El emperrado corazón amora

(282) Juan Gelman. El emperrado corazón amora. Barcelona: Tusquets, 2011. 296 pp.

This is very difficult poetry. The neologisms, of which there are two in the title, present the least of the difficulties. The problem is more that there is little to grasp on to. It is a long book, with little variety of style. The poems, with cryptic titles, all seem the same. Still, I like it.

Here's one of my favorites, "Evaporaciones":

Cómo baila el ahorcadito
del poeta que se subió a sí mismo,
creído. Se le apagaron las
versiones del ser, los
sobresaltos del bien y el mal de la palabra.

So far, it's pretty obvious what it's about. The poet is a little hanged man, dancing. He climbed onto himself, too credulous or trusting, but he ran out of different versions of being, as well as the sudden shifts when language seemed marvelous or horrible to him.

Huyó del deber de los lirios,
de la quinta décima de la luna,
de esa cosa caliente, la sangre.

The poet took flight from traditional themes, the "obligation of the lily," or the fifth "décima" of the moon. The décima is a poetic form. Gelman is perhaps playing on the sound the "quintaesencia" (quintessence). Otherwise I have no idea why this should be the fifth and not the fourth or the sixth.

Su decir mancha
el saco, las tías, los barcos
que ofician y todo lo que gime.

The poet's speech stains various things. A sportscoat, aunts, officiating boats, and everything that moans. This technique is known as "chaotic enumeration," as defined by Amado Alonso in a pioneering study of Neruda's poetry. Poetry is seen, then, as a force of negativity.

El otoño marchita la corona
que se puso sin hojas de verdad.

Autumn always means decline. Autumn wilts the poet's crown of laurel, the traditional symbol of poetic authority. It's leaves were not really leaves anyway. Hojas means leaves but also the pages of a book.

Asiste a su entierro impasible,
se reza por las dudas,
sigue con el día que sigue.

The poet attends his own funeral without emotion. Since he is still alive, the funeral is really for the traditional role of the poet, who must go on like Samuel Becket, continuing with the day that continues.

So pretty much the poem is understandable on a first reading. About 10% remains difficult to explain. The book, however, contains more than 100 poems like this. Gelman complains about the decline of poetry but fully embodies the seemingly decrepit role. Deeply ambivalent, he is halfway between the colloquial irony of Parra and the prophetic voice of Neruda.

La sombra y la apariencia

(281) Andrés Sánchez Robayna. La sombra y la apariencia. Barelona: Tusquets. 233 pp.

I got a defective copy of this so I don't have a date for it. All the poetry is there, just some of the preliminary matter is missing.

ASR is one of the main poets in the line derived from Valente. He edited the Insulas extrañas anthology with Valente, Varela, and Milán. This is a huge and intense book, although not really 233 pages of poetry since Tusquets won't begin any poem on an even-numbered page. I'd really have to devote about twice as much as the two hours I spent with it to do it justice. The problem is that a poem in the essentialist mode practiced by Sánchez Robayna, if it is even a little bit short of perfect, even a little too derivative of Valente or Lezama, becomes intolerable.

Two Poets

(279) María Victoria Atencia. El umbral. Valencia: Pretextos, 2011. 47 pp.

(278) Julia Uceda. Hablando con un haya. Pretextos, 2010. 74 pp.

Atencia would seem to be a much more accomplished poet than her contemporary Uceda. I tried to like Uceda's book but the magic was just not there. It seems odd that there is so little difference between a fine poem and one that does not work. The two poets' emotions are equally intense; both have won prizes and are equally serious about their writing. The difference is minuscule, but at the same time potentially enormous (for any given reader).

Trilogy

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Much of H.D.'s Trilogy is quite extraordinary. "When in the company of the Gods / I loved and was loved, // never was my mind stirred / to such rapture..." I can forgive all the "filling," all the parts necessary for it to be a long poem.

The Third Percent

Here are the 90 books I read for the third percent. You'll notice I mostly read Koch, Ashbery, Milán, Coolidge, and Spanish and Latin American poetry.

