Indran Amirthanayagam

Sobre Nicanor Parra

2011-12-09T19:34:00.000-08:00

Un fracaso, una mariposa

Cuando Nicanor me invitó
a cenar ostiones y tomar
cabernet en su casa de madera
en la Reina conversamos

en aquel 1995 de su visita
a Nueva Delhi y su apego
a la idea hinduista
de dejar los lazos: familia,

bienes, sexo, y caminar,
un mendigo, por las calles
antes de llegar al bosque
para esperar el aleteo

de la mariposa, su luz
enceguecedera. Diez
años despues, otra visita
al poeta, esta vez

en Las Cruces,
ante el oceáno,
y me pidió que leyera
Antonin Artaud sobre

lo absurdo
en la vida moderna.
Otra vez nos acordamos
de la mariposa. Cuatro

años mas tarde, me dijo
que le acompañara a su estudio
en el jardin al lado de la casa,
mi unico camino ahora,

y viendo un poemario mio
en su estante me comentó
que le encantó el titulo
El infierno de los pájaros.

Llega ahora la noticia
que le ha otorgado
el premio Cervantes.
A sus 97 años pienso

si va romper con
su camino de
costumbre y tomar
el avión a Madrid.

Artaud debe tener
respuesta, o el mendigo
Hindu, o nadie.
Me dibujó

un regalo aquella
primera vez. Dice
el lema. Cada uno
fracasa a su manera.

Indran Amirthanayagam, el 9 de diciembre, 2011

Lectura en Casa de La Literatura en el Centro de Lima

2011-10-27T12:40:00.001-07:00

POETAS DE

COLOMBIA, MÈXICO, EE.UU. y PERÚ

“volver a sus raíces, a reconocerse

en la mirada de los otros”

LUGAR:

Casa de la Literatura Peruana

Salón de Lecturas 1º piso

FECHA: Octubre 29 de 2011

HORA: De 5:00 p.m. a 6:00 p.m.

Exponentes:

María Elena Giraldo González de Colombia

Anna Francisca Rodas I. de Colombia

María Dolores Guadarrama de México

INVITADO DE HONOR

INDRAN AMIRTHANAYAGAM DE EE.UU.

PERÚ

MIRIAN CALORETTI

LILY CUADRA

JORGE URETA

EFER SOTO

.

DIPLOMATICA POESIA

2011-10-26T11:49:00.001-07:00

Diplomática poesía

Diplomático de profesión y poeta por impulso personal, el ceilandés nacionalizado estadounidense Indran Amirthanayagam presentará mañana su poemario “Sol camuflado” en el Centro Cultural de la Cancillería.

Indran acaba de regresar del III Festival Internacional de Poesía “Luis Yáñez Pacheco”, desarrollado en la región Cajamarca (Cajamarca, Bambamarca, Chota), donde compartió días y noches de poesía, décima y Música con invitados peruanos y extranjeros.

Su reciente “Sol camuflado” es un poemario escrito en varios escenarios americanos, “bajo este sol cuya luz ha sido afectada, disimulada, mudada por quienes viven bajo ese sol, los seres humanos con todos sus aciertos y sus manías y sus deseos insatisfechos, a veces sobresatisfechos”, dice Indran, quien conoció a Nicanor Parra hace unos años. El poeta Chileno le regaló un dibujo que hizo frente a él, el de un hombre. “Me lo regaló y le puso un lema: ‘Cada uno fracasa a su manera’, y me parece genial, y siempre me gusta reír un poco del oficio al que pertenezco. Yo también he sufrido la enfermedad de la vanidad. Pero la vida nos golpea con justicia a los poetas. El poema es consuelo, desahogo, tiene un sentido terapéutico para el autor”. Amirthanayagam en Bambamarca (Cajamarca).

Es su tercer libro en español. Antes, publicó “El infierno de los pájaros” y “El hombre que recoge nidos”. Actualmente está preparando para su publicación una cuarta recopilación de poemas en español titulada “Sin adorno”, así como un nuevo manuscrito en inglés “Uncivil War”. Ha publicado “The Elephants of Reckoning” (1993), Premio Paterson en 1994; “Ceylon R.I.P” (2001) y “The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems” (2008).

Indran Amirthanayagam nació en 1960, en Ceilán (Sri Lanka desde 1972); sin embargo es ciudadano estadounidense desde hace unos años y diplomático de carrera, por lo cual conoce distintos países e idiomas en el mundo. Escribe en portugués, español, inglés, francés, dependiendo del público y del tema.

“Sol camuflado” (Lustraeditores, 2011) será presentado mañana, a las 7 p.m., en el Centro Cultural Inca Garcilaso de la Cancillería, ubicado en Jr. Ucayali 391, Lima. El poemario será comentado por el poeta Renato Sandoval y la poeta Alessandra Tenorio. El ingreso es libre.

http://www.diariolaprimeraperu.com/online/cultura/diplomatica-poesia_97692.html

PRESENTACION DE SOL CAMUFLADO, LIMA, 26 DE OCTUBRE

2011-10-22T21:37:00.000-07:00

Ven a celebrar la publicacion de mi nuevo poemario, Sol camuflado. Centro Cultural Inca Garcilaso, Jr Ucayali 391, 7 pm. 26 de Octubre.

Indran Amirthanayagam

Poeta, ensayista y traductor al inglés y al español. Ha publicado los poemarios The Elephants of Reckoning (1993), que recibió el Premio Paterson en 1994, Ceylon R.I.P (2001) y The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (2008), así como, en idioma español, El infierno de los pájaros, que fue prologado por José Emilo Pacheco, y El hombre que recoge nidos. Actualmente está preparando para su publicación una cuarta recopilación de poemas en español titulada Sin adorno, así como un nuevo manuscrito en ingles Uncivil War. Fue becario del New York Foundation for the Arts y del U.S.-Mexico Fund for Culture. Ganó los Juegos Florales 2006 de Guayamas, Sonora, por su poema Juárez.

Words After September 11

2011-09-11T18:14:00.000-07:00

WORDS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11

We will not be quiet, Lord.

We will not hide in books,

Under our desks, Lord.

We will not whisper

In the rowdy street.

We will hop

On our “three-wheelers,”

On the Morning Express,

Wheel up the ramp

And fly beyond

The limits

Of our comforts.

We will explore again,

And find ourselves

Lost again. Yet,

We shall hold our hands.

Yet, we shall love

Our neighbor.

Yet, we shall stand

On our dad

And mum’s shoulders,

And we will play yet again.

Let us now honor our dead,

The Earth’s dead.

Let us not tremble.

Let us not be quiet.

Let us not stammer

Through a million

Emergency sessions.

Let us talk

To the bird in the tree,

The bird in the sky.

Let us sing as a flock,

In congregation.

We will

and shall

And can

and must not

Be overcome.

Let us walk out tonight,

Tomorrow, and sing

We will

and shall

And can

and must

Not be overcome.

Let us go to the films

On Saturday,

To worship any day

We wish.

Let not these burning towers

Be our metaphor.

Let us honor our dead, yes,

And let us build and rebuild

Our metaphors.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam c)2001 Chennai, India, September 27, 2001

El abolengo, un poema

2011-09-10T06:10:00.001-07:00

El Abolengo

Borges nos mira,
soñador y joven,
desde la solapa
de su Obras completas,

Tagore
con cabello cano
está envuelto
en una bufanda,

Orwell,
su cara arrugada—
parece 1948,
varios grandes están

expuestos en fotos
y retratos. ˁCuántos
libros tienes, le pregunta
mi hijo a su abuelo?

“Elige uno,”

El reino al borde
del mar. Theroux escribió
el verso para bautizar

un viaje ingles.
Perteneció una vez
a Edgar Allen Poe
en ‘’Annabel Lee.”

Ahora, construiré
mi casa al borde
del mar con antiguous
y nuevos troncos,

madera flotante,
percebes enredados
en maleza, ancla,
proa y casco.

Neruda llenó
su hogar y su jardín
con el mar.
Ahora, me pertenece todo.

Indran Amirthanayagam, de El hombre que recoge nidos, Resistencia/CONARTE, 2005.

El chontaduro: fruta festiva

2011-08-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

Chontaduro

Amarilla, naranja fruta
con textura de camote,
cortada y servida con sal

en un plato por una negra
de la costa con faldas
amplias, amarill-rojas,

su cabeza envuelta
en una bandana,
a 2000 mil pesos,

un dólar por porción,
para soñar de nuevo,
más bien bailar

embriagado
con una mujercita
en espera o no

en algún vericueto
de esta ciudad
de hombres
gigantescos y
tristes en la Plaza
de Botero.

Indran Amirthanayagam, el 12 de julio, 2010

The Destroyed Temple, A Poem

2011-05-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

The house at the end of the road,
the giant multiple-walled house

at the end of the road without
a telephone, or internet,

without a satellite dish,
without rubbish—the residents

burned what they consumed—
certainly smoke can be traced,

and the courier’s story leaked
out of somebody else’s mouth

held incommunicado
in an East-European dungeon,

on leased land in the island
of Cuba, but that is another story,

the war found its target, today,
in helicopter to hand combat,

four aircraft once again, this time
choppers, and special forces—

not from Afghan camps
into Florida flight schools--but

Navy Seals, and the target
legitimate, not three thousand

ordinary civilians living
their American lives

until robbed by death,
rules for the rest of us

alive modified, and now
another death, tying

of the circle, a full spin
around the planet, what

Peru’s president said
was John Paul’s first miracle,

coincidence, his beatification
and death in combat

of Osama Bin Laden,
a bullet in the temple

of Evil, no longer
a Mastermind.

Indran Amirthanayagam, May 2, 2011 c)2011. Reprinting only with author's permission.

Sobre el Susurro de Yoshi Sotomayor

2011-05-03T17:41:00.001-07:00

El miércoles 27 de abril, en una tarde limeña fresca y clara, llegué al Centro Cultural CAFAE-SE. Fui invitado por la poeta Yoshi Sotomayor para presentar su primer poemario El susurro de la colibrí. Oriunda de Huari, en Ancash, Yoshi nos regaló un encuentro entre montaña y ciudad, selva y corazón, nostalgia por la tierra originaria y un delicado reconocimiento de haber hecho la migración, el traslado armonioso a la gran metrópoli, mas con el susurro de la colibrí de cerca, al oído.

No pretendo cumplir en este espacio con la tarea del cronista. Espero que algún otro escritor cuente de esa tarde de maravillas musicales, de los ritmos de los poemas hasta la voz de la cantante que nos acompañó, el violín de otro amigo, y con creces en la voz apasionada del poeta y director de la Casa del Poeta Peruano, José Guillermo Vargas Rodríguez.

Aquí reproduzco mi prólogo para el libro. Espero que acudan a leer este poemario tan delicado como el roce de la mano de un amor que no se quiere borrar de la piel. Está editado por “Ventana Andina”, Fondo Editorial de la Municipalidad Provincial de Huari.

Prólogo

La poesía de Yoshi Sotomayor me pica como el susurro del colibrí que alguna vez llevó al poeta a ese estado de memoria y añoranza que es fundamental para poder escribir poesía. Sotomayor es joven y muestra la temeridad del joven en este primer poemario. Ella no reniega de invocar a Vallejo y a las montañas de su tierra Huari, pero, aunque logrados, estos textos no reflejan las voces indelebles de esta colección. Para escuchar a ellas hay que leer y releer los poemas breves y misteriosos como Lumbre, Esa Rosa, Gris. Lumbre ofrece una excelente muestra de lo que el lector va a gozar. “Átame las manos”, dice la protagonista del poema, con un gesto que agarra al lector y le obliga a sentarse para ver el mundo del fuego, “si no quieres que dañe tus cabellos / aleja de mí este torrente”. Este es un poema caudal, una expresión franca de deseo, pero en fin seco, insatisfecho: “bebo del néctar que no moja siquiera / la punta de mi lengua”. El poema termina con una de las imágenes más tristes del libro: “y dejo escapar tu voz / como viento en mi oreja”.
El mismo viento nos trae el susurro del colibrí, y su ausencia nos deja “este humor a nada / narcótico hasta la idiotez”. Es un susurro protector, y la poeta y su lector van a sobrevivir los “rostros extraños / escupiendo sus vilezas / restregándomelas / en la cara”. ¿Por qué tengo tanta confianza en su supervivencia? Finalmente, la raíz del poema es el encuentro de la imaginación con la fe, lo irracional y lo vivencial. Hay que reconciliar a veces experiencias tremendamente difíciles: la muerte de los seres queridos, las decepciones políticas, amorosas, las discapacidades. Pero la misma vida que parece a veces perjudicarnos, nos da herramientas para renovarnos. El poema es un utensilio flexible y duradero y un alimento básico para la mesa, como lo es la papa, que forma la base de la alimentación peruana. Y si encontramos a Yoshi Sotomayor en nuestro camino, como el lector suertudo que abrirá este libro, nos sentaremos a comer bien y con buena compañía. Así que, no te preocupe Yoshi, si te vemos “caminando sola / en la noche / sobre el mar”, te hablaremos, fortalecidos por tus versos.

--Indran Amirthanayagam, Lima, 3 de mayo, 2011

Criança, Um Poema

2011-04-13T04:58:00.000-07:00

Criança

Estamos assistindo
o nascimento
de uma criança,
banhada do sangue
de sua mãe,
com seu cordão
umbilical para cortar.

Somos as
amas de leite,
lhe ajudando
com diversos
aspectos da
cerimônia,
principalmente

a gramática,
porque as idéias
originais
formam-se
só. Bem-vindo
o poeta e
o poema.
dr) Indran Amirthanayagam 4 de fevereiro, 2011

A espera

2011-03-13T04:38:00.000-07:00

A espera

Não sei o nome deste pássaro
que me canta agora e me
acompanhará ao crepúsculo
até a noite quando encontrarei
as horas apartadas para lhe
escrever seu testamento.

Toda criação insiste
que não se deve apurá-lo
sem cair na angústia
de viver na carreira
ao volante sem os freios,
sem tuas mãos

no meu rosto para
deter-me um pouco mais
do poema, em um ídilio
fora do tempo que
anunciava o pássaro, uma
intimação da eternidade.

Indran Amirthanayagam, 25 de fevereiro, 2011

Letter to Galle, for the festival

2011-01-29T21:56:00.000-08:00

Letter to Galle --for the festival

I sent a poem
but have not yet
had a reply.
I believe the editors

are travelling
or perhaps
they have landed
in the free state

of Galle
for the festival;
I don’t know
if to go or stay,

afternoon teas
with poetry seem
the right way to set
mood and wet palate

before celebratory
readings
by prose stars
in the evenings

and then a few
drinks and to bed,
waking up in morning
panel discussions

where the unpleasant
but necessary
subject of domestic
rights will be aired

with no restrictions,
even for the cameras;
how could I miss
the sea breeze

and hot prawns,
imbibe that rare air
blown by special
bellows during

the few days
when Galle
becomes Berlin
after the Wall

fell down, at least
for ticketed
customers
and scholarship

students. In the end,
even freedom of
expression must be
paid for by somebody.

Yet, I digress.
There are journalists
in hiding and
/or dead.

Indran Amirthanayagam, January 27, 2011

SIEGE, a Poem

2010-12-22T16:12:00.001-08:00

Siege

I can't recall the links at the Golf Hotel
but I don't believe the government

of Alassane Ouattara is contemplating
a chip shot or a putt. I read there are only

800 Peacekeepers between his team
and Gbagbo's army. Betting men say

that ethnic ties are paramount and nobody
ever doubted a Bete man's will to fight,

and as for logistics, how long will
an African Union army take to arrive

in Cote d’ Ivoire? Needless to say they will
not be greeted with attieke and grilled fish.

But wedging Gbagbo, freezing World Bank
loans, his bank accounts in Europe, coco

exports have come to port but have not
been able to leave, how long can this last?

More will die including some principals.
Perhaps there will be a palace coup.

Perhaps the will of people written
in the urns will be respected

but only after unnecessary, uncivil
bloodshed, 200 dead thus far.

Indran Amirthanayagam, December 22, 2010

Ivory Contemporary, Poem

2010-12-21T05:39:00.000-08:00

Ivory Contemporary

Named for ivory, later stripped clean,
the country began to sprout cocoa,
though in copses by a few rivers
the forest elephant drooped still its tiny
frame and trunk through the bulrushes.

I recall the fine tarmac and dirt
paths we drove to meet Headman
and Elders, to bring books and receive
a rooster, a hen. Agriculture, land
husbandry, how can I forget

the moutons with their Djula herders,
and Dozos, hunters with amulets
that can deflect bullets?
Yet what are these few memories
worth at market in Cocody

or Treichville, now that the Army
has blocked nearby streets
and prepares to lay siege
to the Golf Hotel where Ouattara
and his government have registered

guarded by Peackeepers
waiting for the current
occupant of the Presidential Palace
Laurent Gbagbo, to accept defeat,
go into exile, or continue

to order the Army and his gangs
to fight; what price shall we place
on power? His foreign homes
are under threat, the squeeze
has begun, when will the Man

come out of the palace
to face the people
who denied him at the polls?
What value suffrage?
Whose army is stronger?

Sad to recall that Gbagbo
was once a legend, a philosopher
and hero of the Left, the chief
opponent to the sometime
benign dictatorship of Houphouet-Boigny.

Go with dignity. Hold your head high.
Don’t forget the family, the assets,
the invitation to be an elder statesman
to the continent, not reviled in history
as Mobutu, Charles Taylor, Idi Amin Dada.

Indran Amirthanayagam, le 20 de Decembre 2010

On Anthems and the State of the Union

2010-12-13T19:56:00.000-08:00

I posted the following on www.groundviews.org

I have been stirred and moved even to tears by both the Tamil and Sinhala versions of the Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, anthem. I think I owe this emotional tie to birth on the island, to school on the island, to my first toffees and cricket matches on the island. I wonder now how a boy born today in this same, yet- not- the same, Sri Lanka will feel, denied the comfort of hearing his mother tongue at the award ceremony, the annual Shakespeare recital, the spelling bee. I find myself a bit blase contradicting the noted historical wisdom of the ministers who passed the recent decree. They said there are no countries which sing their anthems in more than one language. Of course, that is not true. Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, South Africa, even the United Kingdom which brings together different nations with their particular anthems, come to mind.

But I wonder why a country that has celebrated its rich mixes-- that have produced outstanding talent in literature (Ondaatje), cricket (Murali), and that sprinter, Susanthika Jayasinghe, who won a silver at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and Duncan White who started the trend at the White City Games in 1948-- has changed its law. I speak too much of sport. What about antropology, which has rewarded the world with Gnanath Obeysekere and Valentin Daniel, political analysis, with Jayadeva Uyangoda, diplomacy with Jayantha Dhanapala? We have many heroes in our country and we were all once, boys or girls, moved, choked-up, listening to our mother tongue on the loudspeakers.

Liu Xiabo, Updated

2010-12-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

Updated

Liu Xiabo sits in jail
for writing in favour
of free speech
and thus seeking
to “subvert”
the state, an old
crime against
the emperor
modernized
for our times.

Indran Amirthanayagam, December 8, 2010

Injustice in Cote d'Ivoire

2010-12-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

Alassane Ouattara just won the second round of the long delayed elections in Cote d'Ivoire by 54 percent to 46 percent for the losing candiate Laurent Gbagbo. Despite this loss Gbagbo has seized power in the country through his influence over the country's Constitutionsl Court. President Obama, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and other leaders from throughout the world have recognized Alassane Ouattara's victory. We cannot remain silent before another injustice committed against the democratic values we cherish and celebrate. Speak to your representatives. Write poems. Work with the African Union to isolate this usurper, this recalcitrant power boss and his government that will not accept the will of his people and the wishes of democrats everywhere.

To My Autistic Son, Revantha: Poem by Guy Amirthanayagam

2010-11-16T20:12:00.000-08:00

On this birthday I publish here one of my father's great poems written to my brother Revantha. The imaage of the undetow of sadness has grounded and consoled me ever since I first read the poem. With love, Indran

To My Autistic Son, Revantha

Old soul in a young body, they said.
‘Twere better he was born dead!”
Sins of the fathers, the Christians said.
Ill conjunction of planets, the palmist read;
Fetters of the flesh, cycles of suffering
The Buddhists complacently proposed,
Allah be praised, Kismet in swing,
The fierce Moslems savagely disposed.

Slow motor reactions, my neurologist reckoned.
Early childhood autism, my psychologist beckoned.
Heredity’s the problem, the maid-servant proclaimed:
The servant was vile, his mother declaimed.

I reck not his ruin in his toothsome smile
His speechless grimace, so free from guile;
His dour determination to opt out of life
When all around him are mired in strife.
Lucky and prescient, my miraculous boy,
You will spend your life with spendthrift joy.
I am proud that you have so early seen
That there is in life an undertow of sadness
Which rocks what fleeting gladness
There is today, or may once have been.
I will love you steadfastly as long as I dare
But is there nothing that you can share?
Will you leave me with this nagging regret
That even to me you will never bare
Your awesome secret?

--Guy Amirthanayagam

Nazreen Sansoni Poems

2010-08-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

These poems by Nazreen Sansoni break the heart and evoke bittersweet humours in this reader. I have known Nazreen for years but only in moments during short visits I have made back to the mother island. Her work goes beyond poetry, making of Barefoot, the principal free space for art, dance, theater and music in the capital city of that bittersweet and heartbroken country of Sri Lanka slowly healing now from the cruelties of the thirty year civil war.

These poems will be registered in the hearts of readers who believe that honesty in lyric expression, the image delineated clearly and stated boldly, is the ingredient of fine poetry.

A noble guest

I know you know
where love lies
not in hearts that are heavy
with depression
or some malaise
but in the soul underneath
waiting
to be released
if only for a moment
to kiss your face.

NS July 2009

A Lie

Jealousy, fear and insecurity
Manifest at the most unlikely time
As I am about to step into my bath
Smell a perfume
That I know does not belong to me
So – I smoke a cigarette
Enjoy the deep satisfaction
Of the inhalation

When my husband comes home
The smell of smoke still lingers
‘Honey, have you been smoking?’
‘I don’t smoke.’ I reply, quietly.
Unplug the bath, watch the water drain
After all, one lie deserves another

NS

Loss

Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 11:21pm

Every morning
when I wake
my first thought
is of civilians
dying
In the vanni
Women children
Babies
no chance
at life
Because
She might?
Is a terrorist?
For god’s sake
She could have
been a scientist
Our loss
Our unimaginable loss

NS

Lectura en Medellin, el 13 de Julio, con Bob Holman

2010-07-12T06:34:00.000-07:00

Este martes presentare mis poemas sobre el Mundial en el Centro Cultural Colombo Americano junto con mi amigo y colega Bob Holman. La direccion en Medellin es Carrera 45 # 53-24, La cita es a las 18.30 y forma parte del Festival Internacional de Poesia de Medellin.

Morning: Before the Semi-Finals

2010-07-04T12:33:00.001-07:00

Morning: Before the Semi-finals

Waves rise and fall near the footpath by the sea
on a misty grey Lima morning in our dreams
as we build scenarios. Now what if Suarez were
allowed to return for the final, can Uruguay gobber
up the Mechanical Orange during its semi-final
with some defensive glue, clamp down all movement
then pounce on a breakout, a counter attack?

Can it keep its legs fresh for 90 minutes, but Holland
will have other ideas and which team is younger, fitter?
I don't have all the necessary info. to move to judgment.
Must turn to the sea birds, the para-gliders, perhaps
some living survivor of the last Peruvian side to play
in the World Cup, a local expert--I wonder how I would
manage if my walk took me by Galle Face or along

that extremely long beach in Chennai. The Indian
subcontinent has never competed in a World Cup
although India could have travelled to Rio in 1950,
gaining a place by default, but it demurred claiming
that playing with bare feet would not be allowed,
a lie exposed quickly, but base politics can infect
any federation--and there are solid reasons

for subcontinental absence: temperament, pace of life,
what cricket has taught us although even that great
master of fair play and honour has speeded up proceedings,
but let me not be distracted by parochial debates among
sports about which will better equip us for the trials of life
like the upcoming battle between good luck, cheating,
skill and heroism in the semi finals of the World Cup.

Indran Amirthanayagam, July 4, 2010

Intervention, Quarter Finals

2010-07-03T07:02:00.000-07:00

Intervention, Quarter Finals

Hand of God, hand of Luis
Suarez, hand of fate, destiny,
desperation, immorality, hand
that gave Uruguay one more

roll in the last minute
of the last extra time, hands
and feet, the idea of keeping
hands away in foot not hand

ball, in the moment of defeat
what rules apply? Hero or
villain, Ghana’s Gyan hitting
the cross bar on the penalty,

bitter pill, even in foot the ball
does not drop, even in foot
a Brazilian turns to frozen jelly
while the Dutchman flies; order

of bets turns upside down, or
is Brazil just another beautiful
play become four act tragedy,
specialists of the quarter final

exit, or am I just fussing about
football when gross
international production
dips during World Cup games

except in broadcast, soft drinks,
tee shirts, vuvuzelas, plane
tickets and all sorts
of paraphernalia, including

pictures of players’
significant others? This
is business for some and
yet in Cape Coast, in Accra,

what are gentlemen saying
in high life bars? If we
had the chance to stop
the wrecking ball with

our hands and save goal
and country we too like that
bad cat from Uruguay would
break Good Lord FIFA’s rules?

Indran Amirthanayagam, July 2, 2010

Before the Quarter Finals (World Cup Series)

2010-06-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

Before the Quarter Finals

Bereft is the word, lost, niggling absence,
this break in daily unveiling of the World Cup

before quarter finals kick off, forty eight hours
of writhing and reliving the unfortunate business,

ball bouncing beyond German line by 32
centimeters to break England’s lion-heart, shot

from offside that jump-started Argentina’s ride
over Mexico, foot fault by a finger leading

still to Spain’s illegitimate goal that sent
Portugal home. Hard to digest that three matches

of the round of 16s were marred by goals allowed
in error, that the world is tuning still into football

despite football’s rejection of its good sense.
Breaking News: the head of FIFA apologizes

to English and Mexican federations. A small
step for FIFA, yes, to be celebrated, certainly;

but if Germany’s goalie, or an Argentine
player, preferably the scorer, had stepped up

in the moment of scandal to say no, no, no,
we do not deserve this point, that would

have been a story of saving grace in a world
gathering worth talking of to the grandchildren.

Indran Amirthanayagam, June 30, 2010

Mexico, Assassination

2010-06-29T01:25:00.000-07:00

Mexico, Assassination

Political murder hurts not only surviving members of the family
but all supporters, the dead politician’s community. Remember

how many dreams and spirits fell with Colosio? Now this
recent Mexico has disposed of Cantu in Tamaulipas, candidate

for governor, kidnapped a former head of the PAN, Diego
Fernandez Cevallos. When will the crap shoot, breakdown of state,

impossible living under threat of traffickers with automatics, almost
daily mowing of ordinary Mexicans into bits in Ciudad Juarez,

escapism into narco ballads, easy circulation of weapons, fear,
when shall all this end--and not in statistics about untimely death ?

