Poetry Thursday: In the City of Eternal Spring

Since 1991, the International Poetry Festival of Medelln has opened the ground for language and human dignity to blossom, focusing on contemporary poetry from Colombia.

The Festival's web site is one way that I discovered Luz Helena Cordero, a poet of deceptively simple statement who is well represented on the Poetry International web site.

I am currently searching for a copy of her most recent book, Cielo Ausente (Absent Heaven), which is published only in Spanish (Ediciones Sociedad de la Imaginacion, 2001). Any leads from my readers on how I can find her book (or the earlier Óyeme con los Ojos/Hear Me With Your Eyes) would be most appreciated.

Here is one of her works, in Spanish first and then English, from the translation of Nicolas Suescun, whose own writing you can sample here. I've appended some of my own arrogant commentary on aspects of this very good translation...I promise, no words were actually harmed in the close reading of these poems.

FANTASMAS (GHOSTS)
by Luz Helena Cordero V.

Los fantasmas nacen desnudos, como sus dueños,
pero luego se visten con ropas color atardecer
en los ojos de la muchacha que tiembla.
Son títeres que armamos en la infancia,
pedazos de piel, retazos de voces,
crecen como lama detrás de la frente
y nunca nos abandonan.
Son tan personales como la voz o la memoria.
Nadie ha visto un fantasma que no le pertenezca,
que no ame como a sus ojos cerrados ante el espejo.**
Los fantasmas tienen nombre y apellido,
son ciudadanos dentro de nuestros huesos.
Claro que existen. Tienen el rostro de tu miedo.

GHOSTS

Ghosts are born naked, like their owners
but then they dress with twilight-colored clothes*
in the eyes of the trembling girl.
They are puppets we assemble in childhood,
scraps of skin, snippets of voices,
they grow like moss behind our foreheads
and they never abandon us.
They are as personal as voice or memory.
No one has seen a ghost that doesn't belong to them
that does not love as their eyes close in front of the mirror. **
Ghosts have names and surnames,
they are citizens in our bones.
Of course, they exist. They wear the face of your fear.

[Image by Fernando Botero]

*********************************
My nitpicking notes:
* "dueños" might be translated as the sterner word "masters" instead of "owners." And the efficient verb form "atardecer" implies action, either "dusk coming on" or literally "afternoon growing." I might have opted for "but then they dress in clothes the color of dusk" or the simpler "but then they dress in dusky clothes."

** I might have translated this differently, to say "that doesn't love [them] like their own closed eyes before the mirror"

Babel Babel

Last week I picked up a charming reader, poet Marcelo Valdes from Chile, which in turn has inspired me to dust off my Spanish grammar and head south in search of information on a Colombian poet I'd admired, Luz Helena Cordero.

Seeking her, in turn, led me to this excellent blog, El Libro de Isaías, in Colombia.

Perhaps I will actually speak proper Spanish one of these days. One can hope for miracles.

Or one can work around them, thusly.

[image of the Tower of Babel by Hendrick van Cleve]

utterly charming

You must read the product descriptions on this loopy little Web site very carefully to get the full benefit of its peculiar allure. In particular, scroll down and read the description for Earth Treasures Extra Large 6" Percussion Frog, of which I am especially fond.

Sadly, the main link for Earth Treasures Extra Large 6" Percussion Frog has been properly translated, and loses in charm what it has regained in translation.

Humphrey to me this morning: "Do You Want to Cure Yourself?"

O man, do I ever.

Humphrey is the name of a spambot that visited me this morning to ask, "Do you want to cure yourself?"

So that was one spam I actually opened, because, you know...just in case.

I think it's important to open the odd can of Spam now and again, if for no other reason then simply to show The Man you're not scared.

And it was from Humphrey, and I seem to get a lot of spam from that one guy Humphrey.

And out here in meat space I actually do have a friend named Humphrey, an awesome lovely dude who just wants to be an American citizen for cripes' sake, and I really like getting email from him.

But it was just my luck. Same old pharmaceuticals from Canada.

A couple of friends (half my readership) emailed to ask if that was really reeally REALLY my last post.

i was totally kidding. just as i will never properly maintain this blog, so will i never properly leave it.

and because i have nothing to say and i am saying it, I'll just keep saying it:

THIS is my last post. Honest.

2 tired 2 B of much use...

...found here via Google tonight, while researching the work of Jean Toomer.

(Okay, I really found the link here first, but didn't want to scare you right off the bat. )

(Just maybe a little, and later.)

