Saturday, January 25, 2020

Review of Alejandro Albarran Polanco's, Cowboy & Other Poems (Clara B. Jones)




Cowboy & Other Poems
Alejandro Albarrán Polanco
tr. Rachel Galvin
2019
Ugly Duckling Presse, Señal Chapbook Series
18 pp
$7.00


Alejandro Albarrán Polanco's, Cowboy & Other Poems, Reviewed by Clara B. Jones

It is not every day that one has an opportunity to review a poetry collection destined to become a collector's item. However, emerging Mexican poet, Alejandro Albarrán Polanco's, Cowboy & Other Poems, translated by Rachel Galvin, is such a text. This handsomely-crafted chapbook is issued by Ugly Duckling Presse, a small, non-profit publisher located in Brooklyn, NY, committed to offering avant garde poetry and other genres produced by a volunteer editorial “collective.” As described online, many of the 300 titles published since incorporation by Matvei Yankelevich, Yelena Gluzman, and Filip Marinovich, among others, in 2002, “contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking,” a practice, the “codex book,” traceable back to the Roman Empire. Cowboy & Other Poems is part of the Ugly Duckling Presse Señal initiative, “a chapbook series for contemporary Latin American poetry in bilingual editions.” “Señal” means “sign” or “signal” in Spanish, and, in the present project, seems to suggest words communicated intentionally for verbal, including, semantic, and sensory, as well as, aesthetic, impact. As expressed on the press' website, “we publish what we love and what cannot find a platform elsewhere.”

Polanco, a poet, musician, editor, director, and conceptual artist, has received several awards and grants for his writing. Galvin, a poet, translator, and scholar at the University of Chicago, is a co-founder of the international creative translation collective, Outranspo. Cowboy & Other Poems, a hybrid text, is comprised of six innovative poems, including an image of firearm parts, and a translator's note. The poems are beautiful in their formal features—especially, image, rhythm, music, and lyricism—exhibiting sonorous and poignant elements. Though, in my opinion, Polanco's “voice” is not nihilistic, the language is “indeterminate,” as if he is saying to us, “The situation is dire, but I do not have the answers.” In the first, title, poem, “COWBOY,” “the world is no longer enough” [3], and, symbolized by “a prosthesis,” the prototype of a reckless, wandering, unmoored man travels


on this sea rubbed raw by the coast, on a raft that
you can pull apart and with its two parts make a cross that
flaps like a flag, like the waves of this bilious sea, this sea
from which a sacred body's scabs emerge, from a swell-
ing. This raft on which I float is a stump and I'm riding
it cowboy-style, riding my stump over the bile, people
will say they saw me mounted on a white swan, they'll
say that they saw me, but it will be a lie, it will be my raft,
the stump-raft I ride, and I too am a stump... [4]


Using the signs, “stump,” “mutilation,” and “prosthesis,” Polanco begins his book by introducing us to the spectre of loss and erasure, a theme continued in the second poem, “CONFUSION”—“Did he throw himself into the river?” / “Yes, he was confused.” [5] Both poems appear in experimental form, employing prose, unconventional lineation, and varying use of capitalization.

The third, untitled, poem is introduced by a two-part drawing of a gun and bullets, a foreboding image, again, of loss and erasure—taken one step further into method. Partially-appropriated text accompanies the image, and we are warned, “This bullet is not a bird. Although it invents itself in the air.” [8] Continuing themes of erasure and, now, death, poem four, “HEAD OF A DEAD MAN,” is inspired by an ancient stone statue. This poem appears to be entirely appropriated with erased components and sentences situated irregularly combined with other “defamiliarized” elements mentioned before.

Poem five, “Posthumous Instructions for My Body,” is dedicated to Peter Handke, the controversial co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. This piece is crafted as a conversation between two individuals—the deceased person's “voice” [Polanco's?] and the listener/respondent. This poem is one that would appeal to Handke, capturing his sardonic mien: “First of all crush // all // the bones // until they're compacted.” // “And then?” // “Then (after you cherish them) // char them well // until they become powder (after laughing louder).” [10] A footnote includes information appropriated, no doubt, from corporate advertising, about a process to transform ashes of a loved one into “authentic diamonds,” “a one-of-a-kind way to reencounter the intact beauty of your beloved.” [11]

The final poem, “Multitasking,” is a 5-part prose text including dark content and “dark humor,” as Galvin has described Polanco's sensibilities [“This party is fun, right?” (15)]...


2
Something's coming, I know that something is coming. Perhaps
a storm or a caste of birdmen with cassocks, but something, a
fistful of fists, a grain of salt on the tongue, is going to come. I don't
know what, but something is coming […] a hurricane
of marmots, a gang of winged tigers, a bird that vomits bombs... [12]


Polanco's Cowboy & Other Poems left me with a bittersweet taste in my mouth combined with feelings that, while it is important for radical poets to disrupt the status quo, we must be wary of negativity and defeatism. On the other hand, in her translator's note, Galvin quotes the critic, Luis Felipe Fabre, as saying that Polanco “opposes a poetry of silence—an aseptic, apolitical, 'pure' poetry—with the noise of the world, the sound of the background, a brutal and ungraspable landscape quickly glimpsed through the small window of a train in motion.” [17] In Cowboy & Other Poems, the author's “train” is moving very rapidly, for sure, toward, it would seem, a future not well envisioned but, also, not wholly devoid of “epistemic virtue.” If poets are the bearers of ethics as well as truth, we can understand Polanco to be a messenger of the existential crises of the 21st Century, indeed, of the Anthropocene, itself. The moral question is whether we have the will to save ourselves from dystopian scenarios, and, if so, how? Cowboy & Other Poems is a good place to begin to consider the gravity of the human condition. Galvin's sensitive and durable translation highlights a young poet who deserves an international audience.