Indran Amirthanayagam, June 28, 2010

World Cup Fraud

2010-06-27T22:51:00.000-07:00

World Cup Fraud

A poor call by the referee should not decide a game.
When a player strikes a goal he should have recourse
to a third eye in the stand, a camera, that can help
distinguish wrong from right, as in many other sports.

I don't understand why FIFA persists in celebrating
human folly and frailty, why millions of fans must go
to bed tonight feeling their teams have been robbed,
that blind officials and blind luck trump skilful play.

Surely. even winners must feel some remorse to have
benefited from the erroneous whistle. Their victories
have been diminished and they should call opponents
and say, let us play again, another 15 minutes

for the gaffe, or just have your goal back and let us
see where that leaves us. Old rules are rusting, rotted,
time to move the game to a more equitable plain,
to reduce even the appearance of untoward gain.

Indran Amirthanayagam c) June 27, 2010

SEPTIMO MANANA, MUNDIAL

2010-06-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

Séptimo Mañana, Mundial

Las Américas llevan la ventaja en este Mundial.
Cada día me despierta otro golazo argentino,
uruguayo, mexicano, y falta que Brasil comience
a revelar sus cartas. Hasta Estados Unidos
tiene oportunidad para llegar a octavos.

¿Y qué tal el más viejo continente?
Es triste; en este momento de su bautizo
como anfitrión, sus equipos juegan con el Diablo
y su lanza de fuego y han empezado
a quemarse. ¿Para dónde van las vuvuzelas?

¿Acompañaran a los jugadores en sus primeras
caminatas por los círculos más remotos
del Infierno? No me dejes escribir más,
mi Dios, tal vez los Elefantes de la Costa
de Marfil están a punto de lanzarse en estampida.

Indran Amirthanayagam, el 17 de junio, 2010

Mass Marriage, Vavuniya

2010-06-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

I submitted the following to www.groundviews.org. If you do not know the site, read what's published there. The writing offers lanterns to help illuminate the island's darkness.

Mass Marriage, Vavuniya

What a large and dramatic idea occurred to the brigadier in charge
of rehabilitation , to organize a mass wedding to spur former Tiger

troops into formation under a different philosophy and yet appeal
to their strengths to cohere as a group not any longer in waging war

against the State but to reveal their common humanity to agree
to a public celebration of private bonds, to ensure their co-habiting

led to proper inheritance for children, access to social welfare
payments when necessary, all to the good for these members

of a herd, now in white vershtis and magenta sarees eating cake
and chatting with relatives witnessed by the Bollywood actor

Vivek Oberoi, no less, before returning to detention camps,
now two by two, respectable members of the new unitary ark,

where domestic animals gather obediently while the brigadier
sheds a tear; he told the press, he was nervous, even more so

than before his own wedding, which did not take place thankfully
under public glare and was not diminished by the splendour

of mass marriage like mass production of poultry, efficiencies
of scale, government desire to move rehabilitation forward

in one swoop, a sort of dog training in a large group; anybody
realize that marriage among truly reborn takes place between

two people and the witnesses are God and invited guests? Here,
some exceptions were made to the usual practice, no consultation

with bride or groom, whether the actor was indeed an honoured
guest, or if the brigadier should cry like a mother, or if even

53 couples minded seeing their knots tied in the presence
of each other, or have Reverend Moon and other enlightened

priests of mass marriage, become advisers to Sri Lankan
military, spiritual guides to its standard operating procedure?

Indran Amirthanayagam, June 15, 2010

6 Straight Lines, Gaza

2010-05-31T19:29:00.000-07:00

The absence of sense depends on cultural ball bearings where and how they fall/

to determine relative logic of putting one foot forward in longitudinal march to border lands/

where a country’s laws meet powerful competing demands of moral and international norms/

where six boats on the high sea must be given free passage and are not subject to fits of national/

madness leading to death even death has no logic except to draw attention to continued crime/

of blocking access to cumin and cement, among other necessities, for population of Gaza City.

Indran Amirthanayagam, May 31, 2010

Antesala de Medellin, el 26 de Mayo, 2010, Lima

2010-05-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

Si andas por el centro de Lima este miércoles 26, a las 7 pm, para un rato en el Centro Cultural Inca Garcilaso, Ucayali 391. Ahí voy a leer con el poeta Renato Sandoval en " La Antesala de Medellin". Sandoval y yo nos reuniremos de nuevo en la vigésima edición del festival de poesía de Medellín en julio.

ANTESALA DE MEDELLÍN
Los poetas Renato Sandoval (Perú) e Indran Amirthanayagam (Sri Lanka) ofrecerán una lectura de sus poemas, como antesala del XX Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín, Colombia. El evento, al que ambos han sido invitados, tendrá lugar entre el 8 y el 17 de julio.

Fecha: miércoles 26 de mayo

Hora: 7 pm

Lugar: Jr. Ucayali 391, Lima.

Entrada Libre

On Mark Pawlak's Jefferson's New Image Salon Matchups & Mashups

2010-05-04T23:13:00.001-07:00

Once in a while, perhaps every day, as in an endorphin-releasing morning walk, let us extract ourselves from pressing matters of family and state and delight in the splendid anti-oxidants of association. Mark Pawlak’s Jefferson’s New Image Salon Matchups and Mashups offers us this divertissement. It tells us to look once at the subject name and to stare wide-eyed at its predicate as in “Lincoln Hat Supreme” or “Washington Rib & Chop House”,” Roosevelt Costume Shoppe,” or in the link that gave Pawlak his title “Jefferson New Image Salon.”

I have never read a poetry collection like Pawlak’s latest. This is anti-poetry in the spirit of Nicanor Parra’s drawings with lines attached, as in Parra’s cross where the moniker says “Voy y Vuelvo” ( I will be right back).

The beauty of Pawlak’s book is that he has done the associating from found materials, everything here picked up by an observant and intelligent citizen, member of the community. Pawlak, the peculiar poet, has taken on the role of acute observer and subsequent assembler of tomfoolery and gimcrack and wonder. Like Shelley from our Romantic Poets class, “the unacknowledged legislator,” here is an avatar, resident in Cambridge, Massachusetts and frequenter of “Leda Foods” and “Helen’s Leather Shop” (from “Greek & Roman Mythology in Massachusetts.”)

Pawlak draws his arc wide across the canvass, from the Greeks and the Bible to Shakespeare and the New World. He includes British Authors and European Composers and North American Tribes. This assemblage comes certainly from New England, from associations linking European settlers and America. I have begun to daydream about other associations, perhaps from the West Coast, Chow Fat Salon, or Good Luck Cleaners, or perhaps a Hawaii specific set, Diamond Head Grill, Waikiki Flip Flops, But the universal begins of course in the particular and New England culture and its attendant parts merit a feast day and a fine poet of found materials, a Bauhaus-type, a wit with shapes of words, Mark Pawlak.

SWING A BONE--for the jazz, man

2010-03-20T08:33:00.000-07:00

I wrote this poem during a happy time in a city I love, Monterrey. Mexico. I used to jam with Omar and Milo Tamez and joined them on stage with other musicians from throughout the world during the city's annual jazz festival. A poet, used to embodying silence in speech rhythms and metaphors, stands in awe before riffs on precussion, guitar and saxophone.

I read in the newspapers that Monterrey has become a shooting gallery, that battles with drug traffickers take place everywhere, that one cannot walk about any more in a state of tranquility. I wonder about the illusion of that tranquil sea. I remember the delights of Buenos Aires, strollng after midnight and absolutely calm and safe. I suppose that music can serve as a palliative, that the gulf between the rich and poor can always seem too hard to cross using the usual methods of devotion to studies, getting a job that can pay the bills, establishing a family and teaching one's young to live carefully with the other creatures who occupy the planet. Let jazz continue to heal the gulf, the wounds. Let music make peace.

SWING A BONE

--for the jazz, man.

Swing a bone

catch a skull
in your pocket

Let
your sweat
jingle jangle jangle jingle

bone

bilious bloody blowing

brittle smithereened

bone

spool unraveled

gene code
condemned

bone,

my friend,

pure bone
at home
on the street,
on the phone

I tell you

swing a bone….

It doesn’t matter
where you swing

India, Wales
Sing Sing

Hell‘n Heaven
Monterrey

Man knows not
‘cept he’s got

the bone
and you don’t

have the phone

bone phone
we’re talking
bone language

Mr. Coltrane
swing
soprano bone

Thelonius
Monk fish

swim, man,
closer closer

to the keys

bone

Mingus
muttering

base bone

chattering

Ornette,
my man,

trumpet
the bone

violin
the sap

saxophone

Bone bone bone

Let drums roll

We’ve got
a bone to throw
in the room

Hey Monk
black and white

Hey Coltrane
tenor the sax

Hey Mingus
deeply does it
boom the bone

Ornette
smooth, man,
smooth that alto
sax in my ear

I’ve got a phone
call, man,

phone’s
ringing

and ringing
from the other

side, Man,

Hey God,
Got a bone?

Monk, don’t go,
Mingus, stay,
Coltrane, I invoke
you, Ornette

don’t leave me
man, with God
alone.

I need a bone.

Indran Amirthanayagam, March 31, 2004
Jazz Festival, Monterrey

Resoluciones, 2010

2010-01-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

Resoluciones, 2010

1) Que mi hija siga adquiriendo nuevo vocabulario, sea más segura de si misma y que siempre sea feliz.

2) Que mi hijo establezca más amistades, deje de pasar horas revisando vídeos y vuelva a componer poemas y que siempre sea feliz.

3) Que yo encuentre editoriales para mis libros inéditos en castellano y en inglés, ¡que sean reseñados!

4) Que adopte una nueva manera de expresar las emociones e ideas que circulan en mi cerebro, que no sea solamente en el poema.

5) Que pueda amar tranquilamente, sin miedo ante los miedos de la bien-amada.

6) Que el mundo haga caso a las Cassandras para que podamos construir un mundo sostenible.

7) Que no olvidemos que estamos de paso, hay otros seres que necesitan alimentarse al lado nuestro.

8) Que nos reunamos en un café con tazas de hierbas antioxidantes para que nos sanen.

9) Que nos bendiga el amor del viento y el sabor a sal, al caminar por el Malecón

10) Que todos los carteros del sur y del norte repartan la felicidad que siento al escribirte.

Indran Amirthanayagam, January 1, 2010

LES IMMIGRES

2009-12-26T04:49:00.000-08:00

LES IMMIGRES

Le chat noir
qui traverse la route
devant tes yeux
avant de sauter
au dessus du mur
qui entoure
le jardin du prefet
ne veut rien dire;

Tu peux suivre
encore ton chemin
a l’étranger,
meme si ce matin
avant l’aube
tu as reçu
quelques coups
d’un bagarreur
inconnu
qui t’a poursuivi
dans ta chambre
et y a deposé
sous tes oreilers
la tête d’un serpent
les pieds d’un poulet.

Tu peux toujours
te promener,
quand meme chez toi
au bord de la mer
sur un autre continent,

loin de ta carte
de sejour, tes avances
aux policiers, ta vie
quotidienne d’étranger,
loin de tout ça,
un raz de marrée
a détruit le monde.

Tu peux t’asseoir
quelque part, à midi,
le soir, boire
du vin avec tes copains
et oublier entièrement
ce que le devin
t’a dit quand
tu es allé au village,
les enfants courant
derrière ta voiture
les anciens t’acueillant
devant la maison
du chef après les offrands
d’eau et l’annonce
des nouvelles.

Qu’est ce qu’il a dit
ce devin. Est-ce possible
de penetrer ton esprit,
d’y arracher le mal
et la peur, d’y implanter
la mefiance de tous
ces phénomènes qui passent
comme les vents,
les chats noir, la mort?

Est-ce possible
d’avoir ton attention,
mon ami, quand
nous parlons de l’avenir
de notre cher continent?

Je ne lui souhaite pas
des orages maléfiques,
la peste, la faim;
Je ne souhaite
que la mise
en garde a vue
de quelques chats,
chiens, et coqs,

Que nous leurs expliquions
qu’on peut éviter
l’assassinat de pauvres
bêtes pour que
nos ancêtres mangent;

Ils peuvent se debrouiller,
j’imagine; certes
les pommiers celestes
pourraient les nourrir;

Si je n’ai pas
d’enfant pour verser
de l’eau après ma disparition
j’imagine que je trouverai
un fleuve en haut
où je pourrai boire
tout ce que je veux,

En haut, avec mes amis
parmi les volailles
et les animaux
qui glissent sur terre,
tous a leurs tables,
sans besoin de s’entretuer.

Indran Amirthanayagam, Abidjan, 1998, dr) 2009

Todos los Años Nuevos…

2009-12-25T20:44:00.000-08:00

Todos los Años Nuevos…

nos acecha un nuevo
tsunami que emitimos todos,
este dióxido de carbono
que por tanta emisión festeja
está dando al planeta
una resaca de poca madre,

que nos da además
una opción conveniente
para levantarnos
de nuestras teclas
y caminar o andar
en bicicleta hacia

el nuevo bosque
que hemos sembrado
juntos; está a la vuelta,
se llama reciclaje,
bota nuestros deshechos
en los botes correctos,

se llama sembrar
orquídeas en casa,
y cambiar los focos
incadescentes
por los fluorescentes,
implica oxigenar

nuestros motores,
y echa sólo el agua
que necesitas
para satisfacer tu sed
después de amar
o beber demasiado.

Indran Amirthanayagam c) 12/25/2009

On Dick Lourie and The Confluence of Cultures

2009-12-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

On Dick Lourie and the Confluence of Cultures

I met Dick Lourie after he had edited my first book of poems The Elephants of Reckoning which was published in February 1993. I had no idea then of the man’s own poetry, his blues sax, the musical magic tricks he played in once smoky bars in Cambridge and other Massachusetts towns. Lourie helped sharpen my poems of love and war in a hot far away island—now far better known to citizens of the globe as Sri Lanka, manufacturer of the suicide bomber, blithe practitioner of confronting terror with terror, and unhappy recipient of the Tsunami. I am grateful for his scalpel, his vision for the overall shapes of both my Sri Lanka books, the most recent The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems.

Now,Lourie shows his metaphoric invention and his ability to write history as poetry in If The Delta Was the Sea—a product of a very experienced craftsman who has honed his art as writer and editor over decades preparing himself to compose some of the most compelling poems of our time. Now I am not a fan of the whole book. The Camel Chronicles were lost on me. But so many poems here will be read through the generations by the curious who want to learn about Clarksdale, yes, but also fellow poets interested in Lourie’s techniques in writing history via the poem, and ordinary readers who just wish for the entertainment of metaphors metered into a compelling story line. In my library, I place Lourie’s Delta next to Spoon River Anthology, Under Milk Wood and other classics of a particular time and place, and cultural, physical and psychological geography.

Here is Lourie’s disquisition on ribs in “Notes From the Future: Taken From the Journals of Imaginary Researchers Exploring Ancient Clarksdale, MIssissippi. “
“A recent discovery confirms that this last observation about the significance and status of “ribs” has not been exaggerated. Artifacts and census records make it evident that, as noted above, many parts of the city are predominantly occupied by one “race” or the other. Nevertheless, no matter where we dig, we always find, everywhere, these well-chewed animal bones—along with traces of what appears to be some kind of powerful ceremonial sauce.”

I love that ceremonial sauce. I am delighted that Clarksdale has found its chronicler. I am moved that he is a questioning, not fully practicing Jew, a migrant, and a close observer of sheepish, careful human beings who do not want to rock the boat, who want to move towards the meeting of cultures with all deliberate speed. In “Pinteleh Yid” a poem that contains history, he comments in one section about Jews in Clarksdale in the 1960s:

they were caught like others in the civil
rights conflicts of the 1960s: a
rabbi talks in the film about the tough
dilemma those days had presented to
him and his congregation in a town
near Clarksdale: he is a refugee from
pre-war Vienna where a rabbi could
just leave but those of his flock whose whole lives—

professions businesses were rooted there—
could not they stayed not knowing of course what
was about to happen this memory
stays with him as he angrily defends
his decision not to endanger his
congregation by speaking out against
the white power structure in such times when—
as Jews well knew—they could become easy

targets understanding one person says
that “ it was not periods of calm and
prosperity they had to be wary
of but times of turmoil” thus it might not
have been a surprise when one influential
member of a Delta congregation
advocated joining the White Citizen
Council reasoning that otherwise

the more excitable among those folks might
“begin to remember that we are Jews and
not Southerners and act accordingly. “….

There is more as Lourie then weighs the hate crimes against Jews and tries to present such decisions and revisions in all their complex, sifting horror.

I will not pretend to write definitive criticism of Lourie’s Delta here. The task escapes me. I have read and reread the poems over many months. They are very strong. They stick like glue, like sap, like a line that will not go away. I will sign off this first attempt by quoting his verses on a sandwich. New Yorkers take note that Lourie will read at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project on December 16.

The Sandwich As Metaphor

if you visualize every life as
a sandwich you could imagine endless
variations: with or without onions
hot cold lives sliced thin or just all mashed up

beyond recognition the delicate
the familiar the unsavory crisp
or soggy easy to chew but hard to
swallow dry or absolutely perfect

a lunch to end all lunches or a fast
food snack certainly best forgotten and
so forth from the long view of history
the “sandwich” of a particular life

might be seen as one crucial period
bounded by others less transformative:
an essential substance spread squeezed enclosed
between slices of “before” and “after”

this metaphor applies to the life of
a place as well: I think that for Clarksdale’s
life and Aaron Henry’s the crucial time is
the mid-nineteen-sixties when everything

changed because whites and blacks began—compelled
by history and themselves—to change their
behavior toward each other so that
from then on nothing was what it had been

!FELICIDADES JOSÉ EMILIO!

2009-12-01T17:52:00.000-08:00

...por tu Premio Cervantes, por tu poesia. Te publico aqui la presentacion que hice cuando estuvimos en Hermosillo durante las Horas de Junio.

SOBRE JOSÉ EMILIO PACHECO

El arte de José Emilio Pacheco--desde los primeros poemas que conocí, cuando fui joven poeta hojeando por las librerías de Nueva York, hasta los últimos que leí de Siglo Pasado (Desenlace), ahora mas maduro y amigo del poeta festejado-- se caracteriza por la palabra transparente. En forma, sintaxis, su ritmo de andar, nuestros colegas que exigen la característica dominante de la obra del maestro pueden ahora relajarse y no poner más atención a mis comentarios. Sin embargo es una lastima, esta supuesta necesidad de catalogar, de armar un poeta como fuera un librero ya hecho comprado en la tienda, sacado de su caja. José Emilio—como todos los grandes poetas—sí tiene un estilo, una huella única, pero nos equivocamos si pensamos que hemos logrado destilar tarde o temprano esta obra en una frase, un punto.

¿Como festejar José Emilio? Me acerco a su obra con algunos nervios expuestos. José Emilio fue el padrino para mi bautizo como poeta de lengua española. Sin su apoyo nunca hubiese llegado a tener un lugar en la mesa principal de la boda donde Ramón López Velarde y Octavio Paz, Xavier Villarutia y Carlos Pellicer, entre otros maestros mexicanos fuesen los primeros invitados. ¿Y quien iba a casarse con el inmigrante Indran sino su novia el idioma español en su versión mexicana que me regaló José Emilio, pulido, flexible, lleno de ideas y historias (porque su poesía es también narrativa).

Ahora, me encuentro a su lado en este acto público de reconocimiento justo cuando mi estancia en México esta a punto de terminar, otra vez viajero en búsqueda de esencias. Las he encontrado en México, “cierta gente,/puertos, bosques, desiertos, fortalezas/una ciudad deshecha, gris, monstruosa/varias figuras de su historia,/montañas/---y tres o cuatro ríos.”

Alastair Reid recitó su versión de “Alta Traición” cuando lo invité a presentar sus traducciones en un recital en el sucursal del barrio chino de la Biblioteca Publica de Nueva York. Ahí organicé presentaciones en los principios de los noventas. Reid eligió tres poemas de Jorge Luis Borges, de Pablo Neruda y de José Emilio Pacheco. Añadió unos de Diario de Muerte de Enrique Lihn. De toda la vasta obra de poesía escrita en español que había traducido a lo largo de su carrera, eligió estos poetas. Te queremos mucho José Emilio también al otro lado.

No me atrevo a abarcar toda la vasta obra del poeta esta noche. Para preparar estas palabras, he releído muchos poemas pero como un lector ocioso, disfrutando algunos docenas de veces, sin apuro. Leerlo todo seria una lectura equivocada de Tarde o Temprano—la recopilación del Fondo de Cultura Económica de los poemarios editados entre 1958 y 2000. Su obra es como el mar o las estrellas, el amor y la nostalgia, uno nunca llega a digerir todo lo que quiere darnos el poeta. ¿Es posible cerrar el océano en una bolsa y enterrarlo en el sótano de la tierra, olvidarlo ahí y seguir con tu vida como si nunca más vas a necesitar bañarte en su sal originaria? Los poemas de JEP me llevan a esta pregunta retórica, imposible.

LA ARENA ERRANTE

Los misteriosos médanos cambiaban
de forma con el viento.
Me parecían las nubes que al derrumbarse por tierra
se transformaban en arena errante.
De mañana jugaba en esas dunas sin forma.
Al regresar por la tarde
ya eran diferentes y no me hablaban.

Cuando soplaba el Norte hacían estragos en casa.
Lluvia de arena como el mar del tiempo.
Lluvia de tiempo como el mar de arena.
Cristal de sal la tierra entera inasible.
Viento que se filtraba entre los dedos.
Horas en fuga, vida sin retorno.
Médanos nómadas.

Al fin plantaron
las casuarinas para anclar la arena.
Ahora dicen: “Es un mal árbol.
Destruye todo.”
Talan las casuarinas.
Borran los médanos.

Y a la orilla del mar que es mi memoria
sigue creciendo el insaciable desierto.

El epígrafe de la Arena Errante dice “otro poema de Veracruz.” Sé que el poeta descansa, juega, busca soledad ahí cada año por semanas o meses. Igual con Maryland donde enseña un semestre cada invierno/primavera en la universidad estatal. JEP tiene sus retiros, sus cabañas donde hechiza sus versos. He conocido otro Veracruz, en Isla Negra donde Neruda espía el mar con su telescopio y buscaba anclas y alga marina y otras joyas de las mareas. He visitado Nicanor Parra en las Cruces, al lado del mismo océano pacifico. Y ahora, me comulgo con JEP, el otro poeta del mar escogido esa noche por Alastair Reid. Lo elijo con todas mis agallas porque cuando entro sus aguas emerjo purificado; me levanto en un estado de gracia por la sabiduría encontrado ahí, la enseñanza de un hombre que ha vivido con las mareas y el insaciable desierto del tiempo pero ha sobrevivido haciendo metáforas transparentes como si estuviera tallando piedra y mármol finos como vidrio. En la isla de Pascua han desaparecido los artesanos pero los monumentos se quedan. Miguel Ángel se murió, la Capilla Sextina sigue dando luz. Contemplemos “Edades” de JEP:
EDADES
Llega un triste momento de la edad
en que somos tan viejos como los padres.
Y entonces se descubre en un cajón olvidado
la foto de la abuela a los catorce años.

¿En dónde queda el tiempo, en dónde estamos?
Esa niña
que habita en el recuerdo como una anciana,
muerta hace medio siglo,
es en la foto nieta de su nieto,
la vida no vivida, el futuro total,
la juventud que siempre se renueva en los otros.
La historia no ha pasado por ese instante.
Aún no existen las guerras ni las catástrofes
y la palabra muerte es impensable.

Nada se vive antes ni después.
No hay conjugación en la existencia
más que el tiempo presente.
En él yo soy el viejo
y mi abuela es la niña.

Una niña encantadora, abuela ya muerta, el poeta viejo, el poeta antes del inicio de las guerras y las catástrofes—las figuras de este poema son lúdicas; bromean con el lector y el tiempo. Estamos aquí presentes ante ustedes. ¿Pero quienes somos? ¿Dos viejos poetas? ¿Un poeta niño y otro viejo, maestro y alumno, mexicano y srilankes, “en dónde queda el tiempo, en dónde estamos?”

El tiempo linear es el blanco de muchos poemas. Pienso en los “Cuatro Cuartetos” del poeta estadounidense T.S. Eliot: “Time Present. Time Past. Time Future,”---en el viejo Borges esgrimiendo con los espejos. Es un gran tema: la elasticidad, las ilusiones, las certezas dudosas del paso del tiempo. Y JEP vuelve a tratarlo casi de manera obsesiva. En el mismo La Arena Errante que nos regala el poema del titulo y Edades, encontré esta triste joya:

NIÑOS Y ADULTOS

A los diez años creía
que la tierra era de los adultos.
Podían hacer el amor, fumar, beber a su antojo,
ir adonde quisieran.
Sobre todo, aplastarnos con su poder indomable.

Ahora sé por larga experiencia el lugar común:
en realidad no hay adultos,
sólo niños envejecidos.

Quieren lo que no tienen:
el juguete del otro.
Sienten miedo de todo.
Obedecen siempre a alguien.
No disponen de su existencia.
Lloran por cualquier cosa.

Pero no son valientes como lo fueron a los diez años:
lo hacen de noche y en silencio y a solas.

Ese último hermoso verso—que lleva el andar, el ritmo de los versos clásicos, de “esa ansiosa y breve cosa que es la vida” para citar un ritmo similar del poeta imán Borges—me hace llorar y sentir toda la tragedia que forma parte de la vida humana y alimenta su poesía. En “Dichterliebe,” alemán para una canción alegre, JEP dice “la poesía tiene una sola realidad: el sufrimiento.” En “Ultima Fase” “ningún imperio puede/durar mil años.” Y en “No Me Preguntes Cómo Pasa El Tiempo”

Al lugar que fue nuestro llega el invierno
y cruzan por el aire las bandadas que emigran.
Después renacerá la primavera,
revivirán las flores que sembraste.
Pero en cambio nosotros
ya nunca más veremos
la casa entre la niebla.

Nunca más veremos la casa entre la niebla, esa esquina que cruzamos de niño, ese país lleno de jacarandaes y jazmines, flores del templo. La nostalgia y la perdida son el pan y la mantequilla de tanta poesía. ¿Qué es distintivo en el trato del tema en la obra de JEP?

Fácil señalar su sentido de humor, de reírse consigo mismo y con sus lectores. Claro, podría venir del subconciencia mexicana este talento de JEP, o podría formar parte de un escudo para proteger su ego del aprecio del mundo.

HIENAS

En las ruinas de lo que fue hasta el siglo veinte la Ciudad de
México,
cerca de una gran plaza que llamaban el Zócalo,
me salió al paso una manada de hienas.

