Escribir en el límite



"La poesía vive de dar lugar.
Dar lugar, situar el instante, desear situarlo, ese tormento, esa tormenta, ese temporal suscitador del poema.
Acercar más y más el instante (no poder situarlo), acercarnos a los otros por inmersión en el límite de los instantes de palabra en palabra."



Alfredo Silva Estrada, Al través (Caracas: Angria Ediciones, 2000).


*


The final section of Alfredo Silva Estrada's collection Al través is a series of prose poems called "Escribir en el límite" (To Write at the Limit). The quick sentences in this section, tune up the ample spaces of the earlier poems, which stretch out to long single-line stanzas or groups in variation across the page's field.

The cover of this edition is a drawing by Gego. Silva Estrada may be invoking her distinct lines, their clear trajectories in both poem and canvas or sculpture's 3-D, as her room-sized wire hanging in the Galería de Arte Nacional.

In the summer of 2002, Angria Ediciones collaborated with Editorial Blanca Pantin to publish La libertad del espíritu, Paul Valéry and Antonin Artaud, tr. Claudia Schvartz. A paperback edition in bright orange cover, with an introductory note by poet and editor Blanca Elena Pantin, who writes:

"En días de inmensa confusión donde los discursos únicos alcanzan depuradas manifestaciones o abiertas adhesiones a totalitarismos, las voces de Artaud y Valéry reivindican la disidencia y la diferencia, "la figura del intelectual indócil a las exigencias de cualquier acercamiento," el lugar de la libertad."

*

Here in Boston, I'm glad to see Pettycoat Relaxer #7 is out at newsstands.

I'm finishing Juan Villoro's novel El testigo, which has turned into a crime novel, Mexico's drug cartel underworlds and an anonymous poetry society, informal gathering of readers and writers in an apartment in the Zona Centro of Mexico City.

Boston and Tampa and maybe Miami.

*

Editing my English versions of excerpts from Rafael Castillo Zapata Providence (Angria Ediciones, 1995) which I'll post at Antología next month. After that, Jacqueline Goldberg poems, excerpts from Insolaciones en Miami Beach (1995) in August.