Confusion
She says: “I was confusing gerunds with geraniums.”
—That’s a joke.
—No, a confusion.
A body floating in the water is not a gerund
although it swells up.
—Did he throw himself into the river?
—Yes, he was confused.
The body in the water swells up,
just like a gerund.
GERUND
Said of the person who speaks or writes in an inflated style,
inopportunely affecting erudition and wit.
When a seed swells up, when it bursts
leaves will sprout; eyes,
although they may swell up, don’t bloom.
Bodies will bloom and the word gerund
will be a geranium.
The bodies of the drowned are not bodies,
they are
seeds. Soon they will be
branches.
They are being, being reborn, on their way
to fill the water with flowers born from their bellies.
Rivers will be
shifting sands. Forests fleeing woodcutters.
They will blossom.
And under water
the river-born men will dance
with a geranium on their heads.
The river is what is being.
She says: “So, river is a gerund?”
Cowboy
The world is no longer enough
for a pile of poems
Glory is no longer enough
for a pile of poems
Life is no longer enough
for a pile of poems
Poems are no longer enough
for a pile of poems.
We insist on inventing something sinister. Small
implanted beings, embryos replacing phalanxes,
members replaced by oblations, self-sustainable
parts, hypodermic tubes, flexible, hyper-
sensitive, interchangeable, analogous cables.
We insist on writing false extremities. Prostheses
that compensate for what’s missing.
I don’t want to write a prosthesis, my phalanx
poem, I don’t want to write a prosthesis, my
pinky-finger poem, I don’t want to write a prosthesis,
my arm poem, I want to write a yellow stump,
a stump lengthily caressed, not the missing extremity
but the consciousness of what’s absent, the
involuntary reflections and the phantom limb,
I want to write the amputation.
I write what does Not:
There are yellow cables in the dermis, there are yellow
cables in the cochlea, there are yellow cables in the
buttocks, there are yellow cables in the encoded concavity,
in the little hole.
There are horses in the pubis, there are horses in the abdomen, in
the pelvis there’s an algebraic flute, there are some dumping
gears, there are gálapagos in the abdomen. There are gálapagos
and wallops: gallops.
(They say that’s a metaphor.) They say you eat it
like this, like this they say, they say bag, gallbladder, raft,
they say membrane, bile, they say I’m rafting
on a sea of bile, they say you have to cross with
two coins on your eyes, I’d rather tear them out and
just carry the sockets, the missing.
I travel on this sea rubbed raw by the coast, on a raft that you can pull apart to make a cross that flaps like a flag, like the waves of this bilious sea, this sea from which a sacred body’s scabs emerge, from a swelling. This raft on which I float is a stump and I’m mounting it cowboy-style, riding my stump over the bile, people will say they saw me mounted on a white swan, they’ll say that they saw me, but it will be a lie, it will be my raft, the stump-raft I ride, and I too am a stump, a phalanx extirpated from my mother’s belly, and I’m also an absent extremity, I’m a mutilation, I’m a piece of arm floating in the water, amniotic, floating in bile. They’ll say I’m a swan and that my feathers are golden, they’ll say I’m a mythological bird, but it will be a lie, it won’t be true that they saw me on a swan’s back, it won’t be true that I myself am a swan. Just a stump floating in water. “For this absence there is no prosthesis,” there are no poems, poems don’t suffice for this absence, nor does all of love suffice. There is no phalanx. No one will see the stump because it’s deep inside, in my stomach, in my dark purse, there’s a stump floating in my sea, but the sea is here inside, I feel it, and I too am inside riding on the back of a stump, a stump upon another stump: a cross. This emptiness, this cold at my back, this absence, is it the absence of God? This absence is a stump floating in water. Is God, then, a stump or a swan that passes by my window, white, white like snow?
Confusion & Cowboy
Alejandro Albarrán
translated from the Spanish by Rachel Galvin
Listen to the poems read in the original Spanish by the poet:
Fierce, unrelenting, always keenly attuned to the play of language and where it leads the tongue, Alejandro Albarrán’s poems speak of violence on a national and a brutally intimate level. His poems are also philosophical, as they seek to understand the self, alone and in society. His is a poetry of the news: it critiques state-sponsored violence and private attitudes that lead to the sanctioning of violence.
Albarrán is one of the most dynamic and exciting of the new generation of Mexican poets. These two poems, “Confusion,” from Ruido (2012), and “Cowboy,” from Tengo un pulmón que no es cielo (2014), are drawn from collections that show his remarkable ability to shift poetics and conjure a plurality of voices.
Translation is problematized in a series in Ruido called “El Automatista”: a text is translated from English into Spanish, then German, back into Spanish, into Chinese, and finally back to Spanish, via Google Translate. The process is a metaphor for the complications of international communication, even as it features humorous touches like the transformation of “André Breton” into “Andrea Gordon.” A series Albarrán creates through erasure (“Intervenciones” or “Interventions”) likewise highlights the inadvertent meanings hidden within public, informational language.
