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Stephen Kessler: JULY 4TH, 1985 Could freedom be this heat wave of a long holiday, celebrated by chainsaws and soft breezes, wind chimes improvising the cool accompaniment to the skittish glimmer of green leaves

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declaring interdependence with the high-strung summertime, and strains of jazz serenading the nation with healing sounds. Today my receiver is tuned to those beauties whose allure is ours to be named in the same spirit, praising their grace

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with shameless gratitude, and placing ourselves at their service, the better to worship the ripening fruits and juicy kisses of the season. All the air conditioners in the Havana Riviera couldn't shut down the power of this nectar, pulsing

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between tongues, read songs racing through arteries across borders to embrace and make peace requiring no translation. I set down the headphones to immerse myself in the original language sung by skylarks to keep from colliding in their

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soaring curlicues, or crooned by immortal horns and smoky clubs where men and women and their instruments twist the discord of cities into impossible shapes their hearts can touch. Outdoor bandstands are also jammed with squawky seagulls, and

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volleyballs, and glistening bodies in bikinis, sweat darkening to a Louis Armstrong brown as the sun burns, and sails all lean the same way on the bay. Brassy soloists are blowing rifts unheard since cave composers wrote their scores on

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subway walls, then climbed into the sunlight without history, hunting for a bite. Hungry homeboys are listening and whistling to each other across acres of alien concrete. Calypsos can be heard snaking their way through festive

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cemeteries and flamenco dancers rep flashing heels against hardwood. Streams of cars creep hopelessly over the roads in search of recreation, floorboards baking in ancient repetition of escapist rituals which fill vast parking lots and

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sell chili dogs by the millions. Crushed ice melting in the grip of soda pop, and sticky lyrics linking adolescence melodically with indestructible memories. And here are the stoic fathers who started that way years ago, and now are behind a wheel

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filled up with babies in the backseat and an aging mate for a navigator, a former girl womanized by motherhood, and the rewarding weight of daily demands no supermarket magazine can seduce away. These are the days their love is strained and

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tightened at the same time, sharing the strength their kids faces radiate with delight under the glare of one more summer. Now fireworks are bursting in the brains of rodents whose cocaine habits killed them in their cages. Over the horizon, a

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soothing darkness purples the sky with tones no photograph can touch. Rockets record the escalating decay of our original revolution. Histories, rights are mechanically enacted, disconnected from every source and slowly withering. And yet

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the midsummer telephone rings and brings the voices of the distant living into my kitchen again to resurrect friendships and affections sabotaged by time. We speak through wires and imagine each other's eyes over red wine. In the shade of a tree

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house with no TV, cold beer by my side and the sleeves of this baseball shirt cut off to let the hollows of my elbows breathe, with fires raging over half the state and ashes falling on every inch of the emperor's ranch, smelling the smoke of his

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heavily armed barbecue, I hear the moan of my country's buffaloes stampeding into the sea. Morton Marcus: This is KUSP, community sponsored radio for the Monterey Bay, Salinas, and West Santa Clara Valley, and Big

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Sur. And the voice you just heard is the voice of Stephen Kessler, tonight's guest on the Poetry Show. Stephen Kessler is poet, publisher, translator, and former host of this show. And if I do say so without making him blush, maybe one of the last

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American humanists. And it is a great pleasure to have him here and talk with him tonight, hear what he's been doing over the last several years, and to have him read some of his new poems. That of course, was the poem on July the Fourth. And I just want

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to say this is your host, Mort Marcus, to get rid of all these little things, and I want to thank Plaza Books on Pacific Avenue for the donation which makes this program go in good part. The rest of the part is you out there who very

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generously have donated to KUSP and I hope many of you had a great time the Sunday at the Chomp and Stomp out at Aptos Park. At any rate, right now it is Stephen Kessler and Stephen, welcome back to your show.

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Stephen Kessler: Well, thanks a lot, Morton. It's a treat to be here, especially without having to run the board and feel responsible for keeping it together. Morton Marcus: Stephen, in case you people out there do not

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know, Stephen has been for the last seven years, but intensely for the last five or six, writing columns for the Santa Cruz- gosh, how quickly we forget once their name, the newspaper is gone. What was it?

