Of tender light and radiant erudition, Joseph Donahue’s poetry excels quietly –like all exquisite literature, comfortable with its own greatness- from contemporary masses of literary debris. Poet, critic, and editor, Joseph Donahue is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Before Creation, World Well Broken and Incidental Eclipse. He has also published two poem sequences in chapbooks, Monitions of the Approach and Terra Lucida. He has lived in New York City and Seattle, and currently lives in Durham, NC where he teaches in the English Department at DukeUniversity. Here from The Copper Scroll, one of three poems available on the web; published here without his kind authority, nor his friends’ or editors’, whom we all contacted but received no answer of to this day. MB
As in a box
lodged in light
in celestial radiance,
as in a room inside the sun
Luis Lazo es un artista contemporáneo a la vieja usanza. Uno de los pocos grandes pintores que quedan en la región, ave casi extinta, que nos muestra en su obra el alcance de la mirada desde su grandioso vuelo. Su obra es contemporánea a pesar de ser pintura, a pesar de ser barroca, a pesar de su figuración neoclásica, porque lo conjuga todo lúdicamente en una gama cromática cercana al cómic, porque divide el plano en secuencias que nos refieren al cine y la fotografía, porque nos habla del absurdo y de la sexualidad y los mezcla en escenas que son alquimia y humor a la vez en pinceladas pastosas tiernamente aplicadas.
Desde su vivencia de lo cotidiano, Lazo es un artista a la vieja usanza porque investiga con total libertad, porque cree aun que se le puede dar forma a las ideas con pasión, sin la frialdad de los que vienen abriéndose paso al camino; porque trabaja y trabaja, y se divierte y conversa y observa y le tiene sin cuidado el imperante oportunismo de las nuevas generaciones que han caído en la trampa libidinosa del llamado “curador”.
Luis Lazo Chaparro nació en San Salvador el 6 de enero de 1960. Desde temprana edad comienza su preparación artística con Miguel Ángel Polanco, Rosa Mena Valenzuela, Alfonso Mirón, así como con estudios en la Universidad Iberoamericana de México D.F. y en la Academia de Arte Lorenzo de Médici de Florencia.
Ha participado en más de cien exhibiciones colectivas en el continente americano y Europa y en seis exhibiciones individuales en El Salvador.
Entre sus reconocimientos se destaca el Premio en Pintura de la Academia Internacional (Roma, 2005). MB
El poeta deambula por su muerte con la impunidad de quien se sabe protegido por una fuerza superior. Se ve desde fuera, caminando por la Isla que ama y a la que ha llegado como despojo de mar. De allí en más sólo puede haber un poema, pues el brujo amor ha dado ya el primer paso. Luego el poeta puede morir de nuevo, morir todas sus muertes sucesivas. No importa. El poema ya es. Otoniel Guevara ha ganado numerosos premios: los Juegos Florales de Zacatecoluca, San Miguel, Ahuachapán, Cojutepeque, Apopa, Usulután y en los certámenes «Roque Dalton», «Alfonso Hernández», Juventud Literaria, Wang, para mencionar algunos. Su obra poética incluye: El Solar (1986); El violento hormiguero (1988); Lo que ando (1992, 1996, 1997); Lejos de la hierba (1994); Tanto (1996, 2000); El sudario del fugitivo (1998); Despiadada ciudad (1999); Erótica (1999); Simplemente un milagro (2001); Cuaderno deshojado (2002); Isla ilegal (2003); Sosiego (2003). RER
Isla Juliana
I (Cartagena)
Otoniel busca entre la escarcha pequeños maderos
para prepararse un ataúd
donde quepan él y su rutina, él y su temor,
su hambre y él, su dios y nadie más que su dios solo y solo
Otoniel tiene la mesa revuelta, llena de papeles y estrellas mojadas por las olas
donde las ratas pasean su ventrilocuencia, su exactitud de naufragio.
Entre los golpes del viento
un aliento de mujer vertida en saxo
demanda los despojos de Otoniel,
como si quisiera atraerlo hacia sí, como si de una nota bien ejecutada
dependiera la tibieza del ataúd con que siempre ha soñado.
