Undesirable Desires
The judgment that we might make in favor of or against certain political opinions does not depend on the actual characteristics of those ideas. Rather, our judgment depends on how much we might concur with those ideas. Personally, I have been writing for the press since 1936 and I have never found myself so congratulated as I do now. And I imagine that, at my age, if there has been a change it has probably been for the worse, because of the intellectual disintegration common to old age.
Throughout these many years I have published against the communists, the Adecos, and the Copeyanos, with whom I nevertheless vehemently sympathized, until they transferred power over to the government of Betancourt.
I imagine that I have also published against others. But now I come to the overall question of the positive feedback I have noticed regarding my work. It is clear that I listen only to people who read and, more specifically, to people that I know. But, when I used to write against the Adecos, for example, there were people I respected who disagreed with me. The same thing happened with my other targets. Today, however, I don't know anyone who can read and who doesn't coincide with my opposition to the current regime. Thus, I only encounter agreement with my articles.
I believe that spiritual well-being, as a result of the respect for the freedom to think and speak, is preferable to the material gains of an economically reasonable regime. This is why I have stated so often that I prefer this disaster to the prosperity of the Pérez Jiménez era. However, the supersticious cult of lies that characterizes this current government is notable. The task assigned to Vice President Rangel is picturesque because it is so completely removed from the political sphere, and because it could be performed by any one of the illiterates in the regime. Among other things, the truth is not in question because truth is not only relative but also personal.
We can see how an event need not actually have taken place in order for it to be real, as is the case, for example, with parabolas. But the lies that are assigned to the Vice President are not made up of only words, but of numbers as well. If the government brings 20,000 people to one of their meetings, the Vice President will speak of 200,000 people, without of course mentioning the hired buses and the per diem used as incitements. If the opposition gathers 100,000 people, the Vice President will speak of 10,000. The truth is, one does not need a university education in order to come up with such a scheme.
Returning to the theme of reality being a personal affair, we could add here that, for a person, what exists is only what he knows. For those that don't know the plains, a dust cloud does not exist. And, applying this principle, we could say that for a Chavista culture does not exist. And with this phenomenon, the association ends up drowning the individual. My education at San Ignacio taught me that not every Jesuit is intelligent; but that the Jesuit Order itself is intelligent. The same thing happens with the Chavistas, among whom there are educated individuals. However, their association with Chavismo mercilessly eradicates that education.
I repeat that I prefer this disaster to the prosperity of the Pérez Jiménez era. But everything seems to indicate that our chubby President's goal is to lead our country into another dictatorship, which would bring all of it's own problems, alongside the ignorance that is central to Chavismo. We should not forget that a militaristic civilian is a common occurrence. A civilized military official, however, is not.
{ Francisco Vera Izquierdo, El Nacional, 23 February 2004 }
2.23.2004
The Hogarth Press
Sometime last year I came across this excellent translation of García Lorca's poems:
Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, translated by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili (London: The Hogarth Press, 1943).
Spender and Gili's versions, for the most part, hold up quite well. The edition itself is exquisite, with a plain brown dust jacket imprinted with red letters. The catalog on the sleeve lists ten previous books as part of "The New Hogarth Library." I hope to come across #9 in the collection one day: Forty Poems by John Lehmann.
Spender and Gili conclude this brief collection with the following translation:
"The Lament
I have shut my balcony
because I do not want to hear the weeping,
but from behind the grey walls
nothing else is heard but the weeping.
There are very few angels that sing,
there are very few dogs that bark,
a thousand violins fit into the palm of the hand;
but the weeping is an immense angel,
the weeping is an immense violin,
the tears muzzle the wind,
nothing else is heard but the weeping."
Sometime last year I came across this excellent translation of García Lorca's poems:
Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, translated by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili (London: The Hogarth Press, 1943).
Spender and Gili's versions, for the most part, hold up quite well. The edition itself is exquisite, with a plain brown dust jacket imprinted with red letters. The catalog on the sleeve lists ten previous books as part of "The New Hogarth Library." I hope to come across #9 in the collection one day: Forty Poems by John Lehmann.
Spender and Gili conclude this brief collection with the following translation:
"The Lament
I have shut my balcony
because I do not want to hear the weeping,
but from behind the grey walls
nothing else is heard but the weeping.
There are very few angels that sing,
there are very few dogs that bark,
a thousand violins fit into the palm of the hand;
but the weeping is an immense angel,
the weeping is an immense violin,
the tears muzzle the wind,
nothing else is heard but the weeping."
2.21.2004
Rosamel del Valle
In 1976 Monte Ávila Editores published an anthology of work by the Chilean poet Rosamel del Valle (1901-1965). The volume was edited by Juan Sánchez Peláez, who maintained a life-long admiration for that poet's work. I was lucky enough to find a copy of this book in the shelves of one of the booksellers in the hallways of the Universidad Central de Venezuela two years ago.
I've read that Sánchez Peláez met Rosamel del Valle once, in New York City during the early 1960s. The Chilean poet's books are nearly impossible to find these days. The poems that Sánchez Peláez includes in Antología offer an excellent view of Rosamel del Valle's magnificent interpretations of surrealism, spanning from the 1920s until the 1960s. So much depends on these secret books.
*
"Quinteto
Ah, sí, a veces sé que existes, que eres
Parte de mí mismo y del relámpago en visita.
Y cuando hay más cabellos y olas a mi alrededor,
Debes saberlo, no te atraigo hacia mí ni te aparto
Sino que te dejo danzar en el vértigo de mis huéspedes.
Si yo fuera Ovidio diría que eres la alegoría del amor,
La visión rodeada de centellas por caminos sin cielo.
Y ya ves, eso es forzar la lengua para nada
Puesto que estás vestida de brillantes jeroglíficos
Y tratando de hablar por los ojos de cada signo.
Nada aparto de mí porque la vida lo ordena
Y porque de todos modos la muerte no lo quiere.
¿Qué sería de mi caminar por las aguas,
De mi entrega al banquete privado de la noche,
Sin nada que hablara de ti en esos secretos?
Devuelve, pues, tu cabeza al mar y mírame desde ahí.
Yo estoy contando horas en la vejez de las colinas:
Horas que han cesado de hablar sin despedirse,
Horas atraídas por el imán que no conozco
Pero que ponen un sol de otro tiempo en mis palabras.
Pienso en el instante en que debo deshacerme
Con la magia del tren que se deshace en un túnel.
Al otro lado estarás, eso lo sé, dormida y con el brazo
Del sol alrededor de tu cuello. Mas ¿estaré
Yo ahí para saber que ese calor es mi calor?
Lo digo, como podría decir que las nubes son párpados errantes
Pero sin desear una respuesta a mi ansiedad
Puesto que estaré sentado debajo de tus ojos
Aun con esa cadena ardiente inventada por mí mismo.
Tú y yo, no más que la humedad y la piedra.
Tú y yo, no más que el corazón de la noche en un vaso."
{Rosamel del Valle, La visión comunicable, 1956}
In 1976 Monte Ávila Editores published an anthology of work by the Chilean poet Rosamel del Valle (1901-1965). The volume was edited by Juan Sánchez Peláez, who maintained a life-long admiration for that poet's work. I was lucky enough to find a copy of this book in the shelves of one of the booksellers in the hallways of the Universidad Central de Venezuela two years ago.
I've read that Sánchez Peláez met Rosamel del Valle once, in New York City during the early 1960s. The Chilean poet's books are nearly impossible to find these days. The poems that Sánchez Peláez includes in Antología offer an excellent view of Rosamel del Valle's magnificent interpretations of surrealism, spanning from the 1920s until the 1960s. So much depends on these secret books.
*
"Quinteto
Ah, sí, a veces sé que existes, que eres
Parte de mí mismo y del relámpago en visita.
Y cuando hay más cabellos y olas a mi alrededor,
Debes saberlo, no te atraigo hacia mí ni te aparto
Sino que te dejo danzar en el vértigo de mis huéspedes.
Si yo fuera Ovidio diría que eres la alegoría del amor,
La visión rodeada de centellas por caminos sin cielo.
Y ya ves, eso es forzar la lengua para nada
Puesto que estás vestida de brillantes jeroglíficos
Y tratando de hablar por los ojos de cada signo.
Nada aparto de mí porque la vida lo ordena
Y porque de todos modos la muerte no lo quiere.
¿Qué sería de mi caminar por las aguas,
De mi entrega al banquete privado de la noche,
Sin nada que hablara de ti en esos secretos?
Devuelve, pues, tu cabeza al mar y mírame desde ahí.
Yo estoy contando horas en la vejez de las colinas:
Horas que han cesado de hablar sin despedirse,
Horas atraídas por el imán que no conozco
Pero que ponen un sol de otro tiempo en mis palabras.
Pienso en el instante en que debo deshacerme
Con la magia del tren que se deshace en un túnel.
Al otro lado estarás, eso lo sé, dormida y con el brazo
Del sol alrededor de tu cuello. Mas ¿estaré
Yo ahí para saber que ese calor es mi calor?
Lo digo, como podría decir que las nubes son párpados errantes
Pero sin desear una respuesta a mi ansiedad
Puesto que estaré sentado debajo de tus ojos
Aun con esa cadena ardiente inventada por mí mismo.
Tú y yo, no más que la humedad y la piedra.
Tú y yo, no más que el corazón de la noche en un vaso."
{Rosamel del Valle, La visión comunicable, 1956}
"There was nowhere to turn..."
Today's cassette is Sonic Youth Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (1994), which includes an epigraph by Jack Brewer in the liner notes: "Once the music leaves your head it's already compromised."
*
Reading Tabla sin asidero and Humphrey Bloggart today, I find out that two young Mexican writers/bloggers have been arrested in Mexico City and charged with stealing the rearview mirrors from a parked car.
Gerardo Sifuentes Marín and Epigmenio León Martínez were arrested on February 12 and are now in jail, facing charges of aggravated robbery. I don't think I need to emphasize that the Mexico City police (like the police in most Latin American cities) are extremely corrupt. The charges against these two writers are ridiculous, especially considering that the only witnesses to the alleged crime are the two arresting officers.
I hope their problems can be resolved soon.
*
Along with Teresa de la Parra's Las memorias de Mama Blanca, I have begun reading Cristina Rivera Garza's novel Nadie me verá llorar (Barcelona, España: Editorial Tusquets, 2003 / orig. 1999).
*
The Rafael Cadenas translations are going very slowly. As I transfer them into English, I find that I lose much of the beauty of his early poems. While translating, I get stuck on single words or phrases that seem impossible to evoke accurately in English. As a translator, I always go back to Walter Benjamin's notion of a pure, or transcendental, language that emerges beyond the two languages. In Cadenas' poetry, that moment of purity is always mixed in with sadness and silence.
*
Opening the mailbox today, I'm happy to find three poems by John Ashbery in the London Review of Books:
"The Situation Upstairs
Like a forest fire in a jungle
with no one to watch it, this sea breeze
releases me to the cloud of knowing.
There are beaters in the woods,
nourishing it, and you're it,
reciting it. The long scramble upstairs
landed us here. There is no method
in the alphabet; the urchin came unseated.
You have to learn to 'bounce'
with the ages, just to keep up with time.
By then it will have been censored,
bleached from an autumn of folly.
In time we were twins, grew apart,
felt the centennial dawning.
There was nowhere to turn
and nobody to turn to.
To have 'landed' requires skills
we knew nothing of in our era,
yet their musicianly acts accompany us,
push us out of doors, into late summer's clamour.
Now our pleated longetivity mimics us.
We should have been nicer, talked to children
and their pets. To draw the tapestry aside
at this late date is to shuffle with fools
and clergymen, though there is one more thankless
task to claim and be influenced by:
the credible flight of football plays and calls.
These not any more for our adornment:
talking to new rulers and insight gained,
sunflowers over and out,
ashes on the clapboard credenza."
{John Ashbery, London Review of Books 19 February 2004}
Today's cassette is Sonic Youth Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (1994), which includes an epigraph by Jack Brewer in the liner notes: "Once the music leaves your head it's already compromised."
*
Reading Tabla sin asidero and Humphrey Bloggart today, I find out that two young Mexican writers/bloggers have been arrested in Mexico City and charged with stealing the rearview mirrors from a parked car.
Gerardo Sifuentes Marín and Epigmenio León Martínez were arrested on February 12 and are now in jail, facing charges of aggravated robbery. I don't think I need to emphasize that the Mexico City police (like the police in most Latin American cities) are extremely corrupt. The charges against these two writers are ridiculous, especially considering that the only witnesses to the alleged crime are the two arresting officers.
I hope their problems can be resolved soon.
*
Along with Teresa de la Parra's Las memorias de Mama Blanca, I have begun reading Cristina Rivera Garza's novel Nadie me verá llorar (Barcelona, España: Editorial Tusquets, 2003 / orig. 1999).
*
The Rafael Cadenas translations are going very slowly. As I transfer them into English, I find that I lose much of the beauty of his early poems. While translating, I get stuck on single words or phrases that seem impossible to evoke accurately in English. As a translator, I always go back to Walter Benjamin's notion of a pure, or transcendental, language that emerges beyond the two languages. In Cadenas' poetry, that moment of purity is always mixed in with sadness and silence.
*
Opening the mailbox today, I'm happy to find three poems by John Ashbery in the London Review of Books:
"The Situation Upstairs
Like a forest fire in a jungle
with no one to watch it, this sea breeze
releases me to the cloud of knowing.
There are beaters in the woods,
nourishing it, and you're it,
reciting it. The long scramble upstairs
landed us here. There is no method
in the alphabet; the urchin came unseated.
You have to learn to 'bounce'
with the ages, just to keep up with time.
By then it will have been censored,
bleached from an autumn of folly.
In time we were twins, grew apart,
felt the centennial dawning.
There was nowhere to turn
and nobody to turn to.
To have 'landed' requires skills
we knew nothing of in our era,
yet their musicianly acts accompany us,
push us out of doors, into late summer's clamour.
Now our pleated longetivity mimics us.
We should have been nicer, talked to children
and their pets. To draw the tapestry aside
at this late date is to shuffle with fools
and clergymen, though there is one more thankless
task to claim and be influenced by:
the credible flight of football plays and calls.
These not any more for our adornment:
talking to new rulers and insight gained,
sunflowers over and out,
ashes on the clapboard credenza."
{John Ashbery, London Review of Books 19 February 2004}
2.19.2004
Maintenance
2.
"Por cual causa o nostalgia"
It was so we could speak longer verses
The lector would have his seat somewhere
above the workers but within hearing range
to lead them through novel chapters, newspaper
columns, poem cantos, short stories and essays
So we could speak in volumes unaccustomed
Though we know even less than they do
About building or rebuilding a city
3.
Excerpt from María Ramírez Ribes's interview with Rafael Cadenas, Conversaciones con Rafael Cadenas (Caracas: Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1997).
"--Why does man need the city and its smoke?
--He needs the city, not the smoke. But the city has been developed using (how would I say it?) motives that are far from human. Even though it could be a completely different place. There has been a disconnection from Nature, you see? We have lost our reverence toward Nature and, of course, the cities are made by the man who has lost that connection. But if man were different the cities would be different. They would be gardens. Man today doesn't see nature within himself. Because that connection to Nature is not only found outside of man. Nor is there respect for words. They are used by demagogues, with no depth."
2.17.2004
The Exile Notebooks
Beyond that first book by Cadenas, his poems in recent years often seem to focus on individual lines of plain speech. Paying less attention to the poem as narrative and focusing instead on particular moments of thought and vision. A mysticism maintained within the fractured urban landscapes of Caracas. The selected poems of Antología (Madrid: Colección Visor, 1999), with a helpful introduction by Ana Nuño, is the best place to start.
Beyond that first book by Cadenas, his poems in recent years often seem to focus on individual lines of plain speech. Paying less attention to the poem as narrative and focusing instead on particular moments of thought and vision. A mysticism maintained within the fractured urban landscapes of Caracas. The selected poems of Antología (Madrid: Colección Visor, 1999), with a helpful introduction by Ana Nuño, is the best place to start.
2.16.2004
The Exile Notebooks
Rafael Cadenas wrote his book Los Cuadernos del destierro while he was living in Trinidad in the 1950s, as an exile from the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez.
His collected poems and prose were recently published in Mexico as Obra entera: Poesía y prosa (1958-1995) (México D.F. : Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000). I'd like to post translations of several poems from Los cuadernos del destierro later this week.
Cadenas' prose poems in this book evoke Rimbaud's Une saison en enfer, to a degree. Cadenas always remains lucid, however, in this crystalline collection. After a prolific period in the 1960s, Cadenas refrained from publishing for several years and emerged with a pared down style, which he continues to develop today. While he has recently been disparaged by members of the current administration for his vocal opposition to the Venezuelan government, Cadenas is one of our living masters. His poetry requires an extended silence, and in return it grants us wider vision.
I also intend to post translations of excerpts from an interview with Rafael Cadenas: María Ramírez Ribes, Conversaciones con Rafael Cadenas (Caracas: Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1997).
Rafael Cadenas wrote his book Los Cuadernos del destierro while he was living in Trinidad in the 1950s, as an exile from the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez.
His collected poems and prose were recently published in Mexico as Obra entera: Poesía y prosa (1958-1995) (México D.F. : Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000). I'd like to post translations of several poems from Los cuadernos del destierro later this week.
Cadenas' prose poems in this book evoke Rimbaud's Une saison en enfer, to a degree. Cadenas always remains lucid, however, in this crystalline collection. After a prolific period in the 1960s, Cadenas refrained from publishing for several years and emerged with a pared down style, which he continues to develop today. While he has recently been disparaged by members of the current administration for his vocal opposition to the Venezuelan government, Cadenas is one of our living masters. His poetry requires an extended silence, and in return it grants us wider vision.
I also intend to post translations of excerpts from an interview with Rafael Cadenas: María Ramírez Ribes, Conversaciones con Rafael Cadenas (Caracas: Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1997).
2.15.2004
Los cuadernos del destierro
"[...] Ciudades con el rostro lavado como el mostrador de los cafetines. Ciudades oleosas, arrancadas a los anatemas de los profetas, empantanadas como valles genésicos, sembradas en la negrura náutica de la noche como sirenas de cemento que despiden sus víctimas con máscaras. Ciudades felinas devorando los torrentes del esfuerzo. Sutiles, multitudinarias, roedoras. Cansado de ver naufragar mis expediciones sagradas en vacíos, mi refugio era su muchedumbre enraizada en pequeños apartamentos sin soledad.
Luminosas, deidades de otro mar.
Mi historia, despedirse.
Lleno de cruel sapiencia."
