The pathway finally opened
When my heart came to rule
in the world of love,
it was freed
from both belief
and from disbelief.

On this journey,
I found the problem
to be myself.

When I went beyond myself,
the pathway finally opened.

Mahsati Ganjavi (also written Ganja’i or Ganjevi) lived during the 12th century, born in Ganje, Azerbaijan. Her poetry was a strong voice against prejudice and hypocrisy and patriarchy, while upholding love – both human and divine.

She was celebrated at the court of Sultan Sanjar for her rubaiyat (quatrains), but later persecuted for her courageous stand against overly dogmatic religion and arbitrary male dominance.

Heberto Padilla

By Heberto Padilla
Translated by Andrew McKenna

I live in Cuba. I’ve always
lived in Cuba. Those years of wandering
the world that people have spoken of so much,
are my lies, my fakes.

Because I’ve always been in Cuba.

And it is true
there were days of Revolution
the island might burst between the waves;
but at airports
in places
I felt
I was being called
by name
and answering
I was already on this shore
sweating,
walking,
in shirt sleeves,
the wind and foliage were drunk
when the sun and the sea climb up to the terraces
and sing the Hallelujah.

~

Yo vivo en Cuba. Siempre
he vivido en Cuba. Esos años de vagar
por el mundo de que tanto han hablado,
son mis mentiras, mis falsificaciones.

Porque yo siempre he estado en Cuba.

Y es cierto
que hubo días de la Revolución
en que la Isla pudo estallar entre las olas;
pero en los aeropuertos,
en los sitios que estuve
sentí
que me gritaban
por mi nombre
y al responder
ya estaba en esta orilla
sudando,
andando,
en mangas de camisa,
ebrio de viento y de follaje,
cuando el sol y el mar trepan a las terrazas
y cantan su aleluya.

Heberto Padilla (20 January, 1932 – 24 September, 2000) was a Cuban poet. The Padilla Affair was named after him. He was born in Puerta de Golpe, Pinar del Río, Cuba. His first book of poetry, Las rosas audaces (The Audacious Roses), was published in 1948. After a failed first marriage and three children, he married Belkis Cuza Malé in 1972. This marriage also ended in divorce.

Although Padilla initially supported the revolution led by Fidel Castro, by the late 1960s he began to criticise it openly. A worldwide controversy was sparked when Padilla was placed under house arrest for his award-winning 1968 anthology Fuera del Juego (Out Of the Game) that expressed dissatisfaction with the Castro regime. The book was then taken out of circulation. In 1971, Padilla was imprisoned by the regime. His son, Ernesto Padilla, was born in 1972.

Like tangled hair,
The circular delusion
Of beginning and end,
When straightened out,
A dream no longer.

Dogen, sometimes respectfully referred to as Dogen Zenji, was a key figure in the development of Japanese Zen practice and the founder of the Soto Zen sect.

Dogen was born about 1200 in Kyoto, Japan. At the age of 17, he was formally ordained as a Buddhist monk. Considering the Japaanese Buddhism of the time to be corrupt and influenced by secular power struggles, Dogen traveled to China to discover the heart of the Dharma by studying Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism at several ancient monasteries.

Much of the Ch’an Buddhism he explored utilized koans and “encounter dialogues” to startle the consciousness into enlightenment, but Dogen was critical of this practice. Instead, he was drawn to the teachings of silent meditation.

Dogen returned to Japan in 1236. He left the politicized environment of Kyoto, and settled in the mountains and snow country of remote Echizen Province, where he established his own school of Zen, the Soto school.

While he proved to be a talented writer and poet, the core of Dogen’s teaching was to transcend the mind’s addiction to language and form in order to become fully present and recognize one’s inherent enlightenment.

Heberto Padilla

By Heberto Padilla (1932-2000) From Out of the Game
Translated by Andrew McKenna

Cuban poets dream no more
(even at night).

They’ll close the door to write alone
when the wood suddenly creaks;
the wind pushes them all to hell;
hands catch them by the shoulders,
throw them,
put them face to face with other faces
(sunk in swamps, burning in napalm)
and the world around their mouths flows
and the eye has to see, see, see.

~

Los poetas cubanos ya no sueñan
(ni siquiera en la noche).

Van a cerrar la puerta para escribir a solas
cuando cruje, de pronto, la madera;
el viento los empuja al garete;
unas manos los cogen por los hombros,
los voltean,
los ponen frente a frente a otras caras
(hundidas en pantanos, ardiendo en el napalm)
y el mundo encima de sus bocas fluye
y está obligado el ojo a ver, a ver, a ver.

Heberto Padilla (20 January, 1932 – 24 September, 2000) was a Cuban poet. The Padilla Affair was named after him. He was born in Puerta de Golpe, Pinar del Río, Cuba. His first book of poetry, Las rosas audaces (The Audacious Roses), was published in 1948. After a failed first marriage and three children, he married Belkis Cuza Malé in 1972. This marriage also ended in divorce.

Although Padilla initially supported the revolution led by Fidel Castro, by the late 1960s he began to criticise it openly. A worldwide controversy was sparked when Padilla was placed under house arrest for his award-winning 1968 anthology Fuera del Juego (Out Of the Game) that expressed dissatisfaction with the Castro regime. The book was then taken out of circulation. In 1971, Padilla was imprisoned by the regime. His son, Ernesto Padilla, was born in 1972.

My words are tied in one
With the great mountains,
With the great rocks,
With the great trees,
In one with my body
And my heart.
Do you all help me
With supernatural power,
And you, Day,
And you, Night,
All of you see me
One with the world!

Attributing this to the 19th century is a guess. The source book did not estimate the date of composition.

The Yakut are a Native American tribe of California.

Let us see, is this real,
Let us see, is this real,
Let us see, is this real,
This life I am living?
Ye gods, who dwell everywhere,
Let us see, is this real,
This life I am living?

The Lord is in Me
The Lord is in me, and the Lord is in you,
As life is hidden in every seed.
So rubble your pride, my friend,
And look for Him within you.

When I sit in the heart of His world
A million suns blaze with light,
A burning blue sea spreads across the sky,
Life’s turmoil falls quiet,
All the stains of suffering wash away.

Listen to the unstruck bells and drums!
Love is here; plunge into its rapture!
Rains pour down without water;
Rivers are streams of light.

How could I ever express
How blessed I feel
To revel in such vast ecstasy
In my own body?

This is the music
Of soul and soul meeting.
Of the forgetting of all grief.
This is the music
That transcends all coming and going.

Kabir is not easily categorised as a Sufi or a Yogi — he is all of these. He is revered by Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. He stands as a unique, saintly, yet very human, bridge between the great traditions that live in India. Kabir says of himself that he is, “at once the child of Allah and Ram.”

He was born in Varanasi (Benares), India, probably around the year 1440 (though other accounts place his birth as early as 1398), to Muslim parents. But early in his life Kabir became a disciple of the Hindu bhakti saint Ramananda. It was unusual for a Hindu teacher to accept a Muslim student, but tradition says the young Kabir found a creative way to overcome all objections.

On this summer night
All the household lies asleep,
And in the doorway,
For once open after dark,
Stands the moon, brilliant, cloudless.

O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved
You took the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.

You clogged the feet of my boyhood
and I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick-tongued mumble.

You told me the plough was immortal
O green-life-conquering plough!
Your mandril strained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.

You sang on steaming dunghills
A song of cowards’ brood,
You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
You fed me on swinish food.

You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth!

Lost the long hours of pleasure
All the women that love young men
O can I still stroke the monster’s back
Or write with unpoisioned pen

His name in these lonely verses
Or mention the dark fields where
The first gay flight of my lyric
Got caught in a peasant’s prayer.

Mullahinsha, Drummeril, Black Shanco–
Wherever I turn I see
In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
Dead loves that were born for me.

Heberto Padilla

By Heberto Padilla
Translated by Andrew McKenna

Tell the truth.
Tell, at least, your truth.
And afterwards
let it happen, whatever:
they smash your pages, my love,
they knock your door down with rocks,
people
pile up in front of your body
as if you were
a prodigy, or dead.

