CantoMundo fellow awarded one cool grant!

Last July, when I returned from CantoMundo, I wrote a brief post about poet Manuel Paul Lopez. I wrote:


"I had first come across Paul's work back in 2004 when he submitted a manuscript to the inaugural edition of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. In our initial e-correspondence, he expressed what an impact Andrés Montoya's work had had on him when he first encountered it, and that he wanted to be a part in that first edition of the Prize--by submitting to it. Although his manuscript was not selected, it wasn't long before he made a terrific debut, winning The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize leading to the publication of Death of a Mexican and Other Poems (Bear Star Press, 2006)."


Well, I heard from Paul this past December, and he shared with me some great news. Paul has been awarded a San Diego Foundation Creative Catalyst Fund Individual Artist Fellowship! A San Diego publication called the Union Tribune published a nice piece about this initiative. When Paul passed along his news, I asked if he'd be willing to answer a few questions about his project. Here is what he had to say:

Letras Latinas Blog: 


One of the things I found encouraging and refreshing about the San Diego Foundation’s “Innovation through the Arts” initiative is that they are giving grants directly to individual artists, but at the same time requiring them to collaborate with an arts organization.  Could you share with our readers how and why you came to choose Mo`olelo Performing Arts Company as your collaborative partner, when it came time to put together your proposal. Tell us about this organization and the people behind it. 
 


Manuel Paul Lopez:

The Mo`olelo Performing Arts Company is a fantastic arts organization in San Diego.  It was founded in 2004 as a community-focused, socially-conscious, Equity theater.  Since then, the company has produced several plays that have stayed true to its mission, which is one that aims "to broaden the scope of San Diego's cultural environment by offering professional, socially-conscious theater that provides a voice for diverse and underrepresented populations, aesthetics, and issues on stage."  Since its inception, Mo`olelo has won several awards and recognition, most recently the 2011 American Theatre Wing National Theatre Company grant and a 2011 Ivy Bethune Award from Actors Equity Association.  Mo`olelo also developed a greening initiative in January 2007 to coincide with its socially-conscious principles.  This later developed into the Mo`olelo's Green Theater Choices Toolkit, which has since been adopted by many theaters around the country interested in "greening" their theater practices.  Needless to say, these objectives and practices resonate with me not only aesthetically, but politically. 

Previously to listing Mo`olelo as a possible collaborating organization, I had seen three productions, all of them in line with their stated mission.  The plays I saw dealt with issues like race, class, and family.  The 2012 season will also prove to be strong year of theater, I'm sure.

Another facet of Mo`olelo that struck me was the community partnerships.  If you view the Mo`olelo website, you'll find a list of diverse organizations that are also doing great work in the various communities around San Diego, which includes local schools.  If you know me, you'll know that high school-age students are a demographic that I've worked exclusively with over the last 10 years.  Mo`olelo has a great outreach program that provides students with the opportunity to work closely with theater professionals to develop an awareness, and hopefully, a love for the dramatic arts.  Students write, perform, view, and discuss live, professional theater.  Now talk about instilling critical thinking skills that live far beyond the stale system of standardized testing!

Seema Sueko, the Artistic Director at Mo'olelo, is an energetic and positive force.  She is the consummate professional.  When Seema contacted me initially about the possibilities of a collaboration, I was immediately struck by her willingness to consider a candidate who was not necessarily of the theater community.  It was evident that she'd read my artist's statement and proposal carefully, in addition to doing some extra research, and I respected that.  Seema also mentioned that she understood what I was trying to do with this manuscript and that it would fit well with a production Mo`olelo was scheduled to produce during the 2012 season called Kita y Fernanda, by Tanya Saracho.   
 
 


Letras Latinas Blog: 


Here is how your winning project is described: “The Yearning Feed, a book-length manuscript of poems and short stories dealing with border issues that will be given a public reading upon its completion.” I’m intrigued that this book project is multi-genre in nature. Could you flesh this out for us a bit. What kind of public reading are we talking about here. Will it include more than one performer? What should habitual theater-goers expect? 
 


Manuel Paul Lopez: 


