LETRAS LATINAS BLOG

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

2012-01-29T11:29:00.000-05:00

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.

"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

2012-01-22T13:55:00.000-05:00

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.

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.

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

2012-01-17T01:04:00.001-05:00

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.

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

2012-01-11T15:30:00.003-05:00

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.

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.

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.

from The American Poetry Review's website:

2012-01-09T20:08:00.000-05:00

2012 HONICKMAN BOOK PRIZE

WINNER ANNOUNCED

Tomás Q. Morín has been awarded the 2012 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for his manuscript A Larger Country. His book was chosen by this year’s guest judge, esteemed poet Tom Sleigh, who will also write an introduction for it.

Morín is a Texas native. He received his MFA from Texas State University, and MA from Johns Hopkins University. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and was a fellow at the Idyllwild Summer Arts Program. He is a Senior Lecturer at Texas State University.

His poems have appeared in New England Review, Narrative, Boulevard, Slate,Threepenny Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.

Congratulations, Tomás!

Review Roundup--January 6, 2012

2012-01-06T17:51:00.001-05:00

Rigoberto González reviews Luis Rodríguez’s It Calls you Back (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

I have to confess that I have still to read It Calls You Back. And this confession comes from one who considers Luis Rodríguez’s work—both in deed and word—bedrock in his literary formation. When reading Luis Rodríguez’s work I am often reminded that if one discovers a writer in a felicitous hour—in the wakefulness of spirit, in a moment of uncommon joy or suffering—that poet becomes for that reader a tutelary and redemptive spirit. For me this first encounter with Rodríguez came sometime back in 2005: Luis was giving a reading at Sonoma State University, I was a junior in high school and without a clue to the world that lay beyond a precarious upbringing. Luis read “My Name is Not Rodríguez.” That evening was my first on a college campus and that poem a baptism into the world of poetry. I went home with a copy of Always Running: La Vida Loca and a sudden urge to write: I don’t know from where or how this came to me but that night I wrote my own version of that poem—pure fire, pure nonsense. Years later now and at different crossroads, it is with this same sense of urgency and redemption that I find myself coming full circle and returning to It Calls You Back.

Here is what Rigoberto González (who is slated to read at installment three of Latino/a Poetry Now Macalester College in October of this year) had to say:

In 1993, Luis J. Rodríguez released "Always Running: La Vida Loca," a best-selling memoir that's been celebrated for its honest portrayal of a youth on drugs and involved with gangs in Los Angeles. The impetus for the book was an attempt by the author to save his son Ramiro from succumbing to the temptations that compelled Rodriguez to join a gang by age 11 and end up in jail as a teenager.

In a long-awaited sequel, "It Calls You Back" (Simon & Schuster, $24.99 hardcover), Rodríguez confronts another stark reality: his failure to spare Ramiro that devastating fate -- including prison time. The author takes a closer look at his own life journey after his release from jail, to understand why that crucial second chance was not an option for his firstborn.

Click HERE to read the review.

The Write Christine reviews Ruben Quesada’s Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011)

Of Ruben Quesada’s debut collection D.A. Powell writes: “Like Whitman, Quesada is a poet of motion—journeying to the center of the US, where the traditions and innovations of first-generation Americans transverse the meditative starbursts of hills…. From Costa Rica to Los Angeles and across the continent, Quesada’s poems chronicle one family’s history…carries us toward “that seam in space” where dream and experience intersect.” But not everything in this collection is sheer movement. Two of my favorite poems in this collection are “My Parents Meet” and “Father.” In “My Parents Meet” Quesada writes: “He cuts in/ on her./ His parted hair absorbing the lights,/ nesting wings of a carrion…. Bodies tangled, curve vanishes,/ against curve; fitting into each other, a human/ jigsaw: ear to temple, nape/ to palm, forearm cradles/ hip, lips enters face—.“ In “Father” the speaker is moved by the details on his father’s face: the “aquiline/ nose, the mole above/ your right eyebrow that rises/ when you laugh.” There are also moments of unexpected tenderness and playfulness that act as kind of anchors to a reader that may suddenly find herself transcribed to a place of being, a place far from constant movement and withering. What Ruben evokes over and over again in this collection is the ever elusive and endangered animal of memory. His poems, portraits of neighborhoods and its people are above all poems of moving toward memory, toward the edges of beauty, of “the alpenglow of tomorrow and tomorrow.”

