2000 - 2010: first decade of the 21st winds to a close...

http://letraslatinas.net/

Looking over the recently posted 2010 list of poetry collections by Latino and Latina poets is heartening---its variety and abundance clear. And it occurs to me that the first decade of the 21st century winds to a close today.

What would a Latino poetry bibliography of the first decade look like?

Or perhaps an alternative question to ponder, where Latino poetics is concerned, is not what work was produced and published this first decade of the 21st century, but rather: what work did Latino and Latina poets, as readers of the art, connect with in a particular, indelible way? So...a question, or any variation thereof, could be:

What poem, or sequnce of poems,  or book of poems...did you encounter in the first ten years of this century that you still find yourself returning to for inspiration and nourishment---and why? 


It goes without saying, if it's not obvious, that I don't necessarily mean work by other Latino and Latina poets. I'm more interested in poets' perspectives as readers.

Letras Latinas Blog would like to know.

Neil de la Flor interviews Emma Trelles

HERE

A Year in Poetry: 2010 (in no particular order)

http://letraslatinas.net/

Poetry collections published by a Latino or Latina poet this year—with author links.

Undocumentaries (Shearsman Books)

Rosa Alcalá

This is How It Began (Palace Press)

Valerie Martínez

And They Called It Horizon (Sunstone Press)

Valerie Martínez

The Habit of Buenos Aires (Tebot Bach)

Lorraine Healy

On Wonderland & Waste (Sidebrow Books)

Sandy Florian

Prelude to Air From Water  (Elixir Press)

Sandy Florian

To the Break of Dawn (Creative Commons)

Oscar Bermeo

Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books)

Edwin Torres

furia (Mouthfeel Press) 

ire'ne lara silva

torch song tango choir (University of Arizona Press)

Julie Sopia Paegle

The Lesser Tragedy of Death (Akashic Books)

Cristina García

The Book of What Remains (Copper Canyon Press)

Benjamin Sáenz

He Art (Zion Imprints)

Judith Angeles

Hi-density Politics  (BlazeVOX)

Urayoán Noel

Angles of Approach (White Pine Press)

Holly Iglesias

Long Distance (Bilingual Press)

Steven Cordova

Each and Her (University of Arizona Press)

Valerie Martinez

The Ghost of César Chávez (C & R Press)

David Domínguez

Tunaluna (Aztlan Libre Press)

Alurista

Girl on a Bridge (Main Street Rag)

Suzanne Frischkorn

Flexible Bones (University of Arizona Press)

Maria Melendez

Elisa’s Hunger (Mouthfeel Press)

Carolina Monsivais

Exposition Park (Wesleyan University Press)

Roberto Tejada

Heredities (Louisiana State University Press)

J. Michael Martinez

Ce*Uno*One (Swan Scythe Press)

Francisco X. Alarcón

Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books)

John Murillo

Glow of our Sweat (Scapegoat Press)

Francisco Aragón

Al Pie de la Casa Blanca:

Poetas Hispanos de Washington, D.C

(Academia Norteamerican de la Lengua Española)

Sharks in the River (Milkweed Editions)

Ada Limón

Human Nature (Tupelo Press)

Gary Soto 

The Writer's Chronicle errata: Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize

By now, readers of Letras Latinas Blog may have noticed that it's been on something of an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize "kick" these last few days.

The trend continues---with an announcement to remedy an error.  On page 77 of the current issue of The Writer's Chronicle, the publication of the Assocation of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize is wrongly listed.

I was alerted of this when I received an e-mail not too long ago inquiring if the deadline for the next edition of the Prize was January 15, 2011. It was an understandable query since the current, December issue lists the deadline as January 15, 2010!

The next deadline for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize is January 15, 2012.

It will be the fifth edition of the prize.

The final judge is Francisco X. Alarcón.

In the meantime, Letras Latinas is pleased to announce a slight re-vamping of its official web page. Have a peek:

http://letraslatinas.net/

Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (4): Sheryl Luna

In the spring of 2004, poet Robert Vasquéz selected El Paso native Sheryl Luna as the inaugural winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. In some respects, it's fitting that this four-part series of mini-interviews concluded with the author of Pity the Drowned Horses because the cover art for this volume was created by Andrés Montoya's father, Malaquias Montoya, who produced this image as a direct result of his engagement with Luna's winning manuscript. And it's Malaquias Montoya who has created the silkscreen print that will be the cornerstone of the soon-to-be-launched Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative...

--FA

LL: How, if at all, are the visual arts implicated in your work as a poet? Or, can you talk about the relationship between poetry (yours or the work of others) and the visual arts.

SL: I have a close relationship with my uncle, Alberto Escamilla, a visual artist. We discuss art being a life-long process and share difficulties, accomplishments, goals and struggles with one another. My mother is also an artist and paints with oils and acrylics and she is always encouraging about utilizing my creativity. Both have been models for me in terms of persistence, time spent towards improving as an artist, and the joy and pleasure that arises from the act of creativity.

