CANTO COSAS: volume IV: Steven Cordova

Foreword 
by Alberto Ríos

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Poetry Daily: Canto Cosas Poet Featured

FEATURED POEM

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FEATURED POET

Please welcome CANTO COSAS: volume 2

WHERE THE HEART IS

by

Yusef Komunyakaa

"I met William Archila during the summer of 2005, at the Breadloaf Writer's Conference, and from the onset I was truly impressed by his quiet demeanor and fire-tinged poetry. He already possessed a facility for assaying the sonorities of a multilayered world---lived and imagined. Indeed, here was a voice that seemed old and young, a singer of naked praise and lamentation, a truth seeker and truth teller, a poet who resided with certitude and a sense of grace, uniquely within his own skin, without any bravado or grandstanding. In his best poems, a quiet certainty lived alongside a natural surrealism. Early on, there was already something (how does one explain it, or should one even attempt to explain it?) in a poem by Archila, indebted to a strangeness that seemed matter-of-fact, and an almost casual gravity and buoyancy were intricately woven into that which approximated everyday life. Nothing felt contrived or ornamental in a poem by this fine young poet; this fact kept me returning to his work again and again.

Now years later, sitting here in New York City with The Art of Exile, I am reminded of what truly struck a nerve in me when I first read William Archila's poetry: I believe the authenticity in this voice [...]"

from the Foreword of The Art of Exile (Bilingual Press, 2009)

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"In The Art of Exile, William Archila's amazing first volume of poetry, we have the memoir in poetry of a man who has made both a physical, global journey and a journey of the questing spirit. Born in El Salvador, a country torn by civil war, Archila arrives, after a long travail, in a new homeland of a deeply considered peace---it is the country of poetry. We read depictions of men physically broken, psychically wounded by war, and testimonies of a populace governed by fear intermingled with the profound dramas of these same Salvadorans who've become immigrants in the communities of L.A. Archila's poetry derives from this expanse of experience and makes of them short briefs of poignancy of his exile's acculturation in an urban world that is at once harsh and beguiling. From the worst of humanity's destructiveness, Archila creates the best our civilization has to give---humane sentiment, forgiveness, love, and poetry. The Art of Exile is a marvelous contribution to the Art of Peace."

---Garrett Hongo

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"The Art of Exile is what William Archila works to perfect in this first book of poems about El Salvador, a country 'small as a paper cut.' Archila breathes life into the boys and men left behind who have died in the dirt roads and stubble fields of his lost homeland as he builds the language of a new life in the north, a language steeped in jazz and blood, tobacco and chalk, concrete and dust...History, poverty, family and faith move these poems into mysterious territories where the living speak to the dead and dead speak back."

---Dorianne Laux

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The Cortland Review
features a poem in its spring 2009 issue
by William Archila
along with an audio recording of the poet reading his piece.

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William Archila was born in Santa Ana, El Salvador, in 1968. When he was twelve, he and his family immigrated to the United States to escape the civil war that was tearing his country apart. He eventually became an English teacher and earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. His poems have appeared in Agni, Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, The Los Angeles Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry International, and Puerto del Sol, among others. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife. The Art of Exile is his first book.

KRISTIN NACA / first full-length books

Gracias to Richard Yañez for passing this on from the San Antonio Current: I thought I’d link the brief interview here since there has been some lively web discussion on poetry book prizes and first books: Naca’s wonderful manuscript, Bird Eating Bird, was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa in the National Poetry Series book competition and is forthcoming in 2009 with HarperCollins.

Three of Kristin Naca's poems appear in the pages of OCHO #15, which I guest edited a while back, which also features the work of 14 other fine Latino and Latina poets. The price is a reasonable $8.00 now. When I set out to guest edit OCHO, I chose poets who, at the time, had not yet published a first full-length collection. To refresh our memory, those poets were:

Lisa Alvarado
Oscar Bermeo
Xochiquetzal Candelaria
Diana Marie Delgado
Jose B. Gonzalez
Octavio R. Gonzalez
Raina J. León
elena minor
John Murillo
Kristin Naca
Emily Pérez
Ruben Quesada
Peter Ramos
Carmen Gimenez Smith
Rich Villar

And so: it is heartening to look over this list today because: since the publication of OCHO #15, Lisa Alvarado and Peter Ramos have published their first full-length books: Raw Silk Suture (Floricanto) and Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVOX), respectively!

And: Raina J. León has a first full-length book, A Canticle of Idols (WordTech), forthcoming shortly---a collection that was among the final three manuscripts that Valerie Martínez deliberated over, long and hard, before settling on The Outer Bands by Gabriel Gomez for the second edition of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

And who was the third by, you might ask?

The third was by Salvadoran-born, Los Angeles-based poet William Archila. His first full-length book, The Art of Exile, is forthcoming, soon, in the Canto Cosas series at Bilingual Press---with a wonderful introduction by none other than...Yusef Komunyakaa.

This and That/Esto y Aquello

Brett Keck, the webmaster at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame, informed me today that Latino Poetry Review (LPR), in its first nine days of official existence, received about 1800 hits. To put that in perspective, the web site for the entire ILS (including LPR), which is fairly sizable with all its units and social science research on the web, etc., received about 3500 hits. In other words, LPR accounted for a little over 50% of the total web traffic of the Institute for Latino Studies' website in the last nine days.

I think it's safe to say that literature, in this case, poetry, is now a viable component of the Institute for Latino Studies---a component that did not exist in 2003 when I came on board.

And yet, there's still much to do.

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In some comments I posted over at Craig Perez's blog the other day, I suggested that someone reading Letras Latinas Blog might conclude that Latino poetry was my only source of literary interest and nourishment. With that thought still fresh, I decided to finally take advantage of my PEN American membership and create this and this.

My expectation is that most of my blog activity will continue here since Letras Latinas is what takes up most of my time---is my "day job," if you will. But then again, who knows?