Episode Four: Leo Boix and Pablo Bronstein
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In this episode, Leo and Pablo talk about their personal and professional relationship and how their practices influence each other.
This episode is a conversation between Leo Boix and Pablo Bronstein, recorded in their home in East London. Leo is a poet, translator and teacher, writing from multiple identities on the complexities of creative and cultural translations. Pablo is an artist whose work spans prints and drawings to choreography and performance. His focus is on style, spatial politics and queerness. In this episode, Leo and Pablo talk about their personal and professional relationship and how their practices influence each other.
Find out more about Leo and Pablo on our People page.
To the Glossary, Leo donates Mistranslation 
This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant.
The series is co-curated by Emma McCormick-Goodhart and Martin Hargreaves, with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.
Transcript
Martin:
Hello and welcome to the first series of 
This episode is a conversation between Leo Boix and Pablo Bronstein, recorded in their home in East London. Leo is a poet, translator and teacher, writing from multiple identities on the complexities of creative and cultural translations. Pablo is an artist whose work spans prints and drawings to choreography and performance. His focus is on style, spatial politics and queerness. In this episode, Leo and Pablo talk about their personal and professional relationship and how their practices influence each other. And I was also in the room for this conversation, so you'll hear a couple of my questions from the background. In this episode, our sonic transitions are brought to us by Leo. His first collection of English poems was released in 2021, titled The Ballad of a Happy Immigrant, and he has recorded himself reading some of his poetry. You will hear a selection of his haikus, mistranslations, and riddles dotted amongst the conversation. Enjoy.
Leo:
Why don't you go first?
Pablo:
No, no, you go first.
Leo:
Well, I selected two words. The first one is mask. And the second one is mistranslation and they are linked in a way I was, I began with, I began thinking about mistranslation, which is, you know, what you know very well, because I wrote many poems that are mistranslations and my third collection, I will be exploring the idea of mistranslation specifically to kind of Anglo Saxon poetry.
Pablo:
But is mistranslation like a, just something translated badly? Deliberately badly?
Leo:
Yeah, that's one of the kind of definitions, but it's a bit more expansive. And then I began thinking about mask and masking things and perhaps thinking more about dance and movement as connecting those dots in a way and putting a mask and performing because I translate poetry from Latin American authors into English and I perform those poems and I feel like I put a mask on somehow, the mask of the translator or the mask of the poet.
Pablo:
But is writing in and performing in English something of a masked performance for you?
Leo:
Yes, yes, in a way. And I looked it up and mask is one of the synonyms of mistranslation. So there is almost like a way of saying something is mistranslated. But also, you know, thinking about translation as this moving from one place to the other, mistranslation doing it. In a wrong way. And yeah, I was always sort of fascinated by that, kind of doing it badly and do doing it wrongly.
Pablo:
Do you have an example? I'm just, I'm just curious because I'm just thinking that maybe people listening to this won't necessarily sort of understand what mistranslation might be. If, for example, you're translating a line is there a technique that you use to mistranslate something?
Leo:
Sometimes I do have techniques. Sometimes I for instance, I did mistranslations of charms, Anglo Saxon charms. So, I would translate words from English into Spanish, and then back from Spanish into English, and I would be doing it because of the music, how it sounds, that word, and then I will create this new piece that is entirely different from the original or kind of a literal translation.
And the origins of all this is kind of this idea that when I came here, I couldn't speak a word of English and I tried to explain myself and who I was and I couldn't, and I felt there was something that was missing in that process, and it took me a while to realize that actually it was an interesting process. And I do that anyway, all the time, trying to explain from, you know, even in my first collection, who I am, what are my themes, and be more playful and ludic.
Pablo:
Is that, is that what a mistranslation is for you? It's, it's when you have that sort of straightforward translation in your mind and then you insert a kind of playful variant into it.
Leo:
Yes, yes, in a way that's the way I see it as a poet when I write mistranslations and I consider those poems, but then as a translator, when I teach translation, and when we look at translation, and this idea of the perfect translation that never exists, there's always a mistake, or there's always another way of doing it.
So it also challenges this idea of the perfect translation, that there is a way of translating, moving from one place to the other, that you can do it, you know, in various ways.
