#WeComeFromEverything: no. 14

  “Because We Come from Everything: Poetry &Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. 

During the month of March, coalition members CantoMundo and Letras Latinas are partnering to present guest posts by CM fellows at Letras Latinas Blog that will include essays, creative non-fiction, micro reviews and dialogues between writers. This year’s theme borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” Please return to this space and enjoy all the pieces in the series, and leave comments to participate in the dialogue.

Barbara Curiel, CantoMundo
Francisco Aragón, Letras Latinas 

Migration Memory

by Juan J. Morales

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My parents went to Spanish services at a church near the corner of Conejos and Colorado Avenue in Colorado Springs when they first met. Mom described living in her sister’s basement  with my brother and sister, and my father talked about his house near Ft. Carson. In the version I knew, they married after knowing each other three weeks. In their wedding photo, they toast in my aunt’s kitchen with plastic champagne glasses in front of the cake that my mom made. They’re smiling, mom in her pink dress and my father in a brown plaid suit. When I ask my mom if this is true, she laughs, “Of course not. It was longer than that.” With their 38th anniversary approaching, I’m left asking where did I get the three-week version of their story?

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My mother was twenty when she left Ecuador. She spent a decade in Panama and then moved my brother and sister to Colorado. She sorted microchips for a computer company for minimum wage, shredding up her hands every day. Mom spent little and saved for the three of them. She understates her winding path to US citizenship, similar to so many other hard workers that add to our country’s rich tapestry by stepping past invisible borders we’re not supposed to cross. During our last family visit to Ecuador, we went to la línea equinoccial, the monument to the Equator, where we stood in the northern and southern hemispheres at the same time. We took photos crossing back and forth and then balanced on the yellow line. It cost around $3 to enter the monument, but at least you can cross it without consequence.

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My father enlisted in the US Army at 17 or 18, knowing full well he’d fight in Korea. It was 1952 when he left Puerto Rico. My father didn’t speak English yet. In the three decades he served, dad earned two Purple Hearts (one for a grenade that temporarily paralyzed him and a bullet clean through the shoulder). He rose to the rank of Sargent Major and traveled the world until stationed in Colorado Springs, where he eventually retired.

            My mistake whenever I tell my father’s story: I claim the military as my father’s pathway to citizenship, waking up to the fact he was a US citizen all along. I omit Puerto Rico as the US commonwealth in the Caribbean, the ambiguous island that isn’t a state or an independent country. Just like his home island, my father had to work harder to learn and to speak the right language, and he had to suffer most of his adult life to prove that the effects of PTSD and Agent Orange were real. He still never complains. There is guilt I didn’t make these connections sooner, but I have always been proud of his sacrifices. I see it in his beat-up black hat with the Korea and Vietnam Veteran patch. Soldiers in uniform always look at his hat and then thank my dad for his service whenever they see him in public.

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I was born in Iowa City, Iowa. My mom mentions a memory of how tall the corn grew. And that’s about it. We don’t have connections there, beyond my father rooting for the Hawkeyes and my mother telling me the hospital’s name there was Mercy. Instead of the Midwest, I gravitate toward my parents’ migration stories and what places they call home. Sometimes the gaps in my parents’ stories defeat me. I can’t keep the dates right. The math doesn’t add up to a cogent timeline. My want is to braid the two stories and to avoid losing a single strand of them, which cannot be done. Some stories mom and dad just can’t remember. Some questions they won’t answer. Others I don’t know to ask yet. I try to get out of the way and let their stories unfold again, the way that I heard them over the years, accepting the unavoidable memory fog that wraps around us all. 

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Juan Morales was born in the U.S. to an Ecuadorian mother and a Puerto Rican father. He is the author of the poetry collections The Siren World, Friday and the Year That Followed, and the forthcoming, The Handyman's Guide to End Times in early 2018. He is a CantoMundo Fellow, The Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine, and an Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University-Pueblo, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and curates the SoCo Reading Series. His poems have recently appeared in Pank, Post Road, The Malpais Review, Green Mountains Review, Terrain.org, and others.
 

Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize: The Runners-Up

Lorna Dee Cervantes, the judge of the 2014 Letras Latinas / Red Hen Poetry Prize, which supports the publication of a second or third book by a Latino/a poet residing in the United States, had this to say about the manuscripts she designated as runners-up. She selected four:

1. First Runners-Up (a tie):

THE FABLE OF THE PADDLE SACK CHILD

by Mia Leonin

A compelling integral whole, this book tells the tale of Micaela’s mother from the hand of a child and shimmers like a single multifaceted crystal while comprised of individual poems and prose poems, seamlessly faceted and set semi-precious stones of poems, each one polished to its own perfection. Nothing is extra or out of place in this chiseled and inventive collection. This is a unique and distinct manuscript from a distinct and unique voice.

A CAMERA OBSCURA

by Carl Marcum

Heady and full like a hearty glass of Petit Sirrah, this intelligent collection of poems displays the best of “American” fusion. Both aged and fresh, these poems blanket the tongue with their flush of lush language. “High” and “low” culture blend with the Native Spanish of the Southwest in this poetry of sanguine saquaros set in the windows of Chicago high-rises and the spoils from academic Ivory Towers of “robots” “less than human, more than semiotic ghost” — all woven together into A CAMERA OBSCURA which holds: “every heavenly hypothesis.”