Here is what The Write Christine had to say:

Ruben Quesada’s début collection of poetry, Next Extinct Mammal, is a rare treat of imagery and frankness. At a time when plain, unadorned, weird and disjointed poetry is celebrated and sought, and after so much effort has been put, for so many years, into the rejection of style – into undoing Symbolism, undoing Romanticism, undoing Confessionalism, undoing Imagism – and into reform and political awareness and academic snobbery, reading the work of a poet who is not afraid of himself or of the life and thoughts he keeps company with is a welcome change of pace.

If there is a flaw in Quesada’s writing, it’s a touch of immaturity and simplicity and perhaps an overabundance of the aforementioned frankness, but if the book is green around the edges, the middle of it is in full blom. As a unit, it paints the story of a first-generation American and his family, and breathes to life a vivacious stranger in an even stranger land dreaming not only of belonging to blood and place but of belonging to the cosmos and the edges of time and beauty. Poem to poem, Quesada delivers surprising portraits of neighborhoods, rooms, and women, of changing seasons and cities, of mothers and fathers and sisters. Soft images with sharp hidden edges appear around the corners of sentences where we don’t expect them to appear, releasing us as readers from our expectations and evicting us from our own surroundings, transplanting us into another, less judgmental place.

Click HERE to read the review.

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Heather Treseler reviews Deborah Parédez’s This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002)

Keeping up with what is quickly becoming a Letras Latinas Blog tradition (the re-posting and re-appreciation of already published reviews) in these Review Roundups, and taking advantage to wish happy tenth birthday to Deborah Parédez’s collection This Side of the Skin (2002) I present you here with a review of Deborah Parédez’s This Side of the Skin by Heather Treseler and which first appeared in issue

2 of Latino Poetry Review.

Here is what Heather Treseler had to say:

As her title suggests, Deborah Parédez's first collection of poetry plumbs liminal worlds. From the classical epic to the epidermal quick, Parédez explores a roughly hewn, unhybridized world in which stories from Hades perpetuate in the minds of the living, and elegies—for forsaken loves, childhood sublimity, veterans of violence, and the characters of nostalgia—offer a shapely sadness, a rhythm ultimately heartening in the courage of its returns. In over forty dramatic lyrics, Parédez's work unfolds a mythology of her own making. Engaging with tropes from Greek fable and German poetry, Texan heartlands and salsa dance-floors, Parédez's major themes of exile and divisionary worlds evince an admirable breadth, a restless picaresque verve that dares its critics to assign this collection to any single category.

Click HERE to read the review.

José B. González on Andrés Montoya

2012-01-06T12:11:00.001-05:00

José B. González

with "Untitled" by Malaquias Montoya

“I chose to contribute to the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative by purchasing this beautiful print because it is a great reminder to look back. As writers, we're often preoccupied with the future—e.g. our next creative work, our next publication, and so forth. But this print is a reminder of how so many of our literary opportunities were made possible by the likes of Andrés Montoya. I know I owe him. And this is my way of thanking him and appreciating his legacy.”

—José B. González

***

Guidelines to the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize

Deadline:
January 15, 2012

Final Judge:

Francisco X. Alarcón

FLORICANTO ISSUE of Beltway Poetry Quarterly

2012-01-01T11:39:00.005-05:00

A young man raises his hand.  

“How does it feel writing about our country?”  

The invited guest tells the story of how he came to poetry.  

The country in question: El Salvador. The scene of this exchange: a high school in Washington, DC.

  Frazier O’Leary, who has taught and coached for thirty years, has gathered twenty or so of his Cardozo students, most of them natives of this small Central American nation, or the sons and daughters of Salvadoran immigrants. A few weeks earlier they had each been given The Art of Exile by William Archila—also born in El Salvador, who migrated to California in 1980 at the age of twelve. After Archila’s presentation, O’Leary’s students line up to have their books signed, chatter and visit with their new friend.  

That spring afternoon, in 2010, poetry became a palpable bridge.   

