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Saturday, February 8th, 2014
I went to two different, entirely copacetic poetry events today. In the afternoon was the Medicine Show Theater poetry workshop, led by Martin Espada who turns out to be a wonderful teacher; the workshop's subject was poems that deal with one's motivation for writing poetry. One of the poems used for introduction of the topic was Espada's own The Playboy Calendar and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. This was almost too neat of a coincidence -- the poetic image I'd been working with all week was "the moving hand writes and having writ moves on," and taking this image as the motivating force for me to write poetry. Here is what I came up with --
A jug of wine and thou: The art of consciousness
by J Osner
nor all your Piety nor Wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line.
So just let roll
this animation
this unhoped-for, imagined moving picture
let move these fingers, moving fingers
moving, writing, moving on
these dancing fingers
twirl
across the page
on the other side of my eyes
and trail their strands of inky meaning
and befuddlement
So just watch the fingers
see what they have to say
remember in the end they're yours
So watch these twining braided lines of florid text
unfold
into sentences and sensations and lineations
evocations of senselessness, fading crenellated echoes
of bifurcation
into written finality
So start now to articulate
the moving meanings that motivate
this text amassing
lines unfolding
and relating
inky meaning
in memory
inky unfolding asemic semantic kernel
of beauty
In the evening, I went to the launch party for the Universidad Desconocida. This is going to be great -- I spoke to Enrique Winter, who will be leading the taller de poesÃa, and found him to be familiar with Huidobro and extremely receptive to the idea of writing in a language not your mother tongue -- he said a non-Spanish-speaking friend had found that the distance from the language allows for more precise, analytical use of the language -- exactly what has drawn me to writing Spanish poetry. So, well, this will be great.
posted evening of February 8th, 2014: 1 response
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Thursday, February 6th, 2014
posted evening of February 6th, 2014: Respond
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What we need is a memoir without a self. A memoir about somebody other than 'me.'
This weekend I started Zachary Lazar's new novel, I Pity the Poor Immigrant, set in New York and Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and the beginning, middle and end of the 20th Century -- a nice broad span to cover in 250pp! I am enjoying it. The narrative structure of the book is a little different than any I have seen before -- the framing story is told in the first person by Hannah Groff, a journalist. The three framed stories (well there are more than that -- the three main ones) are a first-person narrative of Groff writing an article about the killing of David Bellen, an Israeli poet; a third-person narrative of events earlier in her life; and a third-person narrative of events in the life of Meyer Lansky. I'm finding the middle one of those especially interesting because the narrator is clearly Groff; but she refers to her younger self in the third person. It gives me a little frisson of weirdness every time she refers to "Hannah".
posted evening of February 6th, 2014: Respond
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Monday, February third, 2014
 Very exciting: a school of Spanish-language writing and literature is being launched in Brooklyn under the compelling name of Bolaño's book of poetry. Go to their launch party on Saturday! (I can't make it because I'm going to a poetry workshop at Medicine Show Theater, about which more anon.) I am planning to enroll in the poetry workshop led by Isabel Cadenas Cañon, and maybe also the writing workshop led by Lina Meruane. Can't wait!
posted evening of February third, 2014: Respond
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Here is a new practice of revision I have been using. I have a couple of notebooks full of rough drafts at this point in a mix of English and Spanish, only a small minority of which I have even read, let alone revised into actual written work. What I've been doing is to scan quickly until I find a passage I like, and then develop it by means of translation: among other things, translating a text forces you to figure out what the core meaning of it is. So in particular, when I'm translating my own rough work with an eye toward revising it, I'm free to modify expression, tone and meaning in the interests of conveying more accurately the underlying sense of the text -- which I may or may not have been well aware of while I was composing the thing. I've had some good luck with this, including the last couple of poems I've posted. Here is a question: Can I (at least for as long as I have untouched raw material) make a daily practice of this? I would like to -- that would not necessarily mean a poem a day posted here, but hopefully a couple of poems a week anyways. Here is today's effort (no translation with this one, just revision in English):
Approaching
by J Osner
It's just dusk now
and the headlights gleam at you
as his front wheels hit that bump
in the road
Purse your lips now,
furrow your brow
as you watch him pulling up
to the curb
the wheels rolling noiselessly
to a stop
posted evening of February third, 2014: Respond
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Saturday, February first, 2014
por J Osner
Quiero otra vez rebosar
otra vez saber
la palabra exacta
necesaria
para describir este mundo
lo que concibo
la frase
esencial
posted evening of February first, 2014: Respond
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por J Osner
Inmóvil en el sótano escucho
Los pisos chirriantes
Mientras los pisa ella
Y la casa hecha carne gruñe
Pesada
Del fardo acumulado
De todos los años
Y miles de años
De todos los pies
Que sus tablas han pisoteado
De todos los vientos
Que sus maderas han azotado
Que las tejas han desalojado
De sus techos
Hace años
Y caÃda la noche
Suspira
La casa y se
Asienta. En su tanque
Callan
Los peces. Afuera
Escucho
El ruido suave
De hojas.
posted morning of February first, 2014: 2 responses
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Sunday, January 26th, 2014
So a couple of weeks ago I was writing a murder tune based loosely on iconic murder tune "The Banks of the Ohio" -- I came up with "Braddock" as a good name for a town to be the setting; did a little research and found there is such a town, and it is pretty ideally located on the banks of the beautifully named Monongahela River, one of the two principal tributaries of the Ohio. Came up with "Veil of Mourning", which John and I played at our New Year's jam. And weird, this story seems to be sticking with me -- I spent some time last week listening to "The Cuckoo, she's a pretty bird" in different versions including Richard Fariña's, "The Falcon"; and the thing to do suddenly seemed to be to write a new version of the Braddock story, called "The Buzzard" -- so that's what I did. Check it out:
It was fun picking up my guitar -- I have not played it in a while.
posted morning of January 26th, 2014: Respond
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Sullen entropy
by J Osner
It's sullen entropy holds sway
decay is part of every system
sands of time just slip away
now vanished, now too late to listen
wax cylinder records the ticking
clock that measures out our days
you listen now, can't find the second
when your life began to play
so play it backwards, scratch the groove
so lose the time that you've been tracking
irreversible flow now cracking
stationary mass begins to move
now creaking, warming as it slides across
this muddy, fecund, fetid marsh
with nothing left to prove:
now found, now lost
posted morning of January 26th, 2014: Respond
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Saturday, January 25th, 2014
My translation (current draft -- there are still a couple of constructions that I'm not 100% sure about to call this "final") of Karen Finneyfrock's astonishing What Lot's Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn’t A Pillar of Salt):
posted morning of January 25th, 2014: Respond
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