ARRIVED TODAY: Dear Jack by Scott Inguito

Editor's Note

A seminar on the San Francisco Renaissance led by Gary Snyder was a highpoint of my stint in Davis, California back in 2000. I took it as an opportunity to read Collected Books of Jack Spicer (poetry), The House that Jack Built (lectures), One Night Stand and Other Poems (early poems), and the biography by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God---a wonderfully vivid portrait of literary San Francisco in the mid 50s and early 60s. In the wake of my years in Spain, Spicer's After Lorca caught my eye: his imaginary letters to the dead poet from Granada, some of which were translations of Lorca poems, both real and invented, were mesmerizing. It's with particular delight, therefore, to present Dear Jack by Scott Inguito; and a happy coincidence, as well, since Wesleyan readies to release, My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer.

Before I had the pleasure of meeting Scott or reading his work, our e-correspondence revealed that he brought to his poetry a background in the visual arts, as well as a constellation of thought that took nothing for granted---perpetually questioning and probing what poetry and a poem could do. I first encountered his work in early poems anchored in his Mexican, Filipino and Irish working-class roots in Santa Maria, California. His play with syntax, the line, and punctuation announced, to my mind, that poetry for him was about exploring and playing with language:
...
The light line falls
Your face
If I have found
Sing back to me
In choirs of arms
Faces wooden
At table
Bread is fondness torn
Olives in the filling
Grape-stuffed empanadas
Pinched & curled
With brown hands
...
[from "Guadalupe Beach" in The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry.]

In 2003 Inguito took part in an AWP reading I organized featuring emerging Latino and Latina poets. Later he accepted my invitation to be in The Wind Shifts (University of Arizona Press, 2007). Put simply, Scott Inguito, as exemplified by the work you'll read in Dear Jack, is among a particular group of writers who are enlarging---stretching the canvas of Latino poetry.

Francisco Aragón
Institute for Latino Studies
University of Notre Dame

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Scott should be getting, or have gotten his shipment today: those of you out in the San Francisco/Bay Area can support the poet and buy a copy from him. One of the other things I'm especially pleased about with regard to this title is that the Introduction is written by Craig Santos Perez, whose work as a critic (and poet for that matter: I recently read, in Cambridge, England, the terrific from Unincorporated Territory) I admire increasingly. He's written a fun and brilliant piece---in the form of a letter ("Dear Scott")---to usher in Scott's work.

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Named after a volcano in Nicaragua,

Momotombo Press publishes new works in Latino literature
in the chapbook format---with particular attention to those artists
who have yet to publish a first full-length book.

Making Us All Proud: MM

Several years ago, the Colorado Review devoted a special issue to Latino writers. It was guest edited by Alberto Ríos with indispensable assistance from Richard Yañez. From this distance, I only recall, meaningfully, one item from that issue. It wasn’t a poem. It wasn’t a story. It wasn’t an essay. It was an e-correspodence between Yañez and Manuel Muñoz.

I hadn’t met either of them at the time. I wouldn’t meet Rich until the Fall of 2001 in South Bend, and I wouldn’t meet Manuel until the summer of 2002 in New York City. But their e-correspondence spoke to me and, I think, to any aspiring artist of color embarking on the journey of trying to be a writer from a context in which a college degree was seen, above all, as a path to a stable well-paying career. In other words, not a writer.

Manuel and Rich, when that e-correspondence was taking place, hadn’t met each other either, and yet one could clearly detect a growing kinship between them in those exchanged e-mails, a kinship that comes from being involved in a common endeavor (in their case, trying to make their way as fiction writers) without any clear indication that “success,” however one defines that term, was around the corner. They had both been publishing stories in journals, but their first full-length books hadn't been published yet. I say this not knowing if book publication was something that was a burning issue for them at that time. But one thing was unmistakable from their exchanges: they viewed themselves as writers---writers very aware of the Chicano communities they were writing from and about. They were serious writers in it for the long-haul.

As a reader and aspiring writer without a book, it felt as though the bond and kinship between them extended to me, as well—a kinship that was made manifest when, in our respective trajectories, our paths would cross, and cross again.

And so I share fully Eduardo Corral’s enthusiasm in announcing Manuel Muñoz’s good fortune last night at winning a Whiting. Those of us who know Manuel and his writing aren’t at all surprised. And this isn’t the first distinction of this nature that Muñoz has enjoyed. He won an NEA fellowship in 2006 for prose; his last book of short fiction, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, was short listed for the 2007 Frank O’Connor award in Ireland; and Muñoz was recently named a 2008 Fellow in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

But, somehow, this distinction feels extra special.

Congratulations, Manuel!

¡Enhorabuena!

THE LATINO LITERARY CULTURES PROJECT

My thanks to Manuel Ramos over at La Bloga for putting what looks to be a great upcoming conference on our radar. I dug a little deeper and found the following:

THE LATINO LITERARY CULTURES PROJECT/
PROYECTO CULTURAS LITERARIAS LATINAS
University of California, Santa Cruz

MISSION STATEMENT

The Latino Literary Cultures Project/ Proyecto culturas literarias latinas is an interdisciplinary initiative at UC Santa Cruz dedicated to studying and promoting creative writing by and about U.S. Latinas and Latinos, past and present. It stages a high-profile biennial conference that is innovatively structured to bring together writers with scholars and students, translators and reviewers, librarians and archivists, booksellers and publishers, along with a wide range of readerships.

