“My poems are constantly
struggling with resistance, the expectation that comes with being a Latina
poet/performer. Simultaneously my poems are extremely concerned with writing
the stories that were never written for me to read”
—Elizabeth Acevedo
“I was born in Reynosa. I
lived in Michigan. I live in El Valle. I live in Louisiana. I carry others’
stories and experiences with me, those of relatives, friends, and strangers. I
am going to write about all of this. I am going to write about none of this.”
—Nayelly Barrios
“What I want is to slow the
world down to a crawl and from there, with time, meditate on the issues that
are at the edges of identity and art.”
—Marcelo H. Castillo
“[I]f there is a Latino/a
literature in the United States, I think its value lies exactly in its
resistance to the notion of fixed cultural categories”
—Thade Correa
“So, consider for a moment
that shift. The shift in not having "documents" in a historical and
metaphorical sense to creating them, a shift in responsibility from being a
consumer of a text "about oneself," to a creator.”
—Lauren Espinoza
“As much as I tried to run
away from my Latina identity in order to blend in and go unobserved, I realized
during a recent trip to Guatemala that I had merely come full circle—it took 30
years to figure this out.”
—Lynda Letona
“Poetry is a kind of endless
river I can swim in and not drown, as long as I hold onto the float that is the
pen.”
—Javier Zamora
*
So spoke seven poets
currently enrolled in MFA programs, representing: Arizona State University,
McNeese State University, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, New
York University, and the University of Notre Dame, organized and moderated by a
poet who has just completed one (Congratulations, Lauro!).
Hopefully, we’ve whetted your
appetite to read on. But carve out some time: what follows is a substantive document that, in my view, merits careful and sustained attention, confirming what I’ve
suspected for some time now: Latino poetry’s future is alive and well and
kicking…
And that's it as far as a "preface"goes: after reading this roundtable, a voice whispered: step aside, you're in the way
—FA
***
Lauro Vazquez:
In the introduction to
the The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona, 2011) the editors (Blas Falconer
and Lorraine M. López) write:
All Latinos share some
Latin American heritage. Apart from this, there is no essential or singular
trait of Latino identity; nonetheless, in the United States, Latinos or
Hispanics are often viewed as a monolithic and homogeneous group. [….] From
such reductive and oversimplified ideas of cultural identity, the Latino writer
often appears on the scene as a mediator, translator, or insider ethnographer
bearing literary artifacts from the native culture to enlighten and entertain
members of the dominant culture. He or she often succumbs to the pressure to
support the illusion of cultural cohesion despite multiple variations that
challenge, counter, and flat out deny assertions of sameness necessary for
promoting even the feasibility of a spokesperson.
Can we speak of a
single unified Latino/a identity (and literature) despite the term’s obvious
linguistic, cultural and racial heterogeneity? And how do we—as poets, as
makers of culture—help to
complicate, reaffirm, and negotiate this unique and changing landscape?
Thade Correa:
Of course, I can only
speak to this question as an individual and as an artist. I do not think we can
speak of a single, unified, or coherent Latino/a identity; rather, I’d like to
identify the multiplicity and diversity that you speak of as what characterizes
the Latino/a identity, for me. I think, fundamentally, all identities (cultural
and otherwise) are always multiple, unfixed, and in a state of constant dynamic
flux and creative negotiation. That is a way of saying that identity does not
exist in any essential way, and any essentialist claims to a singular
definition of identity are ultimately totalizing illusions.
Growing up with a
Puerto Rican father and a German-Polish mother, I never experienced my own
cultural identity, or any other identities, as fixed, unchanging, eternal
states of being, but rather as constructions created by time, place, and
situation. My father spoke Spanish with my paternal grandparents, who had both
come to the continental US from Puerto Rico as teenagers; my maternal
grandparents spoke Polish to one another, and they were the children of parents
who had to come to the US from Poland and Germany as teenagers. So both of my
parents came from families relatively new to the US, and the one thing that
both families shared was a kind of outsider status, the status of being “other”
in the face of the normalized, homogenized, (and ultimately unreal) white
American “identity.”
When my parents first
started dating in the 1980s in Northwest Indiana, the mere fact that a
white-skinned woman and a dark-skinned man had chosen to be with one another
caused a great deal of uproar among many ignorant folk, and my father was
regularly viewed with suspicion by the largely “white” population and, at
times, harassed by the police while he was out and about with my mother. The
people of my hometown saw only the fact that my mother was “white,” and my
father was “black,” and that they were together was unacceptable, threatening,
and downright enraging to them. I do not think the people of my hometown
realized, however, that beyond the fact of my parents’ skin color, both were
equally outsiders to the idea of a coherent, stable, unchanging American
identity. Nor would they have realized that my father, as a Puerto Rican, was a
mix of European, Taino, and African ethnicities, and my mother was a mix of
German and Polish ethnicities. They saw only the surface of things, and for
them, my parents’ identities were not only fixed, but completely opposed.
My feeling is that to
be multiple and diverse in the face of a totalizing illusion of coherent
“identities” is always to be an outsider. Growing up both “Latino” and
“Polish/German,” I was, from the first moment of my life, aware of myself as
fundamentally many-in-one. I think we, as human beings, are all fundamentally
diverse and multiple, every single one of us. That is something we must
celebrate in the face of homogeneity and conformism. Walt Whitman wrote, “I am
large, I contain multitudes.” Poetry is that medium by which I express my own
particular “largeness,” my own individual multitudinousness. And, if there is a
Latino/a literature in the United States, I think its value lies exactly in its
resistance to the notion of fixed cultural categories—in its affirmation of
being an “outsider,” in its celebration of diversity
itself.
Marcelo H.
Castillo:
Thank you, Thade, for
such an insightful introduction. Because he has been recently on my mind, and
because I feel it pertains to our larger question at hand, I am reminded of
Robert Hayden’s final poem in his last book published after his death. How the
speaker, as an alien visitor gathering intelligence on the human race and in
specific, the Americans, ends the poem by saying,
“confess i am curiously
drawn unmentionable to
the
americans doubt i could exist among them for
long
however psychic demands far too severe
much violence
much that
repels
I am attracted
none the
less their variousness their ingenuity
their elan vital
and that some thing essence
quidity I
cannot penetrate or name.”
(American Journal)
Surprisingly, it
wasn’t until recently that I began to think I could possibly and involuntarily
stand out as a spokesman, however minor and insignificant, to a Latino
identity, one that, as the editors of the Other Latin@ say, serves as “an ethnographer bearing literary
artifacts from a native culture.” I don’t know what this Latino aesthetic could
be, and as Thade points out, it is always changing and unidentifiable. However,
to the dominant culture, perhaps there is one definite, or as close to the term
definite as we can come to in poetry, identity that can classify Latin@ poetry.