Ruido (Noise) cites a range of English-language writers such as Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, and even Barack Obama, and includes a tip of the chapeau to French writer Jacques Roubaud, a member of the Oulipo, whose words serve as the book’s epigraph: “When a change in metrical form is first formulated, its new disposition isn’t understood: everything new is initially perceived as noise.” This glosses the book title and provocatively frames its sonic experiments.
Tengo un pulmón que no es cielo (I Have a Lung That Is Not the Sky) is comprised of what may seem to be more conventional lyrics—Albarrán coaxes rhyme to bloom, and self-reflexively inscribes himself (“Alejandro”) in a poem. Yet the collection also shows he is a pyrotechnician: one word bursts from another word’s etymology or cluster of phonemes (reminiscent of Oulipian experiments). The sequence of prose poems, “Cowboy,” is an ars poetica that contrasts the iconic white swan of nineteenth-century modernista poetry with a vision of a contemporary poem made from the remains of an amputated limb. The visceral imagery emblematizes the collection’s poetics of pathology, of the failing and suffering body, of nerves jangled by mortality. In Albarrán’s somatic imaginary, somewhat like César Vallejo’s, the body both gives birth to a text and is a text itself: poetic language arises from violence done to the body and is, in itself, a damaged body.
Albarrán is one of the most dynamic and exciting of the new generation of Mexican poets. These two poems, “Confusion,” from Ruido (2012), and “Cowboy,” from Tengo un pulmón que no es cielo (2014), are drawn from collections that show his remarkable ability to shift poetics and conjure a plurality of voices.
Translation is problematized in a series in Ruido called “El Automatista”: a text is translated from English into Spanish, then German, back into Spanish, into Chinese, and finally back to Spanish, via Google Translate. The process is a metaphor for the complications of international communication, even as it features humorous touches like the transformation of “André Breton” into “Andrea Gordon.” A series Albarrán creates through erasure (“Intervenciones” or “Interventions”) likewise highlights the inadvertent meanings hidden within public, informational language.
Ruido (Noise) cites a range of English-language writers such as Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, and even Barack Obama, and includes a tip of the chapeau to French writer Jacques Roubaud, a member of the Oulipo, whose words serve as the book’s epigraph: “When a change in metrical form is first formulated, its new disposition isn’t understood: everything new is initially perceived as noise.” This glosses the book title and provocatively frames its sonic experiments.
Tengo un pulmón que no es cielo (I Have a Lung That Is Not the Sky) is comprised of what may seem to be more conventional lyrics—Albarrán coaxes rhyme to bloom, and self-reflexively inscribes himself (“Alejandro”) in a poem. Yet the collection also shows he is a pyrotechnician: one word bursts from another word’s etymology or cluster of phonemes (reminiscent of Oulipian experiments). The sequence of prose poems, “Cowboy,” is an ars poetica that contrasts the iconic white swan of nineteenth-century modernista poetry with a vision of a contemporary poem made from the remains of an amputated limb. The visceral imagery emblematizes the collection’s poetics of pathology, of the failing and suffering body, of nerves jangled by mortality. In Albarrán’s somatic imaginary, somewhat like César Vallejo’s, the body both gives birth to a text and is a text itself: poetic language arises from violence done to the body and is, in itself, a damaged body.
Alejandro Albarrán was born in Mexico City in 1985. He has published three collections of poetry, Ruido (Bonobos, 2012), Tengo un pulmón que no es el cielo (FETA, La Ceibita, 2014), and Persona fea y ridícula (FETA, 2017). He has received grants from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas, and Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura. He is a founding editor of the press Canón Accidental, co-director of the radio program Radio Rara, and is also a musician and conceptual artist who works with textual, visual, and sound poetry. Alejandro’s performances, installations, and artist’s books have been featured in numerous contemporary art exhibitions. His poems have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Polish, and Swedish. His musical project “Forastero” can be found here and other work can be viewed at his Tumblr page. His books are available in pdf for free download at Poesía mexa.
Rachel Galvin is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her books include Pulleys & Locomotion (poems) and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s Courir les rues (Hitting the Streets), which won the Scott Moncrieff Prize. A new book of poems, Lost Property Unit, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Alice James Books’ Kinereth Gensler Award, and will be published by Green Lantern Press in 2017. A translation of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry (with Harris Feinsod) is forthcoming from Open Letter Books. Rachel is also the author of a work of criticism, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945 (Oxford UP, 2018), and co-editor of Auden at Work (2015). Her scholarship appears in Comparative Literature Studies, ELH, Jacket2, Los Angeles Review of Books, MLN, and Modernism/modernity, and her poems and translations appear in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, MAKE, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, PN Review, and Poetry. She is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.