(Oh, and, here is a link only David T. and his fellow Buffalonians can fully appreciate)

Plus, some news on the material plane: I saw Artist Formerly Known as Unpublished Tom in the flesh tonight.

I love that man, I really do. Enough to lend him money. But not enough to live with him.

I saw him at a bittersweet reunion called to celebrate the retirement of two fine teachers (See below).

This is my last post, ever. Really, I swear.

But see below from the AU College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) web site:

Kermit Moyer taught courses on creative writing and American literature for more than two decades. During his tenure at AU, Moyer was inspired by visiting writers like William Stafford and Stanley Kunitz to try his hand at his own creative writing, publishing Tumbling in 1988, which the New York Times Book Review hailed as “a work of ringing authenticity.”

“You always hear that you learn from teaching," [says Moyer] "but it’s not so simple as a student giving you an insight into a poem or a novel you’ve been teaching for years . . . When I’m teaching I find myself thinking about what I’m teaching all the time, and it’s not only the subject that I’m teaching, but the feeling of that particular room, the feeling of the particular people in that class. You’re all talking about this novel or this poem, which enables you to talk more deeply about your own experiences than if you were just talking about yourselves. That conversation somehow becomes a part of you, and I think it’s a great privilege to be in that position.”

Myra Sklarew began teaching at AU in 1970. The former president of the Yaddo artist community, she has written three chapbooks, six collections of poetry, a book of essays, and a collection of short fiction. She’s currently working on a nonfiction book exploring the fractured memories of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors tentatively titled Holocaust and the Construction of Memory.

Fondest Memory: “I used to run this program on Washington for undergrads [in the mid-1970s], and we got the curator of the Smithsonian Castle, James Good, to take us out on a barge that we borrowed from the National Park Service. It was called the Wood Duck Barge, and we’d sail up and down the Potomac River at 5 o’clock in the morning as he pointed out all the buildings that use to be there. Then when we were all soaked and miserable and excited, we’d end up in Georgetown, get coffee, and go to school.”

“Of all the things I’ve worked at here...[I will miss most] that mysterious thing that we do when we’re in the classroom can’t be duplicated in some other way....You come into a room and there are 30 strangers . . . and then little by little there’s a conversation that goes on mostly on paper and then in person. It’s just that process, which happens over and over again, how you come to one another and how they rise up in your mind and your spirit, and then it’s gone. And this time, I’ll be gone too. That’s going to be a huge loss for me.

Future Plans: “I’m going to finish this book on the Holocaust, but I’m also interested in getting some kind of rescue training. People think I’m joking, but I’m not. After seeing what happened with Katrina, I have this need . . . There are lots of ways you can be useful, and I very much want to be useful. I’m interested in this process of growing old, this question of what to do with whatever time you have left. No one gives you an instruction book on how to do it. So the rest is sort of like a poem. You put a word down and see where it goes. I’m looking forward to taking that first step and seeing where it goes.”

April was the cruellest month

Between April 16 and April 30, the forces of destruction touched down three times between Blacksburg, Va. and Washington, D.C., and we are hoping the bad luck is done.

I am being melodramatic, but these events were traumatic. I will say only that April 16--Emancipation Day in D.C., and the day we finally moved forward on securing a voting voice in Congress--was buffeted by hard cold winds and overshadowed by the tragedy at Lynchburg. Then two weeks later, two of our greatest local buildings--Eastern Market and the Georgetown Public Library--burned out within hours of one another, two three-alarm fires in the same day. Though no arson is suspected, it was just such a bizarre coincidence. They are in very distinct parts of the city, hard to explain if you don't live here.

Here is the piece I did on Eastern Market a couple years ago.

And it was Georgetown Library that once saved me from a nearly fatal case of youth aggravated by heartbreak.I quote the relevant section from a longer post here:

"Every few days [during my first summer in D.C. at age 22), I took a long soggy walk to the Georgetown branch of the D.C. Public Library, which was housed in a spooky old manse at the top of a high hill. There I would load my arms with books to take my mind off, well, off being so goddamn young.

One afternoon I was sitting on the floor in the stacks and I came across a book called My Apprenticeships. Sounded about my speed. I opened it up and was enchanted...."

Our fortune is that the city is more closely united than it ever has been. We feel like a city now, and we have a mayor who is decisive and focused. We have city revenues and political will to repair both these buildings rapidly and, I hope and trust, with exquisite care.

But repair and renewal are not the same as turning back the clock, and loss is loss. What happened Monday will remain in our memories, and the buildings that were then, will not be again.

"By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet."
--Colette


[photo of Eastern Market in flames via The Washington City Paper]