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Stephen Kessler: The Santa Cruz Independent, the Santa Cruz Express. Morton Marcus: The Santa Cruz Express, and now is editor in chief of the new Santa Cruz Sun, which has been out for around

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ten months or so. And he has taken time off production night actually to come down and read some new poems and talk about the relationship, interestingly enough, between poetry and journalism. So Steve, maybe you want to read another poem to get

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everyone warmed up out there? Stephen Kessler: Well, let's see, here's a poem that picks up on the jazz theme a little bit. A poem written, as many of my poems are, in situations where I'm out in the world or not

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around my other work, and I fin music particularly inspiring an - as a catalyst for the creati e juices. This is a poem writt n at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in San a Cruz calle LISTENING TO GEORGE COLEMAN AT KUUMBWA

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Live this long in a town and you see faces on the street you know, all the time, catch glimpses of profiles you glanced from the side long ago in a store, or danced with in a bar to a local band. Tonight it's another club, the sole chance

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you have to solo along with a master sax player, listening and recollecting all at once, everything you lost in time. Each day now feels more crowded with deadly duties, every task to urgent to postpone on account of poetry; life and death

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decisions you can't delay for art's sake but must face, debts you never dreamed about back in the soft suburbs, payments you have now to acknowledge and set down as a love letter to the one at home. This is how the afternoon's anguish is eased

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through a reed like the New Yorkers' breathing, or vainly building invisibly a disappearing portrait of history played for ages in hot ensembles, and now leading his own under a climbing moon. It's a cool night, two pairs of

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socks, black cap covering the spot god wants to watch, and the rhythm section doesn't even know the time. They're slamming through clocks and calendars, a fierce percussive fire, swearing on a big city how bad it is to be blowing away the chains and

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getting back to some other land where the song began. I feel at home here and far away, sending a wireless line across all these houses and hills between us, hoping you hear something of my love.

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Morton Marcus: Well, Steven, that sort of talks about being out in the world, and it talks about the various tensions which certainly you must be feeling now with a lot of financial responsibilities and the responsibilities really for a

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whole organization. What is that feeling like? I mean, what is the difference between coming from living in the country and keeping out of a lot of this life in the city and in business, and now suddenly being right in the center of it?

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Stephen Kessler: Well, it's an interesting change. I find running a newspaper a very creative activity, and certainly working with a lot of very creative and talented people makes it that much more interesting. It's, to me, it's

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very much like building a big collage every week or constructing a mosaic, but it's got all these different elements in it: there's verbal elements, and there's visual elements, and then there's the whole business dimension, which the public

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doesn't really see that much, but it certainly is the fuel that makes the enterprise run. And so it's a real challenge to present a vehicle that advertisers will have trust and confidence in that we will convey their message

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successfully, as well as having a paper that the public will want to read. And it's always a challenge because naturally, the more creative you get, the more people you offend, you know? And certainly advertisers are easily offended if they don't think

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that their message is being successfully conveyed to their potential customers. So our goal is to create a paper that people want to read, you know, and that everybody in town will pick up. And if everybody in town is picking it up, then the

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advertisers are obviously going to want to be there because people will see their message. And I think that we're well on the road to establishing ourselves as viable, as both an interesting reading experience with lots of lively articles and

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writing that I find interesting to read and a paper that's commercially useful to the people who need to use it for either finding what they need or the advertisers themselves for keeping themselves in business. I mean, that's the thing is that

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we are a business and we are a small business like many other businesses in Santa Cruz and in the general area, and there's a symbiotic relationship there that we have to cultivate. And we're also, above all, a vehicle for expression and for

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information. And it seems to me the livelier the information is, the better it is for the advertisers, and as long as people continue to enjoy reading it, then I think that we're going to make it and- as a business and as well as an

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interesting periodical. Morton Marcus: Let me ask you this question: how do you feel poetry prepared you for this task? Stephen Kessler: Well, in a number of ways, I started

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writing when I was pretty young. And the first forms that I wrote in were very closed forms, they were sonnets and ballads and villanelles and all those English and Italian forms that- that we inherited through our tradition, you know, the English

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language tradition anyway. And that was great fun for me, I really enjoyed making up lines of a certain length that rhymed in a certain place, and that told a certain kind of a story that observes certain kinds of conventions. The same is true of

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certain parts of the newspaper, you know, your editorial can only be so long, you got to get so many ideas into it, you're supposed to try to make a point. Your headlines, you know, have to- the way I write my headlines is that I like them to fit on

