Coloquio que sostuvieron el rincón y la esquina

Don Marcos del Rincón dijo,

"Si me acerco a la ventana,

a Tránsito de la Esquina

veré, ella que siempre pasa

husmeando y rezongando

por la puerta de mi casa

a esta hora, cuando amanece,

porque le comen las ansias

de saber mis novedades. 

Por eso, mejor me alcanza

la cortina, aquí adentro,

que, de tela oscura, tapa

mi cuerpo pero no mi oído. 

Ella quiere vistas anchas; 

yo, prefiero lo cuadrado.

Anhelo las cosas cerradas. 

Cada cosa su función,

cada cosa en su lugar. 

Aquí esperaré escondido

a escuchar su lengua mala."

Dijo doña Tránsito de la Esquina al

pasar por la ventana del Sr. Rincón,

"Ay, cómo me fastidia el ruco chismoso

que aquí vive. Nunca sale, apenas asoma

la nariz, y más bien se hace el desaparecido

detrás de su cortina. Se imagina que vengo con escándalos a contar,

cuando tan sólo me hago llegar a ver si está bien,

como quien

se cuida de un amigo, pues. Así que, 

don Marcos, hágase ver, que le traje noticias del mundo de afuera." 

"Aléjese, señora,
porque de sus malas mañas
no quiero yo ni saber.
Desvíe su caminata
a pasar por otras calles
y dejar de molestar."
Mientras lo dijo don Marcos,
no pudo dejar de espiarla.

"Ni que lo estuviera importunando,
don Marcos, no sea Ud. tan pesado. Mire que
está Ud. pálido. La brisa fresca del mar
le hace falta, y el buen beso
de los rayos del sol."

"¡Tengo la salud de un oso!
¡Qué de rayos ni qué nada!
Más bien Ud., doña Tránsito,
luce bastante quemada.
¿No será que tanto sol
le quita todas las ganas
de pensar con su sano juicio?
Su mente ya no está clara."

"¡Uf! Cuide lo que dice, don Marcos, no vaya
a ser que Ud. sea el más indicado para
señalar con dedo ajeno." Doña Tránsito le guiñó el ojo y prosiguió, "Le haré saber que por lo mismo de que yo sí
salgo y veo las gentes pasar y las nubes pasar y los naves
pasar, yo sí veo bien, todo iluminado por el astro rey, y mi salud es la de
la yegua fuerte que sube y baja por los vericuetos de la ciudad."

"Entonces, ¿por qué delira?
Le escucho pero no me habla
como debe ser, en verso,
con rima y ritmo que entablan.
Si no puede mostrar forma
de romance ni cantata,
sus opiniones e ideas
¿cómo voy yo a respetarlas?"

"¿Forma? También la tiene la ardiente luz del sol cuando se filtra por
el verdor de las hojas del bosque, y toda la escena queda ilustrada, como que de oro impregnada. Forma difícil de asir pero fácil de apreciar. ¿O no lo has visto nunca, don Marcos?"

"En mis libros veo todo.
¿Qué no pueden ilustrar
el arte de los dibujos,
la ciencia de las palabras?
Si se trata de un concepto
que merece muchas páginas,
seré el primero en leerlas.
Así, qué el mundo se me abra."

"Yo creo, señor, que eso que Ud. dice de que quiere que el mundo se le abra, es
realmente lo que Ud. añora. Pero Ud, sólo por empecinado,
digo,
por terco, porfiado, testarudo, obstinado e intransigente,
se niega a ver que el mundo se abre al umbral de su
puerta." Doña Tránsito se ajustó la blusa y la canasta que llevaba, y agregó, "Que pase un buen día, y hasta mañana."

Quedó perplejo don Marcos.
Le respondió, "Hasta mañana,"
refunfuñando entre dientes.
Se puso a pelar naranjas;
pensando en soles y mundos
dejaba caer las cáscaras.
Después volvió a sus romances
de maneras anticuadas
que escribía en puño y letra:
metáforas delicadas
de amores por doña Tránsito.
De repente entró una ráfaga
por la ventana y todo se hizo un caos
de cáscaras y metáforas y hojas sueltas que a don Marcos le costó unas horas
para arreglar, pero se fastidió y salió al muelle
para ver llegar y salir los naves y las nubes y fue entonces que
supo que
un romance es bonito pero que no siempre
lo romántico se confina en su forma.