Should we set our art as a practice that rejects such classifications or
irrespective of how we are received, write the only truths we know? Here I’ll
turn back to Hayden, “that some thing essence / quidity I cannot
penetrate or name.” There is a paradox between the intentions of our art and
how the larger literary landscape sees our art (though I hesitate to say “our
art”). There is a paradox between what we, poets of a different heritage and
culture from that of the dominant culture, are doing and what the dominant
culture thinks we are doing. The dominant culture within the academy and the
larger literary scene, like many anthologies that aim to construct the canon
through generalities and movements, is fond of grouping. By which I mean, they
like to categorize, and create shortcuts that lead to something meaningful: a
meaning-making machine. The key term here is meaningful. Perhaps our
intentions are misinterpreted. Perhaps the general dominant culture, within the
literary scene and outside it, believes that they can name that “quiddity” or
that “essence” which is at the heart of Latin@ poetry. From the inside, we
recognize that we cannot name that quiddity, that we cannot embody it, and that
it remains inpenetrable and nameless for a reason. In order for us to
complicate or negotiate this changing landscape, we must make it evident to the
wider audience to focus less on the subject and more on our intentions behind
the execution of the subject. Both should be taken into equal consideration.
I live by Louis
Glück’s final lines to her poem Nostos, “we look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”
We speak about our experiences the way Plath did, the way Adrienne Rich did,
Robert Hass, Frost, and the list could go on. Our poetry should not only be
categorized by our subject because it stands out, but by our (and here, I speak
mostly about me) approach to the subject, to the image, metaphor and so on. Our
experiences are different, which will yield a different subject. But here, what
is seen as different in us is taken as the official banner rather than what the
underlying structures and attempts our art is performing.
I have been personally struggling to resist succumbing to the pressure of
supporting the illusion of cultural cohesion. However, it should be less a
question of succumbing than one of redefining the relations of power that pin
us at the intersections of race and culture into a specific type or “mode.”
Foucault, for me, has been an appropriate model in terms of resistance to a
fabric of power that is ever present and domineering; how the procedures of
normalization are ingrained into our very psyche and by strategically
pressuring the exact components of society or discourse that are against our
favor, we can, in a way, reverse those relations of power and redefine how our
work is perceived.
I recently had a
conversation with a poet who visited my program in which I asked her the very
same question, “how do I create in the fault line of two cultures? Is what I
write a confirmation of the type of poetry an editor would classify as Latino?
Should I write to that standard because it is all I have?” She replied, and I
agree, with an outstanding, “No!” She said that we shouldn’t write to the
Latin@ canon, that, in effect, anything we write should be considered the Latin@ canon because it is we who
wrote it. More and more, the question of culture has moved to the forefront of
my thinking. However, I’m inclined to believe that art comes before identity,
whichever way we wish to define identity, or the lack of it. I do not write
about my current undocumented status because, frankly, at this point I don’t
feel as if it could trump the art of interpreting and rendering an object or
experience. Perhaps it is too vulnerable of a subject and too close to myself
at the moment. What I want is to slow the world down to a crawl and from there,
with time, meditate on the issues that are at the edges of identity and art.
Perhaps in the future I may begin to write about my family crossing the border
in 1993 through the hills of Tijuana. Six of us in total and my mother being
four months pregnant with my youngest brother and my fifteen-year-old sister
who was forced to dress like a boy so as to not attract attention from the coyotes. I will write about this because in the experience of
being undocumented, there exists an underlying current of myth, or structure
that will grant me a unique perspective on what it means to be in this limbo
state.
Lastly, I would like
to say that there are questions I am asking that my reader isn’t asking him or
herself, and that, to me, is a problem. The reader and the poet, however
disjointed their relationship may be, should bear at least some semblance of
continuity. To put identity before art / technique / execution means that we
ourselves are investing in this idea of “spokesperson” for a culture.
Lynda Letona:
I like this notion of
being in-between states or having what Du Bois termed a “Double
consciousness”—a paradoxical state. Belonging and not belonging, Other and yet
“U.S. Resident” (a recent happening that I think will forever feel a bit
unreal), niña y mujer (though some friends have jokingly referred to me as “The
Man,” so paradoxes abound), dark skinned and “gringa,” tamales and burgers,
English and Spanish, the list could be endless. As much as I tried to run away
from my Latina identity in order to blend in and go unobserved, I realized
during a recent trip to Guatemala that I had merely come full circle—it took 30
years to figure this out. So many triggers: the taste of jocote and mango,
taste of handmade tortillas and tostadas con frijoles y queso, the unapologetic
cursing in front of children, the boys playing soccer instead of obsessing to
do homework like the American kids. There is something about Latino culture
that moves, feels, and tastes different. A chaotic rhythm to things. Of course,
we’re not homogenous, but I’m talking about a captured spirit, an essence that
communes in a way that American individualism can’t quite grasp (or the other
way around). Maybe this boils down to economics. For many Latino families the
thought of being on your own is unthinkable, partly for economic reasons,
partly for cultural. Perhaps economic mobility is starting to change this, but
I still think it’s prevalent.
So what does all this
have to do with poetry? Well, when I stopped trying to run away from my
identity and embraced the troubled past and history of my people, origins,
parents (if you want to go macro or micro), I began writing with freedom. I had
previously thought that writing was the only place where I could live freely,
since legally, I was bound as “illegal.” But there was something holding me
back, and I think it was this reluctance to embrace my past and its
implications, and also my fears of somehow being found out, even though I knew
I could write only for myself. There was a psychic block that translated from
not having papers to pen. It’s hard to explain. Maybe as Du Bois suggests, I
had internalized this narrative of Otherness, when all along, I had also
created this narrative that I fit in, that look—I can speak your language, I
can write your language, I can dress, eat, watch movies like you. But there was
another narrative I was repressing and it was waiting to burst out from the
seams. Remember me, niña? It said. I, your tía, took you to the beach, took you
to Los Helados Pops, watched you perform as Moses at Casa de Esperanza. What
about Chayanne? Remember how we listened to his tapes and adored his poster in
my bedroom? What about your favorite dish? The dish I made you before you left
to the states? Tortitas con arroz? What about the mean rich girls from Colegio
Lehnsen? What about the time I went all out to get you a discount for your estreno
de Navidad, that dress you wanted for Christmas, and I burst out the tears to
haggle a good price at the Mercado Central? Do you remember?
Pero tía, how could I
forget?
For me, there is a
sense of Latino identity that I cannot fully define, but feel as a distinct
thread, narrative, or spirit. At the same time, this identity does not entirely
define me. I am also American/woman/Other. But at the end, these are just
possibilities of being: poetry and literature allows us endless narratives and
voices from which to speak and share our particularities.
