"Protsesiyes" illustration by Evelyn Likht in Monatlakher zshurnal far literatur [Monthly Journal for Literature], 1925
[NOTE. The following marks the continuation of the recovery & translation into English of the experimental modernist masterwork Protsesiye (Processions) by the great & all but forgotten Yiddish poet Mikhl Likht, who was a younger contemporary of Pound and Williams & in some ways the forerunner of Zukofsky & other “Objectivist” & projectivist poets.
My intention has been no more than to project a small film, a one-page film, onto each sheet of paper.
I have always believed that poetry and film spring from the same root and share the same core. Ernst Jünger once said that film is a cross between technology and magic. Something similar could be said of poetry, that mechanism of enigmas. Is there not an inexplicable mystery in the image that burns on the screen and in the words that evaporate into the air or page?
[AUTHOR'S NOTE. Scrolls is a new “experimental” collaboration in progress by James C. Hopkins in Kathmandu and Yoko Danno in Kobe. One of us writes the first half of a sentence and the other follows up with the rest of the sentence. The latter begins the next sentence and drops it halfway, which is taken over by the former. Writing thus in turn we draw “picture scrolls” with words. There is no rule except that a scroll should consist of five paragraphs. When we start a scroll we never know how it will develop and end.
[Along with Whitman & Darío, Sousândrade (Joaquim de Sousa Andrade, 1833-1902) emerges today as one of the great nineteenth-century forerunners to a full-blown poetry of the Americas. Nearly forgotten after his own time, he was brought back through the enthusiasm of Haroldo & Augusto de Campos, to become, in Latin American terms at least, the epitome of a late experimental romanticism & a prefigurer of new poetries to come.
Poems and poetics