Introduction
Giovanni Bello
Like any smaller scene, Bolivian poetry is characterized by a constant mixing of styles and a certain tendency toward insularity. Both characteristics are evident in this selection of poems. The mixing of styles can be interpreted in two ways. On one hand, it is possible to make out an abstract, experimental tendency that is also interruptive or fragmented in many of these authors’ work. On th other hand, one can also note each author’s reflection of certain tendencies of poetry in Castilian that the others do not share. In other words, at the heart of the recent Bolivian poetry scene there are two opposite movements: one of stylistic cohesion, which can be described as an almost sociological phenomenon; the other, of divergence, the result of the necessity of being in dialogue with broader literary currents than those of marked as specifically Bolivian.
Nearly every one of the selected authors is a digital native, which makes for an immensely important difference with respect to prior generations. Likewise, all of them have published their works independently. This is no minor fact and can help to establish a more panoramic view of their work: while there are relatively large Bolivian publishers that publish younger poets, the authors selected have decided to keep themselves at the margins of those circuits due to their militancy with respect to writing and poetry.
Obviously beyond the authors published by relatively large publishers there are a number of poets who have opted for self-publishing and independence, each with a particular vision of poetic creation. Still, the importance of the authors selected here is rooted in that they are among those who have been most committed to investigating the conditions of poetic writing and its material possibilities.
It is also possible to identify an established support network between these authors outside of academic literary spaces. For example, Barriga - whose Anus Solaris (2019) is structured around a circular hole at the center of the book, was co-published by Nuevos Clasicos, the independent press run by Villanueva. Agreda’s Detritus (2017) was edited by Iris Kiya through a press called Maki_Naria. Mariño was a part of the edition of Barriga’s book and for a time edited the magazine Esparjo, which had Barriga on its editorial committee and which Rothe was also involved with. The list could go on, but what is important is not only the previously noted insularity, but also teh material and aesthetic web established by these younger poets and their connection to the artistic militancy that sustains their works: that militancy that we can identify as more formal and self-conscious with respect to others, is the distinctive mark of this selection.
Camilo Barriga
(Sucre 1991 - La Paz, 2020)
from Anus Solaris o La maquina de sodomizar a todos
Tadeys
We built a machine
That sodomizes everyone
For free
From the u gliest to the most beautiful
That would real ly be a dash
Of co mmunism
A ghost prow ls in the gap
The ghost of F oucault
With his burning cock of words
While he fucks you
Or you fuck him
but
We (all) fuck?
Blink and it's
The end of the world
(Did Messiaen appear?)
And this porous and compassionate earth
Cavalry of
mortibial children
shall come
Sowing
mustard (gas)
The waters triple
You have to pull a lit cigarette from a hard dick
a goat dislo cates her jaw
And I walk throu gh flames
That open your p upils
the sun alone kno ws if it'll come out tomorrow
and if it won't?
Shh. The constant conjunction has never yet failed
Translated by Will Fesperman
•••
The Risperidone Speaks
The letters stab
The eyes
The lips
They huddle in the marg in of a dimple
While the lip s trample the earth
Wet from ic e
And it is then wh en the
[estrangement
Writhes and t ries to see
The mirrors back
Questions the dissolution
Of the echo projected through the window
Who are you
Ghost-dweller
And what have you come to inhabit
This scrap of words
From this dry drunkenness drink
And your last eye lids flap
As your mouth bites down
What is the light like if the hand grabs it
From dust and pins it to sight.
Speech without firing
Has also won
The alveoli
Soaking us in their fall
It disappears
The mirror, no longer funny even
As it opens the windows
Translated by Judah Rubin
José Villanueva
(La Paz, 1992)
Genki sudo
you heard I've been seen shirking out of art galleries
it's how I do seppuku for the scene
when in the city they're still razing buildings without warning
but we don't care because it's thursday and we're horny and clinging
the elders break their divine mandate with liquor-infused ice cream
and my motorized love thinks about your labia minora
you say if we're gonna do something with our spirits let it be a and b
we haven't come to this world to laugh at little squares of light
but the absurdity of our contacts can save us
before our beliefs die
before they stretch our yardsticks
even if you want a flying kick into adulthood
a fashionista's nostalgia will always haunt us
so we can withstand the sudden fear that all our things
bear our names
they painted birds in the air for you
"pajaritos en el aire"
you wanted to see the universe in reverse
but it was so unfocused
and you'd lost your resolution
do you still think we belong anywhere but our beds?
