“trampa de dedos” / “finger trap”
after Raquel Salas-Rivera
Should
you
put a
ring on it
spiral out, forget
this is another becoming
you turn in, like Lucille Clifton turning into [her]
own / turning on in / to [her] own self / at last / turning out of the / white cage, turning out
of the / lady cage / turning at last. A person born with twelve fingers isn’t a metaphor for anything, but if you would like her to
she’ll read your palm. When you meet her, that’s what she says. It’s 2008. Not too long before the stock market crash. At a poetry
retreat in an offensively named town where timeshare people go to ski & dream about Aspen.
Around this time, you love Charles Simic’s translation of Vasko Popa’s sequence “The Little Box” more than just about any other
book of poems. The little box can be anywhere & nowhere. You can store & lose the entire world inside her as the little box falls in
love with herself & conceives a little box that falls in love with herself & conceives…
Infinite little boxes! You maintain that sequence is good, but in retrospect, your love of the little box seems like a compromise. So
many young poets you meet between 2004 & 2008 have been influenced by Michael Hamburger’s translations of poems by
Paul Celan, but you can’t read those beautiful translations without remembering what the poet Joe Wenderoth said about Celan’s suicide note to his wife. All it said was her name & “all light.” It may be written in French. The historical context of Celan’s poems— you can’t stop thinking about this.
At the same time, a significant number of young writers—many of them teenage girls—are chatting online with Tao Lin or some
other depressed man in his early twenties. They call this “Alt Lit.” This is before one Alt Lit woman turns up in an Anarchist space in San Francisco & starts sleeping with one of the editors of a Communist journal called Endnotes, but after Kenneth Goldsmith,
taking a page out of the neocon playbook, “transcribes” the September 11, 2001 issue of the New York Times & publishes “The
Day.” At the same time, more & more young artists & writers move to East Austin. It is recommended that you spend a few good
years teaching English in Korea or Japan. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are killed by the United States. If talking about
the past historically doesn’t mean recognizing it “the way it really was,” to what extent does it involve something like translation?
Does translation require a person or just language anymore? What is the legal age of consent in New Jersey & New York? These,
perhaps, were some of the big questions some people were asking. “Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the
First World, but not to children in the Global South?”—that was another. Aaron Schwartz left Reddit. Open access is nothing like an
exhibit at a museum. It’s not even like a museum membership. Not even like a highway shut down. The tech busses have been
around longer than many people think. Fukuyama had predicted an obsession with form removed from anything like political life,
as if the hipsters of the mid-aughts would invent nihilism. Some poets begin to speak in terms of a sincerity / irony binary. It’s
possible the binary doesn’t apply to anything of note. Not even in the always late United States where young people in black fuck
up Starbucks & the Gap during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Then again some of them claim a swastika can be ironic, while
others claim it’s merely cultural, which is to say marginalized people should calm down, which is to suggest a swastika is a
swastika is a swastika, which is to say it’s the swastika you’re afraid of, what the swastika can do & not the history of the people
who make it what it is, which is not over, which is dead wrong
after Raquel Salas-Rivera
Should
you
put a
ring on it
spiral out, forget
this is another becoming
you turn in, like Lucille Clifton turning into [her]
own / turning on in / to [her] own self / at last / turning out of the / white cage, turning out
of the / lady cage / turning at last. A person born with twelve fingers isn’t a metaphor for anything, but if you would like her to
she’ll read your palm. When you meet her, that’s what she says. It’s 2008. Not too long before the stock market crash. At a poetry
retreat in an offensively named town where timeshare people go to ski & dream about Aspen.
Around this time, you love Charles Simic’s translation of Vasko Popa’s sequence “The Little Box” more than just about any other
book of poems. The little box can be anywhere & nowhere. You can store & lose the entire world inside her as the little box falls in
love with herself & conceives a little box that falls in love with herself & conceives…
Infinite little boxes! You maintain that sequence is good, but in retrospect, your love of the little box seems like a compromise. So
many young poets you meet between 2004 & 2008 have been influenced by Michael Hamburger’s translations of poems by
Paul Celan, but you can’t read those beautiful translations without remembering what the poet Joe Wenderoth said about Celan’s suicide note to his wife. All it said was her name & “all light.” It may be written in French. The historical context of Celan’s poems— you can’t stop thinking about this.
At the same time, a significant number of young writers—many of them teenage girls—are chatting online with Tao Lin or some
other depressed man in his early twenties. They call this “Alt Lit.” This is before one Alt Lit woman turns up in an Anarchist space in San Francisco & starts sleeping with one of the editors of a Communist journal called Endnotes, but after Kenneth Goldsmith,
taking a page out of the neocon playbook, “transcribes” the September 11, 2001 issue of the New York Times & publishes “The
Day.” At the same time, more & more young artists & writers move to East Austin. It is recommended that you spend a few good
years teaching English in Korea or Japan. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are killed by the United States. If talking about
the past historically doesn’t mean recognizing it “the way it really was,” to what extent does it involve something like translation?
Does translation require a person or just language anymore? What is the legal age of consent in New Jersey & New York? These,
perhaps, were some of the big questions some people were asking. “Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the
First World, but not to children in the Global South?”—that was another. Aaron Schwartz left Reddit. Open access is nothing like an
exhibit at a museum. It’s not even like a museum membership. Not even like a highway shut down. The tech busses have been
around longer than many people think. Fukuyama had predicted an obsession with form removed from anything like political life,
as if the hipsters of the mid-aughts would invent nihilism. Some poets begin to speak in terms of a sincerity / irony binary. It’s
possible the binary doesn’t apply to anything of note. Not even in the always late United States where young people in black fuck
up Starbucks & the Gap during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Then again some of them claim a swastika can be ironic, while
others claim it’s merely cultural, which is to say marginalized people should calm down, which is to suggest a swastika is a
swastika is a swastika, which is to say it’s the swastika you’re afraid of, what the swastika can do & not the history of the people
who make it what it is, which is not over, which is dead wrong