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Saturday, March 8th, 2014
Mantener enteras las cosas
Soy la ausencia
del campo
en el campo.
Así es
siempre.
A dondequiera que estoy
soy lo que falta.
Al avanzar
divido el aire
y siempre
entra el aire otra vez
para llenar los vacíos
que ha dejado mi cuerpo.
Tenemos todos motivos
para movernos.
Me muevo
para que se mantengan enteras las cosas.
posted afternoon of March 8th, 2014: 1 response
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from Funeral oration, at the death of JoaquÃn Pasos
by Carlos Martinez Rivas
tr. Jeremy Osner
The drum beat echoing across
the little parade ground,
as if we were at the funeral of some Hero:
that's how I'd like to begin. And just
as must be done, in these Rituals of Death, I'd like
to forget his death; to look to his life --
to the lives of all the heroes now extinguished,
heroes who just like him lit up the night down here --
for many is the young poet who has died in our time.
Across the centuries they call out and we hear
their voices blazing, their distant canticle --
from the depths of the night they call out and reply.
There's not so much that we can know of them: that they were young,
that their feet strode upon this earth. That they knew how to play some instrument.
That they felt the ocean breeze across their forehead,
and looked up to the hills. They loved some girl,
and scribbled all this down til late at night, and crossed lines out,
and one day died. And now their voices blaze in the night.
posted morning of March 8th, 2014: Respond
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Thursday, February 27th, 2014
Here is a poem I have been working on this week. The genesis is as follows: I was thinking about my poem Analogies for Time, and also about the Persistence of Memory. I thought, well, the Persistence of Memory is a suspension of time, time does not progress in a painting, the time on the melting watch will always be 6:55 and the watch will never melt away -- from all this came the line "No hay rÃo para correr a través de este paisaje soñado" -- it's a landscape without a river. Well: a promising line. I spent a while tossing it around and it is seeming not to be so much a poem about that painting, but about a landscape that is outside of time. (Possibly this landscape could be the setting for the eternal city in "El inmortal".) Here is what I've got so far:
No river flows through this immortal landscape, dry and still.
No hunter seeks the spoor of his hallucinated prey.
The jagged cliffs look down on desert -- cliffs of granite, dreary desert --
static sands untouched by wind or moisture, waiting still
for time eternal, the imagined camera pans and zooms
but finds no hint of motion, no decay,
no sign of change for good or ill.
posted evening of February 27th, 2014: Respond
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Saturday, February 22nd, 2014
Two short, untitled poems I wrote this week open the same way:
So he tells you
how her ears perked up
and she strained at the leash
as they walked beneath
the rustling maples.
He wondered
what the dog was sensing,
what presence unfelt by her master
the animal knew.
She shook her head and her collar jingled,
and they quickened their pace.
So he tells you
how she looked at the ice
hanging from the eaves of his house
and said it looked like daggers.
("like daggers" is not exactly right, that ending still needs some work.)
I'm kind of enchanted with this form, which seems like it would work for fiction as well -- It brings you into the past tense very naturally and sets up a framework of person -- narrator, reader, characters. The narrator here is identified as "he" and the reader as "you", and implicitly "I" am the author, prior to the shift of frame of reference that occurs on the second line; and there does not really need to be any mention of "him" or of "you" after this first clause, depending -- he can refer to himself in the first person and tell his story as "I", or I the author can keep referring to him in the third person.(Note I don't think this form would work with an omniscient 3rd-person perspective, which is something I have never tried.)
posted morning of February 22nd, 2014: 2 responses
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Saturday, February 15th, 2014
This time in my native tongue! Happy Valentine's Day, Ellen!
posted afternoon of February 15th, 2014: Respond
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¿Recuerdas bien cuando nos encontramos
en Gomorra? Cuando aún no tenÃas barba --
y yo engrasaba el pelo, iluminada por el farol antes de
verte; éramos jóvenes y con esa juventud nos sonrojábamos
como frutas magulladas. ¿Nos interesó entonces
lo que pasara entre los vecinos
en la oscuridad?
Mientras nos nacÃa la primera hija
al lado del rÃo Jordán, mientras
la rosada cabeza de la segunda
se esforzaba, saliendo de mi cuerpo
como promesa ¿nos preocupó
cómo usaran la lengua
los amigos?
O ¿cuáles grietas nuevas encontraran
para lamer el amor? o ¿cuál carne extraña
encontraran para empujar el placer? En llamarlo
entonces a uno sodomita,
sólo quisimos decir
vecino.
Cuando nos mandaron los ángeles correr
de la ciudad, te acompañé;
pero eses ángeles sabÃan también
que mira la mujer siempre atrás.
Déjame asà decirte, Lot,
cómo lucÃa tu ciudad en llamas
puesto que tú nunca te volviste para mirarla.
Los dedos pegajosos del azufre se arrastraban sobre la piel
de nuestros compatriotas. A pelo quemado apestaba
y a huevos rancios. Observé a los amigos sacando trozos
ardiendo de sus rostros. ¿Hay una forma
tan obscena de amar?
