Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Author’s Note:
I was heartbroken writing these. It was a moment of being generally pissed off with the writing world and my process. A concept of mine for another collection of poems had been re-appropriated. Amid the anger of that moment, I was falling in love with contrapuntals, the poems of Miguel James and Miyó Vestrini, translation, and the canvas. I pushed myself to make a form so weird it could not be imitated, and these bilingual contrapuntal paint erasures were born. I wanted to surprise myself. Workshopping these little oceans in rooms full of more formalist poets, I felt misunderstood but it made me happy to be playing with this kind of fragmentation. The Locura Azul suite, named after a song by Cuban filin group Los Zafiros, are an attempt to write "poems that are the sea." I don't know if I succeeded. I know them as an attempt, a glimmering broken blue gem, something like the ever-shifting coastlines I grew up on and am forever chasing.
ERP
CDMX, APRIL 2024
E.R. Pulgar is a Venezuelan American poet, translator, and music journalist. Their poems and translations have appeared in Fence, Changes Review, Epiphany, PANK, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. They have published two chapbooks: Sonnet to the Serpent and Other Poems (Wonder Press) and an experimental translation of Venezuelan poet Isadoro Saturno´s Dear Parent or Guardian (Ugly Duckling Presse).
