Bagku installation/performance at The Dirty Dirty, Brooklyn, NY, 2012 (photo by Martha Clippinger)
Bagku
(haiku escritos en bolsas plásticas)
(haiku written on plastic bodega bags)
Voz sin estado,
entona, ciudadano,
tu mar rimado.
Bagku know no state.
Citizens of baggy style,
syllable and song.
Plásticas bolsas,
¡para botar las sobras
de la poesía!
Institutional
art critique with plastic bags
is family fun.
Ciudad soñada,
sin bolsa de valores
pero con flores.
Dreams of a city
where sleeping body bags lie.
Sing, bagabond bones!
Haikú anarcos,
basuras de Bakunin,
¡qué bien desunen!
Bakunin was an
anarchist who died in Bern...
baby, burn bag-flags!
Glifos del éter
con o sin documentos,
aire que somos.
Undocumented
art that documents airspace.
Glyphs in the ether.
Bagku detail (photo by Urayoán Noel)
***
Cinquain
Sin quien
Anti
Anti
imperial,
imperial
leer. Animal canto
leer. Animal canto
era. De colonial verse
era. De colonial verse
solo.
solo.
Urayoán Noel is an associate professor of English and Spanish and Portuguese at New York University and also teaches at Stetson University's low-residency MFA of the Americas. His recent books include the poetry collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (Arizona, 2015) and the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa, 2014). As translator, he has published Architecture of Dispersed Life (Shearsman, 2018), a bilingual edition of the Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha, and Guatemalan/Garifuna poet Wingston González’s No Budu Please (Ugly Duckling, 2018), among other titles. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, he lives in the South Bronx and vlogs at https://www.wokitokiteki.com.