“Híkuri (Peyote)” is Mexican Infrarealist José Vicente Anaya’s cult-classic poem. Influenced by his participation in a series of peyote ceremonies in his native Chihuahua, Anaya charts a transformative journey inwards, towards a psychedelic convergence of inside/outside, male/female, past/present, self/other. Incorporating Rarámuri language and traversing territory associated with ecopoetics, ethnopoetics, modernism, and infrarealism, Híkuri (Peyote) presents a utopian alternative to EuroAmerican colonial modernity—a reclamation of autonomy and poetic nomadism. [This edition is a dual-language facing-page translation, with commentary from both Anaya and translator Joshua Pollock.]

“José Vicente Anaya’s long, visionary poem ‘Híkuri (Peyote)’ is a countercultural classic of Mexican literature. But it is not only that: it is a mapping of the borderlands of self, a meditation on the ethnopoetic and its limits, and a celebration of the chant as eco-indigenous form that challenges the colonial politics of the lettered city. While Anaya is often mentioned for his transnational involvement with alternative poetry movements (Beat poetry, Mexican Infrarealism), ‘Híkuri (Peyote)’ is its own translingual poetics of luminous defiance: ‘I go into uncertainty certain / of ending up uncertain / INCANDESCENT.’ Whereas Artaud engaged Rarámuri language and culture through the unabashedly imperial eyes of the tourist poet, Anaya proposes an uneasily decolonial auto-ethnographic poetics that works both from and against the settler logic of the avant-gardes in the Americas. Joshua Pollock’s translation powerfully renders the visual and sonic layers of Anaya’s song with careful attention to the politics of oral/aural revolution, the gaps of meaning, the silences of a page where ‘the True Name is not written.'” — Urayoán Noel