Pablo:
So, translation can always be re translated and a 19th century translation of a Babylonian text will be different from a 20th or a 21st.
Leo:
Exactly. Right.
Pablo:
But what you're saying is if there is a mistranslation, it's a creative translation. It has created something new and that is fixed. That is a new, entirely crisp and self-sealed bit of writing.
Leo:
Yes. And there is this kind of cheeky side of it as well, this thing of like, just the word ‘mistranslation’ that's like, puts people like, why are you calling it mistranslation? Is this a joke or what's going on? And I quite like the, the various readings of it, that people can read it in different ways. But yeah, it began actually in The Ballad. I do have some mistranslations and it all kind of started there.
Pablo:
Have your mistranslations been translated into other languages by other people?
Leo:
Yeah, we did an exercise last year at the University of East Anglia where I gave my students one of my mistranslations and I asked them to translate that poem into their own languages and they, some of them, and they were free to do it, you know, any way. So, some of them were very literal and they translated word by word and some, some people did the mistranslations.
Pablo:
And at that point you lose authorship? You retain authorship if it's a regular translation, but you lose authorship if it's a mistranslation or a creative translation?
Leo:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's the mistranslation word. And the mask, yeah, it sort of comes together with mistranslation, I guess. And I was thinking about that poem that I wrote about the mask a long time ago. I don't know where, where I have it. You helped me edit it somehow. Remember there was, it was a mask. It was a very early poem I wrote a long time ago.
Pablo:
I mean, you've written what, 5,000 poems in the last two years?
Leo:
Yes!
Pablo:
How many haikus did you write during the pandemic?
Leo:
Thousands.
Pablo:
3,000?
Leo:
Yeah. And perhaps it was a haiku. Perhaps it was a haiku,
Pablo:
Haiku number 1,374!
Leo:
I wrote many, many haikus, yes, it's true.
TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)
Haikus by Leo Boix.
Today, my first swim
of the year, jellied sea,
my skin on fire.
I follow the sun
as the hours pass. I'm dust
across a heat map.
At the beach, we sun
bathe side by side. My cold skin,
your light freckled hands.
Leo:
Anyway, what about your word?
Pablo:
My word is actually quite an obvious one for me. It's a word that I've used a lot, contrapposto, which, it’s a description of what the body does when it's standing. Most of the weight of the body is resting on one legor on one foot, and the other leg or foot is more relaxed. But it also has, I think, kind of cultural implications. It can be used wider than its sort of description of a kind of physical act. So, for example, most Greek and Roman statues are in a contrapposto pose. It means posto as in a sort of postural pose and contra is the opposite. How would you describe it? It's a kind of, it would be like an S shape for a human being. And so most of the sort of sinuous poses of Greek and Roman art are in that. And a lot of Renaissance and certainly Baroque and Rococo art is in that. A lot of the art I like has an S curve to it. I'm less interested in two feet on the ground, stuff, whether that's modern choreography or whether that's medieval sculpture, I'm less interested in stuff that is too solidly planted.
When I've choreographed things with choreographers or by myself, depending, and the conversation is about, you know, how to move through a space, contrapposto, like it's sort of relative sprezzatura, allows for different visual languages to enter into the contemporary performance space. So you can start to reference art history or certain aspects of art history, which might otherwise be closed to that discourse.
It's also a very queer universe. So, the way of standing that is not two feet firmly planted on the ground, but is actually sort of sloped off, all the glamour is on one hip. That is something that, certainly when I was a kid, you could be beaten up in the playground for. And so it has, I think, a kind of radical edge. It's strong, but simulates weakness. It's relaxed, but actually, in some senses, it's not easy to maintain. So, actually, it's a kind of complex, sometimes camp, way of holding the body.
Leo:
Yeah, I'm just curious to see, to know where does this come from? If it came from you looking at paintings when you were a child, or sculptures, or more like when you were reading about dance, or about the history of art, and the idea came through kind of books, rather than the visual?
Pablo:
It's quite hard when you're sort of going back through gay history, and certain things stay in your mind through mockery, but actually you've selected them to stay in your mind. Do you know what I mean? Like you could, there are things that potentially might have been, things that I was worried about behaving like, to be too sissy was something that I was worried about. And yet, that I was worried about that and that I considered myself secretly to be that means that already I was in the kind of imaginative realm of Contrapposto somehow, that I was already in that sort of Image universe.
