The Acentos Workshops Return

Acentos Workshops Directer Sam Vargas

Photo by Ellie Argilla

In the last year, the Acentos Writers Workshops has been facilitating poetry workshops led by such luminaries as Martín Espada, Sandra Maria Esteves, Willie Perdomo and Lorna Dee Cervantes, to name a few. The price of these workshops: free.

A new season of workshops begin next Saturday, September 6th, with Marie-Elizabeth Mali kicking off what promises to be another exciting group of workshops at the Bronx's own Hostos College. Amongst the educators scheduled this season include activist/historian Louis Reyes Rivera, Marmol Prize winner Annecy Báez and World Poetry Slam champion/Cypher Press author Rachel McKibbens. The names get bigger, the scope broadens but the price stay the same: free.

I talked with Acentos Workshop Director Sam "Fish" Vargas about the history of the workshops, the impact on the Bronx arts scene and the upcoming Acentos Poetry Festival:

CAN YOU SPEAK ON HOW COMMUNITY WORKSHOPS HAVE IMPACTED YOUR GROWTH AS A POET AND EDUCATOR?

These workshops have been an incredible experience for me. I initially started them to help writers prepare for their feature at the LouderARTS reading series. After a few weeks they would bring friends and it just grew exponentially. Seeing the workshops grow has humbled me greatly. After being in the middle of the poetry community for 8 years, I was convinced that we needed something to offer the community. I wanted to give something back to them they could take home and be in awe. As always, I will never let anyone tell me we are shooting too high. We are going to go for the best and work our way down. Did I think I would be able to book a years worth of some of the most academically respected poets? Did I think upcoming poets and educators would jump at the chance to facilitate? Did I think we would have space at the ground zero of the arts movement in the Bronx? I could tell you simply, it would be a big no. I have learned greatly that with hard work and quick wit, anything could happen. With all this, I’ve applied that to my work as I sit down in every class. I have seen my discipline grow and have missed the workshops on Sundays something fierce.

AS THE DIRECTOR OF WORKSHOPS FOR THE ACENTOS FOUNDATION, WHAT ARE THE CRITERIA YOU'RE LOOKING FOR IN AN ACENTOS WORKSHOP FACILITATOR?

Luckily most of the facilitators I’ve booked are people I’ve followed. I know their work and respect them for all they have done in the community. After about 16 weeks of workshops some of the facilitators would be concerned of repeating a lesson plan or not being unique enough to firmly make an impact on the workshop. I’ve decided at one point the facilitators have to have a love and passion for poetry. If they had this, they could at least engage the class in a conversation about poetry. Then, in the back of my mind I had to ask myself if that was enough. I knew (after a horrible class), we had to have facilitators with teaching experience. I would make sure my facilitators are aware that everyone that attends the workshop is hungry for knowledge and they are ready to work. They have to understand they will be at the helm of a class that will dissect every word that comes out of their mouth. So between teaching experience, proper preparation, and a love and passion of poetry, they will be ok.

THERE IS GREAT BUZZ ABOUT THESE WORKSHOPS IN THE POETRY COMMUNITY BUT CAN YOU SPEAK ABOUT HOW THE LOCAL NEIGHBORHOOD FOLKS RESPOND TO THESE WRITING SESSIONS?

The best part about the workshops is the enthusiasm from the college and administrators supporting us. When Martín Espada facilitated a workshop for us, I was amazed at how everyone responded. I had one student who didn’t attend college and had no desire to. He said, “this is really necessary, we don’t have anything like this”. We have people attending the workshops who have never read their work out in the public. The response from the community has been amazingly positive. I am always humbled that I am part of something that could essentially change the artistic scope of the Bronx.

WHAT HAVE BEEN SOME OF THE HIGHPOINTS IN THE WORKSHOPS ONE-YEAR HISTORY? AND IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WILL BE IMPROVING ON FOR THIS UPCOMING SEASON?

I think that having Martín Espada and Lorna Dee Cervantes support us has been the greatest thing for us. Granted, I was in California for Lorna's workshop but reaching out to her and have her show us so much love has been phenomenal. Then, with over 90 people attending Martin’s workshop, well, life can’t get better then that. Of course, we are going to strive to become bigger. There is no reason we should just have one workshop on a Sunday. We are going to push to have one writing workshop and a performance workshop for the youth. So this upcoming year, we will have two classrooms and hope it works out. As the workshops range in ages, I will always want to give the youth more opportunity.

