JESSICA PIAZZA [13.308]

Jessica Piazza

[EE.UU.]

En versión de José Luis Justes Amador, dos textos de la poeta norteamericana Jessica Piazza. Es, a pesar de lo breve de su obra todavía, una de las voces más interesantes de la poesía usamericana contemporánea. Desde su primer libro, Interrobang (Red Hen Press, 2013), ha demostrado una preocupación constante por el lenguaje y sus posibilidades. 

http://circulodepoesia.com/

Esta tendencia se mantiene, a través de la écfrasis, en su próximo libro This is not a sky (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), al cual pertenecen estos dos poemas.

Terraza de café en la noche

sobre un cuadro de Van Gogh

Los caballeros y las damas, apuestos y atildados. Las lámparas astrales brillan gayamente: el cielo antes ominoso, candelabro y dorado y precioso.

(Es Venecia. O París.

Están achispados. Radiantes).

Las terrazas son cuadros para los que pasan, los de ojos con miradas fijas, los que no tropiezan, los que no se desconciertan con las idas y venidas por el empedrado. Los clientes, deslumbrados en rojas alfombras tejidas, beben café au lait, limoncello y vino.

(¿Y ella? No pasa nada… ella está bien)

A pesar de lo oblicuo del toldo y de la patina dorada no tiene rostro y como ya pasada, la forma de una sombra. Un hombre en la puerta. Un hombre que ella puede que conozca.

(Ve por favor. Ve, por favor)

Y la curva de su abrigo convoca pensamientos de una lámpara que destella cruelmente en los espejos que ella ha humedecido con gasa. Ese bajar, esa pérdida. Esa luz que baja.

(Una noche terrible que da pausa a todas las otras noches)

Pero las estrellas. Las estrellas. Las horas del paseo. El tiempo y el color. Las memorias cortadas por la risa, su lavar, sus olas. Nadie se va, nadie tiene tumbas.

No hay tumbas.

Lluvia, vapor y velocidad – El Gran Ferrocarril del Oeste sobre un cuadro de Turner

El clima es de un amarillo que se arremolina, arriba y abajo. Las ventanas en las que los pasajeros se apoyan –mientras las millas avanzan secuestradas y secas- son más húmedas que el cielo.

Esos pasajeros aspiran niebla en las ventanas.

(Antes de los aviones, la única concepción del vuelo

era observar a los pájaros o los sueños o un adiós arrojado del techo).

La humedad sin enmarcar de Londres una maravilla más allá. Detrás: una tormenta.

Detrás: las historias que se desarrollan pierden la causa; la unión obliga a una promesa; los daños.

Alambre espino en la cercas de las granjas.

Las memorias incesantes que el río escribe de los muertos.

(Pero adelante. Hacia delante.

Todo metal; todo movimiento).

Sus nuevas vidas imaginadas son más reales que la verdad.

El tren se estira: todo silbato, todo lamento. Entre los raíles, una canoa diminuta se tambalea en el oleaje, sus remeros entre la niebla, no se ven bien.

Adiós, oh tarde sin horizonte.

(Un cruce de caminos

es todavía un marcharse).

Jessica Piazza is the author of two poetry collections:  Interrobang (Red Hen Press, 2013) and the chapbook This is not a sky (Black Lawrence Press, 2014).   She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where she currently lives with her scientist husband and her crazy-looking dog.

​Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she earned her B.S. in Journalism from Boston University, where she worked as an intern at the Favorite Poem Project under the supervision of US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.  The project—which invited people of all ages and from all walks of life to write in about their favorite published poems—sparked her ongoing fascination with the potential poetry has to foster change on an individual and community level.

​​

After college, Jessica attended workshops at the New School and the 92nd Street Y in New York City.  With the poet Rebecca Lindenberg, she founded the Speakeasy Poetry Series in downtown Manhattan, which routinely featured poetry greats such as Paul Muldoon, David Lehman and Marie Ponsot alongside emerging and mid-career poets.

Bio

Jessica moved to Austin, TX to pursue her M.A. in English (Creative Writing) at the University of Texas at Austin.  While there, she worked with R.J. Lambert and James Capozzi to found Bat City Review, and edited its inaugural issue.  She taught American literature, world literature and creative writing to undergraduates, and in her final year at UT Austin she won the prestigious Keene Prize for Literature.

