JENI OLIN [13.114]

Jeni Olin

Houston.  EE.UU.  Suele escribir desde un registro bastante relacionado con el de los poetas asociados a la New York School. La estética de sus poemas, también, parece derivar del collage y el cutup. Olin es una joven poeta oriunda de Houston. Obtuvo una licenciatura y una maestría en Naropa University (Boulder, Colorado), la legendaria universidad budista fundada por Allen Ginsberg y Anne Waldman. Ha publicado Blue Collar Holiday (2005) en colaboración con Larry Rivers y Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems (2010). Reside actualmente en la ciudad de New York. Tony Towle escribió sobre Blue Collar Holiday: “Los poemas de Jeni Olin están llenos de episodios emocionales y fuertes, a veces, turbulentos sentimientos, que ella ilumina con apremiante ironía y brillante despreocupación”.

Jeni Olin was born in Houston, and studied in North Carolina and at the Naropa Institute. Her first book, A Valentine for Frank O'Hara, is an homage poem. Her work has been published in The Hat, Exquisite Corpse, and Blue Book. She lives in Manhattan.

Los primeros dos poemas que, a continuación, traduzco son tomados del libro Blue Collar Holiday, el tercero y último proviene de una plaquette titulada The Pill Book (2008).

[Eternal Typewriter

Poesía en traducción. Taller. Dayana Fraile, autora del libro de cuentos Granizo (2011) galardonado y editado por la I Bienal de Literatura Julián Padrón, y Guillermo Parra, poeta y traductor, traducen en conjunto poetas angloparlantes de vanguardia.]

Meryl Streep

Besar hombres es como comer pan blanco sin nada de ropa

Invierno. Aburrimiento carnal. Pesado como semilla de algodoncillo

En un tímido mundo de neutrones. La duda física es ser 

Irónica consigo misma. Llena de gracia, “caí por”

El sistema dolor de cabeza. La única verdad es el estilo es lo que

Le estaba diciendo –Que feldespato causa fatiga

Como direcciones de escena para un niño con un riñón, alicaído

O falsamente animado, como en fin de semanas de divorciados

Con Memorias de África, la foto de la estación   en la cual todos se acercan

A un anexo & muestras de sangre, o pasividad tipo clases de Lamaze

Como Meryl Streep después de una sífilis muy grave, conductas fáciles

Con la plataforma de baño & el desenlace, floreciendo

Sin esfuerzo como un vegetal secreto añorando la muerte

“Bomboncito”, él dijo, “aquí es

           donde yo

Desaparezco por algunos momentos, quiero que seas valiente”.

Para que cualquiera que esté mirando hacia adentro sólo vea el archipiélago

Eso es Meryl –la pálida Meryl a través de ásperas paredes:

“Soy de una torsión una cosa bella para que la luz se prenda”

… dibujos de pincel & tinta de armatostes alentándola

Un buen año abajo

New York no me aceptará a este peso &

Madres de los desaparecidos ya no vienen por

Aquí más. Te dije tu eres empleada de limpieza verdad

Con manchas de té Lipton & la Clase dirigente

Seriamente atraída. Él dijo: No

Estoy volteando las camas. Ahora es mi turno

En la cama con una hermosa furia americana

Como morenas con sudores nocturnos. Mi amor

Semiprecioso & alucinado

En la temporada del hombro nosotros resistimos

Aunque yo soy sombría & no tengo drogas

Trasvasado detrás de la pascua rosada

Falsifico un optimismo

Sólo para respirar –Sólo pensando en él por una vez &

El judío errante que comió mi amanecer

Pero conozco flores como Zorro fue mi papá

Aquellas guirnaldas de delgados siseos láser

Y con el “sensual isoterma

De la semiótica” nosotros nos encontramos de nuevo en el Kiev

Para revisar la química. Ellos traen las luces

Sobre esos pasteles de cerezas & como criogénicos

Más o menos funciona. Esta vez mi amor

La muñeca de sal de la noche nos alienta

Derecho hacia el atracadero del zepelín

Con-ella-tiene-un-poco-de-casimaldita-en-ella-

Como-cuando-muere-una-nube interpretada como

Bueno, está bien, he visto cosas peores.

Wellbutrin

“Cuando comprendí que el absoluto no estaba sino en la renuncia, me dediqué a las apariencias”

Yo tengo un “estúpido pequeño corazón” pegajoso y pesado como el arroz

& es tan franco como una logia masónica

tu leche como suero blanqueador de dientes o el rastro de un caracol en la blanca china

cero abortos, cero dependientes & económicamente estable

en un modo de casi-Geisha. Yo derrocho sushi y algas

Tu romantizas el proletariado,

Las estrellas bloquean mi camino hacia ti, tu alfabeto vatídico es mi sangre y mi electrocardiograma

Saltar como las notas de un buque para el tema musical de Peanuts

Algunas veces yo sólo me paralizo y el perro de mi imaginación es convocado

Hogar después de la oscuridad. Otras veces, yo disfruto las esposas trofeo en el área alrededor de la piscina: tempura humana vuela hacia la costa de Amalfi, tragas píldoras y te esfuerzas por elevarte encima de todo.