 

The Writers' Stabbing

            If you know what kind of a thing is a knife, you’re not going to grab it by the wrong end. How will you slice an onion with the handle? More to the point, —ouch—, how will you avoid slicing open your own palm with the blade? Which kind of tears do you want, if any? Knowing how to use a knife means knowing where and when and how to slice.

            Like a knife to an onion, an apostrophe slices a word wide open. The word didn’t, for example, precisely indicates where the o from not was cut, or elided, when the contraction was produced. The scarred misspelling “did’nt,” in contrast, shows a sloppy sliver where none was needed.

            Sometimes we see an apostrophe that reveals who holds the dagger, who possesses what: the student’s sins, the writers’ stabbing. We can even tell how many do the possessing; in these examples, there is one student, and there are more than one writers. To the ear, the student’s sins and the students’ sins and maybe even the student sins all sound the same. If we hear the cut at all, it is only the faint whisper between one s and another as the knife comes unsheathed. But we can see the cut, and a writer who desires clarity of meaning should carve with the precision of the surgeon’s scalpel.

            And yet ignorance of technique leads us to a strange reversal in contemporary English, in which people are given to using the handle for the blade and the blade for the handle, a mangled language of bludgeoned jack-o’-lanterns and punctured doorbells. It seems more common to see, lately, bloody botched procedures such as “Davids Pizzas” where “We have dipping sauce’s.” Plurals don’t need an apostrophe operation any more than pizzas need plastic surgery. And as for David, well, maybe someone is trying to suggest that he dispossess his pizzas. Is this just outright confusion, comparable to a misspelling? Is it the result of dependence on, or ignorance of, software such as Microsoft Word? Does it all stem from the anxiety of that persistent Sword of Damocles, the conundrum of “is it it’s or is it its?” My fearful suspicion is that all of this random slashing replicates the unfocused thrashing-about of a seething, unsettled society whose members do not know where or when or how to show, or to use, their weapons.

            Because an apostrophe is most certainly a weapon, and of the most vastly insidious kind of violence visited upon speakers and readers of the English language. You, writer—you!—you are complicit in Kennedy’s assassination when you give it to him like that, for him to possess, as if anyone wants to possess her or his own murder. This is a fundamentally unethical form of grammatical viciousness that, for as banal and accepted as it is, does not stop being a form of violence that affects the way we think about perpetrators and victims, about crimes and consequences. It is the lazy ease of slurred syllables—the unburdening of not bothering to locate a recycling receptacle; the casual, hurtful chuckle at someone else’s misfortune—that compounds wound over wound and adds up to the death by a thousand cuts. There is always an alternative way to recast the sentence, to subvert the strictures of column width or character count, to slice, if at all, elsewhere: the traitor's crime against the nation, the assassin’s murder of the millionaire, the bombs’ destruction upon the city.

            The writers’ stabbing is the apostrophe’s purpose. At its best, it’s the mark of a clear incision, a graceful stroke, a clever slash’s eye-catching curve. Can you cut it?

Wrap

Flee, thought, across the distance.
runninflyinrunniflyscootrunflyflyscootrunningrunningfly
I will catch you.
And the catching of you will be the knowing, the naming of you.

Because a name you must have.
name thing name signifier name word name name
The speed of the whirling dust in your wake as you pursue the horizon,
cloud of plumes scooting at an attainable height,
I will match with my gallop.

Let your name be... ñandú.
ñandú ñandú ñandú rhea
And mine will be gaucho.
And with my shoulder I raise my arm, I swing that with which
I will apprehend you:
three weighted ropes of different lengths, joined at one end.
ora bolas bolas bolas
With these I will capture you.
I will attain and retain and ascertain you,
thought with the heft and hurl of a
rhea.

Even as you flee I have cast my stones:
ora bolas bolas bolas
one to circumscribe you quickly
your legs
patas
step no more
while the second wraps further round to categorize you
tight
tighter
and the third, the longest, encircles you repeatedly to characterize and contextualize you,
tightest
thought brought down for analysis,
quick squeeze succulent
for dissection
and digestion.