I'll begin with the public reading aspect of the project.  As part of the CCF grant, we were expected to present the new work publicly.  Now it's important to know that this looks different for different recipients of the grant.  Of the 15 individuals who were awarded a CCF grant, there were musicians, installation artists, film makers, actors, dancers and writers, a real nice diverse pool of disciplines, for lack of a better word.  For us, the natural way to present my material would be at a public reading.  This will happen in October 2012 at the 10th Ave. Theater in downtown San Diego.  What I find special about this event, though, is that it will be a two-night reading and concert with other artists participating.  Poet, Luivette Resto, has agreed to participate in this event, as well as the electro-cumbia band, Cumbia Machin.  As a fellow CantoMundo fellow, I was floored by Luivette's poetry and stage presence last summer in Austin.  She's also semi-local, in that she currently lives in the Los Angeles area.  As for Cumbia Machin, I love what they do.  I had the opportunity last year to hear them at The Loft at UCSD, where they opened for Bomba Estereo.  The members of Cumbia Machin are also members or former members of the B-Side Players and Agua Dulce, two San Diego institutions.  I asked them, and they kindly agreed.  So in regards to the staged readings in October, it's less about me, and more about the program that Seema and I put together in hopes to provide the theater-going enthusiasts with something a little different.  And as I mentioned earlier, Tanya Saracho's Kita y Fernanda will be running during this time, so for those in the area, there's going to be a lot happening.

The manuscript is multi-genre.  As of now, it's entitled The Yearning Feed.  Poems and short stories intermingle, though I also want to include primary documents, like graphs, photos, etc.  A section that I'm really determined to develop is one that focuses on California's Imperial Valley during the 7.2 earthquake that hit on April 4th, 2010.  It was Easter Sunday, and it rocked the area, though it never received the sustained coverage that other earthquakes received.  This, I'm sure, because the death toll never reached a number that was anywhere significant in the eyes of the media.  But lives were lost, and there were millions of dollars of damage that impacted many people, causing short and long-term consequences that crossed the U.S./Mexico border, especially affecting many in Mexicali, B.C., where it was centered.  If you think about it, this earthquake was on the heels of Chile's monstrous 8+ in February 2010, and Haiti's tragic, tragic quake in January of that same year.  Lots of trauma and anxieties were sustained during those early months of 2010, not to mention the wars, global economies and immigration issues that remained constants throughout that period and that continue to affect many today.  So with story and poem, I want to revisit this period and see what I find. 

Letras Latinas Blog: 


In the San Diego Union article about the artists who have won these grants, one of them says: “This is life-altering—truly it is…” What effect do you see this distinction having on your writing and writing career. 
 


Manuel Paul Lopez:

I hope this opportunity provides me with the chance to meet a lot of interesting and talented professionals in the local theater community.  At some point in the near future, I would love to try writing for the stage.  I admire immensely what theater can do to an audience, and I want to someday be a part of that experience. And of course, I hope that I'll have a finished manuscript by the end of this year that I'm really proud of.    
 
 


Letras Latinas Blog: 


What did you learn by putting yourself through this process of applying for a grant of this nature, and what advice would you give someone who is seeking to win a grant from an external source like a private foundation. 
 


Manuel Paul Lopez:

The most important lesson I learned, or at least, began to think more deeply about, was how to write a succinct artist's statement that captured the work I'm most interested in creating at this point in my life.  This process included writing a proposal, attending a couple of informational meetings, interviewing, and most excruciatingly, subjecting myself to questions posed by a panel.  Some advice that I would offer: spend some time writing and re-writing the artist's statement.  Beyond using it as a way to project your work and/or ideas to the public, it's a good way to think about where your head is in relation to your own work.  In addition to this, it would be beneficial to prepare an "elevator speech," of sorts.  Be able to articulate a proposed project succinctly and thoughtfully.  It's funny, but not-so-funny for me to be offering this advice, because these are two facets of the process that I had not previously considered much and had both cost me in the past.  Finally, a person interested in pursuing such a grant should also research the foundation to make sure its mission and previously-funded projects coincide or diverge from your own beliefs.

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And here a couple of poems:   

here and here

CanoMundo Poets, ire’ne lara silva and Millicent Borges Arccardi featured in Boxcar Poetry Review

“Weaving Writers Together”

ire’ne lara silva—recently profiled and interviewed for the Letras Latinas Blog—is making literary noise once again . This time ire’ne and fellow CantoMundista Millicent BorgesArccardi are featured poets in the current issue of Boxcar Poetry Review’s e-conversations, edited by Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet Eduardo C. Corral. In the e-talk both poets testify to the grief that marks their work but also to the regenerative power of writing in the face of such desolation:

“My life changed when I lost my grandmother,” writes Millicent “and then it changed again when I lost my mother. Grief cannot not affect my writing. My own work brought me comfort in grief, and it reconciled unresolved feelings while calming those times when I just wanted to pick up the phone and call my mother and was half way through dialing when I realized she was not there.”

Poetry and grief and healing but also time and playfulness: ire’ne is intrigued by Millicent’s ability to inhabit different characters and to play with time, to capture it at her will. And in the same breath Millicent notices a similar thread running through ire’ne’s work: “You do play with time,” declares Millicent, “speeding it up and slowing it down.” Bending it at her will.

Click here to read the full interview.