Un par de bistecs, quizás un poco de anticongelante, navidad en Tokyo

Donde las flores del cerezo caen bajo la sombra de la nieve

Como las sombras proyectadas por las pestañas! Si yo tuviera un millón de dólares, quiero decir, sino estuvieran atados a pagarés, yo le daría a todos los poetas dos semanas en la luz del día del Pacífico.

Stick-up

Thanks for the novel on Catherine the Great.

I was greatly relieved to discover there are fates

far worse than blackness, the clap. Though

nobody knows what they are...

& so come to shepherd me across a stretch of wicked terrain

more limp-wristed wives blackballed from the Bath & Tennis Club.

“O the girls used to dot their i’s with hearts” & their hearts just

break like chocolate, sharp & warm

& exclusive like after-swim bowel movements.

White Castle burgers. High-class poo-poo.

I am assaulted by a cohesive mass

of confidence & steal lines, long & thin

like stringy hemorrhoids or cowboy ties.

I choose not to think of it as plagiarism but as “synchronicity” as in:

Christ was born on a bank

holiday & died on a bank

holiday & I’m worrying about my hedge fund

when a voice blurts out, You could have got salvation,

tri-color pasta if you had waited but since you acted

the way you did you get nothing!

“Honey Kept Saying Primo Levi Was an Accident”

Honey kept saying Primo Levi was an accident

& “about as scary as a glass of orange juice”

Orange Jews he kept saying when I asked for a raise, high

& seedy love to be gathered & dispersed

like diaphanous monks or politics

I never wanted to fight the war against m.s.

I am trying to live with myself in critical care

in Chelsea room #224 minus the bladder control of cub scouts

Did a dog fall out that window I sort of understand

child leashes on Manhattan streets

like a bravura brushstroke, one little dash right here

& it’s all over I defend blindly whatever

brings me money. Well there’s nothing

wonderful in that I really should stop

with the queer diction it’s 1999 but I got laid

in heaven & must rage on as such

against the dying of the light, etc.

A Good Year Down

New York will not accept me at this weight &

mothers of the disappeared don’t come ’round

here anymore    I said you’re housekeeping aren’t you

with Lipton tea stains & the Establishment

seriously attracted He said  No

I’m turning down the beds   Now it’s my turn

in bed with a beautiful American rage

like brunettes with nightsweats    My love

semi-precious & stoned

in the shoulder season we hold on

thought I am dismal & have no dope

Siphoned off behind pink Easter

I fake an optimism

just to breathe    Just thinking of him for once &

The Wandering Jew that ate my sunshine

but I know flowers like Zorro was my dad

those garlands of thin hissing lasers

So with the “sexy isotherms

of Semiotics” we meet again at the Kiev

to check chemistry    They bring the lights

down on those cherry pies & like cryogenics

it sort of works    This time my love

the salt doll of night egging us on

straight to the zeppelin mooring

with she-has-a-bit-of-the-neardamned-in-her-

like-when-a-cloud-dies    construed as

Well, alright, I’ve seen worse

Vanishing Point

Depressed like cabin air & passing out

peach-tinted hygiene manuals

          on westside highway I lead men on

like the Virgil of the garment district:

Now this lovely structure on your right

is baby’s jeans & a struggling pyramid of girls & oh

well I understand his orphans with my gun like cinema verité

shot through with lower-functioning inmates –

          with the “inkings of Scandinavian malaise” & whatnot

I go see art & feel priceless but to be a good sport you have to lose

          & lose value like junk bonds he likes to “sit back & watch ‘em grow . . .”

The Met stuffed with alabaster tits I left alone, sexy & mightily unDutch

Mastered, set fire to a batik picture

          of Mother Chelsea the Pitiless who wasn’t sickle-

          cell white & incontinent & Dia-funded

I stood in his cloud shirt by myself

cursed to stalk the night through all eternity & original so on

through the small ballet company of stocking runs & upset

nuns down Sixth Avenue, John Wieners,

the Americas breaking apart so I can feel this sinuous & partial wind

          like lyme disease with a drip in the arm & the sky is falling.

High Art and Cedar

          1

An artistic, unbalanced boy

          given to colitis, anorexia,

                    shingles, heartbreak, piles,

three chords for each disease,

          and after? Philip Glass

                    just wept & wept.

and what of me?