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one line, you know, so they have to be a certain length and they've got to have a certain snap to them, and they've got to engage the readers' interest so that they want to read the story. And also in writing journalism, because of the

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limitations of the space, it's very difficult to go into very much depth. And poetry is really useful for condensing a lot of information into a small amount of space, so I think a lot of the best journalists I know, and the people I work with, are

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poets as well and it makes them better journalists because they- they have a sensitivity to language and experience that is used to distilling something meaningful out of it. And, you know, in a lot of cases, the people are better journalists

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than they are poets, but the reason that they're good journalist is because they're poets, you know. So, to me, there's no separation, really, there's a continuum there, and I move back and forth between them very, very comfortably. And to

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me, doing a newspaper is an incredibly exciting and creative experience and easily as interesting as writing a good poem. I mean, just, I don't know how to tell the difference really, except that one of them- I think the difference between

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poetry and journalism is that a poem is something that you can't really say any other way, and that's why it's so hard to translate, is that it's a linguistic construction that takes its meaning from the the process of its self-discovery.

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And you can get away with that a little bit in journalism. Sometimes if you're a columnist, you know, I get away with it occasionally, or I try to, in terms of writing a column that takes off and doesn't know where exactly it's going but unfolds

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poetically and sees where it leads, and to me, that's what the essay is all about. But a poem is even more so like that because you are able to use all the unit of the line and the space on the page and all the pauses and all the variations on

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conventional usage and punctuation to create a really unique text. And to me, a poem is something that says something that can't be said any other way. Whereas, you know, maybe a newspaper article you could paraphrase, or you could- you

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could get the meaning of it out and then leave the words behind. The poem is so much the physical body of the text that it's very difficult to abstract from it or imagine it in some other form. Morton Marcus: I think it's great that poets are out in the

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world and I know you felt the same way before you got involved with newspapers. Let's hear another poem and let's hear how you do do this. Because what I wanted to say was, you said befo e we were on the air that real y in a way this journalism h

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s released you, it has put poet y almost in perspective, if I c n paraphrase, and it just h s given you a greater freedom n poetry itsel Stephen Kessler: It's true, I used to- all the years that I

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was trying to be a poet, I was so concerned about writing good poems. I mean, I wrote a lot of poems and I really learned how to write by writing poems. And even though most of the poems are utterly forgettable, it was instrumental in teaching me the

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craft of writing, and the discipline of putting one word after another. And I used to, you know, for many years I was really concerned with publishing poetry and participating in the whole poetry culture which is very intense because they're so

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small an audience that poets tend to take it very seriously. And I enjoyed that for a long time, but as I got more into int journalism and newspapers, realized there was a muc greater chance to reach peopl where they were rather tha

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having, you know, making the come to a poetry reading i order to find out what I had t offer. And the connection wit the more general public was, yo know, it's very inspiring, mean to any writer is to have a audience that you know i

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reading you. And so now I writ poetry, as I said, when I can' say it any other way. And i doesn't matter to me whether a editor is going to critique line because it has too man adjectives in it; I mean, if want to put ten adjectives in

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line, I'll put ten adjectives i a line, you know? If tha pleases me, that's good enoug for me. Henry Miller has tha great line, "Paint as you lik and die happy," you know, and feel the same way about writin that if you're not enjoyin

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yourself, then you're in th wrong field. I mean, it can b really painful to write an difficult, but there's somethin so incredible that only writer know about, the process f discovery when you're actual y writing the thing, and you don

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t really know what's coming nex , and you're getting it fr m somewhere else, that you' e doing, you're having so e influence over it because you' e obviously putting the wor s down. To me, that's really a very, you know, unique quali

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y to poetr Morton Marcus: Now I think if there's been one theme that has come on the show for the last two years, it is the poets coming in here and saying in effect, process is all,

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everything else just is not what making art and making poetry is all about. Stephen Kessler: Yeah, and that for the reader it's the same because when you come at a poem for the first time, you're

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discovering it just the same way that the poet was. And you know what it feels like to read a poem that just opens your eyes at every twist, you know that it just shows you things you never knew existed, or knew- that you knew existed but never knew they

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could be, you know, "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd?" I hate that line but in any case- Morton Marcus: It's the "ne'er" that gets you. Stephen Kessler: Well, it's the fact that it's been repeated so

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many times like, you know, drawing mustaches on the Mona Lisa, you just want to make fun of it. Let me read you- Morton Marcus: Sure. Stephen Kessler: A poem that's kind of typical of my more

