All Announcements

#tbt: Martin Luther King in Connecticut

by  • 

January 19th will mark the annual celebration of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This week’s Throwback Thursday post is dedicated to Dr. King, his time spent in Connecticut (both as an unknown student and as a national leader), and the reaction of Hartford residents to his tragic assassination.

 MLK-1966

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses Wesleyan students in 1963. Courtesy of Wesleyan University.
Read one student’s memory of the visit here.

This first passage is from an essay by Connecticut historian Stacey Close, “Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Connecticut, and Non-Violent Protest.” The essay, found in African American Connecticut Explored, explains the impact of Dr. King on African Americans in Connecticut and, in turn, the influence of Connecticut residents on the Civil Rights movement. It begins with the story of King’s first trip to Connecticut.

As a teenager in 1944 Martin Luther King, Jr. became part of a long tradition of southern students venturing to Connecticut to spend the summer working in the state’s tobacco fields. The teenager joined a group of students from Atlanta, Georgia’s Morehouse College at work on a Simsbury, Connecticut, farm. In My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King recalled that her eventual husband experienced an incredible sense of “freedom” while in Connecticut. Unlike in the South, King and other southern youth ate in restaurants and visited local theaters without having to deal with the horror of legalized segregation. Coretta Scott King argued that the opportunity to lead devotional services with other students that summer started Martin on the road to becoming a minister. This visit to Connecticut had a major impact on the teenage King, but his relationship with Connecticut did not stop there. Later efforts by Connecticans would make important contributions to the non-violent civil rights movement he led in the South. People from Connecticut would frequently travel south to bolster the civil rights movement, and Dr. King’s visits to Connecticut would helped to support and transform African American communities in urban areas here.

In addition to Close’s essay, and other essays dealing with Civil Rights era Connecticut, we find historian Cynthia Reik’s moving essay, “What Would Dr. King Want You to Do?” Her essay deals with King’s tragic assassination and the reaction of school children in Hartford.

  uccello1968

Hartford mayor Ann Uccello with students, 1968. Hartford History Collection, Hartford History Center, Hartford Public Library

On Thursday evening, April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. In response, riots erupted in Hartford’s North End. People were angry about the lack of progress on King’s dream: integrated education, housing, a fair judicial system, and jobs. Republican Mayor Ann Uccello, the first woman elected mayor of a Connecticut municipality and the first woman in the U.S. elected mayor of a capital city, went into the rioting area in a police cruiser on Thursday evening against the advice of most of her administration, carrying but not wearing a riot helmet. The Hartford Times reported that she toured the public housing complexes, “mingling with the people, trying to let them know the city cared.”

The police cordoned off the North End and used massive doses of tear gas to quiet the rioters. Residents in the city’s West End reported that the tear gas was so heavy that it drifted to Elizabeth Park. Showing the extent to which the city was divided, one Fox Scholar graduate of Hartford Public High School, Tom Smith, then attending college nearby, drove to join his family in the North End to share their sorrow but was turned away by police.

Friday morning, after extensive rioting, when Hartford Public High School (where I was a teacher) opened at 7:30 a.m., John Gale (Hartford Public High School class of 1969) recalled that many students remained outdoors, uncertain as to whether it was appropriate to enter the school. The student body was then about 50 percent African American, 15 percent Latino, and the rest white. The principal of Hartford Public High, Dr. Duncan Yetman, came outside to address the reluctant students, asking the question, “What would Dr. King want you to do?” Most students came inside and went to their homerooms for attendance. Over the P.A. system, Dr. Yetman gave students the option of remaining for a regular day or coming down to the office to phone home for parental permission to leave school. For two hours students tied up the office phones, making arrangements to leave.

Instead of going directly home, however, four hundred or more students walked down Farmington Avenue to St. Joseph Cathedral and asked the rector, Monsignor Father John S. Kennedy, to hold a memorial service for Dr. King. Msgr. Kennedy agreed. During this impromptu service, The Hartford Courant’s David Rhinelander reported, Kennedy said, “the Rev. Dr. King was a great black man. He was ‘perhaps the greatest man of his generation.’”

Visit the book page to learn more about African American Connecticut Explored, which covers the state’s African American history from the Colonial era through the Civil Rights era. A full list of topics covered is found at the book page.

