Adrienne Rich

 Adrienne Rich was 82 when she died this week of complications of rheumatoid arthritis. Her partner of decades, Michelle Cliff, and her children and grandchildren will miss her terribly, and so will many, many of her reader who, like me, were influenced tremendously by her words and ideas. Reading her essays when I was in college and graduate school shaped the person I have become. I was fortunate enough to see her read years ago, and I treasure her poems.


This video remixes a reading  by Adrienne Rich of her poem with music and images. Created by vlogger Syd the Skeptic.

Diving Into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
abroad the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or week

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
and I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
Obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

"Canción del pirata"

I learned from my daughter (who has spent time in school in Spain) and also from colleaguesm, that Spanish schoolkids are required to memorize the poem "Canción del pirata" by José de Espronceda. I was treated to impromptu recitations, and told that a heavy metal band called Tierra Nueva had turned the poem into a song.



Of course, the mash-up with Pirates of the Caribbean was absolutely necessary.

'Romance de la luna, luna'

In honor of the lunar eclipse on the solstice, here is a poem about the moon by Federic García Lorca, "Romance de la luna, luna."

Camarón de la Isla sings, with Tomatito on the guitar:

La luna vino a la fragua
con su polisón de nardos.
El niño la mira mira.
El niño la está mirando.
En el aire conmovido
mueve la luna sus brazos
y enseña, lúbrica y pura,
sus senos de duro estaño.
Huye luna, luna, luna.
Si vinieran los gitanos,
harían con tu corazón
collares y anillos blancos.
Niño, déjame que baile.
Cuando vengan los gitanos,
te encontrarán sobre el yunque
con los ojillos cerrados.

Huye luna, luna, luna,
que ya siento sus caballos.
Níno, déjame, no pises
mi blancor almidonado.

El jinete se acercaba
tocando el tambor del llano
Dentro de la fragua el niño,
tiene los ojos cerrados.

Por el olivar venían,
bronce y sueño, los gitanos.
Las cabezas levantadas
y los ojos entornados.

¡Cómo canta la zumaya,
ay cómo canta en el árbol!
Por el cielo va la luna
con un niño de la mano.

Dentro de la fragua lloran,
dando gritos, los gitanos.
El aire la vela, vela.
El aire la está velando.

Easter poem for non-believers

Masa

César Vallejo

Al fin de la batalla,
y muerto el combatiente, vino hacia él un hombre
y le dijo: “No mueras, te amo tánto!”
Pero el cadáver ¡ay! siguió muriendo.

Se le acercaron dos y repitiéronle:
“No nos dejes! ¡Valor! ¡Vuelve a la vida!”
Pero el cadáver ¡ay! siguió muriendo.

Acudieron a él veinte, cien, mil, quinientos mil,
clamando: “Tánto amor, y no poder nada contra la muerte!”
Pero el cadáver ¡ay! siguió muriendo.

Le rodearon millones de individuos,
con un ruego común: “¡Quédate hermano!”
Pero el cadáver ¡ay! siguió muriendo.

Entonces, todos los hombres de la tierra
le rodearon; les vio el cadáver triste, emocionado;
incorporóse lentamente,
abrazó al primer hombre; echóse a andar . .

from España, aparta de mi este cáliz (1937)

"Tamalitos de Cambray," de Claribel Alegría

De la poeta Claribel Alegría:

TAMALITOS DE CAMBRAY

(5,000,000 de tamalitos)

A Eduardo y Helena que me pidieron una receta salvadoreña.

Dos libras de masa de mestizo
media libra de lomo gachupín
cocido y bien picado
una cajita de pasas beata
dos cucharadas de leche de Malinche
una taza de agua bien rabiosa
un sofrito con cascos de conquistadores
tres cebollas jesuitas
una bolsita de oro multinacional
dos dientes de dragón
una zanahoria presidencial
dos cucharadas de alcahuetes
manteca de indios de Panchimalco
dos tomates ministeriales
media taza de azúcar televisora
dos gotas de lava de volcán
siete hojas de pito
(no seas mal pensado es somnífero)
lo pones todo a cocer
a fuego lento
por quinientos años
y verás qué sabor.

One reason why I like my job

When I work with students on their Senior Projects for their last class in our department's major, my role is primarily that of guide and facilitator for the students' efforts. Yes, there are many things I teach them about doing research, writing, editing an academic paper in Spanish, both in groups and in one-on-one session. Sometimes I even get to work with students whose interests coincide with my areas of expertise. But quite often I am helping connect them with other experts, and I learn a great deal from their projects. In most cases, students choose topics that fit with their double majors, their career plans, their experience studying abroad, and their personal relationships (sometimes via marriage). Many of the topics are ones that come up almost every semester, so I've now learned quite a bit about them!

