On the sermons of Tyrone Williams
A lay preacher, as well as the distinguished poet, critic, and English professor I had known him to be, Tyrone had delivered the sermons at the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he worshipped from 1987, when he began teaching full time at Xavier, until he took his position as a distinguished chair in the English Department at Buffalo in Spring 2022.
Six months after Tyrone Williams died from cancer at age seventy on March 11, 2024, I accessed the texts of seventeen sermons he had composed and that were now housed in the “Theological, 2001-2021” section of his archive at SUNY Buffalo.
“Deep alongsideness”: translating the city in parentheses, quotation, and book objects
A review of Claudina Domingo’s ‘Transit’ translated by Ryan Greene (Eulalia Books, 2024)
Claudina Domingo began the poems in Transit by walking 24 routes through Mexico City and registering the accretions of those experiences. First published by the Mexico City-based editorial Tierra Adentro in 2011, Ryan Greene's 2024 translation with Eulalia Books puts the book in conversation with poetic texts in English interested in spatial practices in the situationist lineage. Domingo’s routes chart, as Greene describes, “a path past ‘half-chewed’ churches, through churning markets, and under rain-drenched awnings” as the poems trace onto the page an accumulated streetscape of Mexico City’s pasts and presents.
Claudina Domingo began the poems in Transit by walking 24 routes through Mexico City and registering the accretions of those experiences. First published by the Mexico City-based editorial Tierra Adentro in 2011, Ryan Greene's 2024 translation with Eulalia Books puts the book in conversation with poetic texts in English interested in spatial practices in the situationist lineage. Domingo’s routes chart, as Greene describes, “a path past ‘half-chewed’ churches, through churning markets, and under rain-drenched awnings” as the poems trace onto the page an accumulated streetscape of Mexico City’s pasts and presents.
Domingo instigates the question of how to mark on the page that which the poet simultaneously experiences in the cityscape. But what does it actually mean to convey a city’s “500 years of collaging over itself” in the space of a page? (125)