Paul Hoover's Poetry Blog

Notes on Conceptualisms

2009-07-08T08:54:00.000-07:00

Notes on Conceptualisms is a very likeable and shrewd collaboration by Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). I haven't finished the book yet, but the first half is already packed with my handwritten notes. Its chief theme so far is the allegorical nature of conceptual art:

Allegorical writing is necessarily inconsistent, containing elaborations, recursions, sub-metaphors, fictive conceits, projections, and guisings that combine and recombine both to create the allegorical whole, and to discursively threaten this wholeness. In this sense, allegory implicates Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem: if it is consistent, it is incomplete; if complete, inconsistent.

All conceptual writing is allegorical writing. (p. 15)

And here's an interesting excerpt from pp. 24-25:

One might argue that devaluation is now a traditional / canonical aim of contemporary art. Thus there is now great value in devaluation.

Adorno and Horkheimer: "Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that is is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used" (The Culture Industry: Enlightenment in Mass Deception).

Conceptual writing proposes two end-point responses to this paradox by way of radical mimesis: pure conceptualism and the baroque. Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional textual sense--one does not need to "read" the work as much as think about the idea of the work. In this sense, pure conceptualism's readymade properties capitulate to and mirror the easy consumption / generation of text and the devaluation of reading in the larger culture. Impure conceptualism, manifest in the extreme by the baroque, exaggerates reading in the traditional textual sense. In this sense, its excessive textual properties refuse, and are defeated by, the easy consumption / generation of text and the rejection of reading in the larger culture.

Note: these are strategies of failure.

Note: failure in this sense acts as an assassination of mastery.

Note: failure in this sense serves to irrupt the work, violating it from within.

Note: this invites the reader to redress failure, hallucinate repair.

Success in any event, from the work of Yeats to the Poetry Slams to Kenny Goldsmith, comes with the proper framing and volatility of the SIGN. In conceptual poetry, the entire work is a sign requiring one instantaneous reading (and perhaps later study, such as "Hmm, what was that?"). Goldsmith's The Weather consists entirely of transcribed weather reports from the Northeast U.S. Nothing is written, as such; it is copied from life and transported to the printed page (the art frame). Simplicity is a virtue in such works. On closer look, the editing in The Weather allows for the elegiac in following the fullness and exhaustion of the seasons.

Baroque writing offers a simple sign also, that it intends to be complex, or at least very busy. The first reading warns to be alert and roll with the artifice.

The nice thing about conceptual art is not having to elaborate on it. A one-sentence description will suffice and on to the next conversation piece on your literary mantel. To legitimize the work, you have to actually DO the work of transcription. The power of its simplicity depends on the exhaustiveness of the found details: the literal weight of the book in your hands. Goldsmith's Soliloquy, consisting of every word he spoke during a week of 1996, is 500 pages in length and weighs 1.73 pounds. Like performance poetry, the conceptual work must be understood on the first reading or hearing. In that sense, it is "easy." Difficulty comes at the level of theory, when the art audience begins to question why John Cage simply sat at the piano, rather than played it, in his composition, 4'33". In this respect, conceptual art is always philosophical. The distinction between pure and baroque conceptualism is that between Marcel Duchamp and Wallace Stevens. Both are tongue-in-cheek and pose riddles, but Stevens, who recognizes the power of death, allows for lyricism.

Denver Quarterly 43.4 (2009)

2009-07-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

The following concludes a long interview of me by Joshua Marie Wilkinson that appears in the new issue of Denver Quarterly.

JMW: There’s a lot to navigate for a novice poet/reader these days with so many books, journals, reading series, poets, blogs, presses, anthologies, etc. What’s your advice for somebody starting out in poetry writing?

This is the most difficult question of all, because it calls me out on the essential question, “Why write?” Since it is apparently not to make money, it must be for some other satisfaction, such as fame or a spiritual and/or political calling. I often heard the word “calling” while growing up. One was “called” to service in the church, a profession, or the arts. Having translated Hölderlin, I must have some interest in Transcendental Idealism and the motives of Romanticism, which lead toward inwardness and spirit. I should therefore counsel young poets, in allowing for spirit, to value language as incantation and magic.

I do believe that one’s ambitions in poetry should begin in innocence; that is, in the belief that one may see, know, and transform through words. Innocence includes irony. This perspective holds that communication is possible even in mysterious circumstances, like a Hart Crane or Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. Because it is textured and dynamic, the world speaks. Because we come with certain moods and intentions, it speaks through us differently. The weight of a word varies by its use. It’s not simply what a stone weighs when laid on a scale. Why write? Because life is short, bitter, and sweet.

Spiritual ambition counsels poets to ignore the depredations of the poetry biz. All the getting and spending should be related to the investigations of sensation, memory, and language, not crafting one’s style in order to gain publication in the New Yorker, Paris Review, or Fence.

On the other side of this calculation lies the socioeconomics of poetry, for example, the assigning of value to one poet over another, based on: (1) the perceived importance of their works (2) their position in society, in other words, social class and (3) the good or ill they can do to you as poetry politicians. A young poet would rather have the respect and admiration of an important senior figure, who might further his or her aims by the giving of prizes, blurbs, and publishing contracts. The fiendish plan of the flatterer is to curry favor for as long as it takes to gain advantage over the generous patron; whereupon he withdraws his flattery and seeks to steal all that the patron possesses. See Goneril and Regan. Ancient and abiding, this kind of behavior has its counterpart in the selfish patron, who influences the novice to write in his manner and publicize his importance, but in the end creates an empty entourage. Not one among them is strong enough to surpass the patron, as the patron has arranged.

A true master instructs the student to surpass his own achievement, but no true master is ever surpassed. Think of Plato and Aristotle, Joyce and Beckett, Freud and Jung.

The language I am using is of the courtly era. Most of the politics and social structure of poetry are still medieval. That’s not a bad thing in itself. But many of us lack the graces of court.

On the side of innocence is the long-honored practice of gift exchange. I write the poem as a gift to you, on your wedding, death, or coronation. It is freely written and freely given. This is the world of samizdat and the manuscripts of court and church. Have you read the poems of Donne? Yes, I’ll hand you the tattered manuscript at dinner. It is also the world of the poetry workshop.

Most of the poetry economy is gift-based. But it is not free of self-serving behavior. For example, it is generous of an editor to publish his or her magazine of high standard. The loathing and melancholy appear when one editor publishes another in order to be published in return. Because the great majority of poets have something like a magazine, reading series, or website to offer in exchange, a lot of negotiation and politesse is required. The fact that so many poets are entrepreneurial says something about poetry’s artisanal economic base.

My advice to the student is to aim brilliantly, ridiculously high, which means not playing it cheap; to make friends of other poets they admire, as they are a comfort and help along the way; and, in addition to writing well, to found a magazine and reading series, not for the purpose of gift exchange, but because the poetry you believe in can only be served by you. You are putting your queer shoulder to the wheel. Found only what you can eventually drop by the wayside. The nomadic nature of poetry, as well as history, prefers it that way.

Lance Phillips: These Indicium Tales

2009-06-04T22:14:00.000-07:00

I just wrote the following blurb for Lance Phillips' third book, to be published, like the first two, by Ahsahta Press. A blurb is also a review, so I'm issuing this one two or three months in advance of the book's publication:

Lance Phillips’ poetry takes us immediately into a carnal theater where the word and its thing stagger under the weight of their attraction for each other. Thus actions which are rational and understandable in real life, like having sex and then touching your ear, take on enthralling intensity. The drama of representation is also heightened because the visual frame is a series of quickly changing keyholes; each foreshortened view has immediacy. This is not conventional poetry, in which voluptuous intentions are pursued by means of poetic rhetoric. Lance Phillips’ poetry models consciousness itself. So description won’t do; it’s too removed and slow. Rather than reconstitute, the poet enacts: “Desire and perception meld: moist crease, sun / Wasp, it filled his mouth.” We are first witnesses as now, and again now, worlds interact: “On lips here her body in birds of the air.” To read this book is to experience a series of transformations; in effect, to learn to read all over again.

Inner Time (Adorno 126)

2009-06-04T21:34:00.000-07:00

Adorno (page 126): What appears in the work of art is its inner time . . . . The link between art and real history is the fact that works of art are structured like monads.

This is beautiful thinking. But does time really pass in a work of art, even in works of duration like music and literature? Can a work of art refuse to be a unity and still be structured like a monad? Answer: It can only be a monad by refusing unison. Is a monad’s sense of time eternity? Yes. The monad in art has nothing to do with history and sociology; it is prophetic and hard to comprehend, like prime numbers. Which is more monadic, the nomad or the townsman; the boulder or the butterfly that lands on it?

The Windows (The XYZs of Reason)

2009-05-31T22:17:00.000-07:00

Here are three items of 24 (so far) abecedarian works; also an example of rolling liponymy (no word may repeat). The Windows series seems at this point to contain eccentric and/or formalistic "one-up" works. It grows as a sidebar to other recent work which seems largely to consist of lyric proceduralism. Surface and depth are aspects of intention, but which yearns more? The surface.

A

American boys can distribute equidistant forks,
grant hieratic inflow, jack Klansmen, labor
many noons. Oases parody queasiness
rarely; smitten teenagers understand vacuous waiters,
xenophobic Yankees, zealots.

