#argel corpus

[afteryoupoems]

Mortal* by Argel Corpus

For Ivy Alvarez

Our first meeting, the only one, was a total success. Naturally, we exchanged books. Yours has a special place in my bookshelf: Between Auden’s and Plath’s Collected Poems. Mine? I can only hope it found a public place in your private room. A place where the sun warms its way in.  

In my memory, our encounter seems to have taken place decades ago, London is linked to your book. Is this a happy coincidence? Certainly. Every line of yours is now a street, a part of a city, which my memory re-writes according to your design.

Thus life and the city, memory and poetry live as a cosmos, celebrating words as stars and space as rhythm.

*Name of a book by Ivy Alvarez

[afteryoupoems]

Curtain by Maleea Acker

para Argel Corpus, recordando mirando al sur desde San Pedro, Jalisco 

The wind knocks the lakeside tansy and sorrel down. We need not fall apart to feel the feeling. 

The stems rise again in the intake between gusts. Maybe we have the blue cloak of translation, a dog 

shepherding our sounds. Maybe someone plays for us while we sprawl 

on a stone floor in night’s mute. Maybe it is our song, named the name we could have been 

had the poles been reversed, the losers the victorious, the pen the page. Under the scroll 

of water the hyacinths rise and fall as new land. The shore takes them up as corsages, 

pins its own breast. Maybe we will be saved by loss, Argel, the green bouquets held by force 

in the middle of the wave while the shore climbs its stepladder. The stepladder’s 

feet are unsteady in sand. The green nudges a world briefly lithe and learned. 

It rises in our minds, flames itself out, carbon from coal, 

bowing as it falls.

[aserenadebythedevil]

Professor Argel Corpus

I took class with him since I made it to University. Though his method is highly unorthodox and, by opinions of some fellow classmates, ineffective, he truly became one of my favourite professors of all time and the most unique I have been blessed to work with. Because more than teaching me to analyze literature, he taught me to look into it further than I was accustomed to and taste it deeply, he taught me a different kind of attachment.

Poetry, Theatre, Essay (Which I was unfortunate in not being able to take under his teaching) and now Narrative Prose. I was overjoyed in being in his class once more. Though his class is a genuine delight, however, I must admit it is the most bittersweet moment of my week.

For the very nature of his class makes it impossible to approach texts like so many other more traditional professors tend to do, I inevitably dive into what I read, and considering the choice of works for this semester, the effect is a jolt that tugs at my nerves and floods the machinery behind my eyelids. There is fire in my head and it is fed with every reflection.

Guilt is stirred and so is anger. Three hours of constant fuel that breathes new life into this anxiety that I struggle to conceal in front of my colleagues. Yet, in spite of all, I am overjoyed that I could take this course with him. So, on this foggy night, I raise my glass and say out loud.

Cheers, Argel