Poem Excerpt: Bhanu Kapil

This past winter quarter, I taught excerpts from Bhanu Kapil's narrative Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006--also a former J's Theater Book of the Month pick), as part of my unit on transhumanism/posthumanism, a topic my colleague Alex Weheliye had first hipped me to some years ago, but which it took me, in my usual fashion, a while to assemble in my head. (Tisa B., the Afro-futurists, and others also pointed the way forward.) I'm not sure how much the students got from our conversation about the book, which I felt was a bit rushed given the time constraints--in my ideal class we would have many, many weeks to luxuriate in reading and discussing any text or film or performance we were exploring--but in rereading it, I was struck again by what a remarkable little intervention it is. At its heart are a series of complex and artful algorithms connecting the immigrant Other to the alien/cyborg, based on her own experiences but also reconstructed as a lattice of interlinking and interanimating images, metaphors and metonyms, and structured as a chain of linked narratives. It is an incubatory space, not just for monsters, but for thinking itself. Here're two passages that work as an excerpt and give a sense, in distilled form, of what she achieves in this book. Enjoy!

19. SOFT CRAZINESS: VISUAL MEMORIES, POST-OP

I was a monster but the surgeon said no. You have your mother's eyes. My mother, smiling euphorically, smoothed the aluminum foil over the pillow and went to sleep, dreaming of mechanical sheep flying through a sky of tungsten. Copper and tulle. This thing she pushed off. This "but in the air." This "but the air changes your body." It was me. We communicated in silence. Then I left: a descent. Soft craziness. Drifts of freeable matter. I was three months old but I did it, I rolled out of bed. I rolled out the door and I rolled through London in the deep of night until I reached the river. There, in the Thames, was a black swan with an orange nub on his beak. I think he had wings. I rolled into the water and bobbed there a few moments, like an olive or a rose or a dog, until he saw me and came over to where Iwas with great force. By my neck he took me in his beak and put me on his back. Then the ocean. How small we are, in this image, my mother, Mr. Swan, and I. There is an incredible sense of openness: a luminous intensity in which darkness has a part. When it rained, hours into our long journey to America, I saw citron-yellow flashes in the sky. I reached my little hand out as if taking the light in, through the palm, then touched the long neck of the black swan, feeling his muscles contract then relax as he moved further out into the environment. "Hungry. Want naan. Want chole. Want dudhoo. (Yeast-free bread, chickpea curry, and milk.) Are we there yet?" I have a cousin in Elizabeth, New Jersey. As children in India, we washed our feet each morning beneath a pump. At night, when the electricity went out, our grandmother poured oil into little earthenware cups then slipped in wicks of cotton and lit them and we washed like that, illuminated.

Shimmery from my sea voyage, will I be recognized to my cousin? Or will she scream, slam the door in my face, and resume her life as a citizen, a computer programmer, though she is younger than me and pregnant with her second child, or so I heard?

Copyright © Bhanu Kapil, from Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Brooklyn: Leon Works, 2006. All rights reserved.

Poem: Stephanie Bolster

Our neighbor to the north--Canada, I mean--has numerous fine authors and a vibrant literary scene that often, but not always, intersects with our own. We share at least one common language, English, but it's probably fair to say that Canadian writers often are more aware of what US writers are up to than the other way around. We tend to look in the mirror, rather than turn a full circle and see what's going on out the window, the door, in the fields and mountains surrounding us. As the last 8 years demonstrated, that can be a terrible problem when we elect (or allow to seize office) people who don't have a clue about the rest of the world, including our two closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico. (And truthfully, do you think our previous president knew what city was Canada's capital before he took office?) Of course one could make the argument that national boundaries are insignificant, and that we should, if we must, categorize works in other ways, and I think there're powerful arguments to be made on that account. Nevertheless, here is one Canadian poet, Stephanie Bolster, who lives in Québec, teaches at Concordia University, and has received a raft of honors for her books, which include White Stone: The Alice Poems, Two Bowls of Milk, and Pavilion. From the Parliamentary Library Poet Laureate website (something like our Library of Congress Poet Laureate, I believe), which features a number of contemporary Canadian poets, I chose the following poem, ekphrastic in its mode, in part because of how its syntax creates a fluidity of meaning that reflects the both the static and dynamic qualities of the tapestry it's depicting, which includes the labor of the tapestry's weavers, which we might quite naturally not even take into account, and the image, static as it hangs on the Cloisters' wall, but dynamic in its unfolding in our mind's eye, with the fantastical unicorn at its center. The slant rhymes and consonance in particular grab me. Enjoy.

TAPESTRY, THE CLOISTERS

The unicorn made of stitches of hands by the thousands
of hours in Ghent or Bruges or possibly years.
The unicorn held in a ring of pickets
his beard and buckled collar and blood where they caught him.
All around the flowers with the names of Venetian glass
the hellebore and unbidden berries. All around a place
they went to day and night the candles straining the eyes.
Skin softened by wool the sheep in the field the wolf.
At this great distance the horn is the pinnacle
as tall as the beast is rampant its tip a single thread
squinted over an instant still flinching.

Copyright © Stephanie Bolster, Library of Parliament, Canada, 2009. All rights reserved.