R

A babysitter, capacious, droll, eats fatigue,
glares. Hackneyed icons jostle knockwurst, lacerate
Machiavellian nannies. Oblivious parents question
reactionary sinners’ taboos. Ugly vulvas wince, while
x-rated ying-yangs zigzag.

K

Alone, bathysmal, certainty doubts each feeling,
gives heart its jasmine kiss, loves
madness, narcissism. Often people quit
reading sad tales until violent wastelands,
xenial, yikker zazzily.

Nomad, Meet Your Monad

2009-03-31T10:51:00.000-07:00

Image by Enrique Chagoya: When Paradise Arrived, 1998.

This talk was presented as part of Los pies en otra tierra: Poetas exiliados y transterrados, a literary conference sponsored by Benémerita Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico, October 28-31, 2008.

Paul Hoover
San Francisco State University

When I was born, in 1946, a majority of people in the U.S. lived on farms, and a subsistence farm could be purchased for the astonishing sum of $400, which was also the price of a new car. Before World War II, the percentage of Gross National Product that went to the military was small, and our army was the size of Sweden’s. There was no such thing as a credit card. My parents never bought anything on interest. They paid cash, as did most people. My mother established a large garden wherever we lived. We subsisted all summer on its produce of green beans, sweet corn, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, and fresh strawberries. When we briefly lived in town, where she could not longer raise her own chickens, my mother purchased live chickens and killed them herself using an axe and a tree stump. One day, the dying bird’s gymnastics left flowerets of blood all over the garden. After that, she covered the thrashing birds with a bushel basket. We ate in a restaurant once a year, on Mother’s Day. It was always the same restaurant. I always ordered the same thing, turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy. We did not eat steaks at home or away, because, I believe, we could not afford them. For religious reasons, we didn’t drink alcohol, smoke, dance, gamble, or curse.

The situation has changed dramatically, but not because I migrated to another country. The country migrated beneath my feet, becoming a land of strip malls, fast food restaurants, corporatism, massive credit card debt, celebrity culture, wars for profit and world control, loss of individual rights, a compromised U. S. constitution, a diminishing number of union jobs, falling wages for average workers, and 50 million citizens without health insurance—you name it, the change has been for the worse. Because the military-industrial complex runs the country, we spend more money for our military than the rest of the world put together. Consumers rather than citizens, we have become reified (sadly, not deified) products of capitalism’s eternal happiness machine. It’s a form of internal exile.

How different would your writing be if you killed your own chickens and dug your own family graves? Would the word “postmodern” still make any sense? Would your writing be just a little closer to fate? You can’t imagine your way out of culture; it is what it is. The sorrow or joy you feel in it will become a part of your work, just as the scent of pine is part of the tree. No matter how far-reaching our knowledge of new technologies, we are still the ones who witnessed and ritualized in family, rooted in unique personal mythologies. Native culture offers comfort; commodity culture offers desire and fear. Because it’s commodity-based, U. S. popular culture lacks the silence and reverence of ceremony; noise and speed wins our attention. This is why poetry is so necessary.

My poetry collection, Poems in Spanish (2005), contains poems written in English as if in Spanish. I had long admired the great poetry of Ibero-Hispanic modernism, from Pessoa and Drummond de Andrade to Lorca, Vallejo, Neruda, and Sabines. Their work had sweep, dance, humor, and depth. For some reason, as a German Protestant idealist norteamericano raised in the Midwest, I felt at home with them. There’s nothing puzzling about it. Poetry is nomadic and seeks a universal condition. It would be nice, but too easy, to say that we all share the native culture of spirit, imagination, and words well used. But queso is not the same thing as cheese. It doesn’t sound, look, or taste the same. And simpatía isn’t the same as sympathy. Nevertheless, poetry’s aesthetic is one of errancy and discovery. We slip and slide through our words until finally we put meaning at rest in the form of the poem. A few days later, it starts to slip again. It has just read Don Quixote and wants to travel the roads of Spain with a joisting lance in hand. Of all the literary genres, poetry most enjoys a migrant condition. It revels in metaphor; its motives are transformational. The sonnet originated in Sicily, the pantoum in Malaysia.

Here are two of the works in Poems in Spanish:

The World as Found

“All these things the creator told me in Alabama.”
—Sun Ra

Mariposa, what a clean word is that!
It can fly around all day
and never get mud on its wings.
It makes a clean sound as it passes right through me—
almost nothing really.

Mud sprawls on the ground, completely helpless.
Who can ever respect it?

Mariposa, butterfly,
so pretty and maybe crazy,
like Blanche Dubois as a girl.
Even Schmetterling
has a cadence true to its ideal.

Words in my mouth
are preparing for summer,
giving birth to themselves again.

It isn’t rocket science.
Everyone knows their names:
barranco and embankment,
noises and ruidos—
get down on your knees and pray!
A beautiful woman is passing,
and, if you insist, a man.
Words of skin and bone.

Where’s my refuge and my trap,
Where do they go when I think them?
All day the words are at me,
coming and going and meaning,
and in the evening also.
It’s the traffic of the world.

But at night, if it happens
that I sink into her body,
there is no word, not even silk,
to tell you what I'm thinking.
Sound spills from my mouth,
shapeless all around us.

Driver’s Song

I shall never reach Danville, Ohio,
Danville distant and lonely.

Black car, small moon,
in the back seat beer.
Because I’ve forgotten the roads
I shall never reach Danville, Ohio.

Over the plains, through Indiana,
where I was lonely also.
Black car, yellow moon.
My dead father keeps watch over me
from an upstairs window.

What a long way from California
and in what a fast car—
invisible to the soul.

Ahead I see death moving slowly on the road.
I know I will touch her clothing
before I ever reach Danville, Ohio.

Danville, distant and lonely.

“Driver’s Song” is a direct appropriation of Lorca’s “Rider’s Song.” The works are parodic but highly serious, nomadic but close to home.

The poet and translator, Pierre Joris, writes in Nomad Poetics: “What is needed now is a nomadic poetics. Its method will be rhizomatic: which is different from collage, i.e., a rhizomatics is not an aesthetics of the fragment, which has dominated poetics since the romantics even as transmogrified by modernism, high and low. . . . A nomadic poetic will cross languages, not just translate, but write in all or any of them.” (5)

Following Deleuze and Guattari, Joris wants a wandering rather than rooted system, a search for nutrients by the poet as desiring-machine. The poet is her/himself multiplicity in a system in which “any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 1606).

Adorno offers a more compact model: “What appears in the work of art is its inner time. . . . The link between art and real history is the fact that works of art are structured like monads” (126). In Pythagoras, the monad is God; in music, it is a single note; in Gnosticism, the beginning or source of All; in The Four Quartets, “the still point of the turning world.” A nomadic trek begins with a dot on the map. The monad exists before the concept of unison, because in the monad there is no difference. First, there’s the monad (everything), then the many, then desire (the nomad) creates the work of art, which is structured like a monad. The monad speeds but at a standstill.

Poems in Spanish are translations of a kind. I have also recently produced a manuscript called Sonnet 56, which consists of 56 versions (traducciónes) of Shakespeare’s sonnet of that number. I would like to present the original and two translations. Noun Plus Seven (N + 7) is a writing game invented by Jean Lescure of Oulipo, acronym in French for Bureau of Potential Literature. It involves replacing every noun in the original with the seventh to follow in the dictionary. Haikuisation is the making of the original into a haiku. For instance, you could “haikuise” the novel War and Peace.

Shakespeare

Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but today by feeding is allayed,
Tomorrow sharp’ned in his former might.

So love be thou, although today thou fill
Thy hungry eyes, ev’n till they wink with fullness.
Tomorrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love with a perpetual dullness.

Let this sad interim like the oceans be
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;

As call it winter, which being full of care,
Makes summer’s welcome, thrice more wished, more rare.

Noun Plus Seven

Sweet love game, renew thy forecaster, be it not said
Thy editor should blunter be than apple-jack,
Which but today by feeling is allayed,
Tonality sharp’ned in his former mildew.

So love game be thou, although today thou fill
Thy hungry eyebright, ev’n till they wink with fullery.
Tomorrow see again, and do not kill
The spirochete of love with a perpetual dumbbell.

Let this sad interleaf like the ocotillo be
Which parts the shortcake, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banker, that when they see
Revelation of love game, more blest may be the vigilante;

As call it winter melon, which being full of carfare,
Makes sumpweed’s wellcurb, thrice more wished, more rare.

Haikuisation

Love, renew thy force.
Thy edge should blunter be than
tomorrow-sharpened.

Sources:

Adorno, T. W. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. William E. Cain, et al (W. W. Norton, 2001): 1601-1609.

Joris, Pierre. Nomad Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

Aesthetic Theory: Adorno 23

2009-03-21T18:38:00.000-07:00

Adorno (23): "Schonberg noted what an easy time Chopin had composing something beautiful because all he needed to do was choose the then little used key of F-sharp major."

PH response: Our definition of beauty changes along with the culture’s tolerance for off-notes and dissonance. In our time, agreement of figure and ground is considered corny. We desire groundless figures and figureless ground. A contemporary guitar site refers to the Hendrix chord, the “7 sharp 9,” to be found on the song “Purple Haze” (E7#9). When struck, it jangled and satisfied the ears of its time. The dissonance in language poetry comes from the long-established device of parataxis, in which images or fragments, often dissimilar, are placed together without a clear purpose. The dissonance to be tolerated in Flarf is the less-than-heroic choice of the Google search engine as a compositional device; with Newlipo, dissonance appears in attention to formal play over seriousness and lyricism. No gravitas, no beauty? But Kenneth Koch's playfulness wasn't without weight. For example:

THE GREEN MEDDLER

Aged in the fire.