But sometimes you thoughts are best, and most enticing,
when unfettered, scattered
clouds of plumes plumes clouds plumes clouds of plumes
across the pampas
and I
can only perceive you
remotely
with longing for your form.

Yes, that's often best.
Knowing you are out there in space
potential not kinetic
is another way of naming,
of imagining.

Flocks of thoughts roam free
and live and die unknown
until the hunt.

These things I know

These things I know -

these things that have not yet made known to me how to refer to them -

these are the things I summon to this poem. 

 

These things I know –

they know me too.

We know each other.

We know through each other

intimately. 

Things known so deeply that memory alone does not attain:

the viscera, the nucleus store them,

but they store these things less than they

are these things. 

 

I cannot take them for granted, these things,

because they act, through me, with me, every moment. 

Even to perceive the use or disuse of these things

is for me to act through these things. 

 

These things I know -

how do I know them?

I read them I laugh them I smell them I eat them

I cry them I squeeze them I hide them

I find them...

 

Maybe these things I know are really one big thing,

and that is the thing about which the ceaseless cycle of learning

is also the act of living. 

 

tarareo

Tarareo
porque sí.

Tarareo,
¿por qué no?

Tarareo
porque así me hago vibrar:
el músico, la música,
y el instrumento de cuerdas
es uno mismo.

Tarareo
una intensidad variable
como un arco-iris de ondas.

Tarareo
tan sólo porque el ronroneo
me es ajeno de especie.

Tarareo
porque así manifesto el bienestar
o bien
ahuyento el malestar.

Tarareo
así como quien come con delicia
y bebe con astucia
y enamora con caricia
todo simultáneo como un acorde
como un acuerdo
entre un corazón y dos pulmones.

Tarareo
porque las palabras engañan.
Si fuera posible,
tararearía
este poemmmmmmmmmmma.

diaphany

It didn't catch my eye;

my eye caught it,

a play of light and lift. 

You see what you want, after all.

Seek and ye shall find.

Red, slung in an arc between two trees

it pulsed back and forth

in the sunlight that turned green gold.

I wanted to escape from the meeting 

- it hung just beyond the threshold -

to lie in it, to swing in it,

hammock's ghost

suspended between transcendences

firm while soft, round while straight.

But there was no breeze.

The flow and slack 

streamed through the red firehose

that happened to curve and dip 

among the trees -

in this way only did the realm of fact catch my eye.

In the sway of fantasy it mattered not

and I was back on my back

in the red hammock on the slim balcony

overlooking Botafogo

and the threads of possibilities

and continuities 

extending playfully and joyfully

into a

transcendence

as firm as possible for being so soft

as round as possible for being so straight

the web, the mesh, the arc, the arrow

hammock or hose

of me, on me, under me

restraining my pulsing thoughts

and releasing them into the sky,

a diaphany...

Next I looked,

the ghost was gone.

In its lack

I placed the seed

for this poem

Note: I, too, thought I had made up the word "diaphany," with the meaning of diaphanous epiphany. I'm proud to join a chorus willing this word and its meaning into wider understanding:  http://www.stuartdavis.com/blog/diaphany

Entre Andes y Alpes

Entre Andes y Alpes
anda Aurelio,
astrónomo alemán-araucano.
Astros analiza
antes de la alborada alborotada,
ansioso ausculta
la aurícula de la galaxia.
Acostado abordo
del aeroplano transatlántico,
Aurelio se imagina
sus pasos por la Vía Láctea.
Cuando arriba a Antofagasta,
al Paranal, Atacama,
o cuando asciende en el ascensor
que parte de la estación de Jungfraujoch,
afirma, acierta, agradece
algunos átomos que, al azar,
armaron la arquitectura,
el andamiaje de su anatomía,
para que sea él, Aurelio -
andino-alpino,
astuto astronauta anclado en gráficas - 
el Adán avanzado,
el adelantado audaz,
que abre el espacio
como las mitades de una manzana
algebraica
algorítmica
cabal.

Dilema del castor

Cuando lo otro
se abre y cae
de bruces
sin chistar
ante ti

y recuerdas
del castor
la lucha desigual
entre construir y destruir,
entre el medio ambiente
y el ambiente que se me dio

y contemplas
del castor
su albergue
su alberca
su averno
su avena
su albahaca
su alma

percibes,
por si ves,
que las ideas inundan
el cerebro,
un ser ebrio

y la fría razón
albergada en su iglú
por las buenas
o por las miles
tiene que bañarse
con las chispitas
de iluminación,
peces sorprendidos
que se nos escapan como muslos,
la mitad llenos de lumbre,
la mitad llenos de calor.

