Contents
Acknowledgements
Juan Calzadilla or Total Poetry
from Dictated by the Pack
I Live Day by Day
Waiting for Salvation
Necessary Methods
I Have Been Another
Hitting the Abyss
With Bad Manners
Quartz
The Magma Must Return
In Memory of the Angel
Jonas Always
from Bad Manners
Inmate
Counting to Zero
Invisible Arms
Interrogation of the Empty Suits
Subterranean Landscapes
Under New Warning
City Alone
"Banal spectacles . . ."
"You demand clemency . . ."
from Supernatural Contradictions
Legitimate Defense
Paper Mask
Stone over Stone
"Pay attention . . ."
from Aimless Citizen
I Have No Excuses to Explain Why I Am Not Another
Occupations
from Strangers' Manual
Old City
Tin Mask
Like in a Wave
Inverse Situation
Citizen
Question of Names
from Oh, smog
Garbage Men's Prologue
The Regretful Constructors
Where Citizens Evoke Rural Life
Dreamers on Foot
A New Role
To Guide Themselves Citizens Climb Poles
Dealer of Destinies I
The Multitude
Praying Hunters
The Contaminated Fountain
The Rebel Cub
A Circumspect Fireman
from Minimals
Interstice
Poetic
Poetic II
The Crisis
Dog Talk
Humboldt
Nostalgia in Clouded Gray
I had No Gold, Cattle or Hacienda
Urbanity
End with Revolver
Epitaph
from Glow and Hollowness
Life is not literature
Neither is religion
Prose contains the poem
To summarize
Poetic
It is unnecessary to wind up the imagination
Here is our proposal
Inspiration
Nature offers itself
Only what exists can be corrected
Poetic
Can reality be written
The precise body from there
I am the one who has to talk and not things
from Principles of Urbanity
Smudge of Ink on the Sea
Written in Emily's Album
Pavement with New Commensal
Ithaca
The Deed and Its Waiting
The Pure Poetic Act
Heroism of Reality
Massage
We Would Be Immortal
Principles of Urbanity
1
2
3
The Ferocious Invalids
The Sensible Man
The Last One on the Team
To Be Hanging
Still Life
Definition
Realism
from Journal with No Subject
Journal with No Subject
And Besides It Should Be Done by All
Objectualist Poetic
What Had To Be Said
Hunger for Writing
The Poet Is a Hindrance, I Know
Couldn't It Be Given Form without Writing It?
The Book Will Speak for Itself
The Paradoxical Style
Wager (In the Form of a Manifesto)
The Magician
Middle Ground
I Want Poetry to Reign
Toward a Corporal Poetic
The Materials
Walled-In
Sisyphus
To Strike in the Sky
And Now the History of Criticism
Pleasures of the Hunt
1
2
3
4
Headaches
Inexact Communications
The Old Thresher (Autobiographical Memory)
The Lark
Big Bang
The Poet Cub
Interlineation
Form as Subterfuge
Everything that Doesn't Fit on the Page
The Ambiguity of Sense Has Made Poetry the Greatest Temptation for the Imaginative Individual
Oceanic Demonym
Erasure
The Rules of Art
from Aforemas
Cut with the Same Measure
Your Bag or Your Life
The Idea of Modernity
Inmate of Putrefaction

Promotional Information

Calzadilla's poetry makes us suspect what we see, which is exactly what a great messenger of doubt, the authentic poet, should do. -- Juan Manuel Roca, Jose Lezama Lima Latin American Poetry Prize, 2007 ... a concise, fulminant beauty, ample in its resonance ... -- Daniel Samoilovich, author of Driven by the Wind and Drenched to the Bone

About the Author

Juan Calzadilla (Altagracia de Orituco, Venezuela, 1931) is a paradigm of the complete artist. His work includes poetry, narrative, essay, the visual arts, art criticism, journalism, translation, and editing. He was co-founder in 1961 of the revolutionary cultural movement El Techo de la Ballena [The Whale’s Roof], and in 1984, of the prestigious journal of arts and literature, Imagen. For his work as a sketcher and painter he received Venezuela’s National Prize for the Visual Arts in 1996. His constant poetic production, which began in 1954 with Primeros poemas, includes more than twenty fundamental titles. With intellectual discernment, he vehemently seeks to dissolve the subject, create a more stripped-down language, and to participate as well as represent.

Table of Contents

Promotional Information

About the Author