For some time now I’ve been working with Arie Galles on Graffite, a three-part series of graphite drawings with poem accompaniments: MoonFields, CloudPoems, and PepperTree, in that order. Here, with the exception of MoonFields (abstract circles and lines), Galles’s images begin as black and white photographs that he then translates, as with his monumental 14 Stations, into three sets of twenty graphite drawings each, to which are added twenty poems of mine as linkages.
In 1460, several cuicapihqui (= Nahuatl forgers of songs, i.e. poets) were gathered in Huexotzinco (near the present-day city of Puebla, in Mexico) by the lord and poet Tecayehuatzin to discuss the nature of poetry, its origins & the fate of its poets & poems. The result of that historical meeting was a long poem, here excerpted, transcreated, and lineated by Javier Taboada. The names of the participating poets are given in brackets.
[First presented at King’s College, London, March 13, 2022, as part of a two-day poetry and music event, “Performed Poetics,” celebrating the work of Jerome Rothenberg and the late poet and scholar Eric Mottram.]
[The following is part of an opera conceived and planned with composer Charlie Morrow but never finished beyond the first two scenes (shown here) nor ever put into production. Abulafia selbst (1240–c.1291) was a great mystic and master of a species of meditation that took the form, often enough, of a kind of mystical lettrism. In 1280, responding to a dream or vision, he set out for Rome to convert the Pope (Nicolas III) and to proclaim himself the Jewish messiah.
Poems and poetics