Topics this semester include:

• Myths and facts about Mexican immigration to Minnesota, using the case of Lake Street as an immigrant neighborhood, historically and today;
  
• Américo Paredes and the relationship between his fiction, poetry and research as a founding figure of Chicano studies;
  
• the exhumation of mass graves in Spain today, comparing the case of García Lorca to that of someone not famous, but whose burial on the church threshold was a symbol of repression in the village;
• Sarmiento's novel Facundo, its ideological contradictions, and their relationship to present-day Argentine social tensions;
  
• The situation of Spanish-speaking people seeking health care in the Twin Cities: insurance access, language, and cultural difference as issues in inequality for basic medical care, and another study centered on physical therapy:inventory of resources, identification of problems, possible solutions;
  
• current discourses on discrimination against Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica, comparing academic sources and popular discourse in blogs, press, and other online sites;
• the use of "language brokering" or informal translation by children in K-8 classroom at a school in Minneapolis: what research has to say and what the teachers see;
• examining how relationship between traditional ideas about motherhood and polticial activism for Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina through the films "The Official Story" and "Cautiva";
• Issues of literacy in Spanish for adult learners of English;
• how the maquiladora system on the U.S. Mexican border affects the women who work there, and the documentary film Maquilapolis's representation of that situation;
• What we are able to know about Aztec society before the arrival of the Spanish expeditions, and how we have to evaluate various sources in light of colonialism;
• what we should know about the different paths of Cuba and Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War 1898 as roots of present-day situations;
• the uses of the iconic image of the Virgin of Guadalupe by Mexicans and others in the U.S., in art and popular culture, and how it works to signify different kinds of relationships in different contexts.
• Portuguese-language poetry in Angola, and the use of the trope of mother Africa in the emergence of discourses about identity during and after Independence struggles.
  

Spellcheck poetry

I don't know if I should play this for my students or not. What say you?

Taylor Mali, teacher and poet, has other poems about teaching: "What Teachers Make" the use of "Like, and You Know"

John Amato, whose site Crooks and Liars has been such an important source of the video record and polticial commentary in the last few years, has written a cri de coeur, a call for people to vote on the issues, not personalities.

I am totally behind what he says.

"A vote for McCain equals more War.

A vote for McCain equals No universal health care.

A vote for McCain equals a continued collapsing economy.

A vote for McCain equals higher gas prices.

A vote for McCain equals no help for the housing market.

A vote for McCain equals a further erosion of woman’s rights.

A vote for McCain equals ideologue judges being placed throughout the country.

And yet, so much of political discourse ends up sounding like advertising slogans, as these Twitter generated memes echo:

Sarah Palin is your new segway

is the new Barack Obama is your new bicycle.

How about listening to the man who can talk without using a Teleprompter and who can write his own speeches.

"En una noche oscura"

Inspired by fresca's inclusion of the English translation of this very famous poem by San Juan de la Cruz, I went looking for the original and found this musical setting of the poem "En una noche oscura":

It took me a while to track down who is singing the arrangement of the poem in Spanish in this video. It turns out to be Amancio Prada, who has set many poems to music from Rosalia de Castro (in Galician), Lorca and San Juan. He first recorded San Juan's poetry in 1977. Here is the text of the poem in the original Spanish. One thing to notice is the that poetic voice (the "I") is feminine (el alma, the soul) and not masculine (San Juan).

Carlos Saura directed a film called La noche oscura in 1989, which is centered on one event in his life: as part of the Reform movement of the Carmelites, following the lead of Santa Teresa of Avila, San Juan was imprisoned by the Inquisition in Toledo and subjected to torture. It was during his confinement that he composed this poem. Saura says that the film is about the act of creation. Apparently, it was appreciated by a few, but not a success. I'll have to see if I can find it in Netflix.

Wordle makes your text into a word cloud!

Jonathan Fineburg has created a lovely thing called Wordle. It allows you to make word-clouds out of any text and play around with fonts and colors. You can then post your creation to a gallery. The site's gallery makes these images available to anyone. As you can see if you browse the gallery, one need not choose a poem as a text; you can paste in any text, or write one of your own. Repeated words are bigger. Certain very common words (the, etc) are blocked.

I made one of the poem "Wild Things" by Emily Dickenson. You can paste in the code to embed it in your blogpost, like this. Click on this small image, and it will take you to the Wordle Gallery: Check it out!
Or, I can "print" it by saving it as a PDF, then use Grab to select the image in the pf and make a screen capture. This saves it as a TIFF file, but I can resave it as a JPEG then upload it as a picture, as you see below. Fineburg says that these images can be used for anything, fun, printing on T-shirts, making money, whatever.



