Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Rodrigo Rojas
from 'Exercises on Infidelity,' two new poems in English, with a concluding 'footnote'
[Known as a poet-translator of contemporary Mapuche-language poets such as Elicura Chihuailaf, Leonel Lienlaf, and others, the Chilean Spanish-language poet Rodrigo Rojas has now made a further translingual shift into a series of poems written entirely in English. Of these he tells us: “These are not translations; the poems were written directly in English. The book is called Exercises on Infidelity because English is not my first language, but also because the idea of an original poem as the source of the poetic experience is questioned.