Also, this book is really great to teach in translation classes because it shows Molly Weigl's method, which includes making a "middle version" of each translation. So you can see the work taking shape.
I read this as part of my talk about translation at the New Orleans poetry festival and as soon as I got back to the table at the bookfair we sold out our copies. I really think this is one of the most inspiring, impressive works of translation (as well as poetry!) that I know of.
Here's a poem by great Argentinian modernist Oliverio Girondo. It's from his great last - and most experimental, erotic. and combustive (so much for "late" writing being subdued) - En la masmedula, translated almost incomprehensibly wonderfully by Molly Weigl (In the moremarrow, Action Books).
If you watch and share one thing today make at this. Why is every democrat in the country not talking like this?
A very mediocre attempt at writing an avant-garde manifesto?
A ton of translation and translation-related panels. I was on a panel on the Latin American neo-avant-garde and one on translation. Went to panels on horror and poetry and Mexican poetry. "Critical" and "creative" seemed effortlessly fluid.
Just got back from the New Orleans Poetry Festival. A great time - grassroots poetry is alive and well in this country. One poet asked me to grind up her book in a blender and drink it. Another told me he was "a big fan of Goransson's work" (we had no name tags). Strong recommend. nolapoetry.com
Chicagoans make sure you check out this event!
Helena Boberg tr. Johannes Göransson
even if you don't care about the accompanying writing prompt, I share one unreleased poem here every Sunday morning
Recent writers include: Johannes Göransson, Claire Hopple, Tom Snarsky, Vi Khi Nao, Jay Besemer, Zan de Parry, Joanna Ruocco, Todd Dillard, Michael Bazzett
neonpajamas.substack.com
I wrote a substack about some recent poems and the much-maligned idea of "poetry as therapy," which I used to dismiss but now understand differently.
johannesgransson.substack.com/p/poems-abou...
So much talk about "archive." I really don't know what people mean by that.
CADA is a NYC group, or NY is one site of CADA. National contexts are so limiting when discussing art, esp art that thrives on transgressive circulation.
The VU/Warhol connection is absolutely underrated. As Purgatory begins not just by invoking VU/superstars but also as a photographs of the author allows him to turn himself into a woman. This is the starting point of Zurita's writing.
Plus Zurita directly invokes the two or three most famous character of the world Hoberman describes in his book - following Andy Warhol (and Jack Smith) he calls his friends "the superstars of Chile" in his (VU-echoing) "Sunday Morning" and rewrites Dylan's songs on occasion throughout his career.
CADA had strong ties to the art scene that @jhoberman.bsky.social describes in Everything is Now: the formal/medial play. But also: the use of photography allowed them to include a young Cecilia Vicuna in their happening.
johannesgransson.substack.com/p/a-riot-of-...
And they invited a young Cecilia Vicuna to participate in their happenings - via photographs from NYC. That is to say, CADA was a NYC art group. Or, NYC was part of CADA's art. National contexts are so limited. Esp when it comes to art. Esp the kidn of art that thrives on transgressive circulation.
Attending a lecture on the Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld prompted me to write some thoughts in response (and on CADA and Zurita): substack.com/home/post/p-...
Congratulations to Joyelle McSweeney for winning a Windham-Campbell Prize. A lovely surprise.
Wrote a post about this poem (by Lars Norén, 1970) on substack: substack.com/home/post/p-...
New from Action Books! Leia Penina Wilson's Call the Necromancer!
"What is necromancy if not a refusal of order? Wilson’s ecstatic narrator is narrative’s transcendent rejector"-@niina.bsky.social
"written at a blistering pitch in the key of Cassandra"-Lara Glenum
actionbooks.org/leia-penina-...
Looks great. Will read more carefully.
"...Berg’s shocking guinea pigs and how the poems made me feel like I felt the first time I ever Tori Amos, aged 13: winter-bad-good and crisp and freed up for comedy... girl rage charge"
Olivia Cronk's "stock room picks" from the Action Books back catalog: www.google.com/url?q=https:...
"The bloody ones
the long-haired ones
the wind-shaping ones"
The Whitmanesque beginning of Jaime Saenz's Death at the Very Touch (trans Ted Dodson):
"I had said goodbye back in my youth, and after many years I understood,
when I realized I was in love with the cold.
And now I am in the cold—
here I am writing about it... "
- Jaime Saenz, from "The Cold"
Some of you may have read Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson's Selected Saenz (Princeton UP) which includes some incredible poems:
"... into the great spaces that death's eye has seen, you will know the hidden word."
jacketmagazine.com/08/saenz.htm...
ABSTRACT DEADLINE EXTENDED TO APRIL 1
What Miracle: New Revelations on the Prose Poem
A Prose Poetry Network Conference at the University of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway
More details here: call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/02/...
"Incantation or hex? Curative or curse? Buzzing, clomping, and crying out solilo-quies, Leia Penina Wilson’s call the necromancer performs boldly on the page. Be medusa’d, be transmogrified"
New from Action Books today: Call the Necromancer by Leia Penina Wilson: actionbooks.org/leia-penina-...
"For the great Bolivian poet-mystic Jaime Saenz, the realm of the cold, like the realm of the night, is a place both real and fluidly metaphorical: it is you, reader, and it is the city, the beloved, alcohol, and the unspoken word on our lips."
- Forrest Gander
"The figure of the poet-mystic, derelict-saint, cosmic-mariner, endures for good reason... Jaime Saenz speaks from an impossible yet ultrareal angle of perception, an ecstatic position of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion: absolute cold, degree zero." - Joyelle McSweeney