Every age has its note. Grunge's blend of dissonant chords and "sludge" with Nirvana's "soft verse, hard chorus," supposedly borrowed from the Pixies, expressed the 90s prescient anxiety about a lost future. In the movie Hype! (1996), a Seattle musician explains that the plaintive Seattle sound resulted from a specific chord structure, but I don't know enough about music to recall how it worked.

Expressing, among other things, the comedy/pathos of the instrument's limitations, John Cage’s Composition for Toy Piano is a dignified and lovely work of art, but initially it may have seemed silly. Because Flarf and Newlipo present their carnivalesque and conceptual qualities first, their dissonance lies in a seeming lack of dignity. But poetry is capable of maintaining carnival and gravitas at the same time: the Beckett in Keaton and the Keaton in Beckett. The clown that never smiles (Keaton), the one that never speaks (Harpo Marx), and the reeling drunk who breaks into gorgeous song are stock types of pathos, just as pathos is a stock mode of comedy, and the ridiculous readily fledges with the sublime. Someone quite late to a performance of Hamlet might suppose, upon seeing the bodies lying all about, that the presentation had been farce.

The return to lyricism in our period arrives just in time for the greatest financial crisis in U.S. history. But that doesn't mean that irony is out of a job, with all the cognitive dissonance in need of words.

Thomas Traherne, 1637-1674

2009-03-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

Thomas Traherne was born in Hereford, England, to a shoemaker’s family but was most likely orphaned, along with his brother Philip, at an early age. Adopted by the family Traherne, he received his B.A. from Oxford University in 1656 and was appointed Rector of Credenhill the following year. Unknown in his own time except for the politically motivated Roman Forgeries. Traherne produced, among other works, Centuries of Meditations, Meditations on the Six Days of Creation, the Ficino notebook, the Dobell sequence of poems, and Poems of Felicity. His literary estate was so carelessly managed by his brother, who also conventionalized the language and spelling of some works, that his poems were first published as the work of Susanna Hopton, a religious leader who had been Traherne's friend. It was not until 1903 that his Dobell poems and meditations began to appear under his own name (Dobell being the scholar who identified their true author). In 1910, Poems of Felicity was published. James Osborne discovered the Select Meditations in an archive in 1964. In 1967 a manuscript of Traherne’s Commentaries of Heaven was plucked from a heap of burning rubbish in Lancashire. It was not until 1982 that the work was identified as Traherne’s at the University of Toronto.

Traherne was an ecstatic neo-Platonist and devotional visionary whose work is consistent both with the English Metaphysical and Romantic styles. Blake and Wordsworth explore similar themes, but they could not have read Traherne’s poetry.

The following excerpt (first two stanzas) of the poem "Sight" is taken from Thomas Traherne: Selected Poems and Prose, edited by Alan Bradford (Penguin Classics, 1991). In the original the poem and title are centered on the page.

Sight

1
Mine infant-eye
Above the sky
Discerning endless space,
Did make me see
Two sights in me;
Three eyes adorn’d my face:
Two luminaries in my flesh
Did me refresh;
But one did lurk within,
Beneath my skin.
That was of greater worth than both the other;
For those were twins, but this had ne’er a brother.

2
Those eyes of sense
That did dispense
Their beams to natural things,
I quickly found
Of narrow bound
To know but earthly springs.
But that which through the heavens went
Was excellent,
And endless; for the ball
Was spiritual:
A visive eye things visible doth see;
But with th’ invisible, invisibles agree.

"The Crisis Was a Heist"

2009-03-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

See Jim Jubak's journal on MSN for an eye-popping opinion about the current financial crisis. I'll quote from the lead paragraph:

Fluke? Credit Crisis Was a Heist

Thanks to a complicit Congress, the reins were systematically loosened on the looters of the financial industry. And they're still at it, looking for new plunder.

It was no accident.

The folks in power in Washington and on Wall Street want to pretend that the current global financial crisis -- you know, the one that reduced household net worth in the United States by $11.2 trillion in 2008, according to the Federal Reserve -- was an accident caused by some unfortunate confluence of greed and asleep-at-the-switch regulators.

What we're now living through, though, is the result of a conscious, planned looting of the world economy. Its roots stretch back decades. And it wouldn't have been possible without the contrivances of the bought-and-paid-for folks who sit in Congress.

Of course, just because the plan blew up on the looters, taking off a financial finger here and a portfolio hand there, you shouldn't have any illusion that they've retired. In fact, in the "solutions" now being proposed -- by Congress -- to fix the global and U.S. financial systems, you can see the looters at work as hard as ever.

Full article at:
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/JubaksJournal/fluke-credit-crisis-was-a-heist.aspx

Desolation : Souvenir

2009-03-14T18:06:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Colorado Review (36.1, Spring 2009), edited by Stephanie G'Schwind, Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, and Matthew Cooperman, just arrived in the mail. I have five poems in it from "Desolation : Souvenir," a fifty page work of three stanzas to the page. Here are two:

the window shakes like water

at the center of sensation
>>>>>which has no edge
the sand mechanic stands
>>>>>nothing windswept sleeps

you can't wear a hat
>>>>>too far inside your head
after the guillotine
>>>>>the impercipient feels
much larger than he is

man is born to die
>>>>>the fold holds him well
life is past time
>>>>>'words are not the word'
memory's a savant
>>>>>shining from its well

goodbye to all the bees

hands joined how?
>>>>>as if in thought dying
as if a song roared
>>>>>the rain forgot to pour
what point in space divides us
>>>>>which one holds us close?

sheerest of walls
>>>>>almost transparent
to feel is to fail
>>>>>venus envy, filial wail

water and bell
>>>>>ringing with each wave
a work of vastness
>>>>>too lucid for the mind
behind what wall
>>>>>is the private sacrifice?

My Favorite Fragment (Hölderlin)

2009-03-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

In the readings that Maxine and I have been giving of our Hölderlin translations, most recently at Boise State University, we always like to present "Tinian," from the Fragments of Hymns section. It displays the intensity of his phrasing and imagery ("And drink at the wolf teats / Of the waters. . ." and "for the gods / Hazard us a falcon's glance"), his sweetness of character, and his intellectual and mythic scope (". . .the gods / Decree these outward signs to be birthmarks / Of whose child / The West must be"). The falcon figure reminds me of an image from our Boise trip, glimpsed as we were driving through the mountains on our way to a natural hot spring: a bald eagle feeding in the ribcage of a deer, its head feathers blood-spotted. At the spring with Martin Corless-Smith and his graduate student Stephen, snow fell onto our shoulders and into the pool as we soaked. I've added spacing indicators because the blog's format collapses all type to the left margin without them.

Tinian

It’s sweet to get lost
In the holy wilderness,

-- -- -- --

And drink at the wolf teats
Of the waters that wander
Through my native land
To me,

>>>>>>>>>>>>>,wilder once,
But now, like orphans, accustomed to the taste;
In spring, when unfamiliar wings
Return to the warmth of the woods

>>>>>>>>>>>>>resting in solitude,
Among the willow trees
Full of fragrance
Where butterflies
Mingle with bees
And your Alps

Divided from God

The divided world,

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>indeed they stand

Armed,

And wander as they wish, timelessly

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>for the gods
Hazard us a falcon’s glance, or
Like gladiators, the gods decree
These outward signs to be birthmarks
Of whose child
The West must be;

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Some flowers
Don’t grow from the earth, but sprout
In loose soil of their own will,
Counter-light of our days, nor should
One pick them.
For they stand golden,
Prepared only for what they are,
Leafless even
As thoughts,

Translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover

We've Decided (Homophonic Series)

2009-03-07T06:53:00.000-08:00

[The poem "We've decided" was published in Nervous Songs, 1986. Fifteen years later I wrote four homophonic translations of the work; likewise, of two other poems in the book.] Photo by Philip Hoover.

Original

I can be myself today, tall space ape
in a garden where other space apes play.
What a nice time this will be! and I
can roll on the sides of my balled feet
like a hairy barrel loaded, swinging arms
that scratch the ground like leaves. I’m
an ape today, headed for my pulpit of joy
in sunshine by the window. Daughter laughs.

That’s good. We can hear her mother dressing:
conspicuous absent rustle, dry nylon and hair.
Oh, lord of the spinal cord, what stone
repose do I feel when high heels spike
the spilled roast beef? I do not play
no rock and roll. I am an ape today.

1

Spies can be themselves and pray, space shapes
like wardens where other space shapes pray.
What bright signs lists can be! and I
can play goalie on gliding robo-feet
like an aery feral gnosis, thinking of alms
that match the sound of waves. I'm
a shape that prays, shedding all culpable joys
in an undying window. Laughter laughs.

That’s new. We can fear its other lessons:
continuous absent hustle, tight nylons and tears.
Ode bored with final form, what bone
composure do I feel when ideals strike
the still moist leaf? I do not spray
no phlox with oil. I am a shape today.

2

I can see the shelf OK, call space a grape
in jargon since tender fresh grapes change.
What a crime scene this will be! and I
can roll on my bowling ball feet
like a scary bear exploded, singing of charms
that catch the sound of the sea. I’m
a grape, OK, headed for my gulp of joy
in an unshining window. Laughter gasps.

