[The following excerpt from a longer work by the Paris-born Brazilian scholar Marcel de Lima Santos gives a capsule view of the role played by Alcheringa & its contributors & predecesors in the early development of a workable ethnopoetics. (J.R.)]
[The excerpt below is from a collection of Federman’s writings, Carcasses, published by BlazeVOX Books shortly before his death in October 2009. It was first posted on Poems and Poetics, blogger version, on February 28th of that year.]
Yesterday I bought a new tape recorder – and today I recorded a story on my new recorder – this is the story – I call it –
At that moment, an explosion occurs. At that moment the sumo wrestler dives; he enters the water and makes no splash. The prisoner’s strike is on. Often I wonder whether my teeth are rotting. On Tuesday I had my hair cut. In the bathroom I kill a cockroach as it tries to run past me. My breasts hurt I am pregnant perhaps. This prepares the manifold, earlier, immaterial representations, the mounting system centralized, happily groomed as yoga for planets. The earlier bonobos touched it and squirrels did their math to empower the mergers and exchange.
[To describe John Martone as our greatest living miniaturist, as I have in the past, is to go back for me to a time many years ago when Ian Hamilton Finlay & I corresponded about a poetry of small increments (one-word poems & other such concerns). For Finlay, I believe, some form of minimalism was at the heart of the concrete poetry he was then exploring & developing, & for myself it entered into aspects of ethnopoetics & appeared most clearly in the numerically based poems (gematria) that I was beginning to write. It’s with someone like John Martone, however
The execution of Mansur al-Hallaj, 1602 AD (1011 AH)
FROM THE SECTION: DERELICTION
81. Yâ sirra sirrî
O my secret’s secret, you have dwindled so much you’re hidden from the thought of the living, and yet a hidden-manifest of you has appeared in all things for all things.
My excuse to you is a profound ignorance, a vast doubt, and total powerlessness. O you, all’s completeness, you are no different than me! But then, what’s my excuse to myself?
83. ‘Ajibtu
I’m dumbfounded! How can my part hold up my whole when my earth cannot bear the load of my part?
Poems and poetics