YOU HAVE SOME OF THE MOST RESPECTED POET/TEACHERS IN UNITED STATES POETRY ALONGSIDE A DYNAMIC COLLECTION OF UPCOMING WRITERS FACILITATING WORKSHOPS IN POETICS, PERFORMANCE AND POLITICS, ACENTOS COULD CHARGE A MODEST FEE FOR THESE TOP-NOTCH WORKSHOPS BUT INSTEAD MAKES IT ENTIRELY OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. STRAIGHT UP: WHY KEEP IT FREE? WHY NOT CHARGE?

You know that when NYC forgot about Puerto Ricans and minority Latinos in NYC, The Young Lords were born. They got together and MADE things happen. They never charged for the soup kitchens, Hep tests, and general help for their community. I model what Acentos does on much of what our forefathers paved the way for us. We have to make things happen for our community. If my community can’t afford college or a workshop at an absorbent fee, they are still entitled to gain that knowledge. We are getting something back that has no price from the community: hope. We will never ask much from the community but hard work and dedication to the craft. With that, we feel is enough payment to have wonderful work created within the halls of the workshop.

THIS SEASON'S GROUP OF WORKSHOPS WILL CULMINATE IN THE FIRST EVER ACENTOS POETRY FESTIVAL. WHAT ARE YOUR HOPES FOR THIS FESTIVAL AND WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS FOR THE ACENTOS WORKSHOPS?

This festival is what I hope puts Bronx poets on the doorstep of academia. This festival will be an all Latino festival organized by Latinos that will accept everyone under the sun. We want this to be a festival that will bring everyone together under poetry. It will be a networking event where young people and older alike will converse under the banner of poetry. After the festival, the workshops will have to grow and push everyone on writing. There is also the fact that I will be moving to California and I will need someone to make the magic happen. Until then, the Acentos team will work hard today for our community will work harder tomorrow.

A full schedule of Acentos Writers Workshops is here. To sign up, or for more info, contact fish at louderarts dot com.

Voices from VONA: E-interview with Vickie Vértiz

Every summer the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) brings renowned writers from around the country to the University of San Francisco to nurture developing writers of color. In the first of a multi-part interview, VONA writing fellows Oscar Bermeo and Vickie Vértiz talk about their experiences at the VONA Voices Writing Workshops.

Oscar Bermeo: It’s the post VONA week, what do you think you’re missing most about the VONA experience?

VONA fellow Vickie Vértiz

Vickie Vértiz: I am missing the room where I take writing risks into really dangerous places, imaginary or real, with trust, developed as a result of our faculty and colleagues creating a safe space. “Safe” meaning affirmative, encouraging, through honest, pointed critique. This is space that exists as a result of a shared experience, through a visceral understanding of what life is like for people of color in this country. At VONA we share an understanding that frequently, our art and writing is not valued and is dismissed in this country, but there we are. At VONA your voice is invaluable, precious, and ready to be primed to be at its most beautiful.

I miss my LGBTQ Narratives course with Thomas Glave. I found it incredibly useful as a multi-genre workshop. It focused on our nuanced understanding of a our various sexual-political cultures within our racial and ethnic cultures. It was very responsive of VONA to listen to its queer community and create a specialzed class. Thomas has an incredible contagious drive; all his students caught it in our time together. Thomas asked us to produce 30 pages of writing in a five-day workshop where we were already work shopping something else. There’s a lot of demand to produce work at VONA, which is always the case.

Thomas offered an additional faculty panel– where he was the only speaker–about publishing LGBTQ narratives. He shared with great candor, the mechanics and the individual steps to take while one is publishing a book; from making extra visits to untapped locations on book tours, through hand writing thank you notes to supportive individuals along the way. He showed us how to be proactive advocates of our writing.