 

 

Haiti, 5 Years Later: “Tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm.”

by  • 

January 12, 2015, marks the fifth anniversary of the catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti. The epicenter was near Léogane, approximately 16 miles west of the capital city, Port-au-Prince. By the January 24, 2010, at least 52 aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater had been recorded. The death toll has been estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000 individuals lost. Hundreds of thousands of homes and commercial buildings were destroyed. In short, Haiti was devastated. Haiti—a country already in a precarious position given its centuries-long history of national debt, unfair trade policies imposed by outside nations, and the other, often unhelpful, foreign interventions.

  Ulysse_HaitiAnnivPost

READ AN EXCERPT HERE.

Wesleyan University Press will release Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle in May of this year. The author, Haitian-American anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse, makes sense of the discussions surrounding her homeland in the wake of the tragedy of the earthquake and its aftermath, including the battle against cholera, the mistreatment of Haitian women and children, and the nation’s ongoing political turmoil. As Robin D.G. Kelley points out in his foreword to the book, “Ulysse wants to know how we arrived at this point, when Haiti is treated much like the random bodies of homeless people, whose deaths we’ve come to expect but not mourn?” You can read an excerpt from Ulysse’s work here, a piece titled “Haiti’s Future: A Requiem for the Dying,” dated February 4, 2010.

As Ulysse makes clear, in order to have a meaningful discussion on the state of Haiti today, one must look to the past. On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian independence—the outcome of a successful slave revolt. Although Haiti would now be free, France and other European powers forced the island nation to pay 150 million francs in reparations for the loss of “property” in slaves and land. Western powers refused to trade with Haiti, hoping to choke the life out of a black free state. Today, unfair trade practices continue to plague Haiti and its workforce—not to mention the long history of oppressive and genocidal acts committed against Haitians by the government of its neighbor, The Dominican Republic.

Ulysse also looks at the treatment of Haiti in both the press and popular media. Haiti is often, mistakenly, seen as a dark “other.” Voudou, the prominent earth-based religion of Haiti, is often mis-interpreted, mis-appropriated, and maligned as “Voodoo,” seen by European-Americans as a dark and dangerous power. While Haiti remains the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, to restrict the nation to dystopian narratives of desperation obscures the complexity of the republic and comes dangerously close to dehumanizing Haitians.

Why Haiti Needs New Narratives is largely a reaction to mainstream news coverage of the catastrophic quake of 2010. Ulysse observed that much coverage reproduced longstanding narratives of Haiti and stereotypes of Haitians. In response, she embarked on a writing spree that lasted over two years, and a resulted in a large body of dispatches, op-eds and articles on post-quake Haiti. As an ethnographer and a member of the diaspora, Ulysse delivered critical cultural analysis of geopolitics and daily life in Haiti, with the aim of making sense of how the nation and its subjects continue to negotiate sovereignty in a world where, according to a Haitian saying, tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm (All people are human, but all humans are not the same). Why Haiti Needs New Narratives contains thirty pieces, most of which were previously published in and on Haitian Times, Huffington Post, Ms Magazine, Ms Blog, NACLA, and other print and online venues. The book is trilingual (English, Kreyòl, and French) and includes a foreword by award-winning author and historian Robin D.G. Kelley. It will be published on May 25, 2015.

Today, Haiti continues to be rocked by political turmoil in the form of protests over the delay of elections. Read more about the protests, calling for the resignation of President Michel Martelly, here. The need for better infrastructure and health care continues. You can view recent photographs from Haiti, here, provided by Susan Schulman for The Guardian newspaper.

#tbt: “To come to rest; strike bottom; land…”

by  • 

Today’s Throwback Thursday poem is Amy Newman’s “To come to rest; strike bottom; land: The world first fell from the firmament,” from the book Fall. In this collection of poems, Newman draws upon 72 definitions of the word “fall,” each definition serving as a poem’s title.

  NewmanBanner

 

To come to rest; strike bottom; land:

The world first fell from the firmament.

 

In the beginning. Out of the most original begins the world,

its wish of industry, the main idea,

this first weather, a breeze across God’s face,

new craft swifting, moored, in the unharbored sky.

