Emma Trelles and
Blas Falconer @ The Best American Poetry blog
Poet and editor of The
Other Latin @: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona
Press, 2012), Blas Falconer, is currently featured over at The Best American Poetry blog in an interview by the winner of the fourth
edition of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Emma Trelles. In The Other Latin@, editors Lorraine M.
López and Blas Falconer bring together a collection of 20 essays that seek to
answer the following question: “How can we treat U.S. Latina and Latino
literature as a definable whole while acknowledging the many shifting
identities within their cultures?” And this interview by Emma is a great
starting point of discussion. Speaking of the inspiration behind this project,
and of the role played by mentorship in understanding identity Blas Falconer
states:
“When I started reading Rane Arroyo and Judith Ortiz
Cofer, I thought, ‘Oh these writers are like me in some way.’ But they were
able to find their own voices and incorporate their cultural influences. They
were doing what I wanted to do, and I saw them as legitimate Latino writers. It
was a way in for me. I realized I am also a part of this community. In that
sense I saw them as models.
When my first book came out, I felt an incredibly
nurturing response from the Latino community that I had never expected. Even
today, five years after my first book was published, I still feel welcome and
there's no question I'm part of this community. It made me feel as if my own
experience was legitimate, and it's resolved this kind of conflict of
estrangement I've had. I’m grateful to the Latino community for embracing
diversity within itself.”
[Continue
Reading.]
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Aracelis Girmay @ The
Brooklyn Rail
Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet and National Book Critics
Circle Award finalist, Aracelis Girmay, is currently featured at the Brooklyn
Rail in an interview by Melinda Cardozo. When I first read Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007), Aracelis’ debut collection of poems,
one of the things I loved about this book was the smilingly simple way in which
Aracelis turned language and objects—the letter “B,” a watermelon, a pilon—and
rendered these shapes, through the use of the metaphor, into sometimes
surprising, sometimes sad, but always compelling new narratives and images.
Here are some favorite lines:
From “Ode to the Letter B:”
“Half butterfly, two teeth,/sideways: a bird meet[ing]
the horizon.”
From “Ode to the Watermelon:”
“& in Palestine,/ where it is a crime to wave/ the
flag of Palestine in Palestine,/ watermelon halves are/ raised/ against Israeli
troops/ for the red, black, white, green/ of Palestine. Forever,”
From “Ode to the Litte r (From Kingdom Animalia):”
“Little propeller/ working between/ the two fields of my
a’s,/ making my name/ a small boat/ that leaves the port/of old San Juan”
From the aforementioned interview:
“I was in Eritrea a couple of years ago and the language,
or one of the languages of Eritrea, is Tigrinya. I don’t speak very much
Tigrinya—only things that have to do with food. The alphabet is totally
different, and I found myself really interested in trying to find clues in the
language in terms of hearing the language—trying to understand any piece of the
language that I could, and then looking at the shapes of the alphabet and the
letters and trying to read them in different ways. Obviously, I wasn’t reading
them for comprehension in Tigrinya, but what could that shape be, or how might
I find a story with whatever language I have in the shapes of things.”
[Continue
Reading.]
*
Barbara Jane Reyes
interviews California Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera
Letras Latinas Oral History Project interviewee, Barbara
Jane Reyes is currently featured over at Harriet
in an interview she conducted with California Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe
Herrera. Needless to say, Juan Felipe Herrera is the first Latin@ poet to be
named Poet Laureate of my home state. Writing of their previous attempts to
nominate Juan Felipe Herrera as Poet Laureate, Barbara Jane Reyes writes:
“Indeed, a couple of years ago, during the Schwarzenegger administration, with
a group of poets including Oscar Bermeo, Ching-In Chen, Javier O. Huerta, Craig
Santos Perez, and Matthew Shenoda, we nominated Herrera for the position, so
very wary of how our then-governor would read such unabashedly political
poetry…” In these reactionary times, times of arrested books, Juan Felipe
Herrera reminds us that in the midst of chaos ideas can still escape the
prison-dungeon. His appointment as California Poet Laureate is more than
symbolic assertion of our culture and of our poetry; it is a reminder that writing
can be a consoling act of resistance that gives a kind of pleasure and
gratification, that it is an assertion of the self where such an assertion is
not permitted:
“This is the most political thing we can do – to be brave
about our lives and be willing to step into a wider neighborhood of lives, to
be part of the polity, the city. The questions of color, language, race and
class have a lot to do with how we compound suffering in the lives of others
based on distorted criteria. Poetry can breathe through these hard perceptions
and conceptions of what is right, good, and meritorious, and just maybe provide
a little more humanity to make things better, softer, freer, more equitable.
Poetry is a potent anti-fear spray.”
[Continue
Reading.]
*
Daniel Olivas interviews Richard Blanco
Daniel Olivas of La Bloga discusses Richard Blanco’s newest
collection of poetry, (University of Pittsburgh Press) particularly the three
sections of the book which define this collection. Sections that Richard Blanco
describes as “movements” and which serve to paint a picture of the events that
have shaped the work of this poet born in the milieu of the Cuban
Diaspora. With these movements as a
point of departure, Blanco discusses how his poems color the different
dimensions of what it means to grow up the son of Cuban parents of the
Diaspora, his identity as a gay man, his literary influences and habits and how
his work as an engineer introduced him the world of writing:
“Oddly enough, engineering is largely responsible for me
“getting into” poetry. When I began my
career as a consultant engineer, I had to work on a lot of permitting jobs,
which meant a lot of writing letters back and forth between agencies explaining
often abstract concepts and arguing my clients point of view—much like the
sonnets which root back to legal pleas exchanged between lawyers. Anyway, this got me paying really close
attention to language, how it can be crafted, its nuances, etc. In short, I fell in love with words.”
[Continue
Reading.]
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