[It’s now the 500th year exactly since the conquest and sacking of the imperial Aztec city of Tenochtitlán by Hernán Cortés and allies, concerning which the following segment from the gathering of “The poetry and poetics of the Americas,” assembled by Javier Taboada and me, as it will appear in the final version.
[The following is posted here in memory of Harris Lenowitz, who for many years was my comrade in poetry and translation. He coedited with me Exiled in the Word (a.k.a. A Big Jewish Book) and was himself the author of The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights. But his masterwork was the compilation and translation of The Words of the Lord, a gathering of the words and visions of the eighteenth-century messiah and mystic Jacob Frank, left unpublished by Harris at the time of his death.
One afternoon in northern Europe, probably in the year 1939, a boychild one now sees wearing a blue velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit with lace collar and cuffs, is walking down a chiaroscuro corridor in a haut-bourgeois six-story apartment building —
What Dadaists are still alive are dealing with their life-movies in various ways, suggested by other labels:
Cover of the Lithuanian edition of Khurbn by Algimantas Černiauskas
[The following continues an interview and conversation with Javier Taboada in El Libro de las Voces, just published in Mexico by Mangos de Hacha. The publication of course is in Spanish and includes a selection of poems and essays along with the extensive series of interviews. Still in my possession and unpublished is the entire book in English, from which the following excerpt is taken. (j.r.)]
Poems and poetics