Rafael Cadenas, Los cuadernos del destierro (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2001 / orig. 1960)
"[...] Ciudades con el rostro lavado como el mostrador de los cafetines. Ciudades oleosas, arrancadas a los anatemas de los profetas, empantanadas como valles genésicos, sembradas en la negrura náutica de la noche como sirenas de cemento que despiden sus víctimas con máscaras. Ciudades felinas devorando los torrentes del esfuerzo. Sutiles, multitudinarias, roedoras. Cansado de ver naufragar mis expediciones sagradas en vacíos, mi refugio era su muchedumbre enraizada en pequeños apartamentos sin soledad.
Luminosas, deidades de otro mar.
Mi historia, despedirse.
Lleno de cruel sapiencia."
Rafael Cadenas, Los cuadernos del destierro (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2001 / orig. 1960)
Lecturas
jeringa apocalipstick:
"Esa que soy aquí ya no quiere marcharse"
*
Cristina Rivera Garza:
" LAS IDENTIDADES INTERMITENTES
Fronteriza. Lectora. New Latino. Mexicana. Norteña. Tamaulipeca. Hija. Tijuanense. Chilanga. Lectora. Pocha. Mexico-Americana. Chicana. Mujer. No-mujer. Lo-que-está-más-allá-de-Mujer. Hispana. Primera-Generación. Middle-Age. Lectora. Chamaca. Académica. Third-Wave. Imprudente. Bloguista. Traductora. Clase Media. Diaspórica. Ex-smoker. Madre. Socióloga. Feminista. Historiadora. Bilingüe. Mestiza. Borderlined. Enamorada. Tenured. Lectora. Colored. Amiga. Californiana. Ex-esposa. Profe. Doctora. Spanish-speaker. Mexicanista. Speaker. Contestona. Endorfinómana. Más-joven-que. Viajera. Electrónica. Silenciosa. Accented. Morena. Bípeda. Hyphonated. Estudiante. Invisible. Terrestre. A-veces-muda. Lectora. Ahora-en-Madrid.
Etceteramente.
Todo esto (y más) alrededor de la palabra escritora."
*
Dolores Dorantes:
"No queda
en este territorio antes del muro
en este mundo solo antes del agua
más que alguna parálisis:
el último
permanente sol de cielo
no queda
respiración alguna"
*
Heriberto Yépez:
"—Tu nombre no apareció.
—Sí, lo sé.
—¿Cómo te llamas?
—Tharsis.
—¡Qué bonito!, ¿qué significa?
—La que hace trizas."
jeringa apocalipstick:
"Esa que soy aquí ya no quiere marcharse"
*
Cristina Rivera Garza:
" LAS IDENTIDADES INTERMITENTES
Fronteriza. Lectora. New Latino. Mexicana. Norteña. Tamaulipeca. Hija. Tijuanense. Chilanga. Lectora. Pocha. Mexico-Americana. Chicana. Mujer. No-mujer. Lo-que-está-más-allá-de-Mujer. Hispana. Primera-Generación. Middle-Age. Lectora. Chamaca. Académica. Third-Wave. Imprudente. Bloguista. Traductora. Clase Media. Diaspórica. Ex-smoker. Madre. Socióloga. Feminista. Historiadora. Bilingüe. Mestiza. Borderlined. Enamorada. Tenured. Lectora. Colored. Amiga. Californiana. Ex-esposa. Profe. Doctora. Spanish-speaker. Mexicanista. Speaker. Contestona. Endorfinómana. Más-joven-que. Viajera. Electrónica. Silenciosa. Accented. Morena. Bípeda. Hyphonated. Estudiante. Invisible. Terrestre. A-veces-muda. Lectora. Ahora-en-Madrid.
Etceteramente.
Todo esto (y más) alrededor de la palabra escritora."
*
Dolores Dorantes:
"No queda
en este territorio antes del muro
en este mundo solo antes del agua
más que alguna parálisis:
el último
permanente sol de cielo
no queda
respiración alguna"
*
Heriberto Yépez:
"—Tu nombre no apareció.
—Sí, lo sé.
—¿Cómo te llamas?
—Tharsis.
—¡Qué bonito!, ¿qué significa?
—La que hace trizas."
Music
Elizabeth Alexander will be speaking in Cambridge on February 19th, regarding her book of essays The Black Interior (Graywolf Press, 2004).
*
In Cambridge there's a building cornerstone with the following inscription etched: "God is in the midst of the city. Psalm 46"
*
The march in Caracas went well. My father and uncle marched from Chuao to the Botanical Gardens at the Universidad Central, as did approximately 264, 000 people, according to today's El Nacional.
*
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singing forever: "This is not a modern romance."
Elizabeth Alexander will be speaking in Cambridge on February 19th, regarding her book of essays The Black Interior (Graywolf Press, 2004).
*
In Cambridge there's a building cornerstone with the following inscription etched: "God is in the midst of the city. Psalm 46"
*
The march in Caracas went well. My father and uncle marched from Chuao to the Botanical Gardens at the Universidad Central, as did approximately 264, 000 people, according to today's El Nacional.
*
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singing forever: "This is not a modern romance."
2.14.2004
Los cuadernos del destierro
"[...] Habitaba un lugar indeciso.
Mi historia era un largo recuento de inauditas torpezas, de infértiles averiguaciones, de fabulosas fábricas.
Un dios cobarde usurpaba mis aras.
El había degollado el amor frente a una reluciente laguna, en un bosque de caobos. Huía mugiendo sábanas ensangrentadas. Escapaba del recinto feliz. Las nubes eran símbolos zoológicos de mi destierro.
El amor me conducía con inocencia hacia la destrucción.
El odio, como a mis mayores, me fortalecía.
Pero yo sabia reír.
Como no soportaba la claridad, dispuse entre anaranjados estertores de sol mi regreso hacia el final. Las aguas me condujeron como el sensitivo lleva la pesadilla. Volví insomne al lugar de la ficción."
Rafael Cadenas, Los cuadernos del destierro (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2001 / orig. 1960)
"[...] Habitaba un lugar indeciso.
Mi historia era un largo recuento de inauditas torpezas, de infértiles averiguaciones, de fabulosas fábricas.
Un dios cobarde usurpaba mis aras.
El había degollado el amor frente a una reluciente laguna, en un bosque de caobos. Huía mugiendo sábanas ensangrentadas. Escapaba del recinto feliz. Las nubes eran símbolos zoológicos de mi destierro.
El amor me conducía con inocencia hacia la destrucción.
El odio, como a mis mayores, me fortalecía.
Pero yo sabia reír.
Como no soportaba la claridad, dispuse entre anaranjados estertores de sol mi regreso hacia el final. Las aguas me condujeron como el sensitivo lleva la pesadilla. Volví insomne al lugar de la ficción."
Rafael Cadenas, Los cuadernos del destierro (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2001 / orig. 1960)
2.13.2004
Caurimare
I'm very happy to mention that some of my poems will appear in 6x6 #8, which should be out soon.
The poems from the sequence included in 6x6 are dedicated to my aunt and godmother, Maria Lourdes Parra Eichelbaum, who died in Caracas during the weekend of April 11, 2002.
Maritza told me countless stories about Caracas, a city she knew inside-out. She taught me the importance of memory, and of standing firm against seemingly insurmountable odds. Bendición, tía.
I'm very happy to mention that some of my poems will appear in 6x6 #8, which should be out soon.
The poems from the sequence included in 6x6 are dedicated to my aunt and godmother, Maria Lourdes Parra Eichelbaum, who died in Caracas during the weekend of April 11, 2002.
Maritza told me countless stories about Caracas, a city she knew inside-out. She taught me the importance of memory, and of standing firm against seemingly insurmountable odds. Bendición, tía.
2.12.2004
Sin titulo
movements of thought answers the question: "--¿Cómo es su disciplina de blog?" today. My own blog discipline is based on daily entries, at times forcing myself to add a few words, like tonight, rushed at library or work late. Flip through newspapers and other blogs, look in notebooks and fight invisibility with daily presence. Although invisibility is sometimes necessary.
*
I'm not quite convinced by the conclusion of Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes. The shooting seems forced, as though it were following a tired Tarantino script, in a desert with screams and dust. Maybe the book is meant to fall apart gracelessly in the final chapters. Regardless, it's a brilliant novel.
*
"I climbed through the woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,
Not a leaf, not a bird-
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood..."
{Ted Hughes, "The Horses," The Hawk in the Rain, 1957}
*
dawn speaker lowered to trickle
noise for us to wear night correctly
*
"(¿quién es más indio, un mixteco de Oaxaca o uno emigrado a Los Ángeles?)"
{Rogelio Villarreal, "El Gran Rechazo,
Underground y contracultura"}
*
All those Indian names around me the whole time, and I never knew.
*
Hello to Isabel and Ramana in Calcutta, and to Juan on tour in Japan.
*
At El Meollo, Roberto Echeto writes a letter from Caracas to the novelist Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez in Spain, regarding the latter's novel, Árbol de luna. The letter begins:
"Dear Juan Carlos,
I hope things are going well for you over there in Spain. Over here we're on guard, surrounded by the daily disgraces. My life is beautiful when I'm in my house. However: as soon as I step onto Francisco de Miranda Avenue my existence unravels and becomes miserable. But, what can we do? I suppose this feeling marks all of us who live in Venezuela. At home we're fine, but on the street we become paranoid when confronted with so much disgrace turned routine. Patience, carajo. There's no other way. [...]"
*
Unfortunately, at this moment the Chavistas are wrapped in their pseudo-revolutionary, apocalyptic mantle. Walcott writes, in "The Gulf":
"age after age, the uninstructing dead."
movements of thought answers the question: "--¿Cómo es su disciplina de blog?" today. My own blog discipline is based on daily entries, at times forcing myself to add a few words, like tonight, rushed at library or work late. Flip through newspapers and other blogs, look in notebooks and fight invisibility with daily presence. Although invisibility is sometimes necessary.
*
I'm not quite convinced by the conclusion of Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes. The shooting seems forced, as though it were following a tired Tarantino script, in a desert with screams and dust. Maybe the book is meant to fall apart gracelessly in the final chapters. Regardless, it's a brilliant novel.
*
"I climbed through the woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,
Not a leaf, not a bird-
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood..."
{Ted Hughes, "The Horses," The Hawk in the Rain, 1957}
*
dawn speaker lowered to trickle
noise for us to wear night correctly
*
"(¿quién es más indio, un mixteco de Oaxaca o uno emigrado a Los Ángeles?)"
{Rogelio Villarreal, "El Gran Rechazo,
Underground y contracultura"}
*
All those Indian names around me the whole time, and I never knew.
*
Hello to Isabel and Ramana in Calcutta, and to Juan on tour in Japan.
*
At El Meollo, Roberto Echeto writes a letter from Caracas to the novelist Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez in Spain, regarding the latter's novel, Árbol de luna. The letter begins:
"Dear Juan Carlos,
I hope things are going well for you over there in Spain. Over here we're on guard, surrounded by the daily disgraces. My life is beautiful when I'm in my house. However: as soon as I step onto Francisco de Miranda Avenue my existence unravels and becomes miserable. But, what can we do? I suppose this feeling marks all of us who live in Venezuela. At home we're fine, but on the street we become paranoid when confronted with so much disgrace turned routine. Patience, carajo. There's no other way. [...]"
*
Unfortunately, at this moment the Chavistas are wrapped in their pseudo-revolutionary, apocalyptic mantle. Walcott writes, in "The Gulf":
"age after age, the uninstructing dead."
2.11.2004
Autobiographical
Autobiography has always been the central focus of my writing. In my poems and journals, I almost always end up referring to incidents, places, and people from my past or present. Writing is a way of archiving elements of my life that might otherwise disappear. This is directly related to the nomadic quality of my childhood and adolescence.
One of the earliest autobiographies I remember reading was published by my great grandfather in the 1940s. Strangely enough, it's a book by a Venezuelan American journalist named Thomas Russell Ybarra (1890-1971). My great grandfather published two of Ybarra's books under the imprint that carried his name:
Bolívar, The Passionate Warrior (New York: Ives Washburn, 1929)
Young Man of Caracas (New York: Ives Washburn, 1941)
The copy I have of the 1941 book is a worn hardcover edition, with Ybarra's inscription to my great grandfather signed "Tom." The book is of interest to me because of its account of the author's life in Caracas during the early decades of the 20th century, before oil had transformed the city into the massive metropolis it is today.
This is the only book published by Ives Washburn that I own. He published non-fiction from the 1920s until his death in the 1940s. After his death, the company was bought and it continued to publish under the same name until the mid 1970s.
I know of my great grandfather only through a portrait of him that hangs in my uncle's house here in Boston, and from a few anecdotes that my grandmother has told me. He died, for instance, at a relatively young age when he fell down a flight of stairs one evening, maybe during a cocktail party. She has also mentioned that Ybarra and my great grandfather were friends.
I have moved so often in my life that I am acutely aware of how easily things can be lost: people, places, clothes, books, languages. Books in particular have provided me with a sense of permanence, or home. The copy of Young Man of Caracas was taken from my grandfather's library after his death in 1984. I don't remember if I took it from his bookshelves when I was in New York for his funeral, or if my mother set it aside, knowing the topic would interest me.
When I was in Caracas in 2002, my sister and I went with our cousin to visit her mother's and our grandparents' graves in the Cementerio del Este. As we were leaving, my cousin recalled a conversation she once had with our grandfather. He had mentioned why reading was his life-long passion: "When you die you can't take anything with you. The only things you can take are the ideas and thoughts in your mind."
Autobiography has always been the central focus of my writing. In my poems and journals, I almost always end up referring to incidents, places, and people from my past or present. Writing is a way of archiving elements of my life that might otherwise disappear. This is directly related to the nomadic quality of my childhood and adolescence.
One of the earliest autobiographies I remember reading was published by my great grandfather in the 1940s. Strangely enough, it's a book by a Venezuelan American journalist named Thomas Russell Ybarra (1890-1971). My great grandfather published two of Ybarra's books under the imprint that carried his name:
Bolívar, The Passionate Warrior (New York: Ives Washburn, 1929)
Young Man of Caracas (New York: Ives Washburn, 1941)
The copy I have of the 1941 book is a worn hardcover edition, with Ybarra's inscription to my great grandfather signed "Tom." The book is of interest to me because of its account of the author's life in Caracas during the early decades of the 20th century, before oil had transformed the city into the massive metropolis it is today.
This is the only book published by Ives Washburn that I own. He published non-fiction from the 1920s until his death in the 1940s. After his death, the company was bought and it continued to publish under the same name until the mid 1970s.
I know of my great grandfather only through a portrait of him that hangs in my uncle's house here in Boston, and from a few anecdotes that my grandmother has told me. He died, for instance, at a relatively young age when he fell down a flight of stairs one evening, maybe during a cocktail party. She has also mentioned that Ybarra and my great grandfather were friends.
I have moved so often in my life that I am acutely aware of how easily things can be lost: people, places, clothes, books, languages. Books in particular have provided me with a sense of permanence, or home. The copy of Young Man of Caracas was taken from my grandfather's library after his death in 1984. I don't remember if I took it from his bookshelves when I was in New York for his funeral, or if my mother set it aside, knowing the topic would interest me.
When I was in Caracas in 2002, my sister and I went with our cousin to visit her mother's and our grandparents' graves in the Cementerio del Este. As we were leaving, my cousin recalled a conversation she once had with our grandfather. He had mentioned why reading was his life-long passion: "When you die you can't take anything with you. The only things you can take are the ideas and thoughts in your mind."
2.10.2004
Commerce
"...I now understand why the Greeks were such great Poets, & above all I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony the unity the perfection the uniform excellence of all their works of art. They lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature and nourished themselves upon the spirit of its forms. Their theaters were all open to the mountains & the sky. Their columns, that ideal type of a sacred forest, with its roof of interwoven tracery admitted the light and wind, the odour and the freshness of the country penetrated the cities."
{Percy Shelley, 1818 letter, quoted in Shelley: The Pursuit}
"...I now understand why the Greeks were such great Poets, & above all I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony the unity the perfection the uniform excellence of all their works of art. They lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature and nourished themselves upon the spirit of its forms. Their theaters were all open to the mountains & the sky. Their columns, that ideal type of a sacred forest, with its roof of interwoven tracery admitted the light and wind, the odour and the freshness of the country penetrated the cities."
{Percy Shelley, 1818 letter, quoted in Shelley: The Pursuit}
2.09.2004
Rest
Life fatigue. Walked in New York this weekend, seeing friends and staring at the Hudson from a 16th floor, its changes with the variations in light. Hawks in flight above the ice chunks in the river, trees on the Jersey shore in golden dusk. First time in Queens and the Bronx. I left Sunday afternoon with Old Dirty Bastard, New Order, and Belle & Sebastian on the car speakers for highway hours:
"I fought in a war
I didn't know where it would end
It stretched before me infinitely
I couldn't really think"
Nothing to write. Our suffering is almost always indecipherable. A fiction we dread.
Reading Ted Hughes' The Hawk in the Rain.
Last week I came across this essay in honor of Juan Sánchez Peláez, in the Spanish version of The Miami Herald:
*
El que arrojaba uvas ardientes
Especial/El Nuevo Herald
LORENZO GARCIA VEGA
¿El que arrojaba uvas ardientes en las duras bahías? ¿Quién supo decirlo? Sólo un poeta, por supuesto, sólo mi amigo Juan Sánchez Peláez lo supo. Pero como a mí me resulta doloroso comenzar diciendo que ya él no está, voy a dar un salto que me lleve hacia un cinematógrafo de mi juventud. ¿Cómo es esto?
Algunos poetas, o literatos, o como quiera llamárseles, que irrumpimos en aquel momento de la churumbela hispanoamericana comprendida entre los años 1940 y 1955, veíamos en los cinematógrafos unos patéticos noticieros donde el locutor, con voz ''de circunstancia'', nos señalaba que lo que estábamos viendo: una explosión atómica sobre unas ciudades japonesas, era todo un nuevo Capítulo de la Historia (así mismo, con mayúscula, o con voz de mayúscula, lo decía el locutor) que iba a cambiarlo todo, o a descomponerlo todo. Así que la angustia existencialista estaba a la orden del día. Una angustia existencial que se nos teñía con los buenos fuegos del surrealismo.
Así mismo fue. Entramos bajo una explosión atómica relatada por un locutor, y nos refugiamos, a como pudimos, bajo los últimos tiros del surrealismo. Así que los que éramos jóvenes en aquellos tiempos --unos jóvenes que nos habíamos propuesto refugiarnos bajo el desbarajuste metafórico de la vanguardia--, y vivíamos en el aislamiento de una isla, nos alimentamos a como pudimos con lo que, del mundo exterior, nos llegaba a través de las librerías de La Habana, Y esto, mientras en la tierra firme, o sea, en el continente, un venezolano a quien no conocíamos, Juan Sánchez Peláez, se desplazaba hacia Chile, a recoger el legado de esa surrealista revista Mandrágora, donde, según un crítico: ``Los mandragoristas se abrieron paso a codazos, rompiendo salvajemente con todo; gritos, improperios, insultos al medio sin preocupación por las buenas formas"; y esto para después, en un viaje en velocípedo, según confesó Juan en uno de sus poemas, terminar él en ese París donde conoció a Peret, y donde se asimiló cosas tales como la ``noche profunda y larga de mi edad", señalada por Eluard.
