Introduction for Cedar Sigo at Minor American

In the Preface to his 2003 novel The Mask of the Beggar, the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris outlines his methods:

“The artist or author does not have absolute control of his creations but is subject to being created afresh by the characters (or character-masks) he creates. In this way there is no final creation since finality is ceaselessly partial and subject to profoundest alterations.

The artist experiences an excitement, troubling and ecstatic, as he finds himself launched on pathways he never expected to travel and on which his intuition is aroused afresh.”

Cedar Sigo is both the creator and a participant of the “troubling and ecstatic” adventures we find in his verse. His books enact an unpredictable tension between control and intuition. They seek an awareness of how the poem might take root and unfold its charm, somewhere in the process of reading & writing. A few of the “character-masks” in his strange new book have accompanied him for over a decade, many of them first appearing in hand-crafted, semi-secret broadsides and chapbooks, others in private, typewritten letters. Reading his books, we can note how his poems have built up a repertoire of words and images that are distinctly his own. These familiar presences serve as signposts for the reader, though they remain unsettled. Some of these shades that inhabit his poetry include: hotels, blood, rooms, typewriters, windows, antique or rare editions, the city (as an event & organism), music and the night.

What we might hear tonight is a type of music played on vinyl. It actually begins with pause in the room when someone gets up to select the right record, stopping to admire its sleeve. We wait for the needle to drop, the orphic pulse of a figure leaning over an old machine, broadcasting. Please welcome Cedar Sigo.


(For the reading by Cedar Sigo & Ken Taylor at the Minor American reading series on 19 October 2011, Duke University, Durham, NC)

Ramos Sucre

I’ve written a biography of José Antonio Ramos Sucre for Douglas Messerli’s PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) blog. The bio includes my translation of a short text by Juan Calzadilla on Ramos Sucre, two poems translated into English by Cedar Sigo and Sara Bilandzija, along with two others in my version. An excerpt from Sigo & Bilandzija:


“Birds flew above to rest further on.

I felt strangled by life. The ghost of a woman, the height of bitterness, followed me with unmistakable steps, a sleepwalker.

The sea frightened my withdrawal, undermining the earth in the secret of night. A breeze confused the trees, blinded the bushes, finished in a tired flower.

The city, worn by time & greeted by a bend in the continent, kept common custom. It told of water vendors & beggars versed in proverbs & advice.”

(“The City,” 5 Poems, Santa Cruz: Blue Press, 2008)

London, London / Cedar Sigo

London, London

La luz encendida en alto por la pared verde, yo
me cuidé al afeitarme dejando que los pelos crecieran
hasta la tarde. He estado tomando como si fuera un deporte
nada agobiante. En las noches libres disfruto de una ligera
solución de cognac antes de dormir. El equilibrio de la presión
debe ser aguantada por el cráneo, cada silla llena
en mi (demasiado pequeño) teatro. Telas escogidas
      & guindadas con clavos.
Entrada Para Carruajes. Al dibujarlos los diamantes tenían
      un gran
cruce sombreado de líneas en frente y detrás del ámbito.
Vi una flor solitaria & quise que la misma raya suelta &
      sangrienta
fuese producida en masa. A petición. Un simple jardín
      recortado,
compartir un jarro de té & impulsar mi fortuna. No pude
      simplemente
abandonar todas las inanimadas e inumerables obsesiones. Ni
      seguir
con los mismos tipos de poemas. Consígueme mi radio
quiero escuchar alguna música profesional.




[Primer borrador]




{ Cedar Sigo, Expensive Magic, San Francisco: House Press, 2007 }

5 Poems

“Unseduced by worldy pleasures, I returned by chance to solitude, much before the end of my youth. I withdrew to my native city, removed from progress, among the dead. Since then I have not left this mansion’s shadow. Behind the house flows a thin river of ink, saved from the light by a spot of trees, torn by a furious wind, born of the driest mountain. An oxen cart passes slowly across the deserted road in front of the house, an imitation of an Etruscan country scene.”

