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see facebook.com/differx/posts/10158173011597212
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UNDERSCORE – by K. S. Ernst & Sheila E. Murphy
This is a long-form collaborative visual poem which includes a dialogue
between at least 2 voices and one or more crows, on themes of
consciousness, time, place, and friendship. As the authors say in their
introduction: “The combination psyche of KSEM [Ernst & Murphy] arrows our
way in varying geometric / geo-mantric modes that we prepare to depict upon
a score what we decidedly hear, alongside emblematic crows that sound
themselves and show themselves across the work. They are our center as they
anchor narrative and feeling, spanning multisensory tree-staged colorific
definitions.”
See and buy it at
http://www.lulu.com/shop/sheila-e-murphy-and-ks-ernst/underscore/paperback/product-23706977.html
Jim Leftwich’s transmutations (not translations) of the poetry of César Vallejo are nothing short of brilliant. They feel more Vallejo in English than any previous translations ever have. Vallejo is certainly, bar none, among the greatest poets of the 20th century. Human, more than immediately human, tortured, both baroque and surreal, and lyrical beyond compare, his poetry defies translation, so difficult does it appear at times. This is especially the case with his early work Trilce (Tres tresss trisss treesss tril trilssss, Leftwich’s title has it). Claimed by the surrealists as a master in that genre, Vallejo is that and more than that, opaque as Góngora or bittersweetly acerbic as Lorca, the complexity of his language and imagery find few parallels. Leftwich has created a Vallejo more Vallejo than Vallejo at times. These transmutations have all the speed, energy and enigmatic beauty of the originals on which they are based. – Ivan Argüelles