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"Blood and Breath: AConversation"

Taking advantage of ire’ne and Millicent’s e-talk and keeping up with the tradition of the re-posting and re-appreciation of older pieces of Latino/a literary criticism I’d like to call attention to an older e-conversation between poets Javier O. Huerta and Miguel Murphy and which was featured in issue one of Latino Poetry Review.

“Blood and Breath” is a conversation I keep returning to, sometimes for its sheer humor, sometimes for its creative tension. Miguel Murphy is quick to exploit this tension, “this makes our books in an important way related, opposed even, not as boxers in a ring, but as elements, not air and sand but, say, breath and blood, both of the body, but ruled by their different substance. “ I have heard somewhere that when a poem captures that unexpected juxtaposition of words or images, or some other element of poetics the result is a combustion of sparks and magic. It is this aesthetic tension that makes a poem soar. With that in mind this interview between the two poets begins to read more and more like a poem rather than an interview. And at the core of this conversation is the tension interwoven in language itself. Miguel Murphy describes it beautifully when he states:

“There is a kind of exile in your book, an exile of speech that results in being correctly misunderstood. For me, this misunderstanding is the magic of your poetry. I don't know that your book is interested in clarification as a choice, as in a way to say that or this is correct. Rather, it wants to clarify this state of meaning-full possibility, to say "that" or "this" correctly, to make clear all things mis-spoken, mis-heard, and embrace a surprising, even surrealistic, diversity.”

And Javier O. Huerta too is keen to find this tension in Miguel’s work: “What your [Miguel’s] book does for me that many other books, including Chicano books, including my own, fail to do is to create its own cosmology—a universal mask of teeth and flesh, of hunger and love, of empty ice trays and desire, of stars and rats. Most amazingly, you not only believe in this universe yourself but ask us to believe in it as well. And we do, offering our bare and bloody hearts.”

Click here to read the full interview.

An Interview with Rigoberto González

Rigoberto González is a prolific and generous writer, the author of three poetry books, So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks, a National Poetry Series selection, Other Fugitives and Other Strangers, and a new collection Black Blossoms; two bilingual children’s books: Soledad Sigh-Sighs and Antonio’s Card; the novel Crossing Vines, winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Fiction Book of the Year Award; a memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa and a book of stories Men without Bliss. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and of various international artist residencies, he writes a Latino book column for the El Paso Times of Texas. He is contributing editor for Poets & Writers, on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, and on the Advisory Circle of Con Tinta, a collective of Chicano/ Latino activist writers. He lives in New York City and teaches at the MFA writing programs of both Queens College and Rutgers University—Newark.

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In his newest collection of poems, “Black Blossoms” (Four Way Books, 2011), Rigoberto González presents us with a brave exploration into the lives of women and their journeys. As much as Black Blossoms is a tribute to the violent lives of women who would otherwise go uncelebrated or at least unacknowledged, it is also very much a work of place. Place in the sense that these “black blossoms” collected here in this book are allowed—through the splendor of poet’s imagination—to re-bloom in all their precarious and delicate ways. They together form a place, a garden of sorts that cannot exist without one another; it is as if these voices have found a home in each others company.

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Lauro Vazquez: First of all thank you for taking the time to do this interview with me. Before we delve into questions dealing more directly with your work, could you give us a small background about who you are, where you come from? What kind of household you grew up in etc.? Were the arts encouraged and if so how?

       I was born in California, raised in Michoacán, educated in Spanish, and then English when my family returned to the U.S. when I was ten. I come from three generations of migrant farm workers, grape pickers mostly, and until I left for college I spent summers working alongside my family harvesting grape, onion, and green beans. As you can appreciate, our working class perception of the arts was enriched with folk music, Catholicism, and storytelling. I grew up with a strong sense of myself as a Mexican, and later, in college, as a Chicano and a gay man. One element that has remained consistent is my identity as a politicized person. My family was always willing to participate in boycotts and labor strikes. The good fight is the single sensibility I have kept sacred all these years. There was also familial conflict, of course, and not much freedom in a crowded household that resorted to physical and verbal abuse as a way of channeling the frustrations that came with poverty and exhaustion. I did my best to document this experience in my memoir Butterfly Boy.   

LV: Much of your personal history has been chronicled in your memoir Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa. At its core Butterfly Boy is an affirmation of the self in the face of racial, economic and sexual displacement. Writing seems to remind us here that where there is human creativity there is human dignity. Can you tell us a little about what writing does to you?

Writing helps me understand my losses--I lost my homeland, my parents, my youth, and more recently I have been struggling with health issues--and from this knowledge comes growth, maturity and the ability to survive in my new environments, which I call my gains. I believe writing is a way into the beauty of memory and imagination. Writing also gives value and visibility to my particular experiences and observations. I have made writing a part of my everyday life and I feel extremely fortunate it has become my greatest pleasure. 