 

While we were in effort dreamed—a wordless dream of evers,

the still un-world buzzing in a magnet’s pull,

humming our eyes swift under their translucence, images

in slow motion—while we were dreamed, the world solid shape

 

pulled its mathematical issue from the density of sky,

the filaments of matter in their depth, dirt, color.

And out of this we must have arrived, without luggage.

What would be our eventual.

A sweet primary shift to be the ordered world.

 

When I lean in, I feel a fibrous answer,

the burden of the heart hanging in its chest, a little fruit,

and it hurts with its tiny weight, the logarithm

of the pre-made world—the pre-world

firmament, soft, inviting, into which—

 

by invitation, or uninvited—we

spread ourselves among the Eden. Raised

to its first power. Into that temperate, unforced place,

entwined as promise beneath the trees, we arrived, the fallible human material.

 

AMY NEWMAN is Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University and author of Order, or Disorder (1995), which received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, and Camera Lyrica (1999), which received the Beatrice Hawley Award.

 

#tbt: “A Northern Christmas”, Seward, Alaska, 1918

by  • 

This week’s Throwback Thursday post revisits the work of Rockwell Kent (1882–1971). Kent was one of America’s most celebrated graphic artists. Although he is best known for his illustrations to accompany The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Moby Dick, his artwork also appeared widely in popular media. Kent was also a travel writer. His illustrated books of adventure include N by E, Wilderness, Salamina and Voyaging, all reissued by Wesleyan University Press, a tribute to their perennial appeal. During his Christmas spent in Seward, Alaska, in 1918, Kent produced an adorable keepsake volume, A Northern Christmas, with a dedication that reads: “To EVERYBODY. A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.” In the format of a journal, A Northern Christmas recounts the scenery and company enjoyed during the days leading up to Christmas.

BannerNorthernChristmas

 

During that December, Kent and his son, Rockwell Jr., spent their days

…in a forest on a low-lying level fill between two mountain peaks…our house a one room cabin crudely built of logs and caulked with moss; our dooryard—toward the view—the space we cleared by felling trees for fuel; our view a crescent cove, the bay, the mountains of the distant shore, the sky, the moon and stars at night. And, for companionship, ourselves, each other, and a genial, wise and kind old man, old Sourdough of early gold rush days, old trapper, lifelong pioneer, a Swede named Olson: we three, a pair of foxes shut in a corral, a milk goat (cherished Nanny), an obstreperous Angora goat (one Billy) and some foolishly adoring women of his kind, otters that now and then sat basking on the rocks, blue jays and gulls, and porcupines. It was enough. Of the fullness of the days—fullness of work and thought, of play, of little happenings, of uneventful peace—we kept record.

Kent describes a walk with his eight-year-old son:

This day is never to be forgotten, so beautiful, so calm, so still with the earth and every branch and tree muffled in deep, feathery, new-fallen snow. And all day the softest clouds have drifted lazily over the heaven, shrouding the land here and there in veils of falling snow, while elsewhere or through the snow itself the sun shone. Golden shadows, dazzling peaks, fairy tracery of the branches against the blue summer sea! It was a day to Live,—and work could be forgotten. So Rockwell and I explored the woods, at first reverently treading one path, so that the snow about us might still lie undisturbed. But soon the cub in the boy broke out and he rolled in the deepest thickets, shook the trees down upon himself, lay still in the snow for me to cover him completely, washed his face till it was crimson, and wound up with a naked snow-bath. I photographed him standing thus in the deep snow at the water’s edge with the mountains far off behind him. Then he dried himself at the roaring fire we’d made ready and felt like a new boy—if that can be imagined. Meanwhile I searched in the woods for a Christmas tree and cut a fair-sized one at last for its top. Christmas is right upon us now. To-night the cranberries stew on the stove.

The memory of Rockwell Kent’s visit persists in Seward, where the holiday season comes to life every year through events like the annual Arts and Crafts Fair. This year the Seward Journal and Cover to Cover Bookstore adopted a literary holiday theme, drawing form Rockwell Kent’s Wilderness and A Northern Christmas. 

