Craig Santos Perez hecho Craig Santos Pérez

Échenle un ojo a La cámara verde, una sección curada por Cristina Rivera Garza en el Periódico de poesía de la UNAM en el DF. En la sección actual, aparecen unos poemas de Craig Santos Perez traducidos al español por su servidor y Marco Antonio Huerta.


Craig Santos Pérez ha intentado crear un “espacio extraído”, no tanto des-territorializado como re-territorializado, en el espacio del cuerpo y de la página. Ahí, entre el océano de palabras en inglés, encontrarán sus sitios movedizos y procesionales algunas del nativo Chamorro que no logró aprender (ni olvidar del todo) en los sistemas escolares de las Islas del Pacifico. La selección que se presenta aquí viene de su primer libro y se mueve del inglés hacia el español gracias a las labores de traducción de John Pluecker y Marco Antonio Huerta, ambos poetas por derecho propio, ambos compartiendo ese espacio fronterizo que une y tensa los límites que van desde Tamaulipas, en el noreste de México, y Texas. Ambos, pues, en el continuo proceso de construcción de sus propios “espacios extraídos”.

Fue un reto y algo rara (y desestabilizadora) esa experiencia de traducir poemas del "inglés" al "español", desde la lengua supuestamente materna a la lengua supuestamente madrastra. Se supone que no se debe de hacer tales barbaridades y atreverse de esta manera. Uno se abre al riesgo de tropezar y cometer graves errores. Pero uno siempre se abre a una infinidad de posibles malentendidos y errores cuando está transitando entre idiomas o traficando palabras. El desafío implicó todo un proceso rico de colaboración con Marco Antonio y al final, allí en tu pantalla quedan las huellas de este proceso de re-escribir, traducir, debatir y discutir. Espero comentarios de los lectores. Ójala. Se puede leer las traducciones aquí.

Rue

Check out a new text by yours truly called "Rue" that was published as part of the wikiloot project of valeveil. I used an erasure technique on a U.S. Embassy cable from Mexico: 10MEXICO518, CALDERON VISITS JUAREZ, ANNOUNCES NEW STRATEGY.

A little more info on valeveil and the project: valeveil is a small publishing press and Stockholm-based curatorial node devoted to strengthening connections between America and Scandinavia via ongoing ventures. valeveil is compiling submitted critical and/or creative writing responses to one or more Wikileaks web link(s) of one’s choice, alongside the written responses of other contributors. Text results are being archived and made publicly accessible.

The project is interested in doing this because the people at valeveil think the Wikileaks phenomenon is of particular importance to Americans, Swedes and others who find themselves influenced. It has been reported that Wilileaks founder Julian Assange’s rapport with these countries has been under scrutiny. Yet, Wikileaks as an open source of relevant information―once classified documents―is significant to anyone aspiring for a more realizable freedom of speech and expression. This writing-as-response archive exists because the Wikileaks issue remains unresolved and a topic of concern.

Submissions are currently being accepted to the project.

Broke!

Tomorrow night in Houston, Hank Hancock reads from the his serial novel Broke as part of the Poison Pen Series. I initially started seeing Broke some years ago (around 2006?) as Hank passed out each chapbook-like entry of the series (in true guerrilla fashion) not to his extended network of friends and acquaintances, but rather direct to the wider community in small stacks around town. I understand the urban, random approach: everyone has a right to his work and it is out there on the street, the same streets where his characters are wandering around. Hank wanted everyone and anyone to stumble on his text, including his characters: Carla and Mica and Vernon and Janine. But for me, it was frustrating. I wanted to collect-the-whole-series like I collected Garbage Pail Kids when I was younger. I had a capitalist need for the whole set. Or a collector's dream of possessing them all. But Hank didn't make that possible. At first.

Now, thankfully, the whole series is up and on-line on a gorgeous website at broke-houston.com. All of the entries are there, or at least all of the ones that have been released so far. Right now, that's three chapters with each one divided into four smaller sections. This week Hank presents the fourth chapter (or entry or section).

And what is Broke all about?

A hurricane is sweeping into Houston. Actually, it's Hurricane Rita. The local denizens of the central city, the adjunct professors and art workers and retail shop clerks and waiters, are all deciding what to do. Hurricane party or traffic jam in the Piney Woods? Fleeing or wandering through the empty landscape of the depopulated city? At the same time, police are pulling a body out of the bayou downtown. All around the trees are growing and swaying and building canyons and structures; Hank names most of the trees, chinaberries and crepe myrtles and more, and a ton of the plants, saw palmettos among them. The street is alive and the city is tense and on-edge as routines are broken and everyone prepares for the expected onslaught with its totally unpredictable effects. The highways are crowded and stopped and suddenly the city can see "how the earth had been moved to shape a roadbed that rose above culverts and gullies, and that cut angles into inclines ... how velocity shapes the world, and how inhospitable that world became once the imperative of velocity had been compromised."