Javier Zamora:
Thank you all for
these responses on Latinid@ identity. As Lydia has mentioned, my approach to
poetry was similar to her “psychic block that translated from not having papers
to pen” and yes, “it’s hard to explain.” For me, my senior year of high-school
(when a poet came to lead a workshop) I could not help but write about “Mi
Tierra,” the title of my first poem. There was a psychic block that only the
pen could break. My first impulse, my natural impulse, was to write about my
frustration with my political status. I cannot leave the United States and
legally return. I’m part of a large group of Salvadorans that fall under the
TPS (Temporary Protective Status): a card given to us after we pay close to
1000 dollars every 18 months, and there is no certainty if the president will
renew this status. Currently, Obama hasn’t approved anything, so as of
September this year, I will be “undocumented”.
It was natural for me to write about the place I cannot return to and
write about the place I feel “trapped” in. Poetry is a kind of endless river I
can swim in and not drown, as long as I hold onto the float that is the pen. A
certain freedom. The destination doesn’t matter as much as the ride. I can forget
the place I started (El Salvador) and the place I’m trying to end up in
(complete acceptance in the US) because I truly don’t belong in both of them.
Poetry is my country of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I can relive my past,
describe my present, and conceptualize a better future. To me, this is what all
writers do. I agree with Marcelo H. Castillo’s comment “we must make it evident
to the wider audience to focus less on the subject and more on our intentions
behind the execution of the subject.” That my poems are about my Salvadoran
past, my present identity in limbo, and my conceptualization of an inclusion
into the US; shouldn’t overshadow my execution of poetics, aesthetics, craft,
etc. But, I do believe that responding to this society that continues to
marginalize us (Latin@s) is part
of being Latin@. A response from and to this physical place we live in, the US.
I continually return to my past because it shapes where I am, and where
I’m headed. Since my first poem, “Mi Tierra,” I cannot help writing about the
US’s influence of my being here. About Reagan’s policies in the 80s that
displaced ⅕ of the Salvadoran population abroad. I continue to
write about this topic. It’s my current obsession, it’s what pushes me forward,
and I write.
Lauren Espinoza:
I think it's interesting in the descriptions about identity by Lynda,
Marcelo, Thade & Javier the idea of documents/documentation came up.
The reason for my contemplation of this being two-fold: 1) as poets (a word
which Nayelly will rebuff) we are creating/documenting what it means to be
Latino/a. So, of course, there will be some monolithic moments when we are
creating a world for an outsider reader. And I don't think that is
something we should be wary of. Rather, we are the heart of the cultural
movement within Latinidad. Even now, I go to concerts or cultural events and
even though those are very obviously not poetry readings, there is still a poet
reading his or her work involved in the event. In reading at these events, we
are then becoming the source for what is being added to the conversation about
Latin@/Latinidad. The spokesperson, yes; but not the final authority or
definition. 2) The question I also wonder about in terms of documentation
is how we are (as poets and as Latin@s - because at this point I think it is
useful to distinguish between the two) using the master's tools to dismantle
the master's house, as Audre Lorde would put it. I say this because there are
so many moments in history where marginalized groups do not speak for
themselves, history is written without them. I think, for example, of my own
family history of my Abuelito being a Bracero; I do not know, in his own words,
what it was like. I forever mourn a past I can never recover. As poets working
within Latinidad, we have a collected past that we will never recover because
it is not documented; and because in terms of history, the Braceros were an
“undocumented” peoples. So, consider for a moment that shift. The shift in not
having "documents" in a historical and metaphorical sense to creating
them, a shift in responsibility from being a consumer of a text "about
oneself," to a creator. The possibility of this existing as a way to
negotiate conquest may appear singular and static, and reliant upon the
master’s tools, but is dynamically encompassing of all Latin@s in its
possibility towards phenomenalness.
Marcelo H. Castillo:
I am in love with
Lauren's idea of this “shift in not having ‘documents’ to creating them.” I am
creating documents that will hopefully last longer than I do, and that means so
much more than any kind of documents granted me in this lifetime. Thank you
Lauren for making this distinction. My poems are documents that legitimize my
being more than anything I can be granted by a government body. Though I wish I
could respond to every point made here, I’ll chime in on a few points only. My
Abuelo was also a bracero and I completely agree that we share a collective
past and that we each execute that past in a manner unique to each of us. Also
that uniqueness serves as proof that an archival type, or typology of Latin@
poetry can’t be reduced to a single definition. Our aesthetic choices are 1)
determined by our past and personal experience, 2) that gut feeling you get
when you read a line, and 3) what we are reading, who we are reading, etc. etc.
I’m willing to bet that if we all wrote down our personal canon, say, our top
five artists, our answers would be wildly different. Just to throw in my
personal canon, I would have to say (and this is in no specific order): Bob
Hass, Galway Kinnell, Louis Glück, Cesar Vallejo, and Larry Levis. Just to
throw a few artists in the bunch, they would be Jackson Pollock, Barbara
Kruger, Andreas Gursky, and Cindy Sherman. These are the poets and
artists I go back to again and again. They certainly play an important part in
my poetry as much as my past and heritage, and I feel like my poems that show
the least amount of incoherence are those that appropriately find a middle
ground between my personal canon and my personal history/past. I feel like our
art is very much influenced by our past, but also our present! One question we
can ask is where do we see our poetry going in the next five, ten, fifteen
years? Our generation of Latin@ poets and artists is contingent on not only the
generation before us, but also by our peers.
Elizabeth Acevedo:
As a performer for the
majority of my life, being a poet of Dominican descent has been fascinating in
terms of the kinds of gigs I book and the opportunities I am offered. It is
performing in the in-between as Lynda described, constantly having to juggle
artistic integrity, what I want to read in the moment, and the expectation that
my audience has of me. I am often asked to perform “The Latino poem” or “The
one about your immigrant parents” as if everything I write isn’t navigated
through the Dominican-American experience regardless of the subject matter. At
the same time, a good amount of the performances and readings I am invited to
give are for Latino Heritage Month or Latino-centric events where I am asked to
be the spokesperson for all Latinos in this country, for Latin Americans, for all
Caribbean folk, and it’s a tough position to say, “I don’t think I can speak
for that person. I don’t know that reality.” As a first generation
Dominican-American I’m not even sure I can speak for the Dominican Republic,
but I still want to share my truth.
My poems are
constantly struggling with resistance, the expectation that comes with being a
Latina poet/performer. Simultaneously my poems are extremely concerned with
writing the stories that were never written for me to read—even if they fulfill
what others expect me to be writing.
