Most of the poems I’ve read that touch upon spirituality do so with reverence and a prominent bow. But Charles Simic’s “The Old Word” is refreshing because it communicates the vastness of the soul while still managing to be entertaining. Its poetic language is decipherable, crystalline, earthly. Yet just beyond the flowing syllables lies an unknowable substance that beckons you to the other side. Here is the entire transcription of “The Old Word”: I believe in the soul; so far It hasn’t […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR

Robyn Creswell, the Poetry Editor of the prestigious Paris Review, wrote an interesting article for The New Yorker about a new anthology titled “The Poetry of Witness: The English Tradition, 1500-2001.”  This collection was put together by accomplished poet Carolyn Forché, in collaboration with Duncan Wu, a professor of English Romantic Poetry at Georgetown. The anthology, along with a previous compilation published by Forché under the title “Against Forgetting,” argue in favor of the existence, and importance, of a poetry […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR

With very few exceptions, old poetry is not really my thing. And by old, I mean anything written before T.S. Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915, so I definitely run the risk of missing out.  With the new year, I’ve been making an effort to read some of the classics of what, in my mind, fall under the terribly inadequate label of “Old Poetry.” One of the greats of Latin American “Old Poetry” is Félix […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR