Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Yaxkin Melchy
Translated by
Alice Whitmore
Poetrylife
Fuera de Serie Collection
First edition in Spanish: Kodama Cartonera, 2011
First revised edition in English: Kodama Cartonera, 2015
(CC) Yaxkin Melchy, Alice Whitmore
(CC) 2015, Kodama Cartonera
Tijuana, Mexico
Blog: kodamacartonera.tumblr.com
Facebook: kodama.cartonera
Twitter: @KodamaCartonera
Collection design: Nstor Robles
Editor: Aurelio Meza
Cover illustration: Julio Mara (elcuartovacio.tumblr.com)
Cover design: Jacob Steinberg & Yaxkin Melchy
Collection logo: Talia Prez
Kodama logo: Careli Rojo from a Mononoke Hime character created by Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli, 1997).
In Japanese mythology, kodamas are wood spirits. Their name can
mean either echo, tree ghost, small ball, or little spirit. In Miyazakis film, kodamas would only reveal themselves when the wood is
pure. When it is polluted by men, they die and fall from the trees
like ghost leaves.
This work is under a Creative Commons license
Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 4.0 International.
Some rights reserved.
* This book is part of Los planetas (Mexico City, Literal, 2012), a series in Yaxkins poetic project El nuevo mundo (The New World).
EXPEL
WE MUST EXPEL OURSELVES TO PARADISE
1. There will be no-one behind desks but on top of them, under them,
in front of them... movement
2. Participants will hitch-hike to the event, or, alternatively, by any
means which represent an adventure, a personal challenge
3. The event will take place in a natural setting, whenever possible
4. Authors will venture headless, groundless, yet living ideas
5. :) :x :( :D generate emotions
6. Sharing = orality, intensity = recital, invention, improvisation for
others who, in turn, are others
7. Sharing is learning
8. Eccentricity has a thousand and one paths
9. Perhaps a periodical reunion of loners, synchronised with the
eclipses
10. Children are the Esperanto poets - Walid Tijerina
11. Rebirth or replanting, sowing real possibilities of death
12. Camp for a night beneath the storm and the next day celebrate
in the royal box of a palace: feel that nothing is mundane in this life
13. There will be an open table for all independent and personal publications, fanzines and manuscripts
14. Some themes will border on utopia, composition and dreams,
but this is purely speculative. Speculation is the theme of reality
This is what I learnt during my travels to the There will come a day
festival in Aguascalientes, Mexico, and was read during the Second Young
Writers Conference in Monterrey.
1
20. Anymore
10
11
13
14
david
lauri
raya
mavi
yohana
javier
zara
hctor
jorge
and many others
and after Ive buried it
I want to be born
2.0.1.2
Tecate, Caracol Poetry Festival
15
Dragon is a book
A genius is a kind of dragon, a strange thing that erases its
outline
the return to the air
a book
a dragon
a hurricane
good
great
am the disappearance
little dead poem
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17
A Sugar Planet
Sometimes I feel like I am part of a community that rewrites stars
constellations pieces of shining brain
because I come from insanity
darkness
is the passage between the occurrence and concurrence of light
A we should
B we should place
C we should lose
or the world will always have more cheek
than answers
sometimes I agree that literature opens a compossible eyelid
to distribute past routes
from the most maddening past
which was a beginning
18
19
Fruit of fruits
Like a flaming orange
To be an animal or a plant or a seed
Is to be generating thousand of partial sequences
Chains
Dna = cosmic recycling
Perhaps only heavenly bodies know what it means to complete a life
To generate it while it is extinguished
To illuminate = to illuminate
And thus are
the stars and the hearts of black holes
Close your eyes
and inhale your own
thought disintegration
of defense
and of counter-attack
puncture infect propagate
Happy endings dont exist
lets take the laughter out of storage
were starting a new century
the most fr(eez)ied weve ever seen
Im going to the sea
Gerardos already on his way
hitchhiking
Godzilla is an angel
the biggest star in the sky
Im going with my infinite book
the one thats always missing pages
Mutate
from the genetic usury that you are
be reborn
illuminate 150
D,
We are not defending the fact that we are human
our inhuman right is to reinvent humanity
poetry as effort
and respiration
listen
nothing is so far from earth
not the stars nor the seas nor the black holes
nor the hearts of men
poetry is a genetic means
of attack
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Mexico City
is my Third World Tokyo
Who is poetry
the lively
the affection
that sentient-thinking-creative beings explore
Who is poetry
I am Chilean poetry (Hctor Hernndez)
see: trans appearancy
Poetry is ME
but I AM
in the last instance the Universe: Unite verses
gestures, features, faces...