Era una angustia, entonces, que nos llegaba con una explosión atómica que, convertida en sombras fílmicas, se asentaba en el cinematógrafo de barrio habanero donde íbamos. O era un surrealismo con noche de pasmosos arlequines, o con un grito que avisaba: ¡Apollinaire al agua!, pero donde lo único que había era el aislamiento. Un aislamiento donde el automatismo surrealista en que intentábamos zambullirnos acababa convertido en un gesto vacío, en un gesto que sólo lo rodeaba la soledad de una isla donde lo surrealista era visto de reojo por una mirada que, aunque en su mejor expresión, gongorina, alcanzó la calidad de lo Bello con mayúscula, o sea, de lo Bello con un Dios romano, no podía dejar de ser, por su lamentable vinculación con lo ritualista, la manifestación de lo como ensotanado y catedralicio.
Y, ¡qué lástima!, salidos de aquellos cinematógrafos donde estallaba la bomba atómica, los jóvenes, que vivíamos rodeados de agua por todas partes, no pudimos vincularnos, del todo, con las grandes sombras surrealistas, hispanoamericanas, que rondaban por la tierra firme: César Moro, Molina, o Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, o...
En fin, que tuvieron que pasar muchas cosas y, entre ellas, el salir como en estampida de la isla, para poder, después de algunos años, y después de la contracultura, y ya en Nueva York, podernos encontrar con el surrealista, amigo y coetáneo, Juan Sánchez Peláez, conque nos debíamos de habernos encontrado antes, mucho antes. Pero, en fin... Estábamos destinados a encontrarnos, y las Leyes de la Necesidad Cósmica (unas Leyes que pudieron haber sido dictadas por ese Gurdief que estuba leyendo Juan la última vez que lo vi) condujo al poeta Octavio Armand a ponerme en contacto con Juan (y con su compañera Malena, por supuesto), en una noche neoyorquina de la década del 70.
¿Y quién era Juan, poeta venezolano nacido en 1922, en Altagracia de Orituco, estado Guárico, y que murió en Caracas, en noviembre del año pasado? ¿Quién era ese Juan que, con camisa de cuello de tortuga y ojos picassistas, conocí en una noche de Nueva York? Pues bien, mirando por una ventana de este mes de enero, por una ventana que, no se sabe cómo, me pone en contacto directo con el oro viejo --¿alquímico?--, de una luz, esto así, sin más ni más, me enfrenta con el peso de la ausencia de éste, mi amigo el poeta Juan, quien tan bien definirse supo de esta forma: ``Y sé de mis límites/ poseo morada, mi morada es/ la ironía,/ a lechuza viva, no/ embalsamada/ la lechuza que está en el pozo de la/ luna/ a la una muy sola de la/ madrugada''.
O recuerdo una vez, cuando salido de un cuarto que estaba en el alucinante patio de su casa en la Altamira de Caracas, Juan llegó a la terraza donde yo estaba para decirme de sopetón, pero sin estridencia: ''Suenan como animales de oro las palabras'' Y entonces --puedo asegurar que fue así--, me alucinó oír a Juan decir eso, ya que, de una manera que no sabría explicar ahora, yo entendí que lo que estaba diciendo el amigo poeta no era un verso suyo, sino aquello, animales de oro, que él, asomado al fulgor, como si fuera un niño, parecía saber pesar con sus manos.
O Juan, ¿cómo sabría decirlo?, con su sordera, en los lentísimos, lentísimos paseos que hacía, y en los que él, como una figura del Zen a quien le acabaran de haber quitado el bastón que en realidad nunca había tenido. Lentísimos paseos, repito, y sobre todo recuerdo uno, paradigmático, que nos dimos por el Paseo de los Chorros en Caracas, y en donde a mí se me ocurrió decirle a Juan que, en cualquier momento, de brazos con la Emperatriz Carlota, bien se nos podría aparecer ese Ramos Sucre, poeta venezolano tan cercano a nosotros. Se me ocurrió decirle, y el amigo Juan, poeta sin bastón, avanzó unos pasos, como el solía hacer en sus paseos; y retrocedió un paso, como él enseguida volvía a hacer; y me agarró del brazo, como a continuación siempre el solía hacer; y esto para, como siempre, finalizar abriendo los ojos, o tapándose la boca, tal como un genial personaje de película silente que supiera decirlo todo sin tener que utilizar ningún sonido. Pues Juan, a su manera, junto a lo colorinesco de su palabra, fue un personaje de película silente. Aunque eso sí, un personaje silente, que en ciertos momentos, supo cantarnos Júrame, aquella canción, compuesta por María Greber en 1926, y que él tanto quiso (``Estoy seguro --me dijo una vez-- que de haber sido conocida por los viejos surrealistas, hubiera sido una de sus canciones favoritas'').
O Juan, al final, que como nadie supo evocar a ese César Moro, figura con el cual puede identificarse el surrealismo hispanoamericano, y esto con palabras que, también, sirven para despedirlo a él en esta breve reseña:
"César Moro, hermoso y humillado
tocando un arpa en las afueras de Lima
me dijo: entra a mi casa, poeta
pide siempre aire, cielo claro
porque hay que morir algún día, está entendido
hay que nacer, y estás ya muerto
el suelo se quedará aquí, siempre, ancho y mudo
pero morir de la misma familia es haber nacido."
Life fatigue. Walked in New York this weekend, seeing friends and staring at the Hudson from a 16th floor, its changes with the variations in light. Hawks in flight above the ice chunks in the river, trees on the Jersey shore in golden dusk. First time in Queens and the Bronx. I left Sunday afternoon with Old Dirty Bastard, New Order, and Belle & Sebastian on the car speakers for highway hours:
"I fought in a war
I didn't know where it would end
It stretched before me infinitely
I couldn't really think"
Nothing to write. Our suffering is almost always indecipherable. A fiction we dread.
Reading Ted Hughes' The Hawk in the Rain.
Last week I came across this essay in honor of Juan Sánchez Peláez, in the Spanish version of The Miami Herald:
*
El que arrojaba uvas ardientes
Especial/El Nuevo Herald
LORENZO GARCIA VEGA
¿El que arrojaba uvas ardientes en las duras bahías? ¿Quién supo decirlo? Sólo un poeta, por supuesto, sólo mi amigo Juan Sánchez Peláez lo supo. Pero como a mí me resulta doloroso comenzar diciendo que ya él no está, voy a dar un salto que me lleve hacia un cinematógrafo de mi juventud. ¿Cómo es esto?
Algunos poetas, o literatos, o como quiera llamárseles, que irrumpimos en aquel momento de la churumbela hispanoamericana comprendida entre los años 1940 y 1955, veíamos en los cinematógrafos unos patéticos noticieros donde el locutor, con voz ''de circunstancia'', nos señalaba que lo que estábamos viendo: una explosión atómica sobre unas ciudades japonesas, era todo un nuevo Capítulo de la Historia (así mismo, con mayúscula, o con voz de mayúscula, lo decía el locutor) que iba a cambiarlo todo, o a descomponerlo todo. Así que la angustia existencialista estaba a la orden del día. Una angustia existencial que se nos teñía con los buenos fuegos del surrealismo.
Así mismo fue. Entramos bajo una explosión atómica relatada por un locutor, y nos refugiamos, a como pudimos, bajo los últimos tiros del surrealismo. Así que los que éramos jóvenes en aquellos tiempos --unos jóvenes que nos habíamos propuesto refugiarnos bajo el desbarajuste metafórico de la vanguardia--, y vivíamos en el aislamiento de una isla, nos alimentamos a como pudimos con lo que, del mundo exterior, nos llegaba a través de las librerías de La Habana, Y esto, mientras en la tierra firme, o sea, en el continente, un venezolano a quien no conocíamos, Juan Sánchez Peláez, se desplazaba hacia Chile, a recoger el legado de esa surrealista revista Mandrágora, donde, según un crítico: ``Los mandragoristas se abrieron paso a codazos, rompiendo salvajemente con todo; gritos, improperios, insultos al medio sin preocupación por las buenas formas"; y esto para después, en un viaje en velocípedo, según confesó Juan en uno de sus poemas, terminar él en ese París donde conoció a Peret, y donde se asimiló cosas tales como la ``noche profunda y larga de mi edad", señalada por Eluard.
Era una angustia, entonces, que nos llegaba con una explosión atómica que, convertida en sombras fílmicas, se asentaba en el cinematógrafo de barrio habanero donde íbamos. O era un surrealismo con noche de pasmosos arlequines, o con un grito que avisaba: ¡Apollinaire al agua!, pero donde lo único que había era el aislamiento. Un aislamiento donde el automatismo surrealista en que intentábamos zambullirnos acababa convertido en un gesto vacío, en un gesto que sólo lo rodeaba la soledad de una isla donde lo surrealista era visto de reojo por una mirada que, aunque en su mejor expresión, gongorina, alcanzó la calidad de lo Bello con mayúscula, o sea, de lo Bello con un Dios romano, no podía dejar de ser, por su lamentable vinculación con lo ritualista, la manifestación de lo como ensotanado y catedralicio.
Y, ¡qué lástima!, salidos de aquellos cinematógrafos donde estallaba la bomba atómica, los jóvenes, que vivíamos rodeados de agua por todas partes, no pudimos vincularnos, del todo, con las grandes sombras surrealistas, hispanoamericanas, que rondaban por la tierra firme: César Moro, Molina, o Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, o...
En fin, que tuvieron que pasar muchas cosas y, entre ellas, el salir como en estampida de la isla, para poder, después de algunos años, y después de la contracultura, y ya en Nueva York, podernos encontrar con el surrealista, amigo y coetáneo, Juan Sánchez Peláez, conque nos debíamos de habernos encontrado antes, mucho antes. Pero, en fin... Estábamos destinados a encontrarnos, y las Leyes de la Necesidad Cósmica (unas Leyes que pudieron haber sido dictadas por ese Gurdief que estuba leyendo Juan la última vez que lo vi) condujo al poeta Octavio Armand a ponerme en contacto con Juan (y con su compañera Malena, por supuesto), en una noche neoyorquina de la década del 70.
¿Y quién era Juan, poeta venezolano nacido en 1922, en Altagracia de Orituco, estado Guárico, y que murió en Caracas, en noviembre del año pasado? ¿Quién era ese Juan que, con camisa de cuello de tortuga y ojos picassistas, conocí en una noche de Nueva York? Pues bien, mirando por una ventana de este mes de enero, por una ventana que, no se sabe cómo, me pone en contacto directo con el oro viejo --¿alquímico?--, de una luz, esto así, sin más ni más, me enfrenta con el peso de la ausencia de éste, mi amigo el poeta Juan, quien tan bien definirse supo de esta forma: ``Y sé de mis límites/ poseo morada, mi morada es/ la ironía,/ a lechuza viva, no/ embalsamada/ la lechuza que está en el pozo de la/ luna/ a la una muy sola de la/ madrugada''.
O recuerdo una vez, cuando salido de un cuarto que estaba en el alucinante patio de su casa en la Altamira de Caracas, Juan llegó a la terraza donde yo estaba para decirme de sopetón, pero sin estridencia: ''Suenan como animales de oro las palabras'' Y entonces --puedo asegurar que fue así--, me alucinó oír a Juan decir eso, ya que, de una manera que no sabría explicar ahora, yo entendí que lo que estaba diciendo el amigo poeta no era un verso suyo, sino aquello, animales de oro, que él, asomado al fulgor, como si fuera un niño, parecía saber pesar con sus manos.
O Juan, ¿cómo sabría decirlo?, con su sordera, en los lentísimos, lentísimos paseos que hacía, y en los que él, como una figura del Zen a quien le acabaran de haber quitado el bastón que en realidad nunca había tenido. Lentísimos paseos, repito, y sobre todo recuerdo uno, paradigmático, que nos dimos por el Paseo de los Chorros en Caracas, y en donde a mí se me ocurrió decirle a Juan que, en cualquier momento, de brazos con la Emperatriz Carlota, bien se nos podría aparecer ese Ramos Sucre, poeta venezolano tan cercano a nosotros. Se me ocurrió decirle, y el amigo Juan, poeta sin bastón, avanzó unos pasos, como el solía hacer en sus paseos; y retrocedió un paso, como él enseguida volvía a hacer; y me agarró del brazo, como a continuación siempre el solía hacer; y esto para, como siempre, finalizar abriendo los ojos, o tapándose la boca, tal como un genial personaje de película silente que supiera decirlo todo sin tener que utilizar ningún sonido. Pues Juan, a su manera, junto a lo colorinesco de su palabra, fue un personaje de película silente. Aunque eso sí, un personaje silente, que en ciertos momentos, supo cantarnos Júrame, aquella canción, compuesta por María Greber en 1926, y que él tanto quiso (``Estoy seguro --me dijo una vez-- que de haber sido conocida por los viejos surrealistas, hubiera sido una de sus canciones favoritas'').
O Juan, al final, que como nadie supo evocar a ese César Moro, figura con el cual puede identificarse el surrealismo hispanoamericano, y esto con palabras que, también, sirven para despedirlo a él en esta breve reseña:
"César Moro, hermoso y humillado
tocando un arpa en las afueras de Lima
me dijo: entra a mi casa, poeta
pide siempre aire, cielo claro
porque hay que morir algún día, está entendido
hay que nacer, y estás ya muerto
el suelo se quedará aquí, siempre, ancho y mudo
pero morir de la misma familia es haber nacido."
2.08.2004
2.06.2004
Teresa de la Parra
"Blanca Nieves, la tercera de las niñitas por orden de edad y de tamaño, tenía entonces cinco años, el cutis muy trigueño, los ojos claros, el pelo muy negro, las piernas quemadísimas de sol, los brazos más quemados aún, y tengo que confesarlo humildemente, sin merecer en absoluto semejante nombre, Blanca Nieves era yo."
{Teresa de la Parra, Las memorias de Mama Blanca, Colección Archivos, 1988}
"Blanca Nieves, la tercera de las niñitas por orden de edad y de tamaño, tenía entonces cinco años, el cutis muy trigueño, los ojos claros, el pelo muy negro, las piernas quemadísimas de sol, los brazos más quemados aún, y tengo que confesarlo humildemente, sin merecer en absoluto semejante nombre, Blanca Nieves era yo."
{Teresa de la Parra, Las memorias de Mama Blanca, Colección Archivos, 1988}
2.05.2004
Lecturas
Tonight or tomorrow I'll begin reading Teresa de la Parra's Las memorias de Mama Blanca (1929).
*
On the topic of books, I keep returning recently to Cedar Sigo's Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003). Particularly the long poem "O Twist No Inferno," whose sections always seem to have fallen apart, fragmenting away from each other. All while maintaining an impressive strength, the lines built of vision:
"My heart is wrapped in clover
Floating on the pool of the Washington monument
The little stems shiver and accept it
Because the water is there. It is just that easy
And free free, this way to heaven, free
Some of the room is full of smoke.
Why isin't everyone in tears?
Chains, bottles, knives, guns? I am trying
To be like a gem (firing and still and controlled)
I don't know I may consider this a trap"
*
As an air traffic controller might map, the books have their own schedules.
*
In his column in El Nacional earlier this week (Historia viva), Jorge Olavarría discussed Venezuela:
"I myself tried to penetrate the mentality of that man who has such an overwhelming charisma and such captivating words.
The closest I got was diagnosing him as a case of acute intoxication due to scattered and undigested readings, which resulted in a muddled consciousness. A mix of Peruvian militarism, Argentine Peronism, Cuban Marxism, and a resentful nationalism, adding up to a version of tropical fascism, which is very similar to what Umberto Eco describes as fuzzy fascism."
*
Poetry and politics tend to be very difficult to discuss simultaneously. The Clash did it quite well, particulary on Sandinista! (1980). The results of their early involvement with hip hop culture ("Radio Clash," "The Magnificent Seven": "What do we have for entertainment? / Cops kicking gypsies on the pavement") are brilliant. This album has always made complete sense to my ear: "Please remember Victor Jara, in the Santiago stadium / Es verdad, those Washington bullets again."
It has to be read within its particular time period, anyway. Even though I was a child at the time, I do remember the promise that Sandinismo offered in 1979 or 1980. Maybe I've imagined this childhood awareness in these later years. Most likely, I'm subconsciously remembering words in support of the Sandinistas from my grandfather or father.
Ernesto Cardenal's recent comments about that era in his La revolución perdida should dispel any dangerous nostalgia we might still carry.
Tonight or tomorrow I'll begin reading Teresa de la Parra's Las memorias de Mama Blanca (1929).
*
On the topic of books, I keep returning recently to Cedar Sigo's Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003). Particularly the long poem "O Twist No Inferno," whose sections always seem to have fallen apart, fragmenting away from each other. All while maintaining an impressive strength, the lines built of vision:
"My heart is wrapped in clover
Floating on the pool of the Washington monument
The little stems shiver and accept it
Because the water is there. It is just that easy
And free free, this way to heaven, free
Some of the room is full of smoke.
Why isin't everyone in tears?
Chains, bottles, knives, guns? I am trying
To be like a gem (firing and still and controlled)
I don't know I may consider this a trap"
*
As an air traffic controller might map, the books have their own schedules.
*
In his column in El Nacional earlier this week (Historia viva), Jorge Olavarría discussed Venezuela:
"I myself tried to penetrate the mentality of that man who has such an overwhelming charisma and such captivating words.
The closest I got was diagnosing him as a case of acute intoxication due to scattered and undigested readings, which resulted in a muddled consciousness. A mix of Peruvian militarism, Argentine Peronism, Cuban Marxism, and a resentful nationalism, adding up to a version of tropical fascism, which is very similar to what Umberto Eco describes as fuzzy fascism."
*
Poetry and politics tend to be very difficult to discuss simultaneously. The Clash did it quite well, particulary on Sandinista! (1980). The results of their early involvement with hip hop culture ("Radio Clash," "The Magnificent Seven": "What do we have for entertainment? / Cops kicking gypsies on the pavement") are brilliant. This album has always made complete sense to my ear: "Please remember Victor Jara, in the Santiago stadium / Es verdad, those Washington bullets again."
It has to be read within its particular time period, anyway. Even though I was a child at the time, I do remember the promise that Sandinismo offered in 1979 or 1980. Maybe I've imagined this childhood awareness in these later years. Most likely, I'm subconsciously remembering words in support of the Sandinistas from my grandfather or father.