Poem: Maria Attanasio

Infrequently I find myself browsing through a literary journal, and I come across something I hadn't seen before. And so it was with the Number 7 issue of Aufgabe, the Litmus Press literary journal out of Brooklyn, that regularly features works in translation, from the literature of Japan, Brazil, Mexico, and Morocco, as well as innovative American poetry. (I appeared in its pages some years ago.) My Chitown-area colleague, poet and critic Jennifer Scappetone, who teaches at the University of Chicago, guest-edited a section entitled "Ultima poesia"/"Italian Poetry Now," which is to say, contemporary innovative Italian poetry that would hardly be out of place--in translation--in a wide array of contemporary US reading venues, journals, classrooms, workshops. Jennifer has penned an introduction to the selection that helpfully situates this poetry in relation to current global and Italian poetics, noting in particular how the internet is providing new sources of inspiration, such as the Kootenay school, Flarf, and so on, though Italy's and Europe's literary traditions, Jennifer notes, also provide many starting points. Here, then, is a poem, by poet Maria Attanasio (1943-), new to me, that hasped my attention; it's from a group of poems that are excerpted from a larger work whose Italian title is Amnesia del movimento delle nuvole, which in English is Amnesia of the Movement of Clouds. This is only one of Attanasio's books; she is one of the leading lights of Sicilian and Italian writing, and a maestra not only of poetry, but of fiction as well, having won the 2007 Vittorini Prize for her historical novel Il falsario di Caltagirone. Notize e ragguagli sul curioso caso di Paolo Ciulla (2007). Here is how the Italian writer Vincenzo Consolo describes her in his narrative L'olivo e l'olivastro (1994), which I found on the Carte allineate: recensioni e testi blog:

seated at her computer like a Mena or Penelope at her loom, weaving a tender and amazing story about the seventeenth-century young and beautiful Francisca who, left a widow, dresses up as a man, transforms herself into farm-hand to work with the men in the countryside....(pp. 69-70)

The snippets sounds even more majestic in the original Italian. But back to her poetry, where her attentiveness to language is on full display. Enjoy.

sentivo ogni giorno ...

Sentivo ogni giorno un indice destro
digitarmi ma no riuscii a decifrare
il tocco a spirale che accese
la dialettica dell'onda e del veliero
le ombre degli alberi contro il cielo di notte.
Fu sete guerra nucleo radioattivo
passando come un ruore d'acqua persa
tra gli strati di buio e di chiarore
la forma oscura che me dorme accanto
--ferita mai riscattata dalla storia. Un virus
risalì i circuiti cancellò la schermata.

I felt each day ...

I felt each day an index of the right hand
digitize me but I could not decipher
the spiral touch that turned on
the dialectic of wave and mast
the shadows of the trees against the night sky.
It was silk war radioactive nucleus
passing by like a noise of water lost
between layers of darkness and glimmering
the obscure form that sleeps next to me
--wound never redeemed by history. A virus
reclimbed the circuits erased the screen.

Translated by Carla Billitteri.

Copyright © Maria Attanasio, Litmus Press, from Aufgabe Number 7, 2008. All rights, reserved.

You can see Maria Attanasio, Jennifer, and a host of other Italian poets at two different events sponsored by Poets House in NYC this May.

Cuba Photos 2

Slowly but surely I'm posting the poetry posts from last week, so the Cuba thoughts will have to wait till tomorrow, but until then, here're some more photos.


A clothing vendor at the market, Old Havana

Farmer, Main Street, Pinar del Rio

Gumbo limbo (?) trees, Pinar del Rio

Street scene, near Old Havana and Centro

Sailors on the Malecon, Havana

First-year Institute of Higher Arts student Wilber Aguilera with his ceramic wall sculpture based on Munch's "The Cry"

The drive from the José Martí International Airport in Havana

Remembering Sedgwick & Ballard + Poem: Adrienne Rich

I will post about the Cuba trip later today, but I wanted to note to recent departures from the world of arts and letters, one I heard about only when I got back (I had almost no net access while away), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and one I read about this morning, J. G. Ballard. Both Sedgwick and Ballard were pathblazers, in very different ways, and global literary studies in the former's case, and fiction and science fiction in the latter's, would look quite different had they not appeared. Both have also been very important to me in many ways, as a creative writer, as a teacher, as a critic, and as someone trying always to think about how we see the world and the multifarious ways it works. Both were quite fearless in their work; for Sedgwick it meant trampling on binaristic assumptions that still grip our public and private discourses when it comes to gender and sexuality and how they function in the world, while for Ballard, it involved writing texts that could be read as pessimistic, anti-humanistic, sexist, and obscene. Not that such criticisms stopped either of them.

In the case of Kosofsky Sedgwick, as is now well known, her first two studies, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Tendencies (1993), the text I have studied most closely, have been foundational in what many scholars, students, artists, critics, and increasingly the broader public may now take for granted, the field of queer studies, and the articulation of much more complex readings of the relationship between gender, sexuality, literary and cultural texts, discourse, performance, and related concepts. With each of these studies, the complexity of her argument, and her openness to a range of possible conceptual and performative axes, expanded. These critical texts, along with her teaching, raft of other publications, and public conversations and advocacy with an wide array of other notable scholars, artists and critics in and around gender, queer and performance studies, liberatory politics and practice/praxis, and critical theory, have remade the critical landscape in many humanities fields, while also helping to change discussions about the role of critics in shaping the public discourse around these topics. Though a self-described straight woman, she was truly emblematic of the complex and beautiful queerness she explicated and explored. Eve Sedgwick befriended and championed the work of the important, late black queer writer Gary Fisher (Gary In Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher [1996]). (I should note that I recall the time I first heard her speak about Fisher, just before the book came out, and took her role in its production and publication quite skeptically, though Robert Reid-Pharr calmed me in the moment, and later I read the book and, after much rumination--because it is still a difficult book for me to take on many levels--and came to appreciate it, Fisher, and her role in bringing it into the world.) She was also a poet in her own right (Fat Art, Thin Art [1994]), which, like the playful essays in Tendencies, offered her another critical mode (why oh why do so few scholars not follow her example in this regard?). She had taught at a number of institutions, including Duke University and most recently the City University of New York's Graduate Center. She was only 58.