II (Islas del Rosario)
Tomados de la mano no son menos mortales que una gota de sal.
Los pelícanos flotan sobre las olas. Ellos
flotan sobre la tierra. No es fácil
dedicarse a unos labios coralinos, uno se enreda
como en una ola, uno se escapa y se queda mirando a la muerte
con melancolía.
Otoniel lleva algo en sus dedos antiguos:
No es aquel fusil que le ensució la sangre,
no es el lápiz con que fundara el estropicio del miedo,
no es el moho de las rejas que le pintó la risa…
Es una mano blanca como el pecado
y como el pecado él la toma y le muestra su profunda y palpitante herida.
Since his emergence in the 1980s Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop, Conceptual, and appropriation art with craft-making and popular culture to create his own unique iconography, often controversial and always engaging. His work explores contemporary obsessions with sex and desire; race and gender; and celebrity, media, commerce, and fame. A self-proclaimed "idea man," Koons hires artisans and technicians to make the actual works. For him, the hand of the artist is not the important issue: "Art is really just communication of something and the more archetypal it is, the more communicative it is."
Jeff Koons' artworks rarely inspire moderate responses, and this is one signal of the importance of his achievement. Focusing on some of the most unexpected objects as models for his work, Koons' works eschew typical standards of "good taste" in art and zero in rather precisely on the vulnerabilities of hierarchies and value systems. As critic Christopher Knight has written "He turns the traditional cliché of the work of art inside out: Rather than embodying a spiritual or expressive essence of a highly individuated artist, art here is composed from a distinctly American set of conventional middle-class values."
Since his first solo show in 1980, Koons has exhibited extensively around the world including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the WalkerArtCenter, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, the StedelijkMuseum, the AstrupFearnleyMuseum for Modern Art, and the Victoria & AlbertMuseum. Jeff Koons lives and works in New York. Text by Gagosian Gallery
Brutally raw and unnerving, but always infused with a perverted charm, Jason Flores-Williams’ works are commentaries on greed, superficiality, the pitfalls of pop culture, and in the case of his latest published novel, The Last Stand of Mr. America, the American drive to use sex as a release from the bonds of consumer society. Flavorwire
Flores-Williams, who has been featured on CNN, NPR and Air America, is also known for his political activism. He wrote the High Times “Call To Resistance” and shut down RockefellerCenter in protest against the war. He is a frequent contributor to the Brooklyn Rail, Artillery magazine and does socio-cultural commentary for WBAI radio in NYC. Recently, feature film righs to Last Stand have been acquired by Melting Pictures, an independent film production company in Los Angeles. “Disturb the powerful, empower the disturbed,” says Flores-Williams. Stories.
To the door, the room with no view. There stands my baby. ‘Honey,’ I say with a smile, ‘I’m home.’
She reaches out for the whiskey bottle and I happily oblige. If to be with me she needs to dull a few of her own issues, then God bless her. I like to think of her as suffering in having to be with Yours Truly. It makes me feel irresistible.
‘Saw your face through the window a few nights ago,’ I say and reach for the bottle. ‘You couldn’t have been too happy with what you saw.’ I say this not to make amends, but to challenge. I want to make Miss Beautiful face the pig.
She doesn’t say anything. She stares at me, expressionlessly.
‘You must think I’m a real piece of shit?’ and swig from the fifth. ‘You must think I’m pretty fucked up.’
Again, no reply. She sits down on the floor in the corner. I have a raging boner.
‘Why don’t you say anything? I’m talking to you, aren’t I?’
She reaches out for the bottle, I move over and hand it to her. After a good swig, she looks up at me and says softly, ‘I’m here. What else is there to say?’
Her silence is pure condemnation, and I refuse to let her take the moral high road. ‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’
Grab the bottle out of her hand and take another swig. ‘You were there, you saw it. You came down the hall to see what I was doing, and you got an eyeful. You saw me brutalize another human being, okay? You know what I did, and you must have something to say about it.’
Softly, ‘I’m not going to judge you.’
‘Judge me!’ Fuck her, these people are masters of the reproach. ‘I saw the look on your face. You were disgusted. You hated me. You wanted me to be dead.’ Hard pull of the whiskey. ‘And now you have the gall to tell me that you’re not going to judge me. You already judged me. You are judging me! I make you sick, don’t I? DON’T I?’
She gets up off the floor, puts her arms around me and gently guides me back down. She is so caring. I am in love with this person. I have been from the minute I laid eyes on her. I dig my head into her long neck. I feel weak, tired of life, tired of myself. I feel the tears well up in my eyes. My chest is heavy, there is a lump in my throat. Without any thought I begin talking. My lungs, liver, kidneys, and organs force the issue. I feel like layers of silt are being carried away from the base of my spine. Toxins are fleeing my body.
‘… you can find some happiness, but then there’s nothing. So if there can’t be that, there has to be some sort of backbone or conviction, some sort of reason for not being happy and for suffering. But there’s nothing. There’s not emptiness, there’s nothing. I can’t find a reason to be here. When I was a kid I had the best ideas, but I’ve lost them all. I don’t mean it’s some bullshit like a loss of innocence, but then in a way it is … I don’t feel innocent anymore. There’s nothing I believe in, but I’m not even a non-believer. It’s like I’m floating without a purpose or direction. I see the people around me, and they’re the same way. Everyone is floating, but it’s more me than anyone. I remember when they used to ask me what I was going to be when I grew up and I’d run off a list of all these good, honorable things. Everybody would. We were all going to be archaeologists or find a way to feed poor people or be statesmen. We never became anything. I never became anything. I never grew up. All I did was get older and make more money. I thought this was supposed to be about something. If anyone would have told me that I was going to grow up to be a fucking PR guy, I would have laughed in his face. Now, being a public relations specialist is more about who I am than anything else about me. I feel like I’ve been waiting all these years for a vocation, that something would shake me from this nightmare and I’d wake up with a purpose, that I would be clean, fresh, and innocent again. But nothing has come to me. I’ve tried to convince myself that there aren’t any more battles, but I know there are. Right next door to me is an asshole lawyer who beats up his wife in front of his innocent little daughter. I can hear him smashing her face in. He’s planting the seeds that will grow into a living hell for that little girl. All I do is sit in my apartment and hide behind my fucking CD player! I play it as loud as I can and I can still hear them! I’ve become everything that I once despised. I am the little company man who scurries away at the first sign of danger. I’ve sold my soul for a little piece of security. All my life I told myself that if the shit ever really came down, then I would be there on the right side of things, that I would come through with shining colors, that no matter what I might be up to, I was a stand up guy. Now I know it’s all bullshit. I’ve been deluding myself all these years in thinking I was a good man. I’m as lost and as sold out as everyone else. I’m dead. There isn’t any passion left in me…’ I stop, look into her dark, mystical eyes, ‘…except when it comes to you. You are the only thing that has made me feel anything other than contempt. You are everything that I am not: brave, strong, and beautiful.’ Our faces are three inches apart. I can feel her breath on my face – the only air I want to breath. From the bottom of my heart, from the last remnants of my soul, I speak the words, ‘I love you.’
I kiss her. A passionate, loving beautiful kiss that awakens my core. Her lips are tender, her tongue is sweet. Somewhere in the back of my brain I know that I am sharing myself intimately with a man, but my heart, to whom at this moment I place my faith, celebrates the poetry of the feminine. This man is more woman than woman. For the first time in my life, I feel what it is to make love without sex. I stick my tongue deep inside of her mouth and lick at every crevasse. I trace the lines of her teeth. I taste her and in so doing am brought into the light that is her brave fire.
Gently, our lips part. She delicately places her lips on my cheek, then separates from me to close the door. I feel safe. She retakes her place next to me on the floor, and we kiss again – more heatedly, more sexual. We are making out like high schoolers in the back of the car. I grab her by her hair, pull her head back and lick her neck. She purrs and groans like a feline. She is my black cat. My sensual demon. My equal. My vamp.