There's nothing innate to any form of behaviour and I think, the sort of world of allegory and irony that gay people lived within, certainly when I was younger, that really has to do with understanding that boys don't instinctively behave like boys. They are trained to behave that way. by society. There is no physiological way to sit in a masculine way. It just happens to be that some men sit in one way and some men sit in another. And so I think that world of supposed artificiality that contrapposto and sissiness encapsulates to most people looking for sort of natural masculinity, I think is something that actually undermined my faith in any kind of physical truth, if that makes sense?
Leo:
It's a construction?
Pablo:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo:
But I remember that performance that you did at Tate Modern, and you had a dancer with a mask of the sun. I think he was pretending to be the king's son, and you were giving him directions, and suddenly he was making really exaggerated postures, and he was declaiming as well. I remember he was sort of talking, but you were telling him how to behave or how to move.
Pablo:
Yeah, it was in the heady days of the lecture performance.
Leo:
I remember it was quite striking. The mask, because the mask was quite amazing. I can’t remember it was a, you bought it, but there was...
Pablo:
No, no, we made it.
Leo:
Oh, you made it!
Pablo:
Yeah.
Leo:
And it was sort of golden and it was amazing, and there was a bit of music as well. That was one of the first performances I saw where the postures were really Baroque, but overly exaggerated.
Pablo:
I think at that time I was very keen to sort of pull apart the languages so you know I would juxtapose very very pedestrian, sort of sitting on chairs talking withhighly highly highly mannered behaviour ,mannered in the contrapposto, you know, Baroque way and there's people that I realised could slip into that physical world very, very easily and for other people that really just, contrapposto went against the grain. But for example, someone like Rosalie Wahlfrid, who I've worked with for, I mean, 20 years almost. She's someone who has an unbelievably subtle and intuitive grasp of sprezzatura and contrapposto. And I mean, she's classically trained, but you know, also has a very long contemporary performance history, and she choreographs her own work as well as mine, and she's someone who can move in and out of different languages unbelievably easily.
And so the question of, you know, artificiality and “physical truth” and all of these things, she can just help me deconstruct very, very easily. Those people are quite hard to find, and there was a real Issue actually when we were finding dancers for a performance I did for Tate Britain years ago, where we really struggled to find dancers who had a kind of ease a kind of classical ease with their bodies and it hasn't got to do necessarily with being outrageously camp there were a few dancers who thought that sort of flapping their wrists around a lot was going to do it for me but you can flap your wrist around in a way that, you know, isn't very elegant and similarly there was alot of people who have unbelievable classical ballet technique. But it's not quite the same the stuff that i'm looking at for at least Has to have a slightly perverse edge to it. It has to feel like it carries the weight of decaying western civilization
TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)
With this toad I inscribe a circle,
and trust to the grace of Odd,
against the sore wound, the raw night,
the stinking fear,
against the swarm of horror none can spare,
even sinking into the gland.
I sing a victory charm, lift a victory scorch,
worst-victory, victory of seeds,
let them help now.
Let no ocean hinder me, or heated enemy
beat me slow.
Let faith not hover hover above my life,
but keep me safe, safe.
Leo:
I was thinking of voguing and those YouTube videos you showed me once, those really early '80s. People, I think in, in New York, mostly black dancers voguing. And it was really incredible.
Pablo:
Yeah It's amazing. So, I mean, I have to say that voguing from the 1980s and 90s before it became a kind of international mega phenomenon, where it really does feel like a kind of athletics, olympics, at the moment it's a lot of backflips and crazy gymnastics which is amazing but it's not the stuff that I personally like and the stuff that I think I was very drawn to was the stuff that felt comparable to the technical way that I sourced material. A way of dancing that related to still images from magazines. for example, cover images, the way of holding your face so that you look like you are in a makeup commercial, for example, always in sprezzatura, always with contrapposto, but actually comparable, that sort of relationship to the still image, to the moving one, to the way that I worked with, and very often have worked with, dancers when we actually have to construct a sequence of movements based on classical poses or images of 17th century paintings, whatever it might be, you know.
