Palabras / Words (bilingual edition)

The work of the poet is not easy to define. It involves imagination, observation, a musical ear and a kind of daring that allows words to forge new spaces for meaning. But none of these alone makes the poet, or the poem. In this bilingual edition of Carlos Trujillo’s Palabras, his first collection to be published in English, the award-winning Chilean poet offers the reader a hands-on experience of the creative work of the poet, and by his elegant, melodic approach, suggests a more intimate understanding of what poetry is and how it comes to draw breath.

Jaguar y cascada (libro)

la pregunta básica, apoyada en el arte divino de una respuesta íntegra : la hermosura, la superación de la espera : la resistencia y el regalo sin aparatajes : el ser : el compartir y abrirse : porque sólo así se abre a la vida : sólo siendo rangos de color, entre lágrimas : sólo juntos : la nieve dio lugar a la frescura almada de los últimos días del invierno : entre el bullicio y la vastedad, la semilla : el primer paso, el futuro…

Writing & Naming: the Medicine of Acquiring Knowledge

Through the work of writing, I have learned first and foremost that nothing is what it tells us it is, because there is always another level, another way to play at naming, with reality, to bend untruths to be more true, as medicine, as savior, as demon filtered for taste, as a ritual mark of remembrance of tensile perceptual realities, disputed, fought for and reclaimed. There is a line after which language becomes less a tool for understanding and more a mechanism for undermining it, but that line is constantly in motion, and in language, as in physics, we now understand “reversibility generally does not exist”, as per Poincaré.

Does Anyone Know What Capitalism Is?

Capitalism is “survival of the fittest”… capitalism is rooted in the idea of merit; everyone should be compensated according to his or her contribution (to the common good?)… capitalism is about the movement of capital; the more it moves, the richer everyone gets… capitalism is an upgraded feudalism, where the capitalist is an overseer of an abstract terrain made up of investments, not of arable lands… capitalism is democracy; the free spirit of an open society requires capitalism to support the liberties of individual citizens, and protect against government overreach… capitalism is virtue… or, capitalism is the absence of virtue…

Internet Access Must Be a Human Right

Access to the internet must be a basic human right, across the globe, for a number of reasons. First of all, legitimate, transparent democratic processes of government require in today’s world that information flow freely and that citizens be empowered to share information and to find information, according to their choices and their needs.

The Fiction of Automatic Wealth is Bankrupting the U.S.

America’s banks have, over the last decade, entered into a dangerous fictional world of projected automatic wealth in which they expect that all payments they might receive will without fail materialize, regardless of circumstance. They treat the human beings with whom they have major financial relationships as if they were nothing more than endless fonts of easy money. This is the crisis of reasoning and cash flow we are, as a people, as a global society, trying to solve.

The Evils of the Purge: Crushing Dissent & the False Promise of Finality

The Khmer Rouge sought to establish a red Khmer empire in Cambodia, with some ambitions of expansion beyond the nation’s borders, by stamping out any human life or mind that varied from the project, as narrowly conceived by Pol Pot and his murderous regime. The “killing fields” that ensued, with the mass slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million people, were an attempt to establish a new break in time, the time before and the time after the purification —as the regime proposed— of all Cambodia.

Empathy is Not Prejudice

EMPATHY IS NOT PREJUDICE: it is the ability to imagine the point of view of the other. Without this ability to engage in thoughtful outreach, beyond one’s own personal realm of experience, and empathize with the human situation of the other, no jurist can begin to understand the human meaning of the arguments made in their court, and objectivity remains wholly beyond their reach.

Crossing a Distance

justice is a caravan
of individuals
their dreams shifting
between confluence & conflict …

June 1989 Was Not the First Tiananmen Military Crackdown

On 8 January 1976, Zhou Enlai died. He had been Chinese premier and was viewed by the Chinese people as a true idealist and “man of the people”, a public servant at odds with the violent radicals who had imposed the reign of terror known as the “Cultural Revolution”. In a spontaneous outpouring of mourning, hundreds of thousands of people began building a memorial altar to Zhou, with wreaths of white flowers, white paper chrysanthemums, and short poems called xiaozibao, which extolled the virtues of the fallen premier.

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