ONE MORE NIGHT AT SEA / OTRA NOCHE EN ALTA MAR

Kevin Power had a remarkable mind, an inordinately agile interdisciplinary talent for recognising and evaluating ground-breaking work in modern poetry and the plastic arts.

When Kevin’s partner, Mónica Carballas, approached me after his death in 2013 to propose a publication of his complete works as a poet, I was intrigued. I’ve known Kevin since well before founding Perceval Press with the help of Pilar Perez some 25 years ago, and have been grateful for the fine texts he has contributed to some of our publications. Over the years, it was my good fortune to spend time with him several times in Spain, the country that he spent so many years of his life in, and became a citizen of. During each conversation with Kevin, I and anyone else present was regaled with pearls of wisdom and wry humour, not to mention an encyclopaedic understanding of the latest advancements and debates in modern art and literature.

Although we knew and admired his work as an art curator and essayist, we at Perceval were stunned by the impressive amount of fiercely original and moving poetry that Kevin had written over the years. Very little of it had been published beyond a handful of extremely limited edition publications printed in collaboration with different painters. What Mónica presented us with was an immense treasure to be cared for and presented as well as possible. Kevin’s poems, all written in English, were translated into Spanish by three fine poets for this bilingual anthology – Carlos Bueno Vera, Andrés Catalán, and Nacho Fernández Rocafort -, and then corrected by Antonia Castaño and myself. In spite of our collective efforts, there are bound to be some errors in our work, errors that we will strive to attend to in subsequent editions, but we now share the discovery of a very fine and ground-breaking poet with all of you. To put the value of Kevin’s poetic output into some perspective, here follow some excerpts from the book’s introduction by Esteban Pujals Gesalí:

“It is not often that experienced adult readers unexpectedly find themselves before the complete work of someone that they did not know was a poet. This does occur from time to time, as there exist timid and modest poets, as there exists whim and chance, and there have also been poets who, for one reason or another, have resisted tenaciously making public their output.

“On the occasion of the passing of Kevin Power more than a decade ago, there appeared in the Spanish press numerous obituaries that described his valuable activity during more than thirty years as both an especially curious and perceptive critic of contemporary art and as someone known as an incessant organizer of expositions promoting Spanish painting abroad as well as introducing in Spain international artists whose work we got to know thanks to his labours. What has not been spoken of, neither at the time of his death nor since, is his production as a verbal artist, that is to say as an author of a consistent and very peculiar poetic work, unusual in our country, initiated some years before the publication of his earliest essays on painting, produced in parallel to his work as critic and commissioner of expositions, in connection with his roles as conference speaker and professor of American literature.

“The publication of Kevin Power’s entire poetic work, from his first experiments to the unpublished and unusual Pisueña sequence, opens to the Spanish reader a revealing panorama in relation to the evolution of American poetry since the middle of the last century, and sheds a measure of light on a historical moment that changed the course of poetry in the English language, and that of other traditions which it powerfully influenced. This perspective, which Power’s poetry partially exemplifies, emanating from his particular position but clearly characteristic of the renewing impulse of American poets, could not even begin to be glimpsed in our country until very close to the change of century.”

This book, for anyone who appreciates the markers laid down by the Objectivist poets, the Black Mountain College poets, for anyone who values the work of Robert Creeley, Hilda Morley, Denise Levertov, Jerome Rothenberg, Mary Oppen, George Oppen, Bill Berkson, Lin Hijinian, Susan Howe, Francine du Plessix Gray, Louis Zukofsky, Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, – just to name a few of Power’s references – this complete compilation of Kevin Power’s work will be an invaluable addition to any modern poetry collection.

We hope you will enjoy the journey through ONE MORE NIGHT AT SEA/OTRA NOCHE EN ALTAMAR.

-Viggo Mortensen