J. G. Ballard, a Shanghai native and trained physician, was one of the leading British and English-language experimentalists and of the late 20th century. His works could easily be described as "queer" in a different sense; they are often called science fiction or dystopic fiction, but in a number of them, at the level of narrative, they defy categorization. It's easy to forget, given the popularity of his more mainstream books, such as Empire of the Sun (1984), which later became an acclaimed Steven Spielberg film, which obituaries today have been highlighting, and The Kindness of Women (1991), how utterly strange and singular books like The Crystal World (1966), Crash (1973), which David Cronenberg masterfully turned into a cinematic shocker in 1996, Concrete Island (1974), and my personal favorite, one of the most perverse, draw-dropping, and horrifyingly sublime books in all of English-language literature, The Atrocity Exhibition* (1969) really are. Riding the genre line multiple ways and breaking not only formal boundaries but thematic and content ones as well, Ballard managed to delve perhaps more deeply than many of his fiction-writing peers into the ways in which our endlessly and excessively technologically mediated society was transforming, in a phenomenological sense and at a neuropsychological level, our experiences of the world. As his readers know, an adjective, Ballardian, has been coined to describe essential aspects of his style and dystopian thematics. The proliferation and normalization of paraphilias far beyond concerns about sexuality and pornography, the incessant and life-devouring obsession with mass media and hypercelebrity, the increasing struggle and ecological destruction produced by capitalism's churning engine, the spreading paranoia produced by the creeping global, govenrmental and corporate panoptican, and so much more, can be found in germinal and distilled versions throughout his oeuvre. This body of work influenced a wide range of artists across fields, but especially other fiction writers and many musicians, including groups such as Joy Division, The Normal, the Buggles, Jawbox, Radiohead, and many others. And Ballard did not let up: one of the last novels he wrote that I read, Super-Cannes (2000), refines these interests into what appears to be a straightforward realist narrative that slowly but surely turns bizarre, in quintessential late Ballardian style. He also published nearly two dozen collections of stories, a collection of essays, and an autobiography, and also wrote for film and TV. He was 78.

*As I never tire of telling students, there are different forms of censorship. Apocryphally Ballard experienced one form in the US when publisher Nelson Doubleday decided to glance at Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition and was so disturbed--very likely by the references to the late President Kennedy and his widow, and to the extremely graphic short story/chapter whose title included the words "Ronald Reagan" (Ballard was quite a visionary)--that he ordered the entire press run pulped. The entire press run. Jonathan Cape published the volume in the UK, and it later appeared in the US first under a different title, and then under Sylvère Lotringer's Re/Search imprint, with fetching graphic photos. You're forwarned....

>>>

The poem I'm choosing today is by one of my favorite poets, Adrienne Rich, and it's from her "Twenty-One Love Poems," which appeared first as a stand-alone collection in 1976 and then in her volume The Dream of a Common Language (1978). It is worth reading all 21 of these poems, as they economically and incomparably demonstrate poetry's capacity to express desire and love--and in the case of these poems, specifically the love between women. Thinking of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and J. G. Ballard, I am posting Poem VII, "What kind of beast would turn its life into words?"

Love Poem VII

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
--and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living.
Is all this close to the wolverines' howled signals,
that modulated cantata of the wild?
or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing the worst thing of all--
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionate enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

Copyright © 1988, from Gay & Lesbian Poetry In Our Time, Carl Morse and Joan Larkin, editors, New York, St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved.

Cuba Photos 1

I don't have time to post my thoughts on my trip last week with a group of educators and artists to Cuba, but I am going to post a few photos to give a sense of what I saw (and photographed). More soon (CLICK on them to get the full image, because the website browser often truncates them), including more poetry. Enjoy!


Street scene, Habana (Central neighborhood)


Lovers on the Malecon, Habana


Coffee bean drying terraces and circles, Buena Vista plantation, Pinar del Rio


At the outdoor rhumba party at UNEAC


Two women, Viñales, Pinar del Rio province


Ministry of Interior, Habana


Street scene, Pinar del Rio city

Poem: Virgilio Piñera

(finally posted)
And now, having mentioned or invoked him and his work via his peers or poets of successive generations who write under his star, I present Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979), poet, playwright of the highest acclaim, and equally acclaimed author of several novels, including René's Flesh (La carne de René), he spent his last decades esteemed by some fellow writers, especially younger ones, and some critics, and a persona non grata to the government. Earlier he had been a member of the circle around the literary journal Orígenes, which also included Lezama Lima, and, during his stay in Argentina, had befriended and translated the work of Witold Gombrowicz, which also influenced several subsequent generations. Piñera's outspokenness on social and sexual issues was ahead of its time, as was his art, but no one with a distinctive vision can worry about that: as he himself writes below: "So I was, so I lived / so I dreamed." Indeed.

TESTAMENTO

Como he sido iconoclasta

me niego a que me hagan estatua:

si en la vida he sido carne,

en la muerte no quiero ser mármol.

Como yo soy de un lugar

de demonios y de ángeles,

en ángel y demonio muerto

seguiré por esas calles…

En tal eternidad veré

nuevos demonios y ángeles,

con ellos conversaré

en un lenguaje cifrado.

Y todos entenderán

el yo no lloro, mi hermano….

Así fui, así viví,

así soñé. Pasé el trance.

Copyright © 2008, the estate of Virgilio Piñera. All rights reserved.

Poem: Antonio José Ponte

(finally posted)
A few years ago, I came across Antonio José Ponte's (1964-) two translated collection of stories, In the Cold of the Malecon and Other Stories (City Lights, 2000, translated by Cola Franzen and Dick Cluster) and Tales from the Cuban Empire (City Lights, 2002, also translated by Cola Franzen), both of which charmed me. I was under the impression that he was mainly a fiction writer, but like many an author outside the US, he covers all the beds: he has published collections of poetry, many volumes of essays, a novel, and a novella, among other things, both inside and outside Cuba. He's also collaborated on a book of essays. All of which is to say that Ponte is one of the most prodigious figures of his generation of Cuban writers, and his renown exceeds the Straits of Florida and the Caribbean Sea. Here's a poem so that you can see for yourself.