One of the enjoyable things about the text is that it is still very much in the process of being made. It's not perfect or always primly polished, and it doesn't purport to be so. In one installment, in the middle of the page, is the message: what the? what’s going on? this page is in the middle of some edits… I'm going to read this as intentional. As just another kind of footnote. There's a panoply of footnotes, as the offstage narrator tells us where we can read more about a particular item of interest in a novel from 1974 or a Le Tigre song we should listen to from 2004 or a store in Massachusetts that sells the same T-shirt a character is wearing. Everything is in the process of being made in collaboration with the reader. And often what is in the story is drawn from other, obscure-to-me novels, like John Hawkes’ 1964 Second Skin or 1951’s Beetle Leg.

There's a lot of strangeness in the situation, this clearing out of an entire city, and there are moments of humor sprinkled around: "Jacob could not seem to keep his finger out of his nose. It was not the cool nose-wiping of the cocaine user, but honest-to-goodness, mouth-agape, index finger pointed straight up and in. He seemed to be trying to get at his own brain." Sometimes the characters and the situations feel like those moments from the movie Slacker, people walking, talking, smoking cigarrettes, going to house parties, playing chess at a café, extremely educated people asking questions and interviewing, making political speeches. But it's a slacker who is preparing for the impending Rita doom.

Broke is gentle with its (anti-)heroes, always kind with their quirky eccentricities and their often belabored emotional engagement with the world. There's not a lot of irony here or mocking. The characters are cared for, looked after by their all-knowing narrator. And since many of the characters are often cruel to themselves, it's nice to feel like someone is looking out for them.

I'm happy someone is writing this story about this Gulf Coast in this way, in public and in installments. Serial fiction has a long and "storied" history, stretching all the way back to the One Thousand and One Nights; Broke a sweet blend of nineteenth-century publication strategy and zine culture and chapbook arts. But I will say I'm too thrilled that I don't have to wander Montrose looking for a copy in random stacks anymore, since it's all on the Interweb. But I still want a copy of this fourth installment tomorrow night. And I want the book when it finally (hopefully) comes out in all its broken-chinaberry wasteland glory.

Not infrequently, there are calls for “negative criticism” among poets and poet-critics. I am opposed to negative criticism so called--a performance in which one "takes down” another's work in order to enact evaluation or judgment--opting instead for criticism that is highly interested, motivated, desirous, devotional, conversational, dialogic, coeval, conative, and which--yes!--elects affinity. Affinity which may perpetually off-set the struggles for power that even poets so often fall prey to. Affinity, or connection, which seeks new gravity, which redistributes singularities through a process seeking love. To elect affinity is, as Bhanu Kapil suggests, to mate with the things (or people) that you may most want to become (or may already feel like you are becoming). It is, in other words, to work in the present for what we will have wanted to have been.

- Thom Donovan on the Elective Affinities site


Swamplot notices some poetic signs in the First Ward in Houston.

A little Googling finds the artists responsible.

The artists are on a Mission Year, a "year long urban ministry program focused on Christian service and discipleship." As they put it, "we want to document what we make, what we learn, what we teach, and what God does through our service and creativity."

Ah, Houston: where avant-garde artistic practice meets Christian missionary practice.


Cy Twombly Dies

From the NYTimes:

In the only written statement Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.” The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed and he barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days.”

More here.

Three for the coming weeks



I like a folkloric relationship with the avant-garde. This is a thing our people do.

- daniel lang / levitsky


and


But some are twisted with the love of things irreconcilable / The slant moon with the slanting hill.

- Hart Crane as quoted by Eileen Myles in Inferno


and


I am awaiting, eternally and forever / a renaissance of wonder.

- Mr. Cohen quoting Mr. Ferlinghetti


Review of Dog Ear by Erica Baum

I became a member of the amazing and incredible Ugly Duckling Press this year. I'm happy. I got Dog Ear in the mail a few weeks ago. I'm even happier.

The concept behind these dog ears is clear from the outset. Someone (that someone being Erica Baum) has decided to take photos (or scan?) dog-eared pages of books. Out of these small squares of bisecting text emerge small puzzles, small challenges to the reader to re-learn how to read.