Leo:
And there is always this limitation, bodily, because the way that they move, but also like spatially, because some of the performances, you always build structures that force dancers to move in certain ways, literally. I'm just remembering work that you've done. And now thinking about the kind of contrapposto sort of movements, and the limitations that you force on kind of dancers in all these different ways.
Pablo:
I mean, one of the things I think about Queer culture growing up was that it was unbelievably limited and so it crept through the cracks wherever it could. So, there were so few avenues, there were so few outlets, there was such little scope for direct expression that you had to find your way through whatever openings there were, which is, I think, generationally distinct to now. So, for example, an innate understanding of irony has to do with our generation, (and you are 15 years older than me, he's two years older than me!). Our generation, there was no representation of gay affection in television, to speak of really nothing at all.
And so, we ended up performing gymnastics, mental gymnastics, in order to extract value from Hollywood films. We would kiss the man in the films through inhabiting the woman perhaps, or something along those lines. And one of the things I think, it was a kind of awful moment really, a sort of watershed moment with Brokeback Mountain was the first time that that sort of hit the mainstream. And everyone I knew from my generation basically bawled their eyes out for about a month and we all watched that film like 200 times. Now looking back on it, it's such a load of middle-class crap. It's unbelievable. But at the time it just felt just unbelievably strange to watch it and it be so direct. It was almost kind of a confrontation, wasn't it?
Leo:
Yeah, I was thinking, I mean this is slightly different, but thinking of sort of constraints and form. Because it's something I'm really interested in exploring in my own work. It's corsets that we call form in poetry. The forms, ballads or odes or sonnets or mirror poems. And I tend to go with form in poetry and thinking of what you were saying, in a way, so related to that, now that I'm writing loads of sonnets and the constraint, the 14 lines, the rhyming scheme, the turn, this turn in the eighth line, the movement that goes on in sonnets. It's the idea that you're telling a story and then there's something, there's an epiphany at the end.
And yet with those, all those constraints, all those rules, in a way, you're building this corpus, but trying to subvert it in a way. In my case by using perhaps Spanish words, or calling them Latin American sonnets, or exploring ideas about exploration, or colonialism, or gay love, or relationships, or whatever. But you know, I did that in my first collection, so with using ballads, these very traditional forms.
Pablo:
Do you view that as a kind of, as a form of masochism?
Leo:
No, no, it's interesting. In Spanish I never used form. And I think it comes with, learning a new language and learning the rules of the new language and then realizing that forms are there for a reason that the sonnet has been there since the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance time and it started as a song andthat's why there's this song quality of the sonnet. So, it's the other way around, when I start writing, I immediately realise, oh! this is actually, it's looking like it's going to be a song, a sonnet because, because the, the line length, because the rhyming scheme, because there's a turn or whatever. And the ballad, because perhaps there is a refrain, there's like a, like in a ballad, like in a song with Ballad of a Happy Immigrant, all of those things.
But there's something that I'm thinking more and more, perhaps in relation to translation as well, have form. Informed. I dunno if that can be linked to your work in a way?
Pablo:
Well, I mean, in some senses I like very traditionally shaped things, but my work is not traditionally shaped. I refer to it, but it isn't what it's doing.
So, my architectural renders are not architecture, for example. My ballet performances aren't ballets - there's no ballet training or technique in it. The sort of paintings of, you know, these still lives are imaginary and they're on paper. The whole thing is a little bit spurious. I think when I mentioned the masochism thing, I was sort of referring to this seeping of queerness through the cracks of sort of mainstream culture and how that produces rare, odd things that queer culture essentially fetishizes now.
So we look back through history and find these strange people who were able to produce something that hinted at the universe that we have inside us. But that, as a result of it seeping through rather than having totally open expression, has a kind ofbaroque oddness to it, which I find really rewarding. That said, often you look back on what you think is that and actually it's not that, you know, there's nothing particularly homosexual about rococo culture, you know. You know, there's nothing gay about makeup really.
Leo:
Yeah, it's interesting. When you talk about masochism, I was thinking about the haikus and that. exercise of writing 10, 15 haikus a day during the pandemic and thinking I won't be able to write anything ever again because of what happened. And the haikus keeping me alive in, in the creative sense of the word, but because we were confined there was this compulsiveness and obsessiveness and masochism as well, because it was writing endlessly.
Pablo:
It was sadism for me because I had to edit them!
Leo:
You had to read them! But it was by the end, it was you, you were, you, you were like, oh, this is like a journal of a year during the pandemic. And it was about us in a way and living together in that house and the sea and the daily routines. And it became sort of, an exercise of looking at the work that I was doing, the surroundings in a very, very, very compulsive way. Like when you make those drawings that you do it like nonstop and like the frills or the coils or the, the little things that you can't stop making.
Pablo:
Yeah, they're kind of compulsive.
Leo:
Compulsive. And because of the pandemic, perhaps it kind of was amplified. Yeah. But form there was quite important for like keeping, I was very obsessed by writing those exact lines with a rhyming scheme.
TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)
Before the day's gone,
I'll kiss your neck just below
your ear. Stay still.
I was born at night
in the southern hemisphere,
my heart upside down.
A song on a boat,
a gate to nowhere, myself
underneath the waves.
Martin:
Well, I'm interested if what you do is mistranslation, because you are posing as if you are representing historical facts, but you're, as Leo said, you're kind of, you're putting them through a process of almost translation.
Pablo:
Well, I reference high culture a lot, but I don't think I really imagine that I am that.
Yes, there is a lot of artificiality in my work, and it's very double-edged, so it's not something thatgives you what you think it will give you, and it's very politically ambiguous, but I don't know if I consciously translate anything the way that you do. So,it would be something like I consume this stuff and I digest it and it becomes something else.
So, I might buy a silver George II cafetière and obsess about it and it enters my sort of subconscious visual world. And then a couple of months later I'm producing something on paper that is clearly influenced by it. So, there is a kind of weird consuming of things. But, well...
Leo:
I think that there are similarities in a way. You can, you can find them. I'm just thinking that the latest mistranslations I've done, they were, they're all mistranslations of Anglo-Saxon poems. And what I was trying to do was sort of querifying the, the source text.
Pablo:
In a way, I think that the problem with this mistranslation idea in relation to both you and I is that, actually, it’s not really about translation. It's sort of about pretending to be someone at that moment and doing it either badly or doing something in a particular way. Like, for example, my choreographies that are clearly not particularly sophisticated as choreographies.
Leo:
But that goes back to what I was saying, that when I was teaching, the more I was thinking about mistranslation. That's why it's something that translators really think about. Because, in a way, when they translate, so seriously, translate one text to the other, they pretend to be the poet. They, you know what I mean, there's this impossibility that they will never be that poet. So, in a way, it's almost like an impossible task. It says it's untranslatable that poem. And yet, for 2,000 years there's been translations of poetry. So obviously it's something that is accepted.
Pablo:
So you have to maintain that kind of dual identity at that moment.
Leo:
Exactly. And not only that, but translators do have to be aware that there is this mistranslation thing going on. That there's always this risk, or not even a risk, that it’s part of the process that by turning one thing into another you are.. it's not like a mirror, it’s not exact. The process already involves changing and it's all about how much you change. What are your choices? When you translate, are those choices good for you, but perhaps not for other translators. When I do creative translation, somehow there is a spirit of the original source text that I want to keep. And for me, that's enough. And some translators might do literal translations and that might not be enough for other translators that might consider style more important, rhyme more important, music more important, there's so many things.
Pablo:
But it's fun to think that both of us are, when we role-play that sort of dual creator-translator-type person, essentially that character makes things slightly worse. Do you know what I mean? It's a sort of, you know, inside there is Quasimodo rather than, you know, someone who's there thinking, right, I'm going to translate this to make this so much better, you know? In a way we sort of want things to return to something more corrupt, something twisted.
Leo:
Yes, but when I write my mistranslations, I always think I tend to write anyway in response to other poetry. I tend to write poetry because I've been reading something that really I was itching to respond to and so I might write something in response to that poetry. So, in a way, you know what I mean, like the process is there in any case, sometimes it's more overt, sometimes it's just, it's more ironic. Sometimes it's all about the process, and sometimes it's just, it happens. The majority, I'm sure it happens to you as well. But when you're writing, you're either looking at a source text, or a source image, or you saw something online, or you're actually having, you're reading an audio book, and there's something, you know what I mean?