Like Marcelo, I want
to resist the idea of cultural cohesion. I have written as the Latino
representative in the past and I find that this does not allow for the truth of
specificity, the respect of origins, or the creation of space for other voices.
That does not mean that I don’t understand or embrace our commonalities, but if
I’m the poet performing at a conference for Guatemalen First Generation Youth,
then 1. The organizers don’t realize that there are so many poets and writers
they could/should be bringing in my stead and 2. My poems may possess a
universal truth but how can I better advocate for poets that would better fit
some of the gigs I am taking?
Marcelo H. Castillo:
I wish I could be a
performance poet, Elizabeth, because I have a friend in my cohort who tours
with Louder Than A Bomb and I am
envious of the additional dimensions that I see happening on stage with his
poetry versus those same poems he brings to the page in workshop. He’s getting
more out of the same poem. I do feel like that added dimension of the
performance allows you to play with the threshold of what it is you are writing
about and what you want the readers to get out of your poems when you read or
perform them.
I think I am always
writing the “Latino Poem.” By this, I mean that whatever I write is a Latino
poem because I wrote it. Jean Toomer felt like he wasn’t a Black poet, but
rather, a poet who happened to be Black and who happened to speak of the
African American experience but I think that is too limiting. I see myself as
being all at once. Mexican, Mexican poet, Poet who happens to be Mexican,
Latino poet, Hispanic poet, Mexican poet who happens to speak about issues
related to the Mexican experience within the US, poet, poet, poet, etc., etc.,
etc... I’m less worried about how I am seen than I am with how my work is
received. Within each other’s poems in this roundtable, I saw a wide variety of
different approaches to our art. None of them were the same and I felt relieved
when I read them.
I’ve resisted so many
things for so long and I am now just beginning to write about my personal
experiences and I believe that’s how I’ll ultimately be satisfied. With a tint
of fear, I asked this question to my workshop here at Michigan: “What is an MFA
poem, are we all writing MFA poems which we will eventually trash in the years
after leaving our program?” The response by my amazing friend in the workshop
was, “an MFA poem is a perfectly crafted and well-handled poem about nothing.”
Up until recently, even before I came to Michigan, I was unconsciously writing
these types of poems. But that kind of writing was essential in order to begin
writing poems that were closer to my heart that I couldn’t bring to the page
years ago. I have learned to embrace my vulnerability somewhat and though I
know I have much more to go, I feel confident that I’ve made some progress.
Someone told me that a poet works for 60 years in their art in order to finally
say what they want. They said what they had to in their early years and now,
they are saying what they want to.
I needed to learn how
to structure my lines, my progression, associative language, how to push the
boundaries of surreal metaphors and etc. I honestly feel as if I’m in a
transition stage between using the tropes and strategies of my earlier work
that helped develop my way of thinking, and a new stage in which I have given
myself permission to write what I need to write. I recently wrote about how my
mother was beaten by my father when I was a child and me looking at her eye
which looked like a plum. We have a treasure trove of material that some poets
would kill to have. But perhaps there’s a danger in an abundance of this poetic
material. And the danger is that we can drown in it. It reminds me of how Eliot
ends “Prufrock,” “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls
wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us and we drown.”
We need to understand not so much how to control our material but how to use it
to its greatest benefit. We linger in the chambers of the sea without realizing
that we can’t breathe until someone wakes us. Perhaps I don’t want to be
wakened; perhaps the best place for my unconscious is at the bottom of a lake,
where it’s gently swayed by the ebbs of memory. It is our job as poets to make
something that will last and it will last if we are generous to our reader and
it will last if we take out small pieces of gold from our bottomless trove to
show the world how and unique each one is.
Lauren Espinoza:
I am a bit troubled by the analogy of drowning in material, and us, as
Latin@s, having access to "material that other poets would kill for."
I guess because having access to this material plays into the current cultural
inclination toward a combination of shock, exploitation, and attitudes about
"reality." I, like Nayelly, grew up on the South Texas border. The
things I have access to haunt me, the reality of young men going swimming in a
canal and drowning - and this not happening years ago but within the last weeks
(as it was reported in the news from my hometown). Or knowing people who have
disappeared because of the drug wars. Or even seeing the immense poverty that
people live in, a burgeoning city rubbing up against a colonia. I don't want to
write about this to capitalize on the pain of others, or to make my poems
"feel real," but I feel like I have to write about it. Not for the
necessity of the shock value, that we as a culture have been acclimated to
recognize as real, but for the reasons that this is what I know. Even
then, though, I don’t know it as a result of being a part of it; but rather
from witnessing it. But I don't want to have witnessed this. I don’t want
to have to be responsible for controlling this wealth of material that I should
be thankful to have access to. But, I will continue to write what is my
truth.
Nayelly Barrios:
I don’t believe there
is a specific Latin@ aesthetic in poetry. At least this is not what I look for
in work, or strive to include in my own work. I write. I am Mexican. I have
lived in the U.S. for many years now, the majority of my life. I was born in
Reynosa. I lived in Michigan. I live in El Valle. I live in Louisiana. I carry
others’ stories and experiences with me, those of relatives, friends, and
strangers. I am going to write about all of this. I am going to write about
none of this. My poems may or may not contain elements of a Latin@ experience,
but probably will. It may or may not be overt.
Javier, I loved your
comment, “I continually return to my past, because it shapes where I am, and
where I’m headed.” Life experiences, whether or not these are the experiences
of a Latin@, will find a way to trickle into some poems. I am reminded of the
last two lines in Kimiko Hahn’s poem, “Nepenthe,” “That drug, that
conductivity, / that pleasurable sensation of stumbling into memory.” Many
times as I write I have stumbled into my memory in a word-drunk stupor. The
memories I fold into are not strictly my own. Many times they are others’
experiences as related to me at some point over some lunch, dinner, BBQ day,
tamalada, etc. I work from my own and others’ memories and experiences. My
favorite thing to do is combine memories and experiences of many into a single
poem.
Marcelo, I’m going to
have to disagree with you on something. I don’t know that writing about the
Latin@ experience/Latinidad is something that I want to/need to/can control.
Currently, I don’t say to myself, “Now, I will write a poem about being
Latin@,” then another day, “Now, a non-Latin@ poem.” Usually, a line just
materializes and lines follow after time, work, and coffee. Personally, I don’t
see myself controlling this. I do completely agree, though, that readers should
“focus less on the subject and more on our intentions behind the execution of
the subject” when reading our work. A good and responsible reader of poetry
will do this...it is my hope. I trust my reader. In my poetry, I will strive
for a reader to marvel at craft before subject matter, but the subject matter
is still important. I agree with Javier that we have the “responsibility to
speak of what it is to be Latin@.” That is very important. In the end, though,
I want my readers to read my poems and look for a human experience, not a
Latin@ experience.
