Tag astrology

* inspired gusts with juan morales

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

This week’s poem – “The Right Way to Die for a Poem” by fellow CantoMundista, Juan Morales – presents a brief but powerful catalog of poets’ deaths and the human frailty and risk – whether satire resulting in a death sentence or accident in the tub – involved in those deaths.

What moves me the most is how the poem feels like a cascade of lives in which the speaker’s own life is in the mix, each versifier carried along by “inspired gusts.” For me, this image of lives tumbling in the wind parallels some of what happens when a poet sits down at the page, how we carry our own personal histories – cultural, reading, familial, emotional – as well as the histories of the words we choose, everything alive with us as we press each borrowed word fresh onto the page.

This poem is from Morales’ new book, The Siren World, available for pre-order from Lithic Press here.

The Right Way to Die for a Poem – Juan Morales

Osip Mandelstam in a gulag for a cockroach written on Stalin’s lip,
Garcia-Lorca buried where he fell for siding with those
who have nothing, Roque Dalton gunned down
by ERP comrades, and the Spanish writer I read about
accidently electrocuted by a hair dryer in her tub.
Thinking of them, I want to know if this
is the way I really want to go:
scribbling words about a shirtless man on top of
a southbound train on the back of a gas receipt
against my steering wheel with both hands
at 80 miles-per-hour, praying a deer
will not cross the interstate and
wary of the strong, inspired gusts.

***

 

Happy gusting!

Jose

* flying beyond the surface with ernesto cardenal

José Angel Araguz 4 Comments

The Parrots – Ernesto Cardenal

My friend Michel is an army officer
in Somoto up near the Honduran border,
and he told me he had found some contraband parrots
waiting to be smuggled to the United States
to learn to speak English there.

There were 186 parrots
with 47 already dead in their cages.
He drove them back where they’d been taken from
and as the lorry approached a place known as The Plains
near the mountains which were these parrots’ home
(behind those plains the mountains stand up huge)
the parrots got excited, started beating their wings
and shoving against their cage-sides.

When the cages were let open
they all shot out like an arrow shower
straight for their mountains.

The Revolution did the same for us I think:
It freed us from the cages
where they trapped us to talk English,
it gave us back the country
from which we were uprooted,
their green mountains restored to the parrots
by parrot-green comrades.

But there were 47 that died.

* cardenal *

* cardenal *

For the past two weeks I’ve been doing my best to share with my intermediate composition students what it means to problematize. Last week, one student neatly summed it up as “asking questions to see beyond the surface.” I was so fond of that definition that I’ve adopted it into my day to day thinking.

Poems, in a way, do this kind of questioning, whether explicitly or implicitly. Robert Frost couldn’t just let the two guys build their wall, he had to go and write a poem about it. What else the act of putting words to what we experience but an admission of wanting to understand, to “see beyond the surface?”

This week’s poem, by Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, takes us beyond the surface of a story about parrots into what he would understand and have the reader understand with him. The voice remains straightforward to the point that we don’t notice when the “surface” of the story is broken and when the deeper levels of political and personal meaning start to take flight around us.

***

I wanted to take a moment and say thank you to everyone for the good wishes on the release of my new chapbook, Reasons (not) to Dance. The show of support and kindness here and elsewhere has meant the world to me. I am extremely proud of this project. To officially be a “microcuentista” and add what I can to the rich traditions of the prose poem, flash fiction, short-short, microcuento, etc. is an honor. Thank you for being along for the ride!

See you next Friday!

Jose