Coral Bracho in conversation with Jesús Ramón Ibarra

A multiplicity of journeys rests on water: the summits and bifurcations of language, unfolding, the impact of tectonic plates; the sexual ascent of mountains, vitreous fire, water on colossal scales or water in narrow streams that circle the earth until forming grand entireties infused with multiplying jellyfish, blastocytes, sensations, utopian and dystopian skins, stocks of wood, the sea that grows or shrinks as it forges its everlasting sheen. The voyage there, the voyage back. One such uncommon, at times amorphous journey is that of reading the poetry of Coral Bracho (Mexico, 1951), and recalling that glowing afternoon at Panama’s now-defunct Argosy bookstore when I came across an anthology that has been, for me, defining: Ramón Cote’s Diez de ultramar: Joven poesía latinoamericana, which brings together poets from varied parts of the continent: José Luis Rivas (Mexico, 1950), Alberto Blanco (Mexico, 1951), Raúl Zurita (Chile, 1951), Coral Bracho (Mexico, 1951), Eduardo Milán (Uruguay, 1952), William Ospina (Colombia, 1954), María Auxiliadora Álvarez (Venezuela, 1954), Fabio Morábito (Mexico, 1955), Yolanda Pantin (Venezuela, 1955), and Eduardo Chirinos (Peru, 1960).

The anthology, published by Visor in 1992, drew me closer to outstanding poetics, which have been recognized over time with publications, new editions, homages, critical studies, and literary honors (including the “Federico García Lorca” City of Granada International Poetry Prize and the Queen Sofía Ibero-American Poetry Prize, among others). Such is the case of Coral Bracho, who recently received the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages (Mexico, 2023). Ramón Cote of Colombia, the anthologist, did a fine job of selecting the authors, whose bodies of work have only grown more solid since. He tells us of Coral Bracho: “This manner of playing down importance without being elusive, of taking detours, governs the work of Coral Bracho, who throws language into disorder, volatizing the meanings of words or, rather, empowering other meanings that do not belong to the realm of the definable.”

It is true: Coral Bracho disrupts, expands, and minimizes language as if it were a filigree carving. She makes the pieces fit and imbues the whole with power. The result is an atmosphere that does not fit in with a single or limited interpretation; her words unleash a polymorphous and polyphonic semantics.

Ramón Cote continues:

There is, in her manner of speaking, a chaotic force that somehow seeks to encompass a totality that allows her to remedy objects’ isolation. For this purpose, Coral Bracho need not set off from some specific point, nor does she need certainty to reach another: the poem is open to adventure. Her poetry has set about transforming breath into a power that supplants the word; its interest lies not in defining a happening but in keeping a sensation in suspense, in exhausting all a thought’s possibilities. 

To read Coral Bracho is to come across a series of interpretative possibilities. The words’ journey is unusual; it opens, it closes like a fist, it takes place like a flowering or a sylvanian presence; it happens like water; her poetry keeps in step like water. 

Coral Bracho’s aesthetics also fit into a certain poetic current; we find it in Medusario, the legendary anthology compiled by Roberto Echavarren, José Kozer, and Jacobo Sefamí, which starts with José Lezama Lima and the American Neobaroque, to be nourished also by the postulates of Severo Sarduy and Néstor Perlongher, to whom the project is dedicated. 

The Medusario anthology is iconic in the Latin American literary sphere, juxtaposing authors of varied nationalities with suggestive poetics marked by polysemy arising from their language. Its makers have the following to say of Coral Bracho:

Coral Bracho’s poetry is articulated through rhyzomes, subterranean filaments that fork in various directions and, with no progressive order, accumulate with neither shape nor root. Bracho’s poems are composed of images that do not form a whole; they do not come to conclusions (they might end in a coma or a semicolon, or simply lack punctuation), they configure no complete idea. Hers is an “aquatic” poetry, in the most precise sense of the word; her verses seek an idea in common with rivers, streams, waterfalls, seas; as they do so, they devise maps, routes, flatlands. Water erases, rewrites, and erases again: an eternal palimpsest wiped clean by time.

This sensorial perception is transliterated to her texts, which are unleashed and apparently unmatched, only to then be fused again into harmony, whether consummated or not. The element of water is unifying. Coral Bracho writes a poetry of shoals, of waves, of high seas and low tides, of whirlpools. Her language is articulated to display, describe, and exploit emotions. It has an overflowing, suggestive sensuality, nourished by forms and mutations, that reveals an effective textual richness. Coral Bracho draws on the sensorial and the extrasensorial.

