Feb 16, 2004

Received a copy of 6x6 #8 from the Ugly Ducklings themselves last night. The issue is, as always, worthwhile across the board, but of particular note is a sequence of 6 poems by Allston's own Guillermo Juan Parra.

Those of you unfamiliar with Guillermo's blog should definitely check it out.

Guillermo's work, like the man himself, spans two cultures. Though the poems themselves are singular, evincing that which every poetic traveller knows, that the poet's home is there, in the poems, and nowhere else. The poems are clear as a bell, unafraid of senitment but also steeped in the lessons of modern and contemporary American (read North, Central and South) poetry.

The echoes of Spanish language in the poems serve to heighten and enhance the experience of reading them in the way that double-exposed photographs, those images which retain traces of another frame which can be made out superimposed on the subsequent frame, immediately become more interesting to the eye. Saxifrage flowers splitting the rocks of Babel tower. In Parra's own words (apologies that I don't know how to code the accent marks):

on avenues w/ trees older than
skyscrapers stretch toward my feet

of the eventual loss / degeneration
of the body, my back aches after

walking Sabana Grande boulevard
from parque Los Caobos
sampleos, loops, edicion

twenty years since speaking
a child's caraqueno Spanish

on the radio love multiplies
its fountains w/ varied melody

no static, in our city vision

The voice inhabits the placenames as only those intimate can, the way a place name must inhabit a poem in the same way it inhabits the poet's heart. The lquid placenames acting contrpuntally with the crackly skyscrapers and static, the brutally modern and anglo 'w/[ith]' Those avenues w/ trees also older than the slashed 'w' and its abbreviated skycraper slash. The poem fills in the syllable just as it fills in the scene and the mien of the poet. No static.


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