LV: Tell us about your literary interests and your writing process. What are you currently exploring? What poet or poem do you constantly find yourself returning to? What keeps you going in your own writing?

I usually have multiple projects unfolding at once. I just completed a book of essays, Red-Inked Retablos, my fourth poetry collection, Unpeopled Eden, and the sequel to my YA novel The Mariposa Club called Mariposa Gown--all three will be published in the next year or two. At the present I’m juggling two large projects--a second memoir and a novel. This multi-tasking has been a successful strategy for me over the years--moving from one genre to another and working on two different manuscripts at the same time is my usual process. I don’t know any other way to work, except to work hard and productively. I’ve learned to write while flying across the country and while sitting in sterile hotel rooms and noisy airports, though I prefer to write in my studio in Queens, surrounded by all the art objects I’ve accumulated over the years. What keeps me going is knowing I am part of a thriving writing community--other writers of all walks of life inspire me. Even looking at the growing collection of book spines on the shelf makes me want to write!  

LV: Taking into account the current renascent politics of American nativism and the general anti-Latino atmosphere most exemplified by Arizona’s and Alabama’s draconian anti-immigrant-laws and the intentional or unintentional exclusion of Latino/as from all other aspects of the broader culture, literature included (take for example the long overdue recognition of Latino/a poets in Eduardo C. Corral’s recent winning of the YaleSeries of Younger Poets Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award) what is the role of a Latino/a writer in our times?

I prefer to identify as a gay Chicano. I also embrace other terms, like queer and Latino. I think it’s important to celebrate all of this language as an antidote to the hostility, derision and fear that others are attaching to them. A writer is an activist and a citizen, and has a responsibility beyond the poem, story or novel to participate in the political arena. For some of us that means picketing and organizing protests, others take to the pen or the computer and articulate positions through essays and editorials, and some perform that activism through the classroom as teachers. Activism is defined by the individual. I understand not everyone is willing to accept the challenge, but I sure as hell know that everyone can. In any case, this is an old argument and usually the only ones who speak up are the ones who want to negate that premise for selfish reasons.  At the very least, people who do not want to participate in these conversations should please cease from making such comments as “I don’t want to be known as a Chicano writer” or “I don’t want to be known as a gay writer.” We need role models, not cowards.  

LV:  Among the three women this book is dedicated to is the poet Ai, a poetic teacher and mentor of yours. In his review of Black Blossoms Steve Fellner writes: “No doubt Ai appreciates his prose tributes, but I strongly believe what would matter most to her is the development of his poems.  With Black Blossoms, his new collection, González has performed the ultimate tribute: he has made his poems better than hers [Ai’s].”  How present is Ai in this new collection and to what degree has she influenced your work?

First of all, I have to disagree respectfully that my poems are better than Ai’s--that has never been my goal. Ai has been present in my work since the first book, which opens with a poem about a slaughterhouse. I gravitated toward Ai and Federico García Lorca and Sylvia Plath very early on because they guided me through the dark places--directly to the center of grief and anxiety in order to give it language so that I could climb back out again. But Ai was the most present voice in the writing of Black Blossoms, particularly because I was writing about women. Ai wrote about men, people of all ethnicities, historical figures, cultural figures, focusing in the moment or the narrative, which in turn gave dimension and complexity to the persona or the protagonist of the poem. Her poems worked with imagery that gestured toward class, emotional disposition and cultural setting. All of these become the components of life, landscape and the individual stories within them--an approach to writing I have tried to exercise in Black Blossoms. Also, Ai didn’t really write about herself, and neither do I, not in my poems anyway, so I found the perfect literary ancestor in her.  

LV: As much as Black Blossoms is a tribute to the violent lives of women who would otherwise go uncelebrated or at least unacknowledged, it is also very much a work of place. Place in the sense that these “black blossoms” collected here in this book are allowed—through the splendor of poet’s imagination—to re-bloom in all their precarious and delicate ways. They together form a place, a garden of sorts that cannot exist without one another; it is as if these voices have found a home in each other’s company. Could you comment on this?

I’m flattered that you see the collection that way. Yes, that’s exactly what this is--a garden that complicates the old trope of women as flowers. The flowers bloom, certainly, but they also bleed and wilt and die. My aim was multi-dimensionality. In my second book of poems, I make a reference to visiting my mother’s grave and realizing that she’s surrounded by other women. It was a startling discovery that helped me find solace, imagining that my mother had other strong women for company. Their narratives do not end because their lives did, and I wanted to honor those stories of survival and sometimes heartbreak.

