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.
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