Thirty missing soles
(1985)
origin to the center column
only
thirty thirty thirty soles harpies
missing after
moon exploded in my face then nothing
consumed in your face
TRANSLATIONS
CATALAN
(Peter Twin Selection and translation)
the book Luba
XIII
Alces
old candlestick
Repeating the prayers of our parties
most feared
Afon
your face
the bitter stench of having been a strange
Siege of glory
Wall
Ash
XIV
One
is transiting
We are the same places
future nightmares
Cuts
an ocean
stops in the mouth
XXIII
'm officiating
their fire Saturday
saltamàrgens
s'esglaia
not call or in shadow
Travel
Recórrec
ceilings
their nightmares
My word
fails to stop's
I
scar
in scar
Looking for something
we hurt
the book Masks family
IV wanted
promise
desolate lands within a home without basal
my scabs cracked your future
t'engendraré
desert princes and mighty lord of sorrows
you remain in doubt moaning centuries
IX
this is My certainty
my escape
delirium
bodies that tamed the dagger
your blood empouada
the time inlassable
back to the masks
family
XII
you I shall wear the site
my failures
see nothing there there will be nothing but
entenders
ENGLISH
Miami Beach Sunstroke
(translation and selection of Guillermo Parra)
Poet and critic Harry Almela Discusses Jacqueline Goldberg's collection sunburn in Miami Beach (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Fundarte, 1995) in the essay "A plea for disappointment"
" sunburn in Miami Beach marks a point of departure in her work. It is Perhaps one of the MOST Venezuelan important collections of poetry of That Decade, Despit That the Overwhelming silence accompanied its publication. Firstly, and from the point of view of the development of Goldberg's poetics, this book represents a deepening of a secular vision of family habits and of the banalization of bourgeois themes. Secondly, within this collection one can find, in all of its crudity, the routines and tastes of a middle class that was very prominent during the last two decades. This is a middle class fascinated by its ascent and by the access to consumer goods that mark and determine its members. These goods are usually characterized by poor taste and occasionally border on kitsch. At times, these poems remind us of Robert Altman's film, Three Women. In this book, there's also an amplification of Goldberg's poetic vocabulary which, from this point on, employs Words That Are Often Avoided by poets, Because of Their sound whether or Because of What They signify. The use of everyday language Characterized That this generation of poets this depends on amplification of common words
[...]." The collection is made up of 24 untitled poems, from Which I Have the Following eight selected for translation. Goldberg's book opens with an epigraph by Sam Shepard: "The people here / has become / the people / who pretends to be."
(1)
the balcony is a chunk of Collins Avenue to view
Reduced to extremes no one notices
lunch
DURING ITS
we watch
blend of bathing suits we've got towels
tuna sandwiches Diet Coke
we pause at the dry shot
of an airplane over the bay
(2)
the blonde ladies
shop at Bay Harbor
they choose silk scarves
they'll wear for less than two hours
the shoes are made from Italian leather
the hats brought over from dear England
the Victoria's Secret babydolls
aqua green fuscia black
cost as much
as popcorn tons
(3)
Mr. Jones guards entrances and exits
no other name will do
--for an English course protagonist
worthy of that role--
Mr. Jones is a guachman
ripit egein
Mr. Jones
and his shifts as a doorman
listens bearer of old corpses
maker of strokes and deals
artificial respirator
Mr. Jones-glassdoor
single entrance
(4)
Isaac Baschevitz Singer
spent winters
in the Surfside Tower
we'd see him at his window
two floors down
in checkered shorts and a T-shirt
a nurse
pushed his walker
on certain stretches of the beach
at the time, I couldn't have guessed
that the Nobel laureate chewed gum
and no longer wrote
(5)
Benjamín blew out the seven candles
on a shrivelled apple pie
he denied the necessity of gifts
he serenely accepted the meager party
but he still ended up crying
now I think about the dread
of a McDonald's birthday
of an unbearable and sloppy hug
from grandma
two aunts
three cousins
and five waiters
(6)
uncle Morris died in Manhattan
near the river and the bridges
he chose the casket himself
planned out his final migration
he settled everything
so we could sustain
our weeping as long as needed
weep for him
only a while
because he also insured
future family disputes
his only legacy left to the river and the bridges
hospital window vision
so near the river and the bridges
(7)
my grandmother said she had been
to the Moulin Rouge
and to the Copacabana
also to the Teatro Baralt
when Gardel unveiled
El día que me quieras
she recalled Miami's beaches
as languid pools
at the shores of a shore
without window grown hotels
without so many entrenched old people
she saw herself
inventing scenes
drinking beer
in honor of no one else
(8)
heating up pizza in a microwave at midnight
is a bad omen
boiling water in a bronze baby bottle
weighs the bitter moments
spying on the fat neighbor between shades
warms the ghosts
writing just because
for pure lies
churns the guts
draws smoke
kills the good plague
The Poetics of Jacqueline Goldberg
By Francisco Javier Pérez
The title announces the disturbance. Attractive and terrible, Verbos predadores (Editorial Equinoccio, Universidad Simón Bolívar/Editorial Boker, 2006), a book of books the gathers all the poetry published by the writer between 1986 and 2006, wants to be seen as a summary of a poetry and poetics achieved in tune with the best of Venezuelan literature today. One and the other, poetics and poetry, consistently run through the pages of this work of high caliber and voracious spirit. The collection that gives the book its title, Verbos predadores [Predatory Verbs], the latest of her work and written with conclusions, announces the metabolic edge of a poetry that exists at the limits of many digestions conquered with bites by words that devour all the securities of happiness and ruminate all their implacable desperation.
Five texts with identical syntagma announce a guide for the laconic and sublime method of understanding poetry and invoking a personal epistemology; a form that sees the world by means of forms. Given all the risks, this poetry theorizes convinced and pleased within an unquestionable knowledge, harvested by a pain recuperated “so that the book might grow within the book.” The poem is a structure that dictates misfortunes that create riddles and dense cavities of the spirit’s maps. The poem’s calligraphy traces the scribe’s diction, which is nothing more than an illegible “boreal invalidity,” possible only with the help of others who allow spelling to arise. The poet recognizes that she writes carried by tremors and that with them she is able to gain height with severity and insolence.
The scientific eye arrives at the unseen (“I never saw saffron plots, / nor their bastard complaints”), at the colors of the oracle (“Augury is redder than blindness”), at the poverty of manuals (“they never warn / of the outcome of the accused when the sky clears”) and the fascination with false names (that “twist a world without favors”). Theory proceeds to assess books of poetry as entities that “don’t cease,” “don’t lead” and “don’t bring about.” Each book of poetry is, effectively, a “jumble of tensions” and “the tribe’s exhausted field of stones.”
Born to loot, this poetics of acknowledgment now boasts of having sown the poems and that they will always be an escape forged in the waist and not in the feet, “as the forsaken believe.” The poem is an unhappy, deserting beast that is always passing through. “In the end the most horrible stories choose themselves / and a precipice flows from hesitation,” she prays at the entrance to the final poetics. “This is how the other pours itself into us: / from anguish to comfort,” seems to be the kind coda. “Identity is found in the book’s coat, / not in arguments, / nor in lean antonyms / we undress of their future or their tiredness” and, again, the animal book is recognized by its coat.
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