Juan Calzadilla, Katherine M. Hedeen (Trans.) & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Trans.)

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Biographical note:  Juan Calzadilla (Altagracia de Orituco, 1931) is a paradigm of the total artist. His work includes poetry, narrative, essay, the visual arts, art criticism, journalism, translation, and editing. He was cofounder in 1961 of the revolutionary cultural movement El Techo de la Ballena [The Whale’s Roof], and in 1984 of the prestigious journal of arts and literature, Imagen. For his work as a sketcher and painter he received Venezuela’s National Prize for the Visual Arts in 1996. Among his books of art criticism, El ojo que pasa (1979) and Voces y demonios de Armando Reverón (2004) stand out. His steady poetic production includes more than twenty fundamental titles. He vehemently seeks to dissolve the subject, create a more stripped-down language, and to participate as well as represent.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714667
ISBN:  9781844714667
Author:  Juan Calzadilla
Title:  Journal with No Subject
Series:  Earthworks
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jun-09
Extent:  168pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  10 mm
Weight:  252 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The first collection of the poetry of Juan Calzadilla to be translated into English, Journal with No Subject spans eleven books published from 1962 to the present. This poetry denounces the dehumanization of modernity, appropriates surrealistic language, questions identity and poetry itself, and dissolves the coherent, autonomous subject. Uniting political and aesthetic radicalism, Calzadilla ultimately reestablishes faith in poetry.

Table of contents:
Contents
Acknowledgements
Juan Calzadilla or Total Poetry
from Dictated by the Pack
I Live Day by Day
Waiting for Salvation
Necessary Methods
I Have Been Another
Hitting the Abyss
With Bad Manners
Quartz
The Magma Must Return
In Memory of the Angel
Jonas Always
from Bad Manners
Inmate
Counting to Zero
Invisible Arms
Interrogation of the Empty Suits
Subterranean Landscapes
Under New Warning
City Alone
"Banal spectacles . . ."
"You demand clemency . . ."
from Supernatural Contradictions
Legitimate Defense
Paper Mask
Stone over Stone
"Pay attention . . ."
from Aimless Citizen
I Have No Excuses to Explain Why I Am Not Another
Occupations
from Strangers’ Manual
Old City
Tin Mask
Like in a Wave
Inverse Situation
Citizen
Question of Names
from Oh, smog
Garbage Men's Prologue
The Regretful Constructors
Where Citizens Evoke Rural Life
Dreamers on Foot
A New Role
To Guide Themselves Citizens Climb Poles
Dealer of Destinies I
The Multitude
Praying Hunters
The Contaminated Fountain
The Rebel Cub
A Circumspect Fireman
from Minimals
Interstice
Poetic
Poetic II
The Crisis
Dog Talk
Humboldt
Nostalgia in Clouded Gray
I had No Gold, Cattle or Hacienda
Urbanity
End with Revolver
Epitaph
from Glow and Hollowness
Life is not literature
Neither is religion
Prose contains the poem
To summarize
Poetic
It is unnecessary to wind up the imagination
Here is our proposal
Inspiration
Nature offers itself
Only what exists can be corrected
Poetic
Can reality be written
The precise body from there
I am the one who has to talk and not things
from Principles of Urbanity
Smudge of Ink on the Sea
Written in Emily's Album
Pavement with New Commensal
Ithaca
The Deed and Its Waiting
The Pure Poetic Act
Heroism of Reality
Massage
We Would Be Immortal
Principles of Urbanity
1
2
3
The Ferocious Invalids
The Sensible Man
The Last One on the Team
To Be Hanging
Still Life
Definition
Realism
from Journal with No Subject
Journal with No Subject
And Besides It Should Be Done by All
Objectualist Poetic
What Had To Be Said
Hunger for Writing
The Poet Is a Hindrance, I Know
Couldn't It Be Given Form without Writing It?
The Book Will Speak for Itself
The Paradoxical Style
Wager (In the Form of a Manifesto)
The Magician
Middle Ground
I Want Poetry to Reign
Toward a Corporal Poetic
The Materials
Walled-In
Sisyphus
To Strike in the Sky
And Now the History of Criticism
Pleasures of the Hunt
1
2
3
4
Headaches
Inexact Communications
The Old Thresher (Autobiographical Memory)
The Lark
Big Bang
The Poet Cub
Interlineation
Form as Subterfuge
Everything that Doesn't Fit on the Page
The Ambiguity of Sense Has Made Poetry the Greatest Temptation for the Imaginative Individual
Oceanic Demonym
Erasure
The Rules of Art
from Aforemas
Cut with the Same Measure
Your Bag or Your Life
The Idea of Modernity
Inmate of Putrefaction

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Excerpt from book:  

Inmate of Putrefaction

Down the cliff I move on crowning
the hills of cans, among the reflectors
and the voice of arrest becoming the order to shoot.

I move on among the squadrons of flies
down the cliff toward the embankment
where the sewer and carrion come together.

Greedy, wrapped in rags,
wobbling like an astronaut
and wearing lead-filled shoes,

through the broken glass dunes
and the cork of deserts
I move on to the altars of slime

where porcelain twists copper's arm
and the saltpeter surveys
tin roofs.

From checkpoint to checkpoint I move on,
a step away from the putrefaction,
crippled in a wheelchair

beneath the black hawks’ incessant purring
and the most complete clandestinity
of the states of prostration

Like a real son of a bitch.

Unpublished endorsement:  Calzadilla's poetry makes us suspect what we see, which is exactly what a great messenger of doubt, the authentic poet, should do.

Juan Manuel Roca, Jose Lezama Lima Latin American Poetry Prize, 2007

Unpublished endorsement:  … a concise, fulminant beauty, ample in its resonance …

Daniel Samoilovich, author of Driven by the Wind and Drenched to the Bone