Venice masks

Thursday 31 March 2016

The Lives of Poets - José Emilio Pacheco

In poetry there’s no happy ending.
Poets end up
living their madness.
And they’re quartered like cattle
(it happened to Darío).
Or they’re stoned or wind up
flinging themselves to the sea or with cyanide
salts in their mouths.
Or dead from alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty.
Or worse: canonical poets,
bitter inhabitants of a tomb
entitled Complete Works.

José Emilio Pacheco (1939 - 2014) Mexico
Translated by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and Katherine M. Hedeen
Source: Los Angeles Review of Books

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