LV: One of the most fascinating aspects of Black Blossoms was your use of simile and metaphor to create intimacy between the reader and the characters in this collection. Rather than affirm the horrible with a comparison to revolting objects, tea bags, fans of poker cards, daisies, strawberries and hay—to name but a few examples—are used to create intimacy with a reader that is confronted with the significantly uncomfortable subjects of violence, the grotesque, political injustice and the decaying body. The poem thus becomes a place of momentary solace both for the reader and the characters in these poems. Are the poems Black Blossoms in this sense—through their comparison of the grotesque to objects of diametrical beauty—too poems of place, of self-assertion?

In the poem “Thinking Stones,” the speaker declares, “The woman sitting next to me is the place of my birth.” Having lost the place of my birth after the death of my mother left me with a sense of disorientation, and a haunting that seizes me when I see mothers, motherhood, maternal gestures, etc. These encounters are a response to trauma, and trauma comes in many shapes in this book--the death of women, the loss of women, the pain, grief, crises that women confront. I believe women are much stronger than men, so what I seek is an association with that strength.               

LV: On the other hand, in the title poem the narrator addresses banishing women in language that is bordering on the revolting: “when the sun sets next it will/ blossom with the blackest mushrooms and the moths/ will lay their eggs on your leathery smiles.” The narrator remarks with amazement at the moment after death in which “whatever moves from this minute forward sets/ itself into motion without muscle” and sets off a last chance for sensation: “the pucker and stretch in the sutured/ centers of your gray vaginas.” The body here is reduced to a site which bears the burden of death and loss but it is also strangely enough a site of momentary sensation, and of fleeting life. In essence—however fleeting these moments may be—even in the process of death and putrefaction, there exist miniature sunbursts of light that remind us of the lives of these characters. I see the poem thus as a “re-membering” of the dismembered body and life, and the fleeting possibility of feeling something again, of being made “whole.”  Could you share a few comments about this?

Death is not finality. With each death, each loss, something else is born--even if it’s grief, but another energy has been set into motion. I don’t mean to sound mystical or spiritual but that’s why I value writing--it is the preservation of transition and change. Life and death, healing and pain--or even pleasure and pain--can take place simultaneously. We do not exist in absolutes so why perpetuate that myth when the complexity is much more interesting to inhabit.

LV:  One of my favorite poems in this collection is the poem “Floricuatro” from the “Floreo” series. In this particular poem (and in the whole series) the page is broken by two line stanzas composed of very long lines. This breaking of the page by very long lines is also a predominant feature of the poems in this collection. What was it about these characters that compelled you towards this breaking of the page by these long lines?

The long line is a feature I’ve been wanting to write for a very long time. It’s a challenging structure because a long line can easily fall flat or be quickly forgotten if there isn’t another mechanism in place to sustain its energy and keep the reader interested. Two of my role models include Derek Walcott and Carolyn Forché. Their work taught me to employ music, rhythm, story, syntax, and other poetic devices to maintain language and meaning afloat, or rather, soaring. Since writing about women was another challenge, I decided it was appropriate to use the difficult long line as yet another way to acknowledge the effort I was making in writing about women.  

LV: Finally, I am curious to know what your writing process was, for these poems? The majority of the poems here are persona poems, some in the voices of historical figures like Anita Berber or Lizzie Borden, others like “The Unsung Story of the Invisible Woman,” “The Ballad of Lucila la Luciérnaga” and the “Mortician Poems” read more like surreal fables or magical biographies. With such diversity, how did you get “into the heads” of these women and their stories? What kind of research or reading did it involve and how did you go about writing this collection?

If there was any research involved, I believe it’s been done over a very long period of reading literature written by women. This doesn’t mean I’m an authority on gender issues or female identity, but I like to think I’m empathetic enough to write in close proximity to the female perspective. I am not performing ventriloquism or mimicry, I’m simply placing into words what I observe from my limited perspective. In short, all this time I’ve been listening, paying attention--what many of us males should do more often--so that I don’t exclude women from the art I create.

Latino/a Poetry Now: 3 Poets Discuss their Art

Now that installment one of Latino/a Poetry Now has finally come full circle with the kick-off reading at Harvard University by Eduardo C. Corral, Rosa Alcalá and Aracelis Girmay I thought it befitting to present a sampling of the rich and poignant conversation between the three poets on the Poetry Society of America’s “3poets discuss their art” roundtable. More than offering the reader a sampling of this rich discussion, my intent is to contribute a little and expand on this conversation as we prepare to launch installment two of Latino/a Poetry Now which will feature poets William Archila and Ruth Irupé Sanabria at Georgetown University on March 20^th and which will also feature a PSA roundtable.   