Among those who witnessed what took place in that classroom was Dan Vera, who’d graciously agreed to document the moment with his digital camera—whose poem, “If You Want To Purify America’s Textbooks of Ethnic Studies,” is one of the twenty-six poems you’ll read in this winter issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, an issue that aims to embody a similar bridge.  

Guest editors of Beltway Poetry are asked to hone in on a local angle. Mine is the AWP Conference & Bookfair held in Washington. Or rather: the “off-site” event at the True Reformer Building on U Street that unfolded on February 4, 2011, an event called “Floricanto in DC: A Multicultural Response to SB1070”—in reference to Arizona’s anti-immigrant law.   [...]

---Francisco Aragón

from his Introduction

Beltway Poetry Quarterly
Volume 13:1, Winter 2012

Read the rest of the Introduction and access issue HERE.

*
Floricanto Issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly
CO-SPONSORED WITH

IMPORTANT JOINT-ANNOUNCEMENT from Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press

2011-12-22T00:02:00.004-05:00

Letras Latinas and Red Hen Press are pleased to announce that TWO manuscripts will be selected by final judge Orlando Ricardo Menes for publication by Red Hen Press.

The postmark deadline remains January 15, 2012

These two manuscripts will constitute the first two winners of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize.

Both authors will be offered a standard book contract and each manuscript will be published, one in 2013 and one in 2015.

All other perks of winning the prize remain the same for each poet.

Red Hen Press has been steadily increasing the lead time for books in its publication schedule. Marketing director William Goldstein had this to say:

“Longer lead times let us think harder about how best to send a book off into the world. This arrangement will allow us to better serve books and authors past, present, and future.”

“In some respects, our partnership with Red Hen Press is, in my view, a publishing initiative whose aim, with the help of our judge, is to provide a home for worthy book-length manuscripts at an independent press with a solid track record,” said Francisco Aragón, director of Letras Latinas. "We’d like to emphasize the collaborative nature of this initiative, which couldn't exist without the participation of the poets who send in their manuscripts."

Letras Latinas' A Year in Poetry, 2011

2011-12-18T12:35:00.014-05:00

Poetry collections published this year by a Latino or Latina poet.

We Had More to Say (Sunstone Press)

Raymond Zachary Ortiz

Always Messing With Them Boys (West End Press)

Jessica Helen Lopez
Spring and All (New Directions)
William Carlos Williams
Saborami (Chain Links)

Cecilia Vicuña

Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books)

David Hernandez

The Man Who Wrote on Water (Hanging Loose Press)

Pablo Medina

The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing)

Carmen Giménez Smith

In the Shadow of Al-Andalus (Coffee House Press)

Victor Hernández Cruz

Black Blossoms (Four Way Books)

Rigoberto González

Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (Wings Press)

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Backyard Migration Route (Finishing Line Press)

Emily Pérez

Kingdom Animalia (Boa Editions)

Aracelis Girmay

The Shallow End of Sleep (Tia Chucha)

Jose Antonio Rodriguez

The Trouble Ball (W.W. Norton & Company)

Martín Espada

The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame (University of Notre Dame Press)

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press)

Emma Trelles

Empire (University of Arizona Press)

Xochiquetzal Candelaria

Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press)

Ruben Quesada

Hi-Density Politics (BlazeVOX Books)

Urayoán Noel

Breaking Bread with Darkness: Book 1: The Esai Poems (Sherman Asher Publishing)

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press)

Thelma T. Reina

Here Lies Lalo: The Collected Poems of Abelardo Delgado (Arte Publico Press)

Abelardo Delgado

Handmade Memories (E-Chapbook)

Guy LeCharles González

Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach)

Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Latino/a Poetry Now Featured Poet, Rosa Alcalá on Words on a Wire

2011-12-11T08:48:00.005-05:00

Rosa Alcalá, who took part in installment one of Latino/a Poetry Now at Harvard University, is the current poet featured in Words on a Wire’s “Poetic License” segment. Words on a Wire, a radio show on poetry, fiction and issues of concern to writers and the community at large is hosted by Daniel Chacón and Benjamin Sáenz.