Maldito castor que todo lo destruyes
para construir tu propio mundo.
Roe roe roedor.
Bendito seas, castor, cuando destruyes
con medida para crear un mundo a tu medida.
Roe roe roedor.

La hipérbole ridícula de una bala

¿Cómo responder a una masacre como la de Sandy Hook, una masacre que es una, y también una masacre más?

En su magistral cuento "La estampida," sobre la represión militar, escribió la autora uruguaya Cristina Peri Rossi del

sentimiento de piedad por tantas anécdotas truncas, por tantas biografías de pronto segadas, rasgadas, interrumpidas por la hipérbole ridícula de una bala [...] por todos los idilios bruscamente suspendidos, por las casas vacías, por los muebles abandonados, los niños huérfanos [...]

y la frase que no me abandona, la imagen que se niega a soltarme, es aquella de

la hipérbole ridícula de una bala.

la hipérbole ridícula de una bala

cuando el cuerpo es un cosmos 

y la vida un cielo, un viento, un río

y hay momentos en que nos percibimos 

como parte de una totalidad infinita

pero hay momentos cuando nos perecemos

de tanta hostilidad desacertada

de tanta violencia implacable

y basta una bala

hasta una bala

basta

bala

como para acabar una cosmografía

cada cabeza un mundo

cada esencia su espíritu

y no nacemos con armadura antibalas

nacemos vulnerables

desnudos

así como debemos vivir

porque la vulnerabilidad

es poder

y la bala

es despoder

deshacer

desvivir

destruir

la bala

en el blanco

es la negación

hiperbólica

hiperbálica

y ridícula

del futuro

El que teme el futuro

se desespera

y dispara.

¡Para!

¡Basta!

vivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevivevive

tres pies al gato

le busqué tanto que lo aluciné
y no encontré la manera de
ni siquiera cuando pensé que

pero ahí estaba como esperando
no dije que siempre y cuando
me dijo que vivito y meneando

entonces ya estaba como quien dice
me libré pues ya la hice
tres pies al gato lo que yo quise

buscarle

Epazote for your Epizooties

My parents, who grew up in the 1940s in Ohio, spoke a word the other day that I did not recall having ever heard before. First my dad said it, then my mom confirmed it: "epizooties." The context was medical: something like, "Don't eat that, or you'll get a bad case of the epizooties."

My first thought was the word "epazote," an herb popular in Mexican cuisine. It's one of the herbs that I heard well-known Mexican chef Aquiles Chávez jokingly call the "hierbas nacas," along with cilantro and yerbabuena, as opposed to the "hierbas finas," such as basil, rosemary, or dill. After all, the idea that consumption of a Mexican foodstuff would have sickened an early 20th-century Ohioan, leading to the phrase "case of the epizooties," really isn't much of a stretch to imagine.

Besides, other Americanisms have Mexican origins, such as "jalopy," which derives from the Hispanicized spelling of one of my favorite Mexican cities, Xalapa (Jalapa), capital of the state of Veracruz. Just exactly how the association arose is hard to say. Maybe an early 20th-century convoy of beat-up Fords from Xalapa arrived in Texas to make an epic delivery of the better-known local etymological derivation: jalapeño peppers.

But no one sits down to eat a plate of epazote, just by itself. So I looked into the origin of "epizooties," and found that it comes from a French word (with Greek roots) for animal disease, or more specifically an epidemic afflicting a given animal population such as a herd of cattle. Cows, it should be noted, are certainly abundant in Ohio, and have been congregating there, so to speak, for at least a couple centuries. I've heard of bird flu and swine flu, but not cattle flu; in any case, maybe some cross-species bug, or just bovine sympathy, led to the phrase "you better rest, or you'll come down with a bad case of the epizooties, just like Bessie."