What’s food? We can bear our brother fressing:
despicable absent bustle, cry of lions and bears.
Oh, lord of the penal code, what stoned
exposure do I feel when the spine feels like
chilled ice tea? Nor do I ever say
no lox and bagels. I am a grape, OK?

3

The eye can be itself today, space tape
in a garden where other space tapes play.
What a fine slime this will be! An eye
call roll on the side of its raw seeing
like a tarrying arrow slowing, singing words
that flinch like ounce and please. The eye is
itself today, shedding all its Tupelo joy
in gun-shine at the window. Daughter’s black

in mood. She can fear the other mission:
continuous ashen tussle of high pylons and air.
Restored like the final chord, what tonal
closure do I feel when spiked tea kills
a thrilled ghost cleanly? The eye won’t pay
the landscape’s toll. The eye is space today.

4

The shy can be themselves today—pace and gape
in a dungeon where others gape and pace.
What a fine shyness this will be! and shyness
can stroll the length of its long street
like a hairy chairman bloated, singing harms
that smash the proud like fleas. The shy
have faith today, headed for their populist joy
in the blind sign of a window. Father brags,

“I'm stewed.” He can hear grandmother’s lessons:
ubiquitous passion, dust, fine dye jobs, and prayer.
Torn like the final word, what prone
disposal do I seek when high steel strikes
a West Coast priest? The shy don’t play
with no damned fool. The shy are afraid today.

Aesthetic Theory: Adorno 156

2009-03-06T16:31:00.000-08:00

Adorno (156): "As long as art takes the form of works, it is essentially things, objectified in accordance with a law of form." Art work by Robert Smithson.

Response of PH:

Some laws of form are:
(1) To abide by one form only, remaining consistent throughout: monostich, haiku, imagist poem, blank verse.
(2) To marry several forms in one object: sonnet, masque.
(3) To seek the form of dissolution, from fragment to smaller fragment to photon.
(4) To establish duration: granite and epic rather than paper and lyric.
(5) To shift from one form to another (masque, modernist long poem).
(6) To seek intensity through volume (slam poetry, D.H. Lawrence) or lack of volume (Aram Saroyan, John Cage).
(7) New forms through new technologies (poetry machines, Flarf, Oulipo).
(8) New forms through new ideologies (Marxism : Constructivism = Freud : Surrealist collage).
(9) To express sincerity and belief (Romanticism).
(10) To express insincerity, disbelief, and even scorn (Swift and Nietzsche).
(11) To express lyrically by means of disbelief and a series of valuable emptinesses(Beckett).
(12) To seek form through formlessness (Mallarmé, free verse).
(13) To be monadic and nomadic (Mallarmé, Postmodernism).
(14) To be a solid, sensual fact, thus monumental (Rodin, Whitman, Milton).
(15) To be a chip off the old shard (early Clark Coolidge, appropriation and collage, minimalism)
(16) To contract what was large (bathos, parody, satire)
(17) To greatly enhance what was small (Niedecker, Williams, Moore)
(16) To seek unison and find difference (bad poetry, bad singing).
(17) To seek difference and find unison (good poetry, jazz).
(18) To suggest that it's all just a game (Oulipo, high artifice, collage).
(19) To repeat yourself endlessly (Gertrude Stein)
(20) Never to repeat yourself endlessly (Gertude Stein)

The Mirror and the Encyclopedia

2009-03-05T03:26:00.000-08:00

Orbis Tertius: The Mirror and the Encyclopedia
Paper presented at Druskininkai Poetic Fall, Vilnius, Lithuania
October 3-6, 2008

Paul Hoover
San Francisco State University

Orbis Primus is the world as is; it’s the rock that Samuel Johnson kicked to refute the Idealism of Berkeley. This first world of nature, civilization, and other physical matter (including ourselves) makes imagination possible. Orbis Secundus is the world of imagination, memory, representation, and art. Here we also find accidents of perception, such as mishearing, an uncanny poetry of the everyday. Philosophy is keen on this second world, for example the famous relation of word to thing. It is also an area of dispute regarding the illusion-making faculty of poetry, without which Coleridge’s “Christabel” and Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” would have little force. By joining the visual potency of language, ekphrasis, with movement, such poetry creates a mental cinema that seems almost real, therefore believable. The film semiotician Christian Metz refers to the experience of the real in art as diegesis, a narrative that creates a reality but also admits to its status as a telling. The American phenomenon of language poetry shows its puritanical side in opposing, as illusory, both narrative and the image-icon. Ironically, it makes a claim for the erotics of its oblique and intermittent phrasing, a la Roland Barthes in his comments on zero-degree writing. But a large part of poetry’s power is its ability to “world,” to borrow from Heidegger, through seeing. Common sense and experience tell us that readers aren’t fooled by literary apparitions; they know what they are and delight in them. Adorno writes, “Now, just before the curtain rises there is an instant of expectation: everybody is waiting for an apparition.” (Adorno121) We go to writing for information and pleasure. Why deny the sensual world of objects and their shadows? Do I have to hold a brick in my hand every time I want to use the word brick?

If Orbis Primus is the thing, and Orbis Secundus is the words for the thing, Orbis Tertius is the resulting complex of meaning (poem, city, civilization, dream world, English garden, not as reality but as idea). As a mental construction of seemingly little permanence, it’s a world far in, rather than far out. Borges’ 1940 story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” begins, “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.” (Borges 3) Like the lost mountain in René Daumal’s novel, Mount Analogue, Uqbar exists only metaphysically and metaphorically, not in material reality. Orbis Tertius is the icebound Arctic ship on which Victor Frankenstein meets his creation eye to eye, a monster who, out of revenge for his grotesqueness and lost bride, has destroyed all that is dear to his maker. It’s Zeus descending as a swan to ravish Leda. In the Borges story, four pages are missing from Volume XLVI of the fictional Anglo-American Dictionary; it is those pages, of 921, that describe the conditions of Uqbar. Thus, imaginary pages describe an imaginary land of imaginary conditions. As readers, we trust that Jorge Luis Borges was a man of real flesh who lived in Buenos Aires and wrote: “For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.” (Borges 4)

Ancient Greek sophists could win any side of an argument through verbal skill and false reasoning. They had no particular commitment to truth and would sell their services in the agora. According to Borges, “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for truth or even verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding.” (Borges 10) For instance, Tlön has a transparent tiger and a tower of blood. In Tlön, the only science is psychology, even though there are no people. Tlönian literature “abounds in ideal objects, which are convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic needs.” (9)

Borges’ story is a burlesque on Idealism. What we experience is an airy copy, like shadows cast on a cave wall. Half of western thought is built upon such an assumption, in other words, upon a poetic image. According to an online article, in Plato’s myth of Er, the cosmos consists not of bands of light and darkness (Parmenides), or spheres, “but of the ‘lips’ of concentric whorls fitted into one another like a nest of boxes.” (Burnet, section 93, “The Stephanae”) Compared to the story of Er, Uqbar suddenly doesn’t seem so outlandish. Cosmologists are inevitably poets.

Given the tone of our own time, it’s important to note the story’s political resonance. The directors of the Orbis Tertius have leaked news of its existence into the real world, with the result that ideal objects have been disseminated throughout it:

“Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a resemblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly plant?” (Borges 17)

Today, we have our own orderly plant, the spread of global capitalism and corporate power. Following the fall of the Trade Towers in 2001, the U. S. has abandoned any pretense that it is not a ruthless world power. Under Bush-Cheney, it has suspended habeas corpus, tortured prisoners, damaged the constitution, seized power in all three branches of government, ignored the needs of its citizens (excuse me, consumers), refused to execute laws passed by Congress, and opened the treasury to corporate looters through lax regulations and war profiteering. All these developments were licensed by the images of 911. If to any degree, they were manipulated to give an impression of reality, we do indeed live in a repressive Wag the Dog world (compare Bela Tarr’s Werkmeister Harmonies, a chilling fable of demagoguery). A false image can send people racing through the streets with farm implements in hand.

Poetry is expected to be in good faith. We trust that it is unencumbered in its pursuit of truth and beauty, old and new. Why should poetry be anything but sincere? When a poem is true, even its artifice is surpassing.

Things themselves are true; they could not be truer. A stone is always stone, and a wall is eine Mauer. They are ancient and faithful markers of the world as found. You can try to lie in poetry about the stone, but we won’t believe you. We know it too well. If someone writes that wind and stars sweep through a stone, we test the truth of it on our nerves; that is, on poetry’s terms as well as those of science. This particular proposition may be true even to science. Some stones have fallen from space in flame; they’ve rested underground for thousands of years, in the dark.

Can art be true in one way, for instance technically, but assert something untrue? In Heidegger’s clearing, or Open, the truth is unconcealed, something so deeply familiar that it seems true for the first time. We enter the journey with the hope, or even expectation, that a clearing lies ahead. But when that journey is entirely mapped, the recognition is puny and the art impoverished. A carpenter or a professor may know what is plumb, right, and true, see beauty in it, and go home to beat his wife. There is beauty in right angles and parallel lines that never meet. The right angle is rational and objective; Rodchenko and Tatlin, who avoided the curved line as lyrical and bourgeois, would have seen its beauty. Parallel lines are mystical and whimsical, because the axiom that they will never meet can only be proved by imagination. This sort of brave, laughable, metaphysical puzzle, on a hopeful traipse after its forever-to-be-unproved proof, is my idea of a good time in poetry. Farewell, parallel lines, immortal train tracks, emblem of the soul’s destination, that seem to meet just as they disappear, but not really!