Like a finely-honed scalpel, in this roughly ten minute long segment, Rosa Alcalá dissects the Occupy Wall Street Movement’s demand at heart and in doing so shows us the human tissues behind the abstract language so commonly employed by the popular media in their attempts to dehumanize and discredit the movement and the people who most seek to benefit from it: the unemployed or underemployed, those who compose the ball in this game of labor and markets and are tucked away at whistle’s final call.

Taking us through a hallucinating journey from office temp to graduate student to professor at UTEP, Rosa reflects on what it means to be at the mercy of those who control the rules and regulations of the labor game. Never a stranger to the whims of this game, Alcalá evokes her fight with cancer to further testify to these crimes of our times: had she not left her job as an office temp to pursue an education she might not have survived her cancer. It was precisely being part of an institution of higher learning that gave her access to a top surgeon in that field. Alcalá reflects on the fact that unlike her, there are many who will never have the option of leaving behind hazardous working conditions and will be condemned to the violence of poverty. Rosa sums it best when she states:

“But the Occupy Movement, not just on Wall Street now but everywhere, is at its core about demanding that we all have options. The option to see a doctor when sick without going broke. The option to live and work in a healthy environment. The option to afford a safe place to live. The option to get an affordable education. The option to save a little money for retirement. And the option to not live in fear that everything one has worked for might disappear. And to that I raise my pink message pad. Today it reads:

“CALL FOR CHANGE. URGENT REPLY REQUESTED.’”

To listen to the show click here.

Latin@ Featured Poets: Francisco X. Alarcón, Eduardo C. Corral and Ruben Quesada

2011-12-04T14:04:00.016-05:00

Francisco X. Alarcón @ Acentos

As the manuscripts for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (which will be judged by Francisco X. Alarcón) begin to trickle in to the Letras Latinas office here at Notre Dame, it is almost by serendipitous consequence that I came upon two poems featured in the current edition of the Acentos Review by Francisco X. Alarcón. I first came upon Francisco X. Alarcón’s poetry as a junior in high school. I remember in particular the joy that came with being blown away by the simplicity of language and imagery that came with the lyric flights so characteristic of his poetry. Over the years, I’ve had several encounters with Alarcón—once in 2010 at a poetry reading organized to raise funds for the victims of the Chile and Haiti earthquakes in San Francisco, California. A steadfast believer that in our times—times so characteristic of environmental, social and spiritual degradation—the writing of a poem can act as a transcendent force of prayer and cosmic renewal, Francisco X. Alarcón is a poet I keep returning to both for guidance and inspiration. Of the two poems—En invierno and La noche—my favorite is En invierno, “In Winter:”

In Winter

the branches of trees

turn into open air roots

beseeching the sky

In deceiving simplicity of language and imagery, Alarcón leads the reader beyond reason and into the realm of intuition and pure imagination (see La Noche where night becomes coffee “spilled all over the Earth’s tablecloth”), where even roots—like hands in prayer—can transcend what binds them to the ground.

Eduardo C. Corral @ Poetry

Eduardo C. Corral strikes again. And this time Eduardo C. Corral has two poems “To Robert Hayden” and “To the Angelbeast” in this month’s edition of Poetry Magazine and which can be read online at the Poetry Foundation along with a beautiful thirty minute podcast and two “q&a” mini-interviews regarding his two poems.

Eduardo C. Corral writes: “I shouldn’t admit this in public, but I sometimes sleep with his [Robert Hayden’s] Collected Poems under my pillow. I want some of his greatness to seep in!" And in the two poems featured in this edition of Poetry Magazine, Eduardo has paid Hayden the ultimate tribute by making the speakers in his poems counterbalance the ambivalence present in the homoerotic poems of Robert Hayden and in the poet himself. Like the wedding ring which is “tossed” by Hayden’s imagined lover in the poem “To Robert Hayden,” Eduardo C. Corral recalls times when gay men were jailed and beaten for acting upon their desires. And in “To the Angelbeast” Corral reminds us of the emotional and physical bliss possible of same-sex relationships. I find myself lacking the words to describe what Eduardo has accomplished in these two poems; as much as this is a tribute to Hayden it is also an affirmation of Hayden’s sexuality, as Eduardo explains: “He [Hayden] believed the cancer that claimed his life was a punishment for his orientation. As an out-and-proud gay man, this saddens me…. To counter this sadness, to claim Hayden as one of my queer forefathers, I wrote a poem in which Hayden has an intimate encounter with another man. Not a stranger, but a man he already knows.… Hayden, in this poem, doesn’t fear or detest his desires. This comforts me as a gay man and as a poet who adores his work."