Unsatisfied with this explanation, I researched "epazote," which comes from the Spanish alteration of the Nahuatl "epazotl." I learned that the indigenous Mexican herb was often prescribed throughout the early 20th-century United States as a treatment for intestinal parasites, a fact which perhaps explains its vulgar-sounding English-language alternative moniker, "wormseed." This association with folk-healing brings me to propose a convergent etymology for the late 19th-to early 20th-century middle-America birth of the phrase "a case of the epizooties," deriving as much from a sickness (association to animal diseases) as from a cure (consuming epazote to get rid of parasites). Sometimes the remedy is worse than the disease, and the intestinal malaise caused by parasites reacting to epazote could have become regarded as a sickness itself.

As for me, I prefer the "hierbas nacas." All of them. With jalapeños.

The Romance Language Sisters

As a teacher of Spanish and Portuguese, and as someone who has acheived near-native proficiency in both, I am often asked just how different the two languages are. Here's an analogy I've developed as an answer.

Imagine I show you a family portrait of four sisters. They appear elegant, radiant, vibrant. There are no twins among them, but they are all similar in age and you can definitely see a family air about them. The extension of each smile, the bridge of each nose, the arch of each eyebrow and the curve of each breast show variations on the same Latin family theme. In fact two of them, you decide, seem to resemble each other very closely indeed.

After I show you the portrait, I introduce them to you in person, and you exchange a few words with each of the four sisters. You learn that their appearance was no indicator of how they speak, because the two that you had previously categorized together by physical resemblance, you have now split apart by speech, each with one of the remaining two sisters. Two of the four, although speaking different languages, seem to speak quite nasally and slide more often between their words, while the other two speak with non-nasal, sharp, clear vowels in their also distinct languages. Among the four of them, they seem to be able to understand each other to some extent, though this varies by context and speaker.

Finally you learn their names and the key to the analogy. The two who look the most similar of face and body are named Spanish and Portuguese. But Spanish, when speaking, shares with her sister Italian the use of sharp, clear vowels, while Portuguese, and her sister French, speak with a greater range of vowels, including nasal ones, as well as slipperier-sounding consonants.

The analogy is not perfect. What about the extended family, with sisters like Catalan, Galician, Haitian Creole, and Romanian? What about dialects and other variations within one language, such as Continental vs. Brazilian Portuguese? Obviously it is a more complex issue than my simple portrayal allows; however, I find that at least for the typical perceptions of most Anglophones, the humble little analogy proves insightful for characterizing (if not explaining) the visual similarities between written Portuguese and Spanish, as well as the spoken affinities between Italian and Spanish, and between French and Portuguese.

cada quem

tem quem fala dormido e de pé, né?
tem quem não percebe o fluxo da maré,
o empurrão do sangue,
o pestanejo da lua,
nem mesmo estando
mergulhado
na faísca de estrelas e ondas.
tem quem não pode perceber
nem conceber
a vitalidade de cada
momento de cada
um de
cada
cá dá
cadê
a consciência do
cada
QUEM?

Bar Altazor

Bar Altazor, Santiago de Chile, agosto del 2000

Encuéntrame en el Bar Altazor

donde nos despojaremos de nuestra gruta de huesos

donde colgaremos el bastón de nuestro esqueleto

en el significado de algún significante errante

Entáblame en el Varal Tasor

donde desconfiaremos de las palabras

donde ejercitaremos nuestras lenguas entumecidas

desviadas para siempre de su rol telúrico y puramente excavador

Entiéndeme en el Bar Alta Sor

en la esquina de Bello Naufragio con Medusa Irreparable

al lado del Molino de Estremecimiento

y frente a la Funda Ziombi Sentewi do Bro

Entrevístame en el baraltazor

con Lázaro y Althotas, mis anagramigos,

con alquimias, astrolabios, y alambiques

de Del Puerto de los equinoccios cuadrados

Enfílamelo lo melo

fi lalo

falo

a o

o

Vicente Huidobro and the Curse of the Aymara

Let us imagine the young Vicente Huidobro, intrepid explorer of the heights of poetry, as he stands among swirling clouds, braced against the whistling wind of an Andean mountaintop, in the epiphanic moment in which he receives the following pearl of wisdom from an elderly Aymara poet-guru:

"El poeta es un dios; no cantes a la lluvia, poeta: haz llover." 