That process might be unconscious or might be something that you do on purpose that you want to kind of distort or queerify or amplify. You know what I mean? So there's something of that in the process if you want to find it.
Pablo:
Yes.
Leo:
But that's why, that's one of the reasons I'm keen on exploring more a theory of translation and mistranslation because there's quite a bit of stuff written about all these ideas and it's fascinating because you can apply those to so many things.
Pablo:
All of this is a sort of a world of fractured images of things that have been lost and misplaced and corrupted, reinterpreted, regurgitated, do you know what I mean? I don't think either of us. are in sort of virgin territory, you know, but that might really also be a generational thing, a sort of, a lack of faith in the blank sheet of paper with nothing on it. I mean, in a way, it's probably better that than to feel that the blank sheet of paper exists anyway.
TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)
Charm for a Swarm of Bees (A Mistranslation)
When the bees begin to sing, sculpt some earth
with your right hand, stick it under your right right foot, and say:
Here where I understand I will stake my claim.
Listen to the gland speak, lord of us all:
Mightier than Alice, mightier than Mike,
The master of every man's mother. Tongued.
When the bees begin to swim, eat some sand, use your palm,
Scatter it over then, like a soft clout, and say say:
Stay caput on this spot, proud sisters with arms!
Never turn wild wild and take woods.
What is good for you is God for me,
as all men are nude and tanned.
Leo:
Talking about the masks idea, I was thinking of, because you've been using masks quite a bit, I realise, in some of the performances. And I wonder why, why, why the use of masks and why some of those masks are, are quite ironic or humorous or, again, really fun or, why the use of masks?
Pablo:
I love pantomime evil. I just love it. I love a cruelty that is absurd and meanness with a kind of lightning flash behind it. I think there's a kind of hysterical, in the Freudian sense, element to it, which touches something in me that is real. I don't know.
Leo:
And also like there's this sociological sort of aspect of it. I remember that mask that you put on Rosalie.
Pablo:
The witch's mask?
Leo:
The witch's mask. And then she was performing, she was an estate agent. And now, recently, every time I look at an estate agent, there's this sense of...
Pablo:
Evil?
Leo:
Yes! Yeah, that's the sociological element as well.
Pablo:
It was true truth.
Leo:
So not only distorted truth. Yeah, perhaps I was thinking, in my case, of more like a conceptual idea, like masking things, or pretending to be a sonneteer.
Pablo:
Well, but I think this sort of shift in form is a sort of mask activity with you.
Leo:
Yeah, even the haikus, because I was thinking, I was, I remember back then I was reading lots of anthologies of Japanese poetry and Chinese poetry and, and sort of trying to get into that kind of...
Pablo:
But, ultimately, it's a world that, at some point, becomes a great vehicle for your ideas, and then begins to feel like it's constraining you. And then you push against it. I think. You sort of struggle to integrate and make the form yours at first, and then you get into it with practice, and then after a while it flows unbelievably naturally, and you've fully integrated it. And then you get frustrated by its constraints. You start to feel its artificiality on you: there is no reason for the sonnet to be like this and for it to stop you talking about things in a different way.
Leo:
And with the haikus I felt, because there was no end, I knew that I could write many haikus. Once you start writing so many haikus you know how to write haikus. So, by the end it was, well, it will be a year, so I had to kind of put an end to the exercise.
TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)
I live here among
luminous shapes, my shoes, cap,
an old telescope.
Late last night in bed,
you asked me to embrace you.
I simply obeyed.
With your words, nothing,
even on this day, will change.
You're made of rust.
Martin:
Leo, is there contrapposto in your poetry? Because it feels like, when I read it, you are interested in the weight of the body?
Leo:
Yeah, that's really interesting. I never thought of that in, in my own poetry, but yeah, perhaps there are certainly some poems that I can think of where the body is very much present and movement.
And my second poetry collection in Spanish, Mar De Noche, the sea at night, all the poems are about water and swimming and me, most of them, me swimming in different waters. In swimming pools, or in the sea. And there's a lot of movement and the body in different positions, and the body swimming, but also coming out of the sea, and descriptions of the, not only the, the human body, but the body of water.