Ernesto Cardenal's recent comments about that era in his La revolución perdida should dispel any dangerous nostalgia we might still carry.
2.04.2004
Roque Dalton
As I'm finishing Los detectives salvajes, I'm reminded of another Latin American novel that is likewise a postmodern masterpiece: Roque Dalton's posthumous, Pobrecito poeta que era yo (San Salvador, El Salvador: UCA Editores, 1994). I've read that when Roberto Bolaño left Chile in the early 1970s, after escaping from Pinochet's jails, he spent time in El Salvador. While he was there, he befriended Roque Dalton. Dalton was assassinated soon afterwards, in 1975, by his own comrades in the FMLN, who mistakenly suspected that he was working as a spy against them.
The two novels are concerned with defining the role of the poet in the Americas today. What I love about these novels is their ability to evoke the political and aesthetic struggles that poetry requires of its "makers." While both texts are Latin American novels of the "Left," it would be naive to think of them as "revolutionary" books. If anything, Bolaño and Dalton expect the reader to understand that no revolutionary project is pure. The experimental forms employed in their novels reflect an unwillingness to write "revolutionary" fiction. There are no (false) promises for emancipation or power for "the masses" in these books.
What you will find, however, is brilliant and visionary prose.
*
"11 p.m. : Amo escuchar por la radio programas que, supongo, son noticiarios en idiomas orientales. Algunos de ellos me causan verdadero placer corporal. También ciertos ruidillos (en El Salvador decimos simplemente "estática") que al correr la aguja por el dial parecen abrirnos calles anchas, corrientes de peligrosa succión, chorros hacia el infinito."
{Roque Dalton, Pobrecito poeta que era yo}
The two novels are concerned with defining the role of the poet in the Americas today. What I love about these novels is their ability to evoke the political and aesthetic struggles that poetry requires of its "makers." While both texts are Latin American novels of the "Left," it would be naive to think of them as "revolutionary" books. If anything, Bolaño and Dalton expect the reader to understand that no revolutionary project is pure. The experimental forms employed in their novels reflect an unwillingness to write "revolutionary" fiction. There are no (false) promises for emancipation or power for "the masses" in these books.
What you will find, however, is brilliant and visionary prose.
*
"11 p.m. : Amo escuchar por la radio programas que, supongo, son noticiarios en idiomas orientales. Algunos de ellos me causan verdadero placer corporal. También ciertos ruidillos (en El Salvador decimos simplemente "estática") que al correr la aguja por el dial parecen abrirnos calles anchas, corrientes de peligrosa succión, chorros hacia el infinito."
{Roque Dalton, Pobrecito poeta que era yo}
2.03.2004
Octavio Paz vs. Los real visceralistas
Towards the end of Los detectives salvajes, there's an episode narrated by Octavio Paz's secretary, which recalls a meeting between "don Octavio" and Ulises Lima, one of the leaders of real visceralismo. While walking in a park in Mexico City, Paz recognizes the dishevelled man he encounters as one of the young poets who had wanted to kidnap him in the 1970s (the episode takes place in the early 1990s). There's a beautiful moment in this episode when Lima and "don Octavio" sit on a bench to talk while the secretary watches nervously from a distance, unsure of the vagabond poet's intentions. The moment seems to hint at a truce of sorts between the Nobel Laureate and his sworn avant-garde enemy, years after their aesthetic divergences make much of a difference. For a few minutes they are simply two anonymous poets in a dilapidated city park, talking.
*
"Creo que hasta me mareé. Los ojos de don Octavio y la voz del desconocido y la mañana y el Parque Hundido, un lugar tan vulgar, ¿verdad?, tan deteriorado, me hirieron, no sé de qué manera, en lo más hondo. Así que los dejé que conversaran tranquilos y me alejé unos cuantos metros, hasta el banco más próximo, con la excusa de que debía estudiar la agenda del día, y de paso me llevé la lista que había hecho con los nombres de las ultimas generaciones de poetas mexicanos y la repasé del primero hasta el último, no estaba en ninguna parte Ulises Lima, puedo asegurarlo. ¿Cuánto rato conversaron? No mucho. Desde donde yo estaba se adivinaba, eso sí, que fue una conversacion distendida, serena, tolerante. Después el poeta Ulises Lima se levantó, le estrechó la mano a don Octavio y se marchó. Lo vi alejarse en dirección a una de las salidas del parque."
*
"Creo que hasta me mareé. Los ojos de don Octavio y la voz del desconocido y la mañana y el Parque Hundido, un lugar tan vulgar, ¿verdad?, tan deteriorado, me hirieron, no sé de qué manera, en lo más hondo. Así que los dejé que conversaran tranquilos y me alejé unos cuantos metros, hasta el banco más próximo, con la excusa de que debía estudiar la agenda del día, y de paso me llevé la lista que había hecho con los nombres de las ultimas generaciones de poetas mexicanos y la repasé del primero hasta el último, no estaba en ninguna parte Ulises Lima, puedo asegurarlo. ¿Cuánto rato conversaron? No mucho. Desde donde yo estaba se adivinaba, eso sí, que fue una conversacion distendida, serena, tolerante. Después el poeta Ulises Lima se levantó, le estrechó la mano a don Octavio y se marchó. Lo vi alejarse en dirección a una de las salidas del parque."
2.02.2004
Insolaciones en Miami Beach / Jacqueline Goldberg
Poet and critic Harry Almela discusses Jacqueline Goldberg's collection Insolaciones en Miami Beach (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Fundarte, 1995) in the essay "Un alegato a favor del desencanto":
"Insolaciones en Miami Beach marks a point of departure in her work. It is perhaps one of the most important collections of Venezuelan poetry of that decade, despite the overwhelming silence that accompanied its publication. Firstly, and from the point of view of the development of Goldberg's poetics, this book represents a deepening of a secular vision of family habits and of the banalization of bourgeois themes. Secondly, within this collection one can find, in all of its crudity, the routines and tastes of a middle class that was very prominent during the last two decades. This is a middle class fascinated by its ascent and by the access to consumer goods that mark and determine its members. These goods are usually characterized by poor taste and occasionally border on kitsch. At times, these poems remind us of Robert Altman's film, Three Women. In this book, there's also an amplification of Goldberg's poetic vocabulary which, from this point on, employs words that are often avoided by poets, whether because of their sound or because of what they signify. The use of everyday language that characterizes this generation of poets depends on this amplification of common words [...]."
The collection is made up of 24 untitled poems, from which I have selected the following eight for translation. Goldberg's book opens with an epigraph by Sam Shepard: "La gente de aquí / se ha convertido / en la gente / que finge ser."
1. "el balcón es un pedazo de Collins Avenue"
2. "las damas rubias"
3. "Mr. Jones cuida entradas y salidas"
4. "Isaac Baschevitz Singer"
5. "Benjamín sopló las siete velas"
6. "el tío Morris murió en Manhattan"
7. "mi abuela decía haber estado"
8. "calentar pizza a medianoche en microhondas"
*
Miami Beach Sunstrokes (selections)
(1)
the balcony is a chunk of Collins Avenue
a view
reduced to extremes
no one notices
during lunch
we watch its blend of bathing suits
we've got towels
tuna sandwiches
Diet Coke
we pause at the dry shot
of an airplane over the bay
(2)
the blonde ladies
shop at Bay Harbor
they choose silk scarves
they'll wear for less than two hours
the shoes are made from Italian leather
the hats brought over from dear England
the Victoria's Secret babydolls
aqua green fuscia black
cost as much
as popcorn tons
(3)
Mr. Jones guards entrances and exits
no other name will do
--for an English course protagonist
worthy of that role--
Mr. Jones is a guachman
ripit egein
Mr. Jones
and his shifts as a doorman
listens bearer of old corpses
maker of strokes and deals
artificial respirator
Mr. Jones-glassdoor
single entrance
(4)
Isaac Baschevitz Singer
spent winters
in the Surfside Tower
we'd see him at his window
two floors down
in checkered shorts and a T-shirt
a nurse
pushed his walker
on certain stretches of the beach
at the time, I couldn't have guessed
that the Nobel laureate chewed gum
and no longer wrote
(5)
Benjamín blew out the seven candles
on a shrivelled apple pie
he denied the necessity of gifts
he serenely accepted the meager party
but he still ended up crying
now I think about the dread
of a McDonald's birthday
of an unbearable and sloppy hug
from grandma
two aunts
three cousins
and five waiters
(6)
uncle Morris died in Manhattan
near the river and the bridges
he chose the casket himself
planned out his final migration
he settled everything
so we could sustain
our weeping as long as needed
weep for him
only a while
because he also insured
future family disputes
his only legacy left to the river and the bridges
hospital window vision
so near the river and the bridges
(7)
my grandmother said she had been
to the Moulin Rouge
and to the Copacabana
also to the Teatro Baralt
when Gardel unveiled
El día que me quieras
she recalled Miami's beaches
as languid pools
at the shores of a shore
without window grown hotels
without so many entrenched old people
she saw herself
inventing scenes
drinking beer
in honor of no one else
(8)
heating up pizza in a microwave at midnight
is a bad omen
boiling water in a bronze baby bottle
weighs the bitter moments
spying on the fat neighbor between shades
warms the ghosts
writing just because
for pure lies
churns the guts
draws smoke
kills the good plague
Poet and critic Harry Almela discusses Jacqueline Goldberg's collection Insolaciones en Miami Beach (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Fundarte, 1995) in the essay "Un alegato a favor del desencanto":
"Insolaciones en Miami Beach marks a point of departure in her work. It is perhaps one of the most important collections of Venezuelan poetry of that decade, despite the overwhelming silence that accompanied its publication. Firstly, and from the point of view of the development of Goldberg's poetics, this book represents a deepening of a secular vision of family habits and of the banalization of bourgeois themes. Secondly, within this collection one can find, in all of its crudity, the routines and tastes of a middle class that was very prominent during the last two decades. This is a middle class fascinated by its ascent and by the access to consumer goods that mark and determine its members. These goods are usually characterized by poor taste and occasionally border on kitsch. At times, these poems remind us of Robert Altman's film, Three Women. In this book, there's also an amplification of Goldberg's poetic vocabulary which, from this point on, employs words that are often avoided by poets, whether because of their sound or because of what they signify. The use of everyday language that characterizes this generation of poets depends on this amplification of common words [...]."
The collection is made up of 24 untitled poems, from which I have selected the following eight for translation. Goldberg's book opens with an epigraph by Sam Shepard: "La gente de aquí / se ha convertido / en la gente / que finge ser."
1. "el balcón es un pedazo de Collins Avenue"
2. "las damas rubias"
3. "Mr. Jones cuida entradas y salidas"
4. "Isaac Baschevitz Singer"
5. "Benjamín sopló las siete velas"
6. "el tío Morris murió en Manhattan"
7. "mi abuela decía haber estado"
8. "calentar pizza a medianoche en microhondas"
*
Miami Beach Sunstrokes (selections)
(1)
the balcony is a chunk of Collins Avenue
a view
reduced to extremes
no one notices
during lunch
we watch its blend of bathing suits
we've got towels
tuna sandwiches
Diet Coke
we pause at the dry shot
of an airplane over the bay
(2)
the blonde ladies
shop at Bay Harbor
they choose silk scarves
they'll wear for less than two hours
the shoes are made from Italian leather
the hats brought over from dear England
the Victoria's Secret babydolls
aqua green fuscia black
cost as much
as popcorn tons
(3)
Mr. Jones guards entrances and exits
no other name will do
--for an English course protagonist
worthy of that role--
Mr. Jones is a guachman
ripit egein
Mr. Jones
and his shifts as a doorman
listens bearer of old corpses
maker of strokes and deals
artificial respirator
Mr. Jones-glassdoor
single entrance
(4)
Isaac Baschevitz Singer
spent winters
in the Surfside Tower
we'd see him at his window
two floors down
in checkered shorts and a T-shirt
a nurse
pushed his walker
on certain stretches of the beach
at the time, I couldn't have guessed
that the Nobel laureate chewed gum
and no longer wrote
(5)
Benjamín blew out the seven candles
on a shrivelled apple pie
he denied the necessity of gifts
he serenely accepted the meager party
but he still ended up crying
now I think about the dread
of a McDonald's birthday
of an unbearable and sloppy hug
from grandma
two aunts
three cousins
and five waiters
(6)
uncle Morris died in Manhattan
near the river and the bridges
he chose the casket himself
planned out his final migration
he settled everything
so we could sustain
our weeping as long as needed
weep for him
only a while
because he also insured
future family disputes
his only legacy left to the river and the bridges
hospital window vision
so near the river and the bridges
(7)
my grandmother said she had been
to the Moulin Rouge
and to the Copacabana
also to the Teatro Baralt
when Gardel unveiled
El día que me quieras
she recalled Miami's beaches
as languid pools
at the shores of a shore
without window grown hotels
without so many entrenched old people
she saw herself
inventing scenes
drinking beer
in honor of no one else
(8)
heating up pizza in a microwave at midnight
is a bad omen
boiling water in a bronze baby bottle
weighs the bitter moments
spying on the fat neighbor between shades
warms the ghosts
writing just because
for pure lies
churns the guts
draws smoke
kills the good plague
2.01.2004
"El ave la avenida vuela por colonias,
Barrios tristes, solos y enojados que están
Parece un mito de alegrías de años atrás
Inundaba a esta pobre ciudad
Cuerpo a cuerpo por ríos de motores
Veo los brotes
De la enfermedad que
Obliga atesorar
Millones de faringes exhalando desazón
Que da el vivir sin una razón
A gran altura como aeroplano
Leo los planos con los que se construyó a esta nación
La tierra donde intentamos ir de pie
Es pregunta, si algún día nuestra fue
Ave satélite empieza a dilucidar
Algo de la historia de la humanidad
Revoluciones religiones
Con buenas intenciones
Han terminado por tiranizar
La perspectiva entre más arriba
No es cordial
¿es acaso un gran estado total?
Con dos razas viviendo en paz
La más pequeña oprimiéndonos a los demás
El ave no tiene un plan
Para escapar
Abertura en la obertura
El caos final
Por eso hoy ha decidido
Volar, amar a esta
Ansiedad que le hace tanto bien y tanto mal"
{Cafe Tacuba, Reves/Yosoy, 1999}
Barrios tristes, solos y enojados que están
Parece un mito de alegrías de años atrás
Inundaba a esta pobre ciudad
Cuerpo a cuerpo por ríos de motores
Veo los brotes
De la enfermedad que
Obliga atesorar
Millones de faringes exhalando desazón
Que da el vivir sin una razón
A gran altura como aeroplano
Leo los planos con los que se construyó a esta nación
La tierra donde intentamos ir de pie
Es pregunta, si algún día nuestra fue
Ave satélite empieza a dilucidar
Algo de la historia de la humanidad
Revoluciones religiones
Con buenas intenciones
Han terminado por tiranizar
La perspectiva entre más arriba
No es cordial
¿es acaso un gran estado total?
Con dos razas viviendo en paz
La más pequeña oprimiéndonos a los demás
El ave no tiene un plan
Para escapar
Abertura en la obertura
El caos final
Por eso hoy ha decidido
Volar, amar a esta
Ansiedad que le hace tanto bien y tanto mal"
{Cafe Tacuba, Reves/Yosoy, 1999}
If I were a cigar factory lectór, I would read aloud from Los detectives salvajes.
"Un día le pregunté en donde había estado. Me dijo que recorrió un río que une a México con Centroamérica. Que yo sepa, ese río no existe. Me dijo, sin embargo, que habia recorrido ese río y que ahora podía decir que conocía todos sus meandros y afluentes. Un río de árboles o un río de arena o un río de árboles que a trechos se convertía en un río de arena. Un flujo constante de gente sin trabajo, de pobres y muertos de hambre, de droga y de dolor. Un río de nubes en el que había navegado durante doce meses y en cuyo curso encontró innumerables islas y poblaciones, aunque no todas las islas estaban pobladas, y en donde a veces creyó que se quedaría a vivir para siempre o se moriría."
(Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes, 1998)
(Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes, 1998)
¶
What are the signs we come across as warnings or blessings? It could be birds sighted among trees in Clearwater, Florida, a band of wild parrots crossing above the street at sunset. Or broken beer bottles near my car in the snow of Allston. Symbols that recur, in variations across the maps of decades or cities.
A "political" focus acquires too many unresolvable tensions. Granted, they already exist and thrive regardless of our despair. And to write is to repair, to build a single object, or series of objects. It's also a fictional house, built from years of sleep and silence. Maybe it's a polemical medium, or the ghost from the machine, a discourse on colonialism, a notebook of a return to the native land.
What have you learned from vision's requirements? That nothingness exists y te puedes encontrar con ella en cualquier día. One sign of its grace is driving in the back of a jeep up Monte Avila on a Sunday morning towards Galipan, stopping at a cross roads next to a stone chapel shrine with flowers and candles lit. The empty streets of La Candelaria earlier that morning as we drove to catch the ride up the mountain. A green silence when you stand in Galipan looking down the mountain into the Caribbean sea from impossible angles.
What are the signs we come across as warnings or blessings? It could be birds sighted among trees in Clearwater, Florida, a band of wild parrots crossing above the street at sunset. Or broken beer bottles near my car in the snow of Allston. Symbols that recur, in variations across the maps of decades or cities.
A "political" focus acquires too many unresolvable tensions. Granted, they already exist and thrive regardless of our despair. And to write is to repair, to build a single object, or series of objects. It's also a fictional house, built from years of sleep and silence. Maybe it's a polemical medium, or the ghost from the machine, a discourse on colonialism, a notebook of a return to the native land.
What have you learned from vision's requirements? That nothingness exists y te puedes encontrar con ella en cualquier día. One sign of its grace is driving in the back of a jeep up Monte Avila on a Sunday morning towards Galipan, stopping at a cross roads next to a stone chapel shrine with flowers and candles lit. The empty streets of La Candelaria earlier that morning as we drove to catch the ride up the mountain. A green silence when you stand in Galipan looking down the mountain into the Caribbean sea from impossible angles.
1.31.2004
Computer Evening
I am sitting in the evening's hallways, alone across the universe, late. Don't throw away certain newspaper articles, you might use them later on the blog or in the notebook. A coffee with milk is part of the routine, as is the chatter in my eyes and ears. It could just as well be a computerless evening.
Just finished reading a great essay by Nicolás Cabral, called "Razones de un apátrida":
"13. Después de todo, me pregunto si este desarraigo esencial, esa carencia de raíces, no será, en el fondo, una manera perversa de ser cordobés, de ser argentino."
The same could go for being a venezolano at this moment in "history."
*
Also, I've been reading fantastic poems by Mark in his chapbook 29 Cheeseburgers (Pressed Wafer, 2004):
"Whenever anyone looks at the painting,
their eyes mist
with tears she saw a man
in a black hat a chapeau walk
out of the painting one night
& into the other wall."
There's "magic" and brilliant lines & phrases throughout these poems.
*
What is written first by the sun through the afternoon shades, a silouhette of winter branches in our eyeglasses. The "we" is a fiction and we use it for that exact reason. To amplify and shroud the city, day and night. I was disappointed that Squeeze didn't reunite, since their Singles remains one of the best cassettes I've ever owned.
The Jacqueline Goldberg translations will be up on Monday sometime. As it happens, she was one of the many writers to add her name to the open letter to the Cuban Minister of Culture. Her work has never been explicitly "political." But that is a difficult word for poets to use sometimes. Since the political is arguably present in all of our daily actions and thoughts. Whether we choose to ignore this fact or to face it in whatever way we can. It surely doesn't mean writing "political poems." Very few poets can do that successfully. Even a poet as intelligent as Auden couldn't quite write a political poem. Sometimes however, "political" posts or statements are necessary. I would feel like a coward and a fool if I didn't say something about political events in Venezuela.
The question arises of course, as to how many political situations we choose to address. For instance, what should be said about this reckless empire emerging under W's foolish guidance? Or, on a more local level, what can one say about the racist traditions and habits of a city such as Boston?
The poem can be an escape, at times. I think of it as an avenue, a method for facilitating vision through language and the image. I don't know much most times. My own method is intuitive and perilous. Particularly, because so much is left unsaid. Whether the silence is chosen or imposed.
*
I look forward to reading Los detectives salvajes tonight and/or tomorrow. Some novels are so brilliant they seem to inhabit our lives while we read them. Bolaño's multiple narrators emphasize the diasporic realities of Latin America at this moment. How many of us have left or will leave our countries? To return sporadically or never. Creating a wound that only grows with time, never healing.
What is that process between being a latinoamericano and being a Latino here in the U.S. Whether we are born here or there, the fact of marginalization is going to be a daily repetition. Of course, Latinos "come in all colors," yes. But my own experience here in the U.S. (which is also "my" country) has been a continuous education in the existence of white supremacy as a system with firm roots. Obviously, this doesn't mean all "white" Americans are racist. Just that, as a nation, the United States has not rid itself of its fundamental rejection of blackness and brownness.
Any doubts about this should be addressed by watching Chris Eyre's second film, the magnificent Skins (2002). The question remains then: what about race? Du Bois was correct when he wrote, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): "...the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." The problem continues unabated.
And what about poetry? She's very beautiful at times. At others, useless.
I am sitting in the evening's hallways, alone across the universe, late. Don't throw away certain newspaper articles, you might use them later on the blog or in the notebook. A coffee with milk is part of the routine, as is the chatter in my eyes and ears. It could just as well be a computerless evening.
Just finished reading a great essay by Nicolás Cabral, called "Razones de un apátrida":
"13. Después de todo, me pregunto si este desarraigo esencial, esa carencia de raíces, no será, en el fondo, una manera perversa de ser cordobés, de ser argentino."
The same could go for being a venezolano at this moment in "history."
*
Also, I've been reading fantastic poems by Mark in his chapbook 29 Cheeseburgers (Pressed Wafer, 2004):
"Whenever anyone looks at the painting,
their eyes mist
with tears she saw a man
in a black hat a chapeau walk
out of the painting one night
& into the other wall."
There's "magic" and brilliant lines & phrases throughout these poems.
*
What is written first by the sun through the afternoon shades, a silouhette of winter branches in our eyeglasses. The "we" is a fiction and we use it for that exact reason. To amplify and shroud the city, day and night. I was disappointed that Squeeze didn't reunite, since their Singles remains one of the best cassettes I've ever owned.
The Jacqueline Goldberg translations will be up on Monday sometime. As it happens, she was one of the many writers to add her name to the open letter to the Cuban Minister of Culture. Her work has never been explicitly "political." But that is a difficult word for poets to use sometimes. Since the political is arguably present in all of our daily actions and thoughts. Whether we choose to ignore this fact or to face it in whatever way we can. It surely doesn't mean writing "political poems." Very few poets can do that successfully. Even a poet as intelligent as Auden couldn't quite write a political poem. Sometimes however, "political" posts or statements are necessary. I would feel like a coward and a fool if I didn't say something about political events in Venezuela.
The question arises of course, as to how many political situations we choose to address. For instance, what should be said about this reckless empire emerging under W's foolish guidance? Or, on a more local level, what can one say about the racist traditions and habits of a city such as Boston?
The poem can be an escape, at times. I think of it as an avenue, a method for facilitating vision through language and the image. I don't know much most times. My own method is intuitive and perilous. Particularly, because so much is left unsaid. Whether the silence is chosen or imposed.
*
I look forward to reading Los detectives salvajes tonight and/or tomorrow. Some novels are so brilliant they seem to inhabit our lives while we read them. Bolaño's multiple narrators emphasize the diasporic realities of Latin America at this moment. How many of us have left or will leave our countries? To return sporadically or never. Creating a wound that only grows with time, never healing.
What is that process between being a latinoamericano and being a Latino here in the U.S. Whether we are born here or there, the fact of marginalization is going to be a daily repetition. Of course, Latinos "come in all colors," yes. But my own experience here in the U.S. (which is also "my" country) has been a continuous education in the existence of white supremacy as a system with firm roots. Obviously, this doesn't mean all "white" Americans are racist. Just that, as a nation, the United States has not rid itself of its fundamental rejection of blackness and brownness.
Any doubts about this should be addressed by watching Chris Eyre's second film, the magnificent Skins (2002). The question remains then: what about race? Du Bois was correct when he wrote, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): "...the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." The problem continues unabated.
And what about poetry? She's very beautiful at times. At others, useless.
1.28.2004
"Entre dos vacíos
Larga llanura presentida
entre los párpados del entresueño
desemboca a través de barrotes en la ciudad desmantelada
Nuestras huellas sólo piden borrarse
¿Qué puerta nos sorprende enmarcada en el aire
con sus goznes que la lluvia sujeta
su aldaba donde leemos el silencio?
A lo lejos
ponemos un pétalo sobre un cráter
una gota de rocío enfrenta la tormenta
Y esta ola rompiéndose entre dos vacíos
descubre risas más allá de los rostros
El ala de otro despertar
espejea en las manos que lavan la copa
Un muro me pide trazar con nuestra sangre
en su derrumbe una palabra
salvación"
{Alfredo Silva Estrada, Al través, Angria Ediciones, 2000}
Larga llanura presentida
entre los párpados del entresueño
desemboca a través de barrotes en la ciudad desmantelada
Nuestras huellas sólo piden borrarse
¿Qué puerta nos sorprende enmarcada en el aire
con sus goznes que la lluvia sujeta
su aldaba donde leemos el silencio?
A lo lejos
ponemos un pétalo sobre un cráter
una gota de rocío enfrenta la tormenta
Y esta ola rompiéndose entre dos vacíos
descubre risas más allá de los rostros
El ala de otro despertar
espejea en las manos que lavan la copa
Un muro me pide trazar con nuestra sangre
en su derrumbe una palabra
salvación"
{Alfredo Silva Estrada, Al través, Angria Ediciones, 2000}
The Latino Factory
The semi-anonymity of the DJ, or maybe the librarian, is what I often admire. Lead us to the exact texts, those we might otherwise never find. The secret books.
Write with the sentence crumbling once it's posted. Work with the machine to "produce" the words, this factory living. Claudia has theorized the notion of the "Latino factory," an extension of Andy Warhol's warehouse aesthetics. How much of our lives do we lose to career repetition? How can we use that forced repetition for our own poems? The Latino factory is Jean-Michel Basquiat in his various studios, producing a huge body of work before his early (although expected) death. The Latino factory is writing itself to prove its visibility. No matter how ridiculous the situation (And they do get ridiculous. See, for instance, the episode in the paint factory in Ellison's The Invisible Man.), the Latino factory keeps producing. Perpetual movement is what aligns the Latino factory. The factory is always minimum-wage and overworked.
In an interview, the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris recounts the time he worked in a factory when he first moved to England in 1959. If you can imagine his future jungle-dense epic prose poems working long hours at a grim London factory during the middle of winter, that too is the Latino factory.
The semi-anonymity of the DJ, or maybe the librarian, is what I often admire. Lead us to the exact texts, those we might otherwise never find. The secret books.
Write with the sentence crumbling once it's posted. Work with the machine to "produce" the words, this factory living. Claudia has theorized the notion of the "Latino factory," an extension of Andy Warhol's warehouse aesthetics. How much of our lives do we lose to career repetition? How can we use that forced repetition for our own poems? The Latino factory is Jean-Michel Basquiat in his various studios, producing a huge body of work before his early (although expected) death. The Latino factory is writing itself to prove its visibility. No matter how ridiculous the situation (And they do get ridiculous. See, for instance, the episode in the paint factory in Ellison's The Invisible Man.), the Latino factory keeps producing. Perpetual movement is what aligns the Latino factory. The factory is always minimum-wage and overworked.
In an interview, the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris recounts the time he worked in a factory when he first moved to England in 1959. If you can imagine his future jungle-dense epic prose poems working long hours at a grim London factory during the middle of winter, that too is the Latino factory.
Peace to Pedro Pietri
"Extinction is not on our agenda," he said. "There is no assimilation for us. It is possible to be on two islands at the same time. That is why we are here."
{Pedro Pietri, quoted by David Gonzalez, "When Life Is Art, Dying is Simply Not an Option," The New York Times, 27 January 2004}
*
"Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
will right now be doing their own thing
where beautiful people sing
and dance and work together
where the wind is a stranger
to miserable weather conditions
where you do not need a dictionary
to communicate with your people
Aquí Se Habla Español all the time
Aquí you salute your flag first
Aquí there are no dial soap commericals
Aquí everybody smells good
Aquí tv dinners do not have a future
Aquí the men and women admire desire
and never get tired of each other
Aquí Que Pasó Power is what's happening
Aquí to be called negrito
means to be called LOVE"
{Pedro Pietri, "Puerto Rican Obituary," 1973}
"Extinction is not on our agenda," he said. "There is no assimilation for us. It is possible to be on two islands at the same time. That is why we are here."
{Pedro Pietri, quoted by David Gonzalez, "When Life Is Art, Dying is Simply Not an Option," The New York Times, 27 January 2004}
*
"Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
will right now be doing their own thing
where beautiful people sing
and dance and work together
where the wind is a stranger
to miserable weather conditions
where you do not need a dictionary
to communicate with your people
Aquí Se Habla Español all the time
Aquí you salute your flag first
Aquí there are no dial soap commericals
Aquí everybody smells good
Aquí tv dinners do not have a future
Aquí the men and women admire desire
and never get tired of each other
Aquí Que Pasó Power is what's happening
Aquí to be called negrito
means to be called LOVE"
{Pedro Pietri, "Puerto Rican Obituary," 1973}
1.27.2004
"Durante sus últimos meses de/en vida, el para siempre rayo de la gran poesía venezolana, Juan Sánchez Peláez, nos preguntaba sobre cómo veíamos el país, esa Venezuela que aún conserva la costumbre de poner a vivir en la ciudad de la indiferencia a sus altos espíritus, y sin esperar a que respondiéramos, decía casi con la forma del susurro: “me angustia y temo que, ante la ausencia de una estructura moral sólida, no podamos salir urgentemente de esta barbarie…” "
{Alexis Romero, "La estructura moral de la Coordinadora Democrática," El Meollo}
{Alexis Romero, "La estructura moral de la Coordinadora Democrática," El Meollo}
"Poetry and Revolution"
"Poetry is certainly "counterrevolutionary" in the sense that it expresses compassion for all human beings, regardless of class or race.
Poetry may be taken as the type for all art, and to censor it or any other art is like censoring those functions of the body which purify the blood or give us our sense of balance. Revolution is to be accomplished by an act of will on the part of some, a paralysis of it overtaking others, but it cannot be assisted by censoring the truths of artists. Artists always have been and always will be individualists."
{Stephen Spender, "Poetry and Revolution," The 30s and After: Poetry, Politics, People 1930s-1970s, 1978}
"Poetry is certainly "counterrevolutionary" in the sense that it expresses compassion for all human beings, regardless of class or race.
Poetry may be taken as the type for all art, and to censor it or any other art is like censoring those functions of the body which purify the blood or give us our sense of balance. Revolution is to be accomplished by an act of will on the part of some, a paralysis of it overtaking others, but it cannot be assisted by censoring the truths of artists. Artists always have been and always will be individualists."
{Stephen Spender, "Poetry and Revolution," The 30s and After: Poetry, Politics, People 1930s-1970s, 1978}
" a shade"
"In Benjamin, truth seems to stand in the way of truth, or more exactly, truth and its transmission get in each other's way. He explicitly ascribes that dilemma to Kafka, but he could have pointed to Klee's forests of signs pretending to be correspondences. Truth is always too deadly, and transmission deceptively accomodating. Benjamin, as is well known, would have liked to circumvent this dilemma: he dreamed of writing a book made up solely of quotations, as if there were still, within speech, pristine fragments, moments of impersonal directness. No leakage of attention, no distraction, nothing but concentration absorbing the shock of words. The sounds of proper names, he suggests, which we try to make meaningful through etymology, are residues of an original God-given language.
But in a postprophetic age, proclamation and revelation are dangerous simulacra. In one way or another, Benjamin refuses to confine the identity of the literary work to a message or reader-directed intention, one that could reach its destination. A counterpropagandistic reticence always intervenes--a reticence that is not particularly cryptic but rather aesthetic, a shade or veil (Hülle; Verhülltes) which still allows us to recognize heart or body in hiding, but asks us to forgo imagining that from which we are excluded."
{Geoffrey Hartman, "Walter Benjamin in Hope," 1997, A Critic's Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958-1998}
"In Benjamin, truth seems to stand in the way of truth, or more exactly, truth and its transmission get in each other's way. He explicitly ascribes that dilemma to Kafka, but he could have pointed to Klee's forests of signs pretending to be correspondences. Truth is always too deadly, and transmission deceptively accomodating. Benjamin, as is well known, would have liked to circumvent this dilemma: he dreamed of writing a book made up solely of quotations, as if there were still, within speech, pristine fragments, moments of impersonal directness. No leakage of attention, no distraction, nothing but concentration absorbing the shock of words. The sounds of proper names, he suggests, which we try to make meaningful through etymology, are residues of an original God-given language.
But in a postprophetic age, proclamation and revelation are dangerous simulacra. In one way or another, Benjamin refuses to confine the identity of the literary work to a message or reader-directed intention, one that could reach its destination. A counterpropagandistic reticence always intervenes--a reticence that is not particularly cryptic but rather aesthetic, a shade or veil (Hülle; Verhülltes) which still allows us to recognize heart or body in hiding, but asks us to forgo imagining that from which we are excluded."
{Geoffrey Hartman, "Walter Benjamin in Hope," 1997, A Critic's Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958-1998}
1.25.2004
Venezuelan American
I am thinking of doubleness, and of migration. Considering, along the U.S. Latino spectrum, the relatively recent wave of Venezuelans arriving here. In Florida nowdays, the city of Westwood is often referred to as Westezuela. From Miami to Tampa, the past decade has seen the population of Venezuelans rise significantly in Florida. My siblings and I love this, since twenty years ago we were definitely the only Venezuelans at our school.
Because I didn't return to Caracas until 1990, I often felt in the 1980s that I was "losing" Venezuela the longer I lived in Florida and Massachusetts. A few years ago, I heard the phrase "balseros del aire" in reference to the many Venezuelans flying permanently to the US or elsewhere. My sister and brother and I must have been the pioneer balseros del aire, then. Due to complicated family circumstances, we left by avioneta from the Aeropuerto La Carlota to Jamaica, where we boarded a commercial flight to Miami, that magnificent empire city, capital of Latin America. When I wrote a poem several years ago about our arrival that day, I mocked the city: "O Miami, take three more indios / into your glittering arms, etc."
I'm asking myself a relatively minor question tonight. What is a Venezuelan American?
Later this week I'll be posting translations into English of several poems by Jacqueline Goldberg, from her collection Insolaciones en Miami Beach (Fondo Editorial Fundarte, 1995). As I've been rereading that book, I've thought of her insights regarding Miami, as seen from a visitor's eye. I also sense the impulse to leave Venezuela in some of these poems.
I always have the desire to return to Venezuela, to work and write in Caracas. In recent years that has been impossible, and now most of my immediate family has left Venezuela. Aquí no hay país, ni consuelo. But this is also a problem of the age, and it's not limited to Venezuela. Displacement and doubleness have ocurred for ages, and they continue today. César Vallejo perhaps was writing about this when he spoke of "cuatro conciencias simultáneas" in his Poemas de París, or Poemas humanos.
Much of it is learning to live with an absence, whether of family and friends or of physical places, landscapes, avenues missed. Without falling prey to a nostalgic illusion of a "homeland" or an idyllic childhood in Venezuela. It's also an awareness of the distances we might carry with us here in the North. My writing is for remembering, saving whatever pieces the words might lift.
I am thinking of doubleness, and of migration. Considering, along the U.S. Latino spectrum, the relatively recent wave of Venezuelans arriving here. In Florida nowdays, the city of Westwood is often referred to as Westezuela. From Miami to Tampa, the past decade has seen the population of Venezuelans rise significantly in Florida. My siblings and I love this, since twenty years ago we were definitely the only Venezuelans at our school.
Because I didn't return to Caracas until 1990, I often felt in the 1980s that I was "losing" Venezuela the longer I lived in Florida and Massachusetts. A few years ago, I heard the phrase "balseros del aire" in reference to the many Venezuelans flying permanently to the US or elsewhere. My sister and brother and I must have been the pioneer balseros del aire, then. Due to complicated family circumstances, we left by avioneta from the Aeropuerto La Carlota to Jamaica, where we boarded a commercial flight to Miami, that magnificent empire city, capital of Latin America. When I wrote a poem several years ago about our arrival that day, I mocked the city: "O Miami, take three more indios / into your glittering arms, etc."
I'm asking myself a relatively minor question tonight. What is a Venezuelan American?
Later this week I'll be posting translations into English of several poems by Jacqueline Goldberg, from her collection Insolaciones en Miami Beach (Fondo Editorial Fundarte, 1995). As I've been rereading that book, I've thought of her insights regarding Miami, as seen from a visitor's eye. I also sense the impulse to leave Venezuela in some of these poems.
I always have the desire to return to Venezuela, to work and write in Caracas. In recent years that has been impossible, and now most of my immediate family has left Venezuela. Aquí no hay país, ni consuelo. But this is also a problem of the age, and it's not limited to Venezuela. Displacement and doubleness have ocurred for ages, and they continue today. César Vallejo perhaps was writing about this when he spoke of "cuatro conciencias simultáneas" in his Poemas de París, or Poemas humanos.