1 and 0 delocalising digital memory
converting the sequence
into routes of neuronal, cerebral poetry
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23
with one or two lines that locate where it was placed, and a
reaction or anecdote
signals: are memory
The records of this action
Will be written
in white
and black
like sheets of paper or screens of a book
of a country
when we were zombies
November 2010
exico
25
BUT MY DREAM
WAS NOT MINE
I neither work nor study
heads with wheels
fuck them
let them rot
two lines in white
two lines in black
AND:
No, I regret nothing
Edith Piaf: Non, Je ne regrette rien
LAST DAY OF 2010
GAME OVER
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28
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I.AM.GE
I propose two poems
which are just one poem
A. My friends have entrusted me their books
B. and the best I can do is go camping with them
A. The mind returns
B. its a myth that recognises itself
A. I cant see it
B. neurons
B. brain
A. empty space
Dear Blue:
everything is meaning
today I got up to look for you
I travel in buses through the streets of a droplet
AB?
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31
Blue Boy:
heed the premonitions
take them
a poem a life
without premonitions
is not exciting
because it is a poem fulfilled
it is not poetrylife
Humanity has a premonition: we are the prehumanities
33
But
and the galaxies
and the universe
Might well be in the sea
Perhaps the true cosmic era
is in the sea
(Poetrylife)
Space exploits
are faraway hopes
whose sheen
will grow dull
will be extinguished
when that happens
Change
is a glimmer!
New era = novel
novel era
new is:
to be a star
35
Electronic-Poetics
/0 0\
01011001 01001101
[0 0]
Cyberspace offers: a territory, a satellite, a sun, an earth, a mars. Starting with languages, hybridising with cyberspace means learning to
sow seeds within it, and that suggests that our criterion of poetics is
amplified and enjoyed as a part of diversity. Cyberspace is perhaps a
future part of our brain; still under construction, and its not a matter
of simply being there, but rather moving there, living there, coming,
going, impregnating our poems with cyberspaces, and inseminating
cyberspace with poetic content, poetic language, look at it as a new
planet on the horizon, which challenges us to learn from it.
(0 0)
Poetry read on a computer may be accompanied by video, audio,
interactivity and even immediate feedback. I believe that poetry read
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|0 0|
Poetry as a word of empathy has the power to summon and unite
us. We might reunite to speak out against political parties or against
the life each of us carries within us, to pro-pose new political dimensions, challenges, projects and the means of coordinating them.
Also, poetry as a word of pleasure summons us to join together simply to get to know another, to listen to each other to start a revolution
or transform life, our own life, something that to a certain degree
always occurs when poetry enters into action. What do we want with
language afterwards, be it words or HTML. go from there.
37
_
Dont say things that might change the world, let the world change.
Thats how most people have been educated, even in Philosophy and
Literature faculties, but writing online or moving our writings to the
Internet is just that: never relinquishing while there exists this universe of expressions that appear and disappear, that are created and
erased. The web is a riddle waiting to be written; why write online?
to make the world of literature even more savage, more beautifully
savage.
/*\
write poetry...
Live in discovery
is there really any better meaning to life
than having the non-existent in front of us
Discovering coming out from beneath the fallen leaves
the humus
the humidity of creation
the big humid bang
where everything decomposes
read from 99 to 0
it was just counting backwards
read from 0 to 99
it was just a consequence of the big bang
read: humus
38
Dear space
Robot
39