Pablo:
You also tend to like, for example, there's a lot of butterflies and flying insects in your poetry. So, things do move around and flit around and have lots of S curves and C scrolls through them. There's also a kind of... I think one of the reasons why you like haikus and sonnets so much, I think is because, well, correct me if I'm wrong, it's because you like there to be a sort of turn halfway through or towards the end. Where something that starts off solidly, in the final two couplets flits around. And so that there's a kind of flick of the wrist or a change of view where suddenly the reality has another reality. There's an ‘although...’ to it.
Leo
In the sonnet. Yeah, that works. Yeah, but also I was, I'm just thinking more, I've been teaching last year and the year before concrete poetry and visual poetry and how poetry can move on a page. And teaching students about Latin American visual poetry and concrete poetry. And it moves. You can see movement in, visually, you can see the shape of things. In fact, I included some visual poems in my collection, some in the shape of Latin America or triptychs in the shape of paintings. I find it quite liberating because it's so not the way that most poets use the page. They’re scared of exploring movement in that way, because I don't know, perhaps they see it as something not very serious or something that you teach at primary school or the visual poem, but yet there's so much.
And thinking of contrapposto in my poetry, I'm just thinking of perhaps a specific poem that...
Pablo:
I think, for example, the one of your grandfather in Liverpool has a real, a kind of moment of, you know, fagginess where suddenly the poem just goes off into a very queer tangent and ends in a very contrapposto way. It doesn't end with penis in butthole. It doesn't end in a punch-up in the pub and a murder and then police and suicide, which is the way most, you know, early 20th century poems about homosexuality end. And in a way, like actually, it ends with a sort of flight of geese or whatever over the water. There's a sort of delicacy to it.
Leo:
I see it in that, the contrapposto, or the counterpoint, in that poem. There is this kind of public space, outdoors, outdoor space where it's a heteronormative depiction: the grandfather outside at the port, walking through Liverpool, being a man, a heterosexual man, and then the private space in the hotel when he meets the sailor. The private spaces are the space, the queer spaces.
Pablo:
But also, there is a sort of formal contrapposto because the poem really is two thirds about your grandfather, the sea captain. And actually, the main protagonist at the end is the guy that he had an affair with, in the hotel.
Leo:
The Scottish sailor.
Pablo:
It flips around in a nice, contrapposto type way.
One thing that I think is an interesting thing about contrapposto as a physical activity, and I think it, and it actually plays out in your poetry, or in the poems you've written so far, is that it's not a pose that you can maintain for that long.
In other words, when you've put all of your weight onto one hip, instinctively, you want to liberate that and to put it onto the other one. Or to take the weight off one leg and to move it onto the other. And that sort of flitting around is, I think, a kind of intrinsic modus operandi for certain queer practitioners. Maintain a pose for long, and then you sort of move away from it.
Leo:
I was thinking about in the new collection, that will be coming out next year, one of the poems is a crown of sonnets. It's called The Crown of the Virgin.
A crown of sonnets is an interconnected sequence of sonnets. And the last line of a sonnet is the same line of the next sonnet. So, it's almost like you're weaving through the story. I mean, the story is quite complex. In The Crown of the Virgin, I talk about religion, Catholicism, my mother, her illness, some queer elements in me going to church and some experiences that I had, but because you have to, each sonnet should be telling something slightly different. There is this main theme and then you enter in through different places. So, in a way it's a little bit like contrapposto, like trying to move, change positions constantly.
TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)
Riddle 45.
A month hating songs – wolfed words!
It all seemed like a weird fish – a worm
Should I swallow it? I am grief in the dark,
the thongs of a man, his pants, a glory hole.
His is a face of strength. Such thief! Be my guest
but wiser and swallow all my words.
Martin:
Thank you, Pablo and Leo, for this conversation and for inviting us into your home. If you'd like to give us any feedback, drop us an email on info@rosechoreographicschool.com.
This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production. It's hosted by me, Martin Hargreaves, produced and edited by Hester Cant, co-curated with Emma McCormick-Goodheart, and the assistant producer is Izzy Galbraith.
Thank you for listening. Goodbye.
Bibliography