~

POÉTICA

Di la verdad.
Di, al menos, tu verdad.
Y después
deja que cualquier cosa ocurra:
que te rompan la página querida,
que te tumben a pedradas la puerta,
que la gente
se amontone delante de tu cuerpo
como si fueras
un prodigio o un muerto.

Heberto Padilla (20 January, 1932 – 24 September, 2000) was a Cuban poet. The Padilla Affair was named after him. He was born in Puerta de Golpe, Pinar del Río, Cuba. His first book of poetry, Las rosas audaces (The Audacious Roses), was published in 1948. After a failed first marriage and three children, he married Belkis Cuza Malé in 1972. This marriage also ended in divorce.

Although Padilla initially supported the revolution led by Fidel Castro, by the late 1960s he began to criticise it openly. A worldwide controversy was sparked when Padilla was placed under house arrest for his award-winning 1968 anthology Fuera del Juego (Out Of the Game) that expressed dissatisfaction with the Castro regime. The book was then taken out of circulation. In 1971, Padilla was imprisoned by the regime. His son, Ernesto Padilla, was born in 1972.

are you ready for this?
forget I asked there’s no way
you could be ready for what has to follow
the necessity of the next is not in dispute
I use my vocabulary to enthuse, not confuse
all the English syllabuses want to include me
all the publishers wish I was on their list
all the open stages are empty without me
the radio is white noise when I’m not there
everyone adds me and friends and retweets me
(you and six billion others like this)
I’m the poet the world has been waiting for
the king of words, the master of phrases
I make it look easy
I make it look good
I make it look like a viable god-damn career path
I make you want to try it for yourself
poets wreck lives? who told you that?
it’s the opposite that’s true – this poet
is going to unwreck your life.
spitting poetic seeds out of my mouth
right into your mind, and in no time
a poet tree growing out of your brain
filling your eyes and your ears and mouth
my face on T-shirts and billboards
my words dancing out of the sky, carried high
by radio and television, the net and the publishers
none of them can get enough
fill the dictionary with words and still run out of pages
read it quick before the pages burn
damn your pentameters, alexandrines and tetrameters,
I wear double dactyls as ring-finger jewelery
(apologies, ladies – this poet is taken)
these rhythms I supercede them all
this is the freest verse you’ll find
freeing its listeners from the jails in their mind
coming at you so fast I’m bathed in red light
calculate the doppler shift if you think you’ve got the math
poetry with precision on a subatomic scale
I’m the poet of the superstring, of the gravitino, of the tachyon
I’m the poet of higher dimensions
I’m the sphere to your square, I’m a hypercube
crucifying pretender poets, using words as nails
inventing the words for what I do with words
so fast I take on infinite mass
a perpetual motion poetry machine
no blank page has enough space
no laser can carve the path I trace
resisting capture, transcending media
the words I put forth are words at their purest
distilled to the essence of language and meaning
straight to the bloodstream straight to the heart
crossing the blood-brain barrier and back
I’m the poet laureate of the human race
leaving shattered minds and microphones in my wake

Adam Ford won second place with at the Castlemaine heat of the recent 2011 Australian Poetry Slam for this poem.

The Ojibway (Chippewa) are one of the most numerous nations of Native Americans. Traditional Ojibway lands are centered in Michigan, Minnesota, Saskatchewan and surrounding regions.

Sometimes

by Ojibway (Anonymous, 19th century)
English version by Robert Bly and Frances Densmore

Sometimes I go about pitying myself,
and all the time
I am being carried on great winds across the sky.

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life’s decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.

O na mea huna no eau
O na mele e

E ho mai
E ho mai
E ho mai

Grant us
knowledge from above,

All the wisdom
of the songs.

Grant,
Bestow,
Grant us these things.

Medieval singer-songwriters tended to write songs about chivalrous, illicit love.

By Max McClure

My heart takes root in her and grips with its nail,
holds on like bark on the rod,
to me she is joy’s tower and palace and chamber,
and I do not love brother as much, or father, or uncle;
and there’ll be double joy in Paradise for my soul,
if a man is blessed for loving well there, and enters.

– Arnaut Daniel, 12th century

The poem can seem like a timeless art form. When we talk about the poetry of nature or dance, we’re referring to a primeval form of language – it’s as if verse existed before other words even made it on the scene.