Desde hace un mes nos quedamos sin ratas
o, para ser más precisos,
nosotros somos ahora las ratas
pues nos alimentamos de su pelambre y su carne.

A las hienas les ofendió mi olor y repudiaron mi aspecto.
En vez de atacarme
dieron la vuelta.
De lejos me observaron con gran desprecio.

Pero en “A Través De Los Siglos” JEP nos da la posibilidad de recuperar lo que esta
perdido, encontrarlo de nuevo un siglo después de su aparente desaparición.

Lo posmoderno ya se ha vuelto preantiguo.
Todo pasó.”Eres muy siglo veinte,”
me dice la muchacha del 2001.

Le contesto que no: soy el más atrasado.
En mi penoso ascenso por el correr de los años
ya estoy deshecho y con la lengua de fuera
y aún no he llegado al piso XIX,
donde me aguarda,
de cuello duro y con bombín y leontina,

nuestro señor 1904.

Déjenme vestirlo esta noche con sus propios bombines y leontinas. Me permito sacudir sus poemas de tanto polvo desértico, o acumulado en los sótanos de nuestros corazones, para contradecir sus propios argumentos. Si, las hienas nos ven con cierto desprecio pero andamos todavía en la tierra, de bombines y leontinas, gafas espesas, escudos armados con humildad y el arte de reírse de uno mismo.

José Emilio Pacheco, me bañaste con aguas eternas. Alta Traición merece su lugar al lado de “Suave Patria,” “Piedra de Sol,” poemas fundamentales mexicanos. ¿Pero como escoger un solo poema, destilar todo lo que me ha enseñado en unos versos? Hay que leer Tarde o Temprano, de manera ociosa, degustando cada poema como un alimento raro, fino. Y no hagas tanto caso a las ironías transparentes del maestro José Emilio Pacheco. Dice en

CAMINO DE IMPERFECCION
En tantísimos años sólo llegue a conocer de mí mismo
la cruel parodia, la caricatura insultante
--y nunca pude hallar el original ni el modelo.

Y termina el libro con este tour de force que debe ser incluido en una antología universal de poemas sobre mortalidad e inmortalidad, donde “William Yeats is laid to rest,” donde Neruda dice que esta cansado de ser hombre, donde JEP se despide al fin de un siglo:

DESPEDIDA

Fracasé. Fue mi culpa. Lo reconozco.
Pero en manera alguna pido perdón o indulgencia:
Eso me pasa por intentar lo imposible.

(There are no neat finishes) No hay fines ordenados. Anda todavía la tierra en 2006, con más gracia en sus versos, más luz, más humor chingón por el poeta José Emilio Pacheco.

Writing While the Planet Burns or Floods or Dries Up

2009-11-10T14:07:00.000-08:00

I write from the Wild-9 congress on wilderness conservation in Merida, Mexico, a few weeks before the world meets in Copenhagen to continue to negotiate an agreement on limiting greenhouse gases. I sense the urgency of our time as I see global warming modify the lives of residents of vulnerable places, coastlines, communities in desert environments dependent on fresh water coming from melting glaciers.

I remember the dark scenarios I brought to this meeting, that the world has crossed a tipping point, that we are engaged in a rearguard action against a frightening monster, the human being, who sends his plastic into the ocean, who cuts down the mahogany tree while his government inspector looks the other way, who cannot see beyond his own needs for food and water and a house. Yet he can learn to accept his neighbor's need for the same things, that his neighbor may indeed be a butterfly or a snake or an elephant, that he can help his fellow being eke out a dwelling, a landscape where he can flourish.

LIMA

2009-09-03T20:39:00.000-07:00

Lima

Una chifa bien servida,

una bofetada de humo,

un amigo indio y otro negro,

unas nalgas esculpidas

por las armas mecanicas

del gimnasio El Polo,

un sol, unos dias soleados,

una verdad incomoda

que llena una sala

de empresarios en busca

de innovacion energetica

y financiera, un pizco sour,

un suspiro, un lomo saltado,

un ceviche, un bebe

en un carrusel cuya musica

se disuelve en la cacofonia

de los juegos, un Jockey Plaza,

un edificio de 20 pisos

lo mas grande de la ciudad,

las catacumbas donde

nos caimos al aterrizar

en el centro.

Belonging, A Poem

2009-07-06T19:15:00.000-07:00

Belonging
Indran Amirthanayagam

The island belongs
to centipede,
rat, butterfly,
lots of species
each with
their own habitats,
and supervising
all arable and
fallow land
the president king.

Minorities
may enjoy
clean living
in freshly cleared
forest patches,
welfare villages
with amenities
such as latrines
and tents,
gated communities.

June 28, 2009

Sobre Michael Jackson, por Eduardo Espina

2009-06-27T16:26:00.001-07:00

La vida ya no baila en la Luna
por Eduardo Espina

Hubo tantas cosas increíbles en la vida de Michael Jackson, que uno duda de que esté realmente muerto. ¿No será otra de sus inexplicables tretas, de esas tan frecuentes charadas que lo hicieron un original sin copia? En la vida y en la muerte del último gran ídolo de matinée todo resultó posible. Fue capaz de decolorar su piel (nunca pudimos saber si continuaba siendo afro, si se había convertido en blanco de la misma forma que otros se convierten al cristianismo, o si finalmente había conseguido adquirir el tan ansiado “color MJ”, una de sus marcas registradas). Rey también en la metamorfosis. Un Gregor Samsa, un Indran Amirthanayagam. Fue capaz de cambiar de identidad, de estigmas, de estado civil, de peinado, de chimpancé, de paranoia, de voz (por su falsetto desfiló la armonía), de hobby, de cirujano plástico, de estilo de vida, de etc., y hasta de sexualidad, pues de esta hizo una fábrica permanente de incógnitas, invitando a repetir ocasionalmente la pregunta, ¿es o no? Esa vaguedad, la de no saber bien quién o qué fue Michael Jackson lo convirtió en un personaje imposible de clonar. Mezcla asimétrica de hermafrodita, andrógino y maniquí cósmico capaz de fascinar a gente de todas las edades, el último gran cantante pop pasó por la vida como ráfaga de interrogantes que hicieron de su show, dentro y fuera del escenario, un entretenimiento constante, algo así como un ímpetu de raro magnetismo capaz de generar adicción. Quizás por eso, por haber sabido existir en constante actualización (en ese presente perpetuo solamente reservado a los ídolos), como potpurrí de sí mismo, Michael Jackson vivió la vida tal si fuera una estela luminosa que solo justifica su condición cuando brilla. Por eso existió en constante destello. Tuvo ese don: no defraudó ni como artista pluritalentoso ni como figura generadora de enigmas. Se encargó, y lo hizo bien, de que su nombre y figura fueran imán de atención masiva, removedores de rutina. Ficción y caricatura. Su vida fue un parque temático y hasta llegó a tener su propio Parque Rodó en el fondo de su casa, con calesita y rueda gigante en donde la infancia pudiera hibernar. Tenía 50 años, pero aun no había llegado a la adolescencia. Dejó, para que sepan, dos obras maestras de la música pop: Off the Wall (1979) y Thriller (1982). De esos dos discos gloriosos brotó magia, la cual no logró redimir su megalomanía ni salvarlo de la ignominia asociada a las acusaciones de pederastia que lo mandaron cuesta abajo. Ahora, privilegiado por una muerte antes de tiempo, pertenece ya a la dimensión de los mitos, los cuales nunca mueren. Será posteridad, leyenda urbana. Reliquia y fetiche. Pronto dirán que fue visto por ahí, paseando en un tren fantasma, que todavía sigue vivo como Elvis Presley, que juntos se han ido a Canadá a grabar un nuevo disco, eso sí, de vinilo. Una fantasía que nadie podrá matar. Desde la helada noche del 8 de diciembre de 1980, cuando John Lennon fue baleando en la entrada de su apartamento, ningún otro artista o cantante había generado tanta sorpresa y tristeza colectiva con su muerte como Michael Jackson. De pronto, con su desaparición, se fue un mundo. Una época. Se fue, y si exagero no me equivoco, la voz de una época, la de las últimas tres décadas del siglo pasado. Ahora por fin, el siglo XXI puede empezar, tras quitarse de encima a uno de los últimos lastres ilustres que le tocó heredar. Algunos, como este servidor, han de sentir que con la muerte de Jackson, el mutante que tomaba Pepsi, muere también parte de uno. Para los amantes de la música, la suya, un sonido sin imposturas, un estilo para tararear, fue imprescindible. Quienes estamos en los cincuenta (de edad, no de década) podemos afirmar que crecimos con las distintas etapas de la voz de Michael Jackson, la cual hizo su aparición cuando más la necesitábamos: cuando empezamos a ver la adolescencia en el espejo retrovisor, cuando la vida coleccionaba nombres de mujer, cuando nacieron los hijos, cuando la felicidad se dio cuenta de que la edad no importa, y hasta cuando pudimos confirmar que éramos habitantes de la mejor década del siglo XX, porque lo fue. Precisamente, en un año tan bisagra como 1983, mientras la guerra fría se derretía y las penúltimas dictaduras del mundo (incluidas algunas latinoamericanas) comenzaban a oxidarse, Michael Jackson grabó Thriller, posiblemente el álbum más emblemático de las vivencias asociadas a la historia finisecular. Época de gozos hacia delante, de renovado entusiasmo. Fueron años de tránsito y reacomodo que correspondieron a la cruzada de optimismo generada desde la Casa Blanca por Ronald Reagan. La música de Jackson fue la banda sonora de esos ocho años de gobierno republicano que impulsaron la idea de la universalidad democrática estadounidense y que vieron como corolario la caída del muro de Berlín y el fin del comunismo. Reagan y Jackson fueron la síntesis impostergable de la década de 1980, iconos de la última vez en que el mundo estuvo en calma (extrañamente, el cantante murió en el Hospital Ronald Reagan: hasta en eso estuvieron juntos). En aquellos días que se fueron tan rápido (la promesa de felicidad es siempre así de efímera) la música, los movimientos, los escándalos, la imagen, en fin, la vida de Michael Jackson formaron parte de una película colectiva donde todos pudimos participar, la mayoría desempeñando un papel de reparto. Una canción, y otra, varias, todas las que conforman el álbum Thriller, se convirtieron en himno de una generación, con una voz distintiva acompañada de una imagen igual de diferente, pues Jackson fue también un adelantado en materia audiovisual. Si no inventó el video musical, fue al menos el primero en utilizarlo creativamente. Llegó justo cuando la televisión necesitaba otra opción de entretenimiento. Al verlo en el video de la canción Billie Jean, con sus guantes de lentejuelas y su maquillaje rococó imponiendo un estilo de baile que desconocíamos, el mundo dijo al unísono: “Yo también quiero mi MTV”. Nos fuimos a vivir a un video clip, a venerar una coreografía. Copiando esos pasos tan exactos, bueno intentándolo, y recurriendo al control remoto más de lo previsto para tener sobredosis diarias de imágenes, sentimos que estábamos entrando a la posmodernidad, lo que eso fuera, pues hasta el día de hoy no hemos podido definirla con claridad. Es decir, con Michael Jackson fuimos posmodernos sin saber bien lo que éramos (y tampoco hicimos mucho por saberlo porque, para qué).La muerte, que no es fan de nadie, suele venir en puntas de pie, y la de Jackson entró por la puerta de atrás, de la manera menos pensada y glamorosa, vulgarmente democrática. Murió como uno más: de un paro cardíaco. Igual que un trabajador agobiado por el estrés. Vaya ironía. Al menos en el momento de su muerte fue completamente humano, igualito a todos nosotros. La muerte, siempre tan poco imaginativa, imitó al resto de su vida, pues llegó de sorpresa, sin avisar ni tocar el timbre, justo cuando la segunda parte del show estaba por comenzar y nosotros ahí, sentados en primera fila, listos para empezar a aplaudir otra vez.El próximo mes se cumplen 40 años de la llegada del hombre a la Luna. No ha muerto el primer astronauta en pisarla, sino el inventor del “Moonwalk”, de la caminata lunar, un paso de baile tan importante como la pionera expedición de la Nasa, aunque seguramente más. Ha muerto un compositor, intérprete y bailarín extraordinario, que fue único por ser irrepetible. En tiempos cuando la mediocridad carcome todos los territorios de la vida contemporánea, de la política al deporte pasando por la literatura y el periodismo, la muerte de un talento original como Michael Jackson deja al mundo menos completo. Y contra eso no hay antídoto, salvo recurrir a la música para que el silencio no se quede tan solo. Ha llegado pues el tiempo de rebobinar y escuchar la canción nuevamente. En este momento es la única revancha. La muerte, sorda y muda, no sabrá de qué se trata.

Satellite View: A Poem by Thiru Sambandar

2009-05-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

Thiru sent me his latest:

Satellite View

There will be lamentations
and regrets, there are already,
and recriminations. Why
did we allow the unthinkable
to fall down on those
hapless families
in tents and bunkers?

Why did we agree
only to informal
meetings
in the basement
of U.N. headquarters
before proposing
an emergency session

of the Human Rights
Council for next week?
After months of
slaughter, next week?
How long do we need
to assemble diplomats
of 47 countries

who live in greater
Geneva, some just
a walk away
from the roundtable?
I imagine the table
round like the large
hearts of hapless

bystander diplomats
before the rain
of terror, bombs
and mortar, metallic
lassos thrown
about Tamils
squared

in 2.5 kilometers
between lagoon
and sea, 50,000
civilians left
in that spit of Vanni,
numbers reduced by
tens and hundreds

every day. You ask
about other options,
such as India, or
stiffening terms
of the IMF loan,
an armed force
to separate the parties?

Yes, dear Romans,
we can choose to censure
miscreants. When a man
or state or rebel group
kill wantonly
we must stop him
or it, walk into

the line of sight,
settle the matter
with our most
special forces.
Who is right--
government
controlled by fanatics,

who believe
the island belongs
first to Sinhalese
while other
residents are subject
to extra-judicial
measures

such as roundups
in unmarked vans
and denouncing
for bizarre
collaborations
with terrorist
fighter jets--

or the aforementioned
liberation fighters?
Or do we have
the last word,
survivors of
streets of Geneva
or New York

or Beijing, suited
and stuffed
with ideals
or pragmatic like
moneylenders
weighing assets
of the nation

come to pawn
its Tamil jewels
in return for
a naval base,
a wedge around
India, uninterrupted
supply of fighter

jets and expert
advice in the art
of war, in the age
of CNN, where
the first principle
denies journalists
the chance to speak

with survivors
of the slaughter
which could have
been prevented
if prying eyes
along with
aid workers

from abroad
had been allowed
inside the Vanni
to accompany
local and expendable
employees,
Tamil speakers,

subject to pressure
from Tiger overlords,
whose pictures
of injured and dead
are stage sets,
according to
government,

whose reports
to BBC are spoken
while a Tiger
points a gun
at the telephone.
Come, come,
ye spokespersons,

do you take us
for imbeciles walking
into roundtables
in Western capitals
or even in Beijing?
When food, water,
medicine, and soft

drinks are scarce
in the theatre
of war, can supplies
of stage blood
be made available
like rain and heat,
mortar and missiles?

Thiru Sambandar May 14, 2009

Don't Cry for Us, Sri Lanka--Thiru Sambandar

2009-05-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

Publication: Times of India;
Date: May 10, 2009;
Section: Mind Over Matter;
MIND SET

Don’t cry for us, Sri Lanka

The teardrop isle’s dirty war has resulted in the psychological brutalization of its Tamil minority at home and abroad

Thiru Sambandar

This war is no cricket match and, even if it were, both sides have lost while the civilian spectators have become chief victims. Images of refugees — black skins with raging, red wounds, bones popping out, a mob raising hands and fists for a box of biscuits, while leaving fields of dead — are now the subject of daily contemplation for their cousins abroad, the ones who have made it out.

We left the burning island many decades ago, after cataclysms such as attacks on our people, houses and businesses in 1958 and 1983, the dirty war in Sri Lanka’s south in the late 1980s and the tsunami of 2004. Can you imagine a 26-year-long intense civil war and a natural disaster, the mother of all waves, splintering the same spit of land?

Now we read about emissaries from our Western refuges and the United Nations failing to convince the Sri Lankan government about the merits of entering the so-called ‘no fire zone' to ensure that civilians have food, water and medicine. We read about the visa denial to the Swedish foreign minister and about Lasantha Wickrematunga being shot in broad daylight at an intersection. Lasantha’s last words, his posthumously published editorial “And Then They Came For Me” remind us of the power of his engagement in trying to preserve civil discourse, a democratic space where dissent would not cause the summoning of a death squad.

Don’t cry for us, Sri Lanka. The island’s dirty war has seared all of us. Meanwhile, we wander past the protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London, or Parliament Hill in Ottawa, or the Sri Lankan Consulate General in New York. We see our faces in young people handing out leaflets, born in the diaspora — polite, educated in civic manners. We see the flags of the Tigers and wonder, do we subscribe to the bloody history the emblem implies? Did we blow up Neelan Tiruchelvam at the junction of Kynsey Road and Rosmead Place or garland Rajiv at his last campaign rally?

Yet, we go on emboldened quietly, proud of the sacrifices of our boys and girls. And we have become tired of the grudging respect and jokes of our new fellow citizens, whether English, Germans, Canadians, Australians. Are you a Tiger? Where did you learn such savagery? We learned it when we were advised that our language would be considered a minor key in the island symphony. That was in 1956 when Sinhala became legislated into the pole position in the formula one race to Armageddon.

The leader who championed that fine bill in the parliament died later from an assassin’s bullet, fired by a monk. The prime minister did not go far enough in asserting majority rights, it seemed. He wanted to step back from the demons he unleashed. The robes in which we dress do not preclude savage impulses in the island where the poet said ‘only Man is vile.’

We learned it in 1958 and 1983, years when we became subject to organized lynch mobs, armed with voter lists, thugs who came to burn us out, to help us move to where we live now, in Scarborough, London, Geneva, consoled by new sets of social services, local government support, our community networks, to keep Tamils thriving, to educate our children, to bless their marriages in marriage halls.

We have moved out of Jaffna, out of Kayts, out of Trincomalee and Batticaloa, out of the Vanni. Some of us have moved into armed camps behind barbed wire where we cannot meet friends or relatives. The rest of us, who left before the current flare-up, are now hyphenated into thriving, consoling societies full of immigrants from war-ravaged countries. Yet we are shocked, numbed, without sleep, as we stare at the faces of our people, hungry, wounded, caught in a vise between two implacable, blind, pitiless and careless foes.

Charges of war crimes do not seem to bother the warring parties. And we are not clamouring to return to the now “liberated” East Coast and the soon-to-be-“free” Northern province. We know that our fellow citizens in these regions live in fear as they do throughout the island. The white van visits our sleep, the vehicle without license plates that comes at night and takes away our young.

We would be pleased to return white to snow, or temple flowers, or our shirts as we ride the bus to work in a quiet, democratic, multicultural and thriving democracy. We recall fondly days when our Ceylon mosaic gave us friends who brought us sweetmeats, Dutch sweets, when we would wander over to the Pettah for a Muslim feast. We regret that Ceylon has disappeared. Yet, we think still, in fevered dreams, that we can wake up renewed to palaver with our neighbours, our fellow islanders. (The writer’s name has been changed for security reasons)

Sobre En Busqueda de Batanero de Ivan Loyola

2009-05-08T14:46:00.000-07:00

Sobre En búsqueda de Batanero de Ivan Loyola (vinossimo@gmail.com)

De las pesadillas nocturnas, los sueños despiertos limeños cuando uno se levanta envuelto en la neblina y no encuentra una salida, de las lecturas profundas del deseo humano, la perforación de la piel de la tierra para beber su sangre, del talento obsesivo para escribir exactamente lo requerido para sacar a la luz lo esencial de un paisaje, una emoción, una idea, les recomiendo En búsqueda de Batanero.

El autor Iván Loyola ha reunido 9 cuentos en este libro. Ustedes saben de la magia que uno hace con el numero 3, bueno, aquí son 3 mas tres…un buen formulario para su éxito. Pero este libro no nos salva de lo más oscuro de la psicología humana, más bien, lo subraya, lo hace saltar en las acciones y descubrimientos de héroes aventureros en los cuentos. Así, si no quieres explorar el substrato de la conciencia humana, lo que miles de años de educación y cultivo de lo moral, la acción correcta, ha intentado enterrar o al menos ocultar, no lean este libro.

¿Quien es Batanero? Y parece que hay muchos. No les voy a decir porque no quiero delatar al argumento. Pero ven conmigo a las montañas, dentro de la selva profunda. Loyola sirve como guía, periodista de investigación. Y nosotros vivimos el viaje sin tener que mudarnos de nuestras vidas cómodas o incomodas, de nuestras casas donde tejemos chales con nuestros miedos y nuestras esperanzas. Creemos poder encontrar la paz, el amor, que los muros van a resistir cualquier torbellino que nos envía la naturaleza. Pero Batanero llega igual y de repente no podemos sentirnos seguros.

Terminé mi lectura de este libro hace un par de semanas durante la guerra sumamente sucia, horripilante—todavía con nosotros-- en el noreste de Sri Lanka donde miles de Tamiles civiles han muerto a raíz del conflicto entre el gobierno srilankes y los rebeldes Tigres. Hablé con el autor por mail una tarde y me di cuenta como compartimos cierta preocupación e interés por la crueldad humana, el impulso humano a excavar en el pozo profundo para sacar algas amarillas, vertebra ensangrentada.
Pero hay alivio también en este libro. El placer puro del habla limeña. Por ejemplo, en el cuento Estación Chatelet relata la historia de unos amigos en Lima y qué sucedió cuando uno de ellos se fue a vivir a Paris y el otro llegó para visitarlo. Y como en todos los cuentos, el autor sorprende al lector llevándolo a caminar en un sendero-- que en este caso, tiene que ver con la nostalgia de un paisano por su tierra natal, su infancia--- para girarlo de repente, y tomar otro camino con una historia distinta, esta vez erótica. En este cuento y en la mayoría, existe la moral, una preocupación ética o más bien una reflexión sobre los límites de la ética, su fracaso ante el deseo desencadenado.

Escuchen un poco del diálogo refrescante de este cuento. Y les pregunto a ustedes ¿cuantos aquí han tenido conversaciones así llegando a un nuevo país?
“La voz de Cucho parecía raspar el auricular con tonos metálicos, sonaba tan distinta a la última vez que Yago la había escuchado, cuatro años antes. Sí, compadre, de todas maneras. ¿No tuviste problemas en el aeropuerto, no? Bacán. ¿Saliendo de Lima tampoco? ¿Me trajiste lo que me mandó mi mamá. Te pasastes Yaguito. ¿Dónde estas?....y “Te bajas en chatele, d’acord? No, no, es una estación del metro. Con té al final, chatelé. Si, ya sé, la té, pero así se pronuncia.”

Y más adelante aún dice el autor. “Sonaba bien, dacord. Ya no era el chévere—pulenta de otros tiempos, parados en la esquina de la parroquia Cristo Salvador, sireando chicas, los ochenta en el barrio de Lince.” Me gustó mucho este cuento, tal vez por la pausa que me dio en la lectura sobre otros relatos más crueles. Pero hay que leerlos. Amantes de los cuentos de sombras, del género del horror van a gustar mucho este libro.

Además, el libro ofrece a todos que se derritan ante una frase bien hecha la música de sus oraciones y su precisión ¿Y quien no va a deleitar la celebración de eros que se encuentra en algunas de las narraciones?

Para cerrar estos breves comentarios me gustaría mencionar el cuento Siebenburgen. No he leído una historia tan mágica en bastante tiempo. Me traslado a mi niñez y a la primera vez que escuché el relato del flautista de Hamlin. Ahora, gracias a Loyola, sé que fue a Siebenburgen que el flautista se llevó a 130 niños. Les invito a hacer fila detrás del escritor Loyola. Su música es dulce, sus ritmos hechizantes. En cuanto a lo que va a suceder en esa ciudad escondida en las montañas de Perú…les dejo esta búsqueda de Batanero.

.

Sympathy: A Poem

2009-05-02T16:57:00.000-07:00

Sympathy

Besieged on all sides,
I have sea and death
on all sides. I don’t have
water to drink, just salt slicks,
not rice or dhal, nothing,
bombs and bullets, I am
unhappy, my son killed,
and you watching me
with sympathetic stares,

a black body in a loin cloth,
whites of eyes swinging
about my head, and I hear
wailing from other beds
and see doctors trying
to heal oozing wounds
and now earth blasted
a huge hole, a chance to run,
to what after life ?

How long will I need
to regain my calm
when cousins abroad
say even modern
life in the west
offers only guilty
cups of tea and
unbearable sympathy
from neighbors ?

Indran Amirthanayagam c) 2009

Green Couch by Edward Hirsch

2009-04-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

"Green Couch"

Sofa Verde
By Edward Hirsch

That was the year I lived without fiction
and slept surrounded by books on the unconscious.
I woke every morning to a sturdy brown oak.

Ese fue el año que vivi sin ficción
y me dormí en medio de libros sobre el subconsciente.
Me desperté cada mañana ante un roble fuerte y marrón.

That was the year I left behind my marriage
of twenty-eight years, my faded philosophy books, and
the green couch I had inherited from my grandmother.

Ese fue el año que deje atrás mi matrimonio
de 28 años, mis libros gastados de filosofía, y
el sofá verde que había heredado de mi abuela.

After she died, I drove it across the country
and carried it up three flights of crooked stairs
to a tiny apartment in west Philadelphia,

Después de su muerte, lo conduje a través del país
y lo subí tres pisos de escalera enredada
a un departamento pequeño en West Philadephia,

and stored it in my in-laws' basement in Bethesda,
and left it to molder in our garage in Detroit
(my friend Dennis rescued it for his living room),

y lo deposité en el sótano de la casa de mis suegros
en Bethesda y lo deje pudrir en nuestro garaje en Detroit
(mi amigo Dennis lo rescató para su living)

and moved it to a second-floor study in Houston
and a fifth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side
where it will now be carted away to the dump.

y lo mudé a un estudio en el segundo piso en Houston
y un departamento del quinto piso en el Upper West Side
donde ahora será llevado a la basura.

All my difficult reading took place on that couch,
which was turning back into the color of nature
while I grappled with ethics and the law,

Todo mi lectura dificil sucedió en ese sofá,
que volvía al color de la naturaleza
mientras yo luchaba con ética y el derecho,

the reasons for Reason, Being and Nothingness,
existential dread and the death of God
(I'm still angry at Him for no longer existing).

las razones para la Razón, Ser y la Nada,
el temor existencial y la muerte de Dios
(todavía me enojo con el por no existir).

That was the year that I finally mourned
for my two dead fathers, my sole marriage,
and the electric green couch of my past.

Ese fue el año que lamenté finalmente
por mis dos padres muertos, mi matrimonio único,
y el sofá verde eléctrico de mi pasado.

