He aquí todo un poema de un tal Ben Okri que sale en la revista Poetry de diciembre 2023.
SEGOVIA I walked your acueducts at dawn. With giant legs they bestrode the landscape Of the Moors. Stick insects. Like Romans On stilts. Bearing water across the sky.
Ésta es mi traducción hecha para ti.
SEGOVIA Yo pisaba tus acueductos al amanecer. Con piernas de gigante montaban a horcajadas el paisaje de los Moros. Bichos de palo. Como romanos sobre zancos. Cargando agua através del cielo.
Éste es un diseño que hice. Monigote con gafas. Me gusta como logotipo de la empresa de fingirme <<pintor-poeta>>. ¡Jajaja! ¿Qué te parece?
“When Davis’s poems are poetry, they are powerful.”
(Langston Hughes, on Frank Marshall Davis)
I’ve no basis for discerning what’s verse and what’s poetry other than whether it jostles a personal needle. I compare a poetry moment (loosely) to another apex moment — that of collapsing into a sexual partner, wrapped in appendages and received. The comparison may be overheated, but what strikes me as important is that the text and I are intertwined. Its words have thrust us into close communion. I, a reader, want to be as nuclear to the poetry moment as the writer. They have sought me, and I them. There’s no need asserting that the poem which has induced me into vital congress with itself ought to be important to others having their own affair with verse. When a text that jumps my needle jumps yours, however, we’ve found common ground — something to crow about.
Life is so done and gone, so irretrievable when it leaves the body, so fucked. Perennial violent death is priced so religiously into human affairs that we’re scabbed over from it, psychically calloused by it, inured to it; nonetheless, a single instance concentrated and conveyed through artifice can still hurt like hell. Antonio López’s poem paints the tragedy of a young life snuffed out. Its demotic tone, liturgical parody and evocation of urban desert build to a close whose unruly full stop is at perfect pitch, piercing with dolor and incredulity.
[…] Our altar, that art in EPA, hallow be thy pain, thy henny, thy Don Julio will be poured in dirt as it is in 7-Eleven, give us this day our daily Takis, our westside, our good morning, our good night, our boy back, please, his dreams, his age, 15, his name I pray, Inty, my God, you were hardly. A man. (Antonio López, “Our Lady of the Westside,” in Poetry, December 2023)
I read verses that stir me, but can’t remember what they said. They don’t mean what they say, they are what they say. I read them again to be stirred; they keep not meaning, only being, leaving in my mind a memory of being stirred by words. Grasping them is grasping slaking, thirsty water sliding through my fingers, aching to be drunk. ***
She called me her bow, and she bent and strung me. She called me her arrow, and she loosed me. And I’m still speeding, quivering with her aim. (Poem published in Poetry, December 2023)
[Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice ironic bloviation. The message buried in a made-up rant full of ludicrous rhetoric (posted previously) is that the assertion “It never happened,” or that an encounter was “consensual,” implies that women lie about being violated. That assumption is patently outrageous is my point.]
“Somnambula,” 12 x 14 in. oil on canvas (JMN 2020)
Swaggart. Trump. Weinstein. Epstein. Windsor. Brand. Rose… the list goes on. When will such men be spared the allegations of conniving women? It’s the one time the word “liaress,” feminine of “liar,” would be a useful addition to the language.
Everyone knows women are liaresses; it’s inherent in their DNA, a viral, vapors-prone disposition passed readily from one vixen to the next. How the contagion travels is a mystery. Where there may be, initially, one or two attention-seeking hellcats hollering rape, soon there are six, then a dozen, then twenty or more — it becomes a frenzy of follow-the-lying-liaress, a game of make-up-a-crazy-story about being violated by a powerful, charismatic man. The mendacious flibbertigibbets morph into prevaricating gerbils diving off the cliffside in their suggestible droves, infected by the vicious and delusional inventions of the original liaress. He raped me! they gibber and jabber during their richly deserved plummet to oblivion, to be dashed upon the rocks far below, where the waves consign their lying carcasses to Davy Jones’s locker.
What’s an upstanding celebrity with imperious urges to do when exposed to ripe wenches? Society can’t simply salt away its womb-stock in a secure purgatory, canopied in weeds, in order to make itself safe from female mischief. For now, the sole recourse of the harried victim is to gas off to his fanbase, lawyer up, and ride hell-bent for leather on a hobbyhorse named Consensual.
(Michelle Goldberg, “Why on Earth Are Jewish Leaders Praising Elon Musk?” New York Times, 11-20-23)
UNSTABLE GENIUSES, THEY GO AND COME The dude bogarts a joint and jinxes X, hocks the truth with loogies of spit juice. There’s not a problem Elon can’t unfix. Boca Chica Tex is on the loose!