Much of it is learning to live with an absence, whether of family and friends or of physical places, landscapes, avenues missed. Without falling prey to a nostalgic illusion of a "homeland" or an idyllic childhood in Venezuela. It's also an awareness of the distances we might carry with us here in the North. My writing is for remembering, saving whatever pieces the words might lift.
1.24.2004
Terror Twilight
In the below zeros again, reading Alejandra Pizarnik's journals, Diarios (2003). Tonight's evening sky was a translucent dark blue after the sun had sunken behind buildings. This afternoon watched the Venezuelan film Adios, Miami (1983). While at times it was too reminiscent of a telenovela it reminded me that Venezuela's current crisis has been developing for more than two decades now. We moved to Florida in 1982, so the footage of Miami in the early 1980s cheese of shiny skyscrapers and manicured palm trees was semi-nostalgically amusing. And the thought of disappeareance into the United States, by way of Florida, was familiar. My siblings and I made that move twenty years ago, to inhabit two countries, sometimes simultaneously. Sometimes the episodes resemble fictions, a long novel that takes decades to write. This novel would include the cities of Boston, Caracas, Tampa, New York, Providence, Mexico D.F.
*
A veces uno escribe para los abuelos, los familiares que han muerto y los que nos siguen acompañando.
*
When we saw Pavement play in Boston for their 1999 Terror Twilight tour the theater was much too crowded with drunk frat boys. The band played masterfully, adding improvised changes to the songs, or mistakes left to adorn. Music can lose its aura over time. Or the aura fluctuates over the years. That projection of music is of the same impulse as poetry. As recently, I wonder why I hadn't listened to Belle and Sebastian's great album The Boy With the Arab Strap (1998) until now.
*
"11 de abril, jueves [1963]
Imposibilidad de la poesía. (Apenas anoté esto hice un poema para demostrarme que no.)
Los problemas que me plantea el escribir. El primer, mi exilio del lenguaje. Dada mi espontaneidad y mis fuerzas debiera arrojarme sobre quinientas hojas en blanco y <<escribir como siento>>. Ahora bien: sucede que yo no siento mediante un lenguaje conceptual o poético sino con imágenes visuales acompañadas de unas pocas palabras sueltas. O sea que escribir, en mi caso, es traducir."
{Alejandra Pizarnik, Diarios, Editorial Lumen, 2003}
In the below zeros again, reading Alejandra Pizarnik's journals, Diarios (2003). Tonight's evening sky was a translucent dark blue after the sun had sunken behind buildings. This afternoon watched the Venezuelan film Adios, Miami (1983). While at times it was too reminiscent of a telenovela it reminded me that Venezuela's current crisis has been developing for more than two decades now. We moved to Florida in 1982, so the footage of Miami in the early 1980s cheese of shiny skyscrapers and manicured palm trees was semi-nostalgically amusing. And the thought of disappeareance into the United States, by way of Florida, was familiar. My siblings and I made that move twenty years ago, to inhabit two countries, sometimes simultaneously. Sometimes the episodes resemble fictions, a long novel that takes decades to write. This novel would include the cities of Boston, Caracas, Tampa, New York, Providence, Mexico D.F.
*
A veces uno escribe para los abuelos, los familiares que han muerto y los que nos siguen acompañando.
*
When we saw Pavement play in Boston for their 1999 Terror Twilight tour the theater was much too crowded with drunk frat boys. The band played masterfully, adding improvised changes to the songs, or mistakes left to adorn. Music can lose its aura over time. Or the aura fluctuates over the years. That projection of music is of the same impulse as poetry. As recently, I wonder why I hadn't listened to Belle and Sebastian's great album The Boy With the Arab Strap (1998) until now.
*
"11 de abril, jueves [1963]
Imposibilidad de la poesía. (Apenas anoté esto hice un poema para demostrarme que no.)
Los problemas que me plantea el escribir. El primer, mi exilio del lenguaje. Dada mi espontaneidad y mis fuerzas debiera arrojarme sobre quinientas hojas en blanco y <<escribir como siento>>. Ahora bien: sucede que yo no siento mediante un lenguaje conceptual o poético sino con imágenes visuales acompañadas de unas pocas palabras sueltas. O sea que escribir, en mi caso, es traducir."
{Alejandra Pizarnik, Diarios, Editorial Lumen, 2003}
1.23.2004
Place where the waters meet
"poem from the hand of the god of love"
U.M.
(14 January 2004)
*
My good friend from Tampa, U., has recently been sending me one-line poem letters, including the one above. U. and I met in 1994, when we were both prep cooks at a vegetarian cafe in South Tampa. Since we were both studying at USF at the time, we coincided with weekend shifts under semi-tyrannical bosses, spending as much time as possible discussing art, literature and music while making tofu burgers, tempeh sandwiches and macrobiotic salads at the endless shifts behind the kitchen counter. At that time, Uari had recently returned from living at a Buddhist monastery in New Jersey.
I plan on posting several of U.'s poems here sometime soon. Born in Puerto Rico in the 1970s, U. was raised in Tampa. He mentioned a few years ago, while I filmed him and C. walking through Ybor City for a super-8 film project ("Agua Florida," 1995-1999), that his grandfather had built several of the "cigar worker" tin-roof houses to the West of the interstate.
Over at pamphlet I was trying to write about Ybor City when I was back in Tampa recently. Ybor has always seemed to be a ghostly section of Tampa, with so many of its abandoned or unused historic buildings. While critics have pointed to Nilo Cruz's play Anna in the Tropics as being mediocre, one thing they overlook is its location: Tampa. As a city that is often made invisible or underestimated, Tampa can seem to exist only within itself, a remote province. In that sense it can be a visionary city. I learned how to read and write in Tampa, and I lived everything that one might need to live in that city.
Maybe this "blog" as a form of mythologizing cities. And we often see them through cars. Again, the machine coinciding with the human. Or, the machine writers quick at their instant publishing houses, here on (for instance) Chicha Press ("Made in E.E.U.U."). In Anna in the Tropics the unseen villain is, of course, the machines waiting to displace the lector. And, typically, I have seen no criticism that addresses the Taino elements of the play. Cruz makes an implicit link between the figure of the lector and the caciques and shamans of the Taino indians. So we're back again at invisibility, no?
In Green, Michael Stipe sings beautifully: "Let my machine talk to you..." I first listened to that under autumn trees in rural North Carolina, driving in a car with C. to the small town of Elkin. The mountains in that part of North Carolina are also visionary.
*
Expendable prose. I love the title that was given to Ginsberg's posthumous book of essays, Deliberate Prose. Pero esto es expendeable prose. Because I don't even have internet at home. "Thus, I have written this poem on a jet seat in mid-Heaven..." called the various libraries or internet cafes de Boston. Which require a money one doesn't own. So, the entries write themselves from a cubicle quickness. Hasta que siga siendo gratis.
An awkward prose, an easy and imitative prose. A clear prose and also a mystical prose. Poseur prose.
"poem from the hand of the god of love"
U.M.
(14 January 2004)
*
My good friend from Tampa, U., has recently been sending me one-line poem letters, including the one above. U. and I met in 1994, when we were both prep cooks at a vegetarian cafe in South Tampa. Since we were both studying at USF at the time, we coincided with weekend shifts under semi-tyrannical bosses, spending as much time as possible discussing art, literature and music while making tofu burgers, tempeh sandwiches and macrobiotic salads at the endless shifts behind the kitchen counter. At that time, Uari had recently returned from living at a Buddhist monastery in New Jersey.
I plan on posting several of U.'s poems here sometime soon. Born in Puerto Rico in the 1970s, U. was raised in Tampa. He mentioned a few years ago, while I filmed him and C. walking through Ybor City for a super-8 film project ("Agua Florida," 1995-1999), that his grandfather had built several of the "cigar worker" tin-roof houses to the West of the interstate.
Over at pamphlet I was trying to write about Ybor City when I was back in Tampa recently. Ybor has always seemed to be a ghostly section of Tampa, with so many of its abandoned or unused historic buildings. While critics have pointed to Nilo Cruz's play Anna in the Tropics as being mediocre, one thing they overlook is its location: Tampa. As a city that is often made invisible or underestimated, Tampa can seem to exist only within itself, a remote province. In that sense it can be a visionary city. I learned how to read and write in Tampa, and I lived everything that one might need to live in that city.
Maybe this "blog" as a form of mythologizing cities. And we often see them through cars. Again, the machine coinciding with the human. Or, the machine writers quick at their instant publishing houses, here on (for instance) Chicha Press ("Made in E.E.U.U."). In Anna in the Tropics the unseen villain is, of course, the machines waiting to displace the lector. And, typically, I have seen no criticism that addresses the Taino elements of the play. Cruz makes an implicit link between the figure of the lector and the caciques and shamans of the Taino indians. So we're back again at invisibility, no?
In Green, Michael Stipe sings beautifully: "Let my machine talk to you..." I first listened to that under autumn trees in rural North Carolina, driving in a car with C. to the small town of Elkin. The mountains in that part of North Carolina are also visionary.
*
Expendable prose. I love the title that was given to Ginsberg's posthumous book of essays, Deliberate Prose. Pero esto es expendeable prose. Because I don't even have internet at home. "Thus, I have written this poem on a jet seat in mid-Heaven..." called the various libraries or internet cafes de Boston. Which require a money one doesn't own. So, the entries write themselves from a cubicle quickness. Hasta que siga siendo gratis.
An awkward prose, an easy and imitative prose. A clear prose and also a mystical prose. Poseur prose.
"It's on..."
There's something so magnificent in certain moments of hip hop. For those of us who model ourselves after Walter Benjamin, collecting artifacts and gathering quotations and information for our notebooks, hip hop is indeed a culture that informs all our actions. And, the fact that, at its inception, hip hop culture aimed at dismantling the unfortunate machine of white supremacy that rules this nation makes hip hop our savior.
There are countless moments on recordings where, as in the mistakes preserved on old jazz or blues LPs, improvisation and intuition are given the proper form to flourish. B-Real created some of the most impressive moments in hip hop music during the early 1990s, although his lyrics (for me) never quite lived up to his talents. His nasal vocal style and impeccable timing make him one of the most important writers in hip hop:
"One time tried to come in my home
take my chrome, I said yo it's on."
There's something so magnificent in certain moments of hip hop. For those of us who model ourselves after Walter Benjamin, collecting artifacts and gathering quotations and information for our notebooks, hip hop is indeed a culture that informs all our actions. And, the fact that, at its inception, hip hop culture aimed at dismantling the unfortunate machine of white supremacy that rules this nation makes hip hop our savior.
There are countless moments on recordings where, as in the mistakes preserved on old jazz or blues LPs, improvisation and intuition are given the proper form to flourish. B-Real created some of the most impressive moments in hip hop music during the early 1990s, although his lyrics (for me) never quite lived up to his talents. His nasal vocal style and impeccable timing make him one of the most important writers in hip hop:
"One time tried to come in my home
take my chrome, I said yo it's on."
1.18.2004
A Prologue
From being in the daily habit of reading El Nacional during those weeks, I came across a notice for a reading by the poet Edda Armas, whose work I didn't know at the time. After an early dinner, I got a ride to the bus stop in El Cafetal and took the Metrobus to the subway at Los Cortijos. I went west to Chacaito and the CCC shopping mall, to a small bookstore with huge plate glass window displays. The Librería Macondo is on a second floor corridor overlooking a subway entrance in Sabana Grande. Across the street from a Kuai Mare bookstore branch, and if you continue walking blocks west, just before arriving at Plaza Venezuela and UCV, you'll find the great Librería Suma. These are remnants of periods in recent decades (1960s-1980s) when Sabana Grande's outdoor cafes, bars and restaurants flourished. But there's always remnants of any period in a city, and these facts of movement, deracination, architectural mismanagement or saturation are all part of the postmodern city, or the modern city, either one. Whatever combination of the two exists in that valley.
Armas read with a group of creative writing students graduating from a year-long workshop with the poet and critic Maria Antonieta Flores. The workshop was one of several conducted each year at the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Romulo Gallegos (Celarg). A notice in El Nacional last week mentions that Armas has just published a new collection of poems, En bicicleta (Caracas: Colección Bienal Literaria José Antonio Ramos Sucre, 2004). When she read that night, she introduced her poems as being part of a single manuscript, which I imagine could be this recently published one. The bookstore was filled with about fifty to seventy-five people, in fold-up chairs, on the floor, standing between book aisles. Her poems lived up to the audience's generous attention. In the middle of that dangerously free-falling year, 2002, this was one purpose of poetry: to create a calm, communicative space within the massive metropolitan chaos of Caracas. I remember Armas's poems referring to her "tribe of readers" or her "tribe of words." It was a calm night on the subway and bus ride home to Caurimare. Caracas at her best, after some afternoon rains, crickets and frogs sounding in the trees along the soft lit avenues, neon from a car/bus window upon blocks of metropolis east to west or vice versa, Monte Avila with a darkness hovering over the lights of an open city. And one can be either immune or invisible for poetry.
From being in the daily habit of reading El Nacional during those weeks, I came across a notice for a reading by the poet Edda Armas, whose work I didn't know at the time. After an early dinner, I got a ride to the bus stop in El Cafetal and took the Metrobus to the subway at Los Cortijos. I went west to Chacaito and the CCC shopping mall, to a small bookstore with huge plate glass window displays. The Librería Macondo is on a second floor corridor overlooking a subway entrance in Sabana Grande. Across the street from a Kuai Mare bookstore branch, and if you continue walking blocks west, just before arriving at Plaza Venezuela and UCV, you'll find the great Librería Suma. These are remnants of periods in recent decades (1960s-1980s) when Sabana Grande's outdoor cafes, bars and restaurants flourished. But there's always remnants of any period in a city, and these facts of movement, deracination, architectural mismanagement or saturation are all part of the postmodern city, or the modern city, either one. Whatever combination of the two exists in that valley.
Armas read with a group of creative writing students graduating from a year-long workshop with the poet and critic Maria Antonieta Flores. The workshop was one of several conducted each year at the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Romulo Gallegos (Celarg). A notice in El Nacional last week mentions that Armas has just published a new collection of poems, En bicicleta (Caracas: Colección Bienal Literaria José Antonio Ramos Sucre, 2004). When she read that night, she introduced her poems as being part of a single manuscript, which I imagine could be this recently published one. The bookstore was filled with about fifty to seventy-five people, in fold-up chairs, on the floor, standing between book aisles. Her poems lived up to the audience's generous attention. In the middle of that dangerously free-falling year, 2002, this was one purpose of poetry: to create a calm, communicative space within the massive metropolitan chaos of Caracas. I remember Armas's poems referring to her "tribe of readers" or her "tribe of words." It was a calm night on the subway and bus ride home to Caurimare. Caracas at her best, after some afternoon rains, crickets and frogs sounding in the trees along the soft lit avenues, neon from a car/bus window upon blocks of metropolis east to west or vice versa, Monte Avila with a darkness hovering over the lights of an open city. And one can be either immune or invisible for poetry.
1.15.2004
Allegories
El ancla de este sueño abre mis ojos a la vida.
Juan Sánchez Peláez
constance city, compact city of mine
poet living in Palos Grandes at the foot
of El Avila, this city uncolonized though
only in print occasionally, even-metered
—te imaginas, Guillo? when the Spanish
first reached Monte Avila, looking into
the uncut valley below, whose Guaire
would have been translucent then
unlike our
currents, tribal fracture
mientras tanto across the river
desde Caurimare in the early 1980s
who wrote these allegories above
my unawareness, childhood sped-up
Capital, trans-Caribbean
study
El ancla de este sueño abre mis ojos a la vida.
Juan Sánchez Peláez
constance city, compact city of mine
poet living in Palos Grandes at the foot
of El Avila, this city uncolonized though
only in print occasionally, even-metered
—te imaginas, Guillo? when the Spanish
first reached Monte Avila, looking into
the uncut valley below, whose Guaire
would have been translucent then
unlike our
currents, tribal fracture
mientras tanto across the river
desde Caurimare in the early 1980s
who wrote these allegories above
my unawareness, childhood sped-up
Capital, trans-Caribbean
study
1.14.2004
Este suelo secreto / Esdras Parra
Esdras Parra was born in Santa Cruz de Mora, in the state of Mérida. She has published poetry, fiction and criticism. Her essays appear regularly in El Nacional, El Universal, and other Venezuelan publications. Parra was awarded the Premio de Poesía de la Bienal Mariano Picón Salas in 1993. These five poems are translated from the original Spanish versions in her first collection of poetry, Este suelo secreto (Monte Avila Editores, 1995).
*
This Secret Floor (selections)
The word that's woken
by that late dream
beside your route
navigates through your voice
secretly walks
over the buzzing rocks
answering your enigmas
with an ache in its bones.
In your rooms
there are no tears
nor stairs sinking
into shipwrecks
nor sand arrived
from dreams
only a rock
that shifts in the frost
or leans over to speak
with silence.
Your words shine like bones
they've seen daybreak
stuck at one side of the wall
and the tongue fleeing the candle
sighs for silence
unexpected silence
codified by sound
dawn no longer feels ashamed
arriving with naked shoulders.
And you knock on the door
with a visible sound
that makes you tremble
with an arid sound
that echoes a scream
with your quiet voice
that door opens
within boredom.
With the word's effort
which is endless
or which lends itself to lifting edges
with that announcement
you walk toward your habit
what you abandoned
next to the cup of coffee
to which you'll return
if someday
you find yourself standing
on the high sidewalk
at the shore of your illusory life.
Esdras Parra was born in Santa Cruz de Mora, in the state of Mérida. She has published poetry, fiction and criticism. Her essays appear regularly in El Nacional, El Universal, and other Venezuelan publications. Parra was awarded the Premio de Poesía de la Bienal Mariano Picón Salas in 1993. These five poems are translated from the original Spanish versions in her first collection of poetry, Este suelo secreto (Monte Avila Editores, 1995).
*
This Secret Floor (selections)
The word that's woken
by that late dream
beside your route
navigates through your voice
secretly walks
over the buzzing rocks
answering your enigmas
with an ache in its bones.
In your rooms
there are no tears
nor stairs sinking
into shipwrecks
nor sand arrived
from dreams
only a rock
that shifts in the frost
or leans over to speak
with silence.
Your words shine like bones
they've seen daybreak
stuck at one side of the wall
and the tongue fleeing the candle
sighs for silence
unexpected silence
codified by sound
dawn no longer feels ashamed
arriving with naked shoulders.
And you knock on the door
with a visible sound
that makes you tremble
with an arid sound
that echoes a scream
with your quiet voice
that door opens
within boredom.
With the word's effort
which is endless
or which lends itself to lifting edges
with that announcement
you walk toward your habit
what you abandoned
next to the cup of coffee
to which you'll return
if someday
you find yourself standing
on the high sidewalk
at the shore of your illusory life.
