I’ve been thinking about this blog for a long while. When I was asked to write a comment or two on poetry for Jacket2, I researched several angles: from fiber artist Xenobia Bailey’s extraordinary vision translated into mosaic tile for New York’s newest subway system, to the dynamic Pan-Africanist energy of Congo-American electronic rapper Young Paris throughout Brooklyn’s environs, his majesty reflected in the stunning collection of Congolese art at the Met last year. The aesthetics of Black representation in the public sphere is described as poetic, and it is, but I landed on a decision to debut this column a few days after April 21st, 2016.
What Artaud wanted was seemingly impossible: to shift the foundations of human experience. Because his vision was so ambitious, with each effort to locate the right medium for expression, Artaud would repeatedly fail. Naomi Greene explains that Artaud “believed that any writer who used language traditionally could not reveal metaphysical truths to man, for ordinary language obscured the spiritual realities of the universe.”[1] Artaud began with poetry, expanded the scope of his writing during his time with the Surrealists, then split with the Surrealists.
If refraction reorients boundaries and shapes that we take for granted, then this literal impulse lies at the center of the well-known cut-paper silhouettes of Kara Walker, which I now examine through the lens of translation and refraction. In Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), the title itself is an off-center re-naming of Gone with the Wind, the famous romance novel set in the South during the Civil War. What do the contents of such an intentionally unsettling translation entail?
[Re-posted from a previous publication in Poems and Poetics, to mark Dennis Tedlock’s unexpected passing earlier this year. My admiration & debt to him – & that of so many others – is hardly in need of explanation, though the note below provides some of it. (J.R.)]
Singing the unpronounceable: A season of sounding Black grieving
I’ve been thinking about this blog for a long while. When I was asked to write a comment or two on poetry for Jacket2, I researched several angles: from fiber artist Xenobia Bailey’s extraordinary vision translated into mosaic tile for New York’s newest subway system, to the dynamic Pan-Africanist energy of Congo-American electronic rapper Young Paris throughout Brooklyn’s environs, his majesty reflected in the stunning collection of Congolese art at the Met last year. The aesthetics of Black representation in the public sphere is described as poetic, and it is, but I landed on a decision to debut this column a few days after April 21st, 2016.
From 'Technicians of the Sacred Expanded' (a work in progress): 'The Khanty Prayer of the Bear' by Leonty Taragupta, poem, & commentary
O Father of the Seven Skies –
I too have been a God-spirit,
descendant of the bright ancestor,
descendant of the all-hearing ancestor,
though set upon the firmament
of the Earth!
But the Son of the Master of Towns –
is he your Father’s heir?
the son of the Master of the Hamlets –
Artaud: From the theater to the asylum
What Artaud wanted was seemingly impossible: to shift the foundations of human experience. Because his vision was so ambitious, with each effort to locate the right medium for expression, Artaud would repeatedly fail. Naomi Greene explains that Artaud “believed that any writer who used language traditionally could not reveal metaphysical truths to man, for ordinary language obscured the spiritual realities of the universe.”[1] Artaud began with poetry, expanded the scope of his writing during his time with the Surrealists, then split with the Surrealists.
Kara Walker: Unsettling narratives
Refracting history/archetypes
If refraction reorients boundaries and shapes that we take for granted, then this literal impulse lies at the center of the well-known cut-paper silhouettes of Kara Walker, which I now examine through the lens of translation and refraction. In Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), the title itself is an off-center re-naming of Gone with the Wind, the famous romance novel set in the South during the Civil War. What do the contents of such an intentionally unsettling translation entail?
Dennis Tedlock: Seven poems from Alcheringa & another from a long trip through Morocco
[Re-posted from a previous publication in Poems and Poetics, to mark Dennis Tedlock’s unexpected passing earlier this year. My admiration & debt to him – & that of so many others – is hardly in need of explanation, though the note below provides some of it. (J.R.)]
Advice Received
Don’t ask too many questions.