while the world mistreats us with its kabbalistic facts
do you still see mandalas, where the others see scars?
don't make any effort to wall off our windows
we don't need walls at the meditation after-party
though our notes are based on fake news
open eyelids and their intrepid desires
our enemies are going mad
and I'm sitting on the edge of your bed
it's not the house recipe for yohimbe
or the erotic languages of our texts
the real clothes I take off are invisible
things that watch you put on eye shadow
and the rest of the day turn off:
benefit of the doubt
Translated by Will Fesperman
•••
Zeigarnik
We were on top of the wave
When we thought
It’s won’t be that we get our memory’s movements
I promise you sister there’s no boycott in my prayers
Just the everyday rage
Which if it isn’t rage
Is best we chop it up all
The same there’s blood on the floor
Our friends’ vain readings
Propose inevitable ends
They don’t say anything about the monuments that cells make
Noses stained with makeup
Escaping the radical violence of the world
Like Atlanteans abandoned by the great bathyscape
When we could have gotten together at my house whenever
To aid in making new civilizations
Idols of a new quietism
Born like spectacular fungi
Like ageless medusas
Already feeling our iron tower rising over a single day
Our eyes seize on the new wiring
The touristic vanguard is a voyeuristic delight
My heart an atmospheric discotheque
A tribe gone crazy from modesty and tenderness
And the third eye wide open
At the column’s end
Just be careful when cleaning the screens
Those who least want to leave stains
Are the true lovers of their reflection
Like every so often wanting to be a new person
and afterward in the street what if I see you what can I
do how can I let you pass me by without telling you
I love your information and your style
I love your disposable fantasies
I laugh from at makes you laugh
though it isn’t funny I imagine you laughing
I want us to play with our action figures and avatars
I love the tattoos on your arms
It seems so naïve the way you photoshop your photos
I know all the names without anyone showing me anything
We were the best at opening up slits
In our thighs
Cracks
holes drilled deep
Silent
Like curses
Sister when we wore out our thighs
We were the gods’ pornography
We were people who laugh at the world and its racist jokes
And now we’re sick and repentant
They’ve opened up our trained dogs’ chests
Now there’s no one to bark at our pyrotechnics
Translated by Judah Rubin
Iris Kiya
(La Paz, 1990)
Contact Sheets
I snuggled in as the shot flew and I cried.
She wore her hair smell of fresh blackberries
I sense—
or maybe it was a tree
or maybe it was a deer.
I like to see,
though not the horizon
I always look upside down
because then I won’t know
when the bullet emerges
and I imagine
or maybe it was a merry-go-round
or a swing.
Mornings no longer have color
I should think about saying to my brother,
I must make a gray decision.
Decisions are made depending on the color of the day
and with the smell of blackberries.
Here, the few streets are confused with the little paths
that ants make when everything has been
disrupted by the winter rain.
There is no reason
not to smell the fruit, the grass, the ground.
I must smell them in the season
in which they have not matured,
to reduce tobacco consumption
and satiate my anxiety.
I walked.
I walked.
I walked.
I walked.
Then, there was no choice
but to curl up against the tree
and the woman smelled me like a fawn,
she couldn’t run,
laugh.
The place became fragrant,
and she was struck down by the shot.
The smell of blackberries about to bloom
crushed that of gunpowder, it was beautiful.
•••
Betamax
Souvenir of 1989
I hurried up the catwalk. It wasn’t just me who was late. I stumbled, went through the my house door, as if I were going through a field gate. And behind it? A tiny group of purple boards. My father the most purple of all. We left the house, we got into the car and it left towards the desert. I always found it strange to find things to do there. The only thing that got me was the carrousel full of decorations. Every time we went, I imagined that the gypies would swarm between the little horses, lying in wait to steal something and add it to one of their bronze bowls. My father was fearful of any subject who looked at his camera. All in all, there was no point in having one, if it didn’t do its job. But he only had it to look at it; no one was allowed to touch. Still, what I never thought would happen happened; he leaned towards me, gesturing for me to take a shot. It was just then moment that I left the gate. I watched my family through the camera lens. I imagined being the eye displaying all sorts of flint in some educational documentary.
Javiera on the carrousel,
and the eyes/mirrors of the little horses
kicking the gods.