That panel was really grounding for those of us who have stars our eyes about publishing and what it means to us and our communities. Are we the next Cherríe Moraga or Piñero? Only if we’re willing to tear our hearts out and hold it up to stage lights. These writers are our heroes, but as emerging artists, we may not know what it’s going take for us to get in to the world of writing, to stay in, and continue to grow in unanticipated directions.

OB: And you did your second week this year with?

VV: With Ana Castillo in the Artists’ Residency.

OB: And how was that?

VV: I would tell other Chicanas who are familiar with her work and they’d say, “Wow! Really?” I was very honored to be in her workshop, given the breadth of her writing, an evolution from the Chicano Movement into new genres.

I had gone to a reading of hers a year ago and was listening intensely because, again, as an emerging writer, I’m learning constantly about what it takes be that prolific in so many genres. I was star-struck by her commitment to writing, and am finding that to be a strong common trait among my favorite writers. Obios perhaps, but raza, it still needs to be said. I was intimidated at first, but Ana, as much as Ana is a chingona writer, she’s just as playful.
Ana and Thomas were incredibly encouraging and supportive of my work, just the way Cherríe, Ruth, and Willie are as well. I mean forget about publishing questions and all that. These are my writing, my socio-political heroes, telling me: “Your work is good.” And I’m sitting there, my five-year old inner Chicanita from Bell Gardens saying, “Really? My stories are important?” I mean it’s still that valuable and powerful to hear that. I haven’t heard that in my academic life very often.

OB: Where was the first place you heard about VONA? What attracted you to it? And what were your first expectations going into your first VONA classes?

VV: My friend Aida Salazar, who is also a poet and is now working on a memoir, told me about it. She already has an MFA and she was told by other writers that she didn’t have to do VONA because she already knew what she needed.

However, since then, a lot of the students at VONA have MFAs and all of them feel that it offers the opportunity to work with people who get their work, which their MFA programs did not offer. It’s not just for folks who do not have an MFA. It’s an unparalleled opportunity to connect with prestigious faculty who look like you.

My initial expectations were that some people would like my writing and some not, but I was going to work with some of my favorite writers.

On my first VONA experience, my classes included Cherríe Moraga teaching a tree-day playwriting residency. On the first day of our workshop, a fellow student shared really painful writing about his family, and he was really upset and crying because he felt Cherríe did not yield to acknowledge his suffering. To this Cherríe replied, and I paraphrase of course, “This whole room understands your suffering and what you’ve been through. We are here with you. But we don’t have time to stay in that suffering. What we are here to do in these three days it to make your work as striking and urgent as possible.” Who else can say that to a writer of color, but people who have been there, too? To start off with that kind of understanding about my experience as a woman of color in this country is exactly why I’m hooked on coming to VONA.

FIRST LINES: A selection from My Kill Adore Him

by Paul Martínez Pompa


I play it chingon in full length
*
Lissette opens me with her fingers.
*
With Popsicles shoved down your pants
*
Me & Z walking the block when a cop shoots
*
When I was ten, my older sister walked in on us---me, the dog, the
*
She taught me to wipe
*
The air is like gunmetal
*
the bus fills & empties like an aluminum lung. what he says
*
July smothers the city like a drunk
*
Your feet are a slow train

To the medics he is nothing
*
All night the plows pummeled the streets
*
i am searching for a way. to fall
*
I didn't get past security
*
your poem wind
*
The body as weapon, as inspiration
*
Not only have I disappointed the high school Spanish teacher
*
Are your images inefficient? Is your diction bland? Are you tired of
*
Maybe Zo was hung like a six-ten stallion
*
Damn these stacks of argyle I can't have
*
That Lucia broke the machine twice in one week was evidence

***

Yes, I'm holding Paul's book in my hands.

Yes, you can order it

HERE.

***

The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize

Next deadline: January 15, 2010

Final Judge: Silvia Curbelo

More info. soon

GEMS THAT CROSS MY DESK: Elijah's Farm

I met Rachel Jennings at my first Macondo workshop in 2006.

We were both in the "Mocoso" workshop, which was led by Erasmo Guerra and Leslie Larson. Last year, Pecan Grove Press, based in San Antonio, published Jennings' first full-length book, Elijah's Farm. I remember buying it at Macondo last year, and taking it with me to Dublin, Ireland.

I loved it.