OK, now I've realized that when I have created my little Worlde image, that I can click "print", then select PDF from the printer menu, and then choose to save the PDF to iPhoto and it will make a picture. No need to go through the screen grab method. (NB: the FAQ gives alternate instructions for PCs)
Wordle handles multiple languages as well. Here's another Worlde I made with César Vallejo's poem "Masa." This time, instead of generating the format by hitting the "randomize button" a bunch of times, I selected "edit,", then chose the font, colors and a few other features. Because I didn't save it to the gallery, it's not there. Why don't you try making one?

Paco Ibañez singing a poem by Gabriel Celaya

Celaya's poem "La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro"

GABRIEL CELAYA
(Hernani, Guipúzcoa, 1911 – Madrid, 1991)

LA POESIA ES UN ARMA CARGADA DE FUTURO

Cuando ya nada se espera personalmente exaltante
mas se palpita y se sigue más acá de la conciencia,
fieramente existiendo, ciegamente afirmando,
como un pulso que golpea las tinieblas,
cuando se miran de frente
los vertiginosos ojos claros de la muerte,
se dicen las verdades:
las bárbaras, terribles, amorosas crueldades:
Se dicen los poemas
que ensanchan los pulmones de cuantos, asfixiados,
piden ser, piden ritmo,
piden ley para aquello que sienten excesivo.
Con la velocidad del instinto,
con el rayo del prodigio,
como mágica evidencia, lo real se nos convierte
en lo idéntico a sí mismo.
Poesía para el pobre, poesía necesaria
como el pan de cada día,
como el aire que exigimos trece veces por minuto,
para ser y en tanto somos dar un sí que glorifica.
Porque vivimos a golpes, porque apenas si nos dejan
decir que somos quienes somos,
nuestros cantares no pueden ser sin pecado un adorno.
Estamos tocando el fondo.
Maldigo la poesía concebida como un lujo
cultural por los neutrales
que, lavándose las manos, se desentienden y evaden.
Maldigo la poesía de quien no toma partido hasta mancharse.
Hago mías las faltas. Siento en mí a cuantos sufren
y canto respirando.
Canto, y canto, y cantando más allá de mis penas
personales, me ensancho.
Quisiera daros vida, provocar nuevos actos,
y calculo por eso con técnica, qué puedo.
Me siento un ingeniero del verso y un obrero
que trabaja con otros a España en sus aceros.
Tal es mi poesía: Poesía-herramienta
a la vez que latido de lo unánime y ciego.
Tal es, arma cargada de futuro expansivo
con que te apunto al pecho.
No es una poesía gota a gota pensada.
No es un bello producto. No es un fruto perfecto.
Es algo como el aire que todos respiramos
y es el canto que espacia cuanto dentro llevamos.
Son palabras que todos repetimos sintiendo
como nuestras, y vuelan. Son más que lo mentado.
Son lo más necesario: Lo que no tiene nombre.
Son gritos en el cielo, y en la tierra, son actos.

Merry mayhem with Beckett

Last night, the skies were clear and the temperatures went below zero. It was that kind of cold evening when your cheeks start to go numb. We went out because we were joining a crowd of fellow lovers of the work of Samuel Beckett for Beckett 101, an event in honor of the 101st anniversary of his birth. When I taught French many years ago, we used En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) as the first literary text the students read at the end of their second year. I think I taught it three times. Later I read one of his novels, Molloy, for a class, and became enamored of it as well. This was during a time when I was immersed in the works of high modernism, and Beckett appealed to me, although I never became a fanatic.

The Beckett fans, or "Beckett Heads" as Maria called us, were out in force last night. There was Guinness, Jameson's, beer and wine, dried fruit and nuts, cheese and bread (challah because it was Friday night), clementines and apples, dates and figs, and a giant sheet cake from the local grocery store with chocolate frosting and "I can't go on, I must go on" written on it. Our meeting place was one of those odd corners on campus that I had never seen before: a very old fashioned reading room of the type one sometimes discovers in odd nooks on campus, a wood-paneled room with round tables, study nooks, and a grand staircase leading up to a book gallery that ran around the upper level Large portraits of the doners looked down on the crowd. I think there must have been 60-70 people there, many of them students, others professors, and a few teenage kids who'd been kind enough to accompany their parents and participate in the readings (the Russian kids were the most Beckettian in their dress and demeanor!)