Javiera on the carrousel,
taking turn
after turn
and her family
after turn
ended like wild boars caught on the moon.
Javiera on the carrousel,
watched the skeletal horses
banished
to the desert sun.
They became an extinct sort of wood.
And the man with the camera was one more Achaean,
in an age when
equine gold should be polished.
Javiera on the carrousel,
wobbled with her father’s anodyne laugh,
her long fingers aroused fear
in her brother.
Javiera turned five times,
twenty times,
thirty,
fifty times,
and her flailing fingers
turned purple.
The mother, too, throbbed that color.
She because she would never intend to change.
And the man with the camera removed his lens
and his tears were as false
as the smiles the father exuded.
She decided to leave the camera
and out the gate.
A version of Iris Kiya’s poems, translated by Reina Sara Barrientos was published by Dulzorada Press in 2020. They have been lightly edited for this publication. More can be found here
Rocio Ágreda
(Cochabamba, 1981)
From Detritus
In spite of the dream
And because we’re dreaming now
As though we’ll repair the
Mirror’s abyss in that
Long fall from the surface
The vertigo of-
Of the red riding hood and fierce logos
We’ll talk elsewhere
I’m telling you that there was a direction
For this conjuring
A bridge
But so much time has passed since
So much water passed under
Now we stalk the minor event
It still happened, we say
Of an ancient echo that the wind
Almost without wanting to recite
Dark mater
Oh temple of the nervous system
May this fatigue be divine
Admit your amnesiac goddess, too
At the apex of the night
When you smile in the eyelid’s heaviness
Between eye and eye
That you do not love like the sea
To go on recommencing
•••
after an image by Margarita Terekhova
the autumn stabs us from its pages
my eyes shipwrecks in time
and in the dark sheen of your hair
it is lost like a legion of asteroids
hurriedly hurtling in the opposite direction
of all perception
like a delirious mass fugitive of the blue
and the specter of your saliva
I have never been here before
my life passes in seventeen minute sequences
forget me as soon as possible
(would you be able to bring me a glass of water)
you cover yourself in candor in thread and whatever arrow
you follow on in linked successions
to an unnecessarily fateful void
you invert your direction toward where it did not need to go
you return to the wolves loving the flesh in a meticulously
non-Newtonian fall
keep yourself sober
even the devil felt bashful at the right instant
pardon me I’m seducing one of your grimaces in the mirror
dress me in valor, armor me in value I’m resisting
the cannibalism of its reflection
forget me I’m not going to argue for or against
I knew that you would insist on a blue landscape
I knew you would be intent on recovering me in the gleam
of a headless footless vision
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai
per una selva oscura…
when the music isn’t enough to perfect breathing
just read the underlined we’re going to be late
we’re always arriving late or too early
never on time
our religion has been silence
darkness was a way of watching
to see what I wanted is precise
not watching leaving things boiling
unhinged in the contingent
(at a certain point making is a crime)
but that reveals nothing of the silence you say
silence is a mine field sorry for contradicting me
silence is a mine field
with mute children running
while a heart beats impressively
beyond whatever listens
within that silence I build my house
I sharpen my pencils and comb my hair
in that house I bless the light and its caress
in that house I laugh like a madwoman
I pick out my dress my century and my country
at the exact height of my error
in that house I un-live
I convince myself that it is the only way century after century
until now
Translated by Judah Rubin
Lucía Rothe
(La Paz, 1994)
From Here we have gods cut down by machete
eleven.
penetrate perforate lie beneath give pleasure
and move slowly, slowly
and contemplate time suspended
between your fingers that enter and fit
and the hardness makes your belly shake
your eyes and your eyes with the circular
perfectly pressed lids.
to penetrate to fill up the lack of air and bones
xx xxxxxxxx xx xxxx xx xxx xxxx xx xxx xxx xxxx
for my slack for my lack
xxx xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxx
the salivating warmth of the entrance
xxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx xx xxx xxxxxxxx senob fo
thirteen
When you’re going to cross,
leave me on this side
leave me adrift.
Still my heart is holy flesh
I refuse to murder it to look
to look into its eyes.
Fear will be less
xx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xxxxx
fear will be less
xx xxxxx xxxxx xx xxx
xxxx xxx xx xxxxxx xxxx xx
Translated by Judah Rubin