I've been going pretty hard all day, teaching and writing.

Rothenberg's Lorca Variations (New Directions '93). I have sympathy for what he's trying to do in creating these poems that "both are & aren't mine," but I'm finding I don't care a lot about these poems one way or another in relation to the Lorca originals. They seem to lack resonance in comparison with the other texts I'm studying in this article. Rothenberg is better as a translator than as a poet, I feel--and even more significant as an anthologist than as a translator. That is, his great talent is in imagining those ambitiously large configurations of texts. To the point that nobody else has even come close to what he did in this area. it is not merel that he created better anthologies than anyone else, but that he invented a new genre of anthology. But his individual books of poetry don't convince me as much.

When making my plan to write one article a month for all of 2006, I didn't count on the fact that February had only 28 days. Still, I have made substantial progress on March's article even though Feb's is not yet done. I also didn't factor in my sloth.

***

Maybe "orientalism" is not the best word. What would you call this particular cultural "problematic"?

It turns out that, for all my protests, I am a secret believer in the duende myself. I am both the cultural critic analyzing the phenomenon from "outside," and an example of the same phenomenon I am describing. I wouldn't have become a hispanist in the first place without the damned duende. That's the point.

Debate in the comments: Rothenberg's notion of the "deep image," derived from Lorca and then popularized by Bly, is "orientalist" in a way that Spicer's After Lorca is not. Spicer is almost completely free of "españoladas," of folkloric elements derived from conventional notions of "Romantic Spain." I expect to have 77 comments in the next 24 hours to match Silliman's flarf post. But no bores need apply.

I've read Noelle Kocot's Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems from Wave books. The shorter poems have an unpredictable quality in their language that won me over. You never knew what was coming next. The longer, title poem lost me with its Ginsberg schtick, though it too had its flashes of brilliance.

Connections. Pedro Salinas wrote his great trilogy of love poetry for an American woman named Katherine Whitmore, a professor of Spanish at Smith College. Imagine her then turning around and teaching the poetry written for her to her students. When she did so she was overcome with waves of emotion, she writes. She married someone else, because don Pedro was not going to abandon his wife, Margarita. He could never understand why she had broken off the relationship. Any woman would be proud to be the muse for a poet like him, he told her. She wanted to break with him earlier, but he arrived in the U.S., lost and disoriented, and he could not take the shock.

Our friend Harriet Turner took classes with Katherine at one time. She didn't share the fact that the poetry she was teaching to the class was about her. She was apparently a great beauty, "every inch the lady."

It turns out the Katherine was born in Kansas and once studied Spanish at the University where I teach, before going to Berkeley for her Ph.D. So she is the most famous Spanish major in our department, though nobody alive now in the University would remember her. She was my grandparents' generation, born in 1897, and was six years younger than Salinas.

Hispanism in the U.S. is bound up with the exile community of Republican Spain. Guillén, Salinas, Cernuda, taught at American Universities. Other influential professors from Republican Spain: Antonio Sánchez Barbudo, Ricardo Gullón.

Cyrus Console spoke at the poetics seminar this afternoon on Melville. We had an interesting discussion, though I think Ken Irby talked more than Cyrus himself.

Funding approved for Austin AWP. Now I have to figure out what to say. Of course I have to buy a ticket. They only approved two weeks in advance.

I finished writing that instruction manual. In this case, a report for a publisher who wants to do an edition of a translation of a major work of Spanish poetry.

***

The ideal state of mind is relaxed alertness. In other words, you are alive to the world, not groggy, yet not tense or anxious either. The worst state is, by contrast, both groggy and anxiety filled, sluggish and nervous. Both the best and worst states, then, are combinations of two opposing "forces." In one case, you have the best of these two forces; in the other, the worst.

Medicating yourself through caffeine and alchohol is an attempt to gain this idea state of relaxed alertness, but tends to end up producing sluggish jittteriness instead.

***

I got a new troubadour anthology. Pound and Snodgrass, and third translator whose name is escaping me. As I said to Stan Lombardo, because I am always talking, Stan I said, which was in fact his name, I want to learn enough Langue D'Oc to read it without the translations. After all, I know French and Catalan, the two closest languages to it. Stan, who is translating Dante now, said any language that said "Oc" for yes was good for him.

Suppose we never talked about poetry. If we had a certain way of thinking about poetry but never articulated any of it. That's almost how I feel sometimes. That I must always reinvent the way in which ideas are articulated.

Barbara Guest's language has always had a kind of "ungraspable" quality to it, even before the highly elliptical work beginning with Defensive Rapture. It was always hard for me to get my finger on, hard to hear.

Looking for some novel angle that hasn't been covered yet, trying to force some new reading of a canonical text, can be tiresome. On the other hand, sometimes we can see something afresh. Why did criticism of WCW always seem so dull to me? All those MLA sessions on Williams and .... Williams and Medicine, Williams and Puerto Rico, Williams and... It seemed as though they couldn't see Williams himself. Or else the implication was that they had to go look for something new to say about him. That would never happen in the Ron Padgett Society.

***

A few years ago I noticed in the Graduate students here that, while they wanted to do Cultural Studies with its contextualization, they were still brainwashed New Critics and didn't want to let in any biographical information about the author. They were textual purists on one level, and impurists on another. It's true that biographical criticism is usually wretched. It's not that I'm incurious about biographies of writers, but that the facts of a biography almost never have explanatory power in the way biographers think. On the other hand, if you are going to let in all sorts of contexual information, then prohibiting the biographical and only the biographical seems inconsistent.

***

A student in my class made the equation free verse = no rhythm. I almost flipped out. If even Jim Rome's radio show has a rhythm, why shouldn't a poem by Vallejo?

My premise as a critic is that most poetry written has been understudied, that there is always quite a bit more to be done. That is why I almost never run out of ideas of articles to write. (Finding the time and energy to write them is another thing entirely.) Of course, the canonical bias in literary studies means that interpetions of Milton or Calderón will pile up endlessly. Hence the false crisis of the 1970s, when English professors realized they had nothing new to say about Milton and Donne. Well of course you don't! Why not write the first book-length study on James Schuyler or Barbara Guest instead?

Lorca is overstudied, but so much of the scholarship is not that good. There are contemporary poets about whom very little has been written.

My dream: Someone else was coming out with a version of the book I had just translated and so I had no possibility of publishing my own.

The delay: Things I'm done with. While we're at it, let's be done with visuality in poetry, all those annoying images and evocations.