Using the expertise of Seward’s local historian, Doug Capra, who has written extensively on Kent and who wrote the introductions to Wesleyan’s editions of Wilderness and A Northern Christmas, the newspaper and bookstore adopted “A Northern Christmas” theme. Gene’s Place, the restaurant located in the Hotel Seward , will offer Kent’s “Christmas Menu,” from Wilderness, reproducing his recipe for Fox Island Corn Soufflé.

“As Christmas approaches on Fox Island, Kent choreographs his own dance, teaches steps to his son and Olson, and even provides the music with his flute,” wrote Capra in the forward of A Northern Christmas. “The artist, his son and the old man brighten the winter darkness with a candle lit tree, hang spruce and hemlock boughs for decoration, make do with homemade gifts, and cook up a Christmas feast announced with hand-printed menus. He has again fulfilled a life-long goal by creating his culture rather than being created by it.”

Not only has Capra written extensively on Rockwell Kent; he also authored his own book on Alaska’s history called The Spaces Between: Stories From the Kenai Mountains To the Kenai Fjords.

 

 Caprabanner

 

Capra draws on extensive original research, including interviews with elders. He lends attention to the women of Seward, who have received scant recognition for their strength and contributions to the community. In a colorful collection of articles and stories about the European pioneers who settled on the eastern Kenai Peninsula, The Spaces Between is both an educational and entertaining book.

New book by Fred Moten: “The Little Edges

by  • 

We are pleased to announce a new book by Fred Moten, The Little Edges.

moten

Poems that play in the sonic texture of discourses

The Little Edges is a collection of occasional pieces in which Fred Moten extends his experimentation in what he calls “shaped prose”—a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Moten uses shaped prose to work the “little edges” of the lyric, blurring the lines between poetry and theoretical discourse. The poems—swelling with life, sensuality, and musicality­—are inspired by jazz, everyday speech, and by the urban spaces of modern life.

As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. For example, Moten pays homage Nancy Wilson and Jaki Byard, as well as to dancer/choreographer Ralph Lemon and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. The matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into and interaction with social spaces. These spaces, are in turn, transformed. The poems blend joy and gravitas; they aim “to solemnize in joy…to sing praise…to assemble in disassembly.”

An online reader’s companion is available at http://fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.

Click here to order this book.

Also available as an ebook—check with your favorite ebook retailer.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

akomfrahgment

the praline of amusement and.
my cliometric pearl can’t call it.
curve unnumbered. you can’t

ride that long, you can’t turn
that far, that cold coming and
going in and out of snow. the
speed of our washing is blinding
and our devotion is laughing
without a name or song. this is
our music. we’re many hymns
in love with each other
warring out of circle almost,
almost frozen, color become
shape, you put your coat on me.

Gerald Vizenor visits Minneapolis and the White Earth Nation

by  • 

Gerald Vizenor read at the Bockley Gallery, in Minneapolis, on November 14th, where Louise Erdrich introduced him.

Vizenor then headed northwest, approximately 225 miles, to visit the White Earth Nation. On November 19th, he was a co-signer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation. At this time, Dr. Vizenor was honored with a golden eagle feather for his service as a delegate and principal writer of the Constitution.

His latest literary works are Blue Ravens and Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku. Attendees of AWP 2015, in Minneapolis, can enjoy a Wesleyan sponsored panel (event F214), a “Tribute to Gerald Vizenor.” Panelists, including Heid Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, Kimberly Blaeser, Gordon Henry, and Margaret Noodin, will discuss Dr. Vizenor’s vast body of work and reflect on how this elder statesman of Anishinaabe literature influenced and supported their own work. Vizenor’s political writing, nationalist poetry, and history-steeped novels will be represented in this tribute, fittingly held in his homeland of Minnesota. Panelists will reflect on Vizenor’s role as a mentor and teacher who enabled generations of Native writers to find their voice. The panel is on Friday, April 10th, 1:30pm – 2:45pm. Attendees can meet with Gerald at Wesleyan booth #907, after the panel, where he will sign copies of his books until 4:30pm. Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku will be available in paperback for the first time.

viz_win_2_6

Erma Vizenor, Chief of the White Earth Nation, honors Gerald Vizenor with a golden eagle feather for service as a delegate and principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation.

viz_wen_1_6

Gerald Vizenor signing the official documents as a delegate and principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation. The Constitution Signing was held at the White Earth Nation on November 19, 2014.

viz_win_minneapolis_3_6

Louise Erdrich introduces Gerald Vizenor at a reading of Blue Ravens at the Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis, November 14, 2014. This event was co-sponsored by Birchbark Books, a store operated by a spirited collection of people who believe in the power of good writing, the beauty of handmade art, the strength of Native culture, and the importance of small and intimate bookstores. Photograph, copyright John Ratzloff, 2014.

