Rocío Ágreda Piérola - Think philosophy—Wittgenstein, Derrida, or Merleau-Ponty—rendered via poetry, borne along by elements of surrealism, dream-journaling, and ecstatic communion. “I’m an illiterate man” who is “going to learn to write” to “cure myself of you” by “spitting out a book.”

 

Rocío Ágreda Piérola, Horses Drawn with Blue

Chalk, Trans. by Jessica Sequeira, Ugly

Duckling Presse, 2021

The work of the philosopher-poet Rocío Ágreda Piérola is full of ghostly traces, smudged lines from the past turned with care into new forms through references to writers like Héctor Viel Temperley and Dante, rewritings of Biblical verses, redraftings of personal memory, and forays into history with the Spanish conquistadors. In Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk, Ágreda Piérola’s sensuous language is populated by animals (hyenas, wolves, birds, cats, shoals of fish), parts of the body (the tongue, the nervous system), and the physical stuff of childhood (those horses drawn with blue chalk, erased from the wall yet forever archived in memory, to be drawn and redrawn). The questions here of how to create meaning from solitude and silence do not rely on any facile premade identities or autobiographical intimacies, but seek constantly to unsettle the known, challenging given truths to forge a meaningful communication.

Thinking always leads to madness, according to Maurice Blanchot. Poetic writing could be the trace of that madness, at least the writing of Rocío Ágreda Piérola. She speaks in a language unknown even to herself, for it is the clear, strange language of the illiterate who conceals and spits her vision through her voice of night. She might take as her own the words of the mysterious poet Héctor Viel Temperley: "I meet with my poetry when I don't know how to write it.” Opening Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk, we witness the radiance of this meeting, swimming through her house of water. - Stéphane Chaumet

Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk, by Bolivian poet Rocío Ágreda Piérola as translated by Jessica Sequeira in a well-fashioned bilingual edition from Ugly Duckling Presse, challenges and frustrates for all the best reasons. Think philosophy—Wittgenstein, Derrida, or Merleau-Ponty—rendered via poetry, borne along by elements of surrealism, dream-journaling, and ecstatic communion. Ágreda Piérola uses language (“despotic words,”18) to subvert, interrogate and refute language itself—her work exhilarates in its daring. When language as a tool cannot define or defend itself, Ágreda Piérola reduces words to “delirious fragments” (3), finds language in silence and in illiteracy, attempts to make isometric the event experienced with the event recounted (or possibly foretold). Heady stuff, which she manages with aplomb. Sequeira's translation is more than up to the challenge (no easy feat!), and her notes are also very helpful.

Ágreda Piérola focuses on the temporality of language, on time's passage between the start and ending of any utterance or writing. In so doing, she erases the illusion of language's fixed points in time, of the seeming permanence of text through time. “Maybe if I could at least lend a hand to time,” she writes (1); “We'll always be late or too early never on time”(10); “Yet what matters isn't arrival but the journey, to weave, knit time or unknit it” (4). Hence the title image, that of horses drawn with blue chalk on the walls of her childhood street, gone when she returns in adulthood (6). The symbol existed once, and now does not. And language may not be enough to preserve meaning, it may be an “amnesiac goddess” (8). How then can we can resist its siren call (Ágreda Piérola refers to the Sirens several times)?

“Our religion has been silence” (10) is Ágreda Piérola's first response. She insists on the vital sanctity of “ precious solitude” (page 4): “I plow this desert. I cultivate the onions of silence” (page 2). She summons allies, with quotes from Maurice Blanchot, Franz Wright, and Héctor Viel Temperley. Like them, Ágreda Piérola offers a way forward—silence as a cure, not a calamity. She aims to “unwork” language to re-create time, to yield “a secret movement / an unknown music” (18), to “cultivate a form of speaking that isn't collapse” (13). She yearns for reconstruction: “...from the depth of language a certain intelligence speaks […] Somehow I must make even language arrive” (4).

Ultimately, the goal is to make a language as it might have been in the very beginning, completely limpid. “It's as if my language were a material that molded itself perfectly to my thought, with no tension, no need for agony” (1). Her effort reminds me of, among others, Duchamp's work, that of Ribemont-Dessaignes, Tzara and other Dadaists, of Ionescu and Robbe-Grillet—breaking into the internal workings of meaning to repair and transcend it. Joyceans are likely to enjoy Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk, perhaps aficionados of Anthony Braxton or The Art Ensemble of Chicago may as well.

Most impressive of all, Ágreda Piérola delves into paradox and phenomenology without being either glib or sententious. Indeed, she maintains a sense of play throughout, with sly, tantalizing references to (among others) Dante, E.T.A. Hoffmann, the Russian actress Margarita Terekhova, Spinoza, perhaps Ingeborg Bachmann. We should all be grateful that Ugly Duckling Presse published Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk, and hope that Ágreda Piérola continues to gain a wider audience among Anglophones (with Sequeiros as translator and guide). As the poet says in the translator's words (4):“the absence you've imposed on me is priceless, my love. How will I repay you?” - Daniel A. Rabuzzi

https://www.overheardlit.com/post/rabuzzi-review

The prose poem that opens Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk, “Sunlight Will Win,” reads like an invocation to the book’s themes. Openly unreliable, the narrator states about the story he is going to tell, “It was dictated to me, or maybe I’m inventing it right now. . . This isn’t completely true.” “I’m in a hospital. . . I have no inner world.” The narrator’s uncertainty regarding what is truthful, we are assured, is not an evasion or due his inability to articulate his thoughts: “It’s as if my language were a material that molded itself perfectly to my thought.” And yet, “I’m not happy about this way of describing. It’s too imprecise.” “I’m an illiterate man” who is “going to learn to write” to “cure myself of you” by “spit[ting] out a book.”