By specifying “literary cultures” as its object, the Project recognizes the dynamic nature of twenty- first century literary experience. While many Latinos/as continue to read and write in the genres of short story, novel, and poetry, many others are focused on emergent forms such as blogs, performance work, graphic novels, memoir and testimonio. As our bilingual name indicates, Latino/a literature can be and has been written in Spanish, in English, or in multiple hybrid forms of English-Spanish. This linguistic fluidity underscores the global nature of contemporary Latino/a writing, and its translation and transmission into different national contexts. We actively try to recruit writers and scholars living outside the U.S.

There are precious few public spaces in the U.S. for publicizing, disseminating, and thinking critically about writing by Latinos. Although there are many thriving programs and departments in Latino Studies across the U.S., creative work is less visible in these institutional contexts than policy-oriented and quantitative research projects, in part because of greater funding opportunities in these areas. There is no single, regular conference or research center focusing on U.S. Latino literature from its historical orgins to the present day, and the LLC/CLL aims to step into that void.

The LLC/CLL aims to make Santa Cruz the international center of new thought and creative work in this area. Our region—broadly encompassing the Monterey Bay, San José/Silicon Valley, and the Salinas Valley—is the past, current and future home of a significant population of Latinos and Latinas, including a number of significant writers (Gloria Anzaldúa, Luis Valdez, Ernesto Galarza, Cherríe Moraga, to name a few). As a research unit of the Chicano/Latino Research Center—one of the pioneering universityresearch centers of this type—we are able to draw from a rich range of local expertise both on and off campus. Finally, by joining forces with UCSC’s Educational Partnerships Office, we will build new pathways between the university and local secondary school teachers and students.

Our first bilingual conference in November 2006, “Latino Literature/La Literatura Latina,” was rated a tremendous success by both our participants and our many attendees from the university and surrounding communities. Our featured speakers included the writers Francisco Goldman, Alfredo Véa, Reyna Grande, Tino Villanueva, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Susana Chávez-Silverman, Alicia Alarcón, and Nina Martinez; bookstore owners and small publishers Nicolás Kanellos, Brent Beltrán, Rueben Martínez; and scholars Manuel Martín-Rodriguez, Marisa Belasteguigoitia, Rosaura Sánchez, and Lucia Suárez. Our second conference in November 2008 promises to surpass this, and our new website (currently in the design phase) will both document and publicize the event.

Here is is the web site--CHECK IT OUT.

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Among the writers slated to appear in this upcoming conference at UC Santa Cruz are Letras Latinas friends, Brenda Cárdenas and Roberto Tejada. Cárdenas' first full-length collection, Boomerang (with an Introduction by Juan Felipe Hererra) is slated to appear with Bilingual Press in early 2009 as part of CANTO COSAS which, as a series, should be lifting off in the next month or so with John Olivares Espinoza's The Date Fruit Elegies (with an Introduction by Christopher Buckley).

Roberto Tejada's first full-length book, Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006) will be the subject of two reviews in Latino Poetry Review's delayed, but forthcoming second issue--speaking of which: yes, it is delayed and lamentably so. I accepted an appointment to serve on a literature panel for poetry for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) this last summer/early fall. It was a positive experience, but one whose work load, in essence, put a number of things on the backburner, first among them: issue 2 of LPR.

But the good news about LPR is that the issue is more or less complete. It has to undergo some formatting and light editing. The revised target release is early 2009. I say 2009 because I'll be at the Santa Fe Art Institute the month of November on a writing residency and will be trying to keep my day job activity minimal. During my time in New Mexico, Letras Latinas will be hosting a very special event, which I'll be saying more about in the coming days.

Anyone out there planning to be at UC Santa Cruz for the conference, or know anyone who is planning to attend? Letras Latinas Blog would love to hear about it.

"The Latino Cultural Revolution" by Gavin O'Toole

SINCE 1998, when the fourth anthology of Latino poetry mentioned by Francisco Aragón in the opening comments of his introduction to this collection was published, the demographic wind has most definitely shifted in the USA.

The multiplying Hispanic community has passed a significant census landmark: becoming, depending on how you care to see it, the country’s largest minority or its second largest ethnic group after the non-Hispanic white community.

While such a change may seem tangential to the rarefied world of poetry, it is no doubt indicative of the degree to which factors such as age and integration will influence the ever-changing mosaic of concerns within a large sub-culture anywhere.

Esta noche: PALABRA PURA

Frances Treviño de Santos was first published by Pecan Grove Press in 1999 in a chapbook Mama & Other Tragedies. That same year, she was a fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities for integrating U.S. Latino Literature in the secondary classroom. She is the recipient of the 2000 Premió Poesía Tejana Award for The Laughter of Doves, which was published through Wings Press. In 2001 she recieved a grant from the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. Her current book of poems, Cayetana, is also published by Wings Press. From 1999-2002, she was a member of "Women of Ill-Repute: Refute!" - a performance group that deconstructed issues of culture and identity. Treviño de Santos teaches British Literature to high school students for the San Antonio Independent School district.

Click here for more information.

Poetry in Seattle

Richard Blanco

Richard Blanco, María Meléndez, Deborah Parédez

Richard Blanco

Steven Cordova

María Meléndez

Deborah Parédez

Francisco Aragón, Steven Cordova,
María Meléndez, Deborah Parédez, Richard Blanco