In 1981, Mexico’s iconic Aguascalientes Poetry Prize was awarded to Coral Bracho for her book El ser que va a morir. The being that is going to die? Is that a sentence, or an allegory? I have spoken with Coral Bracho a few times when we have coincided in her native Mexico at poetry festivals. Over this book in particular, and the simplicity that marks it, there hangs a sense of wonder at what this set of poems has achieved and represented in her oeuvre. We once spoke in an old churchyard busy with live orange trees, heavy with golden, juicy, Lezamian spheres. El ser que va a morir earned this honor from three men who recognized the splendor of a woman’s voice, unfurling a sexual ritual of water. It opens with “En la humedad, la cifrada”:

I hear your body with the watered, tranquil greed
of one immersed (of one
emerging,
one who stretches saturated,
overrun
with sperm) within the coded
wetness (soft oracle, dense; temple)

The senses sharpen immediately. Sensations pluralize the intimacy of the body and its speakers. She draws on the sacred, on the pagan, on the deeply-rooted and the iconic, and she continues:

…I smell
in your deep valleys, eager, embers,
in your unctuous jungles,
gradients. I hear (your tactile semen) the springs, forges,
(fertile apse)  I touch
upon your living bogs, your forests: traces
on their enveloping plot: signs
(I open
your anointed thighs, oozing; doused in light)

Coral Bracho turns to sensorial metaphors to make visible the invisible.

Coral Bracho turns to sensorial metaphors to make visible the invisible. She devises a manner of speaking and of naming from the fleeting. The sacred, the divine, and the pagan come together again in the poem “Distant Cities”:

Their incandescent reliefs, their passages, they are
a mournful, single-chorded psalm;
…
In their mirrors of golden gloaming, waters unfold and ignite
pockets of aroma and ritual caresses; in their baths:
laughter, the greening walls;
−Their temples sip from the ocean.

(tr. Forrest Gander)

She makes recurrent use of sacred spaces to situate the reader within the collection’s varied romantic contexts: (temple) and (mosque). Think of the poem “In this Dark Tepid Mosque”:

I know of your body: the reefs,
the scattering birds,
the light sought and unsettled (on your candescent thighs incited by rain),
of your surge:
I know your thresholds as though they let me go to the edge of this roomy, murmurous,
tepid mosque; as though they wove me (your dark suave scent) into the heat of its naves
.…

The mosque excends from the desert to the sea.

On the patios:

The cadenced splendor (sour rumors) of the orange trees;
the languor of the mosses, the myrtles.

(tr. Forrest Gander)

She has a concrete consciousness of the body, based on sensual perception and the literary. A threshold onto pleasure. And, again, allusions to bodies of water in the poem “El ámbito del placer”:

−Now they mark, the door of glass;
from it they plot their pond: Water

with which to besiege certainty; water to verge on it.
…
Outlines the threshold, rhombus, by the pond. Reappears,
entering that stone, setting light to the bushes.

There are forests, vines, gardens, a leafiness, an exuberance and the abundance of the earth as great songs, as fabulations. Hamlet Ayala says on this subject:

On the other hand, we also observe another kind of cycle: an approach to the phenomena and experiences of the human body on a biological level—as well as the potent stamp of a feminine eros, especially present in her first books—finds in the life forms and spaces of the natural world its elements of expression; moving forward, this same potency will continue making itself known from the germination of the earth and its fruits, wildlife and its mysteries, now as a range of visions; contemplation and transit.

Coral Bracho is possessed of a contemplative poetic essence. She has found a vein in her language and has made of this vein a resource of thought, of enunciation, and of musicality. She bolts from rupture towards other possibilities. While every being that is born will indeed die (like the result of an equation), before this takes place, the song comes together; the longings and foundations of this reality are described, but not before insisting, from realism and surrealism, on the touch of skin, of woodland groves, of matter. In this poetry, the speaker not only moves; the speaker also interacts with other interlocutors who take apart the emptiness. This is an erotic water in which there circle the scientific, the placenta, the spiritual, that which is preserved in body and soul. In this book, sexuality is life. In a state of apparent calm, everything overflows and ramifies. There is one poem that has become an avatar within Coral Bracho’s work: “Water’s Lubricious Edges,” where water is named and described in many ways:

