I'm criticizing no one's politics. I'm leary of poetry being political in
this way, as I'm leary of poets laureate and writing degrees in
universities. As a group we've been all too eager to lick from the floor
the few crumbs that power and money have been willing to drop for us.

But your remarks, eloquent as they're likely to be, probably won't be
poetry, and your function at the UN will not be as poet despite the
description on the invitation. And I hope you'll give them hell--all the
thems that deserve to be given hell. What concerns me, here as elsewhere,
is the willing and I think corrupting cooptation of poetry into official
culture.

I speak across borders every day--any good poet does, but I mean quite
literally as an editor and translator. In my pocket of the world Cuban
poetry has been effectively embargoed and there is a border of silence
largely separating all of Latin America from the English and
French-speaking north, most acutely on the border between Alta and Baja
California, now demarcated by a steel wall that this year has killed just
short of 400 Mexicans in my county alone. So I translate and prepare
anthologies to let folks on this side of the border know that those they
turn their backs on are also human. Here's a poem by Heriberto Yepez, a
young poet from Tijuana. The translation is still a bit creaky, but I doubt
it will be read at any official functions even when we get it straightened
out.


MANIACS AND CRAZIES

Maniacs and crazies
ubiquitous gimps with matted hair
and greasy clothes
walk through bottleneck streets
dig through piles of garbage   the leftovers
of school lunches and restaurant scraps    plunging
their hands and muzzles into boxes of the mixed remains
of chinese takeout
harvesting half-rotten lettuce tossed into the street by taco stands
hovering around food vendors
their only hope for a bit of warm food
although the taco makers' blood-spattered aprons terrify them
reminders of the horrors of psych wards.
Maniacs recycling dried-up vegetables outside cut-rate wholesale markets
eating cats and pigeons that they kill and cook
on dead-end streets using their armpits as cupboards drinking water
from the gutters in public parks or the puddles
in the asphalt's potholes gathering soda bottles
searching the manholes of despair for aluminum cans
panhandling for empty bottles and scraps of bailingwire
their features a mockery of the faces of the people they meet
and within them
a catacomb.
Crazy monks
possessed mendicants
the brutish blind and the disabled who calculate
the profits of disability
encountered on the avenue asking for coins
in exchange for foul breath blown into the faces
of the sane the deformed tapping
their plastic cups all day on the cracked sidewalk
pressing grotesque faces to shop windows
pissing on phallic telephone poles and dumb fire hydrants
crossing the streets naked their skin burned and blistered
        fondling the secretaries from high-class companies and the others
who work to exhaustion in sweatshops
bothering students about to graduate into god-knows-what
        making faces at executives waiting for the light to change according to
the government schedule of corruption.
Incurable maniacs tugging at the shirt-sleeves of passersby and scratching
at windshields
letting their beards grow as their teeth fall out because of infections and
they lose their eyebrows
pushing tipsy shopping carts with broken wheels
grimacing, addressing orations to the streets at large
these products of social engineering
deaf-mute heroin addicts
demanding alms
the more depraved in hiding
anywhere, in bus shelters
empty lots on a bench beneath the eaves in wait
for victim or benefactor.
The police and the authorities from the local psychiatric hospital gather
them in
they don't want to know anything else about them the deranged
are migrants who lost it because of the sidewalk's heat
drug addicts who've never come down
foreigners cut off from home
unemployed workers who a few months back
lost jobs and minds men and women
divorced from their families social outcasts
shouting nonsense and denunciations
while clutching the transfigured rags they wear in place of pants
street crazies on every corner
screaming, crawling,
suppurating, stinking
perverts   fences   pickpockets   muggers
of tourists and Indians, punching-bags
nurseries of gangrene
abductors of children   rapists   runaways
roasted by the sun   wrecked
by the noise of cars   and at night
chilled to the bone.
Even jumpier from the sounds of gunshots in the streets
than the rest of us they're always
in motion bumping
through the crowd run down
by traffic
the maniacs and crazies of a city
that spits at them cold showers beatings
and coins rubbed thin by avarice which is why
no longer frightening
they hide from view at nightfall
when abandoned buildings become terrifying and the drugstores
have shut their streetlights the shoestore clerks
have left for home and there's no sound
but the other crazies and the few businesses
whose alarms don't go off at the merest touch to their metal gratings.
The street crazies beat their heads with their fists they hide
from each other they sleep
in cardboard cartons discarded by consumers and pizzerias
in barrels or wrapped
in shredded blankets
the world of the employed, the normal
(those who pay the rent and wash their cars)
rehearsed in their minds as they fall
into the second part of a dying voyage
because each time the city's day threatens
to turn to night
a certain proportion
of its crazies die.


At 08:33 AM 12/30/2000 +0000, John Kinsella wrote:
>--On Thu, 28 Dec 2000 12:27 PM -0800 "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
>wrote:
>
>> I personally think that the whole event is pretty funny--but poetry as I
>> understand it is by its nature subversive. This is like a world-wide
>church
>> picnic minus the good eats.
>
>
>hi, m
>
>as i've said before, it's what's being said that matters. the speech i am
>making fits with my politics and ethics, and i have been in no way
>compromised. i don't censor an audience and it's up to them to respond as
>they will. the idea of speaking across borders is a good one, i feel - it's
>how we use the occasion as poets and editors that matters. this is not a UN
>support group exercise. criticisms can be made. it's called being
>political!
>
>best,
>jk
>
>