Charles Simic, author of Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, employs such whimsical and intellectual imagery. The world is full of real things, such as milk, that poets can’t stop investigating. The more scrupulous the research of object as object, the greater the metaphysical investment, the more intense the drama, and the closer it is to silence and mythology. Simic’s poem “The Wall” contains this stanza:

The fly I was watching,
The details of its wings
Glowing like turquoise,
Its feet, to my amusement
Following a minute crack—
An eternity
Around that simple event.

(Cosmology 28)

The metaphysical is rarely warm and cozy. It’s the recognition of the solitude of things. Simic’s poetry reminds us that poetry, indeed all literature, creates allegorical worlds. The literary modes of the fable and dream underlie much of his work, both fictional in their “worlding.”

Borrowing from Martin Buber, Jerome Rothenberg wrote that the truth of a thing is like a kernel of grain; the husk is its outward appearance. But the gleaming kernel shouldn’t get all the attention; the husk, in its pale overcoat, also has metaphysical character. What matters to poetry is the true fiction that such things make possible. In the work I most enjoy, the representation is as real as the thing. I suspect this makes me an idealist.

Without the thing, there is no representation and no poem. Without representation, the thing is unrecognizable. In one sense, truth is an imaginary, which doesn’t mean it’s not true. It sounds like an old science fiction movie, but all of these worlds collide, intersect, and coincide, which is largely the point of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”: “A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.” (Stevens 93)

Laura Riding eventually abandoned poetry in the belief that it is a “lying art.” She was uncomfortable in the Orbis Secundus of suggestion, representation, and shadow play. Obviously, she had no sense of humor.

In the postmodern period, much doubt has been cast on lyricism, but the same scholars who condemn it probably love mournful songs and the changing color of wheat as wind presses it down on a field. In poetry, the accuracy of the fiction does the singing. It’s what the mirror told the encyclopedia, and the other way around.

Sources

Adorno, Theodore. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970/1984.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writing, Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.

Burnet, John. “Early Greek Philosophy, Chapter IV, Parmenides of Elea.”
http://classicpersuasion.org.pw/burnet/egp.htm?chapter=4.

Simic, Charles. “A Wall.” Charon’s Cosmology. New York: George Braziller, 1977.

Stevens, Wallace. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1982.

Poetry Machines

2009-01-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, I created a course at SFSU called Poetry Machines that began with the Futurisms, Italian and Russian, and concluded with Kenny Goldsmith, Caroline Bergvall, and Christian Bök. I had expected that Constructivism and a strict compliance with materialist philosophy might dominate the discussion, and for some students that was the case. Every week for three hours they removed their prosthetic devices of expression, lyricism, transcendence, depth, and "creativity" and allowed the machine / procedure / concept to have its way. The final class project was to present a poetry machine of their own. Along the way, I realized that my sympathies were with Khlebnikov's numerological prophecies, Jarry's math-driven Pataphysics, and Malevich's Suprematist period--art, in other words, that has a mystical and spiritual element. There's nothing wrong with machines; what matters is how they are designed and put to use. Ted Berrigan's sonnets were so alluring, because they put a 'new' machine, the cut-up, inside a worn-out but reliable old one. It's the same with contemporary musicians, who, through sampling techniques, offer an old song a new rhythm and cultural context. Think of Hal the computer from 2000: A Space Odyssey, down on his luck and drunk in a tavern, singing "Fly Me to the Moon" and "My Funny Valentine."

Here are two excerpts from a machine-driven poem of my own, joined for brevity and counterpoint (machines are often prolix and repetitive). Otherwise, I've not smoothed out the burrs and misfits. The fuel for the machine consisted of my own words (previous poems), placed into a word randomization program that allows the machine to be "tuned" before singing. I'm a little jealous of this work, because it is more radically lyrical than my other works and uses words like "adenose" and "cometits" I would never have considered.

Mouth-sign

All you’re indeed.inhumanity, god’s prettier movings
adenose willseeing, and rice, creation’s motherland,
and melodious cometits have their time. So of Oedipus
he painted ten sentences from enduring space,
the young under-familiar fence, songs its mouth-sign
and plain bad luck. Our shadow misbehaves, as if it couldn’t.

Beyond belfry, something crying. clearly mind.

Tragic. hair.
Myrtles. Calm Ricardo magic. Them, should plotwear.
Lyric reason imitates season, earthbrook distraction, has contradiction than poetic double Portuguese hole that lines pain. Will feeling, along beyond itself.
Consciousness still plays. For sharpeningdogs may aloud clearly,
cries merely being,
to demand a beautiful breakway, all.

26 Instant Reviews

2009-01-02T23:16:00.000-08:00

Reviewing poetry is increasingly a lost art, and it's so much work! I've created 26 instant reviews of no more than one line. The idea is match all the poets, critics, or school of poetry with their review. Match all of them and you may win a valuable prize.

1. Emily Dickinson
2. Ted Berrigan
3. Hart Crane
4. John Ashbery
5. Allen Ginsberg
6. Donald Justice
7. Marjorie Welish
8. Language Poetry
9. Marianne Moore
10. Galway Kinnell
11. Laura Riding
12. The New Formalism
13. August Kleinzahler
14. Jack Spicer
15. Gertrude Stein
16. Ezra Pound
17. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
18. Helen Vendler
19. Sharon Olds
20. Charles Olson
21. Dana Gioia
22. Anne Waldman
23. Frank O'Hara
24. Jack Kerouac
25. Gary Snyder
26. Paul Blackburn

A. Badda bing, badda boom.
B. Does a bear shit in the woods?
C. And if not, not.
D. My typewriter is bigger than your typewriter.
E. Big man, small town.
F. A little more uncertainty, please.
G. The well-hung muse.
H. Rebel angels, measured heaven.
I. I think I'll write a dictionary.
J. Stiff shirt in a sad closet.
K. There's no such thing as post-publication.
L. Unsettled by the name Oil Can Boyd.
M. I do not think it will signify to me.
N. Shyness unrequited
O. Nearing the non-ending.
P. Daring as never before.
Q. What price salience?
R. Not waving but drowning
S. Admiral and existentialist.
T. Let me recite you a ballad.
U. Is there sex in this class?
V. I've stopped being Theirs -
W. The emperor's old clothes.
X. Accidents are not itineraries.
Y. Spare hanger in a bone closet.
Z. How strange to be gone in a minute.

Apples and Oranges

2009-01-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

Does a book of theory written in 1987 have anything to say today? Here's a call and response from Baudrillard's The Ecstasy of Communication (Semiotexte, 1987), consisting of the title essay, "Rituals of Transparency," "Metamorphoses, Metaphors, Mestasases," "From the System of Objects to the Destiny of Objects," and "Seduction, or, The Superficial Abyss":

Baudrillard: "Everything began with objects, yet there is no longer a system of objects. The critique of objects was based on signs saturated with meaning, along with their phantasies and unconscious logic as well as their prestigious differential logic. Behind this dual logic lies the anthropological dream: the dream of the object as existing beyond and above exchange and use, above and beyond equivalence; the dream of a sacrificial logic, of gift, expenditure, potlatch, 'devil's share' consumption, symbolic, exchange.

"All this still exists, and simultaneously it is disappearing. The description of this projective imaginary and symbolic universe was still the one of the object as the mirror of the subject. The opposition of the subject and the object was still significant, as was the profound imaginary of the mirror and the scene. . . . Today the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network. There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication. In the image of television, the most beatiful prototypical object of this new era, the surrounding universe and our very bodies are becoming monitoring screens."

Baudrillard uses a favorite word of theoretical & philosophical persuasion, "all." Having claimed the full wasting of perception, art, and culture, he can begin his elegy for the loss of depth, profundity, object and its shadow: "We no longer invest our objects with the same emotions, the same dreams of possession, loss, mourning, jealousy; the psychological dimension has been blurred, even if one can retrieve it in the particular."

We live in other words in a field of shadowless identities that have been flattened by their status as electronic imaginaries. Imagine then a field of identical oranges, each in its frame a la Magritte's "This is not a pipe" series, along with its non-identical caption: the alienated orange, the starving orange, the green orange, the defiant orange, the actual orange, and orange of the past. We are aware of the actuality of oranges; we have eaten them all of our lives. Do they taste flatter now because of the depth-lack of television or because they are boxed and shipped green? Is the orange in the mirror deeper metaphysically (and of more authentic character) than the orange on HD television? Or does the orange on a grainy color television, ca. 1987, hold greater status because of its interruptive, lay-bare-the-device means of presentation, so close to our imaginary of mind?

The Platonic orange, the one we hold in our hands, peel, and eat, poses under light in the produce section of the grocery store. It has been sprayed orange with food dyes and genetically altered to be the best orange it can be. It's the orange of desire, expression, seduction, appetite, and first thinking. This is the orange you dare take home to mother.

Hotel Comfort

2008-12-26T14:26:00.000-08:00

Hotel Comfort

Minutes each hour took ostrich leaps on the roof of the Hotel Comfort in Strasbourg.
These Surrealist moments cherished each roof a long time.
In the thickened weather of Surrealism the cathedral
is across the street.