          “Fall.” I leaned down,

              knew you, boyish, angular,

over fish & chips

          as over the frozen corn fields,

                    a red sun rose

dilettantish

          in its insistence, touching,

         risqué in failure.

We did have a very nice time.

It would be so easy to stay but

          was it Sal Mineo in the doorframe?

                    I knew you felt like that.

And so my hell is hardly there.

          2

Like a Goya noon

   of excessive leaf-drop

                    or an intense plate of oysters,

connecting a figure & a background,

          I am always sick

                    in time.

Too, there is space

          disappearing,

                    thin as monks

between winter pines.

          They were sweet

                    when I pressured them

but we had to cry a lot.

          You could lose

           your mind in their loving

(monks, not pines)

as though it weren’t

                    the end of the world

of latchless aviaries.

          And the Beatrix Potter show

          we attended

at the Morgan Library –

                    the smudged mothers

                              muscular as dusk

in Tolstoy.

          It seems I resisted

                    when evening fell

myself, intensely Anna

          over the years,

to help care for Anna

          with her neurotic fear

                   of kids and sprinklers.

          3

Our fragility, our bravado:

          Well, Christ, honey,

                    this hair and these words

are all we got.

          Enjoyable, yes;

        and so is divine Anna,

in her peeled doorlight, still

          in the throes

                    of a modernist

prejudice against

      figuration.

                    To say something obscure

and never return to it –

          a colophon of our indiscretions

        like the green carnations

of Oscar Wilde

          or the forgotten logic

                    of The Good Earth:

Why didn’t they just sell the farm

          and move to the city,

                    if it was all that bad?

          4

          I seem to mean my lies

or that I so very much

          need this image

         not to be true:

a pile of wallboard,

          not yet unpacked

  outside the Howard Johnson’s

in Rochester

          and beside that,

                    a small girl sucking her thumb

through a frayed arm cast

          the color of mackerel.

                    “Elle n’est pas artiste,”

in definitive tones,

      her silence enervated

                    though porous

as tiny cork castles

                    in Chinatown

                              drugstores.

          5

We were shanghai’ed into this

          meaning, a heritage of tears

                    particular to the hells

we’re peopled with.

          How is it then

                    I found you through skies

so bright if our veins

          hadn’t stolen

                    the purest blue first?

Milky, as dropped aspirin

          in a child’s sweaty hair,

                    like Vietnam:

“Never should have been there,

          seen such...” a vulgar comparison,

   I know that,

but to have renewed,

          with this error, the reckless sorrow

                    of a poem at its close,

as always, second from last

          in the sack race,

                    yours but only just.

Don't Send Me Flowers

My boyfriend, the Infidel, is dying of old age

so I am praying to Virginia Woolf to soften his heart.

I had to kill a lot of impulses to get to him & his point of misery.

A black cloud chased me with erotic intention then.

My vanity drove me to the ends of the earth

in search of nubile flesh & my runny little heart

slid back & forth along the glamour axis

that is the Rivers’ Divide – an iffy affair flecked with grief.

I fled to a Mexican isle just to lose my honky pallor

turn the faint & dirty mimeograph

red of nipples, die on the line if I recall

there was a bandaged harem somewhere in the background

brownout, sparklers, girls with organic breasts

ducking through oyster fog...

The subject of the mural was the Apocalypse & I think

you handled the destruction of the world

as gently as possible Honey I

am really bawling now, can’t get through –

we’re both sticking to our guns

but I’m loaded, really bombed, shot up

all night with the horrors though my cousin,

my gastroenterologist says I’m fine inside.

Blue Collar Holiday

And if I feel like a woman looming over Lautrec

with water weight & panties and murderous fuschia underfoot

those dying balloons on Job’s Lane sag around like saline breast implants

and pineal sunbeams sneak through my hair

dirty but focused as screwy detectives or Plexiglas

I go to pieces in my adolescent pine

amid blackheads, seltzer, a cold front

falling into a decline

like ladies on the prairies used to

in the klieg-lit house with the deodorant cakes in the upstairs johns

and the foam-core ass on “Bad Secretary” in the living room

and the foam-core bird paintings in the klieg-lit kitchen

warm & endangered as an Orca whale float,

pollen & Coronas, in the foggy autumn

and the thin nude branches all snow-furred

like an X-ray of infant bronchitis. Wrist-slitting stuff.

My honey chapstick stinks of piss & menstrual sharkfear

but like the alpha male in Brownie troops ankled in mud

I sit tight, coping, & spit. The Mormons taught me

to have fortitude when I am in the right & right now

I stand stalwart as lung-colored support hose

in a French sex & death-er for readers under twelve

My Indian name is “Little Hard-Core” I yank on a blue collar

since we have so many blue-collar holidays

salute myself for alpinism – just being high really

& degrees of cousinage even misty like this.