It's a book that grew and continues to grow on me. Fellow Macondista and poet, Ben Olguín, has written a thorough and thoughtful piece on Jennings' book, published recently in San Antonio Current.

APPALACHIA Y AZTLAN

So close to the Alamo, so far from God

by B.V. Olguín

In “Hedge Ghosts,” the opening poem of her first full collection, Elijah’s Farm (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), Tennessee transplant Rachel Jennings shares a familiar familial yearning: “Like anyone I wanted / elders and epic heroes / and not such ghosts as these ... ” These family ghosts, she reveals in her signature picaresque tone, set a Jennings family trail to Spanish Texas with “youthful forays into foreign lands / that climaxed explosively / with bowel bursts in the scrub brush / of Nuevo Santander.”

Them vaunted Tennessee volunteers of our high-school Alamobotomies are Rachel Jennings’s kin. And as kinfolk go, she knows that each time they “hem and haw” about their heroism, they’re just covering up shit. Jennings’s poems offer this ground’s-eye view of the real flesh-and-blood people others have used to create grand heroic narratives. These folks might have something different to say about what really happened, and why, if anyone would just stop and listen. As poet Sandra Cisneros proclaims in her back-cover blurb, “It’s to the survivors she pays homage, the barrio rednecks, the hillbilly women, the folks who don’t think they make a difference in this world.”

Jennings, a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop that Cisneros founded (and of which I, too, am a member), has lived in Texas on and off since 1999. After receiving her Ph.D. in Irish, postcolonial, and Chicana/o literary studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Jennings pursued teaching and editing stints everywhere from Tennessee to Minnesota to Texas. She currently works part-time as an adjunct composition professor at San Antonio College, and this semester she is teaching in a special re-entry educational and college-scholarship program for high-school drop-outs.

“It’s tough,” she says of trying to maintain discipline in the testosterone-laden classroom of primarily Chicano students. “They just don’t realize the opportunities they are jeopardizing.”
Jennings knows that life affords few second chances, and sometimes no real chance at all. Her poem “Mill Girl” is a feminist shout-out to clerical workers preyed upon by “this lawyer / over my shoulder,” who “ is so much like / a floor boss / in her leather heels / not from Payless.”
The poem ends with a challenge to herself, her Appalachian community, and the broader community of readers she has cultivated over two decades of writing: “What is it / with hillbilly women / that we don’t file lawsuits / but manila folders, and / it’s not a difference we make / but coffee / and // copies, copies, copies, // rhythmically, // just like that?” Jenning's poetry is not an overt call to arms — after all, she says, she still is trying to live down the fact that her great-great grandfather fought for the U.S. in the Mexican War. Rather, she offers a poetry of witness, and of the wisdom of mountain folk who have made a culture and identity out of scarcity, neglect, and defiance.

Her signature poem, “The Gag Order,” recounts a personal encounter with the anti-choice zealotry that continues to sweep through parts of the nation as it did in Knoxille, Tennessee, in 1986, where the poem is set. It recalls when the affluent young doctor
frowned testily, sized me up
as they do, then untied
the thin white mask
that divided us, all because
the deferential mountain girl
would not be dismissed
with stern words
or some official ban on maps
(simple directions to a clinic)
but instead, without warning,
looked her
square in the eye
to demand with some fieriness
a place to go.

Redneck Revolutionaries

Pecan Grove publisher H. Palmer Hall has built a reputation as a local talent scout. While none of his writers have yet to cross into the mainstream — few poets from any press ever do — Jennings is a rare author who welcomes her exclusion from the canon. “That’s not where my people are. My kinfolk and my spiritual and political kinfolk live on the margins,” she says with the fervor of an old-time gospel preacher.

Jennings has been a member of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center Board of Directors — the Conjunto de Nepantleras — which means “a gathering of women in between,” as in between peoples, groups, and struggles. Prior to joining this grassroots community arts organization, Jennings had a long history of activism, which is inspired by a family of proud yet populist Appalachian educators and activists. Belying the stereotypes popularized by Li’l Abner-style caricatures of the ignorant hillbilly who can’t count or manage his land (all the better to enable multinationals to strip-mine and pollute the region), her father is a high-school mathematics and special-education teacher, and one sister works in the nonprofit sector in support of Appalachian community organizations.

