Dialect

recently while at AWP and now back home I have come to ask a few questions of myself and to wonder what poetry means in a world of blinking lights and weblogs?

I have been spending allot of my time with translations and poems that are not my own. I recently completed a translated Brazil section for Aufgabe where I got to see how great translators like Chris Daniels, Charles Perrone, Odile Cisneros and Idra Novey do it and place my translations next to theirs, I am pleased that I can at least be a utility infielder to this murder's row of translators.

I have also been working on a presentation on Epic and Creation in American (Not United Statesian) poetry. For the &Now Conference. The thing that I cannot keep from thinking is that so many of us poets including me are ignorant of so much. I read neruda or leminski and I see a breadth that none of my poetic comrades has and I wonder what are we missing?

Reading Brazilian poets one cannot but feel a sympatico.

Unlike European poets or Spanish language American writing Brazilians are almost as insular as Americans in English and the fact that no reads their books either is comforting. having said this there are more Brazilian poetry sites on the web than American sites and this makes for an interesting contrast.

I was always satiated by the romance of latin american poetry. there are so many romantic notions in latin american poetry, it is the sweep of the culture I think the Inkas the Aztecs the Conquistadors San Martin and Bolivar the artists, Rivera, Kahlo the poets, Neruda, Vallejo and Dario but Brazil was always other and when I first encountered their writing and their poetry I knew it was home... kind of the way an American feels in Japan at a baseball game it is familiar and yet different and comforting.

I guess allot of this is personal too. been going through allot of Family things of late with my Nonna who is 92 years old, she speaks mostly italian dialect now and she has retreated into life in the 1920s and 30s and our region's unique dialect is as much french as italian and is a kind of fusion and spending much time speaking dialect
(correctly called gallo-italiano) I find myself in touch with a linguistic root that is as deep as possible and wonder how I can fuse this into my poetry?

I have started to collect gallo italian words and they make for interesting tongue play...