La poesía es lo cura
(Poetry is the cure)
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I saw this tatooed to a friend’s arm—the friend was the great Mexican poet, Francisco Hernandez. It’s true, poetry is my way of maintaining sanity, of ordering chaos. Music is also my way to excise demons and find harmony. In recent years, I’ve begun closing the gap between music, as one thing, and poetry, as another. I can no longer see them as separate. Music follows the contours of language, in effect, adding a uber language to already existing word sounds. My goal is to write—the notes and the words—somewhere in the penumbra between accessibility and mystery.
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My group’s name is Animula and these songs are on the album entitled Trails. In the recordings, I’m joined by my friend, Sebastian Garrido, in our studio in Mexico City’s Roma. We’re currently working there on our fourth album. Animula/The Trails is available on all music servers.
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The song, Cuidala, is about a man whose girlfriend overdoses and dies. To preserve her, he puts her in his car and drives her to Alaska. Madness.
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The song, The Lost Lady, is a about the holocaust. Madness.
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The song, Days on Hold… Also Madness.
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Finally, the song Sundown is about surviving with PTSD after I came home from the war with the Taliban.
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Marlon L. Fick divide su tiempo entre Ciudad de México y Odessa, Texas, donde es profesor de literatura inglesa en la Universidad de Texas—Permian Basin. Además de traductor, es poeta con varios títulos publicados. Ha recibido el premio National Endowment for the Arts de escritura creativa. Editó y tradujo la antología The River is Wide/El río es ancho. Twenty Mexican Poets. Antología bilingüe, traducción de 20 poetas mexicanos.