But her family also has a legacy of addiction. She neither pathologizes, romanticizes, excuses, nor denies it. Instead, she writes these people into history, such as in the poem “Hermitage,” which recounts her encounter with a humble “wino” at the estate of former President Andrew Jackson, renowned as a champion of the “common man.” She was a young girl at the time, and Jennings recalls the derision that even her own family had for the man — much like their soiled-breeched ancestors in Nuevo Santander.

Jennings is no flag-waving patriot. Her poetic vision arises from her political activism and insights as a scholar of working-class and anti-colonial literatures. Yet she is never overly didactic. On the contrary, her poetry manages to blend a cerebral complexity with scatological realism. Her aesthetic functions immediately, like a swig of Kentucky’s finest, and its images linger on the tongue after each reading.

When she writes in the poem “Barrio Rednecks” that “My uncles were / rednecks, that’s all,” she is not denigrating nor moralizing, but simply situating these characters in the socioeconomic class structure that links them to other “rednecks,” including those signaled in the title; think Little Joe’s polka hit “Redneck Meskin Boy.”

Jennings isn’t alone, of course, in reclaiming and expanding the political resonance of this epithet. Unlike Jeff Foxworthy, who never gets beyond the stereotype in his tired “you know you’re a redneck” joke series, Jennings offers an impressionistic meditation on the political economy of race and class.

In Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War (Crown 2007), author Joe Bageant similarly notes that these long-denigrated rural white workers have more in common with immigrants, black dockworkers, and the Mexican-American proletariat than with middle- and upper-class Whites. The failure of the left, Bageant argues, comes from its inability to appeal to the justified rage felt by these displaced and exploited rural folk. In the absence of a coordinated organizing effort, this rage turns to bigotry. The so-called white progressives even gain cultural capital from this stratification.

While Bageant offers a bleak vision of the future possibilities for rapprochement, through poetry, Jennings seeks to uncover the common ground, and preach the inevitability of a cross-racial union of the poor and working classes. Many of the mentors she signals in poem dedications and titles are Chicanos, including Américo Paredes and Tomás Rivera, as well as the Mexican folk figure Don Pedrito Jaramillo.

But the soft-spoken, deferential mountain girl ain’t gonna let nobody get ’bove their raisin’. Her poem “Chicano Studies” opens, “Muy estimado / Don Profe Chicano, / I mean no disrespect, / but ... ” and proceeds to call out an unnamed Chicano professor at her alma mater for his “silly banter about / Kentucky trash, inbred / fools, possum folkways. / My whole past, that is.”

This is why the poet never enrolled in his classes, she confides, nonetheless ending with her signature appeal to building bridges: “I have wondered always / whether sitting at that table / might have felt like family. // ¿Por qué no, profesor? / Let’s imagine it.”

Jennings previously has published an artisan chapbook, Hedge Ghosts (LaNana Creek Press, 2003), and currently is working on a new collection, Knoxville Girl, which takes its title from the series of morbid mountain ballads about the murder of an Appalachian woman who dared defy patriarchal strictures. These poems, like those in Elijah’s Farm, stitch a complex quilt that blends her love of Appalachia with incisive cultural and political critique.

This balance is illustrated in the nostalgic poem to her mountaineer heritage, “The Old Schoolhouse,” which is followed by a much more dramatic, some might say heretical, poem about her more infamous ancestry, “Eulogy for Davy Crocket.” It opens with what may be the best damn line of Alamo literature ever written: “Burn in Hell, Davy. Git!” •


B. V. Olguín is a poet, educator and frequent contributor to the San Antonio Current.

© 2009 San Antonio Current

Another Alternative: MACONDO

Sandra Cisneros shares the anecdote year in and year out with the "first years" aka "Mocosos y Mocosas": one of the principal reasons she started Macondo was because of her alienating experience as an MFA student at Iowa, as well as her unsatisfactory experience as a creative writing instructor in academia. Macondo, then, was an "alternative" creative writing community that got started in San Antonio in the mid 1990s. Below are 20 images from the 2009 edition, which concluded less than a week ago. And below that is Macondo's "Compassionate Code of Conduct"---a seminal document, in my view, and one that's worth a read for those of us who hold and bring certain values to this table. I re-visit it, now and then, to remind myself what really matters.

