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Sunday, June 26th, 2011
I find myself fascinated by Steven White's statement about Alfonso Cortés, Nicaragua's "poeta loco," that he "was prone to fits of violence that coincided with the full moon" -- I am finding in Cortés' poetry some beautiful fragments without its yet coming together for me as a whole. Inscribed on Cortés' tomb in León (adjacent to the tomb of Rubén Dario) is his poem "Supplication."
Time is hunger, space is cold
pray, pray: only supplication
can satisfy the longings of the void.
Dreaming is a lonely rock
where the eagle of the soul can build his nest:
dream, dream, dream the whole day long.
 (I see a couple of references, in the few of Cortés' poems that White includes, to ether -- I wonder if he was a recreational user and if so, whether that had anything to do with his reputation for insanity.)
posted evening of June 26th, 2011: 2 responses
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Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
A lot of writing, and a fair amount of interesting writing, has been done at The Hooded Utilitarian over the past few weeks on the topic of racist images in R. Crumb's work. At the beginning of the month Domingos Isabelinho's strongly negative reference to Angelfood McSpade provoked an enormous, vituperative comments thread. (A large portion of the posts coming from one embarrassingly devoted Crumb fan who will not hear any evil spoken of his object of adoration -- but with plenty of worthwhile thinking as well.) Today, Robert Stanley Martin devotes a lengthy post to the issue, with reference to McSpade, the Cheap Thrills album cover, and Al Jolson(!) And in comments, Noah Berlatsky promises a post of his own about the Cheap Thrills cover.* Well, I'm not sure quite what to make of this... I think of Crumb as a great cartoonist and of the racist and misogynistic imagery as a key, integral part of his work. Certainly worth reading and writing about.
 * Update: Noah's post is here.
Update II: and Sean Michael Robinson's contribution to the conversation.
posted evening of June 22nd, 2011: Respond
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Chad Post of 3% links to an interview with Sergio Chejfec at Fric-Frac Club (and in translation at Read This Next), which includes a hilarious anecdote about Chejfec's first experience (as "a very and consistently bored child" -- which "was a common thing for my generation, at least it’s what I’ve got to think") writing fiction:
One day, it occurred to me to send a fictitious postcard to my mother : it would be written by a sister she had never heard of, who would announce therein that she had numerous revelations to disclose : a dark and scandalous family past, a very sad past, and so on, a real melodrama. In order that the story seem truer, I had to send the card from another country: Paraguay. During my childhood, Paraguay had been for me an exotic country (it was by way of Paraguay that my parents had come secretly into Argentina, after the Second World War). The text was written and I was ready to go buy the postcard at the corner bookstore, on which to to copy it out. But once there, I realized that they didn’t sell postcards for Paraguay, and more problematically even, that I could not send a card from Paraguay! These obstacles proved insurmountable, I had to resign myself finally to the plan’s failure.
I don’t know if there’s some lesson to be taken from this story, or whether to consider it a major defeat. I think that today I would not assign so much importance to details, which seemed so essential then to the making of a credible story. But it was the first time I wrote a fiction and I still remember my anxiety on the walk to the bookstore, in search of a postcard for Asunción del Paraguay.
posted evening of June 22nd, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, June 18th, 2011
I cooked dinner tonight from my very favorite cookbook, one that I've been going back to for more than 20 years now. It was an excellent dinner; and finding that  I've never written about this cookbook on this blog, I feel I should remedy that oversight -- if you're interested in learning to cook this style of food, I can't recommend this book highly enough.
The book is The Spice Box: Vegetarian Indian Cookbook, by Manju Singh. It is a thin book, about 200 pages, filled with terse recipes generally a half-page long or so. The first few pages describe cooking techniques and spice mixtures and repay endless re-reading; with this information in mind the brief recipes are easy to follow and delicious. Singh's genius lies in not over-specifying ingredients and cooking directions. All instructions are simple and to the point; and it is easy to vary the recipes to your own tastes and to use what ingredients you have on hand. Dinner tonight (which was inspired by the need for something to complement the delicious mango pickles Huzefa gave us) was a vegetable curry with cauliflower and potatoes, pink lentil curry, coriander chutney, and an improvised raita; the four dishes took a total of about 40 minutes preparation time.
posted evening of June 18th, 2011: Respond
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 On the first anniversary of José Saramago's death, Pilar del RÃo scatters his ashes at the foot of an olive tree in Lisbon. (The tree was transplanted from Saramago's birthplace, Azinhaga.) image via elpais.com
posted evening of June 18th, 2011: 1 response
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Thursday, June 16th, 2011
Happy Bloomsday! In case you're looking for something to read today, I see the Calypso episode is now complete at Ulysses, Seen. Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls...
Oh wow! Also, Robert Berry (author of Ulysses, Seen) is Twittering the events of Ulysses throughout the day today. (He is doing it on Dublin time.) Right now, Stephen is walking down the beach to Sandymount Strand.
posted morning of June 16th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, June 13th, 2011
This is my translation of Pelele's poem "Mutilaciones," which touched me so strongly when I read it last week.