Darlings, I remember everything.
But now I try to speak the language
ofthe unconscious and study earth for secrets.

Queridos, me acuerdo de todo.
Pero ahora intentaré hablar el idioma
del subconsciente y estudiar la tierra por sus secretos.

I go back and forth to work.
I walk in the botanical gardens on weekends
and take a narrow green path to the clearing.

Voy y vuelvo del trabajo.
Camino en los jardines botánicos los fines de semana
en un sendero verde hacia el claro.

--traduccion Indran Amirthanayagam

PILL FOR AN ISLAND

2009-03-28T22:22:00.000-07:00

The war in Sri Lanka has lasted more than 25 years. I wrote this poem in 2006, after visiting New York, another beloved residence on earth.

PILL FOR AN ISLAND

I did not visit the Black Pussycat,
or the Fat Flounder, even Macy’s
on 34th Street. I left the Back Fence
for another return. I must devote
myself to compressing the city
into a compact, multi-purpose
pill to pop on those occasions
far away on Ceylon’s East Coast

where the blue-green jeweled
sea—turned nut brown, in the wake
of the tsunami--witnesses again
patrol boats and small arms fire,
lobbed grenades and thatch explosions,
rapes of social workers and hundreds
upon hundreds upon thousands
in flight from their villages.

War has returned to the hamlets,
coves and palm-fronded taverns,
and in New York those towers
of Ilium vanished, my two islands
united in the global accounting
of war and war’s alarms,
everybody bruised, jaded and afraid
waiting for the Messiah or the flames.

Indran Amirthanayagam c)2009

Victory and Defeat

2009-03-06T18:29:00.000-08:00

Let us throw these words,
victory and defeat,
into the dustbin.
Mastering illusion
is the only way out
of the maize. Learn
the art of mapmaking.

Find your own way out of hell.
Use gods and preachers.
Use poetry. But do not listen
to rants of those who say
victory is close at hand, around
the corner, one bomb away.

--IA 3/6/2009

Hablando con Ernesto Cardenal

2009-02-16T08:49:00.000-08:00

Hoy el 16 de febrero fui a ver el Maestro Cardenal en el Centro Nicaraguense de Escritores. Platicamos de la guerra civil en sri lanka y en particular los muertos y las heridas que han sufrido los civiles atrapados entre el ejercito srilankes y los tigres tamiles. Tambien platicamos de la condena judicial que ha sufrido el Maestro. Lo encontre bien de salud y fuerte como un chacal y de buena voz. Manana en Granada los poetas del mundo y los poetas nicaraguenses se reuniran para escucharlo.

SRI LANKA: WAR AND SUFFERING

2009-01-30T22:32:00.000-08:00

As I write more than 250,000 civilians are trapped in jungle near Mullaitivu,. They have little food, water and medicine. They are being injured and killed. They need help. Please speak to your representatives, write letters to your editors, insist that their plight be reviewed by the UN Security Council. Harming innocents is not a matter of internal security or civil war to be left to the warring parties in the Sri Lankan conflict. We must not be quiet. Let us make a lot of noise. Let us make the bombers accountable to us. Let us try to save a few lives. Indran

To The Courts, In Remorse

2009-01-24T07:57:00.000-08:00

Drop all charges
against
Tissanaiyagam.
his glaucoma
needs treatment
and his wife
will be grateful,

…and the Dean
of the Diplomatic
Corps will feel
less inclined
to speak
at public
acts of grievance.

I agree
we must not
interfere
with funerals.
leaves a bitter
taste on
the BBC’s tongue.

Inevitably
advisors
will counsel
banning that
Commonwealth
voice.
Yet, then

we must cope
with reporters
in disguise,
especially
these pesky
bloggers
who feel

empowered
to write
what they see
and hear
taste and
touch
as if witness

can make
bread out
of flour
or yams
sprout
in a
mineswept

Vanni.
And let me
not forget
the political
analysts
who worry
in public

that a failed
state will
be our cup
of tea.
I trust
you will
still drink

our fabled
single
leaf
beverage
and visit
our white
sand,

black
sand,
red
sand,
blue
sand
beaches.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam c) 2009

ON SERVICE, MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY JANUARY 19TH, 2009

2009-01-18T07:03:00.000-08:00

“We’ve got to make this world a better place”, the song says. Today we are following the instructions. “I know we can make it. I know darn well”. Here we are making order, making peace. Here we are preparing the house for the invited guests. Tomorrow a new family will occupy the White House. Tomorrow a poet will read to the nation and the world on the Capitol steps. Tomorrow we will return to our lives changed, empowered, moving ahead with confidence.

“We are on earth a little space/to learn to bear the beams of love,” Blake wrote. “Raise high the roofbeams, Carpenter” Salinger told us. Let us raise our arms, friends. Our hearts. We have a garden. It needs water, fruit rinds, tubers, onion peels. And there is a copse nearby. Let that copse alone. Let us live in harmony with other fish ambling about on land. Let us glide, swim, waddle, and walk to walk; throw the car keys into the back drawer.

We shall move ahead with confidence. But let us not forget the errors made in our name. Let us set up a vigil at Constitution Avenue, at the Lincoln Memorial. Let us take back our streets.

First Street: a pact, friends.

Here are the details. Love our neighbor, whether human, fish, bird, worm, scorpion.

Love winds, sky, oceans. Let us learn how to recycle, how to cut down, trim. Let us bonsai our lives, rock garden them and put a pool in the middle. Let us adopt the Mexican custom of a fountain in every home.

Second Street:

Let us cross the borders, tackle difficult, painful wars that murder our spirit. Let us not be silent before them even if our only recourses are the letter to the editor and the vote. Let us not underestimate the power of that vote.

Third Street:

Care for our families. Inscribe the kids into Model UN. Read a poem a day. Say prayers. Sing. Dance for no particular reason and don’t always go to bed at 10. Set up patterns. Then muddy them up. Teach the children to live in the grey areas, to breathe powerfully and straight into the fog and darkness so their breaths will clear the way.

Fourth Street:

Love your neighbor. Cross over the Falls Road. Into Soweto. Downtown East Side. Remove the gates, friends, to the gated communities. Install electronic sensors instead. Yet, how can one tell the movement of one who does not belong, who comes to rob and pillage? Not easy ….Security in the midst of prosperity and poverty. Haves and Have nots. But let’s work to fashioning a world that runs on the word, the bond of man, the trust of Abel in his brother even if Abel will, and must, be killed.

Fifth Street….and I will stop here. There are five acts in the tragedy, in the comedy as well

I have cited Blake already on the beams of love. How about Ginsberg?

Hey Father Death,
I'm flying home
Hey poor man,
you're all alone
Hey old daddy,
I know where I'm going

Where are we going? What is the fifth street or the fiftieth? I am scared but am not yet straight. I am scared but I am taking omega 3, bitter melon and milk thistle. I am scared but I am in love. I am scared but I have my health and a healthy imagination. I am scared but I have a job. And I am grateful. Today I give thanks to Martin Luther King. To my friends. To this evening before the new morning in the United States, everywhere.

--Indran Amirthanayagam c)2009

One Of Us (Lasantha Wickrematunge)

2009-01-12T10:06:00.000-08:00

One of Us

During civilized periods
in the history of kingdoms
courtiers, or the king’s
person himself,
in audience
with the gadfly,
would offer the fellow
death or exile.

These days
assassins
butcher their fly
in daylight
near security
checkpoints
in front of
bewildered subjects.

My Lord,
Dutugemunu,
slayer of wild beasts
in northern
jungles, why must
we kill brother
Lasantha, shed
our own blood?

-- Indran Amirthanayagam, January 11, 2009

On LOVE MARRIAGE by V.V. Ganeshananthan

2009-01-11T11:02:00.000-08:00

I write rarely about novels in this space dedicated to poetry. But once in a while I am moved to break the unnecessary chains and comment about strong new writing produced in prose in the Sri Lankan or Ceylonese diaspora. VV Ganeshananthan’s first novel Love Marriage is a brave and comprehensive work that mixes personal and political, national and international, diaspora and village, into a compelling story of Sri Lankan Tamils and their dilemmas, strangers in strange lands, expelled from home, trying in some cases to get back to their birthplaces.

Exile is the modern condition. We all seem to come from abroad. Meanwhile, Rimbaud noted that life is elsewhere. I read Ganeshananthan’s novel in a checkered manner, impressed by the powerful stories, interrupted by news from the island. I read Roma Tearne’s Mosquito in the same way. Sri Lankan stories get under my skin, bother my heart and sometimes work like a poison leading to literary paralysis.

What can one say about the unrelenting horror that the island has lived for more than 25 years, 50 if one goes back to the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 that began the disintegration of the calm, sea-bathing polity inherited in 1948. Now, I exaggerate. There have always been disputes and of course inequities. But short sighted policies to gain votes have come back to haunt the island like those horsemen of the apocalypse described powerfully by Tarzi Vittachi in Emergency 58. At least at that time, journalists were spared bullets or knives.

Now, all is changed. The recent murder of Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the Sunday Leader, confirms the disintegration of the polity into a chaos where life is nasty, brutish and short, where the rule of law should be renamed the rule of thugs.

In this context—and when is the right moment—to talk about imaginative literature, work that will have a shelf life beyond the particular murders and abuses in the daily political sphere? Of course, Ganeshananthan is also a journalist, a truth teller, which adds another layer of interest for readers of her novel.

So what are the truths revealed in this fiction? I invite readers to examine the novel, to engage its partial truths--Ganeshananthan creates a great variety of powerful and opinionated characters—and to reflect on the correspondences between their lives and the lives of her characters. I am not reviewing the novel here, assessing its merits as fiction or history. My view, in any case, would be shaped by my own prejudices. Yet in the end—to avoid the paralysis of not opining at all, which would be a silly conclusion to the problem of literary or, for that matter, journalistic impartiality—I say here unequivocally that my antennae are dancing thrilled with this novel

I leave you as a teaser with some passages from the novel:

“What he means is this: it would be false to say that there is a beginning to the story, or a middle, or an end. Those words have a tidiness that does not belong here. Our lives are not clean. They begin without fanfare and end without warning. This story does not have a defined shape or a pleasant arc. To record it differently would not be true.”

“To read the story in the press is to read a story that has never gone far enough.”

“Like almos every member of his family, my great-uncle eventually left Sri Lanka. There was nothing else to do.”

“Tamil has two hundred and forty-seven letters. When I was five years old, I could recite about half of them. I could speak Tamil and understand it. But as I got older, I forgot the words. I do not remember how this happened. Sometimes when I dream, I dream in Tamil. But when I wake up I never remember the words. It is like remembering a fever, or a blessing.”

INAUGURATION

2009-01-06T09:43:00.000-08:00

INAUGURATION

I have no words
to compete
with rain
or sunlight,

or the brush
of your hair
on my brow.
I am humbled

before beauty
and this chance
to lead a nation
out of delusion

with self and others;
but I remain unelected,
acknowledged only
by a few readers

of psychosis,
the notion that word
becomes flesh,
we accept by rote,

at Mass,
a divine mystery,
but ignore the man
on a soapbox

who reads his ya yahs
out at the Bowery
Poetry Café
on Sunday morning

at 9 am during
a marathon reading
to welcome the year,
to say, World,

you’ve still got poets
to kick around. Bring
on the go-go girls,
mountebanks, acrobats.

The show is everything.
Let’s say hurrah for all
that jazz. The inauguration
will be like no other.

Time moves the chariot
up Pennsylvania Avenue.
Get your dreams on board,
children well strapped, save

room for seedlings in pots,
germs, a fish tank; ‘though
this is no ark, here hope
will take root or expire.

Indran Amirthanayagam c) 2009

FOURTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE TSUNAMI

2008-12-27T19:49:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the tsunami? Where were you that day?
Did you run from the wave? Did you run from your television?

Every morning brings a new reason to move ahead, to stuff memories further into the back of the drawer.

So why did I compose The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems?

I wrote the book because I had run out of options. The wave brought my island home to me on the television screen. I had to meet my Maker, the one who assigned me some talent in making metaphors.

It was time to exercise the fingers of my heart, to write poems.

ON JOSÉ GARCIA VILLA

2008-12-16T15:19:00.000-08:00

ON JOSÉ GARCIA VILLA

Discovering Jose Garcia Villa’s poetry, thanks to a new collection, introduced by Luis Francia , has been one of my most exceeding joys in recent weeks. Garcia Villa is a poet who exceeds, playing with grammatical preconceptions, forcing us to see, hear and dance the word by itself, and then beside, the next performer in the sentence.

45

A, bee,flying,to, the,end,of,the,world,
To,find,one,flower,wherein,to,lie,curled,

Is,a,fiction,is,a,lie,
That,will,keep,God,in,the,sky.

This is one of more than 50 aphorisms in the suite Aphorisms I,. I am taken to Mondrian and Broadway, Boogie Woogie, to the intense blue color cut-outs of the late Matisse. I think of New York, city of the future, spiraling skyscrapers of glass, to dreamscapes of social light-splashed optimism, not the dark metropolis of Fritz Lang at all.

47

Throwing, diamonds, to,peacocks,
Is,a,philosopher’s,prodigality.

6

A,genius,is,he
That,can,make,
Portable,pyramids

Some background : I have perused Doveglion : Collected Poems for several weeks. I steal five minutes a day to read a poem. I read it furtively. Who is this Philipino modernist, Francisco O’Hara travelling rhetorical streets armed with commas, periods and a gift for word music ? Why does he spin connundrums in the Village ?

I knew Luis had studied with him. But I was too young then to understand the gift that Garcia Villa had bequeathed my friend. I know how to name that gift now. I see it in Luis’ poetry as well.

How shall I call it ? Build maizes with words to ensure that ideas and metaphors get a good workout on the way to the center of the garden where damsels wait,
where aproned chefs serve a plentiful feast of sticky rice and roasted pig.
Delight, complicate and celebrate the gurgling at the heart of the brook, that cascades down the page.

One can’t tell a poem, like a story, from beginning to end. Yet, one can, silly maker of precepts. One can turn the story around as well. We have seen the horror, my friends. We live in the post-post-post epoch. Yet, we fall in love as if love has not taken a bow before and we play with words as if they are the first meteorites crashing into our earth.

I feel first love and heaven-gazing wonder reading Jose Garcia Villa. Although I do not know how often he ate plaintain leaves and sticky rice in the Village in the mid 20th century, I am confident his poems will be read with coffee or tea after any course in any country where English poetry is the currency.

READING AND WRITING

2008-12-13T07:22:00.001-08:00

I have not updated this blog at a fevered rate in recent weeks--distracted by other pursuits. However, I will return from time to time with new material. I am reading at least three or four books that will be commented on here in the upcoming weeks and months.

For those of you who have linked your blogs to mine, thanks. I have encountered a problem with Blogger in adding yours. If any of you can guide me about what I can do please let me know

I will be back in touch soon.

Indran

A DEBT (R.S. Thomas)

2008-11-21T05:29:00.000-08:00

A DEBT (R.S. THOMAS) November 17

R.S.Thomas (1913-2000) wrote lyrics that seared the imagination as if his readers were cattle and required a harsh accounting, an indelible mark. As I read him today, on my birthday, I think too of that other Thomas of my first loves in poetry, the one who wrote about his thirtieth year to heaven. My meter has been more finely shaped, however, by R.S. than by his better known and fellow Welshman Dylan (1914-1953). I miss them both tonight, of course. And like all children I want my loves together, to swaddle me and put me to bed.

Here are a couple of RS Thomas poems

JANUARY

The fox drags its wounded belly
Over the snow, the crimson seeds
Of blood burst with a mild explosion,
Soft as excrement, bold as roses.

Over the snow that feels no pity,
Whose white hands can give no healing,
The fox drags its wounded belly.

THE GAP IN THE HEDGE

That man, Prytherch, with the torn cap,
I saw him often, framed in the gap
Between two hazels with his sharp eyes,
Bright as thorns, watching the sunrise
Filling the valley with its pale yellow
Light, where the sheep and the lambs went haloed
With grey mist lifting from the dew.
Or was it a likeness that the twigs drew
With bold penciling upon that bare
Piece of sky? For he’s still there
At early morning, when the light is right
And I look up suddenly at a bird’s flight.

Sobre Ernesto Cardenal

2008-10-11T20:25:00.000-07:00

SOBRE CARDENAL

de Indran Amirthanayagam, derechos reservados Mayo 2007

Hace tiempo una mañana de domingo neyorquino, un amigo inglés queridísimo se esperaba un taxi en Broadway. Era el 23 de mayo, en las faldas del verano, todavía con la promesa de primavera en el aire. Mi amigo iba al aeropuerto para volar a Managua. Hace unos días atrás habíamos formado parte de la promoción de la Escuela de Periodismo de Columbia University. En ese entonces el movimiento para sacar inversiones de Sudáfrica fue el tema principal de la política estudiantil. Un edificio en la universidad había sido bloqueado por varios meses y renombrado “Harmony Hall” (El edificio de armonía). Cuando caminé para aceptar mi diploma de maestría me levanté el puño en una salutación de apoyo para el movimiento contra las grandes empresas involucradas en la economía de apartheid.

Ese mañana me levanté la mano para despedirme de mi amigo. No sabía que planes tenía en Nicaragua, en ese entonces en pleno conflicto entre los Sandinistas y los Contras. Temía que podría sufrir una herida o podría desaparecer. Fue una despedida difícil, entre hombres con todo su carga inglesa de mantener el decoro, de enterrar las emociones. Unos días después, empecé a escribir un poema pensando en mi amigo ya en Nicaragua. El poema se titula “Homenaje a Managua.” Y ahí, le hice varias preguntas, entre ellas, hay todavía un España y una guerra civil? Y te has conocido a Cardenal?

En esos años la revolución sandinista inspiraba a muchos extranjeros de visitar al país, de trabajar en el campo, formar ONGs dedicadas a la enseñanza, la salud. Mi pregunta era irónica, socrática y lleno del ennui que todos los jóvenes que aspiran a ser intelectuales sufren durante sus estudios universitarios. O tal vez, es un ennui particular al sigo 20 y a este siglo 21, que siempre las promesas, las esperanzas son los blancos de la crudeza de la realidad, su venalidad, su mano corrompida.

En ese mayo, habían pasado también solo dos años desde las manifestaciones del verano de 83 en Sri Lanka, los ataques dirigidos a las casas, negocios, templos y las personas de los tamiles esrilankeses. A raíz de ese verano que dejó la isla ensangrentada se desató una plena guerra civil que desafortunadamente sigue hasta hoy deprimiendo los esrilankeses y los que aman el país. Y Sri Lanka aparece en ese poema donde hago referencias a ciertas guerras justas—si hay—las de Sri Lanka y de Palestina.

Claro, para mi en ese entonces, Cardenal representaba una figura mítica, un poeta sacerdote, discípulo de Thomas Merton, vuelto sacerdote ya adulto como Merton. No podría haber imaginado que algún día me conociera ese leyenda, y en español, mi nuevo idioma de la creación poética. Bueno, ya esta, puedo ahora beber la presencia de Cardenal, tomarla, comerla como una hostia metafórica. Es un poeta que nunca me deja de sorprender por su compromiso con la verdad: la verdad de Marilyn Monroe, de Claudia, su enamorada de los epigramas, mi verdad aunque no me había conocido en persona hasta este encuentro.

Digo por este último que Cardenal inspira poetas y otros luchadores para el derecho de hablar en la fundación de la comunión en la tierra, la entrega intima del amor y del conocimiento del Todopoderoso, el Dios, al feligres/lector por medio del sacerdote, el poeta. Escuchemos a

Detrás del Monasterio

Detrás del monasterio, junto al camino,
existe un cementerio de cosas gastadas,
en donde yacen el hierro sarroso, pedazos
de loza, tubos quebrados, alambres retorcidos,
cajetillas de cigarrillo vacias, aserrín
y zinc, plástico envejecido, llantas rotas,
esperando como nosotros la resurrección.

A la primera lectura este poema parece limpio, entrega su carga de golpe, que no sea necesario la relectura. Y para algunos lectores impacientes o llenos de demandas podrían tomar provecho y seguir en su camino apurado. Sin embargo un lector con más tiempo disponible lo degustaría con revelaciones mas profundas. En fin los grandes poetas hablan de temas esenciales: el amor en todos sus sentidos, la guerra, el descanso en la ribera del río antes de cruzarlo. A donde? A Lethe, o al Cielo, o sea, el río es el Río Bravo y al otro lado está el desierto de Texas. O sea, cruces las aguas y te vas a encontrar tu tema.

En el caso de Cardenal, no puedo separar el hombre que se viste de sacerdote, el antiguo ministro de cultura, el fundador de Soltiname, y el poeta. Una figura parecida en la India seria Rabindranath Tagore de cuya obra vasta se nota su fundación de una escuela y una manera de enseñar, refugios en la tierra como Soltiname. Cardenal es fundamental al paisaje nicaragüense como Tagore a la subconciencia hindú. Los dos interpretan las raíces y las historias de sus pueblos y luchan para los menos afortunados.

Entonces ¿cuáles son las revelaciones de “Detrás del Monasterio”? Las ideas se ven en las cosas. Uno encuentra las cosas gastadas en un cementerio al lado del camino y detrás del monasterio. Todos construimos nuestros caminos y para hacerlos hay que sacar arena, piedras, y a veces, destruir campos agrícolas, la calle principal de un pueblo para lograr la meta, el camino—que podría llevar a uno hacia Itaca o Valhalla. ¿Pero toda la basura que uno ha acumulado en la vida—es solo eso, o también tiene vida, sentimientos, que a su vez está esperando la resurrección?

Cardenal es maestro del epigrama, la verdad dicha de manera económica, lo esencial sin toda la narrativa de la vida. De hecho este poema es un epigrama muy detallado. Sin embargo cada detalle añade un elemento imprescindible a esta visión—que me hace pensar también en las cosas gastadas flotando en ‘Frisco Bay del “Sunflower Sutra” donde Allen Ginsberg experimenta una visión de Blake y su girasol en las aguas negras—y hay, por cierto, una influencia de la poesía de Ginsberg en la conciencia de Cardenal. Ginsberg celebró lo que llamaba “crazy wisdom” o sabiduría loca. Pero siempre fue un poeta engagé que veia el papel de vate de manera muy tradicional, interprete de la verdad para todos lo demás. En la época mas conocida de Ginsberg, Cardenal, Bob Dylan, Merton, entre los cincuentas y sesentas, había grandes entrecruzadas….ahí se encuentra la guerra en Vietnam, la campaña anti-nuclear, los principios del movimiento ecologista…también la droga, el amor libre….y claro el espacio, el primer viaje del hombre a la luna.

Para un sacerdote encargado de llevar su rebaño al paraíso Cardenal ha dedicado bastante energía a su estancia de paso. Y es una energía de compasión, de cuidar lo frágil, de envolverlo en un manto de cariño. Su “Oración Por Marilyn Monroe” sirve como ejemplo amplio de esta compasión que forma el núcleo de la visión política, social y espiritual del poeta (que es además una manifestación de lo mismo en la vida de Jesús con Maria Magdalena, con los usureros del templo, con los guardianes de las reglas, los sacerdotes mayores entre los judíos.) Es un poema completo que empleo para representar la gama de exploraciones poéticas (y psíquicas) que ha hecho en diversos poemas a lo largo de su carrera.
`
SEÑOR
Recibe a esta muchacha conocida en toda la tierra con
el nombre de
Marilyn Monroe
aunque ese no era su verdadero nombre
(pero Tú conoces su verdadero nombre, el de la huerfanita
violada a
los 9 años
y la empleadita de tienda que a los 16 se había querido
matar)
y que ahora se presenta ante Ti sin ningún maquillaje
sin su Agente de Prensa
sin fotógrafos y sin firmar autógrafos
sola como una astronauta frente a la noche espacial.

Ella soñó cuando niña que estaba desnuda en una iglesia
(según cuenta el Time)
ante una multitud postrada, con las cabezas en el suelo
y tenía que caminar en puntillas para no pisar las cabezas.
Tú conoces nuestros sueños mejor que los psiquiatras.
Iglesia, casa, cueva, son la seguridad del seno materno
pero también algo más que eso…
Las cabezas son los admiradores, es claro
(la masa de cabezas en la oscuridad bajo el chorro de luz),
Pero el templo no son los estudios de la 20th Century-Fox.
El templo—de mármol y oro—es el templo de su cuerpo
en el que está el Hijo del Hombre con un látigo en la mano
expulsando a los mercaderes de la 20th Century-Fox
que hicieron de Tu casa de oración una cueva de ladrones.

Señor
en este mundo contaminado de pecados y radioactividad
Tú no culparás tan sólo a una empleadita de tienda.
Que como toda empleadita de tienda soñó ser estrella de
Cine.
Y su sueño fue realidad (pero como en la realidad del
tecnicolor).
Ella no hizo sino actuar según el script que le dimos
--El de nuestras propias vidas—Y era un script absurdo.
Perdónala Señor y perdónanos a nosotros
por nuestra 20th Century
por esta Colosal Super-Producción en la que todos hemos
trabajado.
Ella tenia hambre de amor y le ofrecimos tranquilizantes.
Para la tristeza de no ser santos
se le recomendó el Psicoanálisis.
Recuerda Señor su creciente pavor a la cámara
y el odio al maquillaje—insistiendo en maquillarse en
cada escena—
y cómo se fue haciendo mayor el horror
y mayor la impuntualidad a los estudios.

Como toda empleadita de tienda
soño ser estrella de cine.
Y su vida fue irreal como un sueño que un psiquiatra
interpreta y archiva

Sus romances fueron un beso con los ojos cerrados
que cuando se abren los ojos
se descubre que fue bajo reflectores
y apagan los reflectores!
y desmontan las dos paredes del aposento (era un set
cinematográfico)
mientras el Director se aleja con su libreta
porque la escena ya fue tomada.
O como un viaje en yate, un beso en Singapur, un baile
en Río,
la recepción en la mansión del Duque y la Duquesa de
Windsor
vistos en la salita del apartamento miserable.

La película terminó sin el beso final.
La hallaron muerta en su cama con la mano en el teléfono.
Y los detectives no supieron a quién iba a llamar.
Fue
como alguien que ha marcado el número de la única voz
amiga
y oye tan sólo la voz de un disco que le dice: WRONG
NUMBER.
O como alguien que herido por los gangsters
alarga la mano a un teléfono desconectado.

Señor
quienquiera que haya sido el que ella iba a llamar
y no llamó (y tal vez no era nadie
o era Alguien cuyo número no está en el Directorio de
Los Angeles)
contesta Tú el teléfono!