Wise lettuces exaggerate their claim near the windows of the Hotel Comfort.
And you have sent your letter of explanation for the pleasure obtained
in the wooden jar. Speech-maker, you have sent notes of pleasure
in the glass jars.

Tasting of weather and cinnamon.

This is the final poem of the “New Poems” section of The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, edited by Hadley Haden Guest (Wesleyan UP, 2008). It may be considered the last collectible poem she wrote. Born in 1920, she died in 2006. In reading this work, consider how you are impacted by the knowledge it's her last. The lastness and firstness of things, birth & death, emergence & disappearance, are always ceremonial in poetry, as are descent, ascent, and return. W.C. Williams was a poet of firstness, spring, and material presence--oh, look, things are opening. Eliot was a poet of lastness, the dour reminder that life is fatal. What about the middle, that world of process philosophy beloved by post-modernism and English Composition instructors? It's also the domain of the everyday. All poems begin and end, even when intent on simultaneity. In other words, the poem of immediate perception immediately gives a beginning and end to any experience, simply because it's a poem. The most fascinating of the cermonies is lastness, with its echo and afternote. Poets like Rumi and Rilke like to strike their heaviest notes of lastness on the stage of ultimate openness--infinity, eternity, the cosmos; Frank O'Hara stands transfixed in the door of the Five Spot, hearing Billie Holiday's cracked voice emerging from its flower.

But this isn't what interested me most about "Hotel Comfort."

That poem and several of her last works, such as the Hans Hoffman poems and "Lunch at Helen Frankenthaler's," are written in complete, normative sentences. Following a long exploration of Mallarme's blank spaces and fragments, she makes a stylistic return to confidence, wonder, and wholeness: "Helen! We're having lunch!" and "Return / in your snow boots, / here's the thermos / I've poured with so many words, and the sandwiches / prepared with watercress." Also, for last poems, these works are very warm and worldly, "tasting of weather and cinammon." The poet's face is turned back toward life.

Faits divers de la poesie

2008-12-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

Absent the art work, the following is excerpted from the blog "Faits divers de la poesie"(http://faitsdiversdelapoesie.blogspot.com). It's the effort of a collective of six poets, some of them disguised. See for yourself who they are. I'm including the section that mentions Maxine Chernoff and me. We can be grateful that we don't lose a limb, hold our severed heads by the hair, display more concern for our careers than for the Iraq War, disappear upon stepping into a crop circle, are blown to pieces, or get snatched away by giant prehistoric birds. The first entry in the blog aims bullets at Brian Turner, award-winning soldier-poet and author of Here, Bullet. The following is located near the end:

"M. Bradley and M. Kalamaras were strolling in Montfavet when a car blew up. Apprehended by the police, who have no clue they are the two greatest surrealist poets of America… The U.S. Embassy, suspicious and clueless too, refuses assistance.

Another blow to Imperial Culture: Three miles upstream from Nice, the river Paillon has overflowed its banks, taking with it the French branch of the U.S. Poetry Project, under construction.

This week, in Kandahar Province, a wedding party of thirty-some has been incinerated, by a drone-fired missile. Concurrently, in New York City, The Nation magazine has received three hundred-some mainstream and experimental submissions.

The thief Godin snuck in. Seeing M. Hoover and Mme Chernoff weeping in embrace, the former babbling that the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry betrayed everything he’d stood for, O God, O God, what have I done, etc., the intruder turned away. Softly behind him, he closed the door.

From a butterfly’s wings in the slums of Lagos, an F-4 in Austine: Seven MFA students with $20,000 stipends have been deposited (traumatized but fine) in Iowa City. Itself recently hit by divine wrath…

M. Collins has read at Fort Collins. Mlle Boulanger, the troubled graduate student who expertly drew in the restroom the honored reader committing fellatio upon M. Longfellow, has been expelled.

MFA poets Mlle Fournier, M. Vouin, M. Septeuil, of Providence, Buffalo, Irvine, hanged themselves: rejections, bad review, no review.

Yet again?! The poet Mme Graham was sitting in a beauty parlor, with a large metalloid cone upon her head. When she reached inside to scratch her scalp, one of her numerous rings caught a faulty wire, blacking out the whole arrondissement. This according to the Coroner.

Was it envy or shock? Or perhaps a conflation of both? This, the brilliant young critic M. Blanc (far off in the future) asked his readers, in an essay pondering the curious fact that not a single Flarf blog did offer a comment or link to the Faits Divers de la Poesie…

Was it envy, shock, or the lingerie? Or perhaps a conflation of all three? This, the post-avant world did ask, in muffled tones, about M. Silliman’s blatant refusal to offer even a link to the Faits Divers de la Poesie…

Foul-mouthed, brilliant, ruggedly handsome, fed-up with the exploitation of part-time faculty, the poet and critic M. Amato, of Normal, slugged his Department Chair in the nose, breaking it. Where are the Marxist poets who will follow the Comrade’s example?

On 3 December, the critic and unclassifiable poet M. Weinberger left for Iceland, to address the Parliament. Two days later he flew to Mexico, to receive the National Order of the Aztec Eagle. In their English offices, old-guard Language poets gnash their teeth."

Nómada, encuentra tu mónada

2008-12-17T18:20:00.000-08:00

Los pies en otra tierra: Poetas exiliados y transterrados
Conferencia literaria promovida por la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla de las Angeles, México

Paul Hoover
Universidad del estado de San Francisco

traducción de María Baranda

Cuando nací, en 1946, la mayoría de las personas de los EUA vivían en granjas, y una granja de autoconsumo podía comprarse por la sorprendente cantidad de $400 dólares, que también era el costo de un coche nuevo. Antes de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el porcentaje del producto interno bruto que se iba a la milicia era muy pequeño, y nuestro ejército tenía el tamaño del de Suiza. No existían las tarjetas de crédito. Mis padres jamás compraron nada a plazos. Pagaban al contado, como lo hacían la mayoría de las personas. Mi madre siempre hizo una gran hortaliza en los lugares en los que habitamos. Todo el verano subsistíamos de su producción de ejotes, maíz dulce, pepinos, lechugas, jitomates y fresas. Cuando alguna vez vivimos una breve temporada en el pueblo, donde ella no podía criar sus propios pollos, mi madre los compraba vivos y los mataba ella misma con un hacha y una estaca de árbol. Un día, los movimientos de un ave agonizante florearon el jardín de sangre. Después de eso, mi madre cubrió los desechos con una canasta de paja. Una vez al año, en el Día de la Madre, comíamos en un restaurant. Siempre era el mismo y yo siempre pedía lo mismo: pavo con puré de papas y salsa. Jamás comíamos carne en casa o fuera de ella porque, me parece, no podíamos pagarla. Por razones religiosas, no bebíamos, fumábamos, bailábamos, jugábamos o jurábamos.

La situación ha cambiado dramáticamente, pero no porque yo emigrara a otro país. Fue el país el que migró bajo mis pies, convirtiéndose en una tierra de descarnados centros comerciales, de restaurantes de comida rápida, de corporativismo, de deudas masivas de tarjetas de crédito, de culto a las celebridades, de guerras por ganancia y control mundial, de pérdida de los derechos individuales, de una constitución comprometida de los EUA, de un decreciente número de trabajo comunitario, de prestaciones para los jubilados, y de 50 millones de ciudadanos sin seguro social –usted dígalo, el cambio ha sido para peor. El complejo industrial-militar controla el país, con un gasto de 51% de su cartera anual, más del de todas las naciones del mundo puestas juntas. Consumidores en lugar de ciudadanos, nos hemos convertidos en productos cosificados (tristemente, no deificados) de la eterna máquina de felicidad capitalista. Me parece que esto es un exilio interno.

¿Qué tan distinta sería tu escritura si pudieras matar tus propios pollos y cavar tus propias tumbas familiares? ¿La palabra “postmoderno” tendría algún sentido? ¿Tu escritura estaría un poco más cerca del destino? Es imposible imaginarte fuera de la cultura; es lo que es. La tristeza o el júbilo que sientas por ello será parte de tu trabajo, tal y como el aroma del pino es parte del árbol. No importa qué tan lejos esté nuestro conocimiento de nuevas tecnologías, todavía somos quienes atestiguamos y ritualizamos en familia, enraizados en mitologías únicas y personales. La cultura nativa ofrece comodidades; la cultura de la comodidad ofrece miedo y deseo. Y porque está sustentada en la comodidad, la cultura popular norteamericana encierra el silencio y reverencia la ceremonia; el ruido y la velocidad ganan nuestra atención. Es por esto que la poesía es tan necesaria.

Mi libro, Poemas en español (2005), contiene poesía escrita en inglés como si lo estuviera en español. Por mucho tiempo he admirado la gran poesía modernista ibero-hispánica, desde Pessoa y Drummond de Andrade hasta Lorca, Vallejo, Neruda y Sabines. Su trabajo ha barrido, bailado, reído y penetrado. Por alguna razón, como un germano protestante idealista norteamericano criado en el medio oeste, me he sentido en casa con ellos. No hay ningún acertijo en esto. La poesía es nómada y busca su condición universal. Sería muy bueno, pero demasiado fácil, decir que todos compartimos el espíritu nativo de cultura, imaginación y palabras bien usadas. Pero queso no es lo mismo que cheese. Ni suena, ni se ve, ni sabe igual. Y simpatía no es lo mismo que sympathy. Sin embargo, la estética poética es aquella de la errancia y el descubrimiento. Nos resbalamos y nos deslizamos en nuestras palabras hasta que ponemos a descansar el significado en la forma del poema. Poco tiempo después, comienza a resbalar de nuevo. Apenas y ha leído Don Quijote y ya quiere recorrer los caminos de España con una lanza de júbilo en su mano. De todos los géneros literarios, la poesía es la que disfruta más la condición de migrante. Se revela en la metáfora; sus motivos son transformacionales. El soneto comenzó en Sicilia, el pantoum en Malasia.