Lynda, my experience moving
away for graduate school was definitely problematic with my mother. Before I
moved away for the MFA, I taught high school for a couple of years while I
still lived at home with my family. When I started applying to graduate school,
she would constantly say, “No quiero saber nada de eso.” She didn’t even want
to think about me leaving her home. When I started hearing back from schools,
she kept reminding me of how incorrect it was that I was leaving her home. She
kept reminding me that it is incorrect for an unmarried woman to leave her
parents’ home. Those conversations actually happened. In 2011. It is definitely
still prevalent in Latino families. When I complete the MFA/MA program I am
currently in, I will be the highest degreed individual in either side of my
family (there is a cousin with a BS in accounting). If I had a cacahuate for
every time I heard, “¿por qué tanto estudio?” or “¿cuándo te casas?” or “¿qué,
no vas a tener hijos o qué?” from a family member, I could feed an elephant. I
am not fulfilling the expectations of my traditional Mexican family. I am ok
with that. Sometimes, this family dynamic threatens my writing. Not going to
lie. I feel like I have to be careful about what I write about, but I remind
myself that, more than likely, it won’t be read by a family member. At times, I
feel like I owe someone an apology. I know I don’t. Such an unnecessary and
elementary struggle. I manage. I must say that my mom has grown more and more
supportive of the writing, though. My family, with the exception of my sister,
has no real idea what I am doing in Louisiana. They know I am in school and
that I teach at the university, but that is all. Before I moved away to grad
school, one cousin mentioned I could probably get a job where I can make more money
once I had a masters degree. I didn’t want to go into the explanation of how
that is not why I am pursuing an advanced degree or how inaccurate that
assumption is.
Let me briefly explain
what I think Lauren meant by “as poets (a word which Nayelly will rebuff):”
Personally, I feel more comfortable referring to myself as a student of poetry.
I just don’t feel like the word “fits” me at the moment. Hopefully someday I
will fit into that shirt.
Lauren Espinoza:
Lolssssss. Nayelly,
you started a journal, you read poems, you write poems. The homeless man
I ride the bus to school with calls himself a poet, I should think that you
feel able to call yourself a poet now, knowing what great company you’re
in. He wears his shoes on the opposite feet.
Nayelly Barrios:
Lauren, que no, but,
yes, I am in lovely company! Also, where can I read that man’s work?
Marcelo H. Castillo:
I see where I could
have chosen my words a bit more carefully, and plain and simple I agree with
both Nayelly and Lauren. You can’t really turn it off, you can’t and shouldn’t
want to/ need to control it. What will come will come if it is yours. What is
mine has merely to do with what was in direct vicinity to my “self” growing up.
I feel like I have feet on either side. There is a lot of inner conflict that I
face when writing and I often think, “is this something only I could have
written, or is this something anyone could have written?” Also, I ask myself:
“Is this something I can write or something I need to write?” Slowly, I am
beginning to let my thoughts wander into looser territories, but so many times,
and certainly to my detriment, I try to control what I write. If anything,
speaking to everyone here has only confirmed how much I need to write something
that only I could write, and I am eternally grateful to everyone here for that.
Javier Zamora:
Thank you all for such
insightful thoughts. Regarding the aspect of “documenting,” let me add that we
(immigrants) are only “undocumented” in the eyes of America. Our parents and/or
some of us have documents in our homelands. We just don’t have the necessary
documents to truly be “free” in this country. The same metaphor can be used for
poetry. We, Latin@s, have been writing poetry for years, and only a handful
have “made it” into the “American” canon. This will soon change; more and more
of our voices will be added to this so-called “American” canon, which I think
we should start to spell with an accent, Américan cannon.
Following the
discussion of the “Latin@ poem,” let me add that poets often forget that as
poets, we are not individuals. I like to think of myself as a vessel or a
medium through which our communities, our experiences, our emotions, our
hardships, truths, etc, speak. We are not speaking as individuals; we are simply
transmitting our communities.
When I write a poem,
it’s not mine, it doesn’t and it will never completely belong to me. It belongs
to the world from which it came and to which it returns. Our duty as “poets” is
to listen to the world, listen to what’s behind us, with us, and ahead of us.
We need to approach our craft with this careful attention to the world, outside
us and within us. When this
attention is achieved, we tap into the universality we are all searching for.
I agree with Nayelly’s
discomfort of calling herself a poet. I struggle with the same sentiment
because I believe all humans are interconnected. Why should I name myself a
poet if I owe so much to the place where I come from?
And particularly
because our world has shaped our writing, I always make it a point to show my
poems to my parents, their friends, and my friend’s parents. I want to
challenge all “poets” to show their family what they’ve published and where
they publish and to explain what it means. They do and will understand. The
material I write about is not the most comfortable and pleasant for my family.
But I apologize beforehand and still show it to them. I ESPECIALLY want my
community to read my poems. I write for them.
When I published my
humble first attempt at a chapbook, I gave my mom and dad a lot of copies. They
gave them to their friends and their friends read them. My dad is a landscaper
and my mom is a baby-sitter. I mention their professions because they’re able
to understand my poetry and I feel like oftentimes we forget how smart our
parents truly are, how smart our communities are. Structural racism has made us
doubt this, and we need to challenge these notions as subtle as they may be.
We must create our
future market, if my mom’s friends read the book, they will hopefully pass it
to someone else. At my readings, my mother’s friends show up with their
children. To me, this is why I started writing, so the generations behind me
can understand their world better than I understood it. Growing up in El
Salvador AND in the Bay Area, I never imagined attending “poetry readings”
and/or knowing a “writer.” These children can check both of those boxes. We
have to give back to the world that shaped us, what belongs to them.
Lauro Vazquez:
One of the driving
principles behind Letras Latinas and by extension this roundtable is the
commitment to enhance the visibility and appreciation of Latino/a literature,
in particular through collaborations that support emerging writers—as in this
roundtable.
One of the niches
Letras Latinas has been able to carve out through this project is in
identifying and establishing a “network” of sorts that brings
together—here—seven diverse Latino/a poets in various MFA programs throughout
the nation. How enriching and important has the MFA experience been for
you so far? How has it changed, enriched, diminished, enhanced, degraded your
relationship to the world of (contemporary or not) Latino/a poetry?
Javier Zamora:
Niches are essential
to a writer’s career because they provide a network to expand craft, critique
it, and most importantly build community. In the Latin@ literary world, these
niches are crucial to the development of a young writer; in that we learn from
other writers how to navigate the intricate world of the larger literary
community. Hopefully, the older generation’s experiences can guide us in our
own path of understanding what it means to be a Latin@, but as we’ve seen,
answering this seemingly simple question is an arduous task. The world of the
MFA is akin to the larger literary world, it’s predominantly white. I bring up
the issue of race because in my stint at UC Berkeley I learned a random fact:
if there are more people of color in a classroom, “minorities” are more likely
to participate.
