[EDITOR’S NOTE. To point out that the poetry, while sufficient in itself, is of interest too for the circumstances of its coming publication, under the auspices of Lunar Chandelier Collective (LCC), a self-defined community of younger poets largely quartered in the Hudson valley of New York and with close ties to Robert Kelly and others of his generation and mine among those sharing publication.]
[NOTE. Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry Inquisition, Sky Ward, The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, All One’s Blue, and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon and Wind Instrument. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies, and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. He is also an accomplished translator (of Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi, Mahmoud Chokrollahi and others) and an editor of several anthologies and books of criticism. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light.]
Alongside Roberto Bolaño and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, José Vicente Anaya was one of the founders of Infrarealism in Mexico in the 1970s. Infrarealism was a post-communist avant-garde movement that existed in opposition to a complacent Mexican literary status quo.
Translation from Spanish by Joshua Pollock.
[Reprinted from publication by The Operating System with permission of the author]
[In the process of gathering with Javier Taboada our assemblage-in-progress of North and South American poetry “from origins to present,” scheduled for publication by University of California Press in 2021, I would like to call special attention to this masterwork by Eunice Odio (1919–1974), which is now available in a full four-volume edition from Tavern Books in Portland, Oregon. Octavio Paz’s description of Odio as “of that line of poets who invent their own mythology, like Blake, like St.-John Perse, like Ezra Pound” is a succinct assessment of that work, as brought beautifully into English by Keith Ekiss and Sonia P. Ticas. (J.R.)]
Translation from Spanish by Keith Ekiss and Sonia P. Ticas
[N.B. Cooke’s essay, in its entirety, can be found here.]
[Abstract. In an attempt to respond to the West’s general obliviousness to nonhuman semiosis, this article proposes a method for appreciating nonhuman poetics. By combining the critical tools of poetics and literary theory with insights from ethology and biosemiotics, Stuart Cooke outlines a method of criticism for nonhuman creative compositions.
Poems and poetics