Pares cum Paribus Nº 4: Índice - Facultad de Ciencias Sociales ...

UNIVERSITY OF CHILE
FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
Robert Sward
PARES CUM PARIBUS No. 4
FALL, 1997
Introduction
When Oscar Aguilera invited me to guest-edit "Pares cum Paribus"
No. 4, he suggested I look for a sampling of work by the best
poets writing and publishing on the 'Net. The idea was for Oscar
to translate into Spanish —and thereby introduce— writers from
the U.S. and Canada to their Spanish-speaking contemporaries
around the world.
I began by soliciting poems from writers I already knew and
whose Internet-published material I admired and felt would be
accessible to readers south of the border. Next, I began cruising
the literary e-Zines, requesting contributions from writers whose
poems caught my eye. I looked for poets who impressed me with
their wit and intelligence, their ability to combine lyricism with idiom, music with humor,
white goddess muse and street-talk.
Others, their work discovered by Oscar, had their poems (or names) forwarded from
South America to Santa Cruz, California. In this way Oscar Aguilera in Chile put me in
touch with exciting writers in North America whose work might otherwise have eluded
me.
A friend asks, "All well and good. But what are your touchstones, what did you—as editor
of "Pares 4"—have in mind when you chose the poems you did?"
Answer: Personally, I agree with the French philosopher Diderot who said, "Poetry must
have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild." Think of Shakespeare, Whitman and
Neruda.
English novelist George Eliot was on the right track when she wrote, "Here undoubtedly
lies the chief poetic energy:—in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid
fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures." Yeah, I had that in mind.
And Robert Frost who insisted, "Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat." In his best
poems he succeeded in doing just that.