Hacking it Apart
by Eduardo Valverde
The cripple in the morning
is the flight, the flight to nowhere,
is the light, the graveyard's light
that's shining, shining in my windows,
it's the bus, the line of buses
stinking sweetly on the roadway,
it's the cat up on the rooftop
where it's watching over the bells.
Half-blindness in the morning
is the frigid bite of dawn,
and forgetfulness's knockers
have no prince, have just a frog,
with the freezing rain foreseen
inside the blossom of my eyes,
inside the corpses of my
promised lands, still warm.
Half-lameness in the morning
is the spirit of the road,
and I've got my eyes wide open,
got my shrunken spirit's cough;
the sun, the half-lit sun, oh
how it's burning in their motors,
it's the end of every heartbreak,
they're in mourning for their games.
The birds get off scot-free,
my reading glasses going blind,
with whole decades slowly
dawning on this Monday.
A tantalizing thought I had on the train home this evening: with fairly minor rewrites, this poem could be set to the tune of David Rawling's "I Hear Them All".
posted evening of June 13th, 2011: 4 responses
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Saturday, June 11th, 2011
Here are a couple of poems I have written recently. Experimenting with story-telling and with prosody.
Horizon
The best-laid tracks converge, they meet
way out there by the setting sun
confounding engineering dreams perspective in the desert
where the train runs off the vanished rails and crashes, yes,
it's tragic, sad-sack Sam the goldrush pioneer will never see his lover
who was riding west to meet him, look how Jesse and his outlaws
are confused, the hold-up won't play out, they may just ride their horses over the edge behind the train or else perhaps they'll turn back just in time, they'll skirt impending doom and spend their days retelling stories of the one that got away.
Crystal Armies
Fit the image to the meter
We can print it when you're done
When the armies that you're dreaming
Wander sleepy off the page and
Wave their effervescent banners
To the rhythm of your drum.
Marching softly, scarcely there,
You have to strain to make them out
Their dusty footprints on the pages
Almost like a printer's error
When they finally encamp
Inside your thawed out cerebellum
They'll build ghostly fires and sing
About the journeys of their fathers
And you'll scratch your forehead wondering
(In your clarity of vision)
Where the simple, crystal image
Of your verbal armies went.
I'd like to thank Pelele of Muchacha Recostada, who has posted what I believe to be a great poem, Mutilaciones (from 2009) -- my working definition of a great poem is one the reading of which alters how you read and write poetry -- I believe that "Mutilaciones," with its frantic, driving meter and its clarity of vision, will have a permanent effect on my reading of poetry and on my poetic output. "Crystal Armies" is written strongly under the influence of Pelele's piece. I'm working on a translation of "Mutilaciones"* which will be my first time (even dreaming of) translating a metered poem -- I do not think I am going to be able to keep the rhyme, but the meter is coming through very naturally.
* Update: translation is here.
posted morning of June 11th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, June 5th, 2011
My experiences this past week or so with reading Beckett's Comment C'est were leading me to wonder where the distinction lies between poetry and novel -- in his introduction Richard Seaver refers to Beckett's work as a novel, but very soon after I started reading it I had the thought, this is not a novel, it's a long poem. What did I mean by saying that? A key difficulty I have with long poems (not considering epic narrative verse here) is not being able to put them down and then pick them back up in the middle -- every time I pick up Comment C'est I commence on the first page, because there is not any story line for me to keep track of or characters (besides Beckett himself) or any of the sort of progression and development that I expect to see in a novel. This keeps me from getting anywhere with the book (beyond loving the opening pages anyways), because it is much too long to read all of in a single sitting. In a sort of funny coincidence, I was having a similar problem with the much shorter long poem Canto de guerra de las cosas, by JoachÃn Pasos -- as I wrote below, it is simply too much imagery for me to absorb all at once... Likely a successful reading strategy for the Beckett piece would involve focusing on little bits of it at a time, not on trying prematurely to integrate the pieces together. When I hit on that question -- what do I mean by calling the Beckett poetry "rather than" fiction -- my initial response was along the lines of, well, no plot, no characters, no development, the meat of the piece is its language and the imagery called forth. But, well, language and imagery are of primary importance in many of my favorite novels, ones that I categorize as fiction with no questions. Narrative quality is a key point -- Comment C'est is not a narrative in any sense that I can see. But there are poems (again disregarding epic) that tell stories, and that I don't hesitate to call poetry or confuse with fiction... I think where this is headed is that there is a wide space between the two categories, that individual works can be in one category but have attributes of the other. And somehow I always just seem to know instinctively which category the work I am reading belongs in.
posted evening of June 5th, 2011: Respond
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¿Cómo puedo entender el «Canto de guerra de las cosas»? JoachÃn Pasos me parece periodista incrustado en el ejército de la existencia... Es un poema largo, 19 estrofas, 150 lÃneas, cada lÃnea (casà cada lÃnea) dibujando su propia imagen y cada estrofa surgiendo de estas imágenes en un cuadro complejo y múltiple. Todo junto es demasiado (para mÃ) para mantener... Me parece que el mejor camino de entender el poema entero y también de traducirlo, es bien entender cada lÃnea y cada estrofa, trabajar desde las raÃces del árbol más bien que intentar todo en una vez comprender.
posted morning of June 5th, 2011: Respond
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