In 2007, Jessica moved to Los Angeles to begin her candidacy in the Ph.D. program in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she co-founded Gold Line Press.  Jessica’s scholarly work sits solidly in the emerging field of Cognitive Poetics.  Her academic dissertation explores the relationship between neuroscience and literature; specifically how the brain processes the visual and sound information of text, and how the reactions to that information inform literary analyses.  She teaches undergraduate Composition and Rhetoric, pairing with courses on a variety of social issues, including Changing Family Forms, Religion and Morality, Environmental Ethics and LA and the American Dream.



Throughout her graduate work, Jessica has retained her commitment to arts advocacy through volunteer work with amazing organizations.  She has mentored underserved elementary school students with The Young Storytellers Foundation , taught creative writing to teenagers impacted by HIV with Hollywood Heart, and run a writing workshop for high school kids who need alternative learning environments with Red Hen Press’ Writing in the Schools program.

​

Currently, Jessica serves as Contributing Editor at The Offending Adam. Among other places, her work has appeared in The National Poetry Review, Agni, Indiana Review, 32 Poems, The Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, No Tell Motel, 42 Opus, Pebble Lake Review, Rattle, Hobart, Country Dog Review, Coconut, Barefoot Muse, Forklift Ohio, and the anthologies 150 Contemporary Sonnets (U of Evansville Press) and Hot Sonnets (Entasis Press).

Asthenophobia

Fear of weakness

Hallow

A holy man holds holly plants aloft,

so wholly bent on kissing every saint.

Though he mis-thought (it’s mistletoe he wanted),

my haunted face will dip beneath the branches,

masquerading as each missing martyr.

Watch me barter for his hijacked heart.

Hollow

What wasn’t there was never mine to lose.

(Empty: the promise. Empty: the noose.)

When he pressed the depression at my throat,

he was not cruel. I was not forced.

Like me, the tree’s worst weakness is its hollow.

I always do regret tonight tomorrow.

Heresyphilia

Love of radical deviation

The way change sounds you think there’ll always be more of it; jingling cacophony for the bus ride, for the Laundromat, reinventing itself the way change does—hands empty one moment and the next, windfall. You’d think all change happens that way: a misinterpreted conversation and suddenly you’re in Rhode Island, two days later, four hundred miles and gas money you didn’t have, your last quarter plinking into the steel eyeslit of a vibrating bed the likes of which you’ve only seen in movies, highway high-beams bursting two by two in the window like searchlights, working alchemy on your parasol of cigarette chain-smoke so the whole damn room shines like a steel ceiling. The way change happens you’d think the air always looked like this, like furious fog hiding the highest peaks of a bridge inside her coat, but a breeze shivers through the room and now everything’s different, and you’re younger than you remembered and Rhode Island is perfect, perfect. The conversation was not misinterpreted, you see that now, it was a dozen conversations plaited together to keep them tidy and smaller than they were. You left because you wanted to. There was nowhere to go, but here: the extraordinary thing about the horizon is that it is everywhere.

Kakorrhaphiophobia

Fear of failure

Derailed, your vantage point is not of stairs

you’ll scale, but stars you can’t. Wrong turns advance

no grace and no divine. Anywhere

you land feels falsely fine. When you commence,

each errand’s a half-empty glass to sip

your water from, to sip your wine. You start

a dialogue with never done, a trip,

a wire, a current to defibrillate

your half-stopped heart. Breathing uncaught. Unfailed,

you delve. Another devil is de-veiled.

A doppelgänger born with every task:

the evil twin of its unfinishing.

The harbor, never there, is menacing.

Its ebb, unanswered question asked and asked.

Lack

Of shock. Of dread. 

Of this shock, redressed. 

A man in the flesh, 

engaged, incensed. 

Stock-still. Undressed. 

What a fucking mess. 

Our fucking gone-too-farness. 

The foregone conclusion 

is boredom, I guess. 

Like sailors pressed into duty on a ship, 

we measure the length of our endless 

trip in knots. Raise wet canvases of nots 

and wait for wind to strip the deck. 

I tell knock-knock jokes. You either 

laugh, or you don't. 

My easy consonance. 

Your queasy countenance. 

A stray tucked back in place. 

Our come-uppance. 

I didn't see the glass. 

I didn't notice your eyes. 

I've not gone crazy yet 

(though, it's implied). 

But the floor’s declared a war. 

and I propose a truce. 

Truth is: 

There isn't any more to lose.