My Poetry

The Chello

After fooling around for a week with the idea, I'm not sure this catches the sensuality of the situation. The Spanish version comes first because it is the original one.

Los hombros de la violonchelista,
Curvas blancas.
No recuerdo la música.

The chellist's shoulders,
White curves.
I don't remember the music.

 

 

Surreal haiku

Y tu mirá
se me clava en los ojos
como la voz de Lole.

No os preocupéis, no me he vuelto Neosurrealista de repente (al menos eso espero). Este haiku no se puede adaptar de verdad al inglés porque está demasiado relacionado con la cultura española. ¿cómo le explico a un extranjero quién es Lole?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And your gaze
pierces my eyes
like Lole’s voice.

Don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly become a Neosurreal poet (I hope and pray). This haiku cannot be properly adapted into English because it is too culturally bound. Lole was a flamenco singer, popular when I was a wee child, and her most famous song said “And your gaze pierces my eyes like a sword”. A normal way of saying “stare” in Spanish is “to stab/pierce with your eyes” so the image is not as absurd and violent as you think.

A list poem

In Spain, Christmas gifts are traditionally given on January 6th. The Three Wise Men, not Santa Claus, bring them. Some time ago I  spoke about list poems; they are a good way of writing poetry when you think you can’t write, for lack of inspiration or anything else. The previous entry is a list poem I like a lot. This is my Christmas 2005-06 letter to the Three Wise Men.

Secret Wish List

A pink car.
Pink hair, extensions, a beauty salon voucher
including manicure.
Jeff Buckley’s second studio album*
and tickets to a Martyn Bennet concert*.
A plane ticket to Glasgow.
Or maybe New york instead.
No, to Glasgow.
Inspiration to finish everything I’ve started writing.
A Powerbook.
An ipod, with every single audiobook by Neil Gaiman,
and read by Ian McKellen.
A nicer accent when I speak in English.
Lots of rain,
and one thunderstorm.

 

* That might be hard, as they’re both dead.

Latest poem

I think this melancholic little thing still counts as haiku, even though it has four lines.

So free.
Not a poem in weeks.
Not a lover in months.
So empty.

Qué libre.
Semanas sin componer.
Meses sin un amante.
Qué vacío.

 For those of you who cares about the biographical, gossipy bit, I have many poem beginnings around the idea of how long ago I last wrote something I found satisfying. Those little poem seeds rarely grow into real poems. Everything in this one was written around the second line.

 

Sunday Haiku (one day late)

This haiku is dedicated to my friend Suzanne Guthrie. The Spanish version is the original, and the English one the translation.

Café fuerte.
Pies en alto.
Suplemento dominical.

Strong coffee.
Putting feet up.
Sunday papers.

Latest haiku

En la pantalla,
tu piel de pixels,
inalcanzable.

On the screen,
Your skin, made of pixels,
out of my reach.

I'm feeling more and more comfortable about composing haiku in Spanish, even though up to a couple years ago I thought that it was impossible to twist my native language into haiku shape.  

 

Birds

I love birds,  especially urban ones.

This entry is dedicated to Luc , for cheering me up.

Birds for all seasons

Spring
Hush, it’s a concert:
The blackbird will sing
For those who don’t know his name!

Summer
Swallows flying high.
Summer trickles down my back.
No one cools me down.

Autumn
Hundreds of sparrows!
Dead ashes floating
in the evening’s burning sky.

Winter
Snow melts in the air.
Under her coat, she shivers.
Seagulls around us.

Pájaros para las cuatro estaciones.

Primavera
Sshh, es un concierto:
¡El mirlo va a cantar
para todos los que no saben su nombre!

Verano
Las golondrinas vuelan alto.
El verano me gotea espalda abajo.
Nadie me relaja.

Otoño
¡Cientos de golondrinas!
Cenizas muertas que flotan
En el cielo en llamas de la tarde.

Invierno
La nieve se funde en el aire.
Bajo su abrigo, ella tirita.
Gaviotas a nuestro alrededor.

List Poems

Different cultures have different types of list poems. I have seen long series of verses, free verse, and even sonnets that were simply lists. The easiest list-poem is the imitation of Sei Shonagon’s lists: Sei Shonagon was a lady at the court of a Japanese emperor, and she wrote short sketches of court life, together with lists. For example,  “Things that always seem to be dirty”; “things that look better on a painting”. I have a few of those, and this is the only one that’s not erotic. It's not realy a poem, more like the seed of one.

