(2011, Swan Scythe Press)
55 pages
Picked up Leopoldo María Panero's My Naked Brain because the photograph of the poet on the cover makes him look like a serial killer and I have to say I was not disappointed to learn that he currently lives voluntarily at a mental hospital on the Canary Islands. The poems, translated by Arturo Mantecόn, did not disappoint either. My favorite parts are Panero's descibing of bodies with equal parts disgust and reverence and the languages -- both physical and verbal -- they create: "Thus it is that the word, / so as to not die in another word, / disintegrates into ashes." Inundated with images of blood, semen, anger ("I will kill you tomorrow when the moon comes out"), the 25 poems give you the sense of a past transgression, something so sinister that it can't even be recounted directly. Maybe life itself is the transgression and Panero just wants us to wallow around in it with him to figure it out for ourselves. Maybe that's the way it should have to be.
I pray
--because the empty words
have flown without being heard
and only the prayer remains intact--
I pray that,
even if it takes a long time for me to die
and have my name written, at last,
on my tombstone,
that they will be able to some day say
over that cold corpse
that I was not crazy.
-- from "Correction Of Yeats"
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