CAFÉ SIN HOMBRES

Idioma alrededor,
lo que dicen,
perdido.
Y perdido el afán de leer en las cartas,
n o queda conocido
más que el sabor del agua.
La botella
facturada en un chino
que imprimen por la arena
las patas de los pájaros...

Aunque, si se desconoció hasta aquí
qué estrella era la estrella
y cuál árbol el árbol,
no importa ya ignorar.

Puede intentarse mayor extranjería
en un café de perros,
de jíbaros o pulpos,
no se estaría cercado por humanos.

CAFE WITHOUT MEN

Language all around,
what is said
is lost.
And lost is the urge to read the cards,
the taste of water
is all that is still known.
The bottle's
receipt a cluster of signs
the birds' webbed feet
press into the sand...

Although, if no one knew
which star was the star
and which tree was the tree,
ignorance is no longer a concern.

One might propose even a greater oddity:
in a dog's café,
a café of beasts or octopuses,
one would not be fenced in by human beings.

Copyright © 2007, Antonio José Ponte, translation by the poet, from Island of My Hunger: Cuban Poetry Today, Edited and with an Introduction by Francisco Morán, San Francisco: City Lights Books. All rights reserved.

Here's a video of Ponte reading:

Poems: Damaris Calderón

Y hoy, nuestra poetisa cubana es: Damaris Calderón (1967-). Like Alessandra Molina and unlike many of the older poets here, she was born after the Revolution, and lived in Cuba until she moved to Chile, where she now resides and is publishing books and studying. Since her early 20s she's been winning national poetry prizes, and has published her work in three collections as well as in many periodicals both within and outside Cuba. Her work's distinctiveness will be instantly apparent when you read it, so I'll post two poems by her, to give you a sense of her voice, which is often ironic and caustic. And always worth hearing and reading.

Césped inglés

Los segadores
tienen una rara vocación por la simetría
y recortan las palabras sicomoro,
serbal, abeto, roble.
Guardan las proporciones
como guardan sus partes pudendas—
Y ejercen sin condescendencia
el orden universal
porque el hombre
--como el pasto—
también debe ser cortado

English Lawn

Reapers
have a rare vocation for symmetry
they clip the words sycamore,
service tree, fir, elm.
They guard proportions
as they guard their private parts—
and enact without indulgence
the universal order
because man too
--like a lawn—
must be mown down.

Cielo boca abajo

No,
el cielo no se tiende
como un paciente
anestesiado
sobre la mesa
El paciente
en su camilla
anestesiado de sí mismo
no mira al cielo
espera
el corte
el bisturí
que haga saltar al potro de su infancia
y las canciones natales que volverán
con las agujas hipodérmicas.

Sky Face Down

No,
the sky is not stretched out
like a patient
anesthetized
upon the table
The patient
on his stretcher
anesthetized to self
is not looking at the sky
he awaits
the cut
the scalpel
that will make the colt of childhood leap
and the birth songs come rushing back
with the hypodermic needles.

Translated by Barbara Jamison

Copyright © 2007, Damaris Calderón, translated by Barbara Jamison, from Island of My Hunger: Cuban Poetry Today, Edited and with an introduction by Francisco Morán, San Francisco: City Light Books. All rights reserved.

Poem: Heberto Padilla

(finally posted)
In 1971, poet Heberto Padilla (1932-2000, at right) became an international cause celèbre after Fidel Castro's regime imprisoned him and released him only after forcing him to publicly confess that he was active in counterrevolutionary activities. In the process, he denounced his wife, Belkis Cuza Malé (1942-), also a notable writer now living in Texas, though they reconciled. What sparked this was Padilla's having won Cuba's top literary prize, the Premio Julian de Casal, for a collection of poems, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game), that openly critiqued Cuba's ever tightening post-Revolutionary political restraints and its emphasis on pro-government, social realist art. His imprisonment and forced self-denunciation, which followed the imprisonment, harassment or shunning of a number of prominent socially or politically dissident figures in the arts, provoked 60 highly regarded international writers and culture workers, including strong supporters of the Cuban Revolution, to protest to Castro. The incident also overshadowed Padilla's poetry, which constitutes a substantial--and in the eyes of some critics, the most important--opus in contemporary Cuban poetry. By the time he immigrated to the US, in 1980, he had completely fallen out of favor with the Castro regime, but was widely acclaimed overseas; by the time he died of natural causes in Auburn, Alabama in 2000, he was little mourned back home and merited little commentary among non-Spanish-speaking literary communities. Beside the man as political icon, symbol, tool, as I said, there is the poetry, a great deal of it, and it's very good. So let's read some. Here's one of Padilla's poems that keeps ringing in my head like a chime, from the collection Legacies: Selected Poems (FSG, 1980).

EN LUGAR DEL AMOR

Siempre, más allá de tus hombros veo al mundo.
Chispea bajo los temporales.
Es un pedrazo de madera podrida, un farol viejo
que alguien menea como a contracorriente.
El mundo que nuestros cuerpos
(que nuestra soledad) no pueden abolir,
un siglo de zapadores y hombres ranas
debajo de tu almohada,
en el lugar en que tus hombros
se hacen más tibios y más frágiles.
Siempre, mas allá de tus hombros
(es algo que ya nunca podremos evitar)
hay una lista de desaparecidos,
hay una aldea destruida,
hay un niño que tiembla.

