Cuando caiga el gobierno / Martha Kornblith

When the government collapses

When the government collapses
I will be habitually alone.
Since I will have postponed
the errands
—as always—
from taking so much time
to imagine you,
my pantry will be
empty
and I will wander without
a grain of bread,
or relatives, or neighbors
or painkillers, alone.
I will be a woman in a
country at war
who thinks of you
habitually
—alone—




{ Martha Kornblith, Sesión de endodoncia, Caracas: Grupo Editorial Eclepsidra, 1997 }

Es Martes / Martha Kornblith

It is Tuesday

It is Tuesday
I read Kristeva
(“melancholia is sterile
if it does not become a poem”)
It is Tuesday
and a month ago
my left hand
burned in living flesh.
I met a doctor
whom I loved madly.
That man washed
my blood
that man cleaned
my burned skin
with indulgence.
That man met
my weeping
but that weeping
was not a weeping
that came from within
it was a different
weeping,
an outside weeping.
It is Tuesday
I read Kristeva:
(“I inhabit the secret
crypt of a wordless
pain”)
To him I dedicate
“Love can surge from
pain, the deepest
love.”

It is Tuesday
and I read Kristeva:
“Melancholia is
a perversion,
it is up to us
to guide it into
words and life”




{ Martha Kornblith, Sesión de endodoncia, Caracas: Grupo Editorial Eclepsidra, 1997 }

Sombras nada más / Israel Centeno

Nothing but Shadows

To Martha Kornblith

I never knew Martha Kornblith. I’ve known how to deny her three times since her death. Poisoned by inner desolation, I’ve raised a temple where I lead the useless ritual of an intimate certainty versed in the phantasmal signature of people; of the other in her multiple roles, of the afflicted friend reflecting a world that doesn’t reflect her, of the spirit opening the mouth of her face with its vague expressions, my face and those of my friends, all making a stained glass without pigments of Martha’s face, estranged from immediate reality; an unreachable presence had it not been for the texts she read each Wednesday in Rafael Arráiz’s workshop, with that voice that breaks and that tremor of noble substance carved in the word she knew how to build from the solitude we know she suffered.

She endured the illness of abstract entities, of angels and demons. Abraham has called me recently to tell me that not too long ago he saw Martha sitting in a park in La Castellana, he was in his car and as he headed uphill to the Cota Mil highway, she remained sitting on a bench, receiving the leaf storm in a blue reality of fast clouds, there in her autumn, reddened.

One afternoon in the CELARG, Carmen saw her revolve around herself several times. Martha would always visit the Casa de la Poesía, sit in front of the desk next to Luis Gerardo, and smoke, smoke a lot and speak, returning again and again to her topic: yes, she was obsessive, monothematic, she only spoke about the books she wrote or about the painful condition of the task, of the emptiness. Carmen saw her revolve around herself and didn’t understand that she was dancing around her axis, these were the steps of the final exhalation.

Ubiquitous, she could be seen in transit through others, whether in the Escuela de Letras at the Universidad Central or facing the ticket counter at the Margot Benacerraf cinema; a regular at the gatherings of poets at the Consolidado building, an assiduous participant in the meetings for the Eclepsidra group.

The literary world read her avidly. Her voice emerged from the creative void into this void we are becoming each day; with her strong voice she produced arid sounds, a rude voice; authentic in her pretensions of failed exordiums, a voice of the voices in her mind, a voice that gathered its fragments in an unleashed fear, a voice in the acceptance of emptiness as a fate, a creature of the first day, a creature of the last day, an ambiguous presence or absence, her own ambiguity, the voice that has descended to the consistent infernos in the insensitivity of the act of rotating around herself, over and over again around the axis where she orbits, tracing the ellipsis of distance. A voice that has been unique for quite some time; a solo that claims the lives of those who dare to pull it off.

I never knew Martha Kornblith, despite having exchanged a few words with her and sharing the innocent experiences of a literary group. I don’t think anyone will know her except through her three books, two of which will be read posthumously, because we live in Hades and in Hades Ulysses would find only shadows, nothing but shadows.




Translator’s Note: Abraham Abraham, Luis Gerardo Mármol Bosch and Carmen Verde Arocha were members of the Eclepsidra group. The CELARG is the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos.




{ Israel Centeno, El Nacional, 8 June 1997 }

“O les énormes avenues du pays saint, les terrasses du temple!”

for Micah Ballard

Just now reading two books worth mentioning, even before I finish them, because of their strategies for thinking about poetry within a social context relevant to a sickened age. In her 1988 study of Rimbaud, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2008), Kristin Ross situates the young poet’s verse in relation to the Paris commune of 1871 (whether he actually made it to Paris during those two months or not, she finds intersections between his writing and the anonymous makers of that insurgency). Ross writes:


“Poetry then must exist as critique, as evaluation: the active expression of an active mode of existence. To produce poetry that would be an agent as well as an effect of cultural and poetic change, Lautréamont and the late Rimbaud choose a hybrid, poetic prose – the bastard mix of poetry and prose. Their choice is an oppositional one. Their adolescent, iconoclastic gesture stands out as an evolutionary accident, a different and startlingly abrupt rhythm in the critics’ narrative of waning social energies.” (27)


A few pages earlier, she identifies a relationship between capital and writing, the relationship sprung from writers and business, even those of us who exist on the margins, whether unpublished or irrelevant, the impulse to write deeply aligned, or at least marked, by the currents opened by the market:


“Art for art’s sake, of which Mendès is one of the most vocal, if not the most adept, spokesperson of his time, seems, as Franco Moretti has suggested, to be in a dialectical relation to production for production’s sake, i.e., to booming late capitalism.” (13)