Indigo Bunting. Selected Poems (Dupin). Oracle Night. Transmigration Solo. Underground with the Oriole. The Double Dream of Spring. Poems of the Late T'ang. At Egypt. When the Sun Tries to Go On. Three Poems. Houseboat Days. A Wave. The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951. The Tablets I-XV. Questions of Travel. Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork. Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Mirrors. The Tennis Court Oath. Desdén. Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares. A Conversation with David Antin. Days & Nights. Straits. Determined by Aperture. Rabbit Lesson. Mystery of Small Houses. If and When. Same Enemy Rainbow. Hello: A Journal, February 29-May 3, 1976. Wakefulness. The Country of Our Consciousness. Manifest and Furthermore. Mexico City Blues. All That Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds. Tres. Chinese Whispers. Your Name Here. The Romantic Dogs. El molino y la higuera. Life & Death. Río turbio. El alumbrado y otros poemas. Mesh. Si yo fuera otra. If I were writing this. La mordedura blanca. De barro la memoria. Million Poems Journal. La condicíon del pasajero. El espejo del cuerpo. El azul en la flama. The Crystal Text. Odes of Roba. Luces de travesía. Complete Mimimal Poems. Centauro. Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems. The Cave. Cuarto de hotel. Acontecimiento. SPACE. Por la noche los gatos. Poemas prohibidos y de amor. De una niña de provincias que se vino a vivir en un Chagall. De mí haré una estatua ecuestre. Island Road. The Rova Improvistations. Báculo de Babel. Singularities. Cosas claras. Al margen del margen (antología 1975-1991). Circa 1994. Ganas de decir. Acción que en un momento creí de gracia. Desnudo en Punta Brava. Antología poética (Milán). Por fortunas peores. Naturalezas. Los cinco entierros de Pessoa. Lápidas. Clima. Viernes en Jerusalén. No duerme el animal (Poesía 1987-2003). La perseverancia del desaparecido. A Form of Women. Código. Liturgia.

Other Flowers

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*Schuyler. Other Flowers: uncollected poems. New York: FSG, 2010.

Wow. I delayed purchasing this book but finally did for half price in New York at the Strand. Who'd have thought the James Schuyler wrote so many great poems not in his Collected Poems. Of course it's uneven, but who cares. Part of the fun is going through and looking for the great poems amid the mess of good poems with great lines and bad poems with good lines.

9000

I should probably explain again my 9,000 books of poetry project. That seems like an absurd number, and it is. My idea is to keep track of 9,000 books of poetry that I read and make blog entries about them. Now obviously I will never finish this. One percent of this might take me a year (90 books) and I won't live another 97 years. So the idea is just to do as much as I can, to read as much poetry as possible and keep track of what i read over the course of many years.

Why not 10,000? Well, I want to get through a percent of it in a reaonsable amount of time, so I'm just knocking 10% off from the beginning. I only have to reach 900 to get to 10%, etc...

You might think I am racing through these books and reading too fast to really derive any benefit. This is not true. I still stop and stare at some poems for a long time, some I read several times. Some books are ones I've read in the past and am returning to. Reading in quantity does not replace reading in small doses too, as when I prepare a handful of poems for a class, or when I analyze a single poem for an article.

Echoes

(275) Creeley. Echoes. New York: New Directions, 1993. 113 pp.

I thought that I had already done this book for this project, and it turned out it was the 1982 Creeley chapbook of the same title.

Many think Creeley's later work is mediocre, but this isn't so. When people think of his early work, they are only thinking about a few spectacular anthology pieces. Actually, Creeley's early work also had many unspectacular poems, just like his later books. I don't know if his batting average is any different. Late Creeley stratches the same itch for me as early Creeley, and has the advantage of being less known, less cliché.

Entire memory
hangs tree
in mind to see
a bird be-

but now puts stutter
to work, shutters
the windows, shudders,
sits and mutters-

because can't
go back, still
can't get
out. Still can't.

This poem is called "Echo," one of several with similar titles ("Echoes").

Borges, Sonnets

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*Borges. The Sonnets. New York: Penguin, 2010. 301 pp.

Borges is a great practitioner of the sonnet form. This is a bilingual edition edited by Stephen Kessler. I tried to avoid the translations as much as I could. When I saw Alistair Reid translate "palabras" as "such words as these," or Kessler bury an allusion to Góngora by translating "polvo y nada" as "nothing but dust," I got rather disgusted.