IN LOVE'S PLACE

Always, over your shoulder, I see the world.
It gives off sparks in storms.
It is a piece of rotten wood, an old lantern
that someone waves as though against the wind,
the world that our bodies
(our solitude) cannot blot out,
an age of sappers and frogmen
under your pillow,
in the place where your shoulders
turn cooler, more fragile.
Always, over your shoulder
(something that now we can never avoid),
there is a list of missing persons,
a village destroyed,
a child trembling.

Translated by Alaistair Reid and Andrew Hurley

Copyright © 1980, Heberto Padilla, from Legacies: Selected Poems, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. All rights reserved.

Poem: Alessandra Molina

(finally posted)
Reading through poet Francisco Morán's anthology, Island of My Hunger: Cuban Poetry Today (City Lights Books, 2007), Alessandra Molina (1968-), one of the youngest writers in that collection, was also one of the poets who struck me most, both because of her almost obsessive return in several poems to personal themes, drawn, as I far as I can tell, from domestic fragments and childhood memories, but also because of those points in all of them, often subtle, where a rhetorical shift, carefully placed, or a repeated phrase or image transformed what might appear to be a straightforward poem into something unexpected, delightful and profound. Havana native Molina has published several books, including Anfiteatro entre los pinos (1999) and As de triunfo (2000, 2001), and has received a number of Cuban and international literary poetry prizes. She lives in Cuba. Here is a poem from Morán's anthology; I don't particularly like Peter Bush's Briticisms, so I may try my own translation soon.

EL GUARDIÁN

Dentro del barrio, entre las casas de familias, abrieron la explanada. Es la nueva oficina de leer direcciones y matasellos. Hacia el mediodía el cuadilátero está lleno de bultos con anillos postales y ribetes de colores. Después, poco a poco desaperecen y las almendras que caen cubren el asfalto. Se va al pájaro picar y a los destinatarios que han llegado tarde alzarse desconsolados sobre las cercas. La explanada está vacía, las oficinas cerradas. Alguien, por ahora un joven, vela ese espacio. La caja de las cajas, un cuadilátero de sol, líneas que convergen y forman un incandescencia, fulgores de la promesa que podrían ser atravesados. El guardián va por los bordes, donde hay sombra, el hormigón está húmedo y las hojas amontonadas. Su silencio es el silencio de la tarde. Asoma por un ángulo, ve a los que pasan y parece que es él quien acecha. De pasos lentos, cada vez más estático, ni los colores del uniforme recién estrenado simulan esa ráfaga instintiva, creciente y obscena, de una sexualidad avivada por su idea de un interior y por el tedio.

THE SENTINEL

They opened up the esplanade in the barrio, among family housing. It's the new office for reading addresses and postmarks. Around midday the rectangle's full of packages, postal seals and colored ribbons. Then gradually they disappear and ripe almonds fall, cover the asphalt. You see a bird peck away and late-comers for the post disconsolately shin up fences. The esplanade is empty, the offices closed. Someone, a young lad for the moment, watches that space. A box for the boxes, a rectangle of sun, lines converge, create incandescence, flames of promise that could be crossed. The sentinel walks the perimeter, where there's shade, damp concrete and piles of leaves. His silence is the silence of afternoon. He peers round a corner, sees the people walk by and seemingly he's the one on the prowl. Slow-stepped, ever more ecstatic, not even the colors of his new adopted uniform can conceal an instinctive, growing, obscene charge of sexuality fanned by his idea of an inside and by boredom.

Translated by Peter Bush

Copyright © 2007, Alessandra Molina, from Island of My Hunger: Cuban Poetry Today, edited and with an introduction by Francisco Morán, San Francisco: City Lights Books. All rights reserved.

Poem: Severo Sarduy

(finally posted)
One of the major roots of Cuban culture is Spanish, the other African--and the third, as I've learned, is Chinese. (The Native American contribution, as both Cubans themselves and some studies suggest, is less significant than in many other American cultures.) All come together in the person and work of Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), who was a highly original poet, novelist and critic. Sarduy, who's previously made an appearance in the Theater, when I translated one of his poems, is perhaps less well known than several other writers of his generation, like Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990) or Roberto Fernández Retamar (1930-), but his works, beginning with the novel De donde son los cantantes (From Cuba With a Song, 1967), engraved his centrality to contemporary Cuban and global literature. In terms of his relation to Cuban tradition, he frequently explored the African and Chinese lines within Cuban culture, and was an exemplar of what he called and described critically, with panache, as the "neo-baroque," distinguishing it both from his predecessor José Lezama Lima's own 20th century baroque and from the earlier Spanish (and pan-European) Baroque style and mode. As my earlier post on him noted, he went to study in Paris in 1960, right after the Cuban Revolution had begun, became a member of the Tel Quel group and so was deeply immersed in the development of mid-century French critical theory (post-structuralism, specifically) as it was happening. Lacan in particular influences one theoretical strand in his work, though many different theoretical ideas and models (from Barthes to Derrida) deeply mark all his works from the earliest texts. Along with Arenas, Lezama Lima, and Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979), he is also one of the major queer Cuban writers of the 20th century, and his idiosyncratic explorations of homosexuality and transgenderism were decades ahead of their time. We are still catching up.

Here's a brief poem by Sarduy that I found online. When I have some time, I'll try to translate it, but reading it aloud will give you a sense of its compressed intricacies, intimacies, metrics, strangeness. "The wall is bleeding." He's marvelous. Enjoy.

HARLEY RED

El sueño no:
la pérdida.
El blanco roedor,
que ciega.
Pierdo pie. Todo es compuerta.
Mira:
el muro sangra.

Copyright © 2008, the estate of Severo Sarduy. All rights reserved.