Aquí hay dos ejemplos de Poemas en español:

El mundo como es
“todas estas cosas me las dijo el creador en Alabama”
–Sun Ra

¡Qué limpia palabra es mariposa!
Puede volar alrededor el día entero
y jamás enlodarse las alas.
Hace un sonido tan limpio cuando pasa por mí–
casi nada en realidad.

El lodo se extiende en el suelo, completamente indefenso
¿Quién puede respetarlo así?

Butterfly, mariposa
tan hermosa y tan loca,
como Blanche Dubois cuando era niña.
Aun Schmetterling
tiene una cadencia cercana a su ideal.

En mi boca se preparan
las palabras para el verano,
renovándose una y otra vez.

No es ninguna ciencia.
Todos saben sus nombres:
embankment y barranco,
ruidos y noises–
¡arrodíllense y recen!
Pasa una mujer hermosa
y, si insistes, un hombre también.
Palabras de carne y hueso.

¿Dónde están mi refugio y mi trampa,
a dónde van cuando las pienso?
Todo el día las palabras están en mí,
yendo y viniendo y significando,
por la tarde también.
Es el ir y venir del mundo.

Pero de noche, si sucede
que entro en ella,
no hay una sola palabra, ni siquiera seda,
para decir lo que pienso.
El sonido cae de mi boca
sin forma a nuestro alrededor.

Canción del conductor

Nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio,
distante y solitaria Danville.

Carro negro, luna pequeña,
en el asiento trasero la cerveza.
Porque olvidé todos los caminos
nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio.

En las llanuras, a través de Indiana,
donde también estuve solo.
Carro negro, luna amarilla.
Mi padre muerto me observa
desde la ventana de arriba.

Qué camino más largo desde California
y en qué coche más rápido–
invisible para el alma.

Más allá veo a la muerte moviéndose lenta en el camino.
Sé que tocaré su vestimenta
antes de que jamás llegue a Danville, Ohio.

Distante y solitaria Danville.

“Canción del conductor” es una apropiación directa del poema de Lorca “Canción del jinete”. Los poemas son paródicos, pero altamente serios, nómadas pero cercanos a casa. El poeta y traductor, Pierre Joris, escribe en Poéticas nómadas:

Lo que se necesita ahora son poéticas nómadas. Su método sería rizomático: el cual es distinto al collage, i.e., el rizoma no es un fragmento de la estética, el cual ha dominado la poética desde los románticos aun como transmografía por los modernistas primeros y segundos…. Una poética nómada cruzaría los lenguajes, no sólo los traduciría, sino que escribiría en todos o en cualquiera de ellos. (5)

Siguiendo a Deleuze y Guattari, Joris prefiere un sistema de errancia en lugar de uno enraizado, una búsqueda de nutrientes por parte del poeta como máquina deseante. El/La poeta es en sí mismo/misma su multiplicidad en un sistema en el cual “cualquier multiplicidad se conecta a otras multiplicidades por raíces terrestres superficiales de tal manera que forman o extienden un rizoma” (Deleuze y Guattari 1606).

Adorno ofrece un modelo más compacto: “Lo que aparece en un trabajo artístico es su tiempo interno… El lazo entre arte e historia real es el hecho de que los trabajos artísticos están estructurados como mónadas” (Adorno 126). En Pitágoras, la mónada es Dios; en música, es una sola nota, en el gnosticismo, el Principio de todas las cosas; en los Cuatro cuartetos “el punto quieto del mundo cambiante”. Una emigración nómada empieza con un punto en el mapa. La mónada existe antes del concepto de unicidad, porque en la mónada no existe la diferencia. Primero está la mónada (el todo), después lo mucho, después el deseo (lo nómada) crea el trabajo artístico, el cual está estructurado como una mónada. La mónada se mueve pero en un punto muerto.

Poemas en español son una traducción de ese tipo. También recientemente produje un manuscrito llamado Soneto 56, que consiste en 56 versiones (traducciones) de ese soneto de Shakespeare. Presento el original y dos traducciones. El Sustantivo más Siete (N + 7) es un juego de escritura inventado por Jean Lescure de Oulipo, acrónimo en francés del Taller de Literatura Potencial. El cual consiste en reemplazar cada sustantivo en el original por el séptimo encontrado en el diccionario. Haikuzación es convertir el original en un haiku. Por ejemplo, se podría “haikuzar” la novela La guerra y la paz.

Shakespeare

56
Recupera tu fuerza, dulce amor, que no se diga
Que en el borde hay menos calma que el deseo
Que aunque hoy el alimento se mitiga
Mañana ya se afila con su habitual anhelo.

Así, amor, sé tú y aunque hoy tus ojos calmes
Con el hambre, haz que se cierren con hartura,
Vuelve a mirar mañana, y ya no mates
La esencia del amor con la pereza que perdura.

Deja que esta triste pausa sea como el mar
Que separa una playa, donde dos recién unidos
Van a diario a ver la orilla y cuando van

Vuelve el amor y su visión los hace aún más bendecidos:
Llámalo, así, invierno, que lleno de cuidado
Hace al verano próximo, tres veces más raro y más deseado.

Sustantivo Más Siete

Recupera tu plan, dulce mofa de amor, que no se diga
Que en el redactor hay menos calma que el calamaco
Que aunque hoy el sentido se mitiga
El modo ya se afila con su habitual tizoncillo.

Así, mofa de amor, sé tú y aunque hoy tu ojeada calmes
Con el aperitivo, haz que se cierre a rienda suelta,
Vuelve a mirar matutina, y ya no mates
Lo brioso del amor con el signo que perdura

Deja que esta tristeza entremezclada sea como el ocre
Que separa un tronco, donde dos recién unidos
Van a diario a ver al carcelero y cuando van
Vuelve la mofa del amor y su guarda los hace aún más bendecidos:

Llámalo, así, fruta prohibida, que llena de enfado
Hace a la malformación el molde, tres veces más raro y más deseado.

Haikuzación

Recupera tu fuerza, amor
Que en el borde hay menos calma que
La afilada mañana.

Fuentes

Adorno, T. W. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. William E. Cain, et al (W. W. Norton, 2001): 1601-1609.

Joris, Pierre. Nomad Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

Poems for the Millennium III: The University of California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry

2008-10-22T22:43:00.000-07:00

Maxine Chernoff and I are excited that our Hölderlin translation is now in print and available at bookstores, Amazon.com, and the Omnidawn site, www.omnidawn.com. The first publication event last night at Moe's in Berkeley was a success, and it was great also to hear the work of Lyn Hejinian, Hank Lazer, and Tyrone Williams. The next reading is on October 29, 7:30 p.m., at Xavier Hall & Fromm Hall of University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street. This event will entirely feature our translations, so we will present work from each stage of the poet's career: early odes, later odes, elegies and hymns, fragments of hymns, plans and fragments, the last poems, which he often signed as Scardanelli and assigned dates such as 1648 (long before he was born) and 1849 (six years after his death), and the great prose poem of uncertain origin, "In Lovely Blue."

The magnificent photo above, by David Maisel, Mining Project: Butte, Montana, 100, is the basis of our book's cover design. We are grateful for its use. The image is of sunlight and clouds reflected in the metallic water of a quarry.

Our sincere apologies to Jeffrey Robinson for failing to name him, in the book's acknowledgments, as co-editor, with Jerome Rothenberg, of the forthcoming Poems for the Millennium III: The California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry, in which our translation of Hölderlin's "In the Forest" appears. We are honored to be associated with that volume, which from Lyn's report is a magnificent presentation of Romantic poetry from across the cultures and generations. More than 900 pages in length, it will be published in January of 2009.

Palingenesis
[Plans and Fragments 12]

Often I desire to travel as the speed of the sun, in its wide arc,
from its rising to its setting, often in song
to follow ancient nature in its perfect course,
And, as the general wears an eagle on his helmet in war and
Triumph, so I wish that the sun would carry me,
How mighty the longing of mortals.
But a god lives in men, so they can see what has passed
And what is to come, and, as the mountain stream wanders to its
Source through time, from the silent
Book of deeds through which he knows his past
-----the sun's golden plunder

Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin

2008-10-14T21:05:00.000-07:00

Please join us at two book events to celebrate the publication of Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), a 496 pp. paperback with facing English and German, edited and translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover.