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recent poems in that it was written as a birthday present for a friend of mine. And the friend is someone I've known for many, many years and he was about to have his 40th birthday and we were about to go. I was about to go meet him for dinner,

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I didn't have a gift, so I sat down at the typewriter and just wrote this out. One of the differences that I think really separates poetry from prose technically is that a poem, the unit of construction in the poem is the line and the unit in the

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prose is the sentence. And there's really a difference, I mean, you see lines of a poem in a certain way and they stop, you know, and prose just keeps going on and it stops at the period. But there's more and more overlap in my work lately

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between prose and poetry, you can- you can feel the influence of one on the other. Anyway, this is really just kind of a fun thing that I had a lot of fun with, and really is a personal statement that is probably unpublishable, but here

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I am on the radio so I can publish it myself. It's called: THE BIG FORTY Ali Baba and the forty thieves went bopping across the desert for forty years. On the lookout for the land where they could

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cash in their loot for forty acres and a mule, and listened all day and night to the top forty. Ali was cool, a wandering dude who could deal a mean hand, a forty-card-draw, drink the juice of his roots from a forty gallon burnoose and dream up

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forty different life stories for his thieves who were all him. He had stolen his way through school: stolen bases since he could slide, stolen basketballs on blacktop courts and lead fast breaks across the other side, faking his way past opponents

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and passing off at the last second for the assist or taking the easy layup. Yes, Ali was bad. A boy who wouldn't get old no matter how old he got, wouldn't take shit from no calendar, even if it rained for forty days and nights and the

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news came on declaring him a disaster. No way he'd think, stirring the sauce he had on a low flame, whipping up a dish to nourish and delight his muses, the beautiful spirits who reminded him who he was, and from whom he stole what he knew.

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He knew when his ankles buckled under a jump shot, and his nose got smashed again by a hot grounder, and his steel stomach could resist a snack of forty doughnuts and forty cups of espresso, growling no thanks across a classic mid-century

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drive-in windshield on the other side of which a waitress traipsed. That he crossed some metaphysical forty yard line, dodging cosmically big ugly tacklers as he dashed, shifting toward a distant goal, remembering the back forty of

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the family farm he keeps in his flat in a shoe box on a bookshelf beside the selected Shake and Blake, from whom he stole things and lines as needed, to leave as tips in literate cafes for the eventual enlightenment of gorgeous young

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intellectuals, and the dismay of dilettantes, too slow to catch his lightning illusions scooped on the streets before he could read. He sees his forty lives spread out over his rented land and sings to his thieves, a medley of immortal recipes.

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Morton Marcus: No, it's great. You know, I know a number of poets who are really writing poems now that just sort of take the sides and the tops and the lids off, and just let go. And that really had some great puns. I mean, it was private, but I

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could keep up with a lot of who this guy was and what he'd been through and what he'd done. Stephen Kessler: Yeah, and anybody who's been a kid playing basketball and stuff can relate to that kind of thing. Let's see

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if there's anything else right on top here. Actually, I've got a couple of new translations, it might be nice to just change the mood a little bit. Morton Marcus: Okay. Why don't we do some short translations

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and then we will take off for our musical break. Stephen Kessler: Great. Morton Marcus: Let me just say that Stephen is a well-known translator who has already translated a novel which has

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been published- Stephen Kessler: Actually three now. Morton Marcus: Three novels now? Wow, why don't you tell us- Stephen Kessler: Well, one is, "Widows," by Ariel Dorfman, the

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Chilean writer. Another novel that came out last year was, "The Funhouse," by Fernando Alegria, another Chilean. Morton Marcus: Right. Stephen Kessler: And then, a couple of years ago, I

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translated a novella of Fernando's called, "War Chorale," which appeared in a book called, "Chilean Writers in Exile," published by the Crossing Press, which has recently arrived in Santa Cruz, so I've had, you know, I've done

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a few longish prose translation projects and prose poems. Morton Marcus: -and at one time was the only translator, when he won the Nobel Prize, of-? Stephen Kessler: Vicente Aleixandre, a Spanish poet of

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Generation of Twenty-Seven, as it's called in Spain, born around the turn of the century and came of age shortly before the Spanish Civil War. I was very lucky to meet Aleixandre in Madrid in 1973. And he encouraged me to translate his

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work and it became a really outstanding experience for me as a poet and as a translator and as someone who got to have a little bit of contact and serve a kind of apprenticeship with this great Maestro. Really wonderful poet, beautiful man,

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he died three or four years ago, I guess in his middle 80s. Morton Marcus: Well, not only did you have the only book at the time he won the Nobel Prize, but your stuff has also been included in the big Aleixandre overall collection.

