Translation from Spanish & related dialects or faux-dialects by Jerome Rothenberg & Cecilia Vicuña. Originally published in the blogger version of Poems and Poetics & later in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, edited by Edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon Grosman, reprinted here for Jacket2. Final publication of the anthology of outside & subterranean poetry is scheduled for 2014 from Black Widow Press.
[In the construction of an assemblage of outside & subterranean poetry the question looms of whether to include in the composition some of those who in the aftermath are celebrated & canonized as the ultimate & necessary insiders. For Dante the outsidering came in his 37th year, when he was banished from Florence into what came to be a lifetime of exile from his native city.
[As I enter my eighty-third year the work that still lies ahead begins to focus on the possibility of a new poetry & poetics of the Americas. The idea, like most ideas (good & bad) is by no means new but it stirs up, again, a sense of unkept promises & of a discontent with the idea of America as the domain of the United States alone, the way we speak of it again & again in our works & in our daily lives.
Poems and poetics