'To the groundbreaking Hölderlin translations of Michael Hamburger and Richard Sieburth one must now add the sumptuous new versions by two gifted poets, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff. This is a book to be treasured.' -John Ashbery

'This generous selection elucidates Hölderlin's complex vision with perfect contemporary pitch. It is a version for our moment.' -Rosmarie Waldrop

'This is an admirable presentation of Hölderlin's poetry for English readers. The understanding of Hölderlin aptly embodies scholarly authority, and the translations of the poems have a quiet dignity, avoiding stylistic ornamentation and in the directness of the language displaying much of Hölderlin's ability to convey the arresting immediacy of things.' -Robert Alter

'More than his famous contemporaries, Goethe and Schiller, it is Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet of incessant change and transformation, who today stands as the major poet of his age--and whose visionary work has remained a plum line that helps us fashion the complexities (the beauty and the terror, the 'inside real and the outsideral,' as the poet Edward Dorn put it)of our own age. In their elegant and fluid translations of this excellent and exhaustive selection of poems, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff capture the work's extreme contemporaneity, what they themselves have called 'the drama of Hölderlin's consciousness, the beauty of his lyrics, and the largeness of his vision.' -Pierre Joris

'Friedrich Hölderlin was one of the world's strangest, most rarefied poets, one we need continually to be reacquainted with. The imaginative landscape of his poetry is that of his dearly loved homeland, Germany, but it is peopled with the mythic figures, and the concepts and emotions, of classical antiquity, and his rhetoric and his formal repertoire appear to have little to do with either his own time or ours. Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover have taken on what seems an almost impossible task. They have made a substantial selection from this idiosyncratic, compulsively remote writer, who for much of his life was 'mad' and is often described today as a 'pure' poet, and have put his work into a language that can hold meaning and attraction for an impure age largely indifferent to the ideals Hölderlin thought and wrote by. Chernoff and Hoover, themselves poets of distinction, have brought to their versions both the instinct to make this difficult body of work transparent, and the desire to preserve its own quiddity. The resulting transcreations are a notable, rewarding, eminently readable addition to the range of Hölderlin's work in English.' -Michael Hulse
_______

Moe's Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley, CA
Tuesday, October 21, 7:30 p.m.
also featuring new Omnidawn books by Lyn Hejinian,
Hank Lazer, and Tyrone Williams

Lone Mountain Readings
University of San Francisco
Xavier Hall/Fromm Hall
Main Campus, 2130 Fulton Street
Wednesday, October 29, 7:30 p.m.

Order online from www.omnidawn.com

New American Writing 26

2008-09-24T20:43:00.000-07:00

Take a look at our New American Writing website, beautifully updated by Jerrold Shiroma: www.newamericanwriting.blogspot.com. The cover art is by Enrique Chagoya: detail from The Pastoral or Arcadian State, Illegal Aliens Guide to Greater America, 2006. With permission of Enrique Chagoya and Bud Shark, Shark's Ink, publishers of contemporary prints, www.sharksink.com. Some of the work in No. 26 can be accessed on the website; you can also subscribe or order copies there. Lu Chi (translated by Sam Hammill): "The discourse [shuo] should be both radiant / and cunning."

Sylvia Legris
Three-Note Wing Chords . . .

1
of Irruptive
Bronchial-
Tree
Nesters.

Cartilage
architecture.
Acoustics

2
of sticks
and ligature,
membrana

tympaniformis,
variable-

3
sweep
syrinx.

Oscine-
swing

4
Passing-through
Passerines.
Stinging

wind,
Wax-

winging
hiatus.
Migratory

5
aperture.
Gap-
trajectory (hap
-hazard sparrow*)

6
Diagram

7
a diaphrag-
matic
absence.

Lung-

excursion,
peripatetic
trip-

8
switch.

Tsee-
tseee-
tseee-

pitched
pulmonary-

9
circuit-

broken

passage.

*"a haphazard sparrow is a phrase from Will Alexander's poem "Provision for the Higher Ozone Body," in Above the Human Nerve Domain, Pavement Saw Press, 1998.

Permanent Iraq Bases

2008-09-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

The information below is quoted directly from the Friends Committee on National Legislation website, address given below. One might ask both candidates for president, "What do you plan to do with the large permanent bases that have been built in Iraq by the Bush Administration?" Four of the 106 bases are supersized, with facilities for as many as 16,000 military and staff. They will feature Burger King restaurants and other American franchise strip enterprises. What, no Walmart?

My friends, as John McCain would say, the U.S. has planned a permanent presence in Iraq all along, and the Congress knows it. Of course, it's not about the oil.

"The supplemental funding bill for the war in Iraq signed by President Bush in early May 2005 provides money for the construction of bases for U.S. forces that are described as "in some very limited cases, permanent facilities." Several recent press reports have suggested the U.S. is planning up to 14 permanent bases in Iraq— a country that is only twice the size of the state of Idaho. Why is the U.S. building permanent bases in Iraq?

"In May 2005, United States military forces in Iraq occupied 106 bases, according to a report in the Washington Post.1 Military commanders told that newspaper they eventually planed to consolidate these bases into four large airbases at Tallil, Al Asad, Balad and either Irbil or Qayyarah.

"But other reports suggest the U.S. military has plans for even more bases: In April 2003 report in The New York Times reported that "the U.S. is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region."2 According to the Chicago Tribune, U.S. engineers are focusing on constructing 14 "enduring bases," to serve as long-term encampments for thousands of American troops.3

"As of mid-2005, the U.S. military had 106 forward operating bases in Iraq, including what the Pentagon calls 14 "enduring" bases (twelve of which are located on the map) – all of which are to be consolidated into four mega-bases."

Go to the site http://www.fcnl/org.iraq/bases.htm to see further detail including the above map, which has peek-ins.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Graham, Bradley, "Commander's Plan Eventual Consolidation of U.S. Bases in Iraq," May 22, 2005, p A27

2 Shanker, Thom and Eric Smith. "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq." New York Times. April 20, 2003.

3 Spolar, Christine. "14 'Enduring Bases' Set for Iraq." Chicago Tribune. March 23, 2004.

4 Information on Iraq bases is from GlobalSecurity.org. More information is available at: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/iraq-intro.htm. Used with permission.

Lisbon Story

2008-06-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

Had a wonderful time visiting Argentina August 6-11, 2007, spending one night in Buenos Aires as the guest of Esteban Moore, followed by a bus ride to Rosario in the interior, along the Parana River. Along with Maria Baranda and Victor Toledo of Mexico, Christian Utz of Switzerland, Kornelijus Platelis of Lithuania, and others, I was an invited presenter at Semana de las letras y las lecturas, an international poetry conference. A long poem of Maria's, "Letters to Robinson," translated by Joshua Edwards, appears in the current Chicago Review (Barbara Guest special issue). As wide at some points as 60 kilometers, filled with islands and cattle standing in its water to graze, the Parana is the source of a fish called the boga, filets of which are speared with round metal bars and cooked vertically over an open fire. In order for me to present effectively to a mostly Spanish-speaking audience, Esteban translated some of my Poems in Spanish into Spanish (they were written in English, but in the style of Spanish language poets like Lorca, Sabines, Vallejo, and Neruda). Here are two of the translations and a picture of Esteban. The first, "Lisbon Story," is based on a scene in the Wim Wenders movie in which the main character, a German sound engineer named Winter, listens to the fado music of Madredeus. The second poem is "Driver's Song," based on Lorca's "Rider's Song." Esteban was a friend of Borges and has a black and white photo in his office of the two walking together in the 1970s. "La canción del conductor" also appears in Esteban's new book, El avión negro, Papeltinta Ediciones.

La historia de Lisboa

Estate quieto — una sombra está cantando.
Una sombra sobre una pared amarilla
canta acerca del tiempo,
y un hombre se apoya como el tiempo
sobre una pared azul.
Pero es una sombra la que canta
su corazón tendido en la distancia de la noche.

Más allá de esta habitación en el mundo,
los sonidos del mundo pasan.
Todas las vidas, todas la ciudades, plenas de sonidos.
Una mujer canta acerca de ellos.
El río y su canción
penetran el mundo.

Una sombra mueve su boca . . .
lírica de la distracción, una separación lírica
del mundo y el tiempo, pensamiento y mente.
Sombra sobre la pared — amarilla —
donde el hombre azul escucha.

La casa sobre la calle, oscura,
pequeña, angosta, oblicua, calle en la ciudad
pequeña como la pequeñez de las calles,
el sonido de pájaros en vuelo, el sonido del papel.
El sonido de cuchillos afilándose, veloces,
y perros que levantan sus patas, gruesas,
y la niña que deja caer su muñeca.

El hombre azul escucha al mundo haciéndose a sí mismo -
Un zapato creando distancia, click,
y la nieve sobreviviendo apenas,
sobre el terreno que ha elegido, desapareciendo.
Un mundo como sombra pasa.
Pero en la habitación amarilla,
una mujer, buena moza, está cantando, finalizando,
la habitación y sus sonidos ... son oscuros.

- Versión de Esteban Moore

La canción del conductor

Nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio,
la lejana solitaria Danville.

Automóvil negro, luna pequeña,
en el asiento trasero, cerveza.
He olvidado las rutas y caminos
nunca podré llegar a Danville, Ohio.

Sobre las planicies, a través de Indiana
allí donde conocí la soledad.
Automóvil negro, luna amarilla.
Desde una alta ventana mi padre
vigilante me observa.

Sí, que lejos estoy de California
sí y en un automóvil que es tan veloz-
invisible al alma

En la distancia veo a la muerte moviéndose lentamente sobre el camino.
Sé que podré acariciar sus velos
incluso mucho antes de que pueda llegar a Danville, Ohio.

Danville, distante y tan solitaria.

- Versión de Esteban Moore