Miyó Vestrini - Sometimes called the poet of “militant death” or the Venezuelan Sylvia Plath, Vestrini’s work braids political and confessional registers to address “a fatal disappointment with the world at large”

Miyó Vestrini, Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini, Ed. by Faride Mereb and trans. by Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig,


GRENADE IN MOUTH: SOME POEMS OF MIYÓ VESTRINI introduces to Anglophone readers the work of one of the vanguard voices of Venezuelan poetry with texts that cover three decades: from the year 1960 to 1990. Critics have called Miyó Vestrini the poet of "militant death." Vestrini is known, too, as the Sylvia Plath of Venezuela, but if she is a Plath, we think she is one who would have set Ted Hughes on fire. Her poems are not soft or brooding laments. They are bricks hurled at empires, ex-lovers, and any saccharine-laced lie that parades itself as the only available truth.




Being a poet involves the hope that someone is going to listen. Suicide refuses this hope. It is an act that says, “I couldn’t get anyone to listen, so I’m done living.” In other words, “I can’t be a poet anymore.”
Studying authors who have killed themselves confronts us with not only the rage and loneliness that often make up their writings but also with a world where we can’t think the future of writing without the destruction of life. Authors who’ve killed themselves suggest that writing and life — activities that once engaged hope of an audience — were futile. And a reader needs to find some way forward that the author didn’t. This gap between the reader and the author can feel unbridgeable. Put another way, it is a big job to translate and realize a book whose meaning will partially hinge on non-existence. Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini (Kenning Editions, 2019) is one such book. The collaborative efforts of poet and essayist Anne Boyer and archivist and liturgical poet Cassandra Gillig, the book’s translators, along with the editors Faride Mereb and Elisa Maggi, demonstrate courage in the context of suicide and suicidal fantasy. And their collection conveys a deep love for Vestrini and her voice.
Miyó Vestrini was born in France in 1938 and moved to Venezuela when she was nine.
At the helm of Venezuelan culture early on, Vestrini became an accomplished journalist and participated in the avant-garde poetry group Apocalipsis (Apocalypse) in Maracaibo in the 1960s and, in the 1970s, was part of the informal bohemian La República del Este (The Republic of the East, referring to the east of Caracas). Grenade in Mouth is the first full-length English-language translation of her writing. It is a monolingual volume except for a few images of Vestrini’s writing in Spanish, and it’s divided into two sections: “You Would Not Catch Me Alive” and “It’s a Good Machine” (a translation of Es una buena maquina, an artbook edition of Vestrini’s writing edited and published by Mereb at Letra Muerta). The translators describe Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems as an “imagined book,” one the poet did not put together. In 1991, Vestrini killed herself.
The concept for the collection reflects the fantasies of annihilation and disappearance explored in the writing. Many of Vestrini’s poems show how these fantasies are linked to powerful transformations in scale. In “One Day of the Week II,” the poet touches her “little thing,” but her clit must be “tidy with so much iodine soap/ washed/ and re-washed thoroughly./ An island that smells of iodine.” The smallness of a body part (“little thing”) transforms into something much larger that is still small and alone: an island. At the end of the poem, the poet sucks her thumb. What can she do when she is such a little island? Write a poem? Poems are too little, too. That’s why we need grenades, it would seem. We need something real, in any case. Some way of being less vulnerable.
In the same poem, we get this remarkable sentence: “I wonder if human rights really/ are an ideology.” We can imagine the leftist discourse about human rights, one Vestrini was likely engaged in over long, energetic conversations with other members of the cultural vanguard at bars in Caracas. And we can also imagine the gap between that big talk and a child’s need to be free of extreme control over her body, a need that can get lost in the great masculine rhetorics of ideology. I am reminded of Amiri Baraka’s desire for a poem to be a gun, for a poem to be something powerful with real, lasting effects, for a poem to be able to thoroughly address pain that cannot be heard. I think Vestrini and Baraka would have had a lot to talk about.
Disgust with the girl-child’s body and blame for her dirtiness are themes Vestrini returns to. I interpret this as a concern with the way children and women (and all marginalized and oppressed peoples) come to be symbols of neediness and vulnerability: the things we cannot control, what we learn to hate about ourselves and others. In the poem “Don’t Come Back Here Anymore,” we find the poet trying to enjoy and protect herself but another voice insists on shame.
I like the room.
The sun trades places with
the twilight. I try not to clear
my throat. I keep still.
I think of a
ram with huge
horns, walking
on a Persian carpet.
You are full of it.
Understand?
Full of gross things. One after another.
Your mother, for example.
And your father. What happened?
The poet tries not to clear her throat. She thinks of the ram with big horns — it is powerful — but then someone tells her how gross she is, making all this speaking and the fantasy of presence obsolete. The poem ends with the command: “Don’t come back!” It is an ambiguous address; it’s not clear who’s speaking or who is being spoken to. The poet both resists and obeys.
In the poem “Last Will and Testament,” Vestrini threatens to not come back and then she comes back with a vengeance, to write from the dead.
When dead,
I made the list.
The poem emerges from the fantastical space of asking the reader to imagine the poet was dead when she was writing. I am reminded again of Baraka. The titles of his first two books, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note . . . . [ellipses included] and The Dead Lecturer, ask us to imagine that the poet can only write after they’re dead, or after they’ve killed someone who keeps them from writing. Vestrini’s “Last Will and Testament” feels like a catalogue of all that was good but just wasn’t good enough, the kind of thing that threatens to destroy even as it provides pleasure: “The leg of lamb was so tasty/ that they barely heard me.”