This second fragment instantly coincided for me with a moment in Heriberto Yépez’s new essay on Charles Olson, El imperio de la neomemoria (Oaxaca: Almadía, 2007). Yépez writes of Olson’s life and work as a reflection of the United States as the central imperial power of the late 20th century, how the Gloucester poet’s work evokes the imperialistic expansionism of the United States in its current incarnation. In the process of mapping a lineage for Olson, Yépez discusses Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” pointing to that text as emblematic of this connection between literature and capital:


“Up until now no one has noticed that, above all, Bartleby is the writer – socially unappreciated – from a capitalist society, whose emblem is Wall Street, who refuses to realize that his work is a replica of what he rejects. What this scrivener doesn’t want to acknowledge – and I include myself and I include you in this situation – is that his words are copies of the words of the Law of Capital and of the State.” [My translation] (42)


This desire of mine to focus my energies on this blog, avoiding as much as possible the publication of my poems in book or periodical form, in a space that’s owned – after all – by that postmodern symbol of Capital that is Google. What’s behind this rejection of publication, besides an acknowledged laziness and social reticence? The poems will remain unpublished and accessible only on occasion, not out of any inherent value but from a refusal to perpetuate the mistakes I’ve already made in these two decades of writing (the first notebook began in 1988, in the forests of Maine).

I’ve received several crucial texts in the mail from poet comrades recently, books that remind me why this work takes on its own life, depending on where or when we endeavor to lift a pen to lined notebook pages. In his collection Info Ration (Los Angeles: Make Now Press, 2007) Stan Apps builds a series of utterly beautiful and politically astute poems, verses that Kevin Killian succinctly describes as “sonnets in distortion.” When I say “political,” I mean that Apps is conscious of his duty to shape language according to the spirit of our age, wounded and often hilarious. As when he writes, in “Forget Political Poetry:”


“Sometimes political poetry is a world-class shopper
Whose job is to shop until s/he drops
In order to do market research for a future retailer
Looking for a new way to display products (ideological
Commodities, in this case) which have no immediate applied use
In a nation which threatens its citizens with homelessness
So they won’t go on strike for a living wage.” (47)


There’s no sequential order to these ruminations, in fact they contradict each other, or at least reveal a counter-revolutionary impulse in my goals: to dissolve all notions of solidarity beyond the silent page, arriving in envelopes or purchased online, each one in her orbit. The poems make a sustenance more vital than any ideology, though you might insist on proclaiming one set of allegiances as being most beneficial. “Abandon all hope...” These words are dedicated to mon frère Micah, whose poems I now read with gratitude, a sequence of inductions to the new year, entitled A Suite of Poems for the New Year, from which I gather this fragment:


“ I take from their mouths.
We initiate one another
I am in front. In the night
They are in front when
we sit down to bleed
We face one another in the dark.”
(“Bled White”)


Before we hiked up into Monte Ávila one Sunday in Caracas last month, Israel gave me a copy of Martha Kornblith’s last book Sesión de endodoncia (Caracas: Grupo Editorial Eclepsidra, 1997). It’s a sparse book consisting of twenty poems, a few of which appeared in newspapers, magazines and anthologies, before and after her death. She visited him a couple weeks before she killed herself and they spent several hours talking at his apartment that night. He said, “I’m sure she would have wanted you to have a copy of her book.” These final poems are a model of restraint and fury, sweetness filtered through a rough dissertation of precise lines practicing (or enacting) irreversible decisions, as in the following untitled poem (again, my translation):


Goodbye, poem, goodbye
I've tried to explain to myself the sky
I've danced with a poet
in drunken nights.
Goodbye, poem, goodbye.

I will never be a poet again
I will never be a poet again.

El perdedor se lo lleva todo / Martha Kornblith

Loser Takes All
(Fragment, Las Vegas 1980)

I only kneaded clay and from it extracted gold
Charles Baudelaire

The landscape of my twentieth year was
lace and pink cotton in Las Vegas
the smell of new clothes in my mother's hand
the vapor exhaled by the carpets at Caesar's
violently breaking into the blackjack wall
mint with ice, limousines and excursions to Virginia City
lot's of romanticism.
To live was merely a house courtesy
just like that.

Fortune never went beyond the temptation of the chips
the big suites
the wonder of the hotels on the Strip
the tiny bikinis
the betting men
the sunsets on exclusive islands.
I believed in all of that
because to believe was to forget time
and the design he leaves
or to reserve the right of admission for myself
because I denied many people.
Even so
I often escaped from the explosion of that destiny's lights
I was a thoughtful girl
I thought of things no one would give a nickel for.
Now the numbers betray me on the roulette
and I'm afraid to look at the cards
I've wagered everything.
I belong to a different legion of winners.

Yesterday there were men who wagered their fate
in other lands
where the players marched
in the night in the absence of clocks
the vigil of orchestras and the sweet life concretized
as in an Andy Warhol print.
The bodies said goodbye, splendid, calm
from those unusual beaches, missing daylight.
If my life were vain like that
if I weren't now in this land
of poets who suffer and recall loss
Their childhood
their paradise.
If we had celebrated the poem's birthday,
if my life had been
like a metaphor's thread
and my pretenders devoted
to more erratic vices.
If the beginning had been
like these my new habits
If my entire first life
had not fallen into disuse, like today
Maybe I wouldn't know the difference.
Because to desire and to wager is the same thing.




{ Martha Kornblith, El perdedor se lo lleva todo, Caracas: Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1997 }