Years ago, in the late nineties, I wrote a series of poems about Matisse based on art I’d viewed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I’d like to once again find that intersection between visual art and my poems.

LL: Please pick one of the three following topics/themes, and share what relationship it has with your work as a poet: place, voice, community.

SL: My first collection dealt with the El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez as a place. The border was seen as both bridge and barrier. I was interested in the concept of the border and growing up there and having left and returned. So, the border as home was what the book was about initially. I was very interested in music at the time and sought to make my lines musically appealing, and of course the crisp image and careful attention to language were the building blocks for that collection. I found it interesting at the time I wrote it to make associative leaps that were surprising based on the images around me along the border. 

LL: What did winning the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and, as a result, having your first book published mean to you? What effect did it have on your writing career? 

SL: I was very glad to have a book published as it proved quite difficult to find a publisher. In terms of my writing career, I think it helped publishers take an interest in later work, particularly a second collection of poetry which is still in the works.

***

“There’s a weighty mournfulness to Luna’s borderlands, where the stark poverty of Mexico butts against the brash, unyielding sprawl of her American city. Pity the Drowned Horses takes its reader across a ravaged landscape where . . . the last few hares sprint across a bloodied/highway and there are women everywhere/who have half-lost their souls/in sewing needles and vacuum-cleaner parts. In this world of little comfort, Luna is intent on seeking meaning—however bitter—in the emptiness and meditating on the redeeming power of language.” — The Texas Observer

Pity the Drowned Horses

(University of Notre Dame Press, 2005)

by Sheryl Luna

was a finalist for the Colorado Book Prize in poetry

and profiled at Poets&Writers in their annual feature on debut poets.

Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (3) Gabe Gomez

Gabe's manuscript was selected by former Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, Valerie Martínez. One of the special things about this second edition of the prize was that the official announcement was made public at the Border Book Festival in in the spring 2006. Martínez graciously made the trip down to Mesilla, NM for the occasion. On our way to the festival I dialed Gabe's number; he answered; I passed the cell phone to the judge, and she relayed the good news.....

--FA

How, if at all, are the visual arts implicated in your work as a poet? Or, can you talk about the relationship between poetry (yours or the work of others) and the visual arts.

At this point, my work isn’t necessarily influenced by one single thing, much less other forms of art. The visual arts, however, will probably always have some tethers in my work. Rather than a finished art piece, I find that most of my connections to the visual arts are within a mechanical/spiritual process that begins before I "lay on the paint" so to speak.  To borrow a legal term, there is a period of discovery where I engage, albeit subconsciously, in collecting information—it’s a broad and undefined act, but an important part of my process. I locate myself within these ideas and pieces of the larger world; it’s a kind of measurement. In this, my composition, lines, breaks, phrasing, etc., are not unlike site-specific or performance art. The act of writing often informs the poems, so the idea and execution are often intertwined.  The page presents little if any boundaries, but enough of a limit to structure a poem.   

Please pick one of the three following topics/themes, and share what relationship it has with your work as a poet:  place, voice, community.

I have a vast definition of place; it’s similar to my overarching definitions of poetry, which is to say, ironically enough, that my interests have little to do “with” poetry. Still, my obsessions with sourcing ideas invariably lead to place or rather a “confluence of circumstances.” I remember hiking alone through the desert when I was a boy and wondering if I had been the first person to step through a particular pass in the landscape…whether or not you bring ideas to the place of your origin or the place informs the poem, it is a tremendous thing to capture…

What did winning the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and, as a result, having your first book published mean to you? What effect did it have on your writing career?

 An unexpected gift to winning the prize has been the atmosphere it created for my work to evolve. The Outer Bands is a risky book—it is a restless and urgent document that captured a very specific period in my life. It taught me that art and the art community has a central place among tragedy. Ultimately, it has changed my own expectations of writing and my place within the conversation of contemporary poetry. It was a tremendous way to begin a literary career, as there was no compromise—but rather a refinement—to the vision and integrity of the work.

*

“The title poem of this collection is a 28-day record of days between Katrina and Rita, which draws from the news headlines, the language tossed around by politicians, and realistic images of the storm to provide a portrait of just how dislocating, how jarring, how out of time that period was.” 

— The Times-Picayune

The Outer Bands

(University of Notre Dame Press, 2007)

by Gabriel Gomez

available HERE

Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (2): Paul Martínez Pompa

Here is our second installment of mini-interviews with winners of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a collaboration between Letras Latinas and University of Notre Dame Press. Paul Martinez Pompa, it so happens, is currently tweeting for the Poetry Foundation. 

---FA

LL: How, if at all, are the visual arts implicated in your work as a poet? Or, can you talk about the relationship between poetry (yours or the work of others) and the visual arts.