Water of jellyfish,
lacteal, sinuous water,
water of lubricious borders; glassy thickness—Deliquescence
in delectable contours. Water—sumptuous water
of involution, of languor

in placid densities. Water,
water silken and plumbeous in opacity, in weight—Mercurial;
      water in suspense, slow water. The algal bloom
brilliant—In the paps of pleasure. The algae, the
      bracing vapour of its peak…

(tr. Forrest Gander)

In this poem, water shimmers and forks; it speaks to us with its planetary breath, with its transmutation of streams, creeks, gullies, lakes. There is a multiplication of tones, silences, and images: an artistic and creative capacity that, all at once, leads us into a state of observation and meditation. The poem possesses an implicit sublimity in the pleasures and awakenings of sensations:

…
—across the arched silence, across isthmuses
of basalt; the algae, its habitual rub,
its slippage. Light water, fish water; the aura, the agate,
its luminous border-breakings; Fire trailing the fleeing

elk—around the ceiba tree, around the shoal of fish; flame
pulsing;
lynx water, sargo water (The sudden jasper). Luminescence
of jellyfish.
—Edge open, lipped; aura of lubricious borders,
its smoothness rocking, its nesting efflorescence; amphibious,
labile—Water, water silken
with voltaic charge; expectant. Water in suspense, slow water—The
      lascivious luminescence

in its oily crossing,
over faulted basalt.

(tr. Forrest Gander)

Coral Bracho delves into and suggests the sense of water’s belonging, of vitality. El ser que va a morir takes its place in the dynasty of consecrated, imperishable books, rife with beauty. Written with vitality and a stylistic uniqueness that the author has displayed since her earliest works, it reaches a sensorial summit with the matter of love. It allows us to glimpse, from this vital element, multiple facets with which to name, to speak; to turn ourselves, as readers, into navigators or swimmer in her aquatic (and telluric) fluorescence, with all its ambiguity of voices:

Your voice (in your body rivers stir
a tranquil foliage; grave and cadenced waters).

−From this door, the pleasures, their thresholds;
from this ring, they’re transfigured−

(tr. Forrest Gander)

And thus has Coral Bracho’s work continued, ever reborn, reverberating, fast-paced, silent, rhythmic, with its corporeal syntax making way for geological layers. She is a poet of the angular mystery of water:

—Otter water, fish water. Water

of jellyfish,
lacteal, sinuous water; Water,

(tr. Forrest Gander)

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Krysten Merriman, Unsplash.

Ilya Kaminsky

The Onion Offering

Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.

…

It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Carol Ann Duffy, “Valentine”

Don’t give me the rose
Don’t give me the marsh, the streets.
Don’t give me the chiming of the tree,
Don’t give me the water and its chest of crystals.
Don’t give the thorns of what is beautiful,
Give me the onion
One of those that grow in Coclé or in other lands
Where its skin is white,
Fair like the chest of a wolf cub
Russet like the plumage of a red turtle dove
Draped over the still leaf.
Don’t give it to me from the watery lip
or the petrified forest that you carry inside
Like an unruly glass of wine
The terrestrial and celestial gifts
That creation went on to bestow upon you
With the crumbled ears of wheat,
Better than the nocturnal crater
The pale cherry
The molten stag lifting its antlers
In the bedroom feasts
Fragrant like cinnamon wafting in the desert
Sex in the beak of the bird
Dripping liquid arousal
Or the greatness of the mysticism in the seed.
I prefer to flee from your kingdoms
And leave the table set,
The utensils, the cold food
the communion of your body upon peeling you
Upon removing the skin and becoming the wielder of
the knife
And discovering your flesh in curved pieces
That open slowly like a miracle
Or a pact between God and the lambs.
Don’t give me anything,
Just plant an onion here in my land
May the stalk grow until it reaches
The enormity of the sky and the trial of the confines.
I leave you a rose
I leave you the winds, the seas, the homes
All that is felt, heard, tasted, seen and smelled.
Don’t give me the gifts, don’t give me the flesh.
Don’t give me the seasons
don’t give me the coat, nor the umbrella
Grab all of the vegetables of the world for me
But don’t leave me orphaned
Without the onion.