Now, imagine exposing
your writing (one of the most private of acts) to a group of peers where you
are not comfortable in. Besides race, class has a lot to do with this
alienation inside the workshop setting. Again, I can only speak for myself, but
in my MFA program, these two issues have made it difficult for me to cope with
the environment.
But, at the same time
the MFA atmosphere has been a safe-space for my craft in that I’ve found a
group of poets I share my poems with. Prior to my first semester, I was never
part of a “writing group” where I shared my poetry. For the most part, writing
has been a private endeavor. I only shared my poems with my mentor and my
girlfriend (my apologies to them for enduring my poems at their earliest of
stages). I’ve attended conferences, but I’ve never come out of one with a
writer I’m comfortable enough to share my poems with. I’m weird that way, I
have to truly trust a person to open up, let alone share my poems.
At NYU, although the
number of Latin@ students is minimal, I’ve found my “niche.” And let me go on
the record of saying that I chose to attend NYU because it was one of the most
diverse MFA programs I got admitted into; this is a problem of the MFA system
that we have to fix “on our own terms.” ¿Why haven’t we been recognized or why
don’t we bother to apply to some of these programs? Surprisingly, the niche
I’ve found had nothing to do with race but had to do with class. The two people
I trust and most connect with in the MFA program are a poet from the Blue Ridge
Mountains and another from Llano, Texas.
We connected because
we write about “place” and from “place.” Which, if I may add, I believe is an
essential aspect of Latin@ identity. You could argue, most Latin@ writing deals
with understanding the marginalization of our identity in relation to the
physical boundaries of the United States. Consciously or subconsciously, when
we take the pen, we make a statement against the hegemony that rules a physical
place we reside in (the US), a place that has marginalized Latin@s to the point
it created a Nixon-presidency-designed term some of us still use to refer to
ourselves—Hispanic.
These two poets and
myself have a common understanding that place is the backbone of our poetics,
thus we are part of a collective called “The Localists.” By place, we also mean
more than the physical place; place is historical, mental, subconscious, etc.
Within us, camaraderie has formed, to the point we not only share poems, but we
also sit down and submit poems and manuscripts to contests. Something I
would’ve never imagined prior to the MFA.
Besides the
friendships that form with unexpected individuals, we as Latin@s have to
understand that in “the academy,” we are taken from our communities and that
because of this, we not only have the privilege, but the responsibility to
speak about what it is to be Latin@.
Since our numbers in
the MFA are currently more than in previous decades, we also carry the weight
of our people with us. For example, a few years back, this conversation
would’ve been unprecedented. And we also have to understand that as much as we
want to run away from this responsibility, when a “Spanish” term is used in
class, we know everyone in that workshop is going to look at us for “approval,”
in the best of cases; and in the worst, we will be asked to “let go” of our
obsession with identity, place, class, etc, all that defines us.
Elizabeth Acevedo:
The MFA experience has
been really challenging for me. I really respect the program and my fellow
poets, but I wonder at how often the goal is to “break down” a poem and never
to “build-up” a poet. That doesn’t mean I want a sugar-coated writing process,
but I am so surprised at how destruction-oriented workshops become. It’s
strange because often the comments written onto the poems are kind and provide
great suggestions but I wonder at the way in which the actual space of workshop
is navigated and if it is inherently focused on deconstruction.
Often times I am the
only woman of color in my workshops and classes, although there might be one
other person who identifies similarly. Like Javier, my poems are often dealing
with place but often that place is urban, brown, poor. I’ve had to learn how to
give my fellow workshop participants the benefit of the doubt and I have been
lucky to have some great readers who are often spot on with what a poem
needs... However, being part of a program makes me wonder, who am I writing
for? Who reads poetry in America?
In this journal I want to submit to? Not the block I come from. Not the people
I’m writing about. I don’t mean that to limit my community but there is a
reason why I gravitated towards Spoken Word and not the page. Workshop makes me
wonder if I’m writing for the people in the room critiquing me.
I think I’d like to
say I’m writing for the me that never had my poem to read. But I don’t know if
that’s entirely honest. Especially given that I’ve heard or witnessed
poetry more than I’ve ever read it. I am oriented to the orality and narrative
of a performance poem and I find a huge divide between what I write for
workshop and what I perform at gigs. I am finding more and more that the
distance between page and stage is larger than I thought and a lot more
intentional. This is another in between space I am learning to navigate.
Marcelo H. Castillo:
For me, my experience
at Michigan has been strange and amazing at once. I don’t feel like I’m left
out or that I’m the only person of color because my cohort is very diverse in
terms of minorities and women. I do feel that I have good readers of my work in
my cohort. My only struggle of entering an MFA program was a rude awakening
into a completely new world that I had no idea existed. I mean, I knew there
were people out there as (or certainly more) involved and invested in what I
do, but I didn’t know to what extent. Now, I’m one of them and I feel like I
have to play catch up sometimes because I haven’t read a specific essay for my
theory classes and everyone else has, or I haven’t read this poet and everyone
else has. I’m slowly catching up and informing my poetry with my other classes
that are mostly theory based. My concerns arise from my inner demons and
fluctuating emotions of self-worth and validity. My struggles have been personal
and I am glad that I have my wife Rubi with me; otherwise, I would have cracked
months ago. I feel as if I’m inundated with a flood of poetic stimulants and
different ideas and I need some time alone with my thoughts to process them. My
mother, who raised me by herself, is very supportive of me and always has been.
She never really understood what I was doing and like Nayelly, I was asked some
of the same questions, but mine were, “Porque poesia?” “de que escribes?” and
the ever popular question I get from my father, when I speak to him over the
phone, “que vas hacer, cuanto te van a pagar?” My family is one hundred percent
behind me and my mother is now beginning to write a memoir of her life because
I’ve been speaking to her about what I write. I’ve infected my family with the
writing bug and it has manifested with my mom writing in notebooks about her
life in Mexico, crossing the border since the 70’s back and forth, and raising
three boys by herself. My older brother and sister have gone back to school
after a 13-year hiatus, and my younger brothers are finishing their undergrad
degrees. If I didn’t have my inner demons of self-worth and high anxiety over
so many things, my experience in grad school would almost be ideal. I do enjoy
my time here tremendously and the conversations I have with my cohort and a few
faculty over drinks, coffee, and food are priceless. We drink and laugh a lot;
soon it will end, but I’m confident that I’ll have these friends for a very
long time. Going into my second year in the fall and teaching creative
writing, I hope to get past some of my self-conscious doubts and tap into a
part of myself that only I could represent, to write something that only I
could have written. I know that sounds like a cliché but in grad school, if it
weren’t for clichés and listening to Los Cadetes de Linares while grinding
through Foucault, I don’t know how I could survive.