We began with a mass reading of the first scene of Waiting from Godot, with one half of the room taking the part of Vladimir and the other half Estragon. This got us warmed up for the main attraction, readings in 17 or 18 different languages. My dear friend Maria had sent out a call, and there were people who had volunteered to read the first or last scenes from Godot, passages from Watt, Krapp's Last Tape, and the last passage of The Unnamable in various languages. We proceeded in more-or-less alphabetical order: Bulgarian, Chinese and Japanese (alternating lines), Danish, English, Finnish, French, French and Latin, German, Greek (ancient) Hungarian, Irish and Korean, Mongolian, Papua New Guinea Talkpidgen, Russian, Spanish (us!), Swedish and Norwegian, Turkish and Urdu. I think I remembered all of them! Some people had done their own translations, as none existed in their language; a few people had memorized their parts, some acted out scenes while others just read. I had never heard several of these languages spoken before, and it was thrilling. Because many of us knew the texts intimately, and because we had all read one of them together, we could recognized and follow along with the shape of the text.
We ended with a mass reading of the end of the Unnameable, which was hilarious--some read along with the loudest voice, others read to themselves in their own rhythms, a few formed little groups that ended earlier or later than the group. Someone recorded the whole thing, and took picture--I hope to get to see them!

We had a few props--a branch for "the tree" that is part of the opening of Godot, a bowler hat that evoked the Chaplin/French clochard characters, even a tape deck for the two performers who did bits from Krapp's Last Tape. One reader had directed Godot in China, another was an actor who had performed in a version of Godot.

I was happy that my daughter was willing to come, and willing to stand up with me and read a scene in Spanish. We bought the souvenir T-shirt that has "I can't go on, I will go on" because she enjoyed the energy, the glorious sounds of all these languages, the enthusiasm and charm of each of the readers, and the chocolate cake.

flarf flarf flarf spimes

Do not read or listen if you are easily offended. No, really, I mean it.


intentionally bad poetry + ludicrous obscenity + the Internets= flarf

The Double-Tongued Dictionary has an entry on flarf.


Gary Sullivan (no, not that Gary Sullivan)tells us about flarf in Jacket Magazine.

Listen to the MPR podcast about flarf

Charles Bernstein, poet and scholar, teaches about flarf.

BoingBoing posts about flarf.

Science fiction writer and for real prescient dude Bruce Sterling discovers flarf.

He is the guy who thought up SPIMES.

Eshleman and Vallejo

Clayton Eshleman read from his work today at the bookstore Magers and Quinn. His reading was sponsored by RainTaxi, a fabulous quarterly review of books published locally. RainTaxi hosts an annual Book Fest, a great event. Earlier in the day, Eshleman gave a talk on his translations of the poetry of Vallejo. This text on "Intensidad y altura" (in fascicle) is an example of his process that he shared with us today.
This evening he read some of his translations from The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo: A Bilingual Edition, which has just been published by the University of California Press, as well as his own poetry. The event warmed my heart on an evening when snow is falling once again.

Hommage a Bob

The poet Anne Waldman will be here to talk about Dylan and the Beats at a symposium on the early Bob at the Weisman Art Museum. Many serious scholars will deliver talks on Dylan's thought, his impact, his influence; his music has been covered by innumerable artists. In honor of this influential figure, I give you Wierd Al's Bob, a song completely in palindromes

here, for comparison, is the original:

"Dos formas del insomnio"

A friend told me that lately she is having trouble sleeping. Then she recited this poem by Jorge Luis Borges to me.

Dos formas del insomnio

¿Qué es el insomnio?

La pregunta es retórica; sé demasiado bien la respuesta.

Es temer y contar en la alta noche las duras campanadas fatales, es ensayar con magia inútil una respiración regular, es la carga de un cuerpo que bruscamente cambia de lado, es apretar los párpados, es un estado parecido a la fiebre y que ciertamente no es la vigilia, es pronunciar fragmentos de párrafos leídos hace ya muchos años, es saberse culpable de velar cuando los otros duermen, es querer hundirse en el sueño y no poder hundirse en el sueño, es el horror de ser y de seguir siendo, es el alba dudosa.

¿Qué es la longevidad?

Es el horror de ser en un cuerpo humano cuyas facultades declinan, es un insomnio que se mide por décadas y no con agujas de acero, es el peso de mares y de pirámides, de antiguas bibliotecas y dinastías, de las auroras que vio Adán, es no ignorar que estoy condenado a mi carne, a mi detestada voz, a mi nombre, a una rutina de recuerdos, al castellano, que no sé manejar, a la nostalgia del latín, que no sé, a querer hundirme en la muerte y no poder hundirme en la muerte, a ser y seguir siendo