Desde la primera estrofa estamos conciente que leemos un poema imprescindible, que va a enseñarnos cómo responder a la tragedia y la comedia de la vida y la muerte de Marilyn que es igual al la de nuestras vidas y muertes en esta planeta donde el poeta William Blake nos escribió una vez “pisamos la tierra por un breve paso para aprender cómo soportar los rayos de la luz…we are on earth a little space to learn to bear the beams of love. “

Dice Cardenal que el verdadero nombre de Marilyn era ”el de la huerfanita/violada a los 9 años.” De inmediato, el cuchillo entra al corazón. No podemos escapar sentirnos triste, la empatía con esta niña cuya inocencia se ha sido robado tan joven. ¿Y quienes somos para enjuiciar la pobre empleadita de tienda por el sueño de ser actriz? El primer mensaje del poema entonces cuestiona nuestro papel en la tragedia de Marilyn, uno de nosotros como cualquiera. ¿Cómo podemos dejar que el violador anda husmeando nuestros hijos? ¿No tenemos responsabilidad alguna por la mala suerte? ¿Es meramente una cuestión de suerte, o de leyes y su puesta en acción, o de establecer una sociedad, un reino en la tierra, donde somos verdaderamente guardianes de nuestros prójimos?

Ahora Marilyn se presenta sin maquillaje ni representación ante el Dios “sola como una astronauta frente a la noche espacial.” Cardenal en los poemas de Cántico Cósmico deja libre su imaginación a viajar por las estrellas con el lenguaje científico además de otros lenguajes reunidos con la métrica de una poesía lírica, cantada. Aquí prefigura ese libro con esta muestra de su asombro ante el universo.

El asombro ante la grandeza de la obra de Dios, además de los pecados de los hombres, me parece una imagen útil para expresar la actitud de Cardenal. Y viene frecuentemente con un tinte de ironía y del escepticismo estoico. Ve como describe Cardenal el gran pecador Somoza en “Ha Venido La Primavera” “el dictador/gordo, con su traje sport y su sombrero tejano,/en el lujoso yate por los paisajes de tus sueños.” También el asombro se presenta con tonos heroicos en la oración por Marilyn (y nosotros) y en otros poemas como Hora 0. Cito la parte de “Hora 0” que trata de la muerte de su amigo Adolfo Baez Bone:

En abril los mataron.
Yo estuve con ellos en la rebelión de abril
Y aprendí a manejar una ametralladora Rising.
Y Adolfo Báez Bone era mi amigo:
lo persiguieron con aviones, con camiones,
con reflectores, con bombas lacrimógenas,
con radios, con perros, con guardias;
y yo recuerdo las nubes rojas sobre la Casa Presidencial
como algodones ensangrentados,
y la luna roja sobre la Casa Presidencial.
La radio clandestina decía que vivía.
El pueblo no creía que había muerto.
(Y no ha muerto)

Porque a veces nace un hombre en una tierra
que es esa tierra.
Y la tierra en que es enterrado ese hombre
es ese hombre.
Y los hombres que después nacen de esa tierra
son ese hombre.
Y Adolfo Báez Bone era ese hombre.

“Si a mí me pusieran a escoger mi destino
(me había dicho Báez Bone tres días antes)
entre morir asesinado como Sandino
o ser Presidente como el asesino de Sandino
yo escogería el destino de Sandino.”
Y él escogió su destino.
La gloria no es la que enseñan los textos de historia:
es una zopilotera en un campo y un gran hedor.

Vuelvo ahora a otra muerte, bajo otros reflectores, los del cine. ¿Es la muerte de Marilyn más apetecible que esta gloria de Báez Bone bajo el aleteo de los zopilotes, un cadáver con un gran hedor?

¿Es mas heroica?: “ella tenia hambre de amor y le ofrecimos tranquilizantes.” Cardenal es severo con las alabanzas de los textos de historia en el caso de Báez Bone—y por implicación los que escriben las historias-- y igualmente critico de nuestra complicidad en la muerte de Marilyn. ‘Ella no hizo sino actuar según el script que le dimos. ‘

¿Cómo podemos cambiar ese script? Con la mancha de Cain, el pecado original, los siete
excesos, digo la lujuria y los demás, con toda este peso del hombre caído que llevamos—y hablo solamente de la carga católica y tal vez en otras religiones hay menos condena genética—¿cómo podemos contestar el teléfono cuando Marilyn nos llama?

Cardenal pide a Dios que le contesta. ¿Y a Dios que le importa la suerte de una empleadita de tienda que soñó ser actriz? ¿O el cadáver de Báez Bone comido por los zopilotes? Estas últimas son mis preguntas. Surgen de una lectura parcial, como todas las lecturas, de la poesía de Cardenal. Pero esto no es toda la historia. Hay una razón por la cual Cardenal tomó su derecho de sitio en ese poema que escribí hace 22 años, que Adolfo Báez Bone forma parte de la tierra misma de Nicaragua, que Marilyn sigue alimentando los sueños de los seres humanos ( ahora sabios después de haber leído “Oración Por Marilyn Monroe,”), que detrás del monasterio hay cosas gastadas que también requieren la resurrección, que “el hombre que no sigue las consignas del Partido…será como un árbol plantado junto a una fuente.” (Salmo 1)

Y esa razón se llama Ernesto Cardenal—el que trae el fuego y amor a la tierra, el que nos da la hostia de su visión cósmica y entretenida, el que escribió una vez esta maravillosa epigrama sobre la comedia del amor y la política:

Me contaron que estabas enamorada de otro
y entonces me fui a mi cuarto
y escribí ese artículo contra el Gobierno
por el que estoy preso.

Me pregunto si Dios lo tiene preso o más bien sin la tensión terrenal que viene de ser atado a Dios no hubiera escrito la obra maestra que nos ocupa el día de hoy y todos los días. En fin, Cardenal es hombre y sacerdote, poeta y profesor. Y se viste con sombrero, no tejano, pero con la boina de Che. Y tampoco esto es Cardenal porque enfrente de mi espejo no es la boina ni la barba ni el revolucionario, lo que me queda, lo que me consuelan son sus oraciones por mi, su papel en perdonar el pecado de haber dejado morir a mi prójimo.

El autor da permiso a citas breves de este ensayo. Favor de enviar cualquier cita, referencia a la siguiente dirección de Internet indranmx@yahoo.com

About Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said

2008-10-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

I met Edward Said once in New York about 1988, and he was dressed splendidly in a mackintosh that rainy night , smart and engaging about the heart, exile, the Palestinian parliament, New York. I used to be rather shy and mumbled before the great readers of the world, my father, Said. They were close friends through reading (my father championed Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism) although I don't know if they ever met. I remember giving Said my poems about my particular vanished culture, identity, island.

I discovered Darwish in an early poem about an identity card, a powerful subject addressed by writers throughout our planet. I remember Jean-Marie Adiaffi's novel, Carte d'Identite, just one among many reflections on the conversation between the free and caged man and the State.

Stateless now, flying in the air between Earth and Olympus, where does the soul of Mahmoud Darwish find a home?

On October 5th poets throughout the planet gathered to read Darwish's poems. He died like Yeats on a day one did not quite expect, on August 9th, 2008.

Here is Darwish writing about the basic matter of his poetry: home, exile, friendship. He wrote this poem to bid Edward Said farewell. I cite it here to say goodbye as well to Mahmoud Darwish.
Thank you Mona Anis for your beautiful translation.

New York/ November/ Fifth Avenue

The sun a plate of shredded metal
I asked myself,
estranged in the
shadow: Is it Babel or Sodom?

***
There, on the doorstep of an electric abyss,
high as the sky, I met Edward,
thirty years ago,time was less wild then...
We both said:
If the past is only an experience,
make of the future a meaning and a vision.
Let us go,Let us go into tomorrow trusting
the candor of imagination and the miracle of grass/

***

I don't recall going together to the cinema
in the evening. Still I heard Ancient
Indians calling: Trust
neither horse, nor modernity

***

No. Victims do not ask their executioner:
Am I you? Had my sword been
bigger than my rose, would you
have asked
if I would have acted like you?

***

A question like that entices the curiosity
of a novelist,
sitting in a glass office, overlooking
lilies in the garden, where
the hand
of a hypothesis is as clear as
the conscience
of a novelist set to settle accounts
with
human instinct... There is no tomorrow
in yesterday, so let us advance/

***

Advancing could be a bridge
leading back
to Barbarism.../

***

New York. Edward wakes up to
a lazy dawn. He plays
Mozart.
Runs round the university's tennis
court.
Thinks of the journey of ideas across
borders,and over barriers. He reads the New York Times.
Writes out his furious comments. Curses an Orientalist
guiding the General to the weak point
inside the heart of an Oriental woman. He showers. Chooses
his elegant suit. Drinks
his white coffee. Shouts at the dawn:
Do not loiter.

***

On wind he walks, and in wind
he knows himself. There is no ceiling for the wind,
no home for the wind. Wind is the compass
of the stranger's North.
He says: I am from there, I am from here,
but I am neither there nor here.
I have two names which meet and part...
I have two languages, but I have long forgotten
which is the language of my dreams.
I have an English language, for writing,
with yielding phrases,
and a language in which Heaven and
Jerusalem converse, with a silver cadence,
but it does not yield to my imagination.

***

What about identity? I asked.
He said: It's self-defence...
Identity is the child of birth, but
at the end, it's self-invention, and not
an inheritance of the past. I am multiple...
Within me an ever new exterior. And
I belong to the question of the victim. Were I not
from there, I would have trained my heart
to nurture there deers of metaphor...
So carry your homeland wherever you go, and be
a narcissist if need be/
The outside world is exile,
exile is the world inside.
And what are you between the two?

***

Myself, I do not know
so that I shall not lose it. I am what I am.
I am my other, a duality
gaining resonance in between speech and gesture.
Were I to write poetry I would have said:
I am two in one,
like the wings of a swallow ,
content with bringing good omen
when spring is late.

***

He loves a country and he leaves.
[Is the impossible far off?]
He loves leaving to things unknown.
By traveling freely across cultures
those in search of the human essence
may find a space for all to sit...
Here a margin advances. Or a centre
retreats. Where East is not strictly east,
and West is not strictly west,
where identity is open onto plurality,
not a fort or a trench/

***

Metonymy was sleeping on the river's bank;
had it not been for the pollution
it could have embraced the other bank.

***

- Have you written any novels?
I tried... I tried to retrieve
my image from mirrors of distant women.
But they scampered off into their guarded night.
Saying: Our world is independent of any text.
A man cannot write a woman who is both enigma and dream.
A woman cannot write a man who is both symbol and star.
There are no two loves alike. No two nights
alike. So let us enumerate men's qualities
and laugh.
- And what did you do?
I laughed at my nonsense
and threw the novel
into the wastepaper basket/

***

The intellectual harnesses what the novelist can tell
and the philosopher interprets the bard's roses/

***

He loves a country and he leaves:
I am what I am and shall be.
I shall choose my place by myself,
and choose my exile. My exile, the backdrop
to an epic scene. I defend
the poet's need for memories and tomorrow,
I defend country and exile in tree-clad birds,
and a moon, generous enough
to allow the writing of a love poem;
I defend an idea shattered by the frailty
of its partisans
and defend a country hijacked by myths/

***

- Will you be able to return to anything?
My ahead pulls what's behind and hastens...
There is no time left in my watch for me to scribble lines
on the sand. I can, however, visit yesterday
as strangers do when they listen
on a sad evening to a Pastorale:
"A girl by the spring filling her jar"
With clouds' tears,
"Weeping and laughing as a bee
"Stings her heart...
"Is it love that makes the water ache
"Or some sickness in the mist..."
[until the end of the song].

***

- So, nostalgia can hit you?
Nostalgia for a higher, more distant tomorrow,
far more distant. My dream leads my steps.
And my vision places my dream
on my knees
like a pet cat. It's the imaginary
real,
the child of will: We can
change the inevitability of the abyss.

***

- And nostalgia for yesterday?
A sentiment not fit for an intellectual, unless
it is used to spell out the stranger's fervour
for that which negates him.
My nostalgia is a struggle
over a present which has tomorrow
by the balls.

***

- Did you not sneak into yesterday when
you went to that house, your house
in Talbiya, in Jerusalem?
I prepared myself to sleep
in my mother's bed, like a child
who's scared of his father. I tried
to recall my birth, and
to watch the Milky Way from the roof of my old
house. I tried to stroke the skin
of absence and the smell of summer
in the garden's jasmine. But the hyena that is truth
drove me away from a thief-like
nostalgia.
- Were you afraid? What frightened you?ï
I could not meet loss face
to face. I stood by the door like a beggar.
How could I ask permission from strangers sleeping
in my own bed... Ask them if I could visit myself
for five minutes? Should I bow in respect
to the residents of my childish dream? Would they ask:
Who is that prying foreign visitor? And how
could I talk about war and peace
among the victims and the victims' victims,
without additions, without an interjection?
And would they tell me: There is no place for two dreams
in one bedroom?

***

It is neither me nor him
who asks; it is a reader asking:
What can poetry say in a time of catastrophe?

***

Blood
and blood,
blood
in your country,
in my name and in yours, in
the almond flower, in the banana skin,
in the baby's milk, in light and shadow,
in the grain of wheat, in salt/

***

Adept snipers, hitting their target
with maximum proficiency.
Blood
and blood
and blood.
This land is smaller than the blood of its children
standing on the threshold of doomsday like
sacrificial offerings. Is this land truly
blessed, or is it baptised
in blood
and blood
and blood
which neither prayer, nor sand can dry.
There is not enough justice in the Sacred Book
to make martyrs rejoice in their freedom
to walk on cloud. Blood in daylight,
blood in darkness. Blood in speech.

***

He says: The poem could host
loss, a thread of light shining
at the heart of a guitar; or a Christ
on a horse pierced through with beautiful metaphors. For
the aesthetic is but the presence of the real
in form/
In a world without a sky, the earth
becomes an abyss. The poem,
a consolation, an attribute
of the wind, southern or northern.
Do not describe what the camera can see
of your wounds. And scream that you may hear yourself,
and scream that you may know you're still alive,
and alive, and that life on this earth is
possible. Invent a hope for speech,
invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope.
And sing, for the aesthetic is freedom/

***

I say: The life which cannot be defined
except by death is not a life.

***

He says: We shall live.
So let us be masters of words which
make their readers immortal -- as your friend
Ritsos said.

***

He also said: If I die before you,
my will is the impossible.
I asked: Is the impossible far off?
He said: A generation away.
I asked: And if I die before you?
He said: I shall pay my condolences to Mount Galilee,
and write, "The aesthetic is to reach
poise." And now, don't forget:
If I die before you, my will is the impossible.

***

When I last visited him in New Sodom,
in the year Two Thousand and Two, he was battling off
the war of Sodom on the people of Babel...
and cancer. He was like the last epic hero
defending the right of Troy
to share the narrative.

***

An eagle soaring higher and higher
bidding farewell to his height,
for dwelling on Olympus
and over heights
is tiresome.

***

Farewell,
farewell poetry of pain.

Translated by Mona Anis

READING POEMS ALOUD,...on SEPTEMBER 25th

2008-09-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

READING POEMS ALOUD

I went to hear poetry the other night in Vancouver and the Muse slammed her fist in my face.
Instead of warbling or shower stall arias I heard the cold, precise clink of scientific observation. I listened to prose presented as a form of poetry, lines about businesses and dreams that have disappeared from the sidewalk.

Every utterance belongs to the great, complex symphony I can hear the initiated say. What is wrong with prose smacking against the ear with a dull drip drip?

The matter with drip, drip, drip is that the sound may drive the poor reader mad, move him to storm into the bathtub and yank the tap off its hinges…and without the tap how can future generations drink the original waters that feed our imaginations, that help us bathe in brooks that babble, in tickling streams, in the raging sea?

If you are to be in Vancouver on September 25th come to Simon Fraser University’s library at their Burnaby campus, to the 7th Floor where the Special Collections are housed, where my friend Tony Power directs a marvelous selection of American and Canadian poetry from the Beats onwards. At 12.30 p.m. I will read there with the California and Vancouver master George Stanley who just published Vancouver: A Poem.

AFLAME: Remembering Black July, 1983

2008-09-03T06:24:00.000-07:00

AFLAME

-- remembering Black July, 1983

What is a poem
to a man hiding
in the cellar
of his neighbor’s house,

breathing the way
his hostess spices
lentils and mutton,
while son and daughter

keep quiet,
not one word
allowed
in the mother tongue,

and wife strokes
her neck,
the golden wings
of her thali,

and across the lane
a mob, ruffians,
tontons macoutes,
lynch squad, a few

holy men, politicians
in white vershtis,
light rage
and sew pestilence

in summer fires
that turn houses
to foundation stones
and stoke residents

out to shelter
at neighbors,
St. Peter’s College,
the police station

near Bambalapitya Flats,
before three days
voyage on a ship
hungry to Kankesanthurai

where soldiers
have been swinging
cricket bats
and teenage boys

have stopped
playing cricket,
disappeared,
coerced

into resistance:
this war, these
flames burning
every day since,

and even before,
50 years ago,
1958, when mobs
first enforced

what was deemed
the people’s will.
by unleashing
latent and dark

social energies,
microbes that murder,
that insist on power
as well as alms,

that circulate
in the body politic
and can only
be diffused,

diverted,
distracted, educated,
burned
out of existence

so Ceylon
may take a bow,
step out
of retirement,

save the side
with sixes,
and at the
victory party

speak of boar
and partridge,
gotukola and
other medicinal

greens, traits
of the veddah,
and how
good neighbors

gave food
gave shelter
denied
the goondas?

-- Indran Amirthanayagam, July 16, 2008

UN POEMA Y UNA MANGOSTA

2008-08-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

ODA A LA MANGOSTA

En Abidjan
un hombre
me trajo
una mangosta
a casa.

Quise
comprar
el roedor,
guardarlo
como mascota.

Mi esposa
me negó,
le negó
a la mangosta.

Ahora
me quedo
sin esposa
y sin
mangosta.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam, dr) 2008

Where Is Your Village?

2008-08-07T19:16:00.000-07:00

WHERE IS YOUR VILLAGE?

The blog acquires new readers yet the blogger has gone to bed. Days pass, then weeks. August. Doldrums. Dog days. Much needed rest. How much rest? Time to take the temperature, play with the children, put them to bed, read about the caterpillar waking up and the elephant who flew to the stars. The blogger will not lie down. His hero, the writer from Miraflores, writes his column every Sunday after a week spent on his latest novel. I come from Colombo, parents from Jaffna, grandparents from Alavetti and Atchuvelli.

I watch the globe and I see an island. The island burns. The island calls with treacle and curd while the bull lashes me with its tail. I wear a sarong, a vershti. I wear sandals made from cow hide. I wake up on a rock where a leopard once swung its head before pouncing on my trembling bones.

I shake my bones. I shake my bones. I shake my bones.

"I am going home. You can come if you want," my grandfather cried, in a white sarong, spectacles heavy on the nose, body thin after a stroke, lucid for a few minutes, at the top of the lane, Rosmead Place, a day's journey by car from home.

I will not rest until the island can go off to sleep. I want to get back to bed, to dream of early morning bathers in a tank built in some ancient century where disputes were resolved astride elephants or under a palaver tree.

The duel may offer a neat solution. A fight among the leadership. With rubber bullets. Queen of Marquesberry's rules.

Alavetti, Atchuvelli, villages on a map, pockmarked with shrapnel, excavated by bombs. Jaffna, once a fort, a city resilient still, will continue its daily labor of searching for food, a battery, on a bicycle.

SUR WALDO ROJAS, POETE CHILIEN A PARIS

2008-07-16T01:19:00.000-07:00

SUR WALDO ROJAS, POETE CHILIEN A PARIS.

Ma découverte inespérée de la poésie de Waldo Rojas ne manque pas d’un certain trait romantique: ce poète chilien écrit ses poèmes à Paris, la Ville Lumière, loin de son pays à la géographie enchanteresse, prolongeant ainsi une véritable tradition cosmopolite de la poésie chilienne. Je pense à Vicente Huidobro qui est allé jusqu’à choisir la langue française pour quelques uns de ces recueils; ou à mon ambassadeur Pablo Neruda, en France, à qui il arrivait de composer des poèmes dans un taxi profitant des arrêts devants les feux rouges, pendant qu’il se déplaçait dans les rues de Paris en route vers des réunions diplomatiques. Souffrant grièvement d’un cancer, Neruda est retourné au Chili en 1972, un an avant les événements du 11 septembre, une date connue de tous qui marque une rupture entre le passé et le présent, ouvrant un gouffre où une partie de citoyens chiliens a disparue sous la terre ou s’est éclipsée dans l’exil.

Rojas a pu choisir ce dernier. Il était —il est toujours— membre d’un groupe de poètes dont l’œuvre atteignit sa maturité pendant les années soixante ; un groupe qui a su assimiler en profondeur les traditions poétiques chiliennes et a voulu y incorporer son propre imaginaire poétique au coeur d’une époque sur laquelle soufflaient des vents puissants de liberté et de rénovation politique et intellectuelle, touchant aussi les différentes sphères de la vie quotidienne. Il s’est vu confronté soudain à la urgence de partir en exil, de quitter son pays comme qui saute d’un train en marche, un pays qui dorénavant devait continuer à exploiter ses ressources minérales et ses autres richesses naturelles, mais dans un climat politique devenu étrange et hostile, alors qu’une grande part de ses créateurs et artistes se voyaient forcés de l’abandonner pour vivre loin, survivre et renaître ailleurs.

Je ne peux m’empêcher de céder ici à la tentation de citer Rimbaud : « la vie est ailleurs », car dans le cas de Rojas cet ailleurs est dans la langue, dans son labeur incessant sur le langage, pour y faire pousser, à l’aide des mots, les germes qu’il a transportés dans son cœur, qu’il a fait fructifier dans le terroir de sa mémoire et récoltés enfin pour créer les images de sa poésie.
Les poèmes que je reproduis dans ces pages sont des traductions en langue française à partir de l’original espagnol, mais certaines d’entre elles ont été faites par le poète en concertation étroite avec d’autres écrivains et amis. Je reconnais là-dedans des échos des traditions nord-américaines et anglaises, surtout Pound et son imagisme, ses « apparitions de visages dans la foule », autant que des courants surréalistes français et belge —« Ceci n’est pas une pipe »— « la seule chose réelle c’était les mouches ».

J’aime à croire que dans la poésie tout comme dans l’univers de l’amour, la sensibilité cherche des équivalents, et je découvre chez Rojas une image telle que « les hémisphères de pulpe fraîche du fruit divisé », qui me semble éloquente en ce sens. Ces poèmes parcourent ces grands chemins où soufflent des vents venus de toutes parts et qui mènent à « cette rue qu’habite —exilé— cet étranger qui à certaines heures vient à notre rencontre dans un miroir.»

La poésie de Waldo Rojas ne tourne pourtant pas le dos à la Nature : « Elle berce les décombres / et le figuier renaît tenace / dans la vertical d’un arc éventré. / Il profane la pierre / Il dédaigne l’abîme ».

Mouches

Nous vivions l’après-midi d’un dimanche écrasant.
C’était l’Été dans l’hémisphère que nous foulions, selon l’ordre
des astres.
Empêtrés dans l’oisiveté, avachis, nous déambulions de chaise en chaise.
C’était l’Été, l’après-midi, et le reste du décor les mouches
le dressaient.
Il y avait un Univers épars dans la pièce:
bouteilles vides,
feuilles de journal, un plumeau impuissant rendu à la poussière,
et de tous côtés l’air brûlant bâillait jusqu’à la plainte.
“Il n’y a pire poème que celui qui ne s’écrit pas”, me dis-je
à cris muets,
et la seule réalité, la seule consistance, c’était les mouches.
Beaucoup de mouches, mouches balourdes tombant sur nous
en vagues d’assaut successives.
De tous côtés l’air brûlait et nous avions des bras de trop,
des jambes de trop et tout le corps était un luxe inutile,
article somptuaire acquis à main forcée
par l’habile boniment d’un habile camelot.
Saltimbanques de l’air, trapézistes, miettes d’un grand démon pulvérisé,
Ces tendres, sales mouches, idoles minuscules du dégoût universel.

Nous n’avions pas survécu à notre fable féroce:
jeunes mariés fondus sur le sol, pure mélasse,
à la merci d’un jour d’été, à la merci de la stratégie
des mouches.
Et c’était dimanche comme cent fois encore ce fut dimanche l’été
depuis ce jour-là
et depuis chaque jour où le soleil incendiait l’air
et qu’aux fenêtres tambourinait un bourdonnement et croissait une inquiétude
de toute part.
Quelque chose qui du dehors pénétrait, un certain liquide agressif,
une liqueur caustique qui diluait la chair ou la mémoire,
quelque chose qui troublait le temps nous mettait en désarroi.
A ce point, qui détient le cours des choses et des faits,
comme un pont qui s’effondre,
Tandis que passe le jour mutilé traînant laborieusement
ses membres après lui?

Il n’y a pire poème que celui qui ne s’écrit pas, me dis-je ;
entre-temps,
par-derrière, lèvres closes, la poésie recueillait ses rescapés,
par-devant, yeux ouverts, la seule chose réelles c’était les mouches

(Traduction: Robert Guyon et Waldo Rojas).

Oiseau en terre

Icare a connu en sa chair vive la duperie des ailes.
Ses plumes seront peut-être encore à la merci des ressacs.
Seriner la morale servirait peu aux oiseaux,
la confiance en leur ailes croît à chaque envol et en vol
c’est là une histoire manquant en tout d’importance.
Mais nous autres, nés plus pour le vol que pour l’enracinement,
nous gardons les yeux tournés vers les hauteurs
avec cette étrange nostalgie au pied de l’arbre
du fruit récemment tombé.

Ciel vide d’ailes c’est le ciel de la ville,
domaine des oiseaux en terre
avec les yeux baissés sur les plumes rouillés
comme ces buissons des parcs publics piquetés de boue.

Rue

Tous les chemins mènent à cette rue qui se mire
à travers ses fenêtres.
Chaque pas éloigne de cette rue
et seule sa solitude croît à la mesure
des lumières
et du clignement d’aile des chauve-souris.
Ferons-nous quelques fois dans cette rue autre chose que passer
et nous blanchir les épaules au plâtre de ses murs,
bien que ce soit elle la Rue des Pas Perdus
à la vitesse de ses pavés résonnant?
C’est elle la rue qui fuit à son image,
hésitante au bord du souvenir,
et c’est dans cette rue qu’habite —exilé—
“cet étranger qui à certaines heures vient à notre rencontre
dans un miroir”.

Hôtel de la Gare

Brève trêve de la nuit rapace dans la Ville terminus
cette obscurité étroite et méconnue de tous les deux.
Avec une peur certaine du toucher de leur voix
un corps appelle l’autre avec cette sorte d’étreinte
qui fatigue et qui calme.
Pas une parole, alors, pour agiter l’air qui se blesse :
séparation de leur corps.
Et ce sont maintenant deux moitiés ardûment mutuelles
comme sur l’éclat de la lame du couteau à trancher
ils se contemplent sans surprise
les hémisphères de pulpe fraîche du fruit divisé.