It’s a rhetoric thing. My doggerel fustigates the fouling of standalone nouns (truth, fact, gift, love) with dishonest adjectives (“actual,” “alternative,” “free, “true”). Essential words watered by a pissed well wither. C’mon, everybody, this tongue is your tongue. Keep it sharp.
“Dirt Candy,” oil on paper, 18 x 22 in. (JMN 2023).
The Spanish text I translate to English here is from Las palabras de Javier (November 16, 2023).
In reading poetry of the day I brace for being left in the lurch, for being denied more than a cerebral engagement, at best, with what the verses purport to voice, the correlative they model or invoke. Now and then, however, a text helps me feel a feeling, as these lines by Javier Sánchez do. The internal accusative pounces unstalked. It’s a hurt that punctures numbness, not unsweet, but eye-watering, too, like a stitch in the side or twitch of a dormant muscle. How and why a given text springs an art attack is anybody’s guess. Javier writes Spanish that is taut, tuneful and pointed, the essence of poetic. My English can only shadow it.
WHEN I GO AWAY by Javier Sánchez
When I go away, I’ll leave you the exact letters for you to create a pretty poem.
When I go away, I’ll leave my memories in back of the painting in the house’s dining room.
When I go away, I’ll depart with fear for what I leave behind, and for whom, but not with fear of where I’m going. I know already where I’m going.
And we will see each other again.
From the verb conocer — to know someone.
But don’t be in a rush, life of mine, do not hurry. You’ll see that one summer day I’ll be out there, sitting at the door of the painter’s house on Angel Street, where you used to play when little.
You’ll see me, and without hesitation you’ll read me the poem you’ve written with the letters I gave you before my departure. That towheaded little boy will read with you, line by line, the pretty poem.
That will be when we smile, the two of us, again.
***
Postscript: In reading “When I Go Away” I felt distant vibes from a poem in an old anthology read me by my mother when I was a cotton-top brat myself. It was “Little Boy Blue” by Eugene Field.
André Derain, “Environs of Collioure” (“Environs de Collioure”), 1905… Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; via Galerie Philippe David, Zurich. [New York Times illustration]
“Fauve painting is not everything,… but it is the foundation of everything.”
(Matisse)
I have an affinity for the stripe of painting perpetrated by the Fauves.
André Derain’s “Fishing Boats, Collioure” (“Bateaux, Pêcheurs, Collioure),” 1905. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; via The Museum of Modern Art. [New York Times illustration]
Their manic attack with brush and pigment gestures offhandedly toward trees, water and sky.
Henri Matisse, “Study for ‘The Joy of Life’” (“Etude Pour ‘Le Bonheur de Vivre’”), 1905. Credit… Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Forma, Paris. [New York Times illustration]
The performative nonchalance makes pure abstraction look cautious.
Henri Matisse, “View of Collioure,” 1907. Credit… Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [New York Times illustration]
When Matisse and Derain cut loose it was like nobody’s business for the blink of an eye (1904-08). Over a century later their effusions still are fresh, outrageous, and goading.
(Roberta Smith, “Matisse and Derain: The Audacious ‘Wild Beasts’ of Fauvism in a Radiant Show,” New York Times, 11-9-23)
… A consummation devoutly to be wished.” (Shakespeare)
Evangelical euphemisms like “Grab ‘em by the prissy” and “Kiss my aft” have hopped from bully rally to pulpit rave in American discourse thanks to the God lobby. But, Britannia, oh dear! “Fuckpigs,” “morons” and “cunts” have recently been heard on the airwaves of the Sceptered Isle straight from the recorded lips of a political ruffian at 10 Downing Street. The unchurched epithets he sticks to Whitehall functionaries knock America’s sanctimonious cockuppery into a cocked hat.
See here, sir hooligan, to wit, Mr. Cummings:
In His Majesty’s Government, 778 members sit currently in the unelected House of Lords. It’s the superior chamber comprised of the better sort from the preferred schools and the loftier lineages. This pantheon of life peers will emit the mother of all harrumphs, followed by a scorching remonstrance with thunder of tut-tutting in deprecation of scurrilous utterance at Number Ten. I wager a guinea on it and shall be astonished if not. The Palace is briefed, mind you, and will keep vigil.
EthicalDative 
There’s So Much to Be Said for Saying Less
Afterword
I’m copious and so are you.
(From Cowpunk by Diane Seuss in Poetry, December 2023)
(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved