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.