I owe a new-found obsession with off-road rallies to my husband’s passion for cars. Once our baby was born he exchanged the race track for the dirt track and brought me along. Last weekend we traversed more than 600 kilometers of Colombian wilderness on a dirt buggy. Because road trips are better taken in good company, I took Polish poet Wisława Szymborska-Włodek along for the ride.  Of course, since the former Nobel Laureate is sadly no longer with us, I had […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR

Sometimes a word is all it takes to build a poem. Such is the case in Tomas Tranströmer’s “To Friends behind a Border,” translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly. For me, the poem is constructed around the uncommon word “trilobite,” which refers to a fossil group of extinct marine animals possessing an exoskeleton. An example is shown in the attached picture. Here is the text of the poem, as published in the Spring 2013 issue of The Kenyon Review: […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR

It’s the rainy season in Bogotá, Colombia, where I live. This can mean cold rain and overhanging black clouds for three months straight. But today the sun is out, and I am taking my baby to the park. So in honor of this critical event, I am posting a poem by playful children’s poet X. J. Kennedy. Hippogriff To look at this fictitious steed You’d think some mixed-up farmer Had crossed an eagle with a horse. It carries knights in […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR

One of my favorite Sylvia Plath poems is actually short and sweet. It’s called “You’re,” and it is basically a silly love poem. Here is the first stanza: Clownlike, happiest on your hands, Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled, Gilled like a fish. A common-sense Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode. Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, Trawling your dark as owls do. Mute as a turnip from the Fourth Of July to All Fools’ Day, O high-riser, my little loaf. […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR

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