Chiffré à la Villa d’Hadrien
Veguèro uno figueiro, un cop dins moun
camin arrapado a la roco nuso...
Frédérique Mistral
I
La nature ne laisse pas de Ruines.
Elle berce les décombres
et le figuier renaît tenace
dans la verticale d’un arc éventré.
Il profane la pierre.
Il dédaigne l’abîme.
II
Où florissaient les destins campe à présent
l’opacité des oliviers, leur allure insolvable.
Les ruines induisent le sang au murmure indocile.
Nous interrogeons des yeux leurs profils gisants,
formes d’horizon sans parole et sans chiffre,
mais l’été bourdonnant des collines brille
pour taire toute éloquence.
Traverser les célébration du laurier sauvage.
Ne tournons pas la tête, non, vers notre escorte obscure:
seulement prêtons l’oreille à la voix que nul n’élève:
divinités brisées en sacrifice
à un Dieu incompréhensible,
héros meurtris en leur férocité de marbre mort.

III
En plein cœur des vestiges somptueux,
écoute le Miroir d’eau, ses battements,
fontaine répétée de reflets et présages.
Les enfants que tu guettes sont ces voix, ces ailes, ces vols
par-dessus les cercles d’eau,
l’image brisée d’une image brisée et ravivée.
Palpitation patiente des étangs, leur regard sans trace de
surprise.

IV
Non pas à un caillou, à une brindille,
que la main n’aille pas —comme vers une caresse—
plus loin que la trouvaille d’elle même.
On n’y vient pas en maître,
mais pour offrir en gage le regard.
Laisse à la mémoire sa prédation,
l’abeille solaire s’acharner sur l’ortie du décombre.
Les deux également dédaignent la saveur des racines.

V
Désormais citadelle sans siège,
le soir aussi s’est arrêté devant le seuil abattu.
La troupe regagne un sommeil en tenailles.

VI
Pacte de la Nuit et des Ruines :
murs d’ombre renaissent taillés dans l’ombre.
Revivent les échos des défenestrations.

Villa Adriana, aux alentours de Tivoli, Italie,
septembre 1982, Paris, octobre de la même année.

(Traduction de Armando Uribe E.)

About R. Cheran and a New Play About Black July

2008-07-14T19:56:00.000-07:00

Twenty five years ago this month Sri Lanka burned and as a result of that fire the diaspora received countless new ticket holders. scrambling on to ships, planes, often with just their suitcases, some precious photographs, thalis, and dreams of grey and peaceful lands waiting for them and nightmares where torches burned away their past.

The poet Cheran has written a play "What If the Rain Falls" to be performed in Toronto on July 26th. He sent me some information from which I quote.

WHAT IF THE RAIN FAILS

Twenty five years ago, this month, "Black July ‘83” resulted in the killing of 3000 Tamils and large scale destruction of their properties. Thousands fled as refugees. A significant number of Tamils sought refuge in Canada. Tamils all over the world commemorate Black July, this month. As part of a month-long commemoration in Canada organized by the Canadian Tamil Congress, Asylum Theatre Group of Toronto performs a play, “WHAT IF THE RAIN FAILS” in Toronto on July 26, 2008.
Written by popular Tamil poet Cheran, the play is set against the backdrop of a refugee hearing in Canada. The play weaves personal testimonies, poetry and dance in narrating a heart-wrenching story of loss and survival. The central character is performed by K. Rasarathnam, an actual survivor of Black July.
Venue: Young Centre for the Performing Arts
Tank House Theatre - Historic Distillery District Sat July 26 2008 at 1:00, 4:00, and 6:00 PMReservations not Required
Tickets ($5) available at Young Centre Box Office: http://www.youngcentre.ca/;
(416) 866-8666; or Canadian Tamil Congress office: (416) 240-0078

Director: Dushy Gnanapragasam
Dushy Gnanapragasam received his initiation into live theatre in Sri Lanka. He has been an actor with various Tamil Canadian community theatre groups for over 10 years. For the last five years he has been a director at Manaveli Performing Arts Group's Annual Festival of Theatre and Dance. His directorial ventures include Harold Pinter's New World Order, Mario Fratti's The Satraps, Ivan Turgenev's Broke, and Murray Schisgal's The Pushcart Peddlers.

Playwright: Cheran
Cheran has published seven anthologies of poetry in Tamil. His plays have been performed in Sri Lanka, Canada, the UK and France. His poems have been translated into English, German, Swedish, Sinhala, Kannnada and Malayalam. He has performed poetry at various international writers’ festivals. He was the recipient of a writing award from the Banff Centre for Arts, Alberta. This is his first play in English. He is a professor at the University of Windsor, Ontario.

For more information on the play contact Dushy Gnanapragasam, (416) 995-2984 For information about the Black July commemoration, visit: http://www.blackjuly83.com/

ABOUT FRANCISCO SANTOS AND BRIAN CAMPBELL

2008-07-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

About Francisco Santos (http://undressingthenight.blogspot.com/) and His Translator Brian Campbell( http://briancampbell.blogspot.com/)

I had a copy of Nicaraguan-Canadian poet Francisco Santos’s Undressing the Night near the headboard some weeks ago. It then fell behind, and out of view, owing to the general torrential nature of the river of books that ends up by the pillow waiting to be drunk before sleep. His translator Brian Campbell sent me the poems via email so I would not have to retype them here.

The book satisfies like a clear morning. There is no pretense in the poetry. Santos writes directly from experience and hides his agency in bringing beauty to the reader. There is no dismantling of language so that readers can meditate on broken phrases and dollops of white space. Neither does Santos attempt to dazzle readers with rhetorical catwalks or peacock displays. He shoots straight and is lucky to have a translator who has worked hard to deliver the same transparency in English.

I present five poems here from Undressing The Night: Selected Poems of Francisco Santos (Editorial Luna, San Jose, Costa Rica, 2005)

SOY RICO

Soy rico
camino por las calles
dejando crecer mis poemas
mis cabellos
mi barba
que casi no me crece
Mis zapatos están gastados
mis ropas luyidas, nistas
y sin embargo
soy alegre
soy rico
Llevo conmigo las flores
mis bolsas están llenas
de poemas.

I'M RICH

I'm rich!
I swagger down the streets
allowing my poems to grow --
and my hair
and my beard
(which is almost non-existent)
My shoes are worn down, they're done for
my clothes rag-tag, in tatters
yet
I feel joy
I'm rich
Within me, I bring flowers
My pockets are bursting
with poems

CHICHIGALPA

Allá en Chichigalpa
yo vivía en una casa-hospedaje
que también era cantina
gimnasio de boxeo
y gallera
Enfrente quedaba la estación y los trenes
el gentío
y los adioses
eran mi mayor attracción
La carretera la estaban construyendo
y pasaban los vehículos del Depto. de Carretaras
en medio de grandes polvasales
Los sábados por la tarde se miraba la fila de
caballos bien aperados
y se llenaba la cantina
hasta bien noche
El Domingo amanecían algunos hombres dormidos
que se levantaban mientras sacaban la basura
y yo salía a chuparme las narajas que traía
Doña Juana
como a las diez comenzaba el boxeo
y a les tres el juego de gallos.
Yo tenía como ocho años.

CHICHIGALPA

There in Chichigalpa
I lived in a boarding house
that was also a saloon
boxing gym
and gamecock coop
In front was the station and the trains
the throngs
of goodbyes
were the major attraction
They were just constructing the freeway
and vehicles went by, churning great clouds,
from the Highway Department
On Saturdays, in the afternoon, a line of well turned-out horses
and the saloon filled up
’til well into the night
Sunday, sleeping men stirred, slowly raised themselves
as the garbage was tossed out
and I went out to suck on oranges
Doña Juana always gave me
as at ten the boxing match started
at three, the cockfights
and I was about eight

R.I.P. LEONEL RUGAMA

Una tarde Leonel me recomendó
-- para la flacura -- hacer ejercicios
aclarándome que no se trataba de
"ejercicios espirituales.”
Hablamos acerca de las muchachas
que iban o venían del trabajo o del colegio
de las que entraban o salían de una tienda
de zapatos
de otra que pasaba vendiendo chancho
también me leyó un poema sobre una guerrillera
Vietnamita.
Ahora -- otra tarde que veo su cuerpo acribillado
por la G.N. en la foto de un diario
recuerdo que José Coronel Urtecho
una vez me dijo: "Los poetas no sirven para nada."

R.I.P. LEONEL RUGAMA

One afternoon Leonel recommended
-- to improve my vitality, strength -- that I exercise
going on to say that by this he did not mean
"spiritual exercises."
We talked also about the girls
who passed on their way from work or school
about others that went into and came out of a certain
shoe store
about another on the corner selling fried pork
then he read me a poem about a young girl
who had died in Vietnam.
Today, another afternoon,
I see on the front page of a daily
the photo of his body riddled by the G.N.
and recall how José Coronel Urtecho
once said to me,
"Poets? They're good for nothing."

CARCEL

Encerró el silencio
buscó en su bolso
un cepillo y en espejo

Dio un beso al tiempo
y murmuró al viento.

PRISON

He enclosed the silence
searched through its pockets
for a toothbrush and a mirror

gave a kiss to time
and murmured to the wind

FIESTA

El vaso fuera de la fiesta
los libros en el oído
lo cotidiano en la sangre
El loco con el puño sucio
sale de la mina mostrando
la flor.

FIESTA

The glass beyond the fiesta
the books within the eardrum
the quotidian in the blood --
and the madman with his dirty fist
comes out of the mineshaft
waving a flower.

A FRIENDLY REPARTEE ABOUT FOUND POETRY

2008-06-24T17:34:00.000-07:00

A FRIENDLY REPARTEE ABOUT FOUND POETRY

My comment on the Found Poem and citation of one of Christopher Levenson’s poems led to a fine discussion via email about what exactly constitutes this kind of poetry. Christopher quite rightly pointed out a certain looseness in my definition. I quote:

“I hope you won't think me picky if I say that, as far as I am concerned, (unfortunately my bible on such matters, the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, doesn't have an entry on Found Poems) it is not a found poem. For me a found poem is one that is composed exclusively of words, phrases or sentences taken from a non-poetic context and never intended as poetry (such as a public announcement, a tourist brochure,a questionnaire) that nevertheless in the eyes of the poet contains lines that are poeticallty suggestive. All the poet does is to n o t i c ethe ambiguities or other poetic potentials in the non-poetic texts, in the same way that the convoluted pipes of a natural gas installation might be seen by a sculptor as a kind off unintended sculpture and, if mountain on a stand would be viewed as such. The only real found poem I ever found was 'The Beaufort Scale' (published in a mag decades ago) which gives the definitions of various force winds. The closest I come to the form otherwise is in a poem "From a Romanian Phrase Book" (published in The Journey Back, 1986), which uses almost entirely actual phrases that I found in such a book but rearranges their order and repeats one or two, so as to subvert for surreal, satiric effect the self-importance of such books:

"A child has fallen in the water.
It can't be repaired.
Do you have one in a different colour?

Must I stay in bed? these sheets are dirty.
You're hurting me.
Will you come and see me again?
This is the only room vacant.
How much do I owe you?

I have lost my luggage, passport, travellers' cheques,
There's no plug in my washbasin,
There's no toilet roll in the lavatory.
Is there any danger of avalanches?
A child has fallen in the water.
My appetite's gone."

So Prague 1987 does not for me fall anywhere near this category but simply records aspects of an actual experience: the posters for U2 and the Police, the dead swan and the remark about Kafka all actually existed and happened and needed only to be juxtaposed with other actual events, such as the chamber concert to create a specific unreal atmopshere. But this is in fact my normal way of writing poetry, by starting from a specific incident or scene or spoken statement and then trying to suggest further dimensions of meaning.”

to which I replied

Christopher, I meant that you found the materials of the poem from a journey to Prague, the U2 poster, Lennon lives, and the 300 Kafkas in the phone book. One aspect of your poetic talent is seeing the surreal, ironic, strange in these elements and noting them down in a poem. Certainly, if all poetry comes from experience, whether lived or read about, then all poetry is found.

You are of course quite right to say that the found poem is assembled from already available materials. I guess I felt here that you had assembled your poem together from precisely such materials.

All the Best

Indran

THE FOUND POEM AND CHRIS LEVENSON

2008-06-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

The found poem is a delightful subset of the poetic art. Poets wake up every morning hungry for images. They scour nature programs, read newspapers, comb their pets, anything to tease out some reminiscence, or to enable themselves to describe the sometimes human-like behavior of a centipede in its inexorable march towards a leaf. We are an anthropomorphic lot, blessed (or cursed) with a fertile imagination but unwilling to engage in countless hours of patient study of an amoeba under a microscope. We are not scientists. Yet, we cite Freud at every pause—“that the poets always knew’—meaning the Greeks, who gave us Oedipus and Cassandra and the battle for Troy where gods and men worked together and at cross purposes.

I have gone far afield just to say that each time we write we need to trammel this exceeding imagination, this bountiful garden gone to seed. Why blinker the beast, make it follow our will? Therein lies the rub, the eternal and unanswerable question that rises in conversation between the wild horse and its domesticated brother or sister. The found poem offers a detour from this debate, a chance to find wonder in the odd fish served in reality’s basket. English and Canadian poet Chris Levenson produced a fine example of the found poem in “Prague, 1987,” one of the precise, lyric beauties of his 1990 collection HALF TRUTHS.

PRAGUE, 1987

Now for the first time I see them
in daylight, the statues on the Charles Bridge—
abolished ikons persisting—the Hradcin castle
blurred by scaffolding and rain, the narrow
stairways between old, half-derelict hostelries,
and they are grey: it is not time alone
that wears down the roofs, files away
at the wrought-iron bars of palace gates, and chokes
with cobwebs and dead leaves the once bright fountains.
A dead swan drifts upon the Vltava.

We walk through drizzle to the Maltese Church,
among the baroque impedimenta hear
a string quarter play Haydn, Mozart, Ravel
with, outside, thunder continuo.
in the heart of the Old Town, “Lennon lives”
on several walls, posters announce U2 and The Police;
I ask the hotel receptionist where Kafka’s house is
and I am handed a telephone book: “You look him up,” he says,
“There are over three hundred Kafkas in Prague.”

-- Chris Levenson, from Half Truths, Wolsak & Wynn, 1990

Oh to be the 301st Kafka in Prague or anywhere and receive a call from the poet hungry for an image. My mere presence is enough. I just need to be found. Under K.

AFTER THE PARTY (In Memoriam: Anura Bandaranaike)

2008-06-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

We suffer the loss, try to incorporate the legacy into our lives and then go with eating and drinking, loving and sleeping. Let us remember Anura's great heart as we move on trying to wend our way through the chaos of modern Sri Lanka.

AFTER THE PARTY

-- in Memoriam: Anura Bandaranaike

I remember an evening
flavoured by my mother’s
cooking, bringing
two smart patriots
together, to speak
about devolution
not yet realized,
accommodate
what makes sense
seeing the island
from afar, the only
way forward,

two dear friends
who met then
for the first time.
Now, one is laid
to rest, and
the other engages
readers still
to think afresh
about slow or fast
bombs, double-speak,
cynical tongues, how
to bring more than

twenty five years
of war to an end
before all our parties
break up and families
gather, with shot-gun
shells and confetti
to scatter, at weddings
held on holy ground
beside gravestones
where fathers and
brothers, mothers
and sisters are buried.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam, March 16, 2008

THE LOST POEM-- for Paris Hilton

2008-06-07T16:39:00.000-07:00

I found this poem the other day composed a year ago, forgotten in a misplaced archive of the home computer. Paris Hilton’s brief dalliance with incarceration led me to reflect on writing behind bars, within earshot of the jailer’s keys.

ON RESERVE AT THE LIBRARY

Miss Hilton’s jail time journals
may be read in this syllabus along
with the Diary of Anne Frank and
human landscapes described
on cigarette papers by Turkish
poet Nazim, not to mention U's

letters after reading Twenty
Love Poems for the first time
thanks to the Red Cross. Am
moved by the transformation
after twenty days deprived
of free walking in New York

or Sunset Boulevard or
the Champs Elysee, to know
the Bible belongs also to Paris
and she has no favorite passage;
she will now use fame to raise
awareness of cancers that afflict

women, breast in particular,
not any desire to highlight
hair and ride elevators up
to studios where she will
record the 500th episode
of the long-running reality show

that does not belong to me,
distracted by Gramsci,
lean-boned and bearded
on the book jacket
of my friend’s master class
in making social sense.

I will read him too once
I’ve finished Gibbon’s
history of the Romans
and Mandela’s letters
from Robben Island.
So much to absorb

in the words of tragic heroes,
big men and women,
and now Paris poised
to sweep them all off
the bestseller lists
if only in my lifetime.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam c) 2008

VANCOUVER: A POEM by George Stanley

2008-05-28T00:54:00.000-07:00

VANCOUVER : A POEM BY GEORGE STANLEY

I took George Stanley’s new collection to New York in early May and read it on the subway, and propped up in bed. I spoke of it to my friends. I asked one to bring me a copy of Williams’ Paterson as Stanley pays homage to that major candidate for the last century’s long poem prize at the beginning of this first great urban poem of the 21st century.

In the end my friend forgot Paterson but no matter. We will read Paterson again, as we should Baudelaire’s poems about Paris, to appreciate fully aspects of Stanley’s master work.

I write of mastery because this poet beguiles us with puppetry whose strings we cannot see no matter how hard we try. We are enthralled by the light touch, the inviting language, the confidence. He starts the poem “there is more here than memory.” That line tricks with its apparent simplicity. What more is there? Ideas? Action plans? He then tells us: “I am not a man & this is not my city.”

If not a man, then what, whom? If not his city, then whose?

In this first entry about Stanley’s poem— I do not intend to distil all of my thinking in one blog post—I reproduce an amazing passage to give you an idea of Stanley’s approach and preoccupations. I am also re-reading the poem and find that almost every word and pause has become vital for me, something that happens very rarely in reading a book of poems.

I cite the passage from Section 10, page 72.

“Safe in the city. Safe because of being in the city, place, & knowing all these things to relate to other things, that don’t change, but of course they change & then in between what they were & what they will be there’s a vacant lot, but it’s not a vacant lot like in childhood, you could play in, & make part of the place you were, it’s behind a fence, & now you’re old, & you look through the fence that some younger people have put up, to make it safe for you, & you hope (& it’s an angry hope, & it’s a desperate hope), you hope that really will be (you, that pronoun you hope you are, hope that really will be, & you will be (& then you look sort of shyly away, up the Drive---& all the other old people are there too (where the bank, or the coffee shop, or the bookstore, or the social service agency used to be), next to the fence, standing in ones, look past them & the city goes on & on, outside time, up & down & over small hills, until it gets to the natural line, the water. “

There are a thousand ways to skin a blackbird. The most direct requires seizing a knife, tearing a hole in the skin and starting to peel. That knife appears in the phrase “a vacant lot.” Its tactile, desolate image follows dubitative this and that about place and change. Yet great poetry is made from yoking together the contrast between the music of thinking (this and that) and the graphic image (vacant lot). Stanley knows how to mix the ingredients.

Shall I put my lands in order, I am tempted to ask. There is a lot of Tom Eliot informing this passage. “Between what they were and what they will be” evokes Time Past, Time Present, Time Future from the Four Quartets….and from the Preludes we see old women gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Stanley would agree that Eliot lived still at a time when the poem had some weight, could tweak history. He also wants us to recall il miglio fabbro, the deluded old Lear, Ezra Pound, imprisoned, facing charges of treason, who wrote in 1948 in Canto LXXXI: " Pull down thy vanity/Thou art a beaten dog/beneath the hail/A swollen magpie in a fitful sun/Half black, half white/Nor knowst’ou wing from tail/Pull down thy vanity.”

For Stanley that plaintive cry becomes “& it’s an angry hope, & it’s a desperate hope.” An old man , he sits, in a dry month, among other old men, beside a fence, alone, The various buildings that once occupied the site have gone--the bank, coffee shop, bookstore, social service agency—leaving a vacant lot beside the old men and beyond the small hills, the natural line, the water.

Remember Williams:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Who are today’s chickens? In what space do they cluck? How shall we disappear? By leaning against a fence encircling a vacant lot?

c) 2008 Indran Amirthanayagam Lines cited from Vancouver; A Poem, New Star Books, c) 2008 George Stanley.

A LA PORTE DE LA FETE: Un Poeme de Indran Amirthanayagam

2008-05-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

Avec l’édition de cet poème je voudrais souligner mon compromis avec la langue française. Une langue pourrait devenir raide pour la faute d’exercice. On doit se promener tes langues tous les jours comme si elles étaient tes chiens ou tes enfants ou tes idées. Une idée fermée dans la tête ne vaut rien. Une langue tuée par la faute de volonté de son être-humain est une perte d’éclairement pour le monde entier. Je vous salue en français.

À LA PORTE DE LA FÊTE

Un jour
je déménagerai
sans aucune

ceremonie,
je ne la
permetrai pas;

mais
je comprends
qu’un être humain

a besoin
de fetes,
de rites

de passage,
pour dire
a ses amis

que c’est réel
la blessure
et la memoire,

que nous
ne devons pas
le laisser partir

sans un essai
de plus
contre la règle

de nos vies:
tout marche
partout,

l’eau change
sa forme,
le sang s’arrêtera

de couler
seulement
à la derniere fête,

qui pour certains
n’est pas si grave,
un moment

pour faire
la connaissance
d’une future copine,

pour boire
avec des amis
et passer la nuit

sans être seul
avant cette
présence étrange

qui nous ouvre
la porte
quand nous sortons.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam c) 2008

WHEN THE WIND HURLS STONES (For Manik Sandrasagra, in Memoriam)

2008-05-18T00:58:00.000-07:00

When wind hurls stones,

picks up straw houses,

When earth rumbles,

splits, buries buildings,

When bomb sends bus

flying in Colombo Fort,

When a good man,

precise thinker, reader

of ola leaves and

digital text, gives way

--his body opened

before surgeons--

and we try

to make sense

out of nonsense,

to understand

the boil on the brain,

the blocked artery,

the alarming message:

"surgery did not

go well. We must pray."

He told me

he missed an earlier

Fort explosion

by a minute.

He had just driven

through the round-about.

Today, another bomb,

and in a surgeon's ward,

I don't know where,

in Singapore or Colombo,

we ask for doctors

we can trust, but even

the trusted are not God,

are subject to human

vanity and uncertainty.

Perhaps there is no human

way to cope, except

with hands flailing,

to cut all parties down,

in grief's general cacophony,

in the general madness

of endless war and endless

explosions in the Fort,

and hearts blocked up

in millions of bodies

on all the continents,

and we're left with words,

funeral orations, memories

of the soul freed now

who made our lives

glad for a time.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam, May 17, 2008

GUY AMIRTHANAYAGAM: COMMITMENT IN LITERATURE

2008-05-07T04:58:00.000-07:00

The text of a speech delivered as an invited delegate to the International Writers Conference held in association with the Edinburgh Festival in Edinburgh, U.K. (August, 1962)

The problem posed by the title seems to me an artificial one. Whether the writer deals primarily with his inner life or the world around him, in so far as he is a human being, he is committed the moment he begins to write. The writer uses words, and since words have meanings, he cannot conceivably avoid saying something meaningful about himself or the world in which he lives, unless he chooses to write nonsense. This may seem an unduly banal or simplified way of putting it, but the writer is immersed in the human situation or predicament; that is, after all, the pre-condition of writing, pre-philosophical, pre-epistemological, if you like.

I think 'commitment' is a live issue only for academicians, professors of literature and the clearly minor writers who have the time to bother with issues divorced and separate from the fervid agitation of creativity which should generate their work. I don't think the great writers ever raised the problem in this form, or judged themselves in relation to the extent to which they were "committed." That we should busy ourselves with the question is itself a major sign of cultural decadence and moral confusion.

Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Dickens--how would you see them in regard to this business of commitment? The writer should speak the truth and if in the process he concerns himself with, say, politics and has said the truth about it, he is worth reading, at least for his acumen in affairs of state.

However, you cannot dismiss writers who wrote without the least shade of a political thought, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, or even T.F. Powys in this century as uncommitted and therefore inferior writers. It is rather like the position of the neutralist nations in the 'cold war.' If we in Ceylon are not committed to one of the power blocs, this does not mean that we are not committed: on the contrary we are so fully committed to the human situation in 1962 that we feel the only way we can help avert or at least protest against the possibility of man's suicide, is by being aggressively neutral.

Should a writer express the spirit of his age? Of course, whether he likes it or not, he will be conditioned by the times in which he lives but the particular age of history in which he lived does not altogether determine either the content or the form of his art. If the age in which he lives is given to trivial and worthless concerns, we do not require of the writer that his work merely reflect his triviality and worthlessness: what is valuable in a writer is not merely what he absorbs from his age, but what he, deriving from his own imagination and inner resources, contributes to transform and embed the reality he has encountered. Historians of literature may read a novel in order to discover in it a faithful mirror of its time, but a man interested in the novel and in life will read it for what it has to say directly to him and for what is valuable in it for all time.

Last afternoon there was considerable discourse about 'roots'; it ws said that a writer's work would sicken and die if he cut himself away from his roots. It is healthy and stabilising to discover and ground oneself in one's 'roots' but surely the quality of the roots in question affect the quality of the work. A great writer should be able to grow his own roots wherever he goes and if he cannot, obviously he should not travel.

I was astonished that a great poet like Hugh McDiarmed should be such a stubborn simpleton as to advocate so passionately a complete commitment to an elementary ideology and an inhumane closed system. Shouldn't we learn to cope not only with international but even with cosmic man? The little white rose of Scotland is a beautiful flower and has inspired great poetry, but is that all there is to proclaim? Will it bloom in outer space?

The problem is as simple as it is profound. The writer is a human being, more gifted, more aware but also more normal than the human average. It is the balanced normality of the writer that I wish to stress: a writer is committed to his craft, to himself, to the woman or women he loves, to his family and friends, to his country, to the world, to God or the lack of God, to death--why then discuss this problem of 'commitment' in such an external, such a superficial way?

Great art is not propaganda, not escapism, not even accomplishment; it is an act of radical seriousness forged in passionate logic, wrought out of the mind, the emotions and the blood of man.

--Guy Amirthanayagam c) 2008, Estate of Guy Amirthanayagam.

In collaboration with my siblings, I am preparing a volume of Selected Writing of Guy Amirthanayagam under the title "The Unplanned Flower". I will write further about this as the book takes shape.

NEW YORK

2008-05-05T21:54:00.000-07:00

I have been walking and riding the subway in New York over the last few days. Have read from The Splintered Face and seen old friends. I have also noticed the orgy of lights at Times Square and am thinking we must find a way to reduce the footprint cast by those beams. The city has been sweet, sun lit and throbbing with its constant energy. The surprise meetings also delight...today by chance with Roberto Echavarren, the writer resident now in Montevideo, in town to lecture....we drank coffee in the Village and caught up with our lives since our last meeting at the Poesia de las Americas conference at College Station, Texas in April 2007.