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Stephen Kessler: Right. Lewis Hyde, at the- who edited the Harper and Row edition of Aleixandre, was about the only other North American poet working on Aleixandre at the time. So we both actually had books coming out right about the

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same time and Lewis immediately jumped on the opportunity to put a larger book together when Aleixandre won the Nobel Prize and of course, he invited me to contribute some translations too.

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Morton Marcus: So with that little introduction to your translating abilities- Stephen Kessler: Okay. Lately, I've been translating some poems by a Nicaraguan poet named, Gioconda Belli. She's, I think

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she's thirty-nine years old, one of the leading poets of her generation and a couple of earlier poems. She's the author of three books and she's working now in the ministry of propaganda and political education in Nicaragua. The

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Nicaraguans are really interesting about the way they employ poetry as a social instrument as well. It's very, very interesting the way their billboards are really beautiful and with really interesting lively slogans, and a lot of

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uses of the creative talents of the people there. Anyway, Gioconda Belli has a poem from her first book called: I FEEL LIKE I'M PULLING AWAY I feel like I'm pulling away, like little by little I'm

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leaving this reality of mornings and afternoons. And I'm going off into a world I'm building myself with my desires and my anxieties and everything repressed that's beginning to want out of me. It is pushing me almost without my knowing it

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into uncertainty, out there where I ought to be alone, where I'm scared to go because I know I'll have to take full responsibility for having come to my senses, for knowing that not everything is air and water and bread and milk, and that

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there's something else surrounding us, it's in the atmosphere. It chases us and waits to enfold us in that painful beauty we'd like to share and carry to the rest, but which pulls us away and makes us feel unreal, different, as if

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we've just been born into a world we never saw before, or as if we just arrived from the nearest star, or the farthest one. And we're totally open to the leaves, to the noise, feeling the spill of life, feeling we're getting closer to

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that true reality, even though everyone else thinks otherwise. And we're unable to explain it to them. Poem by Gioconda Belli. Should I read one more first? Morton Marcus: Yep, one more.

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Stephen Kessler: Okay, this is a love poem. She's a very erotic poet and I think you'll understand why when you hear this. WRITING

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Writing you, sketching you, filling your hair with all the held-back words hanging in the air in time, in that branch full of yellow flowers sprouted from the bark whose beauty sets my hair on end when I go out alone along the highway, thinking.

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Defining the mystery, the precise moment of discovery, the love, the sensation of compressed air inside the curved body, the explosive happiness that pulls tears out of me and colors, my eyes, my skin, my teeth, while I go on turning

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into a flower, a tangle of vines, a castle, a poem between your caressing hands whose touch takes my leaves off, tears words out of me, turns me inside out, showering my past, my childhood with happy memories, with dreams, with a sea exploding

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against the years each time more beautiful and bigger, bigger, and more beautiful. How can I seize the illusion, hold it in my hand and let it loose in your face like a happy dove going out to discover the world after the flood. To discover you even in

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the most overlooked reflections, go on absorbing you slowly like a sponge, losing myself, losing us both in the morning when we made love with all our dreams, our smell, the sweat of the night salting our bodies, smearing ourselves with love,

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gushing onto the floor in great huge waves, rolling in love, drenching ourselves in the love that overflows us. [Cut off] -parody or a critique, an imaginative critique of the [Music]

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regime and of the vanity of the dictator. And this is a poem by a writer who's better known as a fiction writer named Julio Cortázar, an Argentinian who also died in the early 80s. Morton Marcus: He died actually in Nicaragua didn't he?