But, in reality, the European poem as we know it was invented, and fairly recently, too. What we in the West think of as poetry is largely the result of 12^th century troubadours and their controversial insistence on singing about the profane.

The troubadours introduced the concept of courtly love and invented poetic forms still in use today; the songbooks in which their lyrics were compiled defined the template for the poetry anthology. In her book, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press next year, Marisa Galvez, an assistant professor of French at Stanford University, traces the growth of this literary culture through a few surviving songbooks, or chansonniers.

“Songbooks were poetry before we had poets,” Galvez said.

The court circuit

In the early middle ages, formal musical culture was devoted to religious hymns. The majority of songs were written in Latin and meant to be performed by sacred choirs.

But medieval aristocrats were looking for lighter courtly entertainment. Into this void stepped William IX, duke of Aquitaine – an important lord in his own right, and the first attested troubadour.

“This is a man who wrote romantic love songs, boasting songs, and very bawdy songs involving erotic scenes with cats,” said Galvez. And, rather than singing in the “universal” language of Latin, William IX wrote his songs in Old Occitan – a vernacular local to southern France, Spain, Portugal and northern Italy. “It went against everything that they learned in church.”

Many disapproved of the frequently vulgar new genre. One cleric from the time period referred to troubadours as “long-haired and skinny” young men who “laze around” uselessly – descriptions that linger still.

The comparison isn’t entirely inaccurate. These courtly singer-songwriters tended to write on one topic: chivalrous, illicit love. In doing so, they made forbidden romance a safe topic for literature and inspired legends of their own promiscuity.

To protect the identity of the women in question, “they always addressed their lovers with code names,” said Galvez. The objects of the singers’ affection would be given titles like Belz Vezers (“Lovely View”) or Miels Domna (“Better than Woman.”)

The troubadours also used pseudonyms to refer to each other, engaging in extended insult wars. Boasting about their rhyming skill, the value of their possessions and their sexual prowess, “troubadours used many of the same codes as rap songs do today,” said Galvez.

And the art’s increasing technical refinement soon overshadowed claims of vulgarity. By the late 12^thcentury, the troubadour Arnaut Daniel had invented the sestina – one of the most complex verse forms still in use today.

On the books

With so many layers of hidden meaning, a full understanding of these songs would only have been possible for the troubadours’ contemporary audience. The lyrics contain references to people who were presumably known to the listeners, or even present at the performances themselves.

These elements that are only understandable in the context of the original performance – known as “deixis” – highlight a major difficulty in studying the medieval art form.

Galvez and other medievalists owe their knowledge of troubadour music to chansonniers – anthologies of songs, some illustrated, often accompanied by brief biographies of each of the authors. But, by experiencing a musical performance through a written description, scholars lose important aspects of the story.

For one thing, most songbooks don’t contain musical notation, meaning the tunes themselves have been lost.

Little is known even about the instruments troubadours played. Musical accompaniment may have been as simple as a single citole (a kind of lute) or organistrum (a hurdy-gurdy operated by two musicians) or as complex as a small band, complete with woodwinds, strings and percussion.

And simply by writing the songs down, scribes significantly altered the troubadour tradition. Songs that may have once been communally written – with a series of troubadours adding their own verses and edits – were now credited to a single author.

“We think about this literature as fixed, just because it’s in a book,” said Galvez. “But that’s not the way it was. What we’re reading in a songbook is someone’s version after reading five different versions of the song in other people’s songbooks.”

Because chansonniers represent the stamp of musical authority, inclusion in songbooks became an end in itself. By the 13^th century, young musicians were publishing their own anthologies, with their new songs slipped between classic works.

At the end of the 13^th century, the poet Guiraut Riquier was already calling himself “The Last Troubadour” and singing about the death of the classic songwriting style.

As Galvez said, “You start to write traditions down because they’re already lost.”

The troubadour legacy

One way to look at the songbooks is as merely a springboard to the canonical works of medieval and early renaissance literature. Dante and Petrarch both pointed to troubadours as important influences.

But Galvez believes that’s only part of the story. “We don’t think of the English language as being a straight shot from Chaucer to Auden anymore.”