‘You’re so fucking hot, baby,’ I pant.
She responds by licking my eyelids with her tongue. She nips at the tip of my nose. She bites my neck, hard. She wants it. My little blackcat whore is ready. My cock is swollen with desire. I want her to feel me deep inside of her. I want to feel what it’s like deep inside of her.
I rub my hand over her dress, find a nipple and pinch. She purrs with delight and puts her long, thin, black-stockinged leg over my crotch. I put my hand on her lean thigh. She grinds her thigh into my cock and slips her hand under my shirt. I flex for her, she digs in with her long, black nails. I want her to cut me. I want her to share in my blood.
‘Harder, baby,’ I say. ‘Make me bleed.’
She claws and scratches at my chest. I feel my skin tear under her nails. She is stronger than a woman, and I am thankful. I want to be ravaged. I want to feel another human being dominate me. I want to be made small and I want to feel the danger. She paws at me hungrily, never giving an inch. Ripping at my soul, she’s an angel come down to liberate me. I can feel the blood trickle down my chest, like holy water down a child’s forehead. A baptism.
Out of my mind with sexual delight, I pull down her dress to reveal two, perfect, little breasts.
She pulls back and strums her nipples with her fingers. ‘Do you like them?’
Without saying a word I plunge my face into her chest and feverishly lap at her titties like a thirsty dog. She holds my head against her chest and swells with rapture. Her tits are firm, her nipples bitesize morsels that I nibble and chew. I am finally getting my 12-year-old, Catholic school girl.
I squeeze her thigh. She grabs my ass. The sexual frenzy is in full swinging order. She pinches my nipple then slides her hand down inside my pants. She plays with the tip of my dick – squeezing, rolling, tracing – so I feel like I have an erection at the end of my erection. Smoothly, she undoes my pants and my cock busts out like a jailbreak. Her hand reaches down to my balls, then to my ass. Gently, so I barely notice the penetration, she sticks a finger in my asshole. In and out she goes and before I know it it’s two finger’s For the first time in my life, I’m getting fucked.
I spread my legs wide so she can really dig in. I feel my asshole being stretched in all directions. To sit back and get pounded is a wonderful thing. A woman knows what she’s doing when she lies on her back and spreads her legs. The hole is being filled.
In soft contrast to the hard fingering, she licks lovingly at my neck. Lady California is a sexual master. She knows both ends of the spectrum – that sex is bittersweet music made of both pleasure and pain. There is nothing melodramatic about her. This is her natural state. Fingering me and licking my neck is all the purpose she needs in this world. I feel her push up into my anus toward my balls. A jolt flashes down my spine, my cock stands on end.
‘You like that?’ She asks.
I wipe the sweat and hair from her forehead. ‘I love it, baby. I love whatever you do to me.’
With this she fingers harder and licks more furiously. I am hot and cold. Empty but full. I bite her nipple. I pull her dress down all the way to the belly button and lick her all the way down. I insert my tongue into her beautiful, little innie and swirl it all around, giving her a good cleaning. She coos with delight, and I am happy to please. I want to impress her, to make her feel good.
She catches my rim with a fingernail and I flinch. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says and begins kissing me all over my face and gently padding around my anus.
‘It’s okay, baby. Even that felt good,’ and I kiss her on the lips.
We lean back onto the floor, me on top of her. I slide my hand up along her thigh, squeezing and rubbing at the taut flesh. She strokes my dick masterfully. I kiss her lips and descend to her nipples. With one hand she pulls my shirt up to my head, and I pull it off. She claws at my back like an animal. I love that she is leaving her mark on me. I’ll go shirtless for days so all can see what it is to make love to a real woman.
Our nipples rub up against each other. We grind, lick, pinch, and bite. I slide one hand under the small of her back and she arches up, letting her head tilt back in gorgeous relief. She’s so light, so ethereal, that I’m afraid I might damage her. Yet the minute I slow my pace or soften my touch, she rakes my back with her fingernails and squeezes my cock so hard that I’m afraid it’s going to burst out the head. She wants me to fuck the hell out of her. I am honoured and lucky.
Kissing her lips, I slide my hand up into her crotch. Her groin is muscular with none of the usual flab. I slide my hand up further and into her stockings. I come to what feel like silk panties. I have no reservations, everything is action. What is, is… To hope for anything other than reality is to betray her. I must accept her in her maleness.
I reach down to her ass and pull the panties aside. With my index finger, I penetrate her asshole. She moans and shakes. Her asshole is her vagina, and to my surprise it is even wet. I’ve fucked women before in the ass. After a few minutes of good buttfucking, the colon secretes a clear liquid that’s as good as any pussy juice. Her ass is one with her mind. I can’t wait to have my dick inside of it.
I can’t fuck her without acknowledging her, though, and Lord knows she’d let me. She would suck my dick without any thought of reciprocation, but I don’t want that. I want to make love to her. I want her to know that I care about her. Nothing else will quench my thirst. Nothing else will be right.
I slowly slide my hand up to her genitals. There, where a sweet, tasty, pink vagina should be, are two little balls and a small cock. I hold the balls in my hand and can’t help but think of when we were kids and would joke about kicking each other in the nuts – because that’s what they are, little nuts. I move my hand up onto the shaft. It’s a limp and lifeless cock, probably good only for pissing. With her tits as perfect and ripe as they are, it’s obvious she’s been on estrogen for a good long while. I play around with it, but really have no idea what to do – if I’m supposed to do anything. There are some issues here that I hadn’t fully considered. I think deep down I was hoping she’d be like some kind of Barbie Doll with nothing but a smooth surface. I move back down to the balls and jiggle them around. I sense that to her the whole assemblage is not even part of her body and that there’s nothing for me to do with it that would please her sexually. I move back to her asshole. I can tell immediately she’s grateful. I insert three fingers and start pumping. She has both hands on my cock – one working the shaft and the other the balls. I’m hard as a rock, but somewhat detached.
To have part, that is not part. To be in a chronic state of self-denial. To be lost inside yourself…
If in addition to the daily specials of the American meat grinder, I had also to deal with issues of gender identity and transsexualism… Well, I doubt I`d make it. I need, for the both of us, to do this right.
I pull off her, grab the fifth of Jameson’s and take a big pull.
Nervously, ‘What’s wrong?’ I’m sure her past is full of last minute rejection. Not this time, though.
I hand her the bottle. ‘Nothing, baby. I just want to slow down a little bit.’ And as she swigs, I run my hand through her beautiful black hair to quell her fears.
‘You’re a fairytale princess,’ I say.
She smiles and hands me back the bottle. I swig hard. ‘You going to be here for a while?’ I ask.
She looks hurt, worried. I immediately kiss her and give the nipple a little pinch. ‘I just want to go to the bathroom and get a drink of water.’
She grabs for the bottle and I hand it to her. She takes a huge swig, and with whiskey on her sexy black lips says, ‘I’ll wait for you forever.’
1969. John Lennon and Yoko Ono spend their highly publicized honeymoon in presidential suite No. 702. For a whole week they stage the famous Amsterdam bed-in sharing bed and kisses, pajama clad, hair uncombed, promoting world peace with press correspondents stationed daily around their bed with cameras and microphones.
Ono and Lennon knew well. Oh yes they did: every act – private or public- is a political act. Bed-in, sex, nudity, sex, workers march, sex, art and literature and sex, all are political acts in the face of a controlling state.
40 years after and a couple of wars, invasions, acts of terrorism, veiled acts of systemic violence against immigrants, the poor, and the ostracized different on part of most democratic governments;the Ono/Lennon act of bringing intimacy into the public eye to make a political statement against war still seems fresh and potent.
1. Make love not war
You have constantly and actively spoken out against these abuses of power and personal liberties. What makes “The Last Stand of Mr. America” a remarkable novel is your ability to weave your political standpoints into a literary venture where each act is a rich concoction of symbolic representation of current state of affairs.
I am thinking specifically here on how Sam -the all-american protagonist- dwells on his homocentric cultural heritage as he feels more and more attracted to transvestite Lady California. Personal is political and political turns personal is the clear message here.
What makes this sexual encounter so dramatically charged?
Jason Flores-Williams: People like to think of themselves as liberal and open-minded, but are really conservative and uptight when it comes to sex. Same can be said of people and politics. They like to think of themselves as progressive and ready for change, but are really traditional and status quo. The common theme here, is that people like to bullshit themselves about how badass they are… A dangerous form of self-deception, because then moderate and meaningless things start to be seen as original and compelling. This is okay, save for when the culture needs to be refreshed by new ideas.
My job as a writer – no matter what the subject – is to do battle with bullshit. Sometimes it’s a dialogue at a dinner party, sometimes it’s a touch of poetry in nature, and sometimes it’s a methed-out fuck scene in an underground sex club. As long as its pissing off the starbelly sneeches, it makes no difference to me.
2. Same-sex marriage
This century’s gay rights activism is one of several examples of the political battle over sexuality, over that fertile and autonomous domain which is the human body. Certainly you will agree that same-sex marriage has become one of the foremost legal battles in that terrain.
It is interesting how your novel’s main thread is an extraordinary internal dialogue in the voice of Sam on the limits of sexuality. What was your starting point for the conception of the argument for the novel?
JFW: The last line of the novel is really the first: there are things to do.
Sam spends the entire novel talking, but in the end he actually does something, That’s the point: time to stand up, fight the good fight, count for something. Nobody wants to hear that, because then it gets all icky and uncomfortable, but maybe right now people need to feel icky and uncomfortable.
MB: What has been the reaction from gay rights activists and their opponents to the contents in your novel?
JFW: I am gay. Maybe not sexually – although there have been some wild after hours parties- but in spirit, in outlook, melodrama, horniness, world weariness, jadedness, openness, sense of humor and arty sophistication….you ask anyone, I’m a queen.
So there’s never any friction between me and the gay boys when it comes to my work. If there ever was, we’d all just put on dresses and go get cocktails.
3. Clinton cigars
Sex is a political act, I dare say (in the risk of it sounding wild and far-fetched) in favor of anarchism. Every time someone engages in sex, walls tumble down. Sex is a powerful venue of self affirmation, an expression of utmost liberty between consenting individuals where law and state enforcement have no say.
Politicians are well aware of this. Political sex scandals are so notorious! In part because they question the very status quo politicians work so hard to withhold, in part because we all live in this hypocritical society where false morals are upheld in spite of better judgments and common sense.
Sam and several secondary characters in your novel deal with this double persona: one mask leading normal 9-5 job and life in a safe neighborhood and the other engaging in after-hours explorations with sex, drugs and violence. It seems you have taken upon yourself the task of unveiling “real” America. Has this always been one of your spear points and why so?
JFW: I grew up poor with a father in prison. I know the darkness in this country. I know how it discards people. I know how it rolls over the defenseless and exploits the vulnerable.
So as long as I have a voice, I will speak the truth about America. I will speak about its greed, its selfishness, its hypocrisy, apathy, sickness and soullessness.
I will also speak about its funky wildness and its unpretentiousness coolness. Problem with that, though, is that the second you criticize this country, then nobody hears anything else you have to say. You are immediately labeled, dark skeptical, unpatriotic and worse, uncommercial and unmarketable.
You can escape almost any able in this country, but if people perceive you as not being able to make them any money, then you’re screwed.
4. Big (Incestual) Brothers
Dear George Orwell delved deeply into the subject matter of politics and sex in his famous and sadly relegated “1984”, where sex is described as a political act against all established teachings by the Party. The Party imposes “antisexualism” upon its members (as manifested in the Junior Anti-Sex-League), because sexual attachments diminish their loyalty.
Taking a step further on the matter of sex and politics it seems it is in the name of safeguard against violence that sex is most regulated.Sex and violence do seem at times like incestual brothers, coupling away in dark corners of human history. The will to surrender and the will to cause suffering seem to crisscross in your novel at deranged times.