 

#tbt: Mel Brooks’ dancing alien, from “Spaceballs”

by  • 

This week’s throwback Thursday post is dedicated to director Mel Brooks! He is one of many directors interviewed in The Director Within: Storytellers of Stage and Screen by Rose Eichenbaum. The photograph of Brooks, below, is one of many images from the book.

 Eichenbaum_DirectorMel_Brooks

To honor Brooks and his ongoing ability to make us laugh long and hard, we picked a clip from his movie Spaceballs (1987).

Mel Brooks is a master of comedy. From film to theatrical productions, his work has earned him the highest honors bestowed on an entertainer: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award—to name a few. As Brooks fans know, the filmmaker loves to spoof historic events, popular culture, books, and other films. Such parodies include Young Frankenstein, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, High Anxiety, and Spaceballs. 

When asked why he’s chosen to create so many parodies, Brooks responded:

“All I’m doing is reliving the movies I loved as a little boy. With Young Frankenstein I was reviving the gorgeous films by James Whale, Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). High Anxiety is a tribute to Hitchcock. Spaceballs I made for my son, Max Brooks, who loved Star Trek and Star Wars. I dolled them up, of course, with a lot of different themes and feelings.”

Directors featured in the book The Director Within include:

• Michael Apted
• Robert Benton
• Peter Bogdanovich
• James L. Brooks
• Mel Brooks
• James Burrows
• John Carpenter		 • Joseph Cedar
• Richard Donner
• Jonathan Frakes
• Lesli Linka Glatter
• Taylor Hackford
• Walter Hill
• Arthur Hiller		 • Reginald Hudlin
• Doug Hughes
• Lawrence Kasdan
• John Landis
• Barry Levinson
• Rod Lurie
• Emily Mann		 • Kathleen Marshall
• Rob Marshall
• Michael Mayer
• Paul Mazursky
• Mira Nair
• Hal Prince
• Brett Ratner		 • Gary Ross
• Mark Rydell
• Jay Sandrich
• Susan Stroman
• Julie Taymor
• Robert Towne
• Tim Van Patten

Rose Eichenbaum will be signing copies of her books, The Director Within and The Dancer Within at Chavelier’s Books in Los Angeles this Saturday. She will be joined by performer-authors Zippora Karz and Victoria Tennant. Read more about the event and participants here.

#tbt: “Democracy” by prisoner Stephen Todd Booker, for his mother

by  • 

Today’s Throwback Thursday poem is “Democracy,” from the book Tug, which was written by Stephen Todd Booker, a prisoner on Florida’s death row.

 

  Booker-Tug

 

DEMOCRACY

A dandelion seed of a woman,
She, the daughter hated by her own
Mother and sisters for having two sons—
Because perhaps too she wasn’t so alone
As to agree that black men were evil,
Each an agent of Satan, the devil;
Nor could she revel in the slaughter
Of her brothers, and became outspoken
In refusing to speak ill of anyone.
For that she was persona non grata,
And even mentioning her name was shunned.
It probably helped to kill my Mother,
Never being let back into the warmth
Of what should’ve been a familial sun.

Many another dandelion seed,
While buffeted by the four winds’ reprise,
Will invariably still crave the love
Of her own blood-kin, and suffer the need
To be needed by them—so what if lies.
And that is the way she gets dealt the card
Filling her cupboard with nothing but lard,
As her siblings maintain their faith in fate,
Their girths increasing along with their hate—
Prosperity telling them they have guts,
They telling themselves nigguhmen need nutts.
Across town, Sis will live by candlelight,
And chicken-delight, or take-out chinese.
She will teach her sons to pray on their knees.

