Jackie at Elastic/Discrete Series pre-reading, witnessing the closeup genetalia on the walls. At my first reading in Chicago in 2003, I was surrounded by graphic novel porn. Freud said there are no accidents. 

Jeff, Eric, Kerri, me, Jackie, Brian--post reading at The Winds in Chicago 

While in Milwaukee, I picked up the following books at Woodland Pattern:

Circulation Flowers, Chuck Stebelton, Tougher Disquises, 2005
Watchword, William Fuller, Flood Editions, 2006
The Anger Scale, Katie Degentesh, Combo Books, 2006
Under Albany, Ron Silliman, Salt, 2004
Meteoric Flowers, Elizabeth Willis, Wesleyan, 2006
Necessary Stranger, Graham Foust, Flood Editions, 2007
Chicago Review, 52:2/3/4

It was great to read at the Discrete Series in Chicago last night. Great to see Kerri Sonnenberg again, and to hang out with her husband at El Cid #2. And to read with Brian Whitener. And to be aided greatly by Jackie Lalley, gracious host/chaperone/chaffeur. Jackie is perhaps the only person possible to be a contributing writer to both Bitch and The Onion. I will perhaps post some pictures when I get back to Chico. And I may make some comments on the above books. May, may, may.

Rupert Sheldrake's works should be taught in every poetry class, at the very least; they should also be taught in business and economic courses. The Presence of the Past was the first one that I read. I also read A New Science of Life and Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals: An Investigation. I see he has a new book out, The Sense of Being Stared At, which I'll pick up shortly.

*

Final poem in Trilce, LXXVII, as translated by Clayton Eshleman. (First lines are indented in the original and the translation).


LXXVII



It hails so much, as if to make me recall
and increase the pearls
that I've gathered from the very snout
of every storm.

May this rain not dry up.
Unless I am permitted
to fall now for it, or unless they bury me
drenched in the water
that would surge from all fires.

This rain, how far will it reach me?
I'm afraid I'm left with one flank dry;
afraid that it's ending, without having tested me
in droughts of incredible vocal cords,
by which,
to create harmony,
one must always rise--never descend!
Don't we rise in fact downward?

Sing, rain, on the coast still without sea!

LXIII has always been one of my favorite Vallejo poems, from Trilce, translated by Clayton Eshleman. Each initial stanza line is indented, which I cannot duplicate here:


LXIII


Day breaks raining. Combed through
morning drips fine hair.
Melancholy is lashed fast;
and on the misasphalted oxident of Hindu furniture
veering, destiny hardly settles.

Skies of the puna disheartened
by great love, platinum skies, torvous
with impossibility.

The flock ruminates and is underscored
by an Andean whinny.

I remember myself. But the staves
of the wind suffice, the rudders so still
they appear one,
and the cricket of tedium and jibbous unbreakable elbow.

The morning suffices with loose tresses
of precious, sierran tar,
when I go out and look for eleven o'clock
and it is only an untimely twelve.

Vallejo's imaginative and deep leap from The Black Heralds to Trilce is almost impossible to understand. Trilce and Ulysses appeared in the same year. Perhaps Joyce's transition from Portrait... to Ulysses is just as hard to understand. Here, like a sudden bell, is the first poem in Trilce, as translated by Clayton Eshleman:


I


Who's making all that racket, and not letting
the islands that linger make a will.

A little more consideration
as it will be late, early,
and easier to assay
the guano, the simple fecapital ponk
a brackish gannet
toasts unintentionally,
in the insular heart, to each hyaloid
squall.

A little more consideration,
and liquid muck, six in the evening
OF THE MOST GRANDIOSE B-FLATS

And the peninsula raises up
from behind, muzziled, imperturbable,
on the fatal balance line.

*

And then later in IX, we get the wonderful:

I sdrive to dddeflect at a blow the blow.

...and still later in the poem:

And female is the soul of the absent-she.
And female is my own soul.

Vallejo's Complete Poetry arrived much earlier than I thought it would. I have begun reading his first collection, The Black Heralds. It is filled with nostalgic writing, Christian overtones, that typical Vallejo exhuberance, and lyrical concision. Thematically, it's very tightly woven still, not darting off into abstract and enigmatic realms, as he'll do in Trilce. But one can see the beginnings in the latter sections of The Black Heralds. Like in these first and last stanzas of:

PRAYER ON THE ROAD


I don't even know who this bitterness is for!
Oh Sun, you who are dying, take it away
and hang, like a bloody Crucifix,
my bohemian pain on their breast.

...


An odor of time lingers fertilized by verses,
for the shoots of consecrated marble that would inherit
the auriferous song
of the lark rotting in my heart!

*

Translated by Clayton Eshleman