Thought Poem for Victor Martinez (Undelivered) by Juan Felipe Herrera

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend July 15, 2016   Thought Poem for Victor Martinez (Undelivered)   Juan Felipe Herrera

You said:   What you wrote (at this moment—here) was being written by someone somewhere else at the same time (this is the question) some country some town on stilts—in a broken concentration bus or a polished make-believe desk a cheap jungled-up clinic an empty one no supplies for the sickly aged children deep   in the rain soaked burnt tree forest slapped together hut smoked with holiness with festered branches and malaria strings just maybe a promotor school that short snout bus that takes us to a new arrangement you said that   would you be writing that there would you be living that there why would you care to write that there in that in that  message without a message that hunger known as life stuff where every damp speckle and mud twig is the shout mouth hunger and that fulfillment i do not know— knowledge let us call it that right now what else   could it be could it be that this gut water inside burning its alphabet incomplete calling for something you and i have bread is it bread is it ink is it simply placement the empty yellowing floor office   across from my 15th floor as I tiptoe into the edge of it all tomorrow i read at the university i stand up and read someone else is standing up and reading someone else is tiptoeing in a circle a palaver a crossing station in Talisman en route to Guatemala halted halfway by soldados a variety a synonym where life splits and fissions mind sequence pattern—reproduction silence   you move your arm and put letters down on paper you move your lips as you (but you are not here—are you—anymore)   spell it as you drink it as you breathe it from that second galaxy (ah yes) halfway down as I   breathe it up half ways up as she ambles with an ancient rifle (the kind sold to Indians) through the shadow greenness mildew heat selva in that   human landscape spiraling no one knows            Copyright © 2016 Juan Felipe Herrera. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “After taking note of Benjamin Boone’s Jazz Quartet here in Fresno, California, where I live, I noticed how fully they gave their life to their music onstage. Nothing bothered them, not a speck of dust. Intensity was the key, total surrender to their art. I followed up with this poem, in a similar pointedness—pouring out, unabashedly, into this particular piece. This poem is a kind of follow-up to the things my great and late friend Victor Martinez would often say—a most deep thinker. A shred of one of his many thoughts is on the back side of his one poetry book, Caring for a House, published in the ’80s in the Bay Area. This back-page thought describes a quantum-like field he called the ‘Super Imagination.’ It always intrigued me—what could it be? How does it function? Perhaps he got this from one of his favorite philosophers, Heidegger. Or is it a Taoist concept? In this poem, I tackle the subject and also the impossible attempt to communicate with his notion—in a ‘third field,’ from mine, to the super-realm in existence, to his, after his death.” —Juan Felipe Herrera   Juan Felipe Herrera is the author of Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights Books, 2015). He is the current U.S. Poet Laureate and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Fresno, California.   Photo credit: Randy Vaughn-Dotta    Poetry by Herrera   Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights Books, 2015)    "A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg "Palo Borracho" by Chip Livingston "Freeway 280" by Lorna Dee Cervantes Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038