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Stephen Kessler: No, he died in Paris. Morton Marcus: Oh, did he get back? Stephen Kessler: But he had been- he spent a lot of time in Nicaragua, was very supportive of the process there and was

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very much taken with the whole experiment that was going on and the way that they were- I mean, he kept urging them; all his speeches and essays of his that I've read about Nicaragua would talk about the importance of keeping creativity alive and not

00:32:22.850 - 00:32:38.690

becoming ideological and not losing sense of that imaginative discovery that we were talking about earlier. And I think if anything saves Nicaragua's life it's going to be that sense of creative improvisation, and they've been doing that

00:32:38.690 - 00:32:54.170

politically, fencing with the much more awesome power of the United States and the arrogance of a world leader who thinks he can go around telling other countries what to do. And this is precisely what this poem about- is about, it's called, "A

00:32:54.170 - 00:33:04.600

Chronicle for Caesar." Morton Marcus: You know, as you get ready to start, for you people out there who have never heard of some of these people, Ernesto Cardenal is one of the finest poets in South America

00:33:04.600 - 00:33:22.570

today. And Cortázar was, and this is certainly the least of his accomplishments, it was his short story, "Blow Up," which was made into the famous film by Antonioni. He's written some wonderful books, but to me, he is the link between Borges and

00:33:22.840 - 00:33:36.700

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And if there's much of his prose, almost all of his prose is out in English now, I would urge you to go down to the bookstore and get it, certainly a novel by the name of, "Hopscotch," which I think will just knock your eyes

00:33:36.700 - 00:33:50.560

out. Stephen Kessler: His stories, he's a master of the short story, I mean, that may be his greatest form of all. His prose is so beautiful, I mean, he is such a master of poem-like

00:33:51.610 - 00:34:02.320

stories that just are phenomenal. After reading this translation, I'll read something I wrote in sort of homage to him and his prose. This is called: A CHRONICLE FOR CAESAR

00:34:05.000 - 00:34:20.990

And you shall raise a great city and the city's bridges will reach other cities as the plague of rats falls on other rats and other men. Everything alive in your city will praise your name and you'll see yourself honored, praised and honored. And you

00:34:20.990 - 00:34:37.010

yourself will say your name as if looking in the mirror because you won't be able to distinguish between the worshipers and the idol. You will probably be happy like any man with a woman, like any man with a city, you will probably be beautiful like any

00:34:37.010 - 00:34:53.270

idol with a stone face, like any lion with its hoop of fire running across the sand. And you'll raise a tower and you'll shelter a circus and you'll name the seventh son of the workers' families. It won't matter that pink mushrooms are springing up

00:34:53.270 - 00:35:10.910

in the shadows if the smoke or the factories writes your name on high. The circle of chalk will close and in the caves of night, the protective images will not be painted again. From this day on, you shall be the high priest, from one morning to

00:35:10.910 - 00:35:29.150

the next, the minister of yourself and you shall raise a great city as the diligent ants exalt their little hills, and he will call up the seed of Romania and the paper of Canada. There will be a wild joy in the newspapers, and in the

00:35:29.150 - 00:35:50.030

homecoming of the winning teams. All this will not pass beyond the walls of your room. But you will raise a great city from noon to midnight. A heart city, a memory city, a shame city, the city of man will grow in the man of the city. And the ones will

00:35:50.030 - 00:36:08.000

defend themselves against the others, the shadows against the shadows, the dogs against the dogs, the children against the children. Although the women may go on leaning on the men and the pacifist shouting on the street corners. I believe you will die

00:36:08.000 - 00:36:33.140

believing you have raised a city. I believe you have raised a city. I believe in you in the city. Well, then yes, now that I believe, then I know you have raised a city. Hail Caesar. Morton Marcus: He's wonderful. Do you know that one little

00:36:33.170 - 00:36:46.670

one-and-a-half page story, which the title skips my mind, the guy is reading a novel and he goes home to the estate. I mean, it is just- I've tried to see what I could cut out of that story, it is the most perfect thing I've ever seen. It's only one

00:36:46.670 - 00:37:01.820

and a half pages long. And very simply, it's this guy reading this novel going back to his estate, and he goes upstairs in a room after he lets the head of the estate leave for the day and all the servants are gone, to read this novel and he gets more

00:37:01.820 - 00:37:15.320

and more absorbed in it. And he's sitting in this green velvet chair looking out over his property with the cigarettes in easy reach and you get involved in the story, you just go right into the story. And with him you see the two lovers

00:37:15.320 - 00:37:27.980

meeting in a distant cabin and then the male lover says there's only one way to stop this, you know what it is, I must kill him. And the woman is horrified at this, but she can't stop kissing the- the lover and all that. And finally, she goes one

00:37:27.980 - 00:37:39.320

way and the lover goes the other way, obviously to commit the murder of the person who must be the husband and the guy runs through this forest and finally runs under these great oak trees and runs into the house. The servants are not to be there and

