Here is a poem I like. Freeway 280 Las casitas near the gray cannery, nestled amid wild abrazos of climbing roses and man-high red geraniums are gone now. The freeway conceals it all beneath a raised scar. But under the fake windsounds of the open lanes, in the abandoned lots below, new grasses sprout, wild … More Lorna Dee Cervantes
I am angry because this is considered prize winning poetry and because writing even a polite review of it takes the kind of effort grading a really bad paper does. These autobiographical poems are stories of the joys and sorrows of women in families – wives, mothers, grandmothers, aunts – on both sides of the … More This paragraph instead
It is good that people write, but this person is not a good poet. It is difficult to come up with things to say that are diplomatic yet still true, and I feel I am putting more effort into the review than the writer did into the poems (as happens with grading papers). Of course … More The first paragraph of a bad review by me
First, more on professors who say we have to be professors, or that they are incapable of being anything else: I always thought this was just lack of imagination and information but is it low self esteem? When I was a child I thought school was my only safe bet as well. We will think … More Geopolitics
Is it something like this? Something in an apocalyptic landscape? My piece, which is “killing” me, begins and ends with Nelson Osorio and the avant-garde as a “reajuste cultural a nivel global.” The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared … More On death in Vallejo. On Pyncheon.
This is a mestizo post because it starts with some famous jarana criolla with my old professor Pepe Durand! After that, it offers an article by Charles Hale on the future of Latin American Studies. Then, it just keeps on mixing. ¡Adentro! My Vallejo problem is and always has been a research problem and not … More “y siempre en el sepulcro estaré ardiendo”
When sound is translated into a blow on the nape of the neck, and light into a flash so bright that it actually scorches the skin, when feeling is lost in one disintegrating jar of every nerve and fibre […] the mind, at such moments, is like a compass when the needle has been jolted … More A new kind of synaesthesia
The True Born Englishman Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman: In eager rapes, and furious lust begot, Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot. Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow, And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough: From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, With … More English mestizaje
True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless “thing” and places it behind … More John Berger on Translation
As a fond mother, when the day is o’er, Leads by the hand her little child to bed, Half willing, half reluctant to be led, And leave his broken playthings on the floor, Still gazing at them through the open door, Nor wholly reassured and comforted By promises of others in their stead, Which, though … More Nature
coldhearted scientist وداد 