"inaudible music"
In the below zero city, wanting prose factories for fingers. This coldness, like the extreme humidity in Tampa during the summer, drains my body and mind of action. I bought the latest issue of Fence magazine last night just for the fantastic text ("Cubism, the Blues, Visions: A Conversation") by Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan, who mentions:
"...or the fact that when I write I leave holes and fragments in poems to account for the translation lag between my thoughts and feelings, and my ability to put them on the page. That would be where the inaudible music takes place, and the decision-making process is part of it, which is why performance is necessary. It is a ritual with a purpose. I often change certain of my poems as I read them to an audience. I try to account for this as I write certain works, with the idea that the reader may skip around, or may "lose" some of the work, or perhaps read the words that they hear coming next..."
In the below zero city, wanting prose factories for fingers. This coldness, like the extreme humidity in Tampa during the summer, drains my body and mind of action. I bought the latest issue of Fence magazine last night just for the fantastic text ("Cubism, the Blues, Visions: A Conversation") by Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan, who mentions:
"...or the fact that when I write I leave holes and fragments in poems to account for the translation lag between my thoughts and feelings, and my ability to put them on the page. That would be where the inaudible music takes place, and the decision-making process is part of it, which is why performance is necessary. It is a ritual with a purpose. I often change certain of my poems as I read them to an audience. I try to account for this as I write certain works, with the idea that the reader may skip around, or may "lose" some of the work, or perhaps read the words that they hear coming next..."
1.13.2004
Una vez más esta ciudad vacila / Alfredo Silva Estrada
"Una vez más esta ciudad vacila
.....................Mi ciudad todavía
Oculta a veces por no herirte
Arropada en el miedo
Hoy busca su secreto
El despejado espacio para decir
Nosotros
..........Pronunciando raíces
Contorno de antes y después encontrar
Nuestros sexos
..................Su desnudez de mitos
Realidad encarnada en cada brote
En las magulladoras de tu ciudad esquiva
Ciudad que te hace frente hasta los extramuros
Ya no es el espejismo de aquella aldea lejana
...........................adormida en tu rostro
Somos de nuevo en ella hombres de la vigilia"
Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos (Monte Avila Editores, 1991)
"Una vez más esta ciudad vacila
.....................Mi ciudad todavía
Oculta a veces por no herirte
Arropada en el miedo
Hoy busca su secreto
El despejado espacio para decir
Nosotros
..........Pronunciando raíces
Contorno de antes y después encontrar
Nuestros sexos
..................Su desnudez de mitos
Realidad encarnada en cada brote
En las magulladoras de tu ciudad esquiva
Ciudad que te hace frente hasta los extramuros
Ya no es el espejismo de aquella aldea lejana
...........................adormida en tu rostro
Somos de nuevo en ella hombres de la vigilia"
Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos (Monte Avila Editores, 1991)
1.12.2004
Las ciudades a veces / Alfredo Silva Estrada
"Las ciudades a veces
derivan nombres en tus ojos
hacia otros territorios
Nos abandonan las imágenes
a los recodos de horizontes
en el relevo de los puntos de fuga
.................................. Atravesamos
nuestros rostros con el óxido de las ráfagas
Un halo desde el sueño
protege todavía los frutos entrevistos"
Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos (Monte Avila Editores, 1991)
"Las ciudades a veces
derivan nombres en tus ojos
hacia otros territorios
Nos abandonan las imágenes
a los recodos de horizontes
en el relevo de los puntos de fuga
.................................. Atravesamos
nuestros rostros con el óxido de las ráfagas
Un halo desde el sueño
protege todavía los frutos entrevistos"
Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos (Monte Avila Editores, 1991)
The Black Interior
I was very happy to come across Elizabeth Alexander's new book of essays this weekend, The Black Interior (Graywolf Press). Graywolf Press has also republished Alexander's amazing first collection, The Venus Hottentot (1990). Along with essays on Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Michael Harper, Alexander writes about a poet who is essential to my life as a reader and writer, Jean-Michel Basquiat:
"The illusion that Basquiat was a wild child, living always and only in the moment of utterance, prevents a more complex understanding of his work and particularly its sense in black contexts. Certainly, stories are legion and legend of a drugged-up Basquiat barricaded in a studio in a narcotic haze, churning out picture after picture that were snatched away and sold. But Basquiat was, in fact, also a doomed black aristocrat, a master of outré Afro-aesthetics who styled and profiled outside of many boundaries."
I was very happy to come across Elizabeth Alexander's new book of essays this weekend, The Black Interior (Graywolf Press). Graywolf Press has also republished Alexander's amazing first collection, The Venus Hottentot (1990). Along with essays on Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Michael Harper, Alexander writes about a poet who is essential to my life as a reader and writer, Jean-Michel Basquiat:
"The illusion that Basquiat was a wild child, living always and only in the moment of utterance, prevents a more complex understanding of his work and particularly its sense in black contexts. Certainly, stories are legion and legend of a drugged-up Basquiat barricaded in a studio in a narcotic haze, churning out picture after picture that were snatched away and sold. But Basquiat was, in fact, also a doomed black aristocrat, a master of outré Afro-aesthetics who styled and profiled outside of many boundaries."
1.10.2004
El libro de las puertas / Alfredo Silva Estrada
The Book of Doors
to Luisa Palacios
Et par la porte ouverte
La perspective du hasard
Pierre Reverdy
1
the closest door:
a beginning block opens
2
from a threshold of unfelt things
doors of the five senses
3
to be born in the strangeness of knocking at a door
4
may it be the door
between sky and earth
5
robust memory doors
for the inner fire
6
listen to eternal chance
at the trembling door
7
doors that drop
a horizon in our hands
8
to love the light that unfolds through the door
9
infinitely, the eyes
through the half-opened door
10
some other avid door
while we taste our bread and the unpronounceable
11
what doors grow from earth
when we enjoy our earth-being?
12
o door sustained by knowledge of air!
13
secret scent of true earth
carried by the glowing door
14
maybe there is an absent door
moving calmly
15
and chance
--in pairs, after all--
as a friendly door
Translator’s note: Poet, essayist and translator Alfredo Silva Estrada was born in Caracas in 1933. He has published several collections of poetry, including most recently: Por los respiraderos del día / En un momento dado (Monte Ávila Editores, 1998) and Al través (Angria Ediciones, 2000). In 1997 he was awarded Venezuela's Premio Nacional de Literatura. Silva Estrada lives in Caracas and recently published his translations into Spanish of the work of Lebanese poet Salah Stétié.
{Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }
to Luisa Palacios
Et par la porte ouverte
La perspective du hasard
Pierre Reverdy
1
the closest door:
a beginning block opens
2
from a threshold of unfelt things
doors of the five senses
3
to be born in the strangeness of knocking at a door
4
may it be the door
between sky and earth
5
robust memory doors
for the inner fire
6
listen to eternal chance
at the trembling door
7
doors that drop
a horizon in our hands
8
to love the light that unfolds through the door
9
infinitely, the eyes
through the half-opened door
10
some other avid door
while we taste our bread and the unpronounceable
11
what doors grow from earth
when we enjoy our earth-being?
12
o door sustained by knowledge of air!
13
secret scent of true earth
carried by the glowing door
14
maybe there is an absent door
moving calmly
15
and chance
--in pairs, after all--
as a friendly door
Translator’s note: Poet, essayist and translator Alfredo Silva Estrada was born in Caracas in 1933. He has published several collections of poetry, including most recently: Por los respiraderos del día / En un momento dado (Monte Ávila Editores, 1998) and Al través (Angria Ediciones, 2000). In 1997 he was awarded Venezuela's Premio Nacional de Literatura. Silva Estrada lives in Caracas and recently published his translations into Spanish of the work of Lebanese poet Salah Stétié.
{Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }
1.09.2004
Arthur Miller in Havana
Excellent essay by Arthur Miller in The Nation, "A Visit With Castro." It offers a vivid portrait of everyone's favorite dictator, that obscene dinosaur who, like Strom Thurmond, seems to have no end.
*
"Watching him at lunch--he ate two leaves of lettuce--one saw a lonely old man hungry for some fresh human contact, which could only get more and more rare as he ages. He might very well live actively for ten years, perhaps even longer as his parents reportedly had done, and I found myself wondering what could possibly be keeping him from a graceful exit that might even earn him his countrymen's gratitude?
The quasi-sexual enchantment of power? Perhaps. More likely, given his history, was his commitment to the poetic image of world revolution, the uprising of the wretched of the earth with himself at its head. And in plain fact, as the chief of a mere island, he had managed to elevate himself to that transcendent state in millions of minds. The more so now, after all other contestants had fallen away and conditions in Latin America and Africa gone from bad to worse, the possibility needed only its right time to erupt again. After all, he had thrown Cuban forces into action in many countries around the world despite his country's poverty and the obstinate resistance of his main sponsor, the now-abominated Soviet leadership.
It would have been too much to expect that after half a century in power he would not become to some important degree an anachronism, a handsome old clock that no longer tells the time correctly and bongs haphazardly in the middle of the night, disturbing the house. Notwithstanding all his efforts, the only semblance of a revolt of the poor is the antimodern Islamic tide, which from the Marxist point of view floats in a medieval dream. With us he seemed pathetically hungry for some kind of human contact. Brilliant as he is, spirited and resourceful as his people are, his endless rule seemed like some powerful vine wrapping its roots around the country and while defending it from the elements choking its natural growth. And his own as well. Ideology aside, he apparently maintains the illusions that structured his political successes even if they never had very much truth in them; to this day, as one example, he speaks of Gorbachev's dissolution of the Soviet Union as unnecessary, "a mistake."
In short, there was no fatal contradiction inherent in the Soviet system that brought it down, and so there is nothing in the Castro system or in his take on reality that is creating the painful poverty of the island. The US embargo created this island's poverty out of hand, along with the Russians by their deserting him. It is Don Quixote tilting at windmills which, worse yet, have collapsed into dust."
Excellent essay by Arthur Miller in The Nation, "A Visit With Castro." It offers a vivid portrait of everyone's favorite dictator, that obscene dinosaur who, like Strom Thurmond, seems to have no end.
*
"Watching him at lunch--he ate two leaves of lettuce--one saw a lonely old man hungry for some fresh human contact, which could only get more and more rare as he ages. He might very well live actively for ten years, perhaps even longer as his parents reportedly had done, and I found myself wondering what could possibly be keeping him from a graceful exit that might even earn him his countrymen's gratitude?
The quasi-sexual enchantment of power? Perhaps. More likely, given his history, was his commitment to the poetic image of world revolution, the uprising of the wretched of the earth with himself at its head. And in plain fact, as the chief of a mere island, he had managed to elevate himself to that transcendent state in millions of minds. The more so now, after all other contestants had fallen away and conditions in Latin America and Africa gone from bad to worse, the possibility needed only its right time to erupt again. After all, he had thrown Cuban forces into action in many countries around the world despite his country's poverty and the obstinate resistance of his main sponsor, the now-abominated Soviet leadership.
It would have been too much to expect that after half a century in power he would not become to some important degree an anachronism, a handsome old clock that no longer tells the time correctly and bongs haphazardly in the middle of the night, disturbing the house. Notwithstanding all his efforts, the only semblance of a revolt of the poor is the antimodern Islamic tide, which from the Marxist point of view floats in a medieval dream. With us he seemed pathetically hungry for some kind of human contact. Brilliant as he is, spirited and resourceful as his people are, his endless rule seemed like some powerful vine wrapping its roots around the country and while defending it from the elements choking its natural growth. And his own as well. Ideology aside, he apparently maintains the illusions that structured his political successes even if they never had very much truth in them; to this day, as one example, he speaks of Gorbachev's dissolution of the Soviet Union as unnecessary, "a mistake."
In short, there was no fatal contradiction inherent in the Soviet system that brought it down, and so there is nothing in the Castro system or in his take on reality that is creating the painful poverty of the island. The US embargo created this island's poverty out of hand, along with the Russians by their deserting him. It is Don Quixote tilting at windmills which, worse yet, have collapsed into dust."
Open Letter to Danny Glover
In today's Tal Cual, columnist Laureano Márquez includes a hilarious letter to Danny Glover (posted below), who is in the middle of a visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the "Bolivarian revolution." The letter is written in broken English, and while Márquez may be joking throughout much of it, he is addressing a very serious problem in Venezuela: the amount of foreign intellectuals who come to Venezuela in search of that ridiculous, adolescent illusion of a "revolution for the people."
*
Serious humor
Laureano Márquez
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open Letter to Danny Glover
By Laureass Márquez
Dear Mr. Glover:
Welcome to our land, Venezuela, land of the liberator Simón Bolívar, the first and the second. I read in the newspaper, que you have come (And I can see you come a lot, because are very big, like two Aristóbulos) to this country to see the situecion of the blacs. You now, the news peiper spicks much sheet. I knew since the first time that this isent could be true: One american citizen visitin ower land to see the situeicion of the blacs. !No me foking! That mey be a joke, blac humor what calling.
Well but in a negative suppose that the motivation of your visit is that, let me tell you something: May be you listen a much to the declarations of the canciller and the vice- president sayng that the problem in Venezuela is a confrontation between blacs and guaits. Rich guaits and poor blac in the most clear tradition of the novel “Poor blac” of Don Rómulo Galician, the same author of Mrs. Bárbara, like the mother of your president.
Let me tell you something: Here we have other kinds of problems. We never had buses for blacs and for guaits, only escoñeteiting buses for everi body. Our government, a diference of yours, no fuk only a blacs, sino a all of us parejo. I don’ t know if I am explain. We don’ t have blacs who like to be guaits an somete itself to a process of blanqueition, like Michael Jackson., ni de pod. Here never a blac woman have to stand up of the seat because a guait don’ t have seat, we like very much blac woman, because they are very good. Here the word “negro”, “negrita” shows love. We have blacs ministers, like Aristóbulo, the little blac that you met the other day in the viceprecidency.
The problem with Aristóbulo is not the blachood, if he tell you this pod, he fuk you. The problem is the incapacity, the incoherence and the cinism.
See. I tell you the problem: We was conquered by the Spanish, they came here, and Rodrigo of the Triana says “Laaaaaaannndddd” and they said “that’s mine”, like you in Irak, I don’ t now if you are understandin me? Well, after a time called the colony we get the independence of the hand of the liberator Simón Bolívar (ower first dictator, Boris Izaguirre says). After de independence we began a century of civil guars, like yours but a complete century: The gocho people came from the mountains one after other and to the coñazo limpio take the power.
Here not law, here not institutions, here not nothing. ¿Are you following me? Then we began the XX century with another gocho dictator: Juan Vicente Gomez. When Gomez peling boling, we began a little democracy: Lopez, the transition and Medina a very simpatic little fat who make legalizations of political parties, including the communist.
The adecos knock out a Medina and then Chalbaud knock out the adecos, and then Pérez Jimenez knokck out Chalbaud, an then –ten years later– the democracy we will come back with the other Rómulo. This democracy, in the course of the time, have had a lot of errors: corruption, especulation, murder, people become poor in the middle of the sea of petroleum. Then the people get a big a red chair and change of the adecos and the copeyanos for Chavez. But the adecos and the copeyanos stay smalls in front of Chávez. They was children of breast. More poverty, more inequality, corruption that you get sick of your stomach and had to go to the bathroom very frecuently. The family of the president in the power (the same like yours but whithout election) and he speaking big eggs all day in the televition. Is this what you want to continue? Is this correct?
Here, we don’ t have ratials problems, and no religions too. Here we want to live the life in peace!Oh Ohoooooooooo!
Then Danny, go to your beautiful land and do that you have to do there, and if you want follow ower example:
One people who want to knock out a one learning of dictator with the law and whitout violence to living life in peace ¡Ohoooh Ohoooooooooh!
In today's Tal Cual, columnist Laureano Márquez includes a hilarious letter to Danny Glover (posted below), who is in the middle of a visit to Venezuela, as a guest of the "Bolivarian revolution." The letter is written in broken English, and while Márquez may be joking throughout much of it, he is addressing a very serious problem in Venezuela: the amount of foreign intellectuals who come to Venezuela in search of that ridiculous, adolescent illusion of a "revolution for the people."
*
Serious humor
Laureano Márquez
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open Letter to Danny Glover
By Laureass Márquez
Dear Mr. Glover:
Welcome to our land, Venezuela, land of the liberator Simón Bolívar, the first and the second. I read in the newspaper, que you have come (And I can see you come a lot, because are very big, like two Aristóbulos) to this country to see the situecion of the blacs. You now, the news peiper spicks much sheet. I knew since the first time that this isent could be true: One american citizen visitin ower land to see the situeicion of the blacs. !No me foking! That mey be a joke, blac humor what calling.
Well but in a negative suppose that the motivation of your visit is that, let me tell you something: May be you listen a much to the declarations of the canciller and the vice- president sayng that the problem in Venezuela is a confrontation between blacs and guaits. Rich guaits and poor blac in the most clear tradition of the novel “Poor blac” of Don Rómulo Galician, the same author of Mrs. Bárbara, like the mother of your president.
Let me tell you something: Here we have other kinds of problems. We never had buses for blacs and for guaits, only escoñeteiting buses for everi body. Our government, a diference of yours, no fuk only a blacs, sino a all of us parejo. I don’ t know if I am explain. We don’ t have blacs who like to be guaits an somete itself to a process of blanqueition, like Michael Jackson., ni de pod. Here never a blac woman have to stand up of the seat because a guait don’ t have seat, we like very much blac woman, because they are very good. Here the word “negro”, “negrita” shows love. We have blacs ministers, like Aristóbulo, the little blac that you met the other day in the viceprecidency.
The problem with Aristóbulo is not the blachood, if he tell you this pod, he fuk you. The problem is the incapacity, the incoherence and the cinism.
See. I tell you the problem: We was conquered by the Spanish, they came here, and Rodrigo of the Triana says “Laaaaaaannndddd” and they said “that’s mine”, like you in Irak, I don’ t now if you are understandin me? Well, after a time called the colony we get the independence of the hand of the liberator Simón Bolívar (ower first dictator, Boris Izaguirre says). After de independence we began a century of civil guars, like yours but a complete century: The gocho people came from the mountains one after other and to the coñazo limpio take the power.
Here not law, here not institutions, here not nothing. ¿Are you following me? Then we began the XX century with another gocho dictator: Juan Vicente Gomez. When Gomez peling boling, we began a little democracy: Lopez, the transition and Medina a very simpatic little fat who make legalizations of political parties, including the communist.
