Writerly News

Abigael


People in the know know Abigael Bohórquez. He has a kind of cult status in Northern Mexico and in sexually subversive communities across Mexico. His poetry is well known (among a select group) for its refusal to accept the status quo, its rebellion in content and form.

The poetry of Abigael Bohórquez (1936 - 1995) leaps across traditional boundaries in Latin American literature: both colloquial and neo-baroque, regional and informed by classical traditions, intimately personal and actively political, traditionally-informed and experimental. Despite this richness, his work has been marginalized even within Mexico because it challenges historical hierarchies: particularly, a centralist tendency within Mexican literature which privileges literature from the capital and an aesthetic hegemony which makes little room for the work of an openly gay man.

In the last ten years, there has been something of a renaissance in interest in the work of Bohórquez. A number of presses in Sonora have republished his works. In 2000 a consortium of Sonora publishing houses released an anthology of his work called Heredad (Inheritance); this anthology has since been re-released in two subsequent editions.

Check out a new translation of a poem, "Primera ceremonia"/"First Ceremony," by Bohórquez here in the most recent edition of Asymptote, an exciting new international journal focusing on translation.

Afternoon with the Little Red Leaves Textile Series

What does a tiny series of books make.  A tiny series of books made of strings and textiles.  What could a tiny series of enclothed feelings make in the world.  How could anyone look at them without seeing their smallness, but also the love and care for each.

One of the authors in the series, Mairéad Byrne, has a bio that says she was "born into her father's library in Dublin, the fifth of eight chapbooks" and these little books feel this way too, born slowly and growing more numerous over time, finding homes on shelves.  Their homes outsourced all around the globe.


Like, for example, A Reading: Birds by Beverly Dahlen. The fact of the two poems in the book.  The first one a poem by Dahlen that spans over the course of several pages and thinks about birds, about doves, about how we think about or see or look at or say birds.  How do the words say the "cranes" or the "tule fog" or "sparrows" or all the other "mythical creatures" gathered.  How did we learn the names of all these birds.  Who did the teaching of what is a "robin" and what is a "sparrow."  Who would "mother them."

The end of Dahlen's poem is jarring, dwelling in "how miserable is this imitation:" "the mourning doves' hoo-hoo-hoo."  And there is something that is felt to be lost, something that has seemed to escape from the book, what was lost in the dove's call becoming those marks on the page.  But then moving on, the realization as Dahlen includes an endnote with "the story of the mourning dove as told by the Yurok people of northwestern California."  And suddenly, going back in time to these first words, this first writing or human singing of the song of the mourning dove, the miserableness of the imitation of the hoo-hoo-hoo is deepened, added to, made more profound and somehow the echoing of this new imitation thickens the previous attempt: "Wee...poo...poo."

And then Lucky by Mairéad Byrne with illustrations by Abigail Lingford.  This one is orange and red and green and black and all kinds of colors irrecognizable to this colorblind eye and, when opened, reveals a more colorblind friendly field of black polka dots (that aren't actually black I think) and yes I do feel lucky, like lucky is what I feel like to have such a beautiful little object in my hand.  And suddenly I am making rugs and observing centipedes and lap-tops together for the first time.  And then the eye is popping out through a series of Figures, scientific illustrations of how an eye comes to protrude and then exude from the eye-socket and it's weird and beautiful.


And in a rush, I think I don't need to fix up my house, I can just set up the floodlights.  I'm told I "can rent them fairly cheap or even invest in a set."  And with those floodlights I'll never have to worry about my ramshackly house again.  Yes!  And I never saw a more thorough meditation on an unexpected "Heap of Snow" in the back of a pick-up truck than the one found here.  Ever.  At the end of the book, Byrne comments on "anything on which smaller things feed" and she reminds me I'm thinking about these little books.

What do these little books feed on.

Holes punched out and made to run a course around the text:


Tiny windows with tiny microscopic slides slid through the carefully sized gaps, creating tiny new poems: collaborations between book-maker and poet:


And I've figured out what these tiny books feed on.  You should too.

Five Best Gay Books

The Good Men Project has a whole slew of queer authors naming their own five best gay books of all time. I'm not going to read all of the authors' best books, but I was into Eileen Myles' list:

The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Wieners
La Batarde by Violette Leduc
Wrong by Dennis Cooper
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution by Jill Johnston
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

Seem worth checking out. And Sarah Schulman's:

Koolaids: The Art of War by Rabih Alameddine
“The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action” from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw
Funeral Rites by Jean Genet
The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers

Koolaids is one of my favorite books ever. I was happy to see I had read all of Rigoberto Gónzalez's books:

Another Country by James Baldwin
The Rain God by Arturo Islas
My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel
Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me by Jaime Manrique
City of Night by John Rechy

Sometimes I feel like I am not well-read. I think I'm just well-read in certain traditions (like anyone else, one has to focus or narrow down somehow). Now back to reading.

An interview of J. Michael Martinez by Craig Santos Perez just came out on Jacket 2:

In addition, I’ve said this elsewhere, at the time I was writing the work I searched for Chicano writers who were employing formal restraints in the vein of the Language poets and other late 20th century poetics. I couldn’t find any one. This is not to say they weren’t out there, but I didn’t have access to that work. Now, I know Chican@s (as friends and colleagues) that were out there: Roberto Tejada, Gabe Gomez, Carmen Gimenez Smith, et al.

and:

I’m uncomfortable naming the work of a certain generation of writers as “avant-Latin@” writing. If anything, I think the Chican@s who are pursuing a broader aesthetic in their work have a chance to move beyond the “avant-garde” and its historical framing of literary history.

Just bought my copy of Heredities. (Feeling strange about linking to the Beast but the book is super cheap there.)

Assorted Items of Much Interest

1.

Erica Mena write about choosing only books published in small presses for her new Translation and Art class:

Teachers are in positions of power, too, because we can create a (sometimes minor) demand for certain kinds of texts, and use our assigned books to support independent presses who are more likely to publish works in translation, and works in translation that challenge the market-based norms for translation. So I decided, back in October, that I would only assign books that were published recently by small presses.

So smart this decision. Go here to see the list of incredible books she is teaching at Iowa.

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Need to read this book on Tim Dlugos.

From a review on Bookforum:

It might seem, on opening A Fast Life, that Tim Dlugos was born fully formed from the head of Frank O’Hara. Dlugos was undeniably an original, but his sophistication and finesse—acquired while he was still a student at La Salle College and immersing himself in the work of the New York School poets—showed from the very beginning, when he started writing at the age of twenty in 1970.

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Eliot Weinberger at the Quarterly Conversation talks about translation and wars and writing serial poem-essays hybrids:

Well, that statement was made twenty years ago, during the time of ethnic wars and before the rise of the unimaginable Internet. And, in American poetry, a time when the poets—with the exception of a few old hands like Rothenberg—had more or less stopped translating poetry. As I’ve written elsewhere, translation flourishes when there is a national inferiority complex or national embarrassment, and in the sense of the latter the Bush years saw a boom in translation. (Though shockingly not a boom in political poetry—another topic.) Intellectuals finally became sick of their American selves, and started wondering what other people were thinking.

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Counterpath in Denver seems like an awesome place. And awesome model for lit-art space.

And super cool Open Door series on the Harriet blog "showcasing performance, scholarship, and engagement outside the usual boundaries of slams, workshops, and book publications."

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Neo-benshi goodness.