The Burial Site of El Ciprián

In this burial site we all have an epitaph
A dark song that chases after us from the past to the present
Like a garland of poor vegetables
The dead that dwell in me at times, such a weight
I correct them in their posture, in their gestures, in their
habits
They run behind me like a child chasing after the bitter
cry of the water
They go sailing alongside my blood
As the winter escapes in its vessel.
Where did the clothing of our first grandparents go
And my grandmother’s crazy beggar costume
With its summer letters after passing through the scorched
Looms of the wind, so they say that madness enters
through the air,
Through the wind, where we must go with the first ring
of the bell
Native of this luck, of being orphaned in the light,
In the territoriality and in the dust?
Where is she and the cruel grandfather
Who dispersed his children throughout the land
(Vitervo, Bredio, Janeth)
Like the fugitive beads of a necklace
That we pull with the rage of time, with that shaking
Of the animals that return from the spasm
When the night is upon us
Like a giant amaranth or like an octopus
That has composed a score with the stony orgasm of its ink?
Oh, my first deceased people that the downpour of
winter
Brings me in disorderly images
Where they contemplate the bestiary of the muses
If I haven’t been able to contemplate the yeast of their bones
Where is her tomb, the long-standing grandmother
made of corn and clay
Marcaria Espinoza who left without a coffin
Only with the shroud of tears of her absent children
In her humility and in her madness?
We will abandon these bodies, we will inhabit these bubbles
That the winter spits out.
There will be tombs from the sky to the vessel,
We will stay in your house and we will all be so real and
unknown.
This is your burial site of El Ciprián, where we will all
have an epitaph.

Marcaria Espinoza

And in her womb we gather in a contained weeping
Eugenio Montejo

To Mom

Everyone placed in the same scene.
The grandchildren in the corners
And her children to the sides
(shrouded like a bride).
I am in the bottom of her chest
Emerging from her neck like a tumor
Or like a prismatic vein.
We poets are born from the strangest torrents.
They say that oblivion will pull the trigger.
We will all emerge from this new Lumix: the family that
we never were.
The one that broke like a mirror and scattered itself
Like a river of larvae, memory.
Here each one shows their best smile
And others their veiled happiness, hiding the most
notable decadence.
We are going to go missing one after another.
Here we pose with its only portrait, unbeknownst to us.
Who traced the steps of the crazy woman?
Who determined the births in the air
Where the atoms of her maternal madness clotted together?
Where did that perverse grandfather pull out
The weeping, the hunger and the opaque laughter of his
children?
She flits through the skies of Las Minas
Like a clay-colored thrush at rest,
Like a steam of crystal in the arc of sound.
In all the waters she seeks them without finding
All the theories that die in the eyes.
Where did she live? Where did she go? Where was she?
She walked with a stick and carried
The figures molded by dust,
She led with a clean gown and with long braids
Woven by the midrib of the night.
The smoke never entered her eyes
And one could hear her sing from far away.
Grandma: I will go on molding you with every step
throughout these lands
With a cord of fury
Where I have no nose or eyes or hands in the opacity of
stroking you
To be like the rice that grows like a hand in the mortar
that absorbs the screams
A tallow of the calves that tremble
A crouched-down dance in space until the cold is defeated.
If I were to picture you between the shadows
Carrying the shroud of dawn in the asylum
Tracing a fable by that guy Matías Hernández where I
hear you cry
Like a girl smothered by dolls
Where there is suffocation and moss, or deaf bells
choked by the silt.
By a dry wash basin that bursts in the puberty of the pit
They are inverse seasons that I find
In your whirlwind fervor.
The black nurse really frightens you.
I am not a rabbit. I don’t eat so many leaves.
I shouldn’t be here, I should be in a house of clay
With a hot meal and the infancy of my children,
Poor but radiant and biting the tubers of the land.
Look at me psychiatric patient
With a missing record.
Who can decipher or imagine the pain
That lies in the brain of the insane?
Here she was and she used to sit and cry for them in the
sickness and feverishness of the day.
She never imagined the beard of her children or the first
menstruations of my mother.
We want to imagine her as she was
Tall and beautiful like the sphynx
Or like a goddess of Olympus or a flower of the Holy
Spirit with a skirt.
She went sliding away like in an agrarian moan.
She ended up at El Ciprián and we don’t know
The secret of her tomb.
Let’s all pose. She is here.
Her womb is full, very full.
We have returned to her.
We have returned to her womb.
With a contained weeping.