But what a poet must remember in order to keep living is how much they enjoy hearing and being heard. Poets love voice, music, and the time of a poem unfolding, all of which are part of the pleasure of reading Vestrini. A reader can hear the music she must have loved, too, in Boyer and Gillig’s English-language translations. The poem “The Good Reasons” begins:
As if there were still time for awkwardness,
and adolescence,
I think about Venice,
because of the blinds that go up and down
a sound like no other.
We hear the pleasure of music and language. The alliteration and assonance of “awkwardness” and “adolescence” are puncutated the nearly rhyming “Venice.” And Vestrini brings our attention to sound when she writes of the blinds, “a sound like no other,” which also returns her reader to the sound of the poet and her poem.
“The Good Reasons” continues:
More than the nauseating rain,
I am shaken by things I remember,
shit things.
In the changing season,
when the mist retreats from north to south,
my relatives die in the distance
coagulated in a clay cup.
With nostalgia’s grim privilege
I know for sure
that outside the big cities
nothing but the sea is bearable.
Despite what Vestrini writes, there is more than the sea that’s bearable, and the poem says so. Boyer and Gillig are tuned to this: how small yet significant experiences and choices can make life passable. I love the onomatopoetic “coagulated” in a difficult but beautiful phrase that holds the dead “in a clay cup.”
At the time Vestrini was writing, Venezuela was a rich country and major institutions supported cultural life. This is an important context for thinking about her world and work. She and her friends were at the heart of significant intellectual and literary experimentation, which was being shared and shaped across national and linguistic borders. And translation was a sustaining activity. In a kind of epigraph to the book, we find images of the December 1986 issue of Criticarte. The first image displays an interview with Julieta Sucre and Juan Luis Delmont-Mauri, Spanish-language translators of Jacques Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Boyer and Gillig translate some of the opening paragraphs to the interview and their translation conveys the urgency of translation: “La civilización descansa sobre la traducción” (“Civilization rests on translation”) and, as Vestrini writes later in the article, “debemos admitir que toda civilización depende de sus traducciones” (“we must admit that all of civilization depends on translation”). I wish Boyer and Gillig had translated all of it. Vestrini’s journalism provides an important context for thinking about translation, fear, love, gender, pleasure, and the experience of never having been listened to. (For the complete article in Spanish, visit Letra Muerta: https://letramuertaed.com/miyotraduccion/) Moreover, her writing cues readers to Latin American avant-garde exchange with psychoanalytic theories of language and translation.
Vestrini writes about the different ways of translating the English I Want into Spanish. “Y es ingenuous pensar que I Want significa Yo quiero, cuando en realidad es Yo carezco” (“And it is naïve to think that I Want means Yo quiero, when in reality it’s Yo carezco”). To say Yo carezco is to say something closer to I lack (from the verb carecer, which is connected to lacking, being devoid of, and scarcity) than it is to say who you love or to describe something you want. So, when we are in the terrain of lack and Lacan, we can have some fun as Vestrini goes on to do by citing Lacan’s puns that connect language to gender and power. One that she mentions is “je persevére” and “je pére-sevére,” where the pleasure is in persevering as or against a severe father-figure.
Without dates or a bibliography, and only a few notes on the translator’s choices, Grenade in Mouth can feel outside of time and space with little to land on for new readers of mid-to-late twentieth century Venezuelan writing. But the book asks readers to consider the imaginative possibility that this book will never come into being, that it “remains eternally unwritten and unread.” I believe the vision of the non-existent book is part of the protective rite the translators invoke at the end of their introduction. “Of course you might feel some damage. Of course you must stay grounded, keep your feet on the floor. You must be careful, but if you are, you will feel the charge of her work without falling prey to its dangers.” The ground I found is the hope of translation. We can translate the charge of Vestrini’s writing into something other than loss. In the spirit of protection, Grenade in Mouth can also warn us against giving ourselves over too fully to the damage we have sustained. This translation helps mark the murderous, dangerous rage that makes some of our best writers and artists, and it offers the hope that we can translate the grenades in our mouths. In this metaphor, grenades are what have gotten inside us, destroyed our voices, and killed some of us over and over again.
It may be that when poets write as the dead, we are also writing as the children we were when we were first taught that dependence was shameful, when our openness and neediness began to transform into hatred. Or in punk terms: we might be writing as the children we were when we first murdered by society and our parents. It’s a view Kathy Acker writes about in Great Expectations when she explores how childhood is plagiarized and stolen. One thing we can do to steal our lives back is to figure out how to stay writers in midst of all the murder, internal and external.
On the facing page to “Last Will and Testament,” there is a photograph of Vestrini and her friend “La Negra” (Elisa Maggi), to whom the book is dedicated. Miyó and La Negra are laughing, their hands on a bottle, perhaps trying to uncork it or keep it from exploding, dishes in a rack behind them. The picture invites us into a wonderfully cramped space, a snug fit in all these hands, caught doing something. It is easy to see the joy in their faces, the way these women fill the space, and I’m loving their big 1970s eyeware. They would have been looking through those glasses at one another and their worlds, thinking and feeling together: best friends. So we can start to imagine the wound Miyó leaves when she kills herself, a wound not unlike the one Boyer, Gillig, Mareb, and Maggi invite us to hear when they translate Vestrini’s writing for audiences who are courageous enough to listen.
* Thanks to Guillermo Parra and Judah Rubin for their help in thinking about and reading this book.
Anna Vitale
http://www.full-stop.net/2019/09/24/reviews/anna-vitale/grenade-in-mouth-some-poems-of-miyo-vestrini-miyo-vestrini/


