[EDITOR’S NOTE: Rose Drachler’s virtual disappearance in death is one of those inevitable but disturbing realities that confronts a number of heroic & gifted artists. Her presence in her final years, as Christine Meilicke testifies, was important for many of us — not only the Jewish poets among us, as stressed by Meilicke, but many others as well. John Ashbery wrote of her: “Rose Drachler’s poems are strong and sweet, firm and quirky, but this oddness soon comes to be perceived by the reader as a new canon.”
[On my way to Buffalo to celebrate the life & work of Dennis Tedlock, with whom I founded Alcheringa in 1970 & launched what we were already calling ethnopoetics, I thought to post this selection of his own poems which we were first able to show in the pages of that magazine.
[In an effort to rescue poems & poets from the last century who may otherwise be lost in the rush & crush of time, I will be reposting a number of works originally published only in the blogger version of Poems and Poetics. The intent of these excerpts from Frank Kuenstler’s oeuvre was to celebrate the publication in 2011 of his posthumous book The Enormous Chorus (Pressed Wafer), by posting Michael O’Brien’s Introduction and two of Kuenstler’s poems.
[As a follow-up to Barbaric Vast & Wild, the gathering of outside & subterranean poetry that John Bloomberg-Rissman & I assembled several years ago, I’ve been giving further thought to the poetry imbedded in the lyrics of so-called popularsong as manifested in particular in the orbit of contemporary blues- and rock-derived singer-poets from Bob Dylan & Leonard Cohen through Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, & Nick Cave, among so many others.
Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine
On the other side of the street, as if it were on the other side of the ocean, there is a sign: “Café.” The man in tweed waits for the light to change.
While he crosses the street, the man in tweed remembers the first time he drank coffee. Another time, another world: a smell of jungle in the steam.
Poems and poetics