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The poets in this conversation are brave and generous in their conversation and engagement with the craft of poetry; and in the process they present us with a colorful tile composing this large mosaic of work being produced by a newer generation of Latino/a poets and which Latino/a Poetry Now seeks to showcase in its various installments. Rosa Alcalá writes of her need to assert and document the unspoken codes of poetry, the “general suspicion of (or disregard for) the female experience.” Aracelis Girmay proclaims her interest “in discarded information, people, places, animals, things. Scraps, first drafts.” She, like Alcalá, is also asserting the need to “write toward” the places, objects and people that have been “monstered.” The poem functions then as a body in transition, as a movement toward the beauty of what has been rendered hideous by those who fear what they do not understand. Eduardo C. Corral on the other hand finds assertion not in the too-often required autobiographical poem by the minority writer and which handles “the bodies of my loved ones with kid gloves, viewed them through rose-colored glasses.” For Corral assertion is found through aesthetic value, through rendering the “stringent spines, the funny bone, the fictitious marrow, or the brutal skin” present in a poem. 

Eduardo writes “art does something wonderful to me. It gives me language.” Hinting that while subject matter is fundamental language remains—to borrow a wonderful phrase from Eduardo—queen.  Alcalá writes, “the language of poetry is queen, not because it reproduces reality, but because it pushes against all those boundaries/limitations.” Language thus as a process of grafting, a cross-pollination of sorts involving other artists and mediums and which pushes us “toward” something previously thought impossible: the unmasking of the unspoken codes of poetry, unveiling the beauty in what has been rendered monstrous, the affirmation of the self or a particular experience through the containment of aesthetic qualities.

But audience here too is of relevance, as Maria Melendez, who served as the moderator this online discussion, points out Eduardo’s concern for the expectations for minority poets to “speak truth to power” in poems that will more likely than not be read by white audiences. For Aracelis Girmay the issue of audience is best illustrated by a “white center,” a complicated center which imposes its cosmology of the world on all people—whether they are writing for an audience or not. “Because of my white-centered education, because of the media, because of the presidential history of this country, because most of my fellow writing students were white, I had great practice in imagining the white center. One gets educated, quite quickly, in the nuances & range of whiteness—but we don't call it whiteness, we call it being American, human.” For Girmay the act of writing itself becomes an act of breaking and expanding the borders of this center of privilege—a center that renders the white experience as the only human experience by default—to include those in the margins, to validate those experiences as human. But this issue of audience is made even more complicated if we take into account Rosa’s astute observation that to write about issues of race and class is also to “write away” from these experiences, as these audiences are least likely to read our poetry. Like Aracelis, Rosa’s work is and is not for a particular audience but it is rather an act of “moving toward” a "place where my work will be deeply questioned & considered & lived with." And this place is a place of music, a place of tiaras and monsters, of magical tongues.  As Eduardo concludes: “But something magical happens when I'm writing a poem, I'm not singing in English or in Spanish—I'm singing in my mother tongue.” 

To read the full conversation click HERE.

Emma Trelles interviews Emily Pérez

Please welcome Emma Trelles to LETRAS LATINAS BLOG. That is, readers will be able to enjoy her literary journalism as she begins to contribute occasional, hopefully semi-regular pieces to this space. The subject of her first contribution, in this case an interview, is the poet-critic Emily Pérez.

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Emily Pérez grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. She graduated from Stanford University with a BA in English and earned an MFA in poetry at the University of Houston, where she served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast and worked as a writer in residence with Writers in the Schools. A scholarship recipient of the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, she has also been a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her book reviews have appeared in Latino Poetry Review, American Letters & Commentary, and Gulf Coast, and her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Borderlands, The Laurel Review, DIAGRAM, and other journals. Her manuscript was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Prize as well as a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard and Zone 3 prizes.

In 2011, her chapbook, Backyard Migration Route, was released by Finishing Line Press. She teaches English, poetry, and gender studies in Seattle where she lives with her husband and son. In this interview, conducted over the phone one afternoon last December, Pérez talks about the serendipity of publication, unintentional passing, Elizabeth Bishop, podcasts, and how fairytales are helping to shape her newest manuscript.

                                                                        —Emma Trelles

ET: This is your first collection of poems, and I'm wondering why you decided to publish a chapbook instead of holding off for a full-length collection of poems. I am enamored with the chapbook for a lot of reasons: it feels more like a unexpected find than a longer collection, a more personal artifact, as if there is less separating the reader from the writer. Chapbooks are also often little works of art, as yours is with its slim green ribbon and photo-collage cover. Did this medium's particular sense of intimacy and visual impact inform your decision to publish in it? Were there other factors?

EP: It's a little bit of the chicken and the egg. I'd been trying to get my manuscript published to varying degrees of not quite success. I thought I needed to take a break and do something different, try something else and go back to the manuscript later. Around the same time I made that decision I connected with a colleague who makes handmade books. She usually makes blank books but was getting tired of it. She asked me to give her some poems to put in a book.  It was before Christmas one year and I thought ‘Great, I can give one to my parents maybe a few other people.’ It really was this idea of an intimate production - there was only going to be about 10 books. I had these long poems that were originally in my manuscript but no longer were, and I knew they would never be published in a magazine because they were too long. So I thought, ‘Why not put them all together and give them to her?’ I did that, and it was about 30 plus pages. Then, I realized, ‘Hey, this is a chapbook!’

