Spicaresque:

A Spanglish blog dedicated to the works, ruminations, and mongrel pyrotechnics of Yago S. Cura, an Argentine-American poet, translator, publisher & futbol cretin. Yago publishes Hinchas de Poesia, an online literary journal, & is the sole proprietor of Hinchas Press.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

PUBLISHER'S NOTE FOR HINCHAS OCHO

It is with ginormous purple buckets of panache that we at Hinchas de Poesía (www.hinchasdepoesia.com) present to you, our faithful readers, issue number eight. Issue eight features our most eclectic amalgam of poems, reviews, and artifacts--all in service of Friday, Dec. 21, 2012, the last day on the Mayan calendar.

There's a couple of things you should know, a couple of emendations concerning our masthead. Our trusted Fiction Editor, J. David Gonzales stepped down so that he may concentrate on his thesis and focus on his transcontinental move from Miami to Los Angeles. We thank him for his service during Hinchas' formative years, and wish him nothing but the best as he crafts his first book.

Our old Poetry Editor, Jim Heavily, is our new Editor in Chief. Earlier this week, I personally asked Jim to become the Editor because his horsepower and gumption have far exceeded mine for several issues. Issue after issue, he has worked tirelessly, most of the times in an under-resourced capacity, to bring forth some very beautiful literature. It would be disingenuous of me to underestimate Jim Heavily's influence and acumen at work between the digital pages of Hinchas de Poesía.

Moreover, we now have a foreign correspondent, James Cervantes, a node in our network that know the terrain below the Rio Grande. James Cervantes was editor of Porch, a print journal, The Salt River Review, an online magazine, and is currently editing poetry for Sol, out of San Miguel de Allende. He has been publishing poetry in print since 1969 and almost exclusively online since 1997.

Last, recently we started a Kickstarter campaign to raise enough scratch to publish Jim Heavily's "The Bringer of Culture," all allow us to break our teeth in the publishing racket. We have been able to garner fifteen "backers" and plan on reaching our goal shortly before the cut off dates of January 2, 2013. If you would like to make a donation, or know of someone who might like to make a donation would you please pass this information along. Our kickstarter page is here: http://kck.st/TwzPM0


Tuesday, December 11, 2012

EL MANDO

EL MANDO


El que tiene el mando es el que manda;

conversely, sin mando, uno no manda, ni man

do. No, el que no tiene mando are the mando-less

the nickel and dimed, hoodwinked and periwinkled

misbegotten and desarriesgados. She who holds the remote

control controls the command console on the programming,

commands channels of things to come, strong premonitions.

She who holds the structure of el mando manda astonishing

cleavages of anthems, makes things happen, stirs my tine of tenor.

El que tiene el mando es el que no tiene el no manda, entonces;

She who holds el mando manda, holds a turbo just outside thresh-

old of a prosthetic stylus, holds our task manager for ransom in

silent index technicians, holds binary repose.

She who has command nears command

Without possessing el mando.

El Mando son ojos Infra-rojos.


HINCHAS PRESS KICKSTARTER EXPO

In 2007, I resigned my high school teaching position in the Bronx and started library school at Queens College. Because my library science degree had evolved to incorporate an invisible "I" (MLIS vs. MLS), I took several classes on web and image design in library school. As a result, the whole Internet-veil thing became demystified and I could clearly see the Mr. Oz in the machine.

In 2009, I bought some server space in Canada and purchased a stack of ISBNs from Bowker and started a literary journal, Hinchas de Poesía (www.hinchasdepoesia.com). I used Dreamweaver to design the first couple of issues and we are publishing our eighth issue on December 21, 2012--the day the Mayan calendar ends. Hinchas de Poesia directly addresses the aesthetic interconnectedness between North America and Latin America, and attempts to comment on the evolving dialogue.

A week ago Hinchas Press started a kickstarter campaign to raise $2,000 to cover the costs of publishing our first book, Jim Heavily's The Bringer of Culture.
Jim's book of poems is a raucous ride through syntax and cognates and words we don't use anymore but totally should resuscitate (words like affect and emendations, et. al.) One of the great things about the book is how it flits from the steppes of a city in Mexico to the backalley compunctions in Metarie, Louisiana. The book is truly a wild ride which makes it a great read, and a book that deserves to be published and in wide rotation.

Jim Heavily also happens to be the Poetry Editor for Hinchas de Poesía, so I also believe in his poems and feel them to be part and parcel of the aesthetic we deploy every time we publish a new issue or try our hand in the publishing racket. Jim is not a Latino and that makes comepletely no difference at all to us because the work is solid. Jim's book is titled after Quetzalcoatl, one of the major deities of the Aztecs, and the one responsible for agriculture, culture, and astronomy.

THE LOGIC OF FACILITY LAYOUT BY JIM HEAVILY FROM "THE BRINGER OF CULTURE"

This poem is from Jim Heavily's yet to be published, The Bringer of Culture.



The Logic of Facility Layout
by Jim Heavily


The wind & the rains provide all that we need, at least on this
conveyor belt. Maps of international cities taped together &
hung on the wall with push pins, emended & annotated with
sticky notes & gruel, neither conjoined, gerundive, subordinate
or sulcate. T he desert cries out for understanding. T rees &
gazanias list seaward. We upsurge & breech in the fallow moon’s
peach light stretching out to the horizon & the Canary Islands,
throwing nickels & dimes on the dark sea-surge, sparkling on
the wave tops & dorsal fins of night-swimming dolphins, the
better part of ourselves taken from us & borne out to the heart
of the rippling amniotic sea.

Sunday, December 2, 2012