Ruben Quesada @ MoondayPoetry

Of the content featured on the Letras Latinas Blog—author interviews, review roundups, etc—one of the most rewarding and pleasurable projects is that of author interviews. Currently I am reading Ruben Quesada’s collection of poems titled Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011). I look forward to interviewing Ruben. In the meantime, a review of Next Extinct Animal can be read here.

“My First Sight of St. Louis,” “Cimmerian,” and “Nostalgia,” three poems from Next Extinct Animal are currently featured at Moonday Poetry. “Too much time has passed,/ and I’ve almost lost this freight/ of memories, that dawning/ of light over bluestem grass” writes Ruben in “Nostalgia.” What Ruben evokes over and over again in this collection is the ever elusive and endangered animal of memory and movement, a poet, a prophet, a collector of things past. His poems, portraits of neighborhoods and its people are poems of moving towards place and memory, toward the edges of beauty, of “the alpenglow of tomorrow and tomorrow.”

ALTA 2011: towards a partial re-cap

2011-11-29T23:32:00.009-05:00

I recently had the pleasure of attending my first ALTA conference (American Literary Translators Association), held in Kansas City, MO. What follows is a post-conference dialogue with Fred Arroyo about our respective experiences. It was conducted over e-mail in the days following the conference, and is an attempt at documentation, a notion that interests me more and more these days. [There is a photo at the beginning and---as an incentive to read to the end---a photo at the end!]

Francisco Aragón, Willis Barnstone,

Fred Arroyo, Aliki Barnstone, Mark Statman

Francisco Aragón:

First of all, Fred, I want to thank you for putting together, and inviting me to participate in, "Duende, Poetry, Translation: The Stranger at the Desk," our panel at the recently concluded ALTA conference in Kansas City, MO. I had been wanting to attend an ALTA conference for some time now. When you told me, months ago, that it was being held in Kansas City, and that Xánath Caraza was on the Conference Organizing Committee, that served as an added incentive to attend: I have a soft spot for Kansas City because of the generous hospitality I have experienced there with the Latino Writers Collective and also because it is the home of Scapegoat Press, the publisher of Glow of Our Sweat. I know that you've also read in Kansas City for the Collective. And in addition to taking part in the panel, it was great to finally be able to read with you, as we did, on Saturday at the New Letters and BkMk Press office at University of Missouri-Kansas City. Right now, I'd like to get your initial impressions of your first ALTA experience. I know for myself one of the highlights was being able to meet and spend quality time with Mark Statman. I'll be honest: I was aware that Mark and Pablo (Medina) had translated Poet in New York, but I hadn't read their translation. But after hearing Mark share his experience of rendering that work into English, and hearing about his work in translation, in general, I'm looking forward to re-visiting my favorite Lorca work.

Fred Arroyo:

What I’m recalling the most is the shape and rhythm of the conference, how it was intimate and well-paced, with a variety of enlightening panels that offered new creative energies for my reading, writing, and translation. Because the conference was not overly frenetic, as larger conferences tend to be, I was able to engage many writers in fruitful conversation. I had had several conversations with Mark Statman; we talked previously about working together, and so it was a pleasure to serve on this panel with him, and to hear more of the context surrounding his work on Lorca, his new translations of José María Hinojosa, as well as his insights into poetry in general. I had always admired Willis Barnstone’s writing on Borges, and continue to paraphrase for my work and life a line in one of his books: the desire to inhabit a university of living languages. I will especially remember several conversations with Willis, and a wondrous state of being as he shared memories and stories of Borges. Aliki Barnstone’s translations of C. P. Cavafy (The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy) have been close to my writing desk for the past two years, and it was an equal pleasure to meet and discuss language, family, and writing, and the ways our creativity in English is formed by powerful memories either remembered in or shaped by different languages.

On this same note, I found Jonathan Cohen’s “Recovery and Significance of William Carlos Williams as a Translator of Spanish-Language Verse: What the Establishment Missed in His Canon” fascinating and compelling. It was one of the best presentations of the conference, and right now I’m excited to read Jonathan’s new edition of By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 19196-1959 (New Directions, 2011).

