Detail from ‘Mezzetin’ by Antoine Watteau, ca. 1718–20, pictured also on the cover of ‘A Suite of Dances.’
Suite of Dances is composed of a series of apparently disconnected statements in verse. A slight detour can help highlight the central formal questions at work in this book. In Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, Marjorie Perloff describes what Herman Rapaport called “negative serialization”:
“Like the role Lynch plays in ‘Autocinema,’ this idea of projector and screen is refracted, complex, unanswerable. Whatever the projector is, the films land on unusual, intimate surfaces.” Image modified from a photo by WiNG on Wikimedia Commons.
The poem, like the air current in the diner, is “both precise and abstract.” It’s a physical space which we can relate to — the muggy air, the trembling page, the big window — but, as in much of Autocinema, it is also static: a mindspace where the reader herself is the “black ant imprisoned in a chunk of ice.”
Know that all of Nature is but a magic theater, that the great Mother is the master magician, and that this whole world is peopled by her many parts. — Upanishads
In his introduction to this Jacket feature, Mark Weiss delves into the literary history of Baja Californian poetry. It is impossible to separate art from history; the growth of a region corresponds to the flourishing of expression, and political occurrences like the increased scrutiny of the borders post-9/11 or Mexico’s Woodstock in ’71 leave a visible trace.
In his introduction to this Jacket feature, Mark Weiss delves into the literary history of Baja Californian poetry. It is impossible to separate art from history; the growth of a region corresponds to the flourishing of expression, and political occurrences like the increased scrutiny of the borders post-9/11 or Mexico’s Woodstock in ’71 leave a visible trace. At the same time, Baja California is a liminal space. It is ever-changing and constantly passed through.
Soleida Ríos (b. 1950 in eastern Cuba) is a remarkable poet from whom comparatively little work is circulating to date in English. There may be a further delay in terms of book projects in translation, for Ríos lost a translator when Barbara Jamison tragically passed away.
The death of a translator is a reminder of the small, mortal scale of possibility embedded within these our “global” landscapes. It’s also a cue to remember, with Esther Allen, that “the translation of a text often depends largely or perhaps wholly on contextual factors that have less to do with the work’s intrinsic value (whatever that might be and however you might measure it) than with encounters between individuals and the shifting cultural and political contexts within which those encounters take place.”[1]
Mark Weiss
from 'A Suite of Dances,' a new gathering
XIV. Sings Forth
The bride of god wants it, now,
on her own terms.
We breed cattle
for the final predator.
There is always something to ask. This-or-that-ness or
this-or-that-less-ness.