Although the songbooks did inspire classic verse, they also gave rise to communally edited folk music traditions that are still seen today. Galvez points to the cancioneros of Texan-Mexican folksongs and the traveling cordel poets of northeastern Brazil, who keep the original troubadour poetry-as-community sentiment alive. Even putting together your own mixtape has something of the chansonnier spirit to it.

“The middle ages were kind of messy and modular,” Galvez said. “It links well with postmodernism, and the idea that I can curate my own playlist.

“Medieval literature is a lot of work, in terms of contextualisation, translation and reconstruction. Parts of it are scientific, but a full understanding requires creative translation.”

I was expelled from the Communist Party
long before they excommunicated me from
the Catholic Church.

That’s nothing:
they excommunicated me from the Catholic Church
after they threw me out of the Communist Party.

Pfff!
They threw me out of the Communist Party
because they excommunicated me from the Catholic Church.

CATÓLICOS y COMUNISTAS EN AMÉRICA LATINA:
ALGUNOS ASPECTOS ACTUALES DEL PROBLEMA

A mí me expulsaron del Partido Comunista
mucho antes de que me excomulgaran
en la Iglesia Católica.

Eso no es nada:
a mí me excomulgaron en la Iglesia Católica
después de que me expulsaron del Partido Comunista.

¡Puah!
A mí me expulsaron del Partido Comunista
porque me excomulgaron en la Iglesia Católica.

Roque Dalton García (San Salvador, El Salvador, 14 May 1935 – Quezaltepeque, El Salvador, 10 May 1975) was a leftist Salvadoran poet and journalist. He is considered one of Latin America’s most compelling poets. He wrote emotionally strong, sometimes sarcastic, and image-loaded works dealing with life, death, love and politics.

His father was one of the members of the outlaw Dalton brothers. After a career of robbing banks, he disappeared from Kansas and settled in El Salvador with his ill-gotten fortune. He invested it in coffee plantations and grew even richer without ever being molested by the law. He left Roque his surname and a Jesuit education.

Under circumstances that still remain obscure, Roque Dalton was accused of complicity with the CIA and assassinated by members of a rival faction of the ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo – People’s Revolutionary Army) in 1975.

But what matters is the revolution
the rest are just words
in the background
of this poem that I give to the world
the rest are arguments.

Pero lo que importa es la revolución
lo demás son palabras
del trasfondo
de este poema que entrego al mundo
lo demás son más argumentos.

Roberto Fernández Retamar (born June 9, 1930) is a Cuban poet, essayist, literary critic and President of the Casa de las Américas. In his role as President of the organisation, Fernández also serves on the Council of State of Cuba. An early close confidant of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, he has remained a central figure in Cuba since the 1959 Revolution. Retamar has also written over a dozen major collections of verse and founded the Casa de las Americas cultural magazine. Professor Castro de Rocha, at the University of Manchester has described Retamar as “one of the most distinguished Latin American intellectuals of the twentieth century”.

On Raglan Road of an autumn day I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue
I saw the danger and I passed along the enchanted way
And I said let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s play
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay
Oh I loved too much and by such by such is happiness thrown away

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret signs
That’s known to the artists who have known the true Gods of sound and stone
And words and tint without stint, I gave her poems to say
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had loved not as I should a creature made of clay
When the angel woos the clay he’ll lose his wings at the dawn of day

Pablo Antonio Cuadra

By Pablo Antonio Cuadra
(Nicaragua, 1912-2002)
Translated by Andrew McKenna

Since ancient times
the rain has wept.

Nevertheless,
a tear is but young,
the dew is young.

Death has been prowling
forever.

Nevertheless,
your silence is a new thing
and so is my pain.

~~

Desde tiempos antiguos
la lluvia llora.

Sin embargo,
joven es una lágrima,
joven es el rocío.

Desde tiempos antiguos
la muerte ronda.

Sin embargo,
nuevo es tu silencio
y nuevo el dolor mío.

Pablo Antonio Cuadra (1912–2002) was a Nicaraguan essayist, art and literary critic, playwright, graphic artist and one of Nicaragua’s most famous poets.