Email Poem

Your IP Address: 18.226.4.129
Your Email Address:
To Email Address:
Subject
Personal Note:
Poem Title:
Poem
Advice to Young Poets
by Nicanor Parra Sandoval
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Youngsters,
write however you will
in your preferred style.
Too much blood flowed under the bridge
for me to believe
there’s just one acceptable path.
In poetry everything’s permitted.

Originally published by Setu



Ivy
by Michael R. Burch

“Van trepando en mi viejo dolor como las yedras.” – Pablo Neruda
“They climb on my old suffering like ivy.”

Ivy winds around these sagging structures
from the flagstones
to the eave heights,
and, clinging, holds intact
what cannot be saved of their loose entrails.

Through long, blustery nights of dripping condensation,
cured in the humidors of innumerable forgotten summers,
waxy, unguent,
palely, indifferently fragrant, it climbs,
pausing at last to see
the alien sparkle of dew
beading delicate sparrowgrass.

Coarse saw grass, thin skunk grass, clumped mildewed yellow gorse
grow all around, and here remorse, things past,
watch ivy climb and bend,
and, in the end, we ask
if grief is worth the gaps it leaps to mend.



Love! Love until the night implodes!—Pablo Neruda, translation by Michael R. Burch

I'm no longer in love with her, that's certain ...
yet perhaps I love her still.
Love is so short, forgetting so long!
—Pablo Neruda, translation by Michael R. Burch

I own my own darkness, alone.—Pablo Neruda, translation by Michael R. Burch

I alone own my darkness.—Pablo Neruda, translation by Michael R. Burch

I like for you to be still: it’s as if you were absent;
then you hear me from far away, yet my voice fails to touch you.
—Pablo Neruda, translation by Michael R. Burch



Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval (1914-2018) was a Chilean poet, mathematician and physicist. He is considered to be one of the most influential Spanish language poets of the 20th century and is often compared to Pablo Neruda. Parra described himself as an "anti-poet" due to his distaste for standard poetic pomp and circumstance; after recitations he would sometimes exclaim: "Me retracto de todo lo dicho!" ("I take back everything I said!") Parra rose to fame with the 1954 publication of his "Poems and Antipoems," which used lucid language to evoke the humor and absurdity of modern life. Keywords/Tags: Nicanor Parra Sandoval, Spanish, translation, advice, youth, youngsters, young poets, mentor, teacher, blood, bridge, poetry, style, genre, method, path, poet, poem, poems, writing, free verse, Chile, Chilean
CAPTCHA Preview
Type the characters you see in the picture
Required