Poet, do you wash your clothes by hand?
Poet, do you hang them up to dry?
Poet, have your poems seen the wind?
Poet, have your poems seen the light of day?
Where did you learn that you weren't a poet
and what do you do to become one after all?
There's a guy on twitter posting semi-pretentious [or wholly pretentious] questions to poets, like how do your poems venerate the earth, so he inspired this poem from me.
It is a block of undifferentiated text of indefinite extension, without paragraph or page breaks, though conventionally punctuated. Lines on the page begin or end arbitrarily, as in other works of conventional prose. The margins are set arbitrarily. It is intimidating and seemingly impenetrable. Where to begin? That is not the problem. Rather, the question is how to continue, and for how long, and why. The end is not in sight, so it is difficult to say where the landmarks might fall. Where, for example, is the end of the beginning, the middle of the middle, the beginning or middle of the end? Coming back to the text another day, it is hard to remember where to begin again. Surely not from the beginning! How to mark one's place? And the purpose of such a text also seems unclear. Black against a white background, it offers nothing lavender or chartreuse, nothing smelling of thyme or cinnamon. Little by little, a plot emerges, unrushed, lavishly prepared for, greatly anticipated. A silvery thread runs through it. Now, finally, something not black or white. But isn't this just the name for something something gray but lustrous? It gathers strength; though still thin as a thread, standing out more clearly from the background of other whites, blacks, and grays. The reader can grab on to it. It is unclear from this example how well the reader knows the language of the text, a detail that was not apparent from the beginning. You merely took for granted the reader's proficiency at the beginning, but what if the impenetrable monolith were only partially comprehensible. Moreover, the reader might be learning the language of the text through the act of reading it, so that the text increases in clarity throughout the reading process. Since theoretically the text has no end, any time the reading stops the text simply breaks off without any reason. Now its continuity is in question again...
Windchimes from the balcony, one wood, the other metal
the chirping of small birds, the scurrying of squirrels
these are are my pigments, my soundscapes
roar of furnace, hum of refrigerator
my own breath, in and out, my own heartbeat at quieter moments
They have created a radio station for me
Monk and Mompou, guessing at my deepest desires
These too are pigments, as vivid as the green of my succulents
as brown as the smell of coffee, of onions carmelizing in the pan...
Some were confined to their homes for months
others thrown into the street
Some suffered extreme solitude
others, forced into the company of gregarious fools
Some sickened and died
others lived in fear
All were lied to, all menaced
all broken
Some lamented
others said next to nothing
Some wrote songs and painted paintings
others did not
Usually I don't write poems that aren't funny. I also never write poems "about" anything. Except for this one. I think this will be my Covid statement for my evaluation.
I've discovered another obscure manuscript by the poet Mateo del Olmo, book of the pigments. I feel obliged to translate it. The urge came to me as I read another, very good book yesterday and today, by an unrelated poet, Teresa Soto, Crónicas de I.
