Dear Jack,
It’s 100 years and one day after your birth. H Is the Letter of the Door could’ve been titled After After Lorca.
When you wrote to Lorca “Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them,” I carried the No you gave me clenched in my palm like a barnacle from the gulf, an almost rung rag. Any departures are, paradoxically, what you’d have done. Like your body, now, it’s nothing personal.
Love,
Max
P.S.
“In That November off Tehuantepec” / title from Wallace
Stevens’ “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” versions from César Vallejo’s Trilce and
Federico García Lorca’s “Oda a Walt Whitman”
“Under the Poplars the Blood Poplars Have Fallen Asleep” / title from César Vallejo’s “Bajo los álamos,” versions from Alejandra Pizarnik’s Árbol de Diana and César Vallejo’s Los heraldos negros
“Crashe” / title from Emily Dickinson’s “Crumbling is not an instant’s Act (1010),” versions from: Arthur Rimbaud’s “Adieu” and “Génie”
“H Is the Letter of the Door” / title from Emmanuel
Hocquard’s Conditions de lumière, versions from Vasko Popa’s Sporedno
nebo
The cover is a photo of a graffito on an apartment building at the corner of 42nd and Walnut in Philadelphia, a few blocks from where I grew up. The four figures echo the four poems in the chapbook: an “x,” an “h” or an “n,” a naturally occurring vowel, and a comet.
Maxwell Gontarek has poems out in Grotto, Lana Turner, Coma, La Lancha, Tagvverk, and elsewhere, and his pamphlet, A Perfect Donkey, is forthcoming from Creative Writing Department. With Léa Fougerolle, he runs the translation project verseant. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, LA.