Sometimes allmotherfuckinnight she prayed;
Or, she’d writhe in pain, unable to sleep,
Fighting a migraine she had had for days.
In the morning, she’d be a quantum leap
Ahead of her time, and again her long,
Go-getter legs would have her up, swinging—
She, the very embodiment of strong.
Once dead, you would have sworn by the keening
Of her sisters and Mother she was loved.
Once cremating her, that mission was scrubbed.
In the posthaste time, both sisters and Mother
Were squabbling over her meager estate.
One son claimed it his law; the other
Quietly watched them dicker and debate.

###

You can read more about Booker’s work and his troubled life in the New York Times.

The first book on hip-hop sampling as a musical process—now with a new foreword and afterword

by  • 

We are pleased to announce new edition of Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, by Joseph G. Schloss with a new foreword by Jeff Chang.

.

Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats was the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods, and values of a surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects—from hip-hop artists’ pedagogical methods to the Afrodiasporic roots of the sampling process to the social significance of “digging” for rare records—Joseph G. Schloss examines the way hip-hop artists have managed to create a form of expression that reflects their creative aspirations, moral beliefs, political values, and cultural realities. Making Beats won the International Association for the Study of Popular Music’s (IASPM) Book Award 2005, and is now looked upon as one of the foundational works of hip-hop scholarship. This second edition of the book includes a new foreword by Jeff Chang and a new afterword by the author.

For more details, click here.

Also available as an ebook—check with your favorite ebook retailer.

#tbt: Vicente Huidobro, from “Altazor”

by  • 

Today’ Throwback Thursday selection is an excerpt from Vicente Huidobro’s avant-garde classic Altazor. Considered untranslatable until the appearance of Eliot Weinberger’s celebrated translation in 1988, Altazor appeared again in Wesleyan’s 2004 revised translation with an expanded introduction. In the introduction, Weinberger explains the origins of the work: “Alto, high; azor, hawk. Altazor, a poem in seven cantos, written by a Chilean living in Paris. Begun in 1919 and published in 1931, the poem spans those extraordinary optimistic years between global disasters. An age that thought itself post-apocalyptic: the war to end all wars was fought and over, and now there was a new world to create. A time when the West was, literally and figuratively, electrified; when the mass production of telephones, automobiles, movies, record players, toasters, radios, skyscrapers, airplanes, bridges, cameras, blimps, and subways, matched an aesthetic production obsessed with celebrating the new, and aesthetics that (in Margaret Bourke-White’s famous remark) found dynamos more beautiful than pearls.”

.

huidobro tbt

.

The world enters through my eyes
Enters through my hands my feet
Enters through my mouth and goes out through my pores
As celestial insects as clouds of words
Silence the earth will give birth to a tree
My eyes in the grotto of hypnosis
Gnaw on the universe that runs through me like a tunnel
A bird shudder flutters my shoulders
A shudder of inner waves and wings
A ladder of wings and waves in my blood
The cables of my veins snap
And it leaps out from my flesh
Out through the doors of the earth
And past the startled doves

Inhabitant of your fate
Why do you want to abandon your fate?
Why do you want to break the chains of your star
And travel alone through space
Falling across your body from your heights to your depths?

I don’t want the bonds of star or wind
Moon bonds are fine for the sea and women
Give me my violins of rebellious vertigo
My freedom of escaped music
There’s no danger at the little crossroads of night
No mystery about the soul

 # # #

Interestingly, in the introduction, Weinberger notes a possible connection to Alastor (is Altazor and anagram for Alastor?), “Shelley’s long poem of ‘a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe.’ Shelley’s Romantic poet-hero, first at peace with the ‘infinite and unmeasured,’ grows dissatisfied with eternity, and in the end is literally consumed, killed, by desire for the Other he has invented in his total solitude. In contrast, Huidobro’s Nietzschean anti-poet/hero abandons his Other (the beloved of Canto II) to reach satori in the pure energy of pure language.”

 

 

VICENTE HUIDOBRO (1893-1948), a politically engaged Chilean who lived mainly in Europe, was a trilingual poet, painter, war correspondent, founder of newspapers and literary magazines, Hollywood screenwriter, and candidate for president of Chile. ELIOT WEINBERGER’s recent books are Karmic Traces, 9/12 and The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. His edition of Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.