Pura Lopez-Colome and Forrest Gander: Watchword
Bookworm
KCRW
4.5 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 23 May 2013
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pura Lopez-Colomé's poetry, translated by Forrest Gander, envisions the body as a mystically rich reservoir of experience and language.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:03.8 | Boots! |
| 0:09.0 | Where would we be without boos? |
| 0:13.0 | Where would we be without good? |
| 0:15.0 | No, Timberd. |
| 0:16.0 | It's a rhetorical question, sir, |
| 0:19.0 | but where would we be without books? |
| 0:23.6 | From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Soreblatt, and this is Bookworm. |
| 0:29.6 | Today I'm so excited because facing me are two poets. |
| 0:34.5 | One of them is the American poet, Forrest Gander. The other is the Mexican poet, |
| 0:40.3 | Pura Lopez Colome, and Forrest has translated the volume called in English watchword |
| 0:50.3 | by Pura. Well, you know, what I always pray from poetry is that I will have a visionary |
| 0:59.0 | experience. And I found that as I was reading Watchword, I was compelled into a different |
| 1:08.3 | experience of my body and of my surroundings. |
| 1:12.8 | Now, I was talking to Pura before we began, |
| 1:16.3 | and Pura is herself a translator and has studied literature. |
| 1:21.1 | But you say that for you, poetry is not literature. |
| 1:25.7 | Explain this to me, please. |
| 1:27.2 | I think that literature in general has this, Poetry is not literature. Explain this to me, please. |
| 1:36.5 | I think that literature in general has this fictional quality about it that poetry does not have. |
| 1:39.2 | Poetry is not fiction at all. |
| 1:47.0 | It is something that you see or do not have the fortune to see ever in your life. But you don't have to be a poet to have that happen to you. |
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