Even in her most cheerful moments, the Venezuelan poet Miyó Vestrini never stopped taking death seriously — or thinking about it. Translated by Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig and edited by Faride Mereb, Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini is the first full-length collection of Vestrini’s texts available in English. It spans three decades of her work, from the 1960s through the 1990s, and includes previously unpublished texts from the posthumous collection Es una buena máquina (It’s a Good Machine, Letra Muerta). The French-born Vestrini emigrated to Venezuela at the age of nine. At 18, she joined the Venezuelan avant-garde group Apocalipsis (Apocalypse). She later became a member of several Venezuela-based experimental literary groups such as 40 Grados Bajo la Sombra (40 degrees in the Shade), El Techo de La Ballena (The Ceiling of the Whale), and La Republica del Este (The Republic of the East).
For Vestrini, the refusal to compromise or accept tyrannical notions of truth was as much a part of her process as her meditations on death. In her writings, death and poetry have their own dark choreography that doesn’t shy away from affirming the stark contradictions at its core — exercises in morbidity also result in the resurrection of a new will to live, in a counter-suicidal impulse, even if it’s only a temporary one. These are whimsical poems that reveal the most familiar domestic settings as designed for eternal sleep. In such spaces, joy and tenderness are to be resisted and death is to be welcomed and carried out as daily routine. Through her poetry she shows us how to die in the most mundane of circumstances by disposing of our certainties; she herself might be wary of life’s little pleasures, but nevertheless indulges in them:

What did you do today?
I read the newspaper and didn’t recognize any friends.
I defrosted my fridge so the beer would stay cool.
I took a bubble bath.
I dried my hair.
It doesn’t seem like you did much.
I do a lot and no one realizes.
I can see myself in the bottom of the pots.
and in the kitchen floor.

