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Poetry
Posts about Poetry
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.
Wanderer, these your steps
Make up the path, and nothing more;
Wanderer, there is no path:
You make the path by walking.
By walking you make the path,
And turning back your gaze you see
The wilderness you'll never cross again.
Wanderer, there is no path:
Just wake upon the sea.
A-and omg, be sure to cf. the 8th Lesson of the maestro de Tarca. Thanks Leilani for the lovely restatement of Machado's classic line. Se hace el lenguaje al hablar.
posted afternoon of July 15th, 2012: 4 responses ➳ More posts about Readings
Wednesday, June 6th, 2012
Check out this passage from Serrano's Antigua vida mÃa -- it gives the pleasure of switching back between Spanish and English, back and forth between narrator's voice and poet's, several times over.
And all the limbs of a woman plead for the ache of birth.
And women come down to lie like sick sheep
by the wells – to heal their bodies,
their faces blackened with year-long thirst for a child’s cry
(...)
and pregnant women approach the white tables of
the hospital with quiet steps
and smile at the unborn child
and perhaps at death*.
Violeta, dime que tu sonrisa fue para el niño noÂnaciÂdo, pero no me lo digas si fue para la muerte.
...And very strange, Google is not showing me any reference to this poem which is not quoting it from this book -- is this a real poem by non-fictional Adrienne Rich, or a part of the fiction?
Some really striking passages are popping up in this collection of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poetry. Sound, listening, singing, sirens,...
y el mar es ceniciento
tiembla dulce inquieto
como una paloma
Agua confusa
como el ruido de popa que escucho
en la sombra
del
sueño
Hay niebla que nos borra
Tal vez nace un rÃo por aquÃ
Escucho el canto de las sirenas
El sol roba la ciudad
No se ve más
Ni siquiera las tumbas resisten demasiado
Below the fold a stunning elegy. Who is the translator? Not credited in the linked file -- possibly it is Luis Muñoz, his is the only name I am finding as a translator for Ungaretti in a few tries via Google.
And with Picasso and "El Loco" and his blue acrobats
And with Picasso shaking his fist at the sky in "Guernica"
And I'm Durer's Steeple-jack seen by Marianne Moore
And those harpies "The Demoiselles of Avignon" are glaring at me personally
And Degas' ballet dancers are dancing for Matisse and Monet and Renoir and all the Sunday painters of Paris and John Sloane and all the Sunday painters of America and most of the painters of the Hudson River School floating along so calm and holding hands with most of the West Coast Figurative painters and their Have a Nice Day cohorts
But I'm also with Malevich in his "Red Square" in the Beautiful Corner
And with Delacroix' "Liberty Leading the Masses"
And with Goya's groaning masses in "The Disasters of War"
And I'm rocking across the Atlantic with "Whistler's Mother"
And I'm crossing the Delaware with Washington standing in the boat against Navy regulations
And I'm with Bierstadt crossing the Rockies on a mule
And with Motherwell and DeKooning and Kline and Pollock and Larry Rivers in the broken light in the shaken light of the late late late twentieth century
And then I'm walking through a huge exhibition in the Whole World Museum of Art containing all the greatest paintings of the entire fine arts tradition of all the centuries of western civilization
When suddenly a wild-haired band bursts into the Museum and starts spraying paint-solvent onto all the paintings
And all the paint in all the paintings starts to run down onto the floors of all the galleries forming fantastic new and exciting images of the end of our little universe
And elite curators in Gucci shoes rush in and cut up the painted floors and hang them on the walls while picturesque bohemian painters in berets stagger through the halls weeping
As I grow older I perceive
Life has its tail in its mouth
and other poets other painters
are no longer any kind of competition
It's the sky that's the challenge
the sky that still needs deciphering
To make your shadow dance, dance. To make your shadow talk, stand on a streambank.
Learn from your shadow. Broken glass won’t cut it, barbed wire can’t stop it, mud doesn’t stick.
Dave Bonta of Via Negativa today posted How to Cast a Shadow, the 27th and final poem in his series Manual. Go read (and if you likeby all means, listen to his recitations) -- some great stuff is present. Start from the beginning! You have to start from a position of strength. Leave a window open for cat-burglars and cats, either of whom may have a lot to teach you.
Zoe Leonard's political wishes (found at towleroad.com, and thanks for the link, ragebunny!):
I want a dyke for president. I want a person
with aids for president and I want a fag for
vice president and I want someone with no
health insurance and I want someone who grew
up in a place where the earth is so saturated
with toxic waste that they didn't have a
choice about getting leukemia. I want a
president that had an abortion at sixteen and
I want a candidate who isn't the lesser of two
evils and I want a president who lost their
last lover to aids, who still sees that in
their eyes every time they lay down torest,
who held their lover in their arms and knew
they were dying. I want a president with no
airconditioning, a president who has stood on
line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare
office and has been unemployed and layed off and
sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported.
I want someone who has spent the night in the
tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and
survived rape. I want someone who has been in
love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has
made mistakes and learned from them. I want a
black woman for president. I want someone with
bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has
eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who
crossdresses and has done drugs and been in
therapy. I want someone who has committed
civil disobedience. And I want to know why this
isn't possible. I want to know why we started
learning somewhere down the line that a president
is always a clown: always a john and never
a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker,
always a liar, always a thief and never caught.
(Check out this group reading of the piece, in English and in Danish!)
posted afternoon of January 14th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Politics
Alex Williams writes a piece for the NY Times' Fashion & Style section on the difficulties of making close friends when one is past one's college years: a piece which rings true for me, one which makes me think of some of the DFW stories I've been reading lately.
In honor of the man's 