We have been at various events together over the years, Francisco, and for sure the opportunity to read together was a highlight of the conference.

F. Aragón:

I spent part of today reading both the Foreword and the Introduction of By Word of Mouth…:Both Cohen's Introduction, which maps WCW's trajectory as a translator from the Spanish, and Julio Marzán's Foreword, which highlights the role that Spanish played in WCW's childhood household, and talks about how WCW loved the work of Francisco de Quevedo and Luis Góngora, were eye-opening for me. Reading the latter reminded me about my time in Spain in 1990 when I fell in love with these latter two Golden Age masters. But getting back to Jonathan Cohen: When I was drafting my notes for our panel, I knew that part of my remarks were going to include mention of reading the work of Ernesto Cardenal when I was in high school—in English translation, including Jonathan Cohen's rendering of With Walker in Nicaragua (Wesleyan University Press, 1984). And so when I saw Mark, right before our panel, warmly greet a man who he identified to me as the Jonathan Cohen (translator of Cardenal), and then saw Cohen settle in his seat for our panel, it hit me: I was going to be talking about my trajectory as a translator in front of one of my "heros" in literary translation… And my subsequent conversations with Cohen at the book fair, and listening to his moving presentation on Williams on our last day, seemed like the icing on the cake, so to speak, of the conference.

I wasn't aware of Willis' work on Borges. My favorite work by him, as a translator, is his work on Saint John of the Cross. As for Aliki, I've been having on-going conversations with her over the years, mostly at receptions at AWP. But the scale of the ALTA conference, as you correctly point out, afforded us the intimacy not only of extended conversation, but also sharing a meal or two, as we did. And I can't tell you what it felt like having them both sitting in the front row at our reading on Saturday. I distinctly remember thinking to myself, as I prepared to read "Torso," my liberal rendering of Rilke: I can't believe I'm about to read some of my translations in front of Willis Barnstone!

I also really really enjoyed the panel with Cynthia Hogue, Martha Collins, Rebecca Seiferle and David Keplinger. As someone who has just begun to explore literary translation as an additional literary practice, what did you make of this panel?

F. Arroyo:

The panel “Poetry Twice Writ: Translation as Creative Acts,” with Catherine Hammond (Moderator), Martha Collins, Cynthia Hogue, David Keplinger, and Rebecca Seiferle, was one of my favorite panels, as well. I took quite a few notes, and I think what the participants offered most insightfully is the material freight and possibilities of language, and how the translator works with layers of expression and meaning continually shifting from both this freight (say of filiation, intention, or desire in the original language) and possibility (of invention, creativity, poetics and form in the target language, English). I had this image of a new poem shining with intensity, with new sublingual and intonated phrasing, still shadowed and emerging from the original, as if cloaked in a special kind of light that makes the poem’s time and language—the poem itself—incarnate. These are elements to consider more carefully in the act of translation, surely, and yet it also spoke to me of those initial sparks or glimpses into the beginning composition of a poem or a fiction: where creativity arises from and becomes visible in written language.

Rebecca Seiferle had this wonderful moment when she spoke of how at 9 or 10 years old she realized that the language around her was weighted with intentions and desires that were outside her and, yet, at the same time, pressing against her being. In that moment she glimpsed—prophetic, it seems to me—her self needing its own language. Prophetic of the need for a poetic being, if you will, and how this very beginning of realization in the face of an “other” language is what the poet and translator must always face. I’m trying to remember this as clearly as possible, although I may be misremembering. She also talked about how we often turn to a dictionary as if it is an authority, as if it had an answer to the complex contradictions, problems, issues, or breakdowns of language, particularly when individuals want to equate a direct correlation (as if language were a straight one-way street) between thoughts, communication, and language. Language is clearly much more a busy intersection, a loud carnival or circus when it comes to thought, communication—and, for sure, creativity and poetry. So she described the act of turning to the dictionary not for answers but a kind of creative apprehension: each word and its “definition” leading us to new insights into origins and possibilities for language. When she is translating she looks up each word for its various possibilities, and this spoke to me of the new slowness, contemplation, and I must say spiritual space for poetry and translation.