By foregrounding death and performing its liturgy, Vestrini seems to seek clarity of form and message in her poetry. She allows no room for cozy feelings or attachments and no space for empty metaphors or shallow formal experiments — when she refers to men as lizards “who open the covers/and enter./without fresh turmoil/without heat or melancholy/without casting a spell,” she conjures a vivid and unequivocal picture. Intimacies and comforts are peeled off to expose the universe to its bare bone, and replace it with hypercharged particles that exert the same force of gravity. Writing at a time when mental health professionals were quick to diagnose any desire for death as unhealthy, Vestrini confronts their institutional authority, the dogma of their textbooks and therapies by positioning death as the raw material of poetry as opposed to reason for concern or treatment. In the process, even her own friends are recalled as having become “totally sad totally idiotic” as a result of the therapies they underwent. She might be willing to give life a chance or two, but only to justify death’s necessity: “Contempt of death/I’ll try it (…) /I hear myself cracking up/debating/smiling/breaking/moaning/And I never left a trace/other than these steps of infamy.”
It would be easy to dismiss Vestrini’s fierce poetry as pretentious cynicism, but warmth is still there; childhood memories may reflect a brutal reality, but they still provide a kind of comfort when loneliness creeps in. She strips off our habitual thinking and joins us through the extinction of our given life, only to eventually leave us naked and greedy for a final, yet never-ending performance in the circus of life and death:

For poetry, cursed and hated, there is always a day that follows: death. What can be taught from an atomic explosion but the agony of those most dispossessed and the infernal laugh of the idiot prophets? The fire is no surprise to the poets. The fire is part of those who, day by day, gamble their lives on the horror of solitude.

- M. Buna
https://hyperallergic.com/482383/grenade-in-mouth-some-poems-of-miyo-vestrini/

I’ve never read anything quite like the late Venezuelan writer Miyó Vestrini’s poems: they obsessively sing about death. They aren’t simply obsessed with individual mortality, but with the potential for radical nothingness at the heart of the social: anyone has the agency to remove themselves from the world of the living, leaving an absence that can’t be filled or reconciled. This selection of works from 1960 through 1990, Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini – edited by Faride Mereb and Elisa Maggi, and translated by Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig – is the first volume of Vestrini’s poetry to appear in English. She wrote in fragmentary, imagistic lines, mixing quotidian scenes with their negations: ‘I think about Venice, / because of the blinds that go up and down / a sound like no other. / More than the nauseating rain, I am shaken by things I remember, / shit things.’
Vestrini’s writing has a clarity and directness that cuts through metaphysical obscurity: death is not mystified or transcendent. Rather, the poems embrace death as an aspect of daily life: both a mundane fact that follows one into every situation (sometimes terribly, sometimes comically), and a secret weapon that one can only use once. For Vestrini, death does not only lord power over the individual, it can also be an exercise of power against a corrupt and patriarchal social order, as in ‘Brave Citizen’, which opens: ‘Give me, lord, / an angry death. / A death as offensive / as those I’ve offended.’ - Steven Zultanski

https://frieze.com/article/steven-zultanski-reviews-five-new-experimental-poetry-collections

Oh holy hell, this is good. These are texts (mostly poems) written by the Venezuelan poet, journalist, and screenwriter Miyó Vestrini between 1960 and 1990. I’ve slowed down my reading of Grenade in Mouth to maybe a line or two at a time as I want it to last as long as possible. I’m also skipping around a bit so that there will be poems I missed to discover later. I’m laying the ground for my next pass. Vestrini is amazing. How can she be so breezy and so intense? How can she sound like someone you know and nobody you’ve ever read? How can this be so much about her world and ours? Translators Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig, in their super sharp Introduction, say, “To translate Miyó Vestrini is like letting a deadly current pass through one’s body and hoping not to get hurt. To read Miyó Vestrini is much the same, and any introduction to her work must end with a warning: of course this is dangerous territory.” The work is, of course, as vital and energizing as it is deadly. It is wild and brilliant. Nobody should ask me to write another “What I’m Reading Now” column for a while because I will still be reading this. - Catherine Taylor, Tarpaulin Sky

…every bit as explosive as its title indicates. Translated collaboratively by poets Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig, this book offers a simultaneously morbid and hilarious selection of Vestrini’s poetry over the course of her career before she took her own life in 1991. As they write in their introduction, her work “contains regular, explicit challenges to the institutions of mental health” as when she writes “I find all my friends treated by psychoanalysts have become/ totally sad totally idiotic.” The opportunity to spend time in the company of Vestrini’s unsentimental and unexpected words is not to be missed. - Kathleen Rooney, Baltimore Sun

…direct, morbid, funny, mocking, truthful…original and unforgettable… - John Bradley, Rain Taxi

Three Poems
Poems
Miyó Vestrini | It’s a Good Machine