write the sky
Danna
different is
years later
here
is
without God
you
and I
had that type
of relationship
we were
profound,
not just
an idea
structured
for structure
that is
a different way
of talking
about nature
this is
mystery
I don't know
I'm a city
of violence and horror
that existed before
and will exist
afterwards,
in you
you are a dream,
an old memory
writing the sky,
the world
Materials:
1. A page of printed text from a book, magazine, or any text.
2. Pencil, pen, or marker.
Instructions:
1. Erase words from the text (or bold them as in the example below) to see what poem or flash emerges.
different form is Juan Luis Martínez. Are there others? No. Afterwards, there are. Diamela Eltit three years later, published a book that was like this, in 1983. But these are like two time periods. Here, there are a few translations of Juan Luis Martínez by Steven White in Poets of Chile, and now La Nueva Novela is being translated by Mónica de la Torre. For people who don't know anything about him, why is he important? La Nueva Novela, first of all, didn't have one sentence that was by Juan Luis Martínez. It was constructed purely from found texts. It's an enormous compilation. It can also be explained a bit in terms of the anti-poetry of Parra, but it went even further; Martínez's was a poetry without God. In this book the role of the author was as someone who compiles or organizes more than someone who writes. It's a huge collage. You know, we wrote some of that book together. I don't know if you know that I was married to his sister. And we shared a typewriter. There's part of La Nueva Novela that I wrote, some multiplications and divisions, so we had that type of relationship. So you were very close friends? We were almost brothers. And how did the literary world respond to Juan Luis Martínez? With a profound distrust. But something weird happened, which is typical . . . He died and they discovered his greatness? Not just that. In part when I started getting attention, then they began to pay attention to Juan Luis Martinez. And I think there was originally an idea that he was somehow copying me, but really they didn't understand him at all. And I really got his work. For him, who were models? The French writers . . . René Char? René Char, Raymond Roussell, Raymond Queneau. . . . Not the more official writers . . . He was an incredible person. He never finished high school, and he knew more about French literature than anyone else, but he didn't know French. He was incredible. And so are there now people who write under his influence in Chile, who use collage, etc. . . ? I think there are some who intend now to write like him, but no one is really able to do it, because he was extremely structured. And so those who try to write like him don't have the patience for the structure. I think there is only one writer, a young writer, who has taken Juan Luis Martínez and used his influence well. His name is Andrés Fischer; a young writer, well young for me; he was born in 1971. He constructed a poetry that is syllogistic, influenced a bit by me and a bit by Juan Luis Martínez, but he's different. You spoke a bit about the cow poems. Reading your work, one notices the use of nature and nature as a way of talking about political and cultural ideas, of talking about something other than nature. How did this happen? For me this is a mystery. It's a mystery, I don't know. The truth is, I'm a city person. I began to feel at one point that in the face of the violence and horror, nature had something permanent. That this existed before and it will exist afterwards. But why? But why so obsessively? I don't know. I think this is something that continues to exist in your work, even in your latest book, In Memoriam. Well, on the same subject the poems from La Vida Nueva that you wrote in the sky—how did this idea come about? That idea came about in the most desperate time of my life. I got the idea far before it happened, in 1975; it was at the time I burned my face and then I remembered that when I was a kid, a really young kid, I remembered having seen an airplane write the name of a soap in the sky. I didn't know if it was a dream or if I had really seen it because it was an extremely old memory. . . . And so then it occurred to me that it would be beautiful to write in the sky. This was 1975 and I was totally desperate, but thinking about this helped me to stay OK. . . .I thought about this, and I was able to escape from the horrors of life. And in practice, how did this function? How did you find pilots? Originally, we tried to do it with the Chilean Air Force, because I thought that if these same guys who bombed La Moneda (the presidential palace) for their government are capable of writing a poem in the sky, then it would prove that art would be capable of changing the world. Of course, it didn't happen. The idea went as far up as a commandante. Then we had some friends who were in the U.S. And I wrote to them and asked if they knew of any agencies that wrote advertisements in the skies with airplanes. And so how it happened . . . it was crazy. I had never even been in an airplane. But we arranged it all. Today I wouldn't be able to do it. It was through pure passion. We were able to get it filmed entirely for free. We sold in advance an
from Written on the Sky. Chilean poet Raúl Zurita talks about life after Pinochet by Daniel Borzutzky thepoetryfoundation.org
No comments:
Post a Comment