Guillermo Parra
@venepoetics.bsky.social
🇻🇪 🇺🇸 Poet & translator. Clearwater, FL
“This boat is of shato-wood, and its gunwales are cut magnolia, Musicians with jewelled flutes and with pipes of gold Fill full the sides in rows, and our wine Is rich for a thousand cups.” (Li Bai, tr. Ezra Pound)
My English translation of a poem by José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Venezuela, 1890-1930), “La verdad” from his 1929 book Las Formas del Fuego, is featured this week at The Arts Fuse. artsfuse.org/332647/weekl...
Weekly Feature: Poetry at The Arts Fuse - The Arts Fuse
This week's poem is José Antonio Ramos Sucre's "The Truth"
artsfuse.org
A review of the new Venezuelan film “Lost Chapters” by Ena Alvarado in The New Yorker. One of the film’s protagonists is her father Ignacio Alvarado, who used to run the excellent second-hand bookstore Libroria, in Las Mercedes, Caracas. I bought several books there during visits in the 2000s.
AH WAR Allen Ginsberg Ah War bigness addiction Alchemized thru meta-industrial Labor-Intensive permanent tree Crop protein energy system recycling Urban Wastes in Meditative Egoless non Theistic Space Lisner Auditorium Monday, March 21, 1994, 8:00 P.M.
Gulf of Mexico gold tonight in Old Clearwater Bay.
Happy birthday to the poet Rafael Cadenas, who turns 96 today in Caracas. Two of his poems in my English translation, from Typo magazine (2013). www.typomag.com/issue18/cade...
TYPO 18: RAFAEL CADENAS
typomag.com
There’s a new, 52nd printing of the Penguin paperback of Pynchon’s Vineland (1990). One Battle After Another has got me wanting to reread this novel.
Colder weather & yesterday’s rain brought a deeper afterglow to the Gulf.
There are few albums as perfect as Meat is Murder (1985). I first heard it when I was at boarding school outside Boston in 1986, and the opening track “The Headmaster Ritual” felt oddly specific to my 15-year-old life at the time. “Mid-week on the playing fields…”
I wonder who made this trail in Flatwoods Forest in Thonotosassa?
Selfie w/ a book my great grandfather published in 1931,T.R. Ybarra’s biography BolĂvar: The Passionate Warrior (New York: Ives Washburn Publisher), a talisman in my library. Ives Washburn published 2 other books by Ybarra.
Afterglow clouds like a Steal Your Face lightning bolt tonight.
In 2016 Noemi Press published my English translation of the Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930). I’m grateful the book is still in print. www.noemipress.org/catalog/poet...
Selected Works: Expanded Edition by José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Trans. Guillermo Parra) | Noemi Press
noemipress.org
A bridge from 1931 in Old Southeast St Pete yesterday
Gabriel Payares writes a list of 9 recommended books by contemporary Venezuelan writers in English translation. He includes my English translation of Eleonora Requena’s collection of poetry, Textos por fuera / Outside Texts (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022). 🇻🇪
9 Venezuelan Books That Imagine Home from Abroad - Electric Literature
These diaspora authors capture the intimate history and complex reality of Venezuela
electricliterature.com
Poem draft fragment of “Grateful Dead,” the third one I’ve written w/ that title, about my years seeing them play between 1988-1994.
After reading the first chapter of Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, I’m already in love with this book.
Hello 55 and a full moon tonight. Hanging out with my parents in NYC c. 1973.
I finished reading Laura van den Berg’s novel State of Paradise (2024). I especially enjoyed its focus on the I-4 corridor of Florida as part of the novel’s landscape.