– José Antonio Ramos Sucre, “Life of the Damned”
tr. Cedar Sigo & Sara Bilandzija


5 Poems (Santa Cruz, CA: Blue Press, 2008)

Stranger in Town

Micah Ballard and Sunnylyn Thibodeaux have published Cedar Sigo’s latest collection, Stranger in Town (San Francisco: Auguste Press, 2006). It arrives stapled along the spine with a creamy cover page by Will Yackulic. The copy I have lists an edition of 150, so who knows how many are available now, a book destined to be reprinted for the sake of those with the pleasure of owning both editions of Selected Writings.

I’ve been reading this book for months now, wondering if and what I’d write about it here, hesitant to dilute it with the dross of a blog or some attempt at critical distance (an impossibility with Cedar’s marvelous poems – they induce marvels in readers). It seems to me built with minor chords, a lowness or retreat to an obscurity for the right reasons. But clear in its honor and devotion to a method, a kindness honed by Baudelairean cruelties:


“Your first presence
is that of a con man
down on his luck.
You cross on the ferry
and return
as it gets dark.”
(“Prince Valiant”)


The poems here take their place as mere shuttles, the failed attempts at recording a movement made vivid by memory’s lament. The poet self-consciously denigrates the notion of perpetuity, attuned to the repetition of stances over the additional decades as they arrive. Poems become more about the reader (this reader) than their conduit’s dramas, a collectivism of singles. They take after music singles, each one sufficient to the drama, seriousness absorbed by style. Place is set by the architecture of our personal maps, their mythological weight:


“I get so
tired at times
and thank

all of
the pills
for being

themselves
and the men
I thank as many

as I bring
to mind again
Fine lines”
(“Lisbon”)


These are gathered from the first two poems in this book, the rest are yours to find. The typewritten font of the one-sided pages marks the distinct shapes of stanzas as they vary, venture towards a dissolute sequence. The title poem reminds me of a feverish walk I underwent, from a train station blocks westward in San Francisco in 2003, on my way back to Boston from Honolulu, stranded but told to head towards the evening sun, feeling invisible or unnoticed by street corner gangsters (“I enjoy reading signs”), the lines weigh differently with each as they should.

"It is eternal audience..."

Among the reasons I keep returning to Cedar Sigo's poems is that he uses silence in such a magnificent way. By 'silence' perhaps I mean reticence, the desire to keep the poem as secret and unearthly as possible. And yet his language remains grounded, affiliated with that sense of place and self Eugenio Montejo calls terredad (or, earthness). As Miguel Gomes describes it in his introduction to Montejo's The Trees: Selected Poems 1967-2004 (Salt Publishing, 2004):

"The new term springs not from some avant-garde attempt to astonish the reader; it is, rather, the only way of expressing the poet's belief in a primordial and always necessary union between culture and anything material existing independently of human beings. Terredad evokes a deeply socialized understanding of space, which is irreducible to merely physical, biological or geographical terms. It reminds us that people cannot conceive of anything around them without immediately marking it with subjective expectations; that space, as Henri Lefebvre would put it, can be and has been produced because it is both an embodiment and a medium of social life." (xix-xx)

Cedar's terredad is rooted in poems and fellow poets, in the movie or TV screen, in the turntable, and of course in the library. As well as the street, the bedroom and the correlation between self and city. In the second edition of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005) the reader is invited to view certain private symbols and memories, all of which the poet never fully explains. And yet, the reader is included within the geography of the poems by way of graceful language. He concludes the book with that private sphere being invaded by economic necessity:

"STOP. It's just so private
A reference, requires enough
Of its audience. Slow the
Spinning wheels in Atlantis,
I have to lose my focus
I have to leave for work now."

