While trying to ramp up my Spanish poetry writing, I decided to get my hands on some more contemporary Latino poetry. I found some great work from Francisco X. Alarcon which can be found here. There is also the enigmatically named aguijonmagico who, despite not really being that lyrically astute, is pretty adventurous with his references to Sarte and Birdman (more of his stuff here). If you really want to go for a poetic name drop, however, look no further than Luis Chaves, who wrote a book a poems and titled it under Cat Power’s real name. He even went so far as to write a poem whose title translates to “Free Translation of an Unreleased Track by Chan Marshall”. There are more poets here in case you’re interested, I’m probably going to be referencing some of the cooler ones as I go through them.
What really got me off the path was when I found the work of Sergio Badilla. He started the poetic transrealism movement, which is vastly different than this manifesto that I found for its literary counterpart. If you’re a sci-fi fan, you should read it, it’s a pretty interesting take on how stories can be written.
To top off my complete derailment, here’s a link to Calexico’s beautiful cover of Goldfrapp’s Human, en español:
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