Introducing tonight's reader is Bonnie Jean Michalski,
Poetry Center's own editor, she herself a poet and publisher.
She's responsible for our website and e-newsletter.
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on the recent work of our poets tonight,
please check the newsletter.
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Welcome, Bonnie Jean Michalski.
[APPLAUSE]
Tonight we have the pleasure of encountering two people
in multiple capacities, as poets, as colleagues,
as translators, and as thinkers.
Lila Zemborain is an Argentine poet
who has lived in New York since 1985.
English versions of her work are included
in the anthologies, The Light of City and Sea
and Corresponding Voices, in the art catalogs, Heidi McFall
and Alessandro Twombly and in multiple poetry magazines
and journals, including Ecopoetics, Rattapallax,
Bombay Gin, and Mandorla.
Selections of her poems have been translated into French,
Italian, and Catalan.
She's a curator of the King Juan Carlos, the first poetry
series at NYU, where she directs the Creative Writing
in Spanish program.
In 2007, she was selected as a John Simon Guggenheim fellow.
Mauve Sea-Orchids is her first full-length English edition.
Her new book Guardians of the Secret
was published by Noemi Press this year.
Rosa Alcala is the author of two chapbooks--
Some Maritime Disasters This Century,
published by Belladonna Books, and Undocumentary,
published by Dos Press.
Alcala's poems translations and reviews
have appeared in publications, including
Barrow Street, Brooklyn Rail, Tripwire, and Mandorla,
and in the anthology, The Wind Shifts, new Latino poetry,
edited by Francisco Aragon.
She received postgraduate degrees
from Brown University and SUNY Buffalo,
and is currently professor of creative writing
at the University of Texas at El Paso.
One word to describe the work of these two writers, fearless.
Lila Zemborain's Mauve Sea-Orchids
is made up of three long center justified
poems whose titles are not the least bit afraid
of beauty or the lyric.
La orquídea y el moscardón, Orchid and Bumblebee;
Los Petalos Furiosos, The Furious Petals;
Malvas orquídeas del mar, Mauve Sea-Orchids.
The graceful largesse of the work
is best experienced at once so that its strangeness
can wash over you.
The declarative mood is a near constant.
You are told that there are such things as love glands.
And yes, yes, they do emit the smell of baking bread.
It is scientific and sensual.
This book marries those two terms in a way I cannot miss
mode, sci-sensual, sensuatific.
Still I keep trying.
[LAUGHTER]
And it makes me want to misuse adjectives.
Mauve Sea-Orchids is pedantic in a good way,
soporific in a good way, written entirely in the present tense.
Mauve Sea-Orchids narrates constant activity of minutia.
Reading this book feels like watching a nature documentary
that takes place inside an organic body
and slow down just a second or two so
that the movements of its simulated natural world
become trancelike.
Guardians of the Secret and Mauve Sea-Orchids,
specifically the section of the book entitled Mauve Sea-Orchids
are translated by Rosa Alcala.
Soon after reading Orchids, I ordered Alcala's out-of-print
chapbook Some Maritime Disasters This Century out
from Belladonna Books.
I've been so excited about the stunning visual effect
of Sea-Orchid's design featuring watercolors by Emily Clark.
And I was so happy to see that Some Maritime Disasters This
Century-- how I love that title--
is also a stunning work of art featuring of woodcut
of a ship on a waves.
So you have to look at the covers of these books
if you get a chance.
The poems here are spare but densely populated
with giants of political, poetic,
and philosophical history, Rumi, Levi Strauss, Derrida,
Garcia Lorca, Langston Hughes.
The poems speak from a collectivity,
a multi-embodied place that becomes
trancelike in the same way Zemborain's scientific sensual
marriages are trancelike.
"I am the memory of milk.
You would not recognize me after the heat of sugar mills.
I shine white.
Little ghost.
Sifted star."
After reading Alcala, I can see why she was
drawn to the work of Zemborain.
I imagine the rangy tones of moxie orchids
allowed her to capitalize on the possibilities of translation.
Zemborain loves a semicolon.
The semicolon connects ideas softly.
It correlates rather than mirrors ideas.
I imagine Alcala saw possibilities in that.
Alcala uses line breaks to play with meaning
in a way that is strangely akin to the many meanings made
by Zemborain's near run-on line structure.
"You voice hands over knees and beg vacancy.
Your body folded as much inward as outward, sways its need.
My disfocused tills."
Alcala writes, "texts on a horse medicine and a girl on a Vespa
crossed the Roman bridge."
Zemborain writes, "the landscape superimposes its figures
over the sordid reading of facts.
I cannot wait for the meeting of these two minds."
Please help me welcome Lila Zemborain.
[APPLAUSE]