Initially, I found the squares curious. I was drawn into looking at them, attempting to read them or to decipher them. Should I read the words that were cut in half? What if the majority of the word was there, but just a piece of it was missing but I still felt like I could reasonably infer what the word would have been? Did the word exist then? How to read the tiny tips of a serif l or the squiggly lines and dots of the remainders of letters? I was puzzled, unsettled, put off, intrigued.

Kenny Goldsmith's introduction (which is (fittingly for Goldsmith) partially plagiarized from Dick Higgen's 1987 book on pattern poetry) helps us navigate the poems with his reference to the traditions of leonine verse. Higgins points out that this kind of poetry is difficult to define (Goldsmith says it's difficult to "explain") and then they both provide the same example of this sort of verse:


We are immersed in a world of choose-your-own-adventures, Goldsmith says. And I would add that they seem like small mindtwisters, mindteasers, prodding us on and poking us out of a passive reading position. Reordered or re-read in multiple ways, each text has a seemingly infinite number of readings, which made me think about the way this is a facet of most of the poetry that engages me (and the same is true for other forms of writing and art as well). We've stumbled onto an axiomatic truth about the multiplicity of possible readings of a literary text. However, Baum pushes us to think about this in an even more extreme, deranged (rearranged) kind of way. Whenever we read, we are forced to make decisions: in a long novel, we skip paragraphs or skim sections, breezing past character or situations we'd rather not dwell on. Perhaps there is a particular kind of writing or language we like in a particular book and another kind we are not so fond of, well, this propels us to make decisions as we read about how we are to read. Baum makes this process visible, forcing us to reconsider, rethink and reanimate our reading experience. With the turn of each page, we're confronted once again with the doubt: how is this to be read?

The books Baum has chosen to dog ear are hardly random. Goldsmith recommends trying to do this process with other books around you in your home in order to quickly realize just how difficult it is to make something provocative. Hopefully, this will help you to understand just what Baum's "accomplishment" really is. Baum has chosen what are all prose books (actually mass-market paperbacks) for her dog-earing. So there are words which are broken in half by dashes due to prose conventions about typesetting. How do we read these words in this poetry when necessarily they are not continued on the next line? How does this help us to think about the gap between prose and poetry? How does it make us aware of the very conventions of prose and poetry?

Some of the plates are easier than others to read. One of the more "transparent" ones is Plate XVI, Differently:


This small piece is strangely satisfying, pleasurable, even calming, mainly because there are so few extraneous bits of words: "174," "175," "MI," plus a strange squiggly shape next to "MI" and then a tiny little serif tip next to how. In comparison with all of the other dog ears, this one seems plain and clean. It's as close as we get to easy reading in the book, I think. And yet, even this one can be read in so many different ways, as Goldsmith points out in the introduction and Eileen Tabios points out in her engagement with the book.

Other squares are more dense, more crowded and more full of bits of words that stymie easy reading. Compare the experience of reading that first plate with this one, Plate VI Fallout:


Clearly this one is more of a struggle, more of a puzzle, more of a challenge for reading. "It" is cut off. A parenthesis is closed but never opened. Dashes lead into the ehter. A half "C" at the very bottom threatens. The serif tip of a "t" morphs into a bit of an "e" and then "d." But yet the title of the poem, Fallout, alludes to this kind of breakdown, this lingering radioactive cloud post-explosion.

The book is a joyful kind of hard reading, a kind of difficulty that challenges, the kind of difficulty Charles Bernstein has written about in the Attack of the Difficult Poems. I think Dog Ear is a perfect book to learn how to find the fun in reading poems that ask the reader to work, poems that ask the reader to participate, engage, judge, decide, involve themselves. Poems that force the reader to do more than simply sit back smugly in their chair and delight in a singular revelation.

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.)

A Report from the Scene: UCSD MFA First Years on May 25, 2011


So in line with this continuing series of "reports" from the events, I took notes at the recent end-of-the-year performance for the students finishing their first year at the UC San Diego MFA in Creative Writing.

My idea is to become more of an active listener-participant at events that I attend. Appropriating words from readings and performances and making a kind of listening poem or participative, collaborative text. Moving away from listening perhaps towards writing. Trying to redefine listening as an active act that implies writing as well. Writing moves closer to listening and makes the listening an act of copying and recycling. And since I am often copying in the dark or writing quickly (so as not to be noticed and given judgmental stares), I make mistakes, I rearrange, I mess up. Then when I am trying to turn my handwritten notes into a computerized blog post, another layer of trouble arises. So much troublein the world (Bob Marley dixit). In the end, they are pieces of a moment, a bit of an experience of listening (Dolores Dorantes dixit). The spirit of recycling.