How do you think violence and sex feed into each other in your novel and why so? What is the point where pleasure and pain turn into abuse? Who are your literary references in this realm?
JFW: Real sex, good sex, heavy sex, honest sex comes from deep from within the psychological store room, spent years down there handcuffed next to violence, power and my coach from little league, Mr. Sandoval. (Total perv.) Fucking is a fantastic free for all – truth, madness, lies, crazytalk and buttspank. And there’s the cathartic element. All those social frustrations: rejection, pain, suffering, insecurity, failure… the stuff that people try to hide, but that makes up who we are more than almost anything else.
We live in such a conservative time. I refuse to let that penetrate (or even perform oral) on my erotic life, both real and literary. If people want safe, well adjusted writers who play softball and fuck their wives – fine, go read them. I’ll hang out here with Miller, Burroughs and De Sade.
5. Long live porn
Cicciolina – the porn actress turned Italian politician (she was a Parliament member for the Radical Italian Party) and peace activist- is an extraordinary example of turning the privacy of sex into public domain and using her body as a powerful tool to make herself seen and heard on issues as human rights and ecological battles.
Hers is an extraordinary life. Is it possible to continue to lead an ordinary life in the face of injustice? Even in the face of risking one’s own life as Sam does towards the end of your novel?
What do you believe is the role of a writer in society?
JFW: First, let me say this: now that we can look back on the Bush administration, there needs to be a reckoning. We have a right to ask the well known and well funded American artists of our time -why did you fail this generation by remaining silent during an eight year reign of war, lies, fear, manipulation, torture and control?
Now, I believe that a writer should be the voice for the voiceless, the enemy of hypocrisy, the champion of the lower classes and a person unafraid to speak the truth in an age of lies and self-deception.
Or, at the very least: if you’re going to be a writer, then have something relevant and important to say. I spent a lot of time being pissed about these people who were putting themselves out there (and being perceived) as “important writers”, but have never written one meaningful or compelling word about the American condition.
But I’m tired of thinking about the limp and bloated writers of our age. Truth is, I’ve already outlasted a lot of them anyway. My only goal now, is to show the next generation how its supposed to be done. Give them something real, a place to stand. The brave and smart ones need to know that they’re not alone.
El Ojo de Adrián se alimenta de una ardiente fe en crear espacios para la expresión y difusión del arte, literatura y pensamiento intelectual salvadoreño y centroamericano. Nacido en formato de blog en junio del 2005, tomó por nombre el del único huracán de la milenaria historia del Océano Pacifico. El Ojo turbulento de Adrián es el punto de encuentro y discusión de quienes están decididos a crear a pesar de la adversidad, a seguir vivos y activos, a compartir la libertad y la belleza, y a afrontar la injusticia y la indiferencia.
El Ojo de Adrián es un esfuerzo independiente impulsado por tres artistas salvadoreños desde el anonimato y editado por el ilustre Enrique Walden-Lagos. A partir de Dic 2008 se conforma su nuevo Consejo Editorial rico en experiencias y aportes nuevos. A lo largo de su trayectoria una verdadera multitud de colaboradores regionales --escritores y pintores, poetas y fotógrafos, músicos y cineastas- han sumado sus voces y obras para alimentar las 100 visitas diarias y 431 suscriptores con los que cuenta, a la fecha.
El Ojo de Adrián se despliega así, de mil formas, en cambio permanente, arrasando territorios con materiales inéditos, desconocidos, olvidados y/o sorprendentes.
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¡431 suscriptores hasta la fecha!
Of tender light and radiant erudition, Joseph Donahue’s poetry excels quietly –like all exquisite literature, comfortable with its own greatness- from contemporary masses of literary debris. Poet, critic, and editor, Joseph Donahue is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Before Creation, World Well Broken and Incidental Eclipse. He has also published two poem sequences in chapbooks, Monitions of the Approach and Terra Lucida. He has lived in 