I visited the Strand and picked up Allen Ginsberg's last book, a nice first edition, Death and Fame. I also met Valentine Daniel for the first time. Daniel is a legendary figure among the congoscenti...author of Charred Lullabies, his study of nationalist violence in Sri Lanka. Daniel is revising a long poem. I was thrilled to find that we agreed on getting rid of false barriers between areas of expression, that poetry can be another way to truth, as valid as the fieldwork of the anthropologist.

Tomorrow I read at the Asian American Writers Workshop at 7 pm. I will greet you there.

CARTA: UN POEMA DE INDRAN AMIRTHANAYAGAM

2008-04-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

CARTA

Dile que espero su carta,
que hay unas burbujas
que salen de las aguas termales
duranguenses y no sé
cómo describirlas,
digo, de manera cientifica,
formal, de la Real Academia.

Dile que no quiero
llevar los 20 volúmenes
o el compact por todos lados,
que hace falta su lectura
de mis manos, de las ideas
americanas
de mi papá adoptivo.

Dile que eligió bien
la novia bailarina,
bailan así sus versos
a un tiempo nuestro,
fracturado, con saltos
pero con una línea
inteligible.

Dile que los extraño,
y a mi no me molesta
si algún critico comenta
sobre los sentimientos
crudos de esta poesía
de amistades. Dile
que la muerte y el mar

son compañeros
de los poetas románticos
y no nos da vergüenza
reconocerlo
esta tarde de espera
cuando un avión
ha llevado a mi familia

a otra ciúdad, otro mar,
y no hay manera
de contactarlos—
no quiero decir celulares—
dile que un pasajero
en un avión vuela
en otro mundo

de espera y de tiempo
suspendido. Dile
que me gustaría
que todos los aviones
aterrizaran al lado mio
y sus miles
de amores hambrientos

se reunieran a la vez
con sus pares.
Dile que me gustaría
que me escribieras
en ese avión una carta
antes de aterrizar
para leérmela.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam, c) 2008

ON READING FROM THE SPLINTERED FACE: TSUNAMI POEMS

2008-04-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

On Readings from The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems

The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems began its tour of the world on the outskirts of London, in Kingston, where I read from the book for the first time in January on the way to my first home, the island now known as Sri Lanka. There I launched the book at the Galle Literary Festival. I then took it to Seattle, to Elliot Bay Books, in early March and last week to the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library.

Now, the story turns to New York in May. And the campaign has not gone on too long, not to worry.

The first New York reading promises to be a bit light hearted and optimistic given that it will take place in a laundromat.

Here are a few lines I sent the organizer for use on their website.

I began to use public laundries when I moved to New York, to East 4thStreet in the scruffy, bathroom in the kitchen, Pyramid Club-hopping days....At the time I realized I had to bring my socks to the local stream where instead of rocks to lay down clothes I was obliged to place them on benches and wait my turn while somebody else spun their week's whites dry. I would bring a poetry volume with my clothes and read and imbibe the starchy and powdered air (and look around a bit for a female with whom I could exchange a furtive glance or perhaps a few words about Constantine Cavafy.) Then I entered washing machine and later the dryer and closed my poetry volume and put it inside the hot and sweet smelling bag of newly-minted linen ready for the week and further chance encounters with poetry and its lovers.

The reading is on Sunday May 4 between

4-5pm at Klean and Kleaner, 173 East 2ndStreet between Ave A/B—

On Monday May 5, I will read with other poets in the West Village
at the

Cornelia Street Café, between 6 and 8 pm
29 Cornelia Street

And on Tuesday May 6, I will read from The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems at 7 p.m. at The Asian American Writers Workshop,
16 West 32nd Street Suite 10A NY NY 10001.

I look forward to giving these poems the works. Cheers.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: A POEM

2008-04-03T18:36:00.000-07:00

Remembering Martin Luther King 40 years later.

OLD KING

What if King wore mirrors,
and they refracted the bullet,
and he did not fall
into Jackson or Young’s arms?

What if he drove out
of Memphis in a car
cleaned of Hoover’s bugs
to meet Coretta

and father another child?
What if he grew old
watching Americans
wild-eyed, dancing,

reconciled, beside
cherry blossoms
blooming, one spring
day on the Mall?

-- Indran Amirthanayagam, April 4, c) 2008

WILL READ FROM THE SPLINTERED FACE, AT VANCOUVER'S PUBLIC LIBRARY, APRIL 16

2008-03-29T19:42:00.000-07:00

This Splintered Face will be on display April 16 at the downtown branch of the Vancouver Public Library at 350 Georgia in the Alma Van Dusen and Peter Kay Rooms. Come to hear the Canadian launch of this new book, starting at 7.30 pm that evening.

SOBRE TRADUCCION, CON TRES POEMAS DE VIVIMARIE VANDERPOORTEN

2008-03-24T15:18:00.000-07:00

Presento tres poemas de la srilankesa Vivimarie VanderPoorten. Subí uno de ellos a mi blog cuando regresé de Sri Lanka en enero. Ahora bautizo mi primer ensayo publico en la traducción del inglés al español con estos tres hermosos textos de su poemario nothing prepares you.

Hay tantas ideas curiosas y acontecimientos extraños que surgen cuando uno empieza la aventura de traducir un poema. Por ejemplo, debemos decidir guardar en el lenguaje de llegada la ortografia y relación idiosincrática que tiene un poeta con su idioma. Cada poeta sufre la tentación de romper las reglas, ver el idioma como debe ser, una energía dinámica, cambiante. Asi, escribo el titulo del libro en minúsculas y utilizo mayúscula al principio de cada verso de una de las traducciónes. Para hacerlo y asi respetar las decisiones de la poeta tuve que dejar a un lado mis propias prácticas de poeta.

Tal vez para algunos lectores este planteamiento es igual de extraño que la decisión original de la poeta. ¿A quién importa una mayúscula? me preguntan varios líderes de nuestras sociedades, presidentes, alcaldes, médicos, abogados, científicos, todos que son responsable desde la Iluminación para asegurar al ciudadano común y corriente que el mundo va bien y se conduce hacia un futuro más justo, intelegible, con salvavidas para todos y las demás criaturas , y también para los árboles y las plantas acuáticas…

Mi pregunta es sin duda retórica y evasiva, pero útil. Si, importa la Mayúscula. Sí importan las reglas de ortografía desarrolladas a lo largo de la historia. Y sí, importa que estas reglas sean creativas, que vayan hacia la luz y el agua como toda buena planta y además acepten la adición de un gene extraño extraido de un pez o un tomate. Y de ahi crecerá un nuevo árbol, un nuevo poema, el poema traducido y orgulloso de andar fuera del laboratorio de Mary Shelley or de Leticia Damm (mi maestra, que me ayudó con estas traducciones).

En otro momento llevaré este texto al inglés y al francés, además de reflexionar más sobre el arte misterioso, y nada menor, ni traidor, de la traducción. Un abrazo.

MAPAS

Perdida
en el viaje confuso
hacia la madurez
no había mapas para mostrarle el camino
solo una maraña de rutas sin letreros
encrucijadas sin flechas.
Sin mapa
ella tomó la ruta
que le pareció familiar,
que parecía ser la correcta—
“Cásate con un buen hombre que te cuide.”

Ahora, abusada y vieja
a los veintiséis años

le pregunta al adivino arrugado,
el profeta de futuros, vidente de destinos,
qué ve en los callos de su palma:
Dice con un suspiro

“Hay tantas líneas,
tienes muchas preocupaciones—
y demasiadas penas del corazón…
Estas líneas son como calles
en una ciudad
sin mapas. “

-- Vivimarie VanderPoorten, c) 2008 traducción Indran Amirthanayagam

MAPS

Lost
on the
confusing journey to adulthood
there were no maps to show her the way
only a mass of roads without signboards
crossroads without arrows.
Having no map
she took the road
that looked familiar
sounded right -
"marry a good man who will take care of you"

Now, abused and old
at twenty six
she asks the wizened fortune teller,
predictor of futures, seer of fates
what he sees in her callused palm:
He says with a sigh
"There are so many lines,
you are having so many worries -
have too many heartaches. . .
These lines, they're
like roads in
a city without maps".

--- c) 2008 Vivimarie VanderPoorten

DECRETO NISI

Hoy un juez
en una corte mohosa
Deciderá
que no podemos más vivir juntos,
tú y yo.
Declarará nuestro matrimonio
Terminado, nos transformará
en extraños. Otra vez.

Eres valiente al presentarte.
Amigas solícitas—
abogados—
me dijeron que No Fuera.
Asi, oculto a
miradas lujuriosas
(suponiendo, con manos sobre bocas)
y fuera de la vista
del Estado invasor,
tengo tiempo para recordar
algunos tiempos cuando la pasamos bien.

Paises visitados, millas recorridas al volante, vida salvaje
en bosques quietos
comidas compartidas, momentos tiernos,
incluso risas .

Basta de eso.
Ahora, como no puedo abondanarte de mala fe,
Y el adulterio no es más una crimen que podemos cometer,
Tal vez podamos ser amigos otra vez.

-- Vivimarie VanderPoorten, c) 2008 traducción Indran Amirthanayagam

DECREE NISI

Today a judge in a musty courtroom

Will decide that

we can no longer live together,

you and i.

He will declare our marriage

Terminated,

Transform us into strangers. Again.

You are brave to be there.

Solicitous girlfriends-

lawyers-

told me Not to Go.

So, hiding away

from lecherous glances

(surmising, behind hands over mouths)

and out of sight of

invasive State,

I have time to recall

some good times we had.

Countries visited, miles driven, wild life watched in still

forests

meals shared, moments of tenderness,

some laughter, even.

But enough of that.

Now, since I cannot desert you maliciously,

And adultery is no longer a crime we can commit,

Perhaps we could be friends again.

--c) 2008 Vivimarie VanderPoorten

VISITA A LOS GIGANTES

En la primera escapada ese verano
A Giant’s Causeway
Restos de una antigua erupción volcánica
Subiendo esas losas octagonales
Perfectas,
Contemplando la precisión
De forma,
Llena de asombro ante el mundo natural,
Me preguntó una hermosa familia perfecta
De cuatro, turistas de Estados Unidos,
De donde venia yo:
Les contesté

“En qué parte de Africa está?”
Entonces les expliqué
Que es la isla
En forma de una lágrima
junto a la costa de la India:
No les dijé
Que tenia un pasado espléndido
Pero ningun futuro,
Que su rico suelo
Está manchado de sangre,
Y que hay desesperanza
En los ojos
de sus niños.
Cuando me preguntaron
“¿Entonces, como es?”
Les dije solamente
“Es mi tierra.”

--Vivimarie VanderPoorten, c 2008 traducción Indran Amirthanayagam

VISITING GIANTS

On the first outing that summer
To Giant’s Causeway
Remnant of an ancient volcanic eruption
Ascending those perfect
Octagonal stones
Contemplating precision
Of shape
Full of wonder at the natural world,
I was asked by a
Perfectly beautiful
family-of-four,
- tourists from America
where I was from:
I answered.

“Which part of Africa is that?”
So I explained
That it’s the island
Shaped like a teardrop
off the coast of India:
I didn’t say
That it has a splendid past
But no future
That its rich soil
Is drenched in blood
And that there’s hopelessness
In the eyes
of its children.
When they asked me
“So what’s it like”
I only said
“It’s home”

-- c) 2008 ViviMarie VanderPoorten

ON ISLANDS, CAVAFY AND JEN HADFIELD

2008-03-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

ON ISLANDS , CAVAFY AND JEN HADFIELD

I have been searching for islands since I left Ceylon in 1969. Ceylon no longer exists and not because of a rising ocean. Even the ravenous Tsunami of 2004 has gone back to its lair and islanders are picking up flotsam and getting on with their lives. What else are we supposed to do? Birth, love, death, a glance back sometimes, and blinkered, hatted, we march ahead

When I left the island I did not realize I carried it with me. I think of Cavafy and his bitter poem called The City, that “you will find no new lands, you will find no other seas/The city will follow you. You will roam the same/streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods.” Cavafy becomes even more acerbic as the poem goes on. He says “there is no ship for you, there is no road.” (translation: Rae Dalven)

But of course there is always a ship, always a road. Like Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen,” Cavafy’s powerful melancholy challenges us. But we do not have to listen. We can choose to ignore the poets' instructions.

And so can all musicians, painters, playwrights, every manner and species of artist fit for the new Ark. If we take Auden and Cavafy to the letter we would pack up our pencils and laptops and disappear. Even Kilroy would not choose to go for a walk.

In the course of my walking about, and thanks to writer Marie Carter, I came across poems of Jen Hadfield. Hadfield lives in the Shetland Islands. But she wanders about Canada in some of her latest book Nigh-No-Place. Spending time with her poems has taken me on a most pleasant journey, past Ithaca and back. She says in “No Snow fell on Eden,” “Eve knew no one who was dying/Adam never sat up late, drinking and crying.”

That is a beaut of a rhyme and full of the sadness of cold and remote climates. Hadfield has a deft ear for the sounds of windswept places. “I will meet you at Pity Me Wood./I will meet you at Up-To-No-Good./I will meet you at Stank, Shank and Stye./I will meet you at Blowfly.”

She has a wicked sense of humor and an ear tuned to fine lilts and jigs in the English language. Here is

Thou Shalt Want Want Want

It is in heaven as it is on thy neighbour’s deck—
a plume-tailed cat, a noodle-legged tin table.

You will covet your neighbour’s horse
and you will covet your neighbour’s land.

You will covet your neighbour,
crawling the apex with a blue tarp in tow.

You will covet bandshaws and braziers,
longbows and throwing knives,

parlour guitars,
shovels snuffling three feet of snow.

You will covet your neighbour,
planting a spittoon for the rain to hawk into.

You will covet your neighbour, hunched over the piano stool
to hammer out the wild, piratical waltzes.

You will covet polkas, quails,
painted pitchforks, a picket fence, a Dutch barn.

a chafing dish, a bain marie,
a kid, a civet, a trivet;

you must have a bodkin, an empire pram.

Thou shalt want want want.
You will covet your neighbour’s ass.

Thou shalt covet Warmbloods,
Arabians.

--c) 2008, Jen Hadfield, from Nigh-No-Place ( BloodAxe Books )

If I may be so bold: I covet the poetry of Jen Hadfield.

LAUREN MENDINUETA: SEIS POEMAS

2008-03-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

Fue dificil para mi hacer una selección de la poesía de la colombiana Lauren Mendinueta por haber tenido que elegir entre tantos poemas poderosos. Recien descubrí su voz y sus intereses y he estado leyendo sus poemas durante días y noches sin fin. Lee muy bien y de tradiciones unidas por su concentración en el oficio solitario y sin compromiso del monje poeta. Me dió gusto ver el poema dedicado a Thomas Merton, el monje que fue el guia de Ernesto Cardenal en el monasterio de Gethsemane en Kentucky. Además Merton era un poeta político y filosófico, uno de los mejores anunciadores de esos años de profetas, de los sesentas de Bob Dylan y Allen Ginsberg y John Lennon. Hay varios poemas sobre el oficio del poeta, la poesía, la creación y la muerte en la antología Poesia en si misma que reune versos escritos durante 10 anos (1997-2007). En fin decidí presentar seis poemas con mi recomendación sin reserva de buscar este libro y otros de la poeta radicada ahora en Portugal.

RELATO DE VIDA

Antes de estos poemas
la claridad de los astros.
En otro tiempo En otro lugar
la transparencia de la música
dentro de mí.

Me deslicé
entre las piernas de la tierra
y al primer aniversario
le siguieron otros.
La tarde se volvió
una estación pequeña del día.

La memoria me dice que existo
y aunque soy un punto
sobre la tierra
no me encontraré en los mapas.

Soy sana
como un árbol en el cementerio.
Estoy hecha
de la más antigua levadura
y sin dificultad me multiplico.

Mi descendencia tiene las manos desnudas
y anudadas a la tristeza.

Ignoro completamente mi destino
a pesar de llevarlo indeleble
en las líneas de las manos.

EL CLIMA DE LAS CAMPANAS

No distingo un golpe del siguiente o el anterior,
y si escuché una campana en Paris
lo mismo la recuerdo como si fuera en Barranquilla.
¿Qué cosa distingue un aire de otro?
¿Qué sonido volará hasta lo que soy
para dar cuenta de lo que he sido?
Soy la mujer que más he detestado,
incapaz de hacerlo como lo merezco,
me detesto con tibieza.
Hay un repicar de nada contra nada,
un clima de campana en mi oído.

EL ÁRBOL DE ORO

El árbol de oro transforma la apariencia del paisaje.
Lo que nosotros llamamos naturaleza está ahí,
pero la vida del árbol le trajo un relieve,
una claridad que antes no tenía.
Crecen en sus ramas resplandores sin sol,
y sus altas luces obligan a mirar hacia arriba,
hacia la amplitud del cielo,
que él, con la delicadeza de sus hojas, resalta.
Su firme presencia
hace visible el espacio invisible del aire.

REPRESENTACIÓN TEATRAL

Los telones de la realidad
se levantan temblorosos
sobre mi enlutado país.
Un coro de espectadores,
la vida del mundo,
espera el inicio de la representación,
pero no escuchará el parlamento de tanto actor,
ni verá sus bocas enormes
que se abren en un gesto desesperado;
sus ojos vacíos, de invitado importante,
no verán el fondo.
Sólo el recuerdo intemporal conoce los libretos.
Porque lo sabe, la memoria calla lo perdido.
Estoy aquí sobre el escenario y sufro:
nada sé del anónimo silencio
que ignoro otra vez.

VIDA MONACAL

El alma es un cristal y la divinidad su brillo.
Ángelus Silesius

En el claustro de la memoria
los monjes caminan con hábitos ondulantes como el agua,
no puedo verlos pero escucho la vocación de las olas.

La adoración exige templos y deberes,
un canto que narre a quien lo escuche
la gloria que asoma en lo real.

En el silencio del deambulatorio
la paciente maduración de la hoja
que abandona el árbol,
deseosa de entrar sola en el misterio.

Para Thomas Merton

VISITA TURÍSTICA

Estoy en medio de una Acrópolis nunca visitada.
Aquí, señores, en Atenas,
existió cuanto el hombre creyó posible:
La civilización, decrépita hoy, pavoneándose
más espléndida que ninguna antaño.
Me estremece saber que fue diseñada noble,
astuta como Cécrope,
útil para el culto y propicia para el cuerpo
de los graciosos adolescentes griegos.
Todo esto fue antes de que yo caminara entre sus ruinas.
Me sobrecoge lo que en la Acrópolis ya no es,
y me siento aún más pequeña
perdida en mi insuperable condición humana.
Me conmueve la armonía de sus formas,
me intimida la grandeza de sus espacios,
pero lo que más me asusta es el tiempo
que como un niño la derribó a patadas.

c) 2008 Lauren Mendinueta

JUAN CARLOS GOMEZ RECINOS, CUATRO POEMAS

2008-03-03T11:05:00.000-08:00

Juan Carlos Gomez Recinos vive en Colima, México. No conozco sus lares pero he vivido y viajado en otras tierras mexicanas y estoy seguro que si los poetas que he encontrado y que se han convertido en mis amigos podrían agarrar aún una porción mínima de la visión y energía de este poeta natural, ambiciosa, listo para abrazar de nuevo al mundo con una retórica aprendida de los grandes, de Neruda principalmente, de Borges…no habrá necesidad para llorar sobre la muerte del poeta y su evicción de la plaza pública. En unas semanas van a ser editados sus primeros dos libros ¡Imaginate, gemelos y a los veinti- tantos años…y premios…y pronto una editorial….y lectores en todas partes! Le felicito a Juan Carlos Gomez Recinos, la poeta igual de ésplendida Ana Gabriel, su esposa y co-conspiradora en el arte medicinal de mantener sano, y salvo de extinción premadura, la poesía y sus poetas. Aqui van cuatro poemas de uno de estos nuevos libros “Art Poetica.”

Los enamorados lloran como ausentes,
anticipando el último día.
Hoy los vi en la horizontal isla,
con los ojos interrogados, con sus baúles viejos.
Son vistosos al sentir la primavera,
hacen el amor ebrios, con pájaros y flores,
se reconocen en un incendio sinfónico,
en el nimio litoral de sus acompasados sexos.

Se funden en un Adán y Eva,
a goterones lentos, zumbando su dulce alegría.

*

Conviene que la sombra
escuche la voluntad del relámpago,
con su silencio espeso.

Te recuerdo al amanecer del día,
inmóvil como las estrellas,
con salvajes besos que se anclan
a mi nuca, y débilmente, esta noche
de palabras confusas, necesita
de poetas y biógrafos.

*
Esto es mi carne temblando,
extraviada en tu cuerpo.

Hay peces sin escama,
palabras, voces nocturnas
empapadas de licor.

Tus ojos parecen practicar
su vuelo, en mi atento silencio.

*

Tu vientre:
ciudad y templo,
río y cascada.

Eres relámpago de colibrí.
Mis palabras cantan tu nombre
en silencio, y un Dios justo
entra en este poema.

De mi oficio, tu nombre,
mis ojos ciegos.

La noche tiembla desnuda
tu ausencia, en un perpetuo
planeta inocente, persigue tu carne.

-- de Art Poetico, c) 2008 Juan Carlos Gomez Recinos

WORDS FOR A PRESS CONFERENCE, GALLE, JANUARY 16, 2008

2008-02-28T11:30:00.000-08:00

I returned from Sri Lanka last month. At the Galle Literary Festival I was asked to speak to reporters about the relationship of the festival to Sri Lankan readers and writers abroad. Here are my remarks:

Words For a Press Conference, Galle, January 2008

At times I have trouble in the diaspora. I don’t know all the rules. There are so many groups gathered in the world’s cities. Do we share the same mother? Have we been weaned to long for the same distant father? I have been asked to reflect on the possibilities that this festival engenders for Sri Lankan readers and writers throughout the world. I remember sitting in my office at the Embassy in Abidjan one morning in 1998 when I got a call from the front desk. A countryman had come to visit. Out of the blue. He invited me to his flat in Treichville. On the wall I saw the blue sea off Trincomalee and the curries were finely spiced, lentiled and mutton hot. The young men in that flat arrived via the Middle East; had stowed away on ships bound for the remote West African coast where another Tamil representing the United States had come to rest.

How to make sense of these multiple loyalties, carrying cards from birthplace, landing status in one of the Schengen countries, the euro? How about—in dancing with locals-- forgetting slowly that jarring speech, treacle and curd, called the mother tongue?

But we are here to celebrate a different mother. Yes, we are children of many diverse parents. This particular long haired beauty rode a white horse stark naked into my dreamery. Godiva, Mary Queen of Scotts, Twiggy. But the sexual is only a partial answer to the pleasures of exile, the adoption of the new tongue. Certainly, for many of us it has been a very old tongue, passed down from missionary teachers through generations, or whipped up by a dedicated colonial servant. But the language has been made Ceylonese, jellied up in a Christmas cake or a bruda, pickled by Malays. I put my poems in the dickey the other day along with my sarong. But I forget. I need to return to the island to stock up on the Sri Lankan English language.

So this festival can encourage the return of the island’s diasporas, to have them come back for cutlets and tea, to walk upon Galle Face Green, to visit the bird sanctuaries and climb Adam’s Peak.

But then how to fend off the accusation of being a tourist, a visitor in one’s own country? I wish rather that we would be made to feel at home, our Sri Lankan roots honored with national identity cards, recognition that even living abroad we are welcome and continue to be citizens of this island.

Another ideal I wish to pursue is the notion of the Garden of Eden, paradise on earth. In 1948 we numbered 8 million; we have doubled that and continue on the way up—around 20 million according to Wikipedia. At the same time, we cull our elephants, shoot monkeys, scissor thalagoyas, and keep cobras at bay. We grow our own ecologists, and persevere in trying to keep some of the other species alive, but we cede our tropical hard woods to the top bidder. There is of course a defensible logic to development, the need to feed and clothe and prosper. Yet, in this conference dedicated also to reflection on the climate, let us think about Sri Lankans abroad and how we can help in the preservation struggle, contribute a bit of Sri Lankan sun vision to the ecological challenges of our host countries.

So many words….we will hear a lot these days. Not enough I say, not enough colored by the particular variant of English modified on a tear of the Indian Ocean-- this Ceylon, this Sri Lanka we love and want to see at peace with itself. Let us work to make that peace. Let us remove from the stage the possessed beast whirling and whirring in a fevered dance trying to find and eat its own tail. Let us make commerce with metaphors, and let us talk sense, and over drinks, nonsense.

-- c) 2008 Indran Amirthanayagam

Will Launch The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems in the US, at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, March 1, 7.30 pm

2008-02-28T11:21:00.001-08:00

Elliott Bay Books sent me the following. If you're to be in Seattle this weekend, do come:

INDRAN AMIRTHANAYAGAM Saturday, March 1 at 7:30 p.m.

Noted poet, essayist, and U.S. Foreign Service Officer Indran Amirthanayagam makes his way down from his present north-of-the-border Vancouver home to give his first U.S. reading for his newest collection, The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose). Born in Sri Lanka, raised in London and Hawai'i, he is a poet who writes in English, French, and Spanish, has been published in the U.S., Mexico, and Sri Lanka, and whose accolades include a fellowship with the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Paterson Prize, a U.S./Mexico Fund for Culture award for his translations of the work of Manuel Ulacia, and more.

"These poems both about those who died in, and those who survived the Tsunami of 2004, memorialize with anger and beauty one of the most devastating tragedies of our time. In its largeness of heart, bold artistry, and admireable desire to bear witness, Amirthanayagam's consoling, life-affirming, and triumphant volume reminds me of Neruda's great Residence on Earth." - Jaime Manrique.

TROIS POEMES DE JOANNE MORENCY

2008-02-20T19:24:00.001-08:00

J’ai connu Joanne Morency à Trois-Rivières l’année dernière pendant le festival international de poésie qui est célébré dans cette ville chaque septembre. Nous nous sommes rencontrés dans un parc où quelques jeunes étaient en train de présenter des poèmes « hip-hop ». Les poètes se reconnaissent dans les parcs publics. Il y a des signes formels : les cahiers, les lunettes, le visage béni par la lumière intérieure. Et l’on trouve aussi ce désir d’apprendre les secrets du langage, de saisir l’esprit dans les mots qui prennent leur vol comme le petit oiseau que j’ai vu ce jour-là, assis sur le trottoir, objet de la sympathie humaine jusqu'au geste de lui donner une petite tasse d’eau. À ce moment-là de rapprochement humain, l’oiseau s’enfuit, bondit vite comme une illumination d’idée, une épiphanie.