And, as an extra delight, a fragment of an interview with Sarduy, discussing his book Cobra (1972), in Spanish:

Poem: Nancy Morejón

(finally posted)
Nancy Morejón (1944-) is a name anyone familiar with contemporary Cuban literature knows well: she is one of Cuba's major poets, translators and critics, and a leading voice in Spanish-language and African Diasporic literature. In 2001, she won Cuba's highest poetry prize. I don't know if I'll have an opportunity to meet with Sra. Morejón when I'm in Havana, but I can say that her poetry has lived within me for a long time. I even featured her poem "Impressions" ("Impresiones") back in 2005, pairing it with a poem by another poet I adore, Thylias Moss. Sisters in conversation.

Since I don't have access to my books right now, I'm culling the Net for poems and links, and I came across this fine, concise discussion of Morejón's work on Brett's "The Shapes You Need Blog." I'm reposting the translation he features of Morejón's "Un patio de la Habana." (I'm not sure who the translator is, but when I find out, I'll post that.) Enjoy.

A HAVANA PATIO

A Havana patio,
as Machado requested,
is dear to memory.
Without tall walls,
without that intrepid glow
of the rainbow,
without the Andalusian flower
grandmother so much demanded
in the flower vases . . .

A Havana patio
preserves the bones of the dead
for they are ample treasures,
a farmer's old seeds.

A patio, ay, from where
so many stars twinkle.

Copyright © 2008, Nancy Morejón. All rights reserved.

And, Nancy Morejón reading her work, in Spanish!

Poem: José Lezama Lima

I'm on my way to Cuba, as part of an educators' tour sponsored by the Center for Cuban Studies in New York and the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (ICAP) in Havana, and I'll write up the trip when I return, but I thought I'd post some Cuban poets (in Spanish, English translation, or both, as I can find them), as part of my Poetry Month offerings. So let's start with a poet I've highlighted before, the inimitable José Lezama Lima (1910-1976), whose work bridges the shift between Latin American modernismo, with its origins in late 19th century and fin-de-siècle symbolism and Latin American and global modernism, the more overtly avant-garde practice that followed. I would of course be remiss if I did not mention in a post on Lezama Lima that one of the signal elements of his style is the baroque, a complex layering of images upon images, much like Cuba itself, and that he authored one of the greatest of all novels written in Cuba, in Latin America, in Spanish: Paradiso. I also take one of his dicta from the opening statement in La expresión americana (1957) as one of my own: "Only difficulty is stimulating...."

MELODÍA

Melodía de la sombra penetra la dureza
de la piel acompañante y ya me pide
un anhelar pasivo que la incline
al borde níveo donde el aire empieza.

Dulce secreto la gaviota o ya se afine
la sombra que extendía la pereza
de la piel, negando que al irse se descuelgue
de la sonrisa en que muere su destreza.

No es melodía ni fuga en la marina
onda rota que recuerda el sueño salpicado
de pluma y pleamar en piel que el aire olvida.

Corvo vidrio en la mano destrenzado.
Frío dardo cayendo más afina
el humo hacia la flauta y olvido deseado.

Copyright © 1999, included in Poesía completa. José Lezama Lima. Edición de César López. Alianza Literaria. Alianza Editorial. Madrid. 1999.

Poem: Harryette Mullen

And another great contemporary poet and one of my former Cave Canem teachers: Harryette Mullen. (Sooner or later I'll have poems by all of them up here.) As the poem below shows, she has enough wit to fuel the mothership. It's from the Academy of American Poets' Poets.org's website. (Now, if only I could figure out a way to bring her to the university.)

BLACK NIKES

We need quarters like King Tut needed a boat. A slave could row him to heaven from his crypt in Egypt full of loot. We've lived quietly among the stars, knowing money isn't what matters. We only bring enough to tip the shuttle driver when we hitch a ride aboard a trailblazer of light. This comet could scour the planet. Make it sparkle like a fresh toilet swirling with blue. Or only come close enough to brush a few lost souls. Time is rotting as our bodies wait for now I lay me down to earth. Noiseless patient spiders paid with dirt when what we want is star dust. If nature abhors an expensive appliance, why does the planet suck ozone? This is a big ticket item, a thickety ride. Please page our home and visit our sigh on the wide world’s ebb. Just point and cluck at our new persuasion shoes. We’re opening the gate that opens our containers for recycling. Time to throw down and take off on our launch. This flight will nail our proof of pudding. The thrill of victory is, we’re exiting earth. We're leaving all this dirt.

Copyright © 1997, 2002 by Harryette Mullen, from Sleeping With the Dictionary, Berkeley: California. All rights reserved.

(H/t to Dramachik for the title correction.)

Poem: Mário de Andrade

The following poem is by one of my favorite poets, Mário de Andrade (1893-1945), who was also a novelist and short story writer, journalist, pianist and ethnomusicologist, art historian and critic, photographer, and professor, and one of the most important figures in Brazilian Modernism. Indeed, in 1922, he and a group of other notable then-young Brazilian writers inaugurated São Paulo's Week of Modern Art, a watershed event in early 20th century Brazilian culture that also established that city as one of the international capitals of the avant-garde. These days this great queer, mixed-race figure is probably best known for his novel Macunaima (1928), which captured the marvelous syncretism of his native country perhaps better than any other fictional work.  Here is one of his poems, in Brazilian and in translation, from Stephen Tapscott's 20th Century Latin American Poetry: An Anthology.

Poem: Wole Soyinka

I'm traveling for the next week or so (I'll say more soon), and thus I'll be posting poems perhaps more sporadically than less, and if so, probably without commentary (depending upon my Internet access), so let me try to get a few up before I'm off for a while. Here's a poem by Wole Soyinka, the great Nigerian author and Nobel laureate, known best for his plays and fiction, but who is also a remarkable poet. The following poem really needs no introduction at all.

IN THE SMALL HOURS

Blue diaphane, tobacco smoke
Serpentine on wet film and wood glaze,
Mutes chrome, wreathes velvet drapes,
Dims the cave of mirrors. Ghost fingers
Comb seaweed hair, stroke acquamarine veins
Of marooned mariners, captives
Of Circe's sultry notes. The barman
Dispenses igneous potions ?
Somnabulist, the band plays on.

