I didn’t have full command of Spanish as an undergrad translating poems of Jorge Guillén. Still, I was surprised my versions “sounded” authoritative when published without the originals. What is the sound of authority? I discovered then and there that all commanding poems read as translations “after a lost original,” to quote a David Shapiro book title.

Ten years ago I had successful open-heart bypass surgery. For several hours, with my heart stopped, I knew only black. “I” was outside of space time, “dead to the world”. When I awoke on the ICU gurney-bed with my mind returned to me, I laughed. I might have been Schrodinger’s cat (1935) in a closed box, dead and alive, a quantum entanglement. Now, in Alice Notley’s The Speak Angel Series we have our first quantum poet, who can be both within the physical/mental world of human history, as well as outside with the dead, “painted black” (as one early jacket sleeve of “Paint It Black” had it, the Jagger/Richards-written Rolling Stones hit of 1966).