Dans les poèmes de Joanne Morency, je trouve un lien très beau entre le langage et les inquiétudes de l’humanité, entre les mystères des mots et les charpentiers, les poètes qui doivent saisir l’esprit du bois, pour faire des oiseaux, petits ou pas, afin que nos enfants puissent jouer, pour toujours, dans un écosystème balancé.

Extraits de : Qui donc est capable de tant de clarté ? de Joanne Morency, Prix Piché de Poésie 2007, dans « Poèmes du lendemain 16 », Écrits des Forges, 2007
-----------------------

j’ai vidé mes boîtes
une à une
de chaque petit morceau d’autrui

il n’y a pas de porte entre les idées d’en arrière
et celles d’en avant

la nuit
les gens se déplacent à leur insu

j’envoie les changements d’adresse

* * *

la seule idée d’un mouvement
façonne l’espace autour de soi

le vent
même s’il l’ignore
obéit aux branches

dans une maison
sans murs ni plafond
des mains se sculptent un homme

j’assiste à la multiplication

* * *

quand la noirceur tourne sur elle-même
il n’y a qu’à sauter de montagne en montagne

mais comment distinguer
le haut
du bas
dans le ciel ?

il arrive que l’on tombe en haut

* * *

Two Review: A Poetry and Nonfiction Journal from Anchorage, Alaska

2008-02-20T11:12:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking again about how poetry thrives in the little magazines, the whispered conversations that take place between furtive poetry lovers throughout the 50 United States and beyond. I have yet to visit Anchorage or go further into the white capes of Alaska. From that space comes Two Review, "an independent, limited edition journal of poetry and nonfiction." The journal publishes writers from beyond the steppes. It reminds us that we are all marooned on private glaciers and that we need visitors. The poems in the journal have been my guests over the last weeks. They have opened my eyes again to the bitter and the sweet in human experience. Here is a poem by Sean Brendan-Brown, a poet based in Olympia, Washington. This story haunts me, the punch in its last lines. Now, don't jump ahead! Read the poem in order. I have a hunch it will make you glad and sad and you will feel a little less alone.

KING OF WOUNDS

He worked our ranch since before I was born—
more uncle than hired hand—Pawnee,
changed his name to King of Wounds
after Korea. Part serious, part joke.
He believed fighting the Chinese
had changed his vision forever at Chosin;
the vision he had at fourteen of a black owl
flying loop-the-loops around a waxing red moon,
talons clutching a shrieking white rabbit.

His name then had been Johnny No-Horses.
He returned from Korea with a cigar-box
of medals, face & chest as scarred
as Frankenstein, but with enough disability
pension it didn’t matter no one wanted Indians.

King of Wounds. Odd even among men
reluctant to judge. He rode his circuit
of fence at night when cattle broke out
or men in; he loved stars and meteor showers,
considered insomnia a blessing.

A beautiful woman once lured him
to the city. Tried to give him everything.
They had a good time and he even wore
the pearl button shirts she bought him.
But at evening’s end, she went home alone.
When I’d heard the story enough from others
I asked him about it, and all he said was
on those barren islands
they die, blamed and blaming.

-- Sean Brendan-Brown, from Two Review, 2007

THE PAST: A POLITICAL POEM BY INDRAN AMIRTHANAYAGAM

2008-02-16T17:43:00.000-08:00

As we engage fully in the presidential race in the United States I thought I'd dust off and revise a poem from 1996 about a trade unionist from what's now known as Old Labor. The U.K., the United States and other liberal democracies may wish to ponder what the fellow has to say:

THE PAST

English trade
unionist
and hoary
member
of Old
Labor
testifies
as ornithologist:

It’s like
a bird.
It has a right
wing
and a left
wing.
If it loses
a wing,

it has only
one wing,
and
plummets
to the ground.
You CAN’T
fly with one
wing.

-- Indran Amirthanayagam, c) 2008

BELEAGUERED NEAR THE SEA: A POEM BY GUY AMIRTHANAYAGAM

2008-02-10T22:48:00.000-08:00

My father, Guy Amirthanayagam, spoke to me once about this dark meditation, this elemental study of reason and madness. I believe he wrote it in his youth and the ocean must have been the same one that led Neruda to his own melancholic and foreboding lapping of sea water in Residence on Earth.

I can’t think of a stronger opening to a poem than the hammering in the brain and desperate rush to seek solace in a calm sea, and as I think incessantly about the tsunami, “the still older tide” turning evil that—in some strange way--my father prefigured in these verses.

BELEAGUERED NEAR THE SEA

As the old, primal images
Kept drumming in my brain,
I went to the land’s edges
To assuage my pain.
The calm sea stretched its hand
Bathed me in felicity.
My cut mind in balmy waters
Regained its unity
Till the still older tide turned
Evil, pushed me back to land
Gasping in sanity.

Guy Amirthanayagam, Selected Poems, Ceylon Printers, Colombo, 2002

SOBRE EL NEOBARROCO: UN POEMA DE INDRAN AMIRTHANAYAGAM

2008-02-05T12:19:00.000-08:00

Escribí este poema después de una visita a Monterrey en Octubre 2005 del maestro José Emilio Pacheco. Me interesa mucho el imaginismo. No creo que sea necesario buscar la palabra rebuscada más bien seria genial ver la belleza desnuda con sus colores primarios: rojo, bermellón, sangre. Esta poesía me agita, me despierta, me da animo para afrontar la noche sin fin, andar en el amanecer brillante.

SOBRE EL NEOBARROCO
--para José Emilio Pacheco

Se me acerca el vaquero
con sombrero arco iris
y la mujer se pasea
con su armadillo--
estamos en la Alameda—
esto es surrealismo.

Un hombre medio calvo
me dirige la palabra
con preguntas comestibles
sobre duraznos,

O dame mil veces
ese retrato de la estación
del metro y su llovizna
de pétalos blancos.

Pero ¿dónde dejé
los oídos para escuchar
la música asfixiada
si no resucitada
de estos embalsamadores

que tocan el tambor
de Góngora
ensuciado a propósito
con cenizas modernistas?

Les felicito
su reconquista
de la lengua
y regreso
a la página blanca,
el dibujo del hombre,
el árbol, el sol.

c) 2008 Indran Amirthanayagam

BEYOND THE BACKYARD: REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN POETRY

2008-02-01T12:45:00.000-08:00

An Esssay by Indran Amirthanayagam c) 2008

Midnight has passed and I wonder still how to speak about the backyard. How could I have let the grass, weeds and bracken grow so thick? There must be all sorts of insects, butterflies and rodents flying and scampering about….rivers with mysterious Indian names: Orinoco, Amazon, Parana…gold, shawls and quixotic guerrillas with masked faces….a few Nobel laureates as well celebrated on birthdays and prize days and in some houses on ordinary Sundays. How to speak of people, squat and brown in highlands, where the air fails to deliver oxygen to the bones, and tall and bronzed on the beaches of Rio and on the cobblestones of Cartagena. How to speak of a continent which I know through poems and fictions, where I have set foot in just a few places, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, El Salvador.

I came to Latin America following Neruda back home. He had been consul in my birth country in the 1920s, set up house in a then pristine Wellawatte, where he entertained a mongoose and assorted visitors from the multiple ethnic groups of the richly hued island. Neruda wrote Residencia en la Tierra when not kept company in that blindingly-lit island where the sun’s rays shone through decorum and clothes: “That Ceylon light gave me life/gave me death at the same time/because living inside a diamond/is a solitary lesson in being buried/is like turning into a transparent bird,/a spider who spins the sky and says goodbye.” He wrote from that solitude of the diamond while gazing upon the wild surf on the Southern beach. Later in life, he sought that surf again, in Isla Negra, Chile where he set up a dream house and wrote “That Light,” one of the poems from his book of memories: Isla Negra: a notebook.

I first learned of Neruda from a fellow Sri Lankan, J, whom I met in Honolulu in the early 80s. J had been imprisoned on a political charge for six years in the island but had access to hundreds of books from the Red Cross. He read all of them including a selection of Neruda. I was presented then to Latin American poetry as one of resistance, read by political prisoners in jail. How lovely to discover that the resistance rose out of a profound sense of love and loss—I think of Neruda’s 20 love poems: “tonight I can write the saddest lines…love is short, forgetting is long.”—and that this Spanish language writer was indeed singing the whole of America with his ample throat.

Neruda was a monster, to use the Latin American phrase to describe a great figure, one who changed the landscape or named it for the first time. Whitman had that kind of reach in the United States and throughout human history we find in all cultures some version of the epic poet. Yet, what Neruda gave us was infinite variety, from the surreal complexities of Residence on Earth, to the ever popular odes to common things like onions and shoes, to the great work of his late period, the zen-like distilled and impossible inquiries of The Book of Questions.

I begin with Neruda because he served as my Spanish Virgil leading me through the circles of America (while Whitman had that role in English). Of course, I say America to include the whole continent, even Canada at the risk of falling into perhaps a false idealism. I also should dispel with that polemic and silly notion of the backyard. I will say it in a sentence. The backyard exists only for those who wish to persist in the folly of making distinctions between peoples and positing one set of influences above another. I realize the sentence has become a bit long. Let me try again. The backyard is a misleading invention of the smug and mediocre fellow who can’t see beyond his own red, white and blue nose. One more attempt: the backyard exists only in the mind.

I come from Sri Lanka but I am resident in the front yard of my house, seated on a canvass chair, with a book of poetry in my hand along with a pipe. I also have a sign. It says I have arrived (along with countless other immigrants). And we too are America.
I also advocate Whitman’s contradictory impulses—“I am grand, I contain multitudes.” This is a useful posture to assess the conversation between North American and Latin American poetry. And I believe there is a conversation despite what some Spanish language poets tell me almost every day.

The naysayers are of course poets who have access to both North and South. They are often resident at US universities and move in a subculture of Latin American literature that circulates through the fifty states. Of course, Whitman’s boast also includes the idea that all groups have a role in America, even Latin American literature hands, as present company demonstrates.

So these friends tell me that US poetry, the sort written in English, does not draw inspiration from reading contemporary Latin American poets. Of course, this is hard to defend when looking at reality with a microscope. Countless festivals take place in Latin America with US poets invited or self-invited. They come to read and listen, break bread, exchange books, and go back to the fifty states with the sounds of contemporary Latin American poets buzzing in their ears. Now, I agree that some of these US poets know little Spanish and find themselves marooned at these festivals, dependent on a translator and bemused by the vast numbers of gathered poets.

There is no greater discouragement for the poor listener or reader than to be obliged to confront round table after round table with five or six poets on each one. My mentor at university used to ask me if I could imagine for 10 seconds the awful implications of the atomic bomb—ten seconds of pure concentrated thought. In the case of poets I would have to say that 120 minutes marks my limit for a day, the rest of which I can spend in reading them quietly back in my room, or as some awfully impolite fellow bards have done, leave the twenty pounds of donated verse in their rooms for the cleaning ladies and the not so amused organizers of the festival.

I mention festivals to point out that reality is always more complex than the popular and emotional feeling of being left out, of belonging to a minor stream within the United States. Why do we worry so much about our place in the conversation? I suppose receiving an invitation to a conference, especially if the ticket has been paid, assuages one’s ego, fortifies the idea of having some expertise, some unique knowledge to share.

Having purchased my own plane ticket I take the Whitman approach—the Whitman who self-published various editions of Leaves of Grass—who had to hawk his poetry as some poets and critics gathered here. Come out of the closet those of you who paid for your own books. No harm in a bit of investment in your own future. Here we can agree to engage in those ancient practices among insecure and ignored poets, namely execution of M.A. and M.D. The acronyms mean Mutual Appreciation, and in the case of poets safely dead or engaged in such horrors as writing simple, declarative sentences, Mutual Destruction. But of course the mutual is a fiction in the latter as the attacked poet is indeed very dead, although he may have been a monster in his time—I think of Ezra Pound for example with his early lyrics or the T.S. Eliot of Prufrock—subject to diatribes by some contemporary poets tired of his overreaching influence like hearing 15 hours straight of heavy metal music during an interrogation session that otherwise features four hours of brightly-lit and broken sleep and a few minutes of temptation when a member of the opposite sex straddles the poor prisoner and reads neo-baroque verse.

I refuse, by the way, to endorse any particular candidate for the title of monster except of course the usual, and most likely dead ones, that we all know and have incorporated into our languages: Neruda, Borges, Vallejo, Paz, Huidobro. And I mean both our principal languages, as these poets have helped shaped both English and Spanish sensibility. I imagine they have also shaped poets who write in some of the indigenous tongues. An urbane and yet mythologically-rooted poet like Natalia Toledo writes in zapotec and Spanish, and I have a hunch has incorporated the monsters into her incantatory zapotec. There are also living masters, Parra, Pacheco. There are great novelists who have poetry in them: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fernando Vallejo. And there are fine upcoming poets who deserve wide readership: the Argentine Ariel Schettini, the Mexicans Jose Eugenio Sanchez and Julian Herbert and others here united.

I understand that the age of the dinosaurs has passed. I think of Jose Donoso’s novel Donde Van a Morir los Elefantes (Where the Elephants Go to Die). I don’t have a copy of the novel but understand that the elephants or monsters end up on obscure American campuses, removed from the hurly burly of Rio or Santiago, Mexico City or Havana, not to mention Los Angeles or New York. Here their only tasks are to bicycle about between classes and guide graduate students on theses and of course teach, try to preserve the collective memory, to include even Eliot and Pound, and to mention someone now forgotten, Conrad Aiken.

How many Latin Americans know Conrad Aiken? I think concern that the conversation goes one way is misguided. With the exception of John Ashbery and a poet like Charles Simic who writes in an easily translated style, few contemporary Latin American poets know new poems by contemporary American poets like Mary Oliver or Louise Gluck or Sherman Alexie. Again, translators keep busy and microscopic examination can always reveal new strands of conversation in and between the Americas. The NEA collaborated with Mexico’s Conaculta recently to publish two bilingual anthologies of Mexican and American poets. So Sherman Alexie is now part of Spanish language poetry. Writing programs—inspired by the U.S.’s MFA—have sprung up now in important universities like Diego Portales in Santiago, while transnational poetry movements have expanded thanks to the internet. In 2002, a UN-mandated Dialogue Among Civilizations led to coordinated poetry readings in hundreds of cities around the world on the same day. I organized one in Chennai, India where I had been posted at the time. A vina player strummed in between the poets. A bharata natyam dancer turned head and hands with fast and deft gestures. The evening became a feast of cross pollination between different art forms.

I like these global events. They help dispel solitude and the feeling of being left off the head table. Let us put all the poets at the head table. Let us write vigorously and with economy and clarity. Let us display our linguistic prowess and our common sense. Let us work to create a public television channel in Spanish in the United States. Let us move Univision and Telemundo towards creating a conversation with authors series. Let us work in our communities and globally to increase readership for poetry. And yes, let us have standards. “Let us go, then you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky/like a patient etherized upon a table.” Let us advocate clear and searing metaphors. And let us always support the translators. Alastair Reid educated me about Neruda and Borges. Rae Dalven brought me Cavafy in high flown and demotic registers. Cavafy became Cavafis in the Spanish of Cayetano Cantu.

I mention Cavafy to remind all of us that our influences are catholic and have no end. We are poets shaped by the sun, wind and stars, by the books we read in original tongues and in translation. And we must put our queer and straight shoulders to the wheel. There is much to do and little time. We can stretch that time if we take our neighbor as our reader and not resign ourselves to communication between specialists in university refuges.

I believe poets should exercise their social obligations as bards of “the past, what is passing, and what is to come”. They should write frequently to the opinion pages, contribute book reviews, insist that newspapers like the LA Times return to writing about poetry. Surely, a bit of advocacy would help, a letter writing campaign, even contacts with House and Senate representatives. April was the cruelest month but is now the month when poetry is celebrated all over the United States. Let’s find other hooks to capture the imagination of our peoples. And let’s not be snooty about our secretaries and oil rig workers, fishmongers and bus conductors. We belong to them as much as the Medicis. In fact, we belong to neither. We are our own society within the larger society and we have our charge, self-appointed perhaps, but powerful. Auden, Ginsberg and Neruda should serve as our models-- la poesie engagé but written with vigorous and fresh metaphors to be etched in the hearts and minds of readers and listeners.

Let me finish with a sampler from three poets who gladden the imagination and make me feel confident about the new Latin American generation. These poets read the United States and will be read in the United States. The wave has already begun to move the sand. Julian Herbert’s poems were featured in the last Americas issue of BOMB magazine. Jose Eugenio Sanchez has just returned from Iowa and publications in US magazines and acclaim on US stages. Ariel Schettini, an earlier Iowa grad, returned to Argentina to be a poet, critic and reader of the Americas from his perch on Arenales Street in Buenos Aires. I expect to see his work come out in English very soon. I have taken the liberty of translating the poems. Here is Ariel Schettini’s The Annunciation

THE ANNUNCIATION

I do not know if he was an alien or angel
(but surely he came from outer space).
He looked at me without knowing
if I was a genius or charlatan.
He needed a description
and I gave it to him,
because I thought
that everything wandering up there
wants to know how. Besides
I only had descriptions.
When I could no longer speak, he told me:
I am sick. I know, I know, I told him.
And that night we made love
because the rest was the enemy
and sex appeared the only safe thing to do.
He told me: I am sick. This is war. No?
I replied: No. No, I told him.

I could have fallen for that alien
as easily as I could have not.
Afterwards, he told me:
I am sick. And I could not make
a pact.
But I kept watch
over the imaginary night
like those who fear and wait
for life in space.
He left like the dead, or thieves
or the nun in The Sound of Music:
without a farewell.
I don’t know if he was an artist,
the kind that give reasons for
trips to the planets.
But that night I saw
him kiss the world
as if he was kissing me.

--c) 2008 Ariel Schettini, trans. Indran Amirthanayagam

NEW YORK WAS LEFT SUDDENLY
WITHOUT JOSEPH BRODSKY

an old car guffaws by
a trembling fellow offers what you want
prostitutes in overcoats huddle together against the wind
some uniformed gents leave a bar completely smashed
a vagabond stretches out his hand
at street’s end a police patrol car
lights up as it moves slowly to the right
a couple leaves the theater
two black men speak to each other
and in the shop window in front
a pair of silk socks
hang silently
they seem more indispensable than us.

--c) 2008 Jose Eugenio Sanchez, trans. Indran Amirthanayagam

THE ASS’S HEXAGRAM

What’s to say of an ass?
I never said a thing.

An ass stood next to Leticia’s mouth:
his ardor sprang from the moon
and he scratched
against me furiously.
There was an ass in Juan Luis’ house
and they charged us five pesos to ride him.
I never rode him.
There was one swollen and black floating in a stream,
another very yellow in an Arctic dream,
and the ass of the comic strips,
and an ass a little crosseyed in Gabriela’s gaze
looking over its shoulder from a country of scent.

Ass.
So beastly this word
that it disgusts me still. How to found
the angels’ flight in a back kick.
How to be the fur and chew
upon the blinking
of a sonorous breath among the sunflowers.
Without carriage drivers or feats, hardly honeycombed
by modesty
or a girl’s insolence.
Without laws or allegory, just submerged
in the copperish afternoon
like a train by Turner.

The sameness—I never told you—
this same ass
detained in his rat-colored skin
in front of a vulgar backdrop of green stalks.
The pleasure of living like an animal and striving
but bitter
like the sage or the laurel.

-- c) 2008 Julian Herbert, trans. Indran Amirthanayagam

If you use any quotes from this article or from any of the poems on this blog, please advise the author via this blog or by email (address in the Author's Profile)

READING TONIGHT AT THE RAILWAY CLUB, VANCOUVER

2008-01-29T07:38:00.000-08:00

I will read tonight from the Splintered Face Tsunami Poems at the Railyway Club, 579 Dunsmuir, in Vancouver. The Railway Club is a very agreeable place for a drink and a poem. The evening begins about 7 pm with a number of poets and writers each on for 15 minutes. I will read around 8 pm. For those of you in the Vancouver area, do come!

ON CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN POETRY: A LECTURE

2008-01-21T05:54:00.001-08:00

I will deliver a lecture on contemporary Latin American poetry at the American Centre on Galle Road in Colombo, on Wednesday January 23rd at 6 p.m. Some months ago I was invited to a gathering on poetry in the Americas and I have for some time thought about the idea of seeing Latin American poetry from the vantage point of its Northern neighbor. I will post the lecture here in due course.

For the moment, let me leave you with the first paragraph

Midnight has passed and I wonder still how to speak about the backyard. How could I have let the grass, weeds and bracken grow so thick? There must be all sorts of insects, butterflies and rodents flying and scampering about...rivers with mysterious Indian names: Orinoco, Amazon, Parana...gold, shawls and quixotic guerrillas with masked faces...a few Nobel Laureates as well celebrated on birthdays and prize days and in some houses on ordinary Sundays. How to speak of people, squat and brown in highlands, where the air fails to deliver oxygen to the bones, and tall and bronzed on the beaches of Rio and on the cobblestones of Cartagena. How to speak of a continent which I know through poems and fictions, where I have set foot in just a few places, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, El Salvador. "

-- from Beyond The Backyard: Reflections on Contemporary Latin American Poetry c) 2008 Indran Amirthanayagam

DECREE NISI: A POEM BY VIVIMARIE VANDERPOORTEN

2008-01-21T05:54:00.000-08:00

The Galle Literary Festival has finished, but with a wonderful sense of hope, and a drive to keep metaphors and stories flowing throughout the days and weeks ahead until the time comes round to gather up writers and readers again in the Fort in 2009.

I was pleased to leave with a strong book of poems in hand, Nothing Prepares You, by Sri Lankan poet Vivimarie VanderPoorten. It's a first book full of poems written with a deft storyteller's ear, fine in their apparently casual rhythms, but carrying potent emotional punches to heart and head for those moments when the reader starts to think more about the words just consumed.

Here is Decree Nisi which means "the provisional order indicating that the court is satisfied that the ground for divorce has been established."

Today a judge in a musty courtroom
Will decide that
we can no longer live together,
you and i.
He will declare our marriage
Terminated,
Transform us into strangers. Again.

You are brave to be there.
Solicitous girlfriends-
lawyers-
told me Not to Go.
So, hiding away
from lecherous glances
(surmising, behind hands over mouths)
and out of sight of
invasive State,
I have time to recall
some good times we had.

Countries visited, miles driven, wild life watched in still
forests
meals shared, moments of tenderness,
some laughter, even.

But enough of that.
Now, since I cannot desert you maliciously,
And adultery is no longer a crime we can commit,
Perhaps we could be friends again.

--Vivimarie VanderPoorten, c) 2007, Nothing Prepares You

SERGIO ASTORGA, PINTOR, POETA

2008-01-13T15:37:00.000-08:00

Este cuadro se titula El Abrazo, el poema abajo, Algun Diseno. Vienen de mi amigo, poeta y pintor, Sergio Astorga.

Conocí a Sergio en una plaza en la Ciúdad de México en 1999 donde exponía sus obras.

Ahora, se los ven en mi casa, en las casas de mis padres y de mi hijo.

Sergio pinta en Portugal. Ay compañero, te agradezco tu abrazo.

Algún Diseño

Algún diseño de tulipa
hoy la tarde tiene.
Incurables sauces
abandonan sus dolencias,
y aquellos huérfanos paisajes
de la sierra dejan su plegaria trunca.

Algo que no eres tú se esfuma
solitario a contra luz por la ventana,
y hueca y desabrida, una lluvia
moja las calles caminadas.

Bermejo es hoy el caracol del frío.
Yo espero que la niebla cenicienta
despeine, al pronunciar tu nombre,
esta helada embriaguez de estar sin nada.

Sergio Astorga

FORGIVENESS: A POEM BY ADAM ZAMEENZAD

2008-01-12T16:28:00.000-08:00

Adam Zameenzad has published six novels and received the blessings of readers and critics. He is a good friend whom I visit at Shant Cottage, Kent as I write these lines. He is also a poet, unpublished for the most part, with manuscripts of wit that explode aorta, ventricle and vessel like heart grenades I love his unforgiving dedication to questioning all received wisdom.

FORGIVENESS

I find no difficulty in forgiving
man,
and woman,
though that
can be somewhat
exacting,
on occasions.

BUT
only if,
every molecule of my skin
turned to dust
before my very eyes,
dust
that would cover
the shame of centuries:

only if,
the pungent waters of my sweat
flood out to disinfect
and wash away
the pain infested streets of history;

only if,
my tainted blood
became flesh,
meat everlasting
for subhumans of the world;

only if,
I died
each minute
of the day
that someone nicer than I,
had life,
and love,
and good looks too,
redeeming my ugliness;

then,
perhaps,
I might,
forgive God.

-- Adam Zameenzad c) 2008

REGALO, UN POEMA PARA LAS MUJERES POETAS MEXICANAS

2008-01-07T15:19:00.000-08:00

A mis poetas compañeras de Mexico, les invito a participar en esta convocatoria (www.mujerespoetasdemexico.blogspot.com). Espero pronto volver a saludarles en México. Con un abrazo. Indran

REGALO

Quieres que te regale un poema,
original, hecho con las arrugas
de estas manos, con las distracciones
que me asedían cuando empieza
el día. Eres una de ellas,
que hace que mi corazón
salte de su lecho y mi cuerpo
se llene de una savia dulce,
como el sabor de ti
cuando regreso a la alcoba
de pronto y te encuentro,
cabellera negra sobre piel
de aceituna, olor de rosas.

--c) Indran Amirthanayagam, de El Hombre que Recoge Nidos (Resistencia/Conarte 2005)

FOR THE LOVE OF BUSES, A POEM

2008-01-03T22:58:00.000-08:00

FOR THE LOVE OF BUSES

Stand on the street
if you’d like to learn
how this poem was made,
and wait for the M-4 bus.

First, you’ll see
four M-1’s pass by
every five minutes,

and you might say,
let’s take a break,
get some coffee, a burger,

and as you sip,
there she goes,
an M-4,
and as you bite,
another M-4 sallies
off into night;

and at the register,
just seconds away,
damn, lost again…

Out on the street
hardened by meat
and drink, you spy
another M-1, then
the M-104, off course,
What’s it doing down here?

(And then it begins)

The Strange Sight
of a man stood
up by a bus—

the way he circles,
the way he opens
his coat to the cold,
the way he speaks
in tongues
until he falls
into silence,

and buries his rebuff
deep within him,
to sprout only
at the next chance
encounter with a poem.

Indran Amirthanayagam, waiting for the M-4, mid 80s, Upper West Side, New York, c) 1987, renewed 2008

The Splintered Face Tsunami Poems: A Reading in London

2007-12-30T23:49:00.000-08:00

For those of you in or about London, I have been invited by the Centre for Community Development to read from The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems on Saturday January 12. The event will begin with cofffee at 10 am to be followed by the reading.

The address of the venue is

Thulasi, Bridge End Close (Off Clifton Road)
Kingston Upon Thames KT26PZ

This will be the first reading from the new book and I would be delighted to see you there. I will then take the book to the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka where it will have its official launch.