Do not make verses about happenings. For poetry, there is no creation or death. In her eyes, life is an unmoving sun, Which neither warms nor lights. The attractions, the anniversaries, the personal incidents do not matter. Do not make poetry with the body. This excellent, complete and comfortable body, so unfit for lyrical flow. … More Drummond: “Procura da poesia”
Writin’ La Vida Loca: Laundry, Poetry, Love Ella qué será She’s livin’ la vida loca Y te dolerá Sí, de verdad te toca –Ricky Martin No one should try to climb this Mexican electric fence –Treviño The title of Natalia Treviño’s collection Lavando la Dirty Laundry (Norman, OK: Mongrel Empire Press, 2013) is most surely … More Only one section to go, and I am learning from doing this, and/but is it too negative?
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
coldhearted scientist وداد 