Here is a tiny bit from the introduction followed by my own translation:
Mallarme’s track changes often and without warning, but still somehow maintains the sense of an aged storyboard, how its colors being bleached by the sun only turns them brighter. (Kenneth Anger’s early film Fireworks also springs to mind.) The pleasure of translation comes as the poet begins to flail around in the trenches of a foreign syntax, obliterating all sense of time.
You can't be an NDN person in today's world
You can't be an NDN person in today's world
and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature
poem. Let's be clear, I hate nature — hate its guts
I say to my audience. There is something smaller I say to myself:
I don't hate nature at all. Places have thoughts — hills have backs that love
being stroked by our eyes. The river gobbles down its tract as a metaphor
but also abt its day. The bluffs purr when we put down blankets at the
downturn of the sun and laugh at a couple on a obvi OkCupid date
and even more stellar, the jellybean moon sugars at me. She flies and
beams and I breathe.
Fuck that. I recant. I slap myself.
Let's say I live in NYC. Let's say I was the first person in my family to
graduate college. Let's say UGH I like watching New Girl on Hulu.
This is the difference:
Some see objects in the Earth, where I see lungs. Sky mother falls thru
a hole, lands on a turtle.
Hole is my favorite band.
from
LOVE AND OTHER EXPERIMENTS
1. He told me he was into natives, but he couldn’t love the traumas hidden in my breathing.
2. How do you tell a ghost that it’s already dead, that its body is a fairy tale you stopped reading a long time ago?
3. What happens when wounds start to work like bandages?
4. One time I slept with a man who looked like he was dying. Each time his body found mine it felt like he was collecting fragments of it. It was as if I were an elixir, a potion that could extend his life if he just took me long enough.
5. Sometimes love feels like vanishing, like taking apart pieces of yourself and giving them to someone who can’t use them.
6. He was native, too, so I slept with him. I wanted to taste the same histories of violence that I couldn’t get rid of with mouthwash. I wanted to smell his ancestors in his armpits, the aroma of their decaying flesh, how they refuse to wilt into nothingness. I wanted to touch his brown skin, to make a kind of friction so complex other worlds would emerge in our colliding.
7. What happens when ‘decolonial love’ becomes a story you tell yourself after he falls asleep?
8. He was my own kind of drug: the more I used him, the better I felt; the worse I felt.
9. I tell him: you breathe us, we are in you, look at the blood on your hands.
10. Sometimes not loving is the most radical thing you can do.
I come from Inuit oil money,
From instruments of chance and divination.
The most loose, shut in, wavering mind,
Recording my day with recitations, antennae,
Narration and figure, my phone might die. I'm walking dirty.
Shop and mob cops, not to touch my mother's breast
Or the queen's royal crown signature
Izzy Juju—hijacked, forsaking all others.
The untamed scotch is mine. It cost the picture a fortune
To say nothing of my turban, costume copies
Of topaz bracelets, the umpteenth translation.
Did you ever know Micah, Gay Sunshine, Grace Cathedral, Coconut?
I went from heels at Barneys to the depths of the bins.
Who could be like dropping in? I'll fold both my hands
In gloves and wait, Hope Diamond peeking out.
From
We never studied together formally, looking back now, that is one of the few regrets of my life. I would always hand off extra copies of my early books to Micah Ballard each inscribed in advance to Meltzer. Of all of the ‘Bolinas’ poets that moved in and out of New College in the early 2000s David seemed to me the most ageless, possessed of a glimmering youth that went beyond body, a purely physic space. How remarkable that he would meet us on equal ground time and time again, even after years of encountering thirsty poets.
Micah and I once hung a tiny show of David’s collages at the Lew Gallery, which doubled as Micah’s office just off of Valencia St. We would unscrew the office door from its hinges to indicate when this transformation had occurred. The door itself was a wonderful welcoming work. I remember at David’s opening that we smoked hash while sliding further down upon the cool tile floors and through it all David’s voice right there, coaching us while also allowing for bliss.
I always loved that one of his later pamphlets was titled Stuntman. He had the best way of kidding himself, somewhat ruthlessly but always bringing down the house around him. He would give almost anything for a laugh, an easy way out. Someone needs to put his chronology down for poets of the future to study and enjoy. His story moves from NY to LA to SF to Bolinas to England to Richmond, then of course each individual collection of poems has a bundle of stories attached. He was also a great editor of anthologies on Birth, Death, Jazz, The Kabbalah. I am also dying to get my hands on more issues of Tree, his alchemical magazine and press. This is only a glossing, a smash and grab from the several arcs within his story.
for Ed Berrigan
Wake up
Feel around for shoes
Sit warm at the wooden table
Write a tower of praises (oblations?)
in cold steel
type
in praise of Ed Berrigan Industries, its massive
sign tilting over
17 Reasons Why
(Now taking off!)
the crypto
liquid metal
skeleton
still shows under
patches of
torn
ankylosaurus
stickers
We once got trapped in Mark’s painted
side shack
illuminations
(Back when Jack held the most titles….
I feel much tractor about things now
(and Selected Poem)
I feel long house
needles point
Icarus shoes
Sloppily painted plates
stapled into a set
A coliseum for playing out music and
poetry’s distortions. A kind of signing off repeatedly,
All this time.
