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Thirty years ago, while living in New York, I stayed awake almost every night listening to the wordy soliloquies of Jean Shepherd on the radio. It was a program in which they said many interesting things and you could hear a little music. One night was a long story that I still remember on a sacred ritual practiced an Amazonian tribe. Broadly speaking, it was something. Once every seven years the members of this remote tribe dig a deep hole in the thick of the jungle and left there with the best flautist. Then Tribe members say goodbye to him, never to return. At seven days, the flutist, with legs crossed in the depths of the hole, he started playing. Members of his tribe can not hear, of course, only the gods can do, and indeed that is the purpose of the rite.
According to Shepherd, who had no qualms about deceiving their insomniac listeners, an anthropologist had remained hidden during the ritual and had managed to record the piper. That night Shepherd was going to issue this recording.
I felt creepy. A man about to die, bewildered by hunger and despair, he gathered what little strength and faith in the gods he had left. A New World Orpheus, I thought.
Shepherd kept talking and talking until finally, in the silence of the morning, in my den of East Thirteenth Street, he heard the faint sound of the flute and the supernatural: a lonely, infinitely sad lament mixing occasionally, breathing creature still live audible resigned to accept the terrible situation in which he stood. At that time I did not care that the story was real or a figment of Shepherd, and I still think the same. In fact, we all live in the bottom of our hole particular, even here in New York.
All arts have to do with the impasse in which we live. It is their fatal attraction. "Words fail me ', they say the poets. Every poem is an act of desperation or if you prefer, a dice roll. God is the ideal audience, especially if you can not sleep or find yourself in a hole in the Amazon. If necessary, even worse.
The poet sits in front of blank paper with the need to say much in the limited space of the poem. The world is huge, the poet and the poem alone is only a fragment of language, a feather that broke the silence of the night.
may be the case that the poet wants to talk of his life. A handful of images resulting from a fleeting moment of happiness or extreme lucidity. The secret desire of poetry is to stop time. The poet wants to rescue a face, a mood, a cloud in the sky, a tree in the wind and take a kind of mental picture of that moment when the reader recognizes himself. The poems are snapshots of other people whom we recognize ourselves.
On the other hand, the poet is driven to tell the truth. "How to be expressed the truth? "asked Gwendolyn Brooks. Truth matters. Getting it right matters. The realistic advice is: open your eyes and look. Proponents of the imagination advice: close your eyes to see better. There is a truth that is perceived with the eyes open and another that is accessed with eyes closed, and sometimes these two truths are not recognized when they cross the street.
addition, one would say something about the times in which we live. Every age has its injustices and suffering unconscionable, and ours is far less an exception. We must face up to history of human evil, and every day we find new examples on which to reflect. You can think about it all you want, but understand it is another story. We live in a time when there are hundreds of ways to explain the world. You can believe in anything, in all religions and all varieties of scientism. Perhaps the task of poetry is to rescue the vestiges of authenticity can still be found in the ruins of religious systems, philosophical and political.
addition, one would write a poem so well done to do honor to the tradition represented by Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, to name just a few teachers.
other hand, one hopes to overcome that tradition, revolution and put it upside down and find their own living space.
Moreover, one would entertain the reader with the help of dazzling metaphors, fits of imagination and heart-rending statements.
Moreover, most of the time one has no idea of \u200b\u200bwhat it does. Words make love on the page like flies in the heat of summer, and the poem owes much to chance as to the intention. Probably even more.
This is only a small commands a huge menu that could only serve one of those many-armed Hindu deities.
A major drawback of poetry, or one of its biggest attractions, depends on how you look, is being designed to cover everything. In the cold light of reason, writing poetry is impossible.