Nayelly Barrios:
I am so grateful and
fortunate to have the peers I have in my MFA program. I have found friendship,
family, and trustworthy readers amongst Benjamin Sutton, Lori “LoMo” Mosley,
Danielle Grimes, and Nate Friedman, amongst others. They look at my work as
they would anyone else’s. They don’t expect me to write a specific way because
I am Latina, or from the Rio Grande Valley, etc. To top it off, they are
phenomenal poets and I take great pleasure in their work.
Workshop has been
beneficial to my poetry. The poets have been receptive to the work I have
turned in which happens to have Spanish, as well as the poems that don’t. They
understand how to read my poetry and its instances of Spanish, even if they may
not understand Spanish. They don’t dabble in a large and pointless conversation
about the use of Spanish in it, rather they focus on the craft within and around
it. Not too long ago, one individual did tell me to italicize the Spanish in my
poem since it was a foreign language. The language was evidently not foreign to
the speaker of the poem. This assumption on the individual’s behalf that I was
not familiar with the implications and traditions of italicizing Spanish,
bothered me greatly. I calmed down and figured his experience reading writers
of diverse backgrounds must be limited. In retrospect, I should have lent him a
book.
As for diversity in my
program, I do wish there was more diversity, I started counting and was shocked
at the numbers. I would definitely appreciate more diversity. Who knows, maybe
it will happen in the upcoming cohort. There is a healthy number of women in my
program and I appreciate that.
Lauro Vazquez:
We all read each
other’s work prior to this roundtable. The diversity of form, style, voice,
theme and other defining characteristics employed in these works reflect not
only a tantalizing variety (here present in microcosm through these seven young
poets) of the possible expressions of contemporary Latino/a poetry; but also a
group of emerging poets that are fully committed to exploring the many
possibilities of poetic subject and of language.
What poems or poets in
this roundtable did you find yourself to be constantly returning to, to be in
conversation with? What poems or poets opened up any particular insights or
possibilities for your craft that you had not yet considered? What poems or
poets in this roundtable did you find particularly enriching, challenging,
insightful vis-à-vis your relationship/definition of Latino/a literature or to
your own work?
Lynda Letona:
There were so many
favorite poems I read from this roundtable and comments I had that my blog
entry would be too long to address all of them, so I will just note a few here.
Two of my favorite poems were Nayelly’s “Recurring Dream as a Tire” and
Lauren’s “Birth Control Method.” I thought Recurring Dream was very good &
creative. It captured the absurdity of border crossing, but also the inability
to forget this event. “Recurring…” Great title. As if the poet is reliving the
tale through the dream, embodying her father’s crossing by contorting into the
tire. Physically “fitting” into the narrative. What is the term when someone
identifies so much with the victim? They feel the pain themselves…
Lauren’s “Birth
Control Method” was funny and a great visual poem. The box “Sex During Your
Menstrual Cycle” made me go HA! Because I knew a girl who got pregnant in
college, since she believed this was a sort of birth control method. She was a
straight A student, but I think she was given an abstinence type of sexual
education that horribly misinformed her. I laughed out loud during the box
entry “Sex Standing Up/Being on Tip/Jumping Up & Down” and also the entry
“Placing pebbles in the Vagina.” I was on my way to the doctor to get a
prescription for birth control to deal with PMDD symptoms and hopefully stop
the monthly blood flow that I loathe when I read this poem, so I could really
relate to it. I thought about giving the poem to my doctor but when I met him,
he was all business and rushing me out of the office, as doctors tend to do, so
I didn’t think about giving him the poem. I wonder if he would have cracked a
smile if he read it.
Another line that I
really liked of Lauren’s was from the poem “after ‘Border Wars’”:
in the infrared it’s
difficult to distinguish the agents
from the immigrants.
I found it an
interesting merging indicative of pluralism or assimilation. I also found
“non-sequiturs” very funny and thought it would make a great performance poem
with lines, such as, “did you just/clean the cat?” and “if there is a formula
to bag yourself a professor,/I’d like to do that.”
I was also drawn to
the formatting and stanza structure of Elizabeth’s poems, such as, “He Tells Me
My Body Be Temple,” and “On a Bronx Bound 2 Express Train” (another favorite).
I really liked the way Elizabeth managed to write about nostalgia through
images, such as, “I don’t cook at home anymore/because I’ve been told that all
my dishes/are too heavily seasoned with nostalgia.” The previous line when the
mother makes the brother’s plantain and cries when she finds them on the
counter was also very striking and reminded me of a scene in the film The Savages.
Other favorites were
Javier’s “Void and Cold Thing,” great opening stanza. “God’s Message to Glue
Sniffers” was fascinating structurally as well as content-wise. I liked the way
Javier played with language and voice. Marcelo’s “The Night Fire” was great; I
loved the imagery in the opening stanza. And finally, I liked the philosophical
approach of Thade’s “At Dowling Pond” in the stanza:
Regarding the question
of suffering:
it may be that your
own life
is the answer,
resounding
silently throughout
time.
On the line: “I am
forever that/which I seek,” I wrote in a bubble comment, “Ha! I wrote the same
line in a poem once.” I also loved the line, grief’s rain-drenched wolves from “Anthem.” Beautiful work everyone!
Nayelly Barrios and
Lauren Espinoza (joint response):
When we found out we
were both part of this roundtable, we were elated and relieved. We have been
working together, in a physical extension of this roundtable for a long time.
We’d like to think that we are the OG (Original Gangster) version of this
roundtable. We actually sat together both in Emmy Perez’s creative writing
class at UTPA and when we were going through the application process to get
into MFA programs (we created an application support group and called it, “Road
Trip to MFA”). So, when the opportunity came up to actually sit together and
talk about these poems, it was a natural “duh” moment. So this write up is a
text version of a few conversations that we had while we were both in the same
place at the same time.
Lynda Letona: In
Lynda’s poem “MARTE Y VENUS,“ as readers we are bombarded with images of a
Guatemalan street scene, image after image: the theme and the tone match the
form. The sense of being in a place that is familiar but distant is made clear
through this onslaught of images. This makes the landscape of the poem all the
clearer, and the barrage of images is a direct move towards excess in
immediacy. So many things happen at once, that in the end we come to rest with
a visually arresting move - “We all desire collusion in dark spaces” in italics. Which takes the reader into the last
stanza where the speaker rests upon a quiet moment, a moment that is
internalized within his or herself - a move towards the body rather than the
image. The quietness of the swooshing seed in the speaker’s mouth is the silent
comfort amidst the poem’s earlier cacophonous state. How fitting in the sense
of a larger Latin@ landscape of poetry.
