Karl Marx and Arthur Rimbaud
meet at a table
in some London cafe
while in the Thames' deaf water
--clouded by oily patches
floating between bottles and stubs
and the grey clothing of the drowned--
the Drunken Boat awaits, already unanchored,
waiting for the specter to cover Europe
and to get on at last, to sail off
(Karl, dressed in blue jeans for sailing,
says goodbye to Engels at the dock
and Tahur does the same to Verlaine
--the insolent dreams stored until now
in the cap that he wore at the Commune);
just like, at this stage, we'd like it
if Hegel, honored by the platform of his seminar,
could have visited Holderlin one afternoon,
at his hidden tower hospital
to listen to the demented poet
--without recognizing him, perhaps--
speak to him of an old friend from Tubinga
with whom, in the middle of an adolescent party,
he danced one morning, next to a tree
they had planted and grown
(They'd call it "Liberty")
as fierce and happy as children peeing
with the audacity of dogs, in front of the king
(within the monochord summer's sleep,
remembering the sweetest girlfriends from Heidelburg,
the two companions confess:
Reason must ask Madness for
her irreductible dance, the innocence
with which the mad Hyperion, from his tower,
explains to the professor about the white light,
the rose of the Spirit's winds,
it doesn't end in the Cesar's State
mocking the Prussians's Kaisers);
I would wish that William Blake were allowed
one single day to preach today
above the carved pulpit of a church
--Westminster Abbey, for example--
in the presence of Archbishops and priests,
and a multitude of worshipers
sick, as everyone is, of sermons.
I imagine the sacred wind resonating
for the first time, next to the marble slabs,
while the bodies, naked at last,
as in the hour of water or love,
bristle with the passage of this living god
and they tremble at the aroma of Christ the Tiger
devouring the soul's edges,
now so intact, so drunk, such virgins
as when that greying child saw angels
at the hour in which Venus burns over Lambeth
and even the prostitutes of Soho are prophets.
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