If this is the book, the spit consists of time, solitude, and silence, and the ambiguous malleability of language. Just as a word’s semantic content changes over time, what happens over time as a cultural practice can change too:

within that silence I build my house I sharpen my pencils

and brush my hair

within that house I bless the light and its caress

within that house I laugh like a madwoman

I pick out my dress my century and my country

at the exact level of my error

within that house I undo and outdo myself

I convince myself it’s been the only way century after century

until now

(from “Autumn Stabs Us from Its Pages”)

It’s that “until now” the poem builds toward, transforming the words into a poem. Every verb represents a self-chosen and self-building act—the uncertainty and incoherence of the book’s beginning have been channeled through and transformed by the discipline of gaining literacies of the self, culture, and communication into “a form of speaking that isn’t collapse, / a serpent’s language to save me / when I plummet.”

Jessica Sequira’s translation is, as usual, lucid, with rhythms that match English’s natural patterns.

- https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/2022/03/11/ten-books-under-100-pages/

Translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira, Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk (42 pages; Ugly Duckling Presse) is Bolivian poet Rocío Ágreda Piérola’s first English publication, a bilingual presentation of poems from her 2017 chapbook, Detritus, and prose fragments from her working manuscript Quetiapine 400mg. In her introduction, Sequeira aligns the collection with the work of Argentine poets such as Hugo Mujica and Héctor Viel Temperley, situating Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk at the interstice of “carnality, communion and the word.”

The opening excerpts from Ágreda Piérola’s manuscript make a bid for fragmentation as a means of “reconstructing and vanquishing [time],” setting the tone for the collection’s halting exploration of what Sequeira describes as the written word’s “poetic abyss.” “Somehow I must make even language arrive,” the poet writes. The prose segments and proceeding ten poems in Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk address this imperative. In Ágreda Piérola’s words: “I go yellow/I confront no answer.”

Sequeira accurately describes Ágreda Piérola’s poetic project as an “unworking” of language, an “un-inhabiting” made manifest in different forms of lyrical absences (“empty spaces, temples, deserts and wastelands, somewhere between ruins and new worlds”). The work appears to emerge from the negative space “between an event and the way it’s narrated,” a sense bolstered by Ágreda Piérola’s greater refusal of language as an instrument of order or sense-making (“a wasteland of symbols”).

I’ve seen despotic worlds

leading armies

putting out fires

I’ve seen silences

ghosts of dentures

[…]

an unknown music

As she plainly states, “To see what I want it’s necessary/to not look to leave things boiling jumbled as possibility.” The absences afforded in fragmentation seem to allow for this sort of jumbling, making space for what Ágreda Piérola calls the “expansive flocks of being.”

silence is a minefield with mute children running

as an imprecise heart beats

Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk imagines language as an “unlimited spectrum of micro-visions,” one whose fragments or possibilities belong to infinite terms—possibilities sustained, too, in the collection’s bifurcated form (you turn the book upside down to read the other language). This ambiguation of language lends well to the “un-inhabiting” she’s after: “I disorder my habits,” she writes, “I twist my tongue out of tune.” - Chiara Bercu

https://www.zyzzyva.org/2022/01/18/horses-drawn-with-blue-chalk-by-rocio-agreda-pierola-language-as-an-unlimited-spectrum/

“Literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.” —Franz Wright

It doesn’t happen in any place. It’s not a story. I don’t know what it is. It was dictated to me, or maybe I’m inventing it right now. I’m in a hospital, everything is white disinfection and all I remember is a horse’s neigh. I give thanks that it’s the only thing that fills my memory, save for the harmless structure of my language.

I don’t know what language I speak, but I feel I’m fluent in it, as one is fluent in a vision that spans an unlimited spectrum of microvisions. Let me explain myself. It’s as if my language were a material that molded itself perfectly to my thought, with no tension, no need for agony. I can speak exactly what I think, as fast as I want to say it, if I do want to say it. I don’t remember a thing, and think that just by having the potential ability for speech, I must somehow possess the keys to hell. If I have to create metaphors, all that’s needed is to open my mouth.

*

I must not be a coward.

I need to tell something first. The boy I met on the way to the cemetery was called Xllul. He was brown, he had big eyes and a small, hawk nose. He had cold hands and a trickster’s eyes. I’m not happy about this way of describing. It’s too imprecise, it adds no extra dimension to my tale. Maybe if I could at least lend a hand to time. You are Xllul. You are time. You are the first and last little boy I met and will meet, I’ve evoked you in all others. This isn’t completely true. It is not.

The problem is that I have no inner world, or it’s stuck. How poor of spirit I have been, and am. Suffering shrinks one. And how.

*

And this is how I could continue the tale, if only breathing had given me something to tell. I’ve had no friends, this time hasn’t left me a thing. I owe and owe and owe. I’m an illiterate man. My sentimental education has tyrannized the time. I’m out of time. I plow this desert. I cultivate the onions of silence. The world is one more appendix. I’ll surrender these pages to the fire. I won’t live long. I have neither faith nor desire. I don’t know the true blaze, from myself I hoped to extract a spurious shine, a tinsel of perishable tendernesses brief but alluring as fraud.

*

(I won’t give myself easily. I have to forget you. I’ll cross the ocean, will take an exit every time I drive down the highway. I refuse to look at this spectacle of dinosaurs anymore, this circus of the subconscious.

I’m a very shy man, I won’t show you my face. Make no mistake. I must remove everything and cure myself of your vacuum. Great, immense, monstrous and at the same time nothing, a few vulgar words and expectations. This is how a universe collapses. Blue, nebulous, an impossible universe. The last, and now nothing. Go on and break, I crush you against the rocks like a mollusk, all mouth and apologies, all excuses and I squeeze just one blue chlorophyll drop from you, the blood of greed.)

*

I’ve just taken communion and am in ecstasy. I’m beyond myself. I’ve just taken communion and balance outside myself. I don’t want. I don’t want. Heart, arrhythmic, come, stop despite everything. Come. Overcome everything and come, in pursuit of something, a deserted word. Quench my thirst; early on this morning the birds chirp and peck at rice. Before the deluge, come, to contain my ecstasy. Come. I won’t wake. I won’t wake. I won’t wake. Go, it’s late and I’m dead.

Malina Bach

It seems that we knew something about art when we felt the meaning of the word “solitude.”

Maurice Blanchot

*

I hug a tree. My friends are drunk, scattered by cold. Now I’m going to learn to write. I’ll copy out a story for you and transform it as it happens. I’ll see colors that I’m unable to see. I’ll paint a desert for you. I’ll tell you an atrocious story one day, to heal. To cure myself of you I must spit out a book. A beautiful book and my saliva will be the star with five points . . . I’ll write with light and life. And a little rage. I’ll tell you an atrocious story in the most gorgeous way. A redheaded woman. She devoured my heart like a bird of prey. She flew through airs and in the middle of her siren song, I saw the ugliness smooth on her beautiful face.

*

To write about the book that Xllul wanted to search for. To make him a character. Sehnsucht: to start from an error. To write about such a Structured topic, about characters. A woman obsessed with the sign and with H. The recurring dreams are Sehnsucht, the real episodes. To take care of a junkie. In hindsight. Coppelius. Defenestration. A female writer who doesn’t write. A blind poet. To investigate: the political?, poetry or madness. Investigative style. Delirious fragments.

*

I don’t have time. I must fragment it with the aim of reconstructing and vanquishing it. I’ve got twenty years to my name sir, and a woman like a song. Of sirens. I have to fragment time to reconstruct it down to its smallest parts, lapse, duration, experience, breath. My life is spent on this, and my verses. What must I do now. I have no order assimilated, my thought runs in pursuit of nineteen different directions at least. I possess a certain rhythm, rhythm has given me harmony. I must lie to you. My country is unreason. Dionysian pessimism. Love, because I must lie to you, I write. So that you return. So that you’ve never left. Language is a danger to temporality. The tragic situation in which the latest events have submerged me makes me laugh. I don’t forget, I don’t forget you, the habit of loving and taking care of a stranger. I’ll never hurt from the time lost. But at a certain age, one must be a little more sparing with time, if one wishes to do something with it. Precious solitude, the absence you’ve imposed on me is priceless, my love. How will I repay you?

*

Hector Viel I read you day and night with my two eyes with my two hands.

My nature: to be born at 33.

All I must do is channel my novel, I have time, I have it, I have it. I have time. I remember, I hear attentively, from the depths of language, a certain intelligence speaks. A certain meaning, a certain order that I’ve lost. I must listen, write, breathe, keep breathing, assimilate myself in my hearing to that murky depth, from which the chaos speaks that isn’t me. I am not what happens, so then what am I. Am I the system? I must begin again, I must breathe, I must write and give an account of something. That there’s nothing behind this mask? It might be a shortcut. But what matters isn’t arrival but the journey, to weave, knit time or unknit it. Somehow one arrives. Somehow I must make even language arrive. There are zones in it that repel me. Not to speak of certain things? One must speak of them, then. Precisely of that which one cannot speak. That’s the only thing that interests me. To speak. Of what one cannot. - Sunlight Will Win       https://www.arkint.org/roco-greda-pirola

Rocío Ágreda Piérola (Cochabamba, 1981) studied philosophy and literature. Her work has appeared in anthologies in Peru and Chile, and she has collaborated with the Bolivian publishing projects “Género aburrido” and “Lenguanegra.” In 2017 she published the poetry collection Detritus (Maki_Naria), and is currently working on a manuscript called Quetiapina 400mg.