Cosas que me causan una profunda sensación de nostalgia:
Que un hombre que conozco de toda la vida se afeite. De repente su piel tiene el mismo tacto que hace quince años.
Un parque con hiedra y helechos en vez de césped.
El rock español de los 80.
Un día gris, muy gris, sobre todo si no hace frío.

Things that make me feel very nostalgic:
A man that I have known all my life when he shaves. Suddenly his skin feels like it did fifteen years ago.
A park with ivy or ferns instead of grass.
Spanish rock music from the eighties.
A very grey day, especially if it’s not cold.

Saudade

Saudade is a Portuguese term which means, roughly, "homesickness of what never was; longing for what never will be". I find it very fitting because it's odd to say that I'm homesick of places that were never home.

The first haiku is Alan Spence's. The second is mine. It's a work in progress, I'm not completely happy with the rhythm nor with the Spanish translation. It's a true anecdote, and I composed it while stuck in a traffic jam.

400 miles from my friends
the apples they gave me
for the journey

A 500 kilómetros de mis amigos,
las manzanas que me dieron
para el viaje.

Morning e-mail!
Photos of red leaves
from an American friend.

El e-mail de hoy:
fotos de hojas rojas
de un amigo americano.

Three years later.

I rescued a feeling from three years ago to compose this one. Writing haiku in Spanish is becoming easier and easier; I cannot judge if they are better than the ones in English, if the rhythm is bad, if the syllabic count is less correct. I used to think that haiku in Spanish would be bad, flat poetry because the language and the form are simply incompatible. Maybe when I said that I wanted my poems to follow too many rules.

Sigo buscando.
Al fondo de tus ojos,
sólo hay tristeza.

I keep on searching
deep into your eyes,
there’s only sadness.

·

Los Planetas and haikus

Los Planetas are a Spanish rock band. The singer is awful, he has the worst nasal voice in the universe, and he can’t vocalise. The music is stolen from older, better bands and the lyrics are often bad and vague. But I still like Los Planetas. Corrientes circulares en el tiempo, “Circular time currents” is yet another song of hate and need for a woman who has abandoned the singer. These guys have filled all quotas of break-up songs, seriously. I don’t have enough hate haiku, so I’m stealing their ideas to compensate for so many poems about hands and clouds and pretty things.

Es mi venganza:
Tu mente espiral,
Girando a mi alrededor.

I want this revenge:
Your spiral mind
Spinning around me.

Happy (late) birthday, Zifra

Zifra gave me that cute little button on the sidebar that takes you to my other blog, the one about belly dance. And it was his birthday on Tuesday, so I told him I would give him a poem as a bithday gift. Considering what I know about him, a poem that hints atheism on the author might be to his taste.

Technical nota: this is a Ghazal. It is a Persian-then-Arabic form with a series of 6 to 12 couplets. Lines 1 and 2, and all even lines, end with the same word. Lines should all be the same lenght. The author must mention herself (either by name, "Nia says, Nia does", or in the first person). Everything else can be nearly free. Scroll down for the English version.

Luz refractada da color al cielo.
Del negro al rosa, misterioso cielo.

Demasiada luz roba las estrellas,
Las ciudades se han quedado sin cielo.

Posponer los problemas tomando el sol,
Prohibida la pena si está azul el cielo.

Gris plomo de nieve, gris claro de lluvia:
No hay otro destino escrito en el cielo.

Si existe un Dios, nos mira desde lejos.
No es un consuelo imaginar el cielo.

El granjero no ve ninguna nube.
A sus plantas secas las mata el cielo.

El exiliado ve las constelaciones.
Alumbran su casa desde otro cielo.

Los aviones vuelan de aquí al futuro.
Yo no los alcanzo, mirando al cielo.


Refracted light gives its colour to the sky.
Black down to pink, mysterious sky.

Too much light steals the stars.
Cities have lost their sky.

Put off your problems and sunbathe.
Banish all sorrow if there is blue in the sky.

Dark grey for snow, light grey for rain:
Don’t read any other destinies from the sky.

If there is a God, He’s so far away.
No comfort from an old man in the sky.

The farmer looks in vain for a cloud.
His dry plants are killed by the sky.

Exiles gaze at the constellations.
They light up his home on a different sky.

Airplanes fly from here to the future.
I cannot reach them as I stare at the sky.

Hate song for a lazy Muse

A lazy poem about a lazy Muse for a lazy day. And I have a dance lesson this evening! All I want to do is go back to bed. It's all Zifra's fault.