00:37:39.320 - 00:37:52.550

they are not there. The man who takes care of the property is not there. He looks in one room and looks in another, finally he runs upstairs, throws open the rooms of the study, there just as he was told was the green velvet chair with a man sitting

00:37:52.550 - 00:38:03.810

in it reading a book. Oh man, I mean it's just such magic because he has to do it to a turn, and perfectly, and he does it. Stephen Kessler: Yeah, he's definitely a great writer. I had

00:38:03.810 - 00:38:18.030

the pleasure of translating a couple of his stories- well, one essay and one story, and translating is like living inside the text, you know, you really have to get in it. And I didn't- I mean, I knew his prose was beautiful, but working in it

00:38:18.030 - 00:38:37.950

is really something else. I also had the great good fortune of meeting him when he was teaching at Berkeley in 1980. I actually served as a reader of the English versions of his texts that are- at a reading that he and Fernando Alegria, whose work

00:38:37.950 - 00:38:53.220

I translate, were giving in San Francisco, so I got to meet him. He's just the sweetest man, really, really warm, really humble, amazing. I mean, so unlike so many of the writers I know who are just on the greatest ego trips, you know,

00:38:53.220 - 00:39:09.450

and who want to be the star of everything and you have this aura of, you know, don't get too close, but you better you know, respect me, whereas he was just so, so friendly and so sincerely interested in, you know, in the other people around. And he came

00:39:09.450 - 00:39:21.590

down here one day and we had a really great visit and it was definitely- I just feel really lucky because he was gone in a few years after that. Morton Marcus: He was very young, did he have cancer, or

00:39:21.570 - 00:39:36.360

Stephen Kessler: He had some kind of leukemia or some kind of cancer. I'm not sure precisely, well, he was a heavy, heavy smoker. He wasn't that young though, he was close to seventy when he died.

00:39:33.750 - 00:39:46.170

Morton Marcus: He really was. Stephen Kessler: He looked much younger than he was, he was in his mid-sixties. This is a poem that- or actually a piece of prose that I wrote after reading one of his posthumous books

00:39:46.240 - 00:40:02.820

called, "A Certain Lucas," which is really kind of a self-portrait in these little vignettes, very light, and but the quality of the writing was such that he also has about the best translator in the business Gregory Rabassa . So even- I was

00:40:02.890 - 00:40:17.550

reading the English version of this book and I happened to be in Mexico City at the time and wrote this in response. It's called: A CERTAIN JULIO Julio writes with his back to the mirror but with a

00:40:17.970 - 00:40:34.470

wrap-around imagination revealing the transparency of his inventions, lucid, mysterious trips into many dimensional cities in time and out. Now he's dead, his deep voice underground, surfacing to meet me in this book in Mexico.

00:40:34.980 - 00:40:51.690

Smells of garlic and fried grease in the street mid-afternoon mingling with the announcer and crowd of a soccer game sounding from the TV in the lobby of a pink hotel. Business men's cologne and beautiful women's perfume and the smoke of

00:40:51.690 - 00:41:11.670

Gitanes are blended in the epths of Julio's rgentine-Parisian accent, which ises from the grave with a axophonic tone, a tender tenor azily improvisational, as if erenading a woman snail-years way, one whom he knows his notes

00:41:11.700 - 00:41:29.670

will reach and caress much later in melodious wisdom. The dancing gypsy on the blue pack of smokes moves to the rhythm of Julio's prose, an uncurling, a casual spinning, the sentences measured by commas, digressions, whose integral expanses link

00:41:29.670 - 00:41:47.250

themselves gently through the turns and pauses of his thought. Julio's heart beats on in the left foot of a transcendental piano player poised composing on a bench in the sky, a piano traveling slow motion wise, lik a jet plane making its wa

00:41:44.340 - 00:42:01.710

Morton Marcus: I think, if I may say so, you do that kind of through cloudless blue. It i Julio's way to move too wit great speed ever so deliberatel through atmospheres of illusion painting or cooking or singin or playing an idiosyncrati

00:42:01.710 - 00:42:19.290

self-portrait for his friends t savor beyond the arrival of hi last news. Music, he thinks works this way: wandering in an out of rooms which house th ones he loves, and those h doesn't know but finds amusin anyway, admiring the shapes o

00:42:19.290 - 00:42:38.040

their ears and noses, th politics of their dreams, th style of their habits, and his From his desk, it is a shor walk to a favorite cafe, where feline Julio paces the spac below the tables, picking u scraps of conversation, an

00:42:38.040 - 00:42:58.950

turning them over in his mind inwardly laughing, pausing t lick his paw, alive to th ironies. The cat is cosmopolita and commonplace, simple an sinewy, like Julio's line incorruptible, baroque, an clean. Anyone's eyes would shin

00:42:58.980 - 00:43:15.810

at night in the light of it arriving beams prose better than anyone, and I mean, it's just so vivid, it catches so many things. It really is prose poetry at its best, I think.

