As the patterns are emerging from the small battered lawn—the patterns which are for her continuously seeping in from those in the long-ago linoleums . . . they begin to form before her eyes the patterns of a parquet floor . . . the patterns, even, of a kind of design she has seen somewhere before . . . watching, waiting, with ever increasing urgency, an urgency she feels violently and vividly coursing through her tautening veins . . . as the memory begins to clear . . . revealing to her both the floors and the ceiling of a Cinema she had frequented as a child . . . in some outlaying area of the small battered city . . . an area which she associates more with dream than memory . . .
El Colonel is smiling, writing with his cigarette’s smoke in that great page, the sky . . . that great page, ever open to all, in which all eyes may read---and there, their readings being writings . . . find also the writings of others . . . moving, living, in skies of their own among these sometimes shared skies, these skies sometimes encountering each other . . . these writings, readings readers & writers . . . meeting among these skies . . . so that—
[It was during our transition into the fabled 1960s that it began to feel that everything we wanted for poetry was now becoming possible. I’ve written about much of this before, but a curious moment for me was the one time, in 1965, that I allowed myself to write a whole poem in a language other than English. The occasion was the fourth anniversary issue of El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn), the revolutionary poetry magazine that Margaret Randall & Sergio Mondragón co-founded in 1962 & carried forward for most of the following decade. I was inv
Poems and poetics