The Muse is on holidays,
The Muse is on sabbatical,
The Muse is on sick leave.
The Muse is on strike.
The Muse is uncooperative,
The Muse went AWOL,
The Muse went out for a packet of cigarettes,
The Muse is scared of commitment.
The Muse left me for the Next Big Thing,
Who dares saying all poets are thieves and liars?
From the muse we learn to be so.

La Musa se fue de vacaciones,
La Musa se ha cogido un año sabático,
La Musa se dio de baja.
La Musa está en huelga.
La Musa no quiere cooperar,
La Musa está desaparecida en combate,
La Musa se fue a por tabaco,
La Musa tiene miedo al compromiso.
La Musa me ha dejado por otro.
¿Quién tiene el valor de decir que los poetas somos ladrones y mentirosos?
De la Musa aprendemos a ser así.

Intertextuality

I haven't given you haikus in weeks, so here's a handful.

Intertextuality is the technical name to refer to quotes and allusions from one work of art in another. The texts don’t need to be written down: for example, Boticelli’s Birth of Venus is inspired by Ovid, and movies copy each other all the time. Every poet is a thief, me included, and sometimes I steal bits that I like from other writers. These are most of my poems that contain a quote straight out of someone else’s work. Naturally, almost all my poems are inspired by someone else's; these are only the ones with textual quotes.

The autobiographical bit: I wrote “Stirring memory and desire” and “Don’t give in without a fight” because those lines had seven syllables each, something unusual in either Spanish or English poetry. “Giving up laughter” came out of my fascination with Old English’s capacity to create compounds: “morning-ceald” expressed effectively something that I can only say with a clumsy phrase like “as cold as the morning”, and it doesn’t even refer to cold: in the original context it means “with a desperation and sadness as bleak as the cold of the early morning”. And the gorgeous understatement: “giving up laughter” in its original context didn’t mean “the end of happiness”, it meant death! Less is more. Then I wrote the graffiti one because the Chapina Bridge area is one of my favourite places in Seville and I like to see the kids skating in the park that’s covered in graffiti. Finally, “How can we know the dancer from the dance” was born after two years trying to finish a cycle about going out dancing on weekends, what is now The Friday Cycle, together with my intention of writing a poem about dancing for somebody else to see.

Beowulf.
“Giving up laughter”,
river-misty, “morning-cold”,
Monday begins.

“Poniendo fin a la risa”,
Como río neblinoso, “mañana fría”,
empieza el lunes.

Wiliam Butler Yeats.
“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Do I dance better if you watch?

¿Cómo distinguir el baile de la bailarina?
¿Bailo mejor cuando me miras?

T. S. Eliot.
Tenderness has died.
Two fierce young bodies,
“Stirring memory and desire”

La ternura ha muerto.
Dos cuerpos jóvenes y feroces,
“Removiendo el recuerdo y el deseo”

Pink Floyd.
Leaf clings to the tree,
Chill autumn.
“Don’t give in without a fight”

Una hoja se aferra a la rama.
Otoño helado.
“No te rindas sin oponer resistencia”.

Graffiti anónimo en el puente de Chapina /Anonymous graffiti on Chapina Bridge.
“Presos del suelo”,
Me envidian si patino.
¡Mira cómo vuelo!

“Prisoners of the ground”
they envy me when I skate.
Watch me fly!

Lyrical Neosurrealism (again)

Lyrical Neosurrealism is the predominant style for the current generation of Spanish young poets. In Spanish I call it "Neosurrealismo inimista"; "intimista" is a very hard word to translate because the intimacy it refers to has nothing to do with sexual intimacy, so "lyrical" it will have to be. The label is mine and I doubt it will ever catch on, because these poets like to consider themselves very new, very post-everything. Elusive Poet agrees with me, though, in the definition.

I don't have anything particular against the style apart from the fact that it is a default mode: as I have said before, a whole generation of people want to be fresh and original and at the same time sincere, and they all end up as photocopies of Lorca and Pedro Salinas (and in terminal cases, Bécquer, bleh).

Since this style is everywhere, and I adore its wonderfully rich early-20th-century sources, I have used it occasionally. This is my first piece of creative writing ever; early spring, 2000. A professor asked us to do an experiment with automatic writing, that is, writing the first thing that comes to mind, or rather, writing without thinking. The Surrealists liked that.

I never forgot the piece; later, I wrote it down in several slightly different versions. A couple of phrases, and the person I was talking about, belong to my teens. Later on, I have come to despise any writing that is confessional, intimate, or with a strong look of having been improvised, but the first poem is like the first love, isn’t it?