All of a sudden this evocation of space, spirit, contemplation and poetics brings to mind Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and David Keplinger’s translation of the Danish poet Cartsten René Nielsen: House Inspections (BOA Editions, 2011). These prose poems are so far evocative and beautiful, and it seems their poetic territory are the rooms in a house, and at times the objects that inhabit those rooms with their own dark yet clear existence. I’ve just started to read House Inspections with great wonder and pleasure. I focus often on the power of objects as items of memory and meaning for translation and creativity, and so this book is speaking to me with strong sounds and images. David spoke of his work—collaboration—with the poets he translates; the detailed conversations they have about specific choices of translation, about poetry in more general terms, and how this conversation is shaping his own poetics. It was all the more interesting when he discussed working on translations from a language he is not fluent in.

Overall I took a lot away for writing poems, from this panel and others, and so I wonder if you, Francisco, found yourself reflecting on translation and your own poetry as well?

F. Aragón:

Reading this response, Fred, seems to suggest and confirm what you intimated at the conference: that perhaps more than literary translation, your ALTA experience seems to have jarred you into wanting to explore poetry—period. That is, exploring this genre for your own original work. If that’s the case, I’ll look forward to reading those poems! In fact, the pieces you read at our reading on Saturday sounded like prose poems to me; and the way you read them brought to mind poetry, as well.

My mindset before, during, and now after the conference is to get back to translation. My first significant literary publications were translations, particularly my work with Francisco X. Alarcón and Lorca’s “Sonetos del amor oscuro,” which I did with my late UC Berkeley mentor Jack Walsh. And during my years in Spain I started working on the creationist work of Gerardo Diego. Last year, I was able to re-visit some of this work with Diego and managed to place a decent selection, and essay at Jacket. I have a Gerardo Diego manuscript that I want to place and the conference has energized me to carve out the time to clean it up and start doing the necessary work to secure permission from the Diego estate.

At our ALTA panel I honed in on my work with Rubén Darío (I’ve recently placed three pieces in PALABRA) which is a concurrent interest of mine, as you well know.

Getting back to the panel we were discussing: one thing I especially appreciated about David Keplinger’s talk was how important it was for him to ground his work in translation in his relationship/friendship with the living authors themselves. It made me wonder what it might be like, for example, to identify a Nicaraguan poet of my generation and explore rendering his/her work into English in some hypothetical future. I also really felt drawn to Cynthia Hogue’s project that involved a French poet collaborating with a French philosopher, who contributed prose commentary. That made me wonder what it might be like to collaborate, as a poet, with a prose writer.

I don’t want to end my comments without mentioning a few other people, beginning with Stephen Tapscott. When I first saw the program for this conference. I was delighted to see that he was slated to moderate a panel on translating German literature, and also slated to read from his translations of Georg Trakl. I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen in November of 2008 when we were both at the Santa Fe Art Institute. I had been a long time admirer of his translations of Neruda’s love sonnets. During our time in Santa Fe, I also learned what a fine poet he is: he gave a reading at a local bookstore. It was great to catch up with him on a number of occasions during the conference, to hear him read from, Georg Trakl: Poems (Oberlin College Press, 2011). And it meant a lot that he took the time to come to our reading. In fact, I was also great to see poet/translator Don Bogen, along with poet Michael Waters at our reading, as well. Also, on my first night, before you arrived, I had occasion to dine with a group that included Denise Low-Weso, former Poet Laureate of the state of Kansas, fellow AWP board member and friend. I think it's the most time I've spent talking with Denise one and one and it was a treat (and I visited with her again a few days later, along with Cynthia Hogue in the lobby of the hotel). In short, my first experience with ALTA could not have been better. Perhaps our e-dialogue here might serve as an incentive for other Latino/a poets and writers to consider literary translation, and the ALTA conference in particular, something worth exploring. What do you think?