The adecos knock out a Medina and then Chalbaud knock out the adecos, and then Pérez Jimenez knokck out Chalbaud, an then –ten years later– the democracy we will come back with the other Rómulo. This democracy, in the course of the time, have had a lot of errors: corruption, especulation, murder, people become poor in the middle of the sea of petroleum. Then the people get a big a red chair and change of the adecos and the copeyanos for Chavez. But the adecos and the copeyanos stay smalls in front of Chávez. They was children of breast. More poverty, more inequality, corruption that you get sick of your stomach and had to go to the bathroom very frecuently. The family of the president in the power (the same like yours but whithout election) and he speaking big eggs all day in the televition. Is this what you want to continue? Is this correct?
Here, we don’ t have ratials problems, and no religions too. Here we want to live the life in peace!Oh Ohoooooooooo!
Then Danny, go to your beautiful land and do that you have to do there, and if you want follow ower example:
One people who want to knock out a one learning of dictator with the law and whitout violence to living life in peace ¡Ohoooh Ohoooooooooh!
Dirt McGirk
So, Old Dirty Bastard has been on my mind recently because I've been listening to his "Best of" CD. One can never be sure if ODB is a genius or a fool. Maybe one of Shakespeare's wise fools. His recent arrests and stints in rehab are part of a long series of "misadventures" that have served to enhance his legend as The Wu-Tang Clan's resident chaos factor. His lyrics tend to blur the edge between coherence and violence. He has also penned verses that refer to his Native American ancestry, explicitly linking his "black" words with a "brown" history.
What it might come down to, as with any good rapper, is how he makes the English language move in ways it has never moved before. While the following verses (from "Brooklyn Zoo") might seem mediocre on paper, when he uses them to open the song they are hip hop perfection:
"I'm the one man army, it's on
I never been tooking out
I keep MCs looking out
I drop science like Crosby dropping babies
Enough to make a nigga go crazy
Energy-building, taking all types of medicines
Your ass thought you were better than?
Hey, son, I keep planets in orbit
While I be coming with deeper and more shit
Enough to make you break and shake your ass [...]
Rhyme good as a tasty cake mix
This style I'm mastered in
Niggas catching headaches
What, what, you need aspirin?"
So, Old Dirty Bastard has been on my mind recently because I've been listening to his "Best of" CD. One can never be sure if ODB is a genius or a fool. Maybe one of Shakespeare's wise fools. His recent arrests and stints in rehab are part of a long series of "misadventures" that have served to enhance his legend as The Wu-Tang Clan's resident chaos factor. His lyrics tend to blur the edge between coherence and violence. He has also penned verses that refer to his Native American ancestry, explicitly linking his "black" words with a "brown" history.
What it might come down to, as with any good rapper, is how he makes the English language move in ways it has never moved before. While the following verses (from "Brooklyn Zoo") might seem mediocre on paper, when he uses them to open the song they are hip hop perfection:
"I'm the one man army, it's on
I never been tooking out
I keep MCs looking out
I drop science like Crosby dropping babies
Enough to make a nigga go crazy
Energy-building, taking all types of medicines
Your ass thought you were better than?
Hey, son, I keep planets in orbit
While I be coming with deeper and more shit
Enough to make you break and shake your ass [...]
Rhyme good as a tasty cake mix
This style I'm mastered in
Niggas catching headaches
What, what, you need aspirin?"
1.08.2004
I wish
I could write with some purpose, or clarity. But even my readings are fragmentary and riddled with allusions. Part of my reason for opening this blog was to challenge myself to write more often. But that was already there in the notebook. So, there's a performative angle to this writing. Which I dread. I would much rather read, but even that is an activity that is always threatened.
Citation is my mode, for now. Because the channels don't change fast enough for me. Because the various forms that Pain takes in my life demand diversion.
I keep thinking about Borges when I think of blogs. His story of meeting his future (past?) self on the banks of the Charles river.
I write because living is inadequate. I write more simply each day. Or, more dully.
The novelty of this medium should be wearing off anytime now. At which point I can hopefully post only when necessary. No more of these self-reflexive comments. A friend recently described what happens on some poetry blogs as "masturbation." And I think he has a point.
I wish I remembered what I meant to say here, before the routine of self-focus overwhelmed me.
I wish the poem were constant.
I could write with some purpose, or clarity. But even my readings are fragmentary and riddled with allusions. Part of my reason for opening this blog was to challenge myself to write more often. But that was already there in the notebook. So, there's a performative angle to this writing. Which I dread. I would much rather read, but even that is an activity that is always threatened.
Citation is my mode, for now. Because the channels don't change fast enough for me. Because the various forms that Pain takes in my life demand diversion.
I keep thinking about Borges when I think of blogs. His story of meeting his future (past?) self on the banks of the Charles river.
I write because living is inadequate. I write more simply each day. Or, more dully.
The novelty of this medium should be wearing off anytime now. At which point I can hopefully post only when necessary. No more of these self-reflexive comments. A friend recently described what happens on some poetry blogs as "masturbation." And I think he has a point.
I wish I remembered what I meant to say here, before the routine of self-focus overwhelmed me.
I wish the poem were constant.
The Love Below
Over the past month, I've been listening to the new double CD from the Outkast, Speakerboxx/The Love Below. Actually, I've mainly been hooked on Andre 3000's half The Love Below. The "Hey Ya" single is nice, catchy, etc. But the rest of the album is much better. It's full of citations (Geto Boys, Ice Cube, Prince, John Coltrane, Rick James, Jimi Hendrix), and refuses to settle into any single mode. For me, it answers the question Mos Def talked about on his album Black on Both Sides (1999) : "Where do you think hip hop is going?"
According to Andre 3000, it's going toward its eclectic, hybrid roots. It's embracing jazz, rock, its former selves (1980s, 1990s), classical, Broadway musicals, classic love songs, and whatever can be made to fit within two turntables & a mic. Which is everything. It is like Borges' library: "The universe (which others call hip hop)..."
Over the past month, I've been listening to the new double CD from the Outkast, Speakerboxx/The Love Below. Actually, I've mainly been hooked on Andre 3000's half The Love Below. The "Hey Ya" single is nice, catchy, etc. But the rest of the album is much better. It's full of citations (Geto Boys, Ice Cube, Prince, John Coltrane, Rick James, Jimi Hendrix), and refuses to settle into any single mode. For me, it answers the question Mos Def talked about on his album Black on Both Sides (1999) : "Where do you think hip hop is going?"
According to Andre 3000, it's going toward its eclectic, hybrid roots. It's embracing jazz, rock, its former selves (1980s, 1990s), classical, Broadway musicals, classic love songs, and whatever can be made to fit within two turntables & a mic. Which is everything. It is like Borges' library: "The universe (which others call hip hop)..."
"My hip hop falls on your head like rain..."
And it does, Old Dirty Bastard (aka Big Baby Jesus, or, Dirt McGirk) has to be one of the best MCs of the past decade.
Driving in a snow flurry two days ago, as though the trees were weeping w/ me. God is of the smallest details, the briefest interludes. Two days that appear and depart as though two hours.
*
I finished reading Carl's $4 Poems chapbook last night. The series of (mostly) untitled poems ends with these great lines:
"[...] and tell me
more about The Clash, their influence
on pinch-stomach kids of the southwestern
dead malls and brunch retreats, where
the death rate exceeds a show of hands"
*
And this, from Eileen's Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole:
"That one begins a journey voluntarily will be irrelevant to the outcome? The source of a wave is never certain; despite its seeming repetition each wave is singular."
*
The keyboard and drum machine so sublime on New Order's song "Sub-culture," from the LP Low-life (1985).
*
Yesterday quiet in the living room, invisible, listening to Nas' The Lost Tapes. More "refined" than ODB, a very different style, in general. Both, though, inhabit hip hop's New York intellectualism. Or, words and our survival.
And it does, Old Dirty Bastard (aka Big Baby Jesus, or, Dirt McGirk) has to be one of the best MCs of the past decade.
Driving in a snow flurry two days ago, as though the trees were weeping w/ me. God is of the smallest details, the briefest interludes. Two days that appear and depart as though two hours.
*
I finished reading Carl's $4 Poems chapbook last night. The series of (mostly) untitled poems ends with these great lines:
"[...] and tell me
more about The Clash, their influence
on pinch-stomach kids of the southwestern
dead malls and brunch retreats, where
the death rate exceeds a show of hands"
*
And this, from Eileen's Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole:
"That one begins a journey voluntarily will be irrelevant to the outcome? The source of a wave is never certain; despite its seeming repetition each wave is singular."
*
The keyboard and drum machine so sublime on New Order's song "Sub-culture," from the LP Low-life (1985).
*
Yesterday quiet in the living room, invisible, listening to Nas' The Lost Tapes. More "refined" than ODB, a very different style, in general. Both, though, inhabit hip hop's New York intellectualism. Or, words and our survival.
1.06.2004
La revolución perdida
According to today's Tal Cual, Ernesto Cardenal has just released the third and final volume of his autobiography, La revolución perdida, in Managua. The article quotes comments that Cardenal made during an interview with a Chilean newspaper. In recent years, Cardenal has been explicit in his criticism of his former comrades in the Sandinista movement, blaming their obsession with power for the failure of the Nicaraguan revolution.
For me, there are very few poets who are as exciting to read as Cardenal. I am heartened by the fact that he refuses to romanticize the idea of revolution.
*
Below is a translated excerpt from the Tal Cual article:
Cardenal explains that he renounced from the Sandinista Party in 1994 because "I couldn't accept that in a country with so much poverty, supposedly revolutionary leaders would clean out the State funds when they were forced to give up power."
The poet affirms that the leaders of the Sandinista National Front were incapable of assimilating the 1990 electoral defeat against Violeta Chamorro. "The [Sandinista] Party was corrupted. Defeat did not have to mean the end of the revolution, which had been democratic and which created free, just, and honest elections, and which because of this could lose those elections. As it did.
But it could go on being the revolution from the side of the opposition. Once they lost the election, its leaders were demoralized and they devoted themselves to stealing before handing over the government. They destroyed the revolution for the sake of personal enrichment," said Cardenal to the newspaper La Vanguardia.
That was the end of the Sandinista dream for Cardenal: "Once it was corrupted, that beautiful project stopped being revolutionary. That is why I have left the Sandinistas.
Today the party is dominated by a Stalinist leadership." With the exception of the writer Sergio Ramírez, the former Minister of Culture does not exempt any of the Sandinista ex-leaders from blame.
"I excuse neither Daniel nor Humberto Ortega. Both of them took advantage of their positions in order to enrich themselves. Nor do I excuse Tomás Borge, the guerrilla leader who participated in that great robbery. Many others succumbed to temptation. As Galeano said: those who were not afraid to give their lives were afraid to hand over their Mercedes Benz, their houses, and the products of that robbery carried out by the Sandinista leadership."
For me, there are very few poets who are as exciting to read as Cardenal. I am heartened by the fact that he refuses to romanticize the idea of revolution.
*
Below is a translated excerpt from the Tal Cual article:
Cardenal explains that he renounced from the Sandinista Party in 1994 because "I couldn't accept that in a country with so much poverty, supposedly revolutionary leaders would clean out the State funds when they were forced to give up power."
The poet affirms that the leaders of the Sandinista National Front were incapable of assimilating the 1990 electoral defeat against Violeta Chamorro. "The [Sandinista] Party was corrupted. Defeat did not have to mean the end of the revolution, which had been democratic and which created free, just, and honest elections, and which because of this could lose those elections. As it did.
But it could go on being the revolution from the side of the opposition. Once they lost the election, its leaders were demoralized and they devoted themselves to stealing before handing over the government. They destroyed the revolution for the sake of personal enrichment," said Cardenal to the newspaper La Vanguardia.
That was the end of the Sandinista dream for Cardenal: "Once it was corrupted, that beautiful project stopped being revolutionary. That is why I have left the Sandinistas.
Today the party is dominated by a Stalinist leadership." With the exception of the writer Sergio Ramírez, the former Minister of Culture does not exempt any of the Sandinista ex-leaders from blame.
"I excuse neither Daniel nor Humberto Ortega. Both of them took advantage of their positions in order to enrich themselves. Nor do I excuse Tomás Borge, the guerrilla leader who participated in that great robbery. Many others succumbed to temptation. As Galeano said: those who were not afraid to give their lives were afraid to hand over their Mercedes Benz, their houses, and the products of that robbery carried out by the Sandinista leadership."
Canto llano: XII
Cintio Vitier
Algo le falta a la tarde,
no están completos los pinos,
y yo mirando a las nubes
siento lo que no he sentido.
A cada instante pregunto
por el tesoro perdido
cuya sombra se desplaza
con melancólico frío.
Mirándome está el deseo,
nocturno, solo, infinito;
callada va la nostalgia
llameando eternos vestigios.
No llega nunca mi gesto
a la tierra del destino;
la vida acaba inconclusa,
quedan los sueños en vilo."
{Cintio Vitier, Canto llano, 1953-1955}
Algo le falta a la tarde,
no están completos los pinos,
y yo mirando a las nubes
siento lo que no he sentido.
A cada instante pregunto
por el tesoro perdido
cuya sombra se desplaza
con melancólico frío.
Mirándome está el deseo,
nocturno, solo, infinito;
callada va la nostalgia
llameando eternos vestigios.
No llega nunca mi gesto
a la tierra del destino;
la vida acaba inconclusa,
quedan los sueños en vilo."
{Cintio Vitier, Canto llano, 1953-1955}
1.04.2004
Canto llano / Cintio Vitier
I've been reading a magnificent edition of Cintio Vitier's selected poetry: Antología poética (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002). Going back to his early poems in the collection Canto llano, written during the early 1950s. I sense an affinity between his tendency toward the use of traditional forms or meters and that of poets such as Auden, Lorca, Vallejo, and in Venezuela, Ana Enriqueta Terán, Vicente Gerbasi, Arturo Uslar Pietri, Fernando Paz Castillo.
Maybe in alternative ways certain Venezuelan poets follow this formalist passion today: Rafael Cadenas, Luis Alberto Crespo, Jacqueline Goldberg, Patricia Guzmán, Yolanda Pantin, Elizabeth Schön, Alfredo Silva Estrada, and Esdras Parra (among others).
Cintio Vitier is the most important Cuban poet now writing. His extensive bibliography of publications spans from the 1930s to the present. The poems in Canto llano use the quatrain and couplet as a pattern in a formalist gesture, while the context of each poem breaks up the frequencies of those set forms.
Dama pobreza (1992) reminds one of Derek Walcott's creative use (and deconstruction) of traditional English (or, in Vitier's case, Spanish) forms: "Tan cerca de la nada que es lo poco / a que puedo acercarme todavia."
Vitier is, like his friend Ernesto Cardenal, a mystical Catholic poet. Interestingly enough, he was born in 1921 in the United States, in Cayo Hueso, Florida. Reminding us of the proximity of Cuba and Florida. And so, in that geographical sense, Cuban and American poetry are linked. Vitier can also be read as a universal poet, one of the major poets of the Latin American 20th century.
*
"X
Hay una gota en el mar
que es la que está sustentando
su masa verde y amarga,
la opulencia de su llanto.
En el fuego hay una chispa
que es la que está alimentando
como la envidia de un oro
en otra parte llameando.
Hay un soplo entre los aires,
en la levadura de un grano,
tiempla en el todo una nada
que es lo que estoy deseando."
{Cintio Vitier, Canto llano, 1953-1955}
Maybe in alternative ways certain Venezuelan poets follow this formalist passion today: Rafael Cadenas, Luis Alberto Crespo, Jacqueline Goldberg, Patricia Guzmán, Yolanda Pantin, Elizabeth Schön, Alfredo Silva Estrada, and Esdras Parra (among others).
Cintio Vitier is the most important Cuban poet now writing. His extensive bibliography of publications spans from the 1930s to the present. The poems in Canto llano use the quatrain and couplet as a pattern in a formalist gesture, while the context of each poem breaks up the frequencies of those set forms.
Dama pobreza (1992) reminds one of Derek Walcott's creative use (and deconstruction) of traditional English (or, in Vitier's case, Spanish) forms: "Tan cerca de la nada que es lo poco / a que puedo acercarme todavia."
Vitier is, like his friend Ernesto Cardenal, a mystical Catholic poet. Interestingly enough, he was born in 1921 in the United States, in Cayo Hueso, Florida. Reminding us of the proximity of Cuba and Florida. And so, in that geographical sense, Cuban and American poetry are linked. Vitier can also be read as a universal poet, one of the major poets of the Latin American 20th century.
*
"X
Hay una gota en el mar
que es la que está sustentando
su masa verde y amarga,
la opulencia de su llanto.
En el fuego hay una chispa
que es la que está alimentando
como la envidia de un oro
en otra parte llameando.
Hay un soplo entre los aires,
en la levadura de un grano,
tiempla en el todo una nada
que es lo que estoy deseando."
{Cintio Vitier, Canto llano, 1953-1955}
1.03.2004
Textos del desalojo / Antonia Palacios
Antonia Palacios Textos del desalojo (Monte Avila Editores, 1974)
"Te siento crecer oh temible ardimiento. Siento tus vestigios y tus signos, tu duro asentamiento que cimbra la materia. De rodillas. De rodillas te presiento, yo, la extraviada, y tú dejas al desnudo este muñón de ala ya petrificado."
Antonia Palacios Textos del desalojo (Monte Avila Editores, 1974)
"Te siento crecer oh temible ardimiento. Siento tus vestigios y tus signos, tu duro asentamiento que cimbra la materia. De rodillas. De rodillas te presiento, yo, la extraviada, y tú dejas al desnudo este muñón de ala ya petrificado."
1.02.2004
Poetry
is difficult and I always postpone reading, thinking, or writing about it. As with theory and some novels. The reading gets done anyways, after excuses are spent. But the physical world is (obvious) much clearer and unavoidable. It can be beautiful as it was new years eve, in the woods of Port Charlotte, or a backyard view of the Gulf of Mexico another instant. Same as an instant seeing Caracas from the porch of a house in Santa Paula, staring down into the valley from that height, late afternoon into night.
I probably need utilitarian prose, basic signs, just the words in a plain style. Certain slownesses and books we struggle with. Florida highways can carry sadness quickly. Valued friendship and loss over a decade. And the realization of loss, how profound she can be. So, plainer words maybe. No se sabe. Pain speaks directly and clearly, sometimes mumbles.
is difficult and I always postpone reading, thinking, or writing about it. As with theory and some novels. The reading gets done anyways, after excuses are spent. But the physical world is (obvious) much clearer and unavoidable. It can be beautiful as it was new years eve, in the woods of Port Charlotte, or a backyard view of the Gulf of Mexico another instant. Same as an instant seeing Caracas from the porch of a house in Santa Paula, staring down into the valley from that height, late afternoon into night.
I probably need utilitarian prose, basic signs, just the words in a plain style. Certain slownesses and books we struggle with. Florida highways can carry sadness quickly. Valued friendship and loss over a decade. And the realization of loss, how profound she can be. So, plainer words maybe. No se sabe. Pain speaks directly and clearly, sometimes mumbles.
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