Peruvian poet Mirko Lauer, my translation, published in New World: New Words (Center for the Art of Translation, 2007). Caveats for long-line overrun in blog format.

SURVIVAL:
EIGHT STANZAS OF COMMENTARY ON THE WORDS OF BUDDHA

All of reality is burning, and you can’t beat that as a sentence.
Complete reality accumulates in a volatile stack
at the limits of loss. What’s yours and what’s his are consumed
leaning against the retina, on the smooth palm of your hand.
Only love’s a grave thing, grave as the world’s universal gravity
which weighs equally burning Isaac Newton and an apple.

Nobody bathes twice in the same river, and you can’t beat that as a sentence either.
The world lacks a shadow, reality’s the oil your heart floats in.
Doors open on boiling water: you get out of one river and get in another;
your bones shiver with ignorance on all thresholds, while your reckless soul
sails on sustained by unknowns and by feathers.

Silence unites eloquence and first–degree dangers,
possibilities of words that are flowerings of the skin,
wounds and multicolors heaped to form a black tower. Your brothers
the corpses are toasting in that silence, and stalagmites
attract dribbling lightning nobody dares to grasp for the sacrifice
of reality that falls all over itself, with flames and crackling.

A rustling beach of dry towels at the shore of the shower reminds you
of the passage of water which comprises all reality and yields
ablution of existence to soiled unmoving in two instants:
alabaster and onyx, onomatopoeia and miracle,
metaphorical life and literal death, the cradle and the bed,
filling your ears with the boxed fru–fru of these combinations.

Birds fly with flaming feathers, perforated by combustible air,
their hexagonal bodies traversing, delayed along the bias.
In the southern desert light pierces the dust, lifting fragile columns
the wind carries away in flames. And even what’s unreal holds your head
against that of a match which explodes in a glance’s fission,
prisoner likewise of an inextinguishable flame.

Forgiven by the unforgivable, your chest boasting wet flowers,
chlorophyll and cadmium bunched: water that you are and grasp,
flow in which you see and are, impeccably adrift, molested.
And you leave the bacchanal engrossed, your hands washed and a sailboat
tacking against the wind of your dream. Sponges which are darts seek your chest,
find your chest, pass through your chest and forget your chest in their flight.

Nobody laughs twice in the same bathtub, nor rubs their body against another
without multiplying it. Banal and tragic conclusion: it’s impossible
to be alone without the aid of a mirror. And you leave your cell perplexed, your temples frozen;
and you leave your study wiped out, with drenched femurs;
and you get out of the river and get in the river and get in the river and get out of the river
through an expiatory abyss of portals and trampolines.

There’s a bonfire in the golden entrails of the guinea pig. All of reality is suffering
the burning stain of that uncaressable mildness. Your house is burning while you sleep,
the world screams while you contemplate, the ovens groan with jaws ajar
exhausted by the ash that lacerates your confused forehead, and floats toward the green ground
where a million blades of grass are consumed to make one meadow.

“…a new low-water mark in the publication of Poetry?”

This is why one of these days I’ll probably take a hiatus from poetry for several years (again) and return to my musical proclivities.

Oh hear ye fools in verbal trade
what is shoddy and not well made
in a country where knaves teach
less and less literature each day

where ignorance reigns supreme
and fewer people read, but steal
that which is written, to write ten
and more flarf poems at one sitting –

I guess the long and the short of it is that..you just have to focus on your own craft, and not worry about what others are doing and/or publishing…I sometimes wonder if maybe the Dickinson approach is the best. Just file them all away somewhere and hope they’ll be discovered post mortem to a much more sensible audience.

ask yourself, not what s/he can give
you, what gift of the mind invisibly
got gets you to the top,

but what you can give the mohn
who give you blud clop ‘n git-stab

…it has seemed to me that the last year or two of Poetry has been pretty good…Wiman is consciously trying to represent a wide range of styles and schools, while trying to maintain a high standard — a tough task.

I stopped my subscription to Poetry when I could no longer stomach their self-styled image as a barometer of contemporary poetry, when in fact their attitude is parochial, elitist and narrow-minded in the extreme…with some exceptions, has a sameness that makes you feel it might have been written by a few of the same people (which a lot of it is)…much if not most…utter incomprehensible gibberish…puts people off poetry because…makes them feel dumb..perplexed..bored..brought down the wrath of the Universe…I consider myself an open-minded, intelligent person…I have tried, really tried, but fail to understand the prestigious reputation Poetry continues to enjoy.

Revolutionary as a Bosch CBS 520
Interrogating oranges in Cuba
at full torque – ask yourself, what’s

surreal as a lemon in outer space,
ducks quack in a vacuum and Welsh
tragedy played straight on the face
of a red dwarf in the Virgo
Supercluster – buster.

“My first marriage took place in the Rothko chapel
…we don’t like what’s playing on one channel

intentionally bad, frivolous, or wacky, formed
by a collage of quasi-random stand-up comedienne”

And what exactly does Winters have to do with flarf?