Elizabeth Acevedo: In
Elizabeth’s work there is an arresting intensity created by the language. Particularly
in the way that opening stanza of “He Tells Me My Body Be Temple” slings the
reader into the poem, and the way that this poem moves on the page, like a
waterfall, does the same thing. Each time the reader reaches a stasis by having
a square footing in the poem they are moved forward, almost by the force of the
spacing.
The “he” in the poem
wants the speaker to succumb to a persona that the speaker is not: the “he” in
the poem tells the speaker that her body is like a temple, and his idea of a temple
is something that is clean & pure, etc. Yet, the speaker is portraying a
different sort of temple than the person being indicated understands it to be.
The speaker in the poem says that temple isn’t quite like you imagine it,
chipping paint, shaky scaffolding, but there are moments of reverence to be had
here; and the people who come to worship at this temple don’t come for purity,
they come for the opposite.
Marcelo Hernandez:
“You carefully unravel
another crab so small,/ laced together like the fingers of a nun/ that it could
pass for the moon”
These lines from
Marcelo’s poem, “Thanksgiving with my Father,” are characteristic of the
reliance upon well crafted imagery present throughout his work. In this poem
particularly, his voice echoes that of “Those Winter Sundays,” wherein which
the father provides warmth for the family, yet this scene has a distinctly
different understanding of warmth. This poem allows for the reader to
understand the way that poverty is embodied in the 21st century, using 20th
century methods. The poem doesn’t rely on the reader knowing that experience of
fishing for food firsthand.
Thade Correa: The “me”
in the poem, the speaker, is so concentrated in recovering a loss, much like an
archaeologist. This is moving in the way that this loss is familial, the
archaeology being done is that of the self; and what is more compelling than
that -- the search to recover one’s own self that has been lost through the
process of assimilation/acculturation/colonization, etc.
“Grandfather, you are
not history/ and absence.”
There’s a pseudo sense
of absence because the poem is about the grandfather’s absence; not just his
absence alone, but the strength of his presence through his absence. To
conceptualize absence, you have to have a notion of what is present/what could
have been present/ what was once present. This poem, moves beyond the
opposition of presence and absence to create a larger truth about existence,
resonance, and history within the poem.
Javier Zamora: “[...]
Stop dressing/ in order to understand burials.”
Oftentimes when one brings up surrealism or
surreal in terms of poetry there is a move toward being dismissive. We are
considerate of this fact and want to point out how these particular lines are
surreal without being gimmicky, heavy handed, or laughable. Much like the
surrealists there is a question of the shifting notion of the subject, and this
is subtle yet powerful. The way he’s relating death, how it’s laid on the bed
of surrealism, speaks to the notion of a person displaced from their homeland.
In the third line, “I miss the river of your mouth,” there is a sense of longing and there is an evident
void that seeks to be filled as the poem progresses.
***
Heartfelt
thanks to Lauro Vazquez, who was solely responsible for putting this together,
from beginning to end. As the project progressed, we agreed that this
roundtable was his "Letras Latinas thesis"!
***
Elizabeth Acevedo is the daughter of Dominican immigrants, proudly born and
raised in the heart of New York City. Through poetry that is infused with
hip-hop and bolero she uses her words as a way to translate the world. Slamming
since she was 14, Acevedo has featured at several prestigious venues such as
the The Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, The Kodak Theatre, and Madison
Square Garden. She has graced the stage besides such renowned artist as Lupe
Fiasco, M1 from Dead Prez, Stacyann Chin and Lemon from Def Poetry Jam on
Broadway. She was a featured poet for BET’s You(th) Speak Out national public
service announcement, as well as a featured poet in their political slam during
the 2008 elections. Other television appearances include the third season of
Mun2’s The Chica’s Project as well as season 3 of BET J's Lyric Café. Elizabeth
was also a featured poet in the publication Off the Subject: The Words of
Lyrical Circle, featuring a foreword by the Grammy nominated Sekou Sundiata and
an afterword by Nikki Giovanni.
*
Nayelly
Barrios is a Rio Grande Valley native. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming
in Beloit Poetry Journal, Puerto del Sol, and DIAGRAM. This summer she will be
attending the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
*
*
Born and raised in Northwest Indiana, Thade Correa
received his BA from Indiana University, Bloomington, and his MA in the
Humanities from the University of Chicago. Though he considers writing his
primary artistic vocation, he is also a composer and pianist. His poetry and
translations have appeared in various journals, both in print and online,
including Paragraphiti, Ibbetson Street, The Aurorean, and
Modern Haiku. A chapbook of his poetry, Anthem, appeared in 2010,
and a collection of his recent work earned him the 2012 Billy Maich Academy of
American Poets Prize.
*
Lauren Espinoza is currently a graduate
student in the M.F.A. Program in Poetry at Arizona State University.
Growing up in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, her work investigates the
intersections of language, sexuality, border-identities, humor, and culture.
Her poetry has appeared in an anthology selected by Naomi Shihab Nye
entitled Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25, in print at The Mas
Tequila Review, online at The Acentos Review and Whole Beast Rag,
and she has a poem forthcoming in NewBorder: Contemporary Voices from the
Texas/Mexico Border published by Texas A&M Press. She is a member
of The Trinity, a poetry cliqua from the Rio Grande Valley; and holds a
graduate certificate in Mexican American Studies from the University of
Texas-Pan American.
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Lynda
Letona, a current MFA student at Notre Dame and Creative Writing
Instructor, received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of South
Dakota. Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared in Liternational,
hotmetalpress.net, and The VLP Magazine.
As a previously undocumented student also referred to as a
“DREAM Student,” Lynda underwent the risky legalization process (during the
summer of 2011) known as the “consular option” that requires applicants to
return to their home country. Not knowing whether she would be allowed to
return to the U.S. after living here 23 years, Lynda spent much of her time
writing poetry and a series of blog entries to her friends. She turned this
“adventure” into a third-world writing workshop. Lynda was allowed back in the
country after five months in Guatemala; she has enjoyed being a U.S. legal
resident for the past year and half.
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Javier Zamora was born in San Luis
La Herradura, La Paz, El Salvador. At the age of nine he immigrated to the
“Yunaited Estais.” His chapbook, Nine
Immigrant Years, is the winner of the 2011 Organic Weapon Arts Contest.
Zamora is a CantoMundo fellow and a Breadloaf work-study scholarship recipient.
He has received scholarships from Frost Place, Napa Valley, Squaw Valley, and
VONA. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Interrupture, NewBorder, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Spillway, among
others.
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