Here are my notes from the event:


Here are the retypings/rewritings of the notes:


From Amy Forrest

1. Gin rummy picks a
blemish, fiercely .
2. Edie watered a
fluid arc an orb.
3. Susie the organist plays a
other wife and second grade teacher.
4. Pill box hat fucked a
secretary with blank eyes.
5. Frostie freeze frowns a
pushed back chair.


From Kara Ford-Martinez

Take a Sentimental Journey. Go away, I'm getting out. The urine soon. Her children carry her to her clatter as she tried to raise her old pickle jar. I have my glass of wine and disleveled hesitantly. The crowd was cheering wildly.


From Jennifer Lorene Ritenour

What do I need gold for? Pearls made me young again and kiss me first. What does it feel like? Swim up to the beach in the sand. Toes shaken with a knife. She doesn't like him floating inside of her. The bleeding head hung low. A nuisance making her hungry and sick while holding her. Screech.


From Allie Moreno

To take to steal
to move to probe
to explode my name
muddies the hurt
untitled hold sky.
To broom the want
roof drink like
the pillows. I read
her I do that I
didn't no capital
the traded lemon
conditions buckle
the broke rewrites
wasted uncomfortable
munching cuddly
deamon we often
conjure spearkly peeling
the river spools.
I want to, my voice.


From the Franolous Voeltz

Borders rip blanket
still over your fingers
snow tacky flake
all six kilometers
jerry canned game.

Today people live in rooms never touched by death.

A seagull found
shimmering geese
safety time one
tell me one third
boot dance duck
shape juice out.
A river jump
off naked flesh.
Never asked blood.


From Sean Ryan

Bermless friesling cocktail erasable flowers
grass the gripping receptacles ontics the Camry
the joists and drusses migrate erasing relations
curving concrete un-self-yielding to images
of signals worn carpet ashtrays signals toilet
paper ownedness crashes ontics douchebag's
sarong its sari assasin to its own visibility.


What Fences Us In





Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Waiting room at the gastroenterologist's office.
Facts: Two female patients talk about the nervous indigestion they're suffering from. One of them, the older woman, tells the younger one about her day-to-day concerns (the kids, money, health), and now the additional issue of avoiding getting hit by a bullet. The younger one tells her that the other night she felt sick and had to go to the hospital at dawn, that she lives with her mother, she didn't want to wake her up so she wouldn't insist on going with her, not only because of the inherent risk involved, but also because if her mother went, she wouldn't have anyone to leave her son with. The older woman says, you were really lucky, because if you'd run into the bad people they could've cared less you were feeling bad. The younger woman shook her head, yeah, I was really lucky, I didn't run into anyone and they took care of me at the hospital.


Time: 6:20 p.m.
Location: Waiting room at the gastroenterologist's office.
Facts: The younger woman goes in to see the doctor, and the older woman talks to the receptionist. The older woman asks her if she's received any phone calls, like extorsion attempts to get money. She tells her the story of her neighbors, a couple of elderly people who were kidnapped by phone. On the phone, they gave instructions for them to leave their house and they went to a hotel and there, under threat of death, didn't answer any calls from their children. The kidnappers called their children and got a large sum of money from them. The elderly couple was later found at the hotel. Next, the receptionist tells her that a few moments before she received a strange call from an educated man asking her for the doctor, which seemed strange to her and she said he wasn't in, and that that same man then started asking her what kind of work she did there and other strange things. The receptionist was so scared she hung up on him.


Time: 6:50 p.m.
Location: Inside the gastroenterologist's office.
Facts: I go in and sit down on one of the seats in front of the desk, I listen to the doctor talking on his cell phone, it's clear he's talking with some family member, since he's tell them them about how he's been receiving strange phone calls. He asks them to tell his siblings to be on the lookout.


Time: 7:25 p.m.
Location: My house.
Facts: As soon as I get home from the doctor's office, I start to hear sirens. I run to check Twitter. Apparently a man's body is sprawled out on the street. On the same street I just came from, which is about two blocks away and where the doctor's office is. At an intersection close by. That all this had just taken place and that the police were showing up.


And I'm left thinking to myself: all this happened as I was walking around that area. Minutes before. Minutes after. A body in the street.


The metal fence. The tension. All of this that fences us in. And some of us insisting on jumping all the damned barriers.