00:43:16.230 - 00:43:30.900

Stephen Kessler: Well, thanks a lot, Morton. I don't think I do it as well as Julio, but it was- maybe the reason it sounded good, if it did, was because it was an imitation of his style. Morton Marcus: Humility doesn't become you, Steve.

00:43:31.460 - 00:43:43.880

Stephen Kessler: Well, okay. Anyway, what else? Well, we have, what, six more minutes? Was there anything else you want to talk about? Morton Marcus: Well, I'd just like to hear more work, stuff

00:43:43.880 - 00:43:56.120

that you'd like people to hear out there, poetry or translation. I know you have one long translation of Cardenal's but I'd like to hear some more of your poetry. Stephen Kessler: Yeah. Well, let me see if I can find something

00:43:56.120 - 00:44:18.710

here that- it seems like a lot of the poems I write are love poems. Maybe because I'm at heart a lyric poet, that's the way I started out and those are the poets I first really learned from and appreciated and I definitely tend toward the song.

00:44:18.770 - 00:44:33.530

I'm sure part of the reason I write the kinds of poems I do is because I gave up playing the piano when I was seven in order to play baseball, and always trying to get back to music somehow. This is a poem, a fairly recent poem, I have no

00:44:33.530 - 00:44:44.060

idea. I mean, this will be its first time out in public. Morton Marcus: Great, terrific, a world premiere. Stephen Kessler: It's a world premiere, and it's another one of those poems, it was written really as a letter, you know, as

00:44:44.060 - 00:45:01.640

a direct address to a friend, rather than something with the public in mind, but it's always interesting to hear what they sound like in another context. It's called- well, let me tell you it's addressed to a person I know who's very literary, you

00:45:01.640 - 00:45:19.190

know, who is really heavily into like French and German literature. So that gives some of the background and very, very dramatic sense of her own life and the poem is called: DON'T KILL YOURSELF, YOU'RE ONLY THIRTY

00:45:22.330 - 00:45:39.400

Mozart must have thought he was a real sap for having spent his genius so fast, never wasting a Sunday on the softball field, or bod-surfing on some Mexican beach with the blonde California girlfriend in a bikini as a mindless sidekick. The storms of

00:45:39.400 - 00:45:58.870

music he recorded were roses of sound massacring his innocence as he sacrificed his youth like a young heroes smothering a hand grenade, saving us the future to be inspired by. These dead men you are in love with would have made bad roommates, fencing in

00:45:58.870 - 00:46:14.200

their sleep with the demons that needed them and never remembering when the movie starts. Their work speaks to you of impossible victories, the same ones you cultivate talking into your tape recorder as you commute home over Hecker Pass

00:46:14.470 - 00:46:32.470

and confess later into paper, coated with tales you crave to create, a few clues to the beautiful mystery that was you. When we hugged tonight standing beside your car in the church parking lot after the concert, and you handed me the literature

00:46:32.470 - 00:46:48.640

that could save my soul, I knew it would take more words to touch you driving home alone with your cassette deck blaring Apollinaire than I could feel in your fine bones holding me. Having your love would mean having to sing to you in endless

00:46:48.640 - 00:47:05.590

inventive metaphors the tireless reasons for revealing every truth you can while you have a chance, which means being a lover at the same time. Romantics are doomed to believe in gorgeous visions at the expense of what's in front of

00:47:05.590 - 00:47:21.760

them, even as they worship its ruthless beauty. You could have composed your confessions tonight, but your cold would have gotten worse and maybe you would have vanished in my embrace, becoming one more tragic mystery of European

00:47:21.760 - 00:47:33.610

extraction instead of the phantom cartoon of my insomnia. Maya, I've shined my shoes, got myself a suede sport coat an [cut-off]