The magic words echo among the peaks as the guru disappears into the mist. The young Huidobro, grateful and enlightened, reluctantly makes his way down the cordillera, feeling very reassured by what he has heard. The mystical aphorism affirms the apprentice seer's yearning for the godlike power of original imagery and semantic immanence.

Such a scenario is what Huidobro would like for us to believe in "La creación pura: Ensayo de estética," his manifesto attempting to arrange and defend his poetics, first published in French in L'Esprit Nouveau in April 1921. Regardless of the origin of the guru's cryptic phrase (Juan Larrea, for example, suggests that Huidobro merely switched one kind of "Indian" for another, in that the phrase is elsewhere attributed to a Hindu poet), and its various modifications in several of Huidobro's texts--such as

"Por qué cantáis la rosa, ¡oh poetas! / Hacedla florecer en el poema" ("Arte poética")

--the essence of its meaning challenges the temporal nature of poetry as an art of words through its mandate (the command "make") to execute something akin to organic immediacy. In fact, as our daring adventurer (cue stirring music) returns with the boon of knowledge from his heroic quest, beginning to sense within himself the intense desire to conceive of a--yes, that's it!--a metalinguistic parachute voyage, he does not suspect (ominous key change) the perils that await him. He does not yet understand that the mystical message, still resounding in his ears, bears the potential to be both blessing and curse. He walks, confidently, into a trap.

The paradox of the Aymara's blessing/curse is the synecdoche trap, my metaphor for describing the necessity to create an image, part by part, in an always and essentially incomplete way, especially as compared to image-creating in the visual arts. Given the temporal limitations of the written word as artistic medium, it is impossible to perceive the entire image or range of actions, at one glance, of, for example, a body--an image at once very ordinary and yet complex. Such a total perception at one glance is at least theoretically possible in the visual or spatial arts, but a writer must name, and describe, a body part by part, action by action.

The truest solution to the synecdoche trap is to employ some kind of radical onomatopeia, impossibly expanded beyond the range of mere sound such that the word IS the image IS the thing itself. One of Huidobro's examples in this vein would be his palindrome neologism "eterfinifrete" from his 1931 masterpiece Altazor. Such words can exist with effect in a certain context, but they're better for inventing than for describing, and the semantic problem with the end of Altazor is that the entire context--no longer just a word here and there--is composed of this kind of invented words.

Huidobro's more frequently deployed solution, more orthodox in a paradoxical vanguard way, is best explained in his earlier manifesto "La poesía": to find the novel juxtaposition of "palabras enemigas" whose semantic charges ignite the sparks of illumination. An example that he trots out is the title image of one of his collections, "horizonte cuadrado." Preferably such images occupy no more than two words: a smaller word count means greater proximity to the simultaneity or totality for which many vanguard writers envied the plastic arts and also music. But it is never as easy in practice as it sounds in theory, and this tension between plan and execution is essentially what articulates the theme of Altazor, in which the reader's gaze falls along the pages into the impasse of separating form from meaning, with any degree of success, in written expression.

[...]

my further explorations of these ideas:

Aesthetics of Equilibrium: The Vanguard Poetics of Vicente Huidobro and Mário de Andrade. 

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures. Purdue University Press, 2006.

"Altazor: A New Arrangement."
Hispanic Issues On Line Volume 6 (Spring 2010):  
Huidobro's Futurity: Twenty-First-Century Approaches (eds. Luis Correa-Díaz and Scott Weintraub)

Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations.

Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming January 2013.

Reese's Remix

un silabario sabrosamente sintético... del náhuatl al español

Uncanned

A conjugation, or a juxtaposition?
A chord, an accord, a concordance:
that particular bark,
that particular chirp,
and the light burdened by a heavy mist.

It was a simultaneity of synesthesia,
a congruence of the uncanny
that transported me
from one humid morning
to another, suddenly not so
far away and long ago:

a generally generated street
somewhere in Mexico's
pungent abundance of pueblos.
Cobblestone, painted adobe, a dewy dawn
framing the smell of tortillas,
lightly slightly burning on a comal,
remarks from an anxious dog, a wary songbird,
and the calls of vendors, radiolocutores and roosters.

My mirror, the window could show nothing of this.
But this, this sensual scenery,
leaped into my mind on cue,
like the incongruous coiled-spring snake
released from
this, its peanut brittle cylinder,
uncanned.