Rocío Cerón - both a book of poems and a performance action by the poet Rocío Cerón, who guides the reader on a hallucinatory, spiraling journey through image, language, Mexican history, and soundscapes

Rocío Cerón, Diorama, Trans. by Anna Rosenwong. Phoneme Media, 2014. 

rocioceron.blogspot.com/

DIORAMA is both a book of poems and a performance action by the poet Rocío Cerón, who  guides the reader on a hallucinatory, spiraling journey through image, language, Mexican history, and soundscapes. As unrelentingly tactile as it is unapologetically cerebral, Rocío Cerón’s new book asks that we relinquish control and submit to the poet’s brutal lyricism, and to a new kind of order imposed like a penumbra between us and the waking world. Cerón’s poems have been translated into English, Finnish, French, Swedish, and German.

The gift of Rocío Cerón’s Diorama is that of an experimental poetry of great means and power, a work beautifully brought into English by Anna Rosenwong who delivers it to us as it is “without check with original energy.”  In the second decade of the new century Rocío Cerón’s work feels to this reader as both the culmination of the century before us and the start of something new and equally vibrant: a performance work at the outset that is here translated on the page as a testimony to the force of poetry when it finds its own form and emerges fresh and new and like its original with no holds barred. —Jerome Rothenberg

The poetry of Rocío Cerón reaches a high degree of maturity in Diorama. A protean book, a rush withheld, a contemporary spiritual chant in that it not only probes how to reach unity but does so by exploring our historical era’s multiplicity of self-displays. Diorama will remain in the consciousness of its readers. —José Kozer

Diorama provides its reader with a camera obscura where their view is refracted—reader, view, and camera made miracle of language. This book expects everything of its reader. The pain and celebration of language, this brilliant book unfolds a horizon of freedom in the process of becoming: a certain faith in that margin of humanity. —Julio Ortega

Diorama lives and disintegrates in each of its listener, in the eyes and ears of its viewers, readers, listeners—a solid and ephemeral cluster that reminds itself once and again that everything is transitory. —Sergio Huidobro

Rocío Cerón’s Imperio serves as one of those extreme examples of making the poem into a place, a country, where all the dispersed fragments, syllables, and remains of an ineradicably violent hurricane are gathered. It’s a physical, concrete violence, of wars effectively freed on innumerable sets and places, that makes each letter of this book open like a perforation, like a wound. —Raúl Zurita

Judging from the selection of Latin American poets at the moribund mass-market bookstores, the poetry enthusiast from the United States reads the love poems of Neruda, a tad of his autochthonous deep imagism, the erotic and surreal poems of Paz—whose imagery has become standard, if not old-hat, among Mexican poets—and a smattering of others coexisting in expensive anthologies. It is harder to come by something like the stunning Baroque cascades in the imagery of a Lezama Lima. As always, one must rely on university or small presses for voices currently changing the appurtenances of a poetic tradition. Phoneme Media, of Los Angeles, have given us that opportunity with the publication of Diorama by Rocio Cerón, skillfully translated by Anna Rosenwong. Cerón is considered a major poet in Mexico, and her Diorama, divided in four demanding and experimental sections, surely marks a significant step in her development.

One must situate her within the generation of poets born in the 70´s from Mexico. It must have been traumatic being a young poet in a country where there was one cacique handing out cigars at the poetry circus: Octavio Paz. He practically invented what the contemporary Mexican poem should read like; he stamped grants, created prizes, edited the major anthologies and journals, and he pontificated from an affluent purlieu of the nation´s capital. Poets who opted to sweat it out in the boondocks weren´t read. Poets of a different tenor—even that purveyor of the vox populi, Jaime Sabines—never sat comfortably on an adjacent throne.   Thus, one speaks of a Post-Paz generation, of poets who came of age aesthetically shortly after his death in 1998, and who sought to wipe the slate clean. For these poets born in the early 70´s through the early 80´s, one should mention poets from the North who published books that, for the first time, brought the landscape of junkyards, border crossings, the language of Bukowski and Chandler, to readers from the capital. There was also a wonderful conflagration of poets who experimented in new ways, or began looking to voices that were not permitted a greater diffusion during the reign of Paz. One should regard Cerón as one of these new poets who writes in order to ¨be there in splendor.¨ In fact, one can argue that the contemporary female poets of Mexico, such as the Tijuana resident Amaranta Caballero, are currently writing the most innovative poetry.   For the past fifteen years, Cerón has been steadily publishing challenging and eclectic books that demand more and more of the poetry being written in Mexico. To a far greater degree than her peers, she explores new ways of incorporating music and visual art into the poem, and she forces the reader to re-examine his or her limited definition of the poem . For the North American poet who lives in an MFA culture plagued by the one page, Billy-Collinsesque -fire-cracker, this is something to emulate.

