silence

A slowing 2: Gestures of attention

What can language open when given space? Poetry invites pause, the pause of music, of introspection, of spreading sensitivity. Maggie Nelson reports, in The Art of Cruelty, that John Cage proposed this “exceedingly difficult” advice: “The most, the best, we can do, we / believe (wanting to give evidence of / love), is to get out of the way, leave / space around whomever or whatever it is” (268). What is exceedingly difficult is necessary and important.

Duras & the cinematic novel

The poet's novel

Laynie Browne

The first thing you might notice about The Malady of Death is the visual components to this book. It is slim, only sixty pages of text, like many volumes of poems. On each page the font size is larger than most large-print editions of books. I measure the opening capitol “Y” beginning “You” at one-half of a centimeter. The page that appears the fullest contains one-hundred and sixteen words. A page appearing one of the sparest contains sixty words. Section breaks appear as multiple paragraph breaks, a multitude of white space, and an occasional asterisk.

'But do we need to know a second language to translate?'

Erín Moure

There is a sense in which every reading of a text by an individual is a translation, because ink and paper, or pixellated light and darkness, are “read” through a body, an individual apparatus impossible to replicate in terms of its cells and experiences and the ways that experience has affected its neural maps and capacities. This body may not even know its own filters and how they act when it “reads”. Because of this, we can study literature, which is the act of sharing readings and benefitting from other filters: in reading groups, in university classrooms and cafeterias and libraries, and on-line with brilliant teachers, in cafés, in living rooms, on ferries, at bus stops.

One question I am sometimes asked is: given this, is it possible to translate without having a second language? It’s a sly question, for people know very well that Elisa Sampedrín, my nemesis-polynym who has no interior, has done this.

Recently in Jacket2

Jacket2's January 2019 reading period

Jacket2

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2019.

Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2019. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds:

— Reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory

— Reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US

— Reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, movements in conversation

— Coauthored reviews or essays

The products of labor

A review of 'lo terciario/the tertiary'

Amy Paeth

The Spanish and English texts are rotated 180° relative to one another, such that the bilingual reader, halfway in, would rotate the book upside down to read the collection in its entirety. Or — if you are an anglophone reader, like myself — you are made literally aware that you are reading only one half of the book.

los productos del trabajo tienen sus residuos.
a estos residuos les llamamos objetividad espectral.
a esta objetividad espectral le llamamos mera gelatina.
a esta mera gelatina le llamamos
cristalizaciones de la sustancia social común.

a estas cristalizaciones les llamamos valor.[1]

So begins “todas sus propiedades sensibles se han esfumado,” the opening poem of lo terciario/the tertiary, the newest collection released in May by Puerto Rican poet and translator Raquel Salas Rivera. Or it begins:

Into-an-empty-swimming-pool-diving in love

Sommer Browning

a photograph of branches twisted into the shape of a person in an alcove — Ana Mendieta, Untitled from Silueta Series, Mexico, 1973-77

I am falling in love with a person. Isn’t falling in love one of the weirdest feelings you’ve ever had? I can’t say that it is pure joy. I mean we say FALLING in love for a reason. And, as you get older, falling is no joke. Forty-two-year-olds fall down and can break their body. But love falling is so much riskier! We really should call it plummeting in love. We really should call it into-an-empty-swimming-pool-diving in love. It feels like my realities are at stake. My sense of self. The view of my life from this angle — forty-two-year-old white mother poet lady.