PMP: In the sense that written art and visual art are created with an assumed audience, I see their common ground as texts that depend on their respective readers/listeners/viewers to fulfill or produce meaning. I used to approach the two mediums as mostly dissimilar, but that was maybe because the former, to me, involved a slower kind of meaning-production-process while the latter immediately imparted meaning to its audience. That assumes a lot of passivity on the part of the visual arts’ audiences. In reality, just as a poem isn’t finished until the reader engages with it, so is the case with anything visual. On a somewhat related note, I wasn’t able to title my book until I engaged with the artwork that eventually became the book’s cover. I gave the artist, Lauren Levato, my manuscript, which at the time had a less satisfactory title; she read the poems and came up with the cover image. When I saw her work and thought about its implications, it provided me with the distance and perspective to arrive at a title that better fit what was going on with my poems. In other words, I arrived at the book’s title only after a visual artwork reported/exposed/communicated back to me what I was doing.

LL: Please pick one of the three following topics/themes, and share what relationship it has with your work as a poet:  place, voice, community.

PMP: I suppose the most immediate topic/theme I engaged with in my first book was place, not only in the sense of, say, an imagined city, suburb or bathroom stall as a place, but also the body as a place, as a site that acts and is acted upon, as a place that empowers and disempowers. For most of the poems, voice and community begin with an awareness of place.

LL: What did winning the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and, as a result, having your first book published mean to you? What effect did it have on your writing career?

PMP: Winning the Montoya Prize meant a lot. While I write poems primarily out of emotional and psychological necessity, I have the hope that someone will eventually read the poems, so the Prize and subsequent publication provided an opportunity to reach a larger audience and create further meaning. The Prize has also afforded me the opportunity to travel and connect with other writers and artists around the country who I would not have met otherwise. Writing can be a very solitary endeavor, so the Prize helped me to gain a better sense of community. And considering the historical marginalization of Latin@ voices, the Montoya Prize is an empowering platform that allows us to shape and revise ongoing conversations pertaining to art and politics. Lastly, and unexpectedly, the Prize upped the stakes for me as a poet; the visibility that it provided has served as a welcome challenge to keep evolving as a writer and as an artist.

My Kill Adore Him (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009)

was a finalist for the 2009 Book of the Year Award 

at ForeWord Magazine.

Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (1): Emma Trelles

This is the first in a series of mini-interviews with current and past winners of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. All will be answering the same three questions. These, and a forthcoming interview with writer Daniel Chacón, who has edited a manuscript of poetry by Andrés Montoya that aspires to be a posthumous book, are part of what Letras Latinas is calling the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative. Stay tuned.


---FA


LL: How, if at all, are the visual arts implicated in your work as a poet? Or, can you talk about the relationship between poetry (yours or the work of others) and the visual arts?

ET: There is a long and ongoing love affair between poetry and visual art:  Blake, Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Patti Smith,  the tradition of ekphrasis, the Sackner Archive of concrete and visual poetry, which is housed here in South Florida—all of these come instantly to mind and I'm certain I could come up with a weighty list of who and what has tethered poems to art over centuries. About five years ago, I began covering the visual arts as a journalist, and the steady viewing and analysis that accompanied this job found its way into my own poems, but not in any overt ways, as of yet. Instead, I find myself wanting to write more deeply into my own work, to not be satisfied with the precisely rendered image but to investigate its relevance within the larger context of perception. Visual art has invited me to consider how language shapes memory in its immediate and distant forms. This focus on texture, I believe, is a direct result of me looking hard at the abstractions of Georgia O'Keeffe or the manipulation of light by the French Impressionists. Visual art, ironically enough, has made me examine not just how poems look, but how they think. Because the best of art, the kind that stays with me, at least, has a brain buzzing beneath its surfaces.

LL: Please pick one of the three following topics/themes, and share what relationship it has with your work as a poet:  place, voice, community.

ET: Place, particularly in the form of physical geographies, has been a key theme in my work up until now. South Florida's quilt of city and wilderness is a constant source of interest to me, although I've lately thought more loosely about place, how it can incorporate intangibles such as time or spirit or even be wholly invented and still have heft. It's exciting to consider place without delineation. I do like a poem to possess at least a touch of a setting, though, even if it quickly disappears into a drift of clouds.

LL: What did winning the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and, as a result, having your first book published mean to you? What effect did it have on your writing career?

ET: Winning this prize has been an honor, and it immediately impacted my writing career, which to me is more of a way of living than a profession.  I've been introduced to a wide community of Latino writers that I had not met or, in some instances, even known about, poets such as Brenda Cárdenas, John Murillo, Paul Martinez Pompa, and Silvia Curbelo, who selected my manuscript, Tropicalia, for the prize and whose  aversion to po-business I find sort of punk rock and inspiring.  I feel as if I've joined this vast array of art makers, all of us unified by some facet of Latino/Hispanic culture—perhaps language or music, perhaps the politics of displacement or gender. We are our own distinct voices, but the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize draws us into an unexpected harmony. Although I lived in Miami for a big portion of my life, and I'm of Cuban descent, I've never felt all that Latino, so my arrival to this sphere of writers is filled with a sense of discovery.


***

Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) 

will debut at the book fair at the 2011 AWP Conference 

in Washington, D.C. next February