Photos courtesy of Macondistas

Jenn De Leon &Lilliana Valenzuela

Sandra Cisneros & Jenn De Leon

Sandra Cisneros & Charles Rice-Gonzalez

Jessica Lopez

Seated: Amada Irma Pérez, Fan Wu & John Olivares Espinoza (workshop instructors), Reggie Scott Young, Margo Chavez-Charles. Standing: Liliana Valenzuela, John Pluecker, Toni Plummer, Elaine Beale, Charles Rice-Gonzalez, Ellen Wadey, Jenn De Leon, Ching-In Chen, Francisco Aragón, Miryam Bujanda (Macondo board member). Third row, standing: Sehba Sarwar, Linda Rodriguez, Josslyn Luckett.

late dinner after "Cafe Nostalgia"

Resistencia Bookstore @ Macondo

Beatriz Terrazas & René Colato Laínez

Linda Rodriguez, Sehba Sarwar, Jenn De Leon. Liliana Valenzuela

Levi Romero & Liliana Valenzuela

Charles Rice-Gonzalez & John Pluecker ("JP")

Reggie Scott Young & Macondo Board President Bill Sanchez. Vicente Lozano chatting with Amada Irma Perez.

Francisco Aragón, Margo Chavez-Charles, Ruth Behar

Sandra Cisneros @ Casa Navarro

Jessica Lopez @ Casa Navarro

Elaine Beale @ Casa Navarro

Liliana Valenzuela @ Casa Navarro

In afternoon seminar

Beatriz Terrazas & Belinda Acosta leading their seminar "How Writing Short Can Help Your Longer Works"

Las Dos Normas Workshop:
front center: Deborah Miranda
Standing: Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Norma Cantú, Norma Alarcón, Sehba Sarwar, Jessica Lopez, Liliana Valenzuela

hanging with Sandra


COMPASSIONATE CODE OF CONDUCT

For one precious week out of each year, we come to Macondo to share our work, to learn from each other, to befriend one another, and to re-commit ourselves to our writing in a supportive environment. We have an opportunity to create the world we would like to live in every day — to create a kind, generous, respectful, creative, and passionate community. We also have an opportunity to be our most generous selves — engaging in the daily work of creating Macondo, checking our egos at the door, recognizing the divine spark within others, fostering creativity and well-being in others, and sharing what we most authentically can offer.

In order for this work of creating community to flourish, it is necessary to establish certain boundaries. These boundaries are not meant to curtail individual freedoms or to spoil anyone’s fun. Rather, they are self-preserving and community-preserving. To put it simply, we forefront the practice of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is a spiritual cornerstone derived from Macondo’s Buddhist, Feminist, communal, and activist roots. It is a practice motivated by having witnessed marginalization in our communities, and it is a compassion applied with the resolve to treat each other better. We approach each other as guests from different worlds, with the common impulse to create. Mindfulness serves to ensure that we, as individuals and as a group, envision and re-vision what compels us to work together towards the Macondo mission of art for humanity’s sake.

This is not to say that we avoid conflict. Because we are a community of writers learning to be better artists and better people, we understand that in questioning the world, we sometimes question each other. In many cases, the friction between our fruitfully disturbed worlds necessitates another Macondo virtue — learning from Difference. We acknowledge that respectful disagreements can be extremely productive in many settings, including our workshops. Even when it is uncomfortable, challenging each other’s work or ideas is an essential part of growing and learning — as writers, activists, and human beings.

Many of us come from places where we’ve been involved in long-term conflicts and have learned extremely valuable survival skills, including persistence, skepticism, and a willingness to confront others. But in declaring ourselves present, we do not get to silence anyone else. In fact, such behavior is paradoxical. Our community is collective; by suppressing another voice, we shut an unrecognized part of ourselves down. Everything is an ongoing discussion. No one should consciously or unconsciously be working to shut down dialogue. No one can expect to have the last word or to persuade everyone of the rightness of their opinion. Our words can only open the next door, the one out to a nighttime back yard where we realize how small we stand beneath the sky.