"No me hagan lorquismo," Lorca told his actors, acting in a production of "Bodas de sangre."

"Don't give me Lorquian Kitsch" in other words.

This shows that Lorquian Kitsch already existed in his own lifetime. That he himself was aware and on his guard against it.

He wanted to avoid such simplifications. But how seductive they are!

I've always liked this post, I am not my music's fault, by composer and bloggist Kyle Gann. It seems to me the exact right position to take. Of course, it doesn't work with poetry that takes a definite political position. We can't have poetry of such a musical purity that political questions will remain outside the discussion. I'm not sure what the "bracketing" rules should be. Should we blame the poem "Ode to an Onion" because its author, Neruda, was a Stalinist? Of course, the communist ideas are there, in the poem, too. It's not a question of depoliticizing it. Yet the poem also seems to escape that dimension, in that the author is putting the best face of his ideology forward. It seems a perfectly innocuous version of an ideology that also had very nocuous results. It's not the poem's fault that there was a gulag, that the author of the poem took pro-Gulag positions, etc... All we have is the humble onion, minding its own business, mildly symbolic of a better world to come and the author's sympathy with the working class. The onion never sent anyone to a concentration camp. Or did it? Can we celebrate Pound's happy little Confucian workers without seeing in them a metaphor for the fascist state?

Sun up; work
sundown; to rest
dig well and drink of the water
dig field; eat of the grain

So is Neruda cynically disguising his ideology, or transcending it by revealing its uncorrupted core?

"Lorca es andaluz. ¿ Por qué no tengo el derecho de ser peruano?" (César Vallejo). Lorca is Andalusian. Why don't I have the right to be Peruvian? In other words, why accept the regional difference in Spanish within Spain, and not the difference between Spain and Latin American? Why is Lorca's Spanish seen as comprehensible, and Vallejo's not?

This edition of Aphorisms, translated by Kessler and published by Green Integer, seems based on a corrupt or unreliable text. For example, the sentence above reads "Lorca en andaluz." (Lorca in Andalusian). I've corrected it--although I could be wrong.

How about Frank, who brings Auden and Maiakovsky together (in the same poet if not the same poem)?

I think what Ron was trying to say was that Brodsky had no interest in Vladimir M., and when he came to the U.S., had no interest in really interesting modern poetry, preferring the Auden strain of English-language verse to the poetry influenced by the international avant-garde. I remember too that Brodsky wasn't too popular for his political stands either (support of Vietnam war?) when he came this way. Denise L in the APR took him to task both for disdaining free verse and supporting the war.

If we see New Criticism and Russian Formalism as two branches of "formalist" criticism that developed independently, Brodksy fell in with the Auden-influenced academic school influenced by New Criticism and was distant from the Formalism of his own homeland, associated with the Soviet but pre-Stalinist cultural ferment of Russian Futurism. In all of this is an implicit equation: Russian Formalism is to Russian Futurism as Anglo-American New Criticism is to the anti-modernist neo-modernism influenced by Auden and a certain reading of Eliot's essays. In other words, both RussForm and NewCrit are the critical movements parellel to and supportive of certain manifestations of literary modernism prevalent in their respective milieux. Roman J. even wrote some futurist poetry, I believe, in the same way JC Ransom and Allen Tate were both New Critics and founders of the anti modern neo-modernist school that sought to displace the radicalism of actual Modern Poetry.

i'm trying to write this poem for my congressman, Dennis Moore. It's pretty hard to do. I want to write one that he would really understand, yet that isn't written in the political language that he is forced to use to market himself to his constituents. It can't just be a bad political poem. At least he is a Democrat.

What would it mean not to have ideas about poetry? I'm sure Joseph does have ideas about poetry more often than he thinks. I appreciate his nice comments about this blog in the past months.

Neruda was famous for his enemies. Jiménez, Huidobro, Larrea, Bergamín, Rokha. At one point the entire country of Cuba sigend a letter denouncing him. He fought with Vallejo.