I could only see how the poems would work after they had taken that shape. And I sent it out to see what would happen, essentially, at a friend's prompting, who is not in the poetry world but in the book arts world. A book artist pointed me in the direction of the chapbook.

ET: That really speaks to the importance of creation and artistry above marketing and placement. There's a real sense of purity in that.

EP: Right; I certainly did not have the marketing in mind when I started this. It was going to be a one-off piece. I sent the chapbook to two places and it got picked up. I sent it out never really expecting it to be published; I really didn't think it through about what would happen if it was selected. I put something really intimate into the world without the thinking about it. I realized afterward that I might have made my parents overly exposed, but I didn't particularly feel that way during the process.

ET: One of the central themes of Backyard Migration Route is the contradiction between appearances and experience; you’ve focused specifically on how your heritage is interpreted by others vs. how you understand it – sometimes these perceptions overlap and other times they seem to leave you in mystery, as with the opening poem, “Heritage.”

Heritage

It bore no return address, no

vaccination tags. It smelled somewhat

like imposters, or improbability.

It grew pale in the flashlight’s beam

and would not say its name.

We soaped and scrubbed, but

it would not come clean. We requested

that it wear a robe or hat, that it fold

its hands upon its lap, feet under its seat.

And where to keep it? Too gangly for the bassinet,

too pouty for the parlor. We pressed it

like a flower but the book kept flapping

open. We expected it to know a dance

or special call. It would not shimmy, shake,

or tap its skinny toes. We begged it summon others

like itself, but no one came. We patted it and told it

not to cry. We cried. We searched for numbers

we could dial. We shushed and cooed. We spoke

to it in slow, loud tones. We shut it up.

I won’t say how. We gulped it down.

It won’t go down. We speak and hear its voice.

ET: Can you explain a bit about your background and how where you come from, so to speak, reveals itself in these poems?

EP: My mother is white and my father is Mexican-American.  I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. Growing up we were the only family that I knew with a mixed heritage. And it wasn't something I was very conscious of for many years. I became more conscious of it as other people made me aware of it - like schoolyard bullies and people like that. In my town there was a lot of segregation that I didn't recognize until I was older - where people lived in town, class segregation, racial segregation. My family was in this weird position of being Mexican but not totally Mexican. My dad's family has been in this area for several hundred years, but here my siblings and I didn't speak Spanish and weren't Catholic. Yet we thought of ourselves as Mexican Americans and overall we led very privileged lives compared to other people in our community.

It is the beauty of a small town was that every one knows your family - so some of these questions about who you are and what you are didn't appear, like questions about my last name. It wasn't until I left home, to boarding school in New Hampshire, where my name became an issue. I would tell people my last name and they would correct my pronunciation. I became privy to people's racism because they weren't aware of my background and made comments to me thinking I would be sympathetic to them.

ET: How did this experience impact you as a poet?

EP: It made me start thinking about how I did and didn't  fit in. I was writing poems in boarding school about typical teenage heartbreak, but it wasn't until college that I started writing more about where I was from. Then, after college, I started writing more about this cultural merge, and then thinking about the Rio Grande Valley as this amazing place of border crossing, all the different kinds of borders, the physical, the social. I wanted to start playing with this idea, and it led me into the poems in this collection. And also, it got me thinking from the very macro scale of the US/Mexico border, and from the very micro scale between a father and a daughter, how he grew up in a Spanish speaking household and I grew up in an English speaking one. We needed to make it here and the way you do it is to speak English. For my generation, it's such a loss– why didn't we speak Spanish?

ET: It's interesting to hear you speak about similar experiences as my own. Our backgrounds are regionally and ethnically different, but some of what you talk about has happened to me as well, particularly the cultural and personal politics that accompany assimilation. Do you ever feel as if you are not Latino enough for the Latinos and not American enough for the Americanos?

EP: Oh god, yes. I feel as if I'm in a constant state of unintentional passing. The whole world sees me as white, and I get all the privileges of being white for looking the way I do. If I want my heritage to be recognized I have to assert it. I have actually been very well accepted by other Latino writers in person, although I don't know what their secret thoughts are! My subject matter is not politically or socially affiliated with heritage so I think I wouldn't be your first pick for a Latina poet, but the idea of not being Latino enough is not something that I've felt from other Latino writers. Latino poets are open to what the breadth of what that means.

           

I don't feel it so much in the writing community but more in my day to day life. And I do feel it more within myself as a writer. I think this is something that all writers have - this feeling of being on the outside, looking in on things from an outsider view, not quite fitting in. A lot of that stems from my heritage, and for other writers it might come from elsewhere.