Yet for all its experimental or ¨immanent¨ and ¨stubbornly elusive¨ language as Rosenwong writes in her informative translator´s note, Cerón´s Diorama skillfully situates itself among longer poems from Latin America which use collage, kaleidoscopic experimentation and an all-observant eye to fly over the history and landscape of a country, people or epoch. Cerón´s new collection commences with the micro, ants foraging for candy in a room, and then opens up to the macro in wider thrusts, addressing a ¨Pan-Latin American¨ exploration of ¨Silenced sun on the Rio Grande or the Amazon,¨ South America and the harrowing legacy of the Guarani and ¨Columbus on his knees in Hispaniola: the blindness of deer and the cunning need to procure prey: Malinche, the first American Babel.¨

The Latin American poetic canon boasts of such a poem as Hay un pais en el mundo by Pedro Mir, wherein a Whitmanesque voice floats over his country ravaged by the sugar industry and the Monroe Doctrine, and in staccato bursts speaks of its vertical rivers and astounding archipelagos, and the fact that with so much land, the peasants still have none. Mir´s strongest moment occurs during a burst of jintanjafora— a sonically appealing glossolalia in print— in order to cry out against the thieves who plunder his Dominican Republic. Such literary devices seem tame in comparison to Cerón´s Diorama, wherein the reader encounters a Sonata Mandala to the Penumbra Bird and its pages that close the book with images and textures of language that veer wildly from the scientific to post-colonial critique. Diorama is a razorsharp assemblage that is quite unlike anything else in contemporary Mexican poetry.

Cerón continues to demand more and more from language and tradition, and continues to break new ground. Previous collections, such as Tiento (2010), incorporated music and image, and during readings of her work, she deftly incorporated music and video (something I was lucky enough to behold at the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles where Anna Rosenwong read her translation of Diorama). Cerón´s work will continue to dazzle and puzzle readers. In comparison to the caustic, conversational tone of such compatriot poets as Julian Herbert, or the exquisite, intellectual and stylized classicism of Jorge Ortega, her poetry offers the experimentalism that keeps language and tradition in suspense. - Anthony Seidman

Rocío Cerón was born in Mexico City in 1972. Her work is experimental, combining poetry with music, performance, and video. Her books of poetry include Basalto (2002), Imperio/Empire (2009, interdisciplinary bilingual edition), Tiento (Germany, 2011), and Diorama (2012). Her poems have been translated into English, Finnish, French, Swedish and German, and she has performed her work at venues in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States.

 from DIORAMA

LEFTOVERS

(NOODLES WITH SCALLIONS)

1. Gust (at the left side). 2. Tempest (over remains of noodles with sauce). 3.

Figure (piece of beef pushed aside). 4. Surface (lip stain on napkin). 5.

Container (bite left on plate). 6. Tapestry (cloud of balled-up breading).

Aleatory movement of the eye (or smiling at the ferryman

with no thought of money).

3.

Not what it seemed. Bird hidden while the body shines.

As close as that or having crossed the boundary.

Finest film, almost hair, not fur. —West Indies.

Minute space where two drops of sweat touch.

At the center of the back a mole. Meters.

Skin spot where tone and musculature survive.

Habit.

Birth of a mark or sun obtained in the open air. —Desert, before the

oceanic swell, desert.

On the shoulder /the wedding ring’s treacherous endgame/ contracture.

From there down to the rib’s horizon.
  

Left earlobe. Fleshy. Mole on the margin of the skin.

Mountain of shadows music and shindig.

The body shines. Metal and air on tip of tongue.

Presence of that which always cleaves the original surface.

Sieve. Basal rosette. Marks.

            What loom nape or lobe is the body spilled into weight and unmarked

form?

Not what it seemed. Map of thread to say “that swift-moving time where the

wolves hunt their prey.”

Get out of a tight spot. Nape or marks —Sang the man in the theater. Novitiate.

Landscape of stalactites and steps, time’s systemic circulation. Mother camping

on your chest. Cerebellum where the scream hides. Hamstrings. Stations to

decipher the limit.

Epidermis, fear is always epidermic.

Marks.

1.

(transformable object for positioning in repose)

Talismanic city inhabited by woman who unfolds her skin. Air through theashtreesbaobabsequoiasahuehuetes —Then throwing little stones in the waterwas perforating rice paper to knot the eyes. —Then stumbling blindly through the fog it burst into high-pitched noises. (It turned out that hordes of ducks were flinging themselves off a cliff.) Three-handled pot with anthropomorphic motifs. On the other side of the clay the motifs repeated: inhabited house fleeing birds red triangles in flight through celestial block: from this body to your body like building progress the future. Solar cult. Every morning (centuries/intonations/signal clasped to chest) a grammatical light guides the remains. To go. Leave this ritual practice to the dead alone.

5.

(black and white photograph. s/t. 1972.)

On leaving home /corner/ everything seems like so much. And so little.

Somewhat tepid: scab scars. Meteor and luminous sand. Hole in the wall

through which the measure is deduced. Cosmic gust. Next to the girl a man

points to a point: black petrel spying through the window. Fire opal or teasel.

Darkness in the middle of the amazonian canopy. Be there in splendor.

2, 4 and 6.

DIY —Decant the scenery, swap the figures, assembly. Then everything, or

almost everything, is warehousing, domain of inch and a half, pressure, pupil

that dilates centuries, simultaneity.

Fleeting, everything is fleeting.

Be there in splendor.

An introduction to the work of this artist who has written the most hallucinatory poems in today's poetry scene. She has achieved a relevant position by putting together what she calls "Galaxy Projects: Loads of poetry, body, sound and image."  Her work is a continuous dialogue with other artists working in different media like video and music.  Her ability to interpret is one of her most notorious qualities. She has worked in tandem with artists like Bishop, Enrico Chapela, Nomada, Natalia Perez Turner, Raul Calderon Gordillo, Friede Dähn  and Benjamin Capps, et al.  Her work has been showcased at Carlos Chavez hall in the National Auntomous University of Mexico and the Pompidou Center in Paris.