There Is a Small Village Made With the Poems of Ledo Ivo

Ledo Ivo is an old man that lives in Brazil and he appears in
the anthologies with a crazy face.
Juan Carlos Mestre

The crabs now walk over Ledo Ivo
Over the houses and the dreams
Or the highlands in the land of Maceió,
He turned into the sea under the boats
And untied his words like seagulls on the dock
Whistling this time that funereal chord to
the flesh of Hermengarda
For this intoxication that passes through the pursed lips
of bats and the cigarette butts
In the darkest cave where the souls jingle like bear cubs
Where darkness is stained with the iridescence of your
constellations
Rebuking the resurrection of the rooster,
The stellar milk of the spurs
And the unredeemed feathering building up courage
between the yards and between the sea houses
Where the boys sit on the back of the snail
And the girls focus their beauty on the virtuous marks of
the shells.
This is your home where a boy called Ledo began to
write his poems in the sand
On the sugar cane petals and in the mills where the
people sweat
The immemorial juice of the cane
The equinoctial juice of the cane
The demented juice of the cane
The sexual juice of the cane
Next to the infinite aroma of cocoa, by the cocoa flowers,
by the cocoa seeds,
Where
This time you illuminate the stones, over the will of a
black woman dancing samba
She whistles and whistles the funereal waltz
To the flesh of Hermengarda
And it’s you, walking like a mulata along the wavering
napes of the crabs
Over an enraged fire of water, over the flustered piles of
wood
By the reigning foam,
Opening with your word like a bed of leaves,
Like a pillow of trees over those golden dreams
That go to the memory of the path and end up in the feet
Of the infants and they begin to run
And grate like bees or butterflies taking care of deep snow,
Of the invented snow and of the sun that milks the
miracles of the goats
Where there are witches and women explaining the
roundness of the earth
With rituals drawn on the monastic spheres of the coconut
And young women extracting shoals of fish from their
hearts
Now the crabs walk over Ledo Ivo in the land of Maceió.
There, in Brazil, is a village
Where he learned to write poetry
A little boy anthologized with a crazy face,
Separating the homelands from the languages,
Emigrant and immigrant of the Portuguese language
Turning it into soil,
Turning it into the juice of the cane,
Turning it into cocoa,
Turning it into a crab on the beaches of Maceió.
There, in Brazil, is a village made of the poems of
Ledo Ivo.

Dora Diamant

Only he who knows Dora knows what love is
Robert Klosptock

Everything had been postponed—since the flight and
that long pilgrimage—
Towards the prison next to her daughter in the Isle of
Man, for being a “foreign enemy”
And for making strange coalitions with the fire. She also
formed an alliance with the sea,
Once at a bathhouse she met a writer.
Franz Kafka had seen her through different eyes.
Her fear of tying her bathing suit again and again
—the beach—was full
Of locals and tourists and she remained in that search
For the legendary phrase of the last paragraphs
To finish his masterpiece,
Always somber
Always unsatisfied,
In front of his typewriter and before the inconclusive loves
That once populated the isles of God
In pages adrift.
Indeed, he found her in the “unworthy task” of scaling fish,
“Such delicate hands for such a cruel job”
And both laughed and set out to walk at dusk.
This Dora Diamant said that there was another father
Inside of Kafka’s father
Who hid behind his negotiator’s table
To listen to the prose of that son with little desire
An even then his critique
Made him breathe in deeply the vastness of the frozen
morning
And although he did not speak with his mother at all
He kept on waiting for the men of black
Perpetually rooted in the routine
Of the kitchen or the living room
Or in the flapping of the bats in the attic
There is no longer a job nor a boss
Only taking care of the cough and of the crises, of her,
the last love of Kafka
The actress from the stages of Moscow, in the theaters of
Germany;
Now in this winter, from the windy storm of anywhere.
To this tomb
In the United Synagogue Cemetery of Marlowe Road, in
East Ham,
When we took on the haze
“Only he who knows Dora knows what love is”
Wrote Robert Klopstock
When the fevers of England attack us
Smoking contraband cigarettes;
When nothing is exempt from seizing the days
When a candle takes control of the cathedrals
And everything becomes inflamed like in the memory of
the ravens.
Those chirps that belong to the neighborhood and the
beauty
Of retaining the word “distance” on a table cloth
Set for the afternoon offering, then ending
With the silence of the whistle and the money
Now that I am here corresponding with a rose
To the body, this last testimony that it is possible to love
Despite the negativity of the parents
Returning time and again to the cemetery of Prague
Where the Jews killed in the war rest,
From a ghostly exhaustion, after the battering of the
holocaust
Or of tired lungs from tuberculosis,
That cacophonic expectoration
That chases Dora Diamant,
Enjoying each day by his side more than his masterpiece
And ending in that puzzle of Kafka
When she saw him cough
For the last time.

Translated by Joanne Britland and Lina Rincón

Photo: Rosie Kerr, Unsplash.