Congo Square. Just north of the French Quarter in New Orleans, on the other side of Rampart Street, within the Louis Armstrong Park, in the Trème district, is this sacred space that the American Indians had used for centuries for their religious gatherings but taken over by Africans on Sundays during slavery. It remains…
Heroism in Hombre: Elmore Leonard
The hero of Elmore Leonard’s Hombre John Russell is a resolute figure who passes from mortality to legendary status in no time at all. When we first meet John Russell we learn that he is at least a quarter Indian and that he has the ways of the Apache. For some one so young,…
Invisible cities
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Malecón (in Dirty Havana Trilogy) is a place of sin! It takes its inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perceptions deceitful, and everything conceals something else. Gutiérrez…
Prayer and melancholia
That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence…
Kafka’s Body
I have been in Venice this past weekend, at the Warwick Poetry in Medicine symposium. Even if you've been in Venice before, when the vaporetto comes from the Piazzale Roma onto the Grand Canal, in the bright morning sunlight, everything hangs like a Canaletto (1697-1768) canvas that is three dimensional, vast and alive. On either…
St Lucia: Walcott’s Island
The crickets here at Rodney Bay sound all night like an unoiled iron gate swivelling back and forth, on its hinges, in the wind. There is the occasional cricket with a bell in its throat and another that rasps and wheezes. What is absent is the bullfrog, croaking, calling with the kind of zest that…
Melancholia
Our sixth combat is with what the Greeks call ακηδια, which we may term weariness or distress of heart. This is akin to dejection, and is especially trying to solitaries, and dangerous and frequent foe to the dwellers in the desert… (Cassian circa 416 CE) Ajax, in Sophocles’ play, after slaughtering cattle…
Poems of disquiet
Sabi is the color of the poem. It does not necessarily refer to the poem that describes a lonely scene. If a man goes to war wearing stout armor or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about…
Fiji
One must first of all concentrate one's thoughts on an object. Once one's mind achieves a state of concentration and the space between oneself and the object has disappeared, the essential nature of the object can be perceived. Then express it immediately. If one ponders it, it will vanish from the mind (Basho 1644-1694) …
Thin strip of lace, foam
Rain all day. This was Fiji. Drops splashing into the sea, splash! The malachite undulating hills dark against the impossible turquoise of the sea. A ferrous blue skirted a thin strip of lace, foam and waves climbed unto the beige beach. A thunderstorm that was forever childhood excitement: a knife sharp, mercury-white glare…
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