[For some years now, Rochelle Owens has been a regular contributor to Poems and Poetics and, before that, a key part of the poetry world which many of us have shared with her. Of the power of her work Marjorie Perloff has written: “brilliantly inventive, immensely learned, sophisticated, and witty in its conceits. She is, in many ways, a proto-language poet, her marked ellipses, syntactic oddities, and dense and clashing verbal surfaces.
[The essay by Yépez following the translation, below, of Jean Louis Battre’s Portuguese poem, “The Cave,” is reposted here as a tribute and acknowledgement of the work and thought of Mexican poet Heriberto Yépez in the development of a future-facing ethnopoetics from a perspective outside the familiar US nexus. It was originally published in the radical magazine R.A.U.L. / Red Anarcho Utopista Libre in May 2012, and a related work by Yépez, “Ethnopoetics.
[While it’s been slowed down by the current pandemic, I’m awaiting the publication later this year of El Libro de las Voces (The Book of Voices): Poemas y Poéticas from Mangos de Hacha in Mexico, DF, and the Universidad de Nueva Léon in Monterrey. The book (in Spanish) consists of an extended interview of me by Javier Taboada reinforced by an interspersed selection of poems and other writings, the whole of it translated into Spanish by Taboada.
[What follows is an attempt by two poets to create as linked dialogue a specifically “Jewish poetry” — more mystical and religious, as I read it, than sentimental. The excerpts (ten out of thirty-six poems) and the poets’ later reflections on intention and process are presented below without any attempt at further clarification. (j.r.)]
Photograph of Jackson Mac Low by Anne Tardos, 2003.
[In the final stages of composing a new assemblage of North and South American Poetry (“from origins to present”), I became aware again of the current and continuing relevance of Mac Low’s poem and the accompanying commentary prepared earlier by myself and Javier Taboada. (j.r.)]
Poems and poetics