One Highlight of National Poetry Month: April 10

Rigoberto González's forthcoming lecture at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. is one of many highlights Letras Latinas has in store for National Poetry Month.

Others are:

--An interview here at Letras Latinas Blog with Xavier Cavazos, conducted by Lauro Vazquez, on the occasion of the publication and presentation in New York of Barbarian at the Gate, selected by Thomas Sayers Ellis for a 2013 PSA Chapbook Fellowship Award.

--A collective review/response to the poetry collection Fetish (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) by Orlando Ricardo Menes. Letras Latinas Blog will be posting, throughout the month, two at a time, a total of ten pieces, each responding to a different poem in the collection.

--the release of TITULADA by elena minor, volume 2 of The AKRILICA Series, brought to you by Letras Latinas and Noemi Press

--The press release announcing the 2014 recipient of the John K. Walsh Residency Fellowship (formerly the Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship). Started in 2008, this will be our seventh recipient in the series.

--a reading on April 8 at Colorado State University at Pueblo, featuring Letras Latinas national book prize winners Laurie Ann Guerrero and Dan Vera.

--The second annual Letras Latinas Writers Initiative MFA weekend gathering at the University of Notre Dame, slated for April 12-14, where we will be hosting three visiting Latino/a MFA candidates: Elizabeth Acevedo, Nayelly Barrios, and Javier Zamora.

-- The fifth Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize reading, slated for Monday, April 14 at the University of Notre Dame, featuring Laurie Ann Guerrero and Francisco X. Alarcón. At the conclusion of the reading, Letras Latinas will be announcing the winner of the sixth Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, selected by Rhina P. Espaillat. We will also be naming four honorable mentions.

--The press release, in the latter half of the month, for the third recipient of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, slated for future publication with Red Hen Press, selected by Lorna Dee Cervantes

--a reading in Washington, D.C. on April 20 at Busboys and Poets, as part of Split This Rock's "Sunday Kind of Love series," featuring Pablo Miguel Martínez and Elizabeth Acevedo.

El Paso Photo Gallery: September 24, 2013

Letras Latinas kicked off its 2013/14 season last night in El Paso, TX. Our thanks to the faculty of the Creative Writing Department at UTEP for saying Yes/Sí to this collaboration, which was pitched over dinner in Manhattan, oh, a year and a half ago!

Laurie Ann Guerrero and Dan Vera

(photo credit: Daniel Chacón)

Dan Vera

winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize

(photo credit: Daniel Chacón)

Rosa Alcalá with poet as backdrop

(photo credit: Daniel Chacón)

Laurie Ann Guerrero

winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize

(photo credit: Daniel Chacón)

Los poetas

(photo credit: Daniel Chacón)

The support continues: Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative

CONNIE HALES

Last March at AWP in Boston I had the pleasure of meeting, for the first time, someone who had taught Andrés Montoya at Fresno State University when he was a student there. I told Connie Hales about the volume of Andrés' poetry, edited by Daniel Chacón, that Bilingual Press was going to publish. I told her that our hope and goal was to hold a one-day symposium on Andrés and his work, upon the publication of this book, perhaps at Fresno State. I told her about the Malaquias Montoya print--inspired by Andrés' poetry--that Letras Latinas was selling to help underwrite the expense of publishing Andrés' book, and running the prize that honors him and his work. But also: the sale of the print was to raise funds to hold this aforementioned symposium. We have in mind inviting past winners of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize come read their work; inviting a young scholar to come speak about Andrés' work; perhaps even organize a panel, etc. It's all in the conceptual phase right now. All of this, I said, constitutes the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative. In short, a targeted fundraiser. Before I even formally, as they say, "made the ask," she offered to buy a print. It's feels particularly special when this happens: when someone offers to buy the print without even being asked. Since Connie is a former teacher of Andrés', this shouldn't have surprised me. It didn't. And yet, the norm has been asking individuals, one at a time, to join the circle of print owners that's been forming slowly over the past two years. We're over half way there, and the majority of folks have been fellow writers, like Connie. 

Have peek at the photo gallery to see who they are.

And speaking of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, our next deadline is January 15, 2014. 

Here are the full guidelines.

And who is the final judge, you ask?

Click here and find out who she is!

Poetry sin fronteras: Francisco X. Alarcón featured @ “Kritya”

From Kritya, Journal of Poetry

Of special interest to all lovers of poetry, but especially to those of you that submitted to the fifth edition of the Andrés Montoya poetry prize (best of luck!), Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize judge, Francisco X. Alarcón is the featured “editor’s pick” poet at Kritya. 

This edition of the Indian international poetry journal features six poems by Alarcón: “Deep Song,” “Night,” “Lightning,” “Leaf,” “Poetic Manifesto,” and “Let Us Be Gandhi.”

“[E]ach poem is an act of faith/ in the power of the Word/ a flower passed / hand to hand” declares Alarcón, staying true to his conviction that in times of social and environmental crisis, poetry can be a transcendent agent of change, of understanding and healing. And staying true to his simplicity of language and imagery, Alarcón pushes his readers to make imaginary assaults against the sterility of the impossible, against all the ugliness of repression and to envision a place where poems teach us to “never be bullets

but true healing hands

pressing bleeding wounds

run[ing] away from lions

and eagles, always content

to be butterflies”

But not everything is sheer resistance there are moment s here too of playfulness, poems that refuse to be corralled by the workings of the rational mind.  In the poem “Lightning” Alarcón leads us to a realm of intuition and sheer imagination where land becomes sky, where light and darkness intertwine and transcend the limitations of their own elements, where no rational answers exist but rather a reflective surface where we can contemplate the mystery of life:

Lightning

sky
rooting
on the land

a tree
of light
in the dark

lasting
an instant
an eternity

announcing
a celestial
drumming

FOR MORE POEMS CLICK HERE AND HERE.

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

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.”

Mis Muertos by Francisco X. Alarcón

A great Day of the Dead poem byFrancisco X. Alarcón—judge of Letras Latinas’ current Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

From The Other Side of the Night (University of Arizona Press).

--Lauro