Of course, many of these enemies are also notorious for their emnities, especially Jiménez and Bergamín. Jiménez called Neruda "un gran poeta malo." Someone wrote a book entirely about Bergamín's fights. Maybe it was a conflictive period, that 20th century.

Pablo de Rokha accused Neruda of not being Marxist enough, of ignoring the aesthetic lessons of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

I always thought that the word "avatar" should have some connection with the word "atavistic," but there is no link at all. despite a certain phonetic and semantic kinship. There could be a new word: "avatistic."

"Miniature" should have something to do with the prefix "mini-" meaning small. But once again, no. It comes from a seemingly unrelated Latin word for a kind of red dye used to make small pictures.

I can't get myself to choose Vallejo over Neruda, even though I wouldn't disagree with that choice. Neruda made some political and poetical missteps--Vallejo died young and was spared the fate of a long decline. Have they ever made a movie out of Vallejo's life?

I still prefer Residencia en la tierra to almost anything else in modern Spanish-language poetry.

Veinte poemas de amor is probably the most popular book of poetry in Latin America.

Both Vallejo and Neruda make Huidobro look a little superficial. Vallejo makes Neruda look too facile, too prolific. Yet the best pages of Neruda...

Pantoum Beginning with Lines by Jordan Davis and Jonathan Mayhew

It's fatiguing, consuming all this Stalinist Sadism.
Samuel Beckett and César Vallejo are buried in the same cemetery,
Sartre and Poe are buried elsewhere,
And Pound and Ginsberg wander undead between epitaphs.

Samuel Beckett and César Vallejo are buried in the same cemetery,
And Walser, wherever you are, no more jokes on Thomas Mann!
Sartre and Poe are buried elsewhere.
Sarah Orne Jewett however is alive, and living with Amy Beach by the shore.


[please write the next line in the comments. The rule for the poem is that each line must contain references to two individuals, like Sade and Stalin in the first line. I reserve the right not to use your line if I don't like it].

Lorca was probably the most cited Spanish-language poet in the context of U.S. poetry from the late 1930s until Neruda's Nobel prize in 1973, but since then Neruda is clearly the most popular. Just browse the best sellers at Amazon under Literature and Fiction / Poetry / Spanish and you will see that Neruda occupies the spots of 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19 21, 23, 25, 29, 31, etc... (For yesterday, anyway). No other poet even comes close. The other top sellers are not Vallejo or Lorca, Jiménez or Machado, but what appear to be children's books like Tortillas para Mamá and Arroz con leche. (I'm actually pleased that people seem to be reading poetry in Spanish to their children.) ( #19 is Bly's Neruda and Vallejo, which is still in print after all these years. The top rated Lorca book is at #42.)

The key is sort of textual misprision. At the risk of sounding like Bloom again, I would argue that such misprision is the central dynamic to consider when discussing the assimilation of "foreign" poetries. We want to look for misreadings, because they will tell us more than more faithful readings do. What does an English-speaking person "see" when reading poetry translated from the Spanish? So Creeley and Koch become significant for me because they weren't major translators from the Spanish. I've decided to focus on these two figures.

Imagine two circles touching each other at a single tangential point. That's one image of poetic influence. Or two circles which overlap in about 5% of their area. At first I thought this would give me nothing to say, but it's turned out to be the opposite. That concentrated 5% becomes the zone of increased focus. It is interesting *because* it is small.

The simply bad translations of a Bly are not critically interesting. Mere mistakes, mere incompetence, are not interesting. That Bly's version is accepted as legit--that might be more worthy of note.

James Wright was a good translator though.

Two Episodes in the Assimilation of Spanish-Language Poetry in the U.S.: Creeley's "After Lorca," Koch's "Some South American Poets"

This essay is going to kick some serious ass. I'm psyched about it.

To tell the truth about a traumatic, but private experience, one must exaggerate, in order to get the *emotional* truth over.

Nah...

***

I see Kasey has come over into the Church of Joseph Ceravalo. It's about time. What took you so long?