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predictions we read so often say that poetry is about to disappear are completely wrong, as wrong as most of the twentieth century intellectuals prophecies. Poetry demonstrates and again that the general theories do not work alone. Poetry is the cat serenade under the window of the room where you enter the official version of reality. Academic critics write for instance, that poetry is an instrument of the ideology of the ruling classes and everything is political. It turns out that Anna Akhmatova was tormented in fact their guardian angels. But what if poets were not crazy? And if they were able to convey the feeling of a historical period better than anyone? Obviously, the poem captures something essential to human beings, something that is often overlooked, and it is this ineffable quality that has ensured its Longevity has always been. "To glimpse the essential ... stay lying down all day and complain," says EM Cioran. Poetry is much more than that, of course, but as a start is not bad.
lyric poets perpetuate old values \u200b\u200bof the Earth. They claim the individual's experience against that of the tribe. Emerson said that a genius was tantamount to "believing in what you think, believe what you believe is good for you deep in your heart it is for other men." From the Greek lyric poetry has always been based on that budget, but Whitman and Emerson became the fundamental premise of American poetry. Everything in the world, whether secular or sacred, must be reconsidered in light of personal experience.
Here and now I am afraid of living my life ... the American poet is the modern citizen of a democracy that lacks a historical, religious or philosophical defined. Marxists used to mock such claims and said they were "typical of bourgeois individualism." "They love to smell your own shit," said an acquaintance of mine alluding to the poets. Maoist era and the idea that every man could find his own truth he found incomprehensible. However, this is what I thought Robert Frost, Charles Olson and even Elizabeth Bishop. They were realists who had not yet decided what is the reality. His poetry defends the sanctity of that search in which reality and rediscover identity forever.
is not in the imagination or the identity they trust our foremost poets, but in the examples, stories or experiences. Poets still have a lot of Puritan diarist. Like their ancestors, introduced remarks on the state of his inner life in his diary entries that talk about the weather. The problem of identity is always present, as the nagging suspicion that the existence is meaningless. The working premise, however, is that each individual is representative of even their most intimate concerns that the "aesthetic problem," as John Ashbery has said, is "a microcosm of all human problems," the poem is the where the "I" of the poet, courtesy of a visionary alchemy, becomes the mirror of us all.
"America is not over, may never become so," said Whitman. Our poetry is dramatic awareness of that state. His heresy is to consider that part of the truth is the truth absolute and turn it into "a place where temporary refuge from the confusion," according to Robert Frost's famous formulation. In physics, the infinitely small contradicts the general law, and the same is true of good poetry. What we like about it is the democratic nature of his values, his reckless attitude, individualism and freedom. There is nothing more American and more hopeful that American poetry.
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chained A black dog wags its tail when it happened to him. The house and barn of his master warp like to sink overwhelmed by the sky. On the porch and my neighbor's patio store old cars, stoves, refrigerators, washers and dryers that comes from the municipal landfill in the future, give them a purpose which is not clear, yet to be decided. Everything is broken, rusting, dismantled and dispersed, except for an incongruous plaster statue of the Virgin Mary that looks new and looks down, as if ashamed of being there. Behind his house on the lake you can see a spectacular winter sunset, as the pictures they sell at the offer section of department stores. Regarding the piper, I remember reading that in the far southwestern deserts can be found matches made figurines on the walls of some caves and some of them play the flute. In New Hampshire, where I write this, only this house is dark, ghostly statue, the silence of the woods and the cold winter night that falls in a hurry.
offer a preview, chapter 23 of A fly in the ointment [ A Fly in the Soup ] memoir of the American poet Charles Simic that appear to end of the year in Broken Glass Editions in translation Jaime Blasco. We thank the editorial responsibility for permission to reproduce this chapter in Reasons flyer .
Charles Simic (Belgrade, 1938) emigrated to the United States in 1954, after a childhood marked by the difficult events of the Second World War. Figure currently among the most important poets known in the United States for the originality and communicative power of his work. He has received numerous awards and recognitions, among them the Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress in 2007-2008, or the International Prize for Translation from PEN in 1970, or the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his work The World Doesn 't End . Spain has released three large collections of his work: The world does not stop other poems, trans. Mario Lucard, Barcelona, \u200b\u200bDVD editions, 1999; Deconstructing Silence, trans. Jordi Doce, Lucena, 4 Seasons, 2004, and The voice at three in the morning , trans. Martín López-Vega, Barcelona, \u200b\u200bDVD editions, 2009.
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