The original is Spanish; scroll down for the English version.

Tengo frío. El frío me sale de dentro cuando Ángel me mira. Cuando está con las demás, Ángel se ríe, pero conmigo no, cuando está conmigo me hace preguntas, o quizá son preguntas que yo oigo aunque él no las haga, y las contesto y hablo sin parar hasta que las palabras sólidas que salen de mis labios forman una cadena, una espiral alrededor de mis caderas, con púas que me obligan a seguir hablando.
Los ojos de Ángel son telarañas pegajosas que me enredan, y yo lucho, pero no sirve de nada, estoy atrapada y siento cómo me observa, soy su presa. Los ojos de Ángel son espejos de mercurio resbaladizo. Me gustaría entrar en ese lago de mercurio gris venenoso, ahogarme, y poder olvidar este frío.
Pero a Ángel le gusta que yo pase frío.

I´m cold. I feel cold comes from the inside out when Angel looks at me. When he’s with the other girls, Angel laughs, but not with me, when he’s with me he asks me questions, or maybe those are questions that I hear even if he doesn’t ask them, and I answer them and talk incessantly until the solid words that come out of my mouth make a chain, a spiral around my hips, with thorns that force me to keep on talking.

Angel’s eyes are sticky spiderwebs that tangle me, and I struggle, but it’s useless, I’m trapped and I feel ho he stares at me. I’m his prey. Angel’s eyes are mirror of slippery mercury. I would like to walk into that lake of poison, drown and forget this cold.

But Angel likes me to be cold.

Free sex!

One of my favourite bloggers (the link is in Spanish) is being naughty; he mentions anal sex in a blog entry just to say that he isn't going to be around much in the next few days. A bit of search engine magic later, he will have masses of people visiting his blog. Not that he needs them, but anyway. I discovered the power of porn words when I did a merciless review of Inga Muscio's Cunt and my readers tripled in a few days.

Well, now that I have lured you here with promises of free sex, porn and dirty words I'll give you something to read. This is one of my earliest poems; I had it printed on a red tank top and whenI'm at home, in Spain, no one realy notices what it says even though it is bilingual. A few weeks ago, when I was still living in the States, I wore it often and it made my male friends giggle.

I chew the brightness of pain with pleasure.
My body is full of you now.

Mastico la luminosidad del dolor con placer.
Ahora mi cuerpo está lleno de ti.

A cold poem for a lovely summer day

Snowflakes on your eyelashes.
Precious, wet diamonds.
Not at all like tears.

Copos de nieve en tus ojos.
Diamantes húmedos,
En nada se parecen a lágrimas.

Excusatio non petita, inculpatio manifesta is Latin for “Unasked apology, evident self-accusation”. I have a few poems or stories that are ironic because they work on that principle: if you need to say you are not in love, hey, I never asked you. I'm too deep inside this one to judge if I was successful, but the intention here was to show that the speaker is trying to ignore the pain of the person with snowy eyes.

Poems for Martin

Specially for Martin, a poem out of the Glasgow Cycle, another one from Birds for all Seasons and another one from the Song for a River North to South. I will post the first two cycles sometime soon.

Sun coming through my eyelids,
Glaswegian kiss
As I lie on the grass.

El sol me atraviesa los párpados,
beso en Glasgow
tumbada en la hierba.


Swallows flying high.
Summer trickles down my back.
No one cools me down.

Las golondrinas vuelan alto.
El verano me gotea espalda abajo.
Nadie me relaja.

Los siete puentes
abrazando la ciudad,
a todos nosotros.

Our seven bridges
Hugging the city,
hugging us all.

Jacaranda

Swaying in the breeze,
Feather-leaved jacaranda:
it dreams it’s a bird.

La jacaranda de hojas plumosas
se mece en la brisa:
sueña que es un pájaro.

A new haiku

It is a relief that after one week at home, shuffling my books and reading half a page out of at least ten or fifteen of them in five days, I’ve composed my first back-home poem.

Hojas caídas,
se parecen a lápidas.
La acera llora.

The fallen leaves,
resembling tombstones.
the sidewalk weeps.

It is my first haiku in three months! It wasn’t a real, scary writer’s block, only the need to be in familiar surroundings so that I could process a feeling that had been sitting there for very long.

For anybody interested in the gossipy, autobiographical bit: I’m thinking of dull brown autumn leaves in Seville, not bright red Ithacan leaves. The tombstones are the ones in St Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen (North Campus), whose grounds weren’t very well kept. The feeling is not simply sadness, but mourning.