By Anna Daniels
Octavio Paz
During National Poetry Month, San Diego Free Press will be publishing a poem of the day. San Diego has poets, some very familiar and others not so familiar. We will be posting their works on Saturday and Sunday, while you are enjoying late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.
During the week we will draw upon poetry from other places and times. Thursdays however, are reserved for Ishmael von Heindrick- Barnes video/poem series for SDFP called Geo-Poetic Spaces. We will also keep our eyes open for poems from SDFP contributor Will Falk.
Today we bring you Octavio Paz. The one hundredth anniversary of Octavio Paz’s birth was this past March 31st. The Mexican born poet was a prolific poet and essayist. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. The Nobel Prize website offers this insight into his work:
His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes “the secret religion of the modern age.” Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, “the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other.” His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense.
Here are two interpretations of his poem Touch/Palpar
Here’s the original Spanish:
Palpar
Mis manos
abren las cortinas de tu ser
te visten con otra desnudez
descubren los cuerpos de tu cuerpo
Mis manos
inventan otro cuerpo a tu cuerpo.
Anna Daniels
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Lovely poem, Anna. How about some Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and/or Mary Oliver? It’s so nice to have a poem to read on SDFP every day!
Shelley- I just spent the past hour listening to Mary Oliver’s poems! Stay tuned. There’s so much more!
Beautiful! Thank you so much Anna! Once again, SDFP
offers us something nourishing and thoughtful.
The music on the second video was perfectly matched to this lovely poem. He says so much in so few words.