ET: Let’s turn to the craft and aesthetics in Backyard Migration Route. The four poems that comprise this chapbook feel at both casually inventive and structurally formal, the latter primarily because you have presented so much music in these stanzas - internal and end rhymes, iambs, a cadence throughout that is reminiscent of song. Do you consider yourself a formalist of sorts? Do you also play music? Was it a part of writing these poems in some way?

EP: I am not a musician, but I come from a family of musicians. My father plays several instruments and both my grandparents do as well. My older and younger brothers are jazz musicians, my husband is a musician. I've been surrounded by music in my life, although it wasn't something I was particularly successful at, even though I took piano, violin , and saxophone lessons when I was younger.

In some ways I saw the poems as little conversation pieces but also as feeling complete in themselves.  I hope that sound allows the fragments of each poem to stand alone and that the story is what pulls them together.  Perhaps the musicality was a way for me of enforcing these smaller sections as a whole, whereas sometimes in a longer poem you can trust the cohesiveness to hold it together..

I don't consider myself a formalist in the way of people who submit poems to formalist publications. The form of “Field Guide” and “My Father” are ones that I started experimenting with in college. Elizabeth Bishop has a poem, “12 O’ Clock News” - she's listing items on a desk on the left hand side of the poem in titles. On the right hand side are these blocks of texts that de-familiarize the items on the desk. I had read her poem and thought it was really interesting. In the time I've been writing poetry seriously I've written a handful of poems in that form; it especially works for longer poems.

I guess in that sense my own poems can be a  formalist pursuit but not a formalist approach, as if I'm writing a book of sonnets. But it does take collage one step further.

ET: Who were you reading while writing this book, and who are you reading now? Do you think poets should read other poets while working on their own poems. Why or why not?

EP: Definitely. Now I'm trying to read whenever  I have time to - that's the hard part, making the time. I am very drawn to musical poets. I don't know if I can say this for the blog, because it can seem shameless, but your book, for example–  I thought it was very musical. And I also love Romey’s Order by Atsuro Riley for its musicality and for its family story, ironically,  in part, about  mixed race parents and a boy growing up with both white and Japanese parents.

What I do regularly is listen to podcasts because that's something I can do while I'm taking the dog or the baby for a walk. I listen to NPR's poetry podcast and Poetry magazine's podcast. Those are great because you are often hearing the poets themselves reading their work. The musicality really comes through with the poet's own rendering of the poem.

ET:  It's also an exclusively aural experience of the poem.

EP: Exactly. If hearing a poem makes an impression on you, that's the kind of poem I want to write.

ET: You are also a book reviewer. What value do you think there is for a poet in writing reviews and articles about other writers?

EP: Tremendous value. To write a review, you have to really spend time with a book and invest in it, not just for the first read and the superficial ‘What do I like? What sits well with me?’ You really have to think about the mind of the writer, how the pieces come together. I find that immensely satisfying. It's hard work but it forces me to stay with a book for a while and really explore it. I think that we can get that kind of close reading with a book through teaching it, discussing it, or writing about it. I think as an adult no longer in a formal writing community like I was in my MFA, it's one way for me to really engage in a book.

ET: What is your next project?

EP: Getting my manuscript published! I'm sending it out. It's called “House of Sugar, House of Stone,” a book about family, again, about the anxieties around having family and abandonment within family. It starts with some poems based on the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, which turned into a very productive device. It helped with an organizational impulse within me because I felt that writing about this tale turned into a very productive exploration. Then, it launches into parenthood. The last poems in the book I wrote while I was pregnant, so there is a lot about the anxieties of motherhood and babies.

For the next manuscript, I'm exploring poems about trying things and having unexpected outcomes, cause and effect. Some of the inspiration is watching my son grow up and daily learning. I'm trying to map some of that surprise onto my own life and experiences, looking at his process and trying to see what is analogous. I'm also interested in what could have been, and I’ve started a few poems about Red Riding Hood running off with the wolf. There's always been something very satisfying to me about existing forms and the way restrictions unlock possibilities.

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Emma Trelles is the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), winner of the 2010  Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook Little Spells (GOSS183), a recommended read by the Valparaiso Poetry Review and the Montserrat Review. The recipient of a Green Eyeshade award for art criticism, she has been a featured reader at the Miami Book Fair International, the O, Miami Poetry Festival, and  the Palabra Pura reading series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in Best of the Net, Verse Daily, The Rumpus, Gulf Stream, Poets and Artists,& Newsday, the Miami Herald, and Organica. A contributor to LETRAS LATINAS BLOG and the Best American Poetry blog, she is an arts writer and teaches writing and literature in South Florida.