Cúbrete los ojos con fuerza,
hombre, hasta que veas las estrellas. Convéncete
de que miras el cielo.
Pues el hombre que es bastante débil para cerrar los ojos mientras
se castiga a los vecinos por la forma en que se aman merece a un dios
malévolo.
Todo esto te lo dirÃa, Lot,
si no se me hubiera secado océano en la lengua.
En lugar de eso me quedaré aquÃ; mi cuerpo soplará
grano a grano de regreso a la tierra de Canaán
Voy a quedarme aquÃ
y te veré
correr.
posted afternoon of February 15th, 2014: 2 responses
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Tuesday, February 11th, 2014
I saw Sylvia Plath's poem "Mad Girl's Love Song" today and was impressed by the elegance of the form, and thought I would try one.
Aturdir
por J. Osner
parece esencial hacer sentido
las lÃneas cultivo, crecen del centro
los dichos se regresan aturdidos
busco recuerdos hace mucho perdidos
digo los sueños los que yo encuentro
parece esencial hacer sentido
sueños romanticos y sin sentido
visiones que se lucen desde dentro
los dichos se regresan aturdidos
escuchad de cerca, mis queridos
las palabras caen en desencuentro
parece esencial hacer sentido
parece fácil pues ser entendido
pienso; pero cuando me concentro
los dichos se regresan aturdidos
ojalá se vean, comprendidos
los obstáculos los que encuentro
parece esencial hacer sentido
los dichos se regresan aturdidos
posted afternoon of February 11th, 2014: 1 response
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Saturday, February 8th, 2014
I went to two different, entirely copacetic poetry events today. In the afternoon was the Medicine Show Theater poetry workshop, led by Martin Espada who turns out to be a wonderful teacher; the workshop's subject was poems that deal with one's motivation for writing poetry. One of the poems used for introduction of the topic was Espada's own The Playboy Calendar and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. This was almost too neat of a coincidence -- the poetic image I'd been working with all week was "the moving hand writes and having writ moves on," and taking this image as the motivating force for me to write poetry. Here is what I came up with --
A jug of wine and thou: The art of consciousness
by J Osner
nor all your Piety nor Wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line.
So just let roll
this animation
this unhoped-for, imagined moving picture
let move these fingers, moving fingers
moving, writing, moving on
these dancing fingers
twirl
across the page
on the other side of my eyes
and trail their strands of inky meaning
and befuddlement
So just watch the fingers
see what they have to say
remember in the end they're yours
So watch these twining braided lines of florid text
unfold
into sentences and sensations and lineations
evocations of senselessness, fading crenellated echoes
of bifurcation
into written finality
So start now to articulate
the moving meanings that motivate
this text amassing
lines unfolding
and relating
inky meaning
in memory
inky unfolding asemic semantic kernel
of beauty
In the evening, I went to the launch party for the Universidad Desconocida. This is going to be great -- I spoke to Enrique Winter, who will be leading the taller de poesÃa, and found him to be familiar with Huidobro and extremely receptive to the idea of writing in a language not your mother tongue -- he said a non-Spanish-speaking friend had found that the distance from the language allows for more precise, analytical use of the language -- exactly what has drawn me to writing Spanish poetry. So, well, this will be great.
posted evening of February 8th, 2014: 1 response
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Monday, February third, 2014
 Very exciting: a school of Spanish-language writing and literature is being launched in Brooklyn under the compelling name of Bolaño's book of poetry. Go to their launch party on Saturday! (I can't make it because I'm going to a poetry workshop at Medicine Show Theater, about which more anon.) I am planning to enroll in the poetry workshop led by Isabel Cadenas Cañon, and maybe also the writing workshop led by Lina Meruane. Can't wait!
posted evening of February third, 2014: Respond
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Here is a new practice of revision I have been using. I have a couple of notebooks full of rough drafts at this point in a mix of English and Spanish, only a small minority of which I have even read, let alone revised into actual written work. What I've been doing is to scan quickly until I find a passage I like, and then develop it by means of translation: among other things, translating a text forces you to figure out what the core meaning of it is. So in particular, when I'm translating my own rough work with an eye toward revising it, I'm free to modify expression, tone and meaning in the interests of conveying more accurately the underlying sense of the text -- which I may or may not have been well aware of while I was composing the thing. I've had some good luck with this, including the last couple of poems I've posted. Here is a question: Can I (at least for as long as I have untouched raw material) make a daily practice of this? I would like to -- that would not necessarily mean a poem a day posted here, but hopefully a couple of poems a week anyways. Here is today's effort (no translation with this one, just revision in English):
Approaching
by J Osner
It's just dusk now
and the headlights gleam at you
as his front wheels hit that bump
in the road
Purse your lips now,
furrow your brow
as you watch him pulling up
to the curb
the wheels rolling noiselessly
to a stop
posted evening of February third, 2014: Respond
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