Photo in concert at iBeam in Brooklyn, by Peter Gannushkin.
“I am a poet of the lyric lineage, favoring the lucidly bent, bare syntax of George Oppen, & the strange torn-off clarity of Paul Celan. Mine are poems of compressed language, of a self folded in on itself. It has been said that there is a void in my work, & a trace left by other poets. That void might be filled or left be, at the edge of our correspondence.
[Originally published in part in Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, edited by Christine Ward Gailey (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992). Copies of Diane Rothenberg’s book, Mothers of the Nation, in which this essay also appeared, may still be available through Ta’wil Books, pjoris@icloud.com. Another essay, “Corn Soup & Fry Bread,” was posted earlier on December 5, 2008, in Poems and Poetics, and parts one and two of the present essay first appeared there in September 2014.
[Known as a poet-translator of contemporary Mapuche-language poets such as Elicura Chihuailaf, Leonel Lienlaf, and others, the Chilean Spanish-language poet Rodrigo Rojas has now made a further translingual shift into a series of poems written entirely in English. Of these he tells us: “These are not translations; the poems were written directly in English. The book is called Exercises on Infidelity because English is not my first language, but also because the idea of an original poem as the source of the poetic experience is questioned.
Poems and poetics