[There was with Clayton Eshleman a ferocious wisdom that came through in his remarkable poetry and in a range of translations (Vallejo, Césaire, Artaud, and others) that entered into his own dreamlife and wakenings in a way unknown to most poet-translators: a narrative of interactions with his subject that is without precedent and with a deliberate consciousness of what he’s doing and why and of how he may fail in that effort.
[Rochelle Owens remains, as she has been for the preceding half-century, a necessary voice among the growing company of those American and world poets writing and performing at the limits. The work presented here is a follow-up to the first part of “Patterns of Animus” presented earlier on Poems and Poetics, and a harbinger of yet more works to come.
[The following, a Spanish translation of which will appear shortly in El Libro de Las Voces, my latest book from Mexico, was an attempt by me and David Antin to start a public correspondence focused on the many years of our friendship and ongoing discourse, from New York in the 1950s to California from the 1970s until David’s death in 2016.
Poems and poetics