In so many sonnets, you start to notice repeated rhymes. Borges was fond of the "verso" "universo" rhyme, for example.

Juan Bernier

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*Juan Bernier. Antología poética. Madrid: Huerga y Fierro, 1996. 109 pp.

Bernier is another poet of amazing linguistic talent. He has an amazing description of water mixed with oil in port of Málaga. I've discovered that Bernier and García Baena are a little more interesting that Álvarez Ortega.

Dios de un día

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Manuel Álvarez Ortega. Dios de un día. Madrid: Palabra en el tiempo, 1962. 115 pp.

Here, again the poet creates a single mood by using a consistent rhetoric. The book is made up of two sections, Dios de un día and Tiempo en el sur, both written in the 1950s.

Los campos Elíseos

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*Pablo García Baena. Los campos Elíseos. Madrid / Valence: Pretextos, 2006. 67 pp.

PGB has real poetic chops, with an amazing vocabulary and powers of sensorial evocation.

One poem that stood out in an excellent book begins like this:

He dejado las puertas entornadas
tras el suicidio. Sé que vienes, llegas
por la cal del pasillo con la luna
y es hermoso el verano que escogiste...

The funny thing is that in this poem, where I did not have to look up any words, I feel much more emotion than in all the rest of the book put together.

***

Here begins the fourth percent, or 90 books, of the 9,000 books of poetry project.

Código / Liturgia

(270) Manuel Álvarez Ortega. Código. Madrid: Devenir, 1993. 52 pp.

(269) Manuel Álvarez Ortega. Liturgia. Madrid: Devenir, 1990. 56 pp.

Two books by the Cordova poet MAO. Código is dense, surrealistic plotless narrative, in long dense prose poems. Liturgia consists of shorter prose poems, each divided into three very short paragraphs. I am not fond of how these books seem to be saying the same thing over and over again, caught in a particular rhetoric.

There concludes the third percent of the 9,000 books of poetry project. Only 97% to go.

This Time We Are Both

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*Clark Coolidge. This Time We Are Both. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010. 93 pp.

This was written in the late 80s, so has that classic Coolidge style from that era. That explains why I like it so much. I thought he had returned to form, but no, it's because its is an older book. Well, it is new to me at least.

A Form of Women

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I'm resuming my series 9000 books of poetry. I just read A Form of Women, by Creeley, published in 1959. I picked up the first edition cheaply in New York. I'd read all the poems before, but there is something different about reading them in the first edition.

(266)

*Miguel Suárez. La perseverancia del desaparecido. Madrid: Hiperión, 1988. 57 pp.

Taking advantage of the window of receptivity I'm experiencing now, I read this book by Suárez which I recently purchased. I may have another copy of this book in my office already, but reading it now it seems new to me so maybe not. Anyway, it has a very distinctive tone despite being close to poets like Ildefonso Rodríguez and Miguel Casado.

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*Ada Salas. No duerme el animal (Poesía 1987-2003). Madrid; Hiperión, 2009. 246 pp.

This volume includes four separate books of poetry. Every poem is extremely short, written in the "essentialist" style which I ought to like in theory. Some poems I find too slight, almost inconsequential, but she does hit it right once in a while.

*(264)

Marco Antonio Campos. Viernes en Jerusalén. Madrid: Visor, 2005. 94 pp.

Campos is ok. I didn't like this book the first time around, but now I do quite a bit because I'm able to hear its tone.

(263)

*Andrés Sánchez Robayna. Clima. Barcelona: Edicions del Mall 1978. 101 pp.

I've owned this book for years but never read it--I know because the pages were uncut. I had underestimated this poet from the Canary Islands, thinking him a kind of minor epigone of Valente. I was clearly wrong about that.

The 9000 book project requires an enormous receptivity. That's probably the quality that I most strive for as a reader of poetry. Receptivity means allowing oneself to be overwhelmed by beauty without trusting too much in one's own prejudices. It's difficult because the prejudices are like a suit of armor, a protective but rather clumsy form of protection--against what? My suit of armor might be very useful in a medieval joust, but really how often am I in a medieval joust?

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*Antonio Gamoneda. Lápidas. Madrid: Abada, 2006. 121 pp.

Here is a magnificent edition of a book originally published in 1987, with a brilliant epilogue by Julián Jiménez Heffernan.