Cocktail mixer, silvery fish
Dances for limpet clients.
Applause is steeped in lassitude,
Tangled in webs of lovers' whispers
And artful eyelash of the androgynous.
The hovering notes caress the night
Mellowed deep indigo ?still they play.

Departures linger. Absences do not
Deplete the tavern. They hang over the haze
As exhalations from receded shores. Soon,
Night repossesses the silence, but till dawn
The notes hold sway, smoky
Epiphanies, possessive of the hours.

This music's plaint forgives, redeems
The deafness of the world. Night turns
Homewards, sheathed in notes of solace, pleats
The broken silence of the heart.

Copyright © Wole Soyinka, 2009, all rights reserved.

Good News from the Green Mtn. State + Poem: Taha Muhammad Ali

Vermont joins Iowa, which last week joined Connecticut and the original pathblazer, Massachusetts, in approving same-sex marriage.Vermont, which was the first state to legislate civil unions, is also the first state to enact same-sex marriage legislatively, making its Senate's and today's House override of Republican governor Jim Douglas's veto a major historical triumph. This past week, the New York Times reported on a New England-wide push to legalize same-sex marriage, which I imagine will probably be in place within the next 5 years. Outside of New England, although Proposition 8 canceled out (at least so far) California's Supreme Court ruling permitting same-sex marriage, it remains to be seen whether the current attempts to overturn Prop 8 and maintain the existing marriages will succeed (I hope it will), though in a few years, perhaps less than half a decade, I foresee the state legislature, the new governor, and most California voters supporting new legislation permitting it. Where next? Illinois? New York State? New Jersey? For now, what great news for the Iowans, Vermonters, and now, let's push for the other 45 states to come on board and for full equal, civil rights for everyone.

***

Today's poetry selection is by Taha Muhammad Ali, a Palestinian poet I'm late in coming to, though he has garnered the acclaim of a wide array of the global literati. (Including Michael Palmer.) Today on WNYC, I heard Adina Hoffmann on the hapless Leonard Lopate's show discussing her brand new biography of Ali, entitled My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness (Yale, 2009), which she claims is the first biography of a major Palestinian writer, a claim that strikes me as incredible (Can this be true?)

Hoffman spoke about what distinguishes Ali's work for her, citing his combination of extraordinariness and his very ordinary background and life. Self-taught and a late starter, and still half his time maintaining a shop, Ali has managed to produce a body of work that can stand with the best, not only among his peers in the Middle East, but also globally. I admit that I've only read a handful of his poems, as I'm not that familiar with Palestinian poetry and have tended to read the work of the better known Adonis (whose poetry is more lyrical and experimental) and Mahmoud Darwish (who was work more overtly political), among others, but I found the few Ali poems I've read compelling. Back in 2007 he was featured on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and here's a snippet of what he said to interviewer Jeffrey Brown:

TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: I think there is two kinds of language, one for the news, for the politicians, and this is broad, and one for poetry. And this is beautiful and descriptive. And they are different, very different languages.

JEFFREY BROWN: Muhammad Ali insists that his poetry does speak to the conflict around him, but indirectly.

TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: In my poetry, there is no Palestine, no Israel. But, in my poetry, suffering, sadness, longing, fear, and this is, together, make the results: Palestine and Israel. The art is to take from life something real, then to build it anew with your imagination.

I'm posting the poem whose resonant, antitautological ending provided the title for Hoffman's book. (I found a copy of it on the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center's website.) A trio comprising award-winner Peter Cole, Yaya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin translated it. It's tight.

WARNING

Lovers of hunting,
and beginners seeking your prey:
Don’t aim your rifles
at my happiness,
which isn’t worth
the price of the bullet
(you’d waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine,
like a fawn,
and flees
every which way,
like a partridge,
isn’t happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.

12.IX.88

Copyright © 2000, from Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, Ibis Editions, all rights reserved.

Claro, empieza el Béisbol + Poem: Mónica de la Torre

It's officially Opening Day for the 2009 baseball season (the first game was played yesterday), and my ardor has cooled. Perhaps it's age or my mind on a different trip for a change or mental exhaustion, who knows, but I figure it'll gin up again after a weeks. Across the media spectrum the Yankees' and Mets' new taxpayer subsidized stadiums appear to be generating the major hubbub, when outrage should be the response for these millionaire-stacked teams that could both have afforded to finance out of their own deep pockets these new temples of commerce, but I bet that's far more humbug than any fans, especially supporters of the Yankees and Mets, want to hear now that the roid-reduced pastime is beginning again. Instead, it's now more about whether some team other than the two in New York, or the powerhouse in Boston, or these confounding and constantly underrated Florida squads will dominate. Or will this be the Chicago Cubs' year? Phantoms of failure aside, they do have one of the most solid squads in the National League. For me, it's always about the St. Louis Cardinals, first and foremost. They still have Albert Pujols (above, chrisoleary.com) and a reconstituted Chris Carpenter, but the rest of the team is a collection of question marks. (And strangely, in this day of increasingly diverse and global staffs, of global baseball, more monochrome than anytime since the early 1960s.) If the Cardinals emerge anywhere above the middle of their division, and overperform as they did last year, it'll be a miracle. I am hoping for a Bailout Series: Detroit's young team returns to the post-season to face the Mets. Autos against the capital of the diminished world: not likely, but it would be almost poetic.