That privacy he invokes exists as far away from "work" or "publication" or "career" as possible. It is a Mallarmean privacy, intended for friends and family, for the few who might want to listen. Of course, he inherits this dedication to silence partly from John Wieners, whose poems inhabit whatever Boston I might want to actually keep. When Wieners concludes the opening poem of his chapbook Pressed Wafer (1967) with the following stanza, he is perhaps hailing that immense and productive silence:

"It is eternal audience
and my feet hardened, my heart
blackend, nodding and
bowing before it."

I find this same dedication in the poems of Dolores Dorantes, whether in their original Spanish or in Jen Hofer's wonderful translations. I don't mean to connect any of these poets within a single impulse, since I'm merely watching my own affinities unfold here. But what they do share, in my reading of their work, is a refusal to abandon the poem to noise. They remind me why the poem must stay quiet. Dorantes carries her words into a blank space, an aura the reader should also wear, or risk missing:

"Redonda suerte
surca
cierto pueblo
de pensamientos
devastado


Round fortune
plows
a certain pueblo
of thoughts
devastated"*


* [Jen Hofer, ed, Sin puertas visibles, University of Pittsburg Press, 2003.]

Selected Writings

I received Cedar Sigo's Selected Writings (Expanded Edition) (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005). Cedar has added ten new poems to the original four of that manuscript, along with a slight change in one of the sections of the long poem "O Twist No Inferno." As I've been reading through the book, I love how the additional poems provide a new context for the first four. I get the sensation of familiar music being played through new instruments, remixed or extended versions of favorite songs. Like many poets I admire, Cedar is a subtle DJ who uses repetition and slight variations on lines to amplify his sound.

Rereading "O Twist No Inferno" two years later, I see it as an ambitious and effective long piece. The section from the 2003 edition that began "The maps were advertised..." has been taken out and replaced with another poem that begins "With a promise of blood I took the car..." (published online last year as "I Know I Love Them.") The replaced poem has now been printed as a broadside dagger w/ sheath included.

I hadn't noticed before how the first poem in the book, "O Fantasma," serves as a prologue for "O Twist No Inferno," its precise tercets setting an irregular and effective meter for the longer poem:

"I stand outside
Of my dark past
And applaud for hours"

I'm probably projecting my own affinities onto the long poem when I read it, but it does make me think of Rimbaud's Une saison en enfer. In the sense that Cedar's poem is manipulating verse and prose, commenting on a semi-mythical past and never flinching from the blood or ghosts that the poem conjures within itself.

There's a hardness to Cedar's lines and stanzas that signals a serious dedication to poetry and her affiliates. In "An Ancient Tomb East of the Village," the poet draws a self-portrait in a pastoral mode, with its opening lines:

"Frost on my temples and books
I hold onto a harp that I am too lazy to play.
The books I open read like wallpaper.
The smoke is a filthy yellow.
Rushes from my mouth and bends down from my ears."

This sense of sacred power and knowledge is eventually overshadowed by a blood-soaked block that waits for the poet's head, seeking rest. These nightmare scenarios are sometimes taken seriously and sometimes mocked.

The repetition of certain words and objects throughout Selected Writings (blood, knives, books, smoke) brings to mind a series of choruses. As in hip-hop, repetition here becomes an emblem, a means of decoding and challenging ghosts. The poet aligns himself with that portable music, carried for protection and as a torch. The music is often royal, to be heard by those who recognize the lines, their lineage:

"She must have known
how I would adore its design
having a weakness for
the coronations of poets."

Much like Juan Sánchez Peláez did in his final collection, Aire sobre el aire (1989), Cedar accomplishes a great deal with only 14 poems. "O Twist No Inferno"'s epic allusions spread throughout the entire collection, allowing individual lines to serve as chapters, books within the book. This expanded edition is exquisitely edited by Ugly Duckling Presse, with the same antique paperback cover, now smaller and in red. It has the look of a French paperback from the 1940s, relatively anonymous and practical. Again, a portable music.