F. Arroyo:

I’m currently finishing a class discussion focused on John Phillip Santos’ Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, a wonderful, powerful book I’ve taught several times over the years, both in the United States and in Spain, and really a book I love to teach whenever the opportunity arises. The book reflects concerns you bring up about Latino/a writers considering literary translation. In his memoir Santos focuses on preoccupation, preocupado, and one of the possible readings of this preocupado is to reflect on how there may be too much of a concern for origins, and states of being and ideas that are singular, original, pure. Latinos, in other words, can never return to some pure state no matter how much we create strong representations of who we are, or gain certain levels of progress educationally, economically, and politically. In some ways, then, “Latino” itself might be viewed as some kind of sign or marker of homogeneity, some kind of signification expressing a desire for a pure space. But this is just a part of our current preocupado with performing, questioning, creating and celebrating Latinoness, ethnicity, and this is nothing new: it has been going on since the beginning of time in the Americas. We have to be wary of preoccupation because it tends to create isolation, separation, and disengagement: it is a state of being housed in the mind, in consciousness, in reflection. To consider more carefully the power of a mestizo race, consciousness, art, and culture, as Santos does, is to recognize how Latinos, as mestizos, are part of an unfinished quest or project, are continually becoming more diasporic and hybrid, always, it seems, on a long migration following in the footsteps of the antepasados.

Santos suggests strong relations between shame and preocupado. One can make the case that we are experiencing a “boom” of Latino/a writing because we are preocupado with language. The negative and academic view is that what we are worried about is “identity,” but for many of us identity means nothing without language, and we are driven to write because we’ve become all to conscious of language—its power to exclude, oppress, lie, and overlook the rich mestizo history that is America. In addition, we love languages—Spanish and English, English and Spanish, and we move between the two in memory, conversation, and writing, and they are the terrain from which we draw a rich vein of linguistic play, invention, and creativity. Part of this preocupado, and a shame, however, has to do with the loss of the Spanish language in our families, in our communities, and in our literature. We may be bilingual, yet most often or not most of our living is in English. We are often writing, to follow some of the critical insight of Gustavo Pérez Firmat, love letters to a language (Spanish) in another language (English), which makes the possibility of union and love between the lover and the beloved impossible, and so some might read the writing as negligible.

I’m not making an argument here, of course, but I’m interested in the complex forces John Phillip Santos illuminates. Secrets and silences are a part of these elements of shame and preoccupation. In the end we have to consider how there is a large silence and secret surrounding the loss of Spanish. And for many the silence and secret is that we do have to read writers of Spanish in translation. So to return to your question there is an incentive for Latino/a writers to engage translation—at the very least to become more consciously aware of how translation has creative possibilities given our movements from English and Spanish, Spanish and English, and a “mingling” of both, to quote William Carlos Williams via Jonathan Cohen!

You write, Francisco, that you “felt drawn to Cynthia Hogue’s project that involved a French poet collaborating with a French philosopher, who contributed prose commentary. That made me wonder what it might be like to collaborate, as a poet, with a prose writer.” This strikes me as most essential for the incentive to consider translation. What I mean is that we have a long tradition of collaboration between poetry and prose, and immediately

. …y no se lo tragó la tierra / … And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, The House on Mango Street, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, and Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation come to mind. I’m reminded as well of Luis Rafael Sanchez’s La Guaracha del Macho Camacho, Neruda’s Passions and Impressions, the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Maurice Kilwein Guevara and Ray Gonzalez. Guevara writes,

I see the galleon on which my ancestors escaped from the southern ports of

Spain; I see the torsos of Muísca hoeing in a field and slipping off the screen; I

see a village of people covered in mud, sliding in the barro, some dancing and

bloody and hooded; I see El Tiempo on fire and storefront windows breaking.

In all that blurring and shaking, I see a tapestry of red and yellow roses

through the milky windows of a greenhouse.

(“The Sound of Glass is Unimstakable,” Poema)

I could create a parade of writers who have composed a new frontier in between the boundaries of prose and poetry. It is as if we can “orient [our]selves over the landscape by the scent of a shared history” (“The Sound of Glass is Unmistakable”). So we have in the relations of poetry and prose important possibilities, and I think “translation” can help many writers investigate these possibilities, and perhaps the richness of Latino/a literature—our languages, our linguistic diversity—will be read and heard even more distinctly with this stronger consciousness of translation.

breaking bread at La Bodega:
Stephen Holland-Wempe, Xanath Caraza, Mark Statman
Francisco Aragón, Fred Arroyo