***

At the Associate Writing Programs (AWP) conferences, I sort of lose my mind when I enter the book fair and always walk away with more books than I originally intend. One year it took me weeks to realize how many books I'd actually purchased (though my wallet knew right away), and I don't think I've finished reading all of them. This year I was much more restrained, and tried to select books judiciously, focusing on smaller presses, chapbooks, pamphlets, or works by authors I knew who were there to sign them. One book I picked up was Mónica de la Torre's Public Domain (Roof Books, 2008). I first encountered her work in several different literary journals after having heard about her repeatedly from friends who were poets or taught poetry, then I heard her read from her fantastic earlier book Talk Shows (linked at right), at an AWP panel last year in New York. Of my 2009 AWP haul, de la Torre's book is the only one I've managed to read twice, because between the brutal quarter and committee-related reading, I couldn't manage a single other book, of poetry, fiction or nonfiction more than once. But de la Torre's new book did beckon me more than once, perhaps because of its lively engagement with the boundaries between the oral and literary, the material and the virtual, the private and the public, the true and truthy/fictional, information and knowledge, Spanish/English/somebordertongue, those spaces and places of slippage where selves generated by and in language do and don't map onto each other.

A number of these poems do what other poets' poems are attempting to do in terms of relating to our contemporary technologically mediated social conditions, but do so in (to my eye) unexpected and often funny ways. This is a seriously funny, sometimes hilarious book. I'm not sure that like it more than her earlier book, but I have thought about it quite a bit since I've read it. Among its contents are an open-form found-text playlet on the Iraq War, several performance pieces, a email-form poem based mistaken identities, poems about mis- and dis-articulation, a multipage poem about economy (financial, political, linguistic) and the opening suite of poems, "The Crush," that play with several ideas, including lists, lyrics, overheard language, echoes and clichés, desire and notions of the romantic, distortion and noise, and the Babel-like technopolis through which the globe increasingly moves. I kept thinking about Tan Lin's book of found autobiography and how selves are constructed through and in virtuality as I read this section. It's hard to excerpt anything from the book, but here's one short poem from "The Crush" section, an almost ridiculous-seeming sound poem that ends up doing something else by its end. (Here's an essay she wrote on OuLiPo for Poets.org.)

Letters Are What Is in a Name

Tea, yes.
Meat + yams
+ yeast=
Yum.
Sake, más yum.

My Eye,
yé-yé.
My key: task.
Say sky.
Maya skate team,
yay!

¡Ey! ¿Amas?
¿Y tu kama?
Me matas,
me atas.
Súmate.
Tu suma, tema y meta.

My yute tee,
me yuky.
Muy musky.
Sema.

Tame yaks meet meek tusks.
Eye may meat my tusk.
Eye may meet my task.
As a.k.a. Mask.
Ay!



Lists are what they tell you to begin with if you want to be on top of things.

Copyright © 2008, from Public Domain, by Mónica de la Torre, Roof Books, all rights reserved.

Poem: Pura López Colomé

Today's poet was only an incidental reference to me at first, an attribution ("after Pura López Colomé") by the American poet, Michael Palmer, but I thought, if Michael Palmer is writing a poem "after" someone, particularly someone whom I've never heard of (as opposed to those that I have, like Carlos Drummond de Andrade, say), who must that be? And so what a revelation it was the first time I came across this major contemoporary Mexican poet's work, in translation by another great American poet, Forrest Gander (who was also a wonderful colleague some years ago), in the Australian-international online literary journal Jacket. Forrest's book of translations of her work, No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé, was published by Graywolf Press in 2002. Her work, which I imagine is quite difficult to translate, often hermetically explores the self in its multiplicities, her selves, in their relation to language and form, and the poems unfold like journeys in forms that at times appear to be making themselves afresh. Here, then, is a poem by López Colomé, a little lyric fable of sorts with a bitter end, titled "Prism" (from Jacket):

Prism

Those coveting health —
I saw them making their way along the worn path,
the one trailing away from the city,
a part of the world,
a part of my own wounded humanity,
a sweet apparition for whomever awaits
me, living within but apart from me,
in my thirst, in my shifting
moments of trouble and peace.
I was them. I was myself.

They ascend toward Chalma, the pilgrims. Knowing that, on the way, their dry branch will break into blossom. Most are young. They carry water, a sleeping pallet, their daily lives. A few elders. Children on their shoulders. The sanctuary in search of its premises.

At once, with a single question,
their old age woke up in them.
For what do they petition
the Lord they worship,
a Lord whose body
is mortified by today’s exhaustion
and yesterday’s misery?
To be able to go on crying in fury or impotence,

to be able to sicken or to go beyond sickness,
to be able to testify to, to endure the terrifying absence of . . .
at the very core of the horn of plenty,
to be able to forget, yes,
the seven or eight year old ghost
impetuously flying without tail or string
by which it might be tugged back to earth,
to forget the future history,
the missing relinquishments to love.
That?
Oh, body, Lord and Master,
show me a tree made in your image,
synagogues, shrines, mosques,
filled out with your being.

They’ve made camp. Night. Groups of men over here, mixed groups over there, women with babies and children farther off. Around the campfires, standing, squatting. They share neither food nor coffee, each bringing out their own dinner, without making excuse for... and celebrating by sitting on the hard ground, letting the rocks bruise their thighs, nursing the baby in front of strangers. The warmth whelms from the nearness of arms, backs, necks, breasts; not from fire. From blood. There are those falling asleep, those about to, and those keeping vigil. None needs a roof.

All our fates
are measured out as breath
in the songs of stars.
A communion of luminous bodies,
I prayed in terror or envy,
a particular sequence,
a particular translation,
the joy of the indispensable.
Nothing more.

The next morning, full of admiration and rapture, I returned to those places, hoping to breathe in the last smells of what had been dreamt and shared. Going back as though to touch the votive stone, the feet or hands of the worn image of some miraculous saint:

I found nothing but garbage.
The Lord’s mouth agape,
his stinking breath.

Copyright © 2002, 2008, Pura López Colome, Translation by Forrest Gander, all rights reserved.