With regard to the teaching and promotion of the ancient Mediterranean “classics,” as reported recently in the New York Times and elsewhere, I’m reminded of the following — partly tongue-in-cheek and partly serious — which I published first in Shaking the Pumpkin (1972) and that Javier Taboada and I are including again in our new hemispheric and omnipoetic anthology of the Americas “from origins to present.” The premise behind it, however, is far
[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.
Poems and poetics