Third Runner-up:

PLANNED AND SUDDEN JOURNEYS

by Gina Valdés

This book spells, holds you as you come to Earth pulled by the intimate geography of language and the love of place wherever it is homed, be it this imaginary border or that. Here, “Chaplin and Cantinflas/ waddle up a hill, roll down,” and “English Surely Latinized” takes over in the hidden history and talk-story of those who cross for a living — “only the heart/ of all things throbbing.”

Fourth Runner-up:

A PLACE THAT NO LONGER EXISTS

by Juan J. Morales

These poems, as in the poem, “A Kind of Chemistry,” “extract a kind of chemistry that unifies it all.” From Pizarro “ready to maneuver Manco like brittle bones/ spat to the ground” to the “Underdogs” “smelling failure” and “thinking instead/ of this hiss of anti-war, shock and awe,” these poems ask if the “occupation…is anything like the Incan revolt that failed.” “How can I not believe what they believe?”

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We will be announcing the winner tomorrow night. Our gratitude to all who submitted a manuscript.

Latin@ Featured Poets

Juan J. Morales @ Kwelli Journal

CantoMundo fellow, Juan J. Morales—whose debut collection, Friday and the Year that Followed: Poems (Fairweather Books, 2007) is reviewed by Daniel A. Olivas in this issue of Latino Poetry Review—is the current poet featured at Kwelli Journal with his poem “One Last Love Poem.”

When I first read Friday and the Year that Followed, Juan J. Morales struck me as a storyteller. In the same way that a short-story writer or a novelist uses prose, Juan uses poetry to tell a story, except Juan’s use of poetry makes his stories that much more compelling.  For example, in the first section of the book titled “Ambato” and more specifically in the poem “Newspaper Story,” Juan gives a statistical account of a 1949 earthquake that devastated the Ecuadorian city of Ambato, leaving behind “6,000 dead,” “100,000 homeless” and “50 cities rubbled.” In the midst of this violence, which reduces the suffering of the innocent to the muteness of statistics, Morales summons the language of storytelling and the supernatural to give life to those who perish in the catastrophe.  In a way, his work—like that of recent Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet, William Archila—reminds us that the poet is first and foremost a creator, with the ability—to borrow Archila’s words—“to shape and bend his or her work into an iron-like form that will out last the experience of the war,” of catastrophe.

“One Last Love Poem” is in Morales’ words “self-explanatory” and is part of a new collection of poems in progress:

One Last Love Poem: 

I confess being nervous to preserve you
before the little things fall in chasms of lost wishes.
Maybe it’s not ready but it escapes
like cigarette smoke in a sigh.  Before it’s too late, before
fully waking from living this life, I will write
to your body, to your telling stories.
I will drink them into my day like a subtle wink
you’d throw me in a crowded room.  I will always
see the charm of a chickenpox scar interrupting
your long lashes, your eyes set in navy
flecks of almost grey, how they will still look
into mine to instantly know how I feel.

I’d like to think I have photo sharp memory
but I still crash down to earth
noticing the strands of your hair
around the house that will sadly vanish in time
and golden bobby pins I find becoming
mousetraps that snap down on smaller memoirs,
subtle as your scent on skin beyond perfume. 
The cling to clothes a eulogy for squeezing
into your neck.  Your scent will dissipate in the quiet of
home, and I will desperately conjure it when I hum
improvised songs we sang to television melodies
we know and punk mixes we wore out.

If I could, one last time, I would kiss the freckles you hate
on your alabaster skin, the cigarette burn
on your arm that matches mine and shows our survival
so far, the two moles you hate
you know where, the small scar on your knee
you once showed me.  Either way, I can hold on
and let this all collapse into the calamities
of beauty, rising to be collected
when I don’t know what else to say or when
I let myself swirl into other sensations of you
I’m still sorry I couldn’t hold onto.

Click HERE for more.

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Eduardo C. Corral @ Lambda Literary 

CantoMundo fellow and Latino/a Poetry Now Featured poet, Eduardo C. Corral is currently a featured poet at Lambda Literary, where his poem “To Tim Dlugos (Four Centos).”

Lacking the necessary words to intrigue you, dear reader, to this poem by Eduardo C. Corral I am tempted to simply write: “Eduardo C. Corral. Enough said.” And perhaps I should but instead I will confess to having never heard of the “cento.” The cento is a poem composed of verse and passages taken from other authors, hence Eduardo’s title “To Tim Dlugos” and which borrows a line(s) from Duglos in each of the four centos’ openings.  According to Wikipedia, the word Cento, meaning, “a cloak made of patches,” comes from the Latin. With this in mind I invite you to check out this four centos by Corral, which revisits Tim Duglos’ A Fast Life, a book that “rocked  my [Eduardo’s] life.”

Here is the opening cento:

TO TIM DLUGOS (CENTO)

I thought I was incapable of love. The year


I could not find a pen.


When you stop to think, it’s quite the bargain.

We were supposed to


drop a quarter


in this story. The horizon drops. All winter the sky gets higher.


It used to be more fun to be a poet.


I want a Pepsi for breakfast.


When I’m this blue,


I wash
the city and the continent.


Masturbate.


I really ought to carry a notebook.


Don’t know why.

Click HERE for more centos.

Review Roundup-September 18, 2011

Yvette Benavides reviews Lorna Dee Cervantes’ CIENTO: 100 100-WORD LOVE POEMS

Yes this is a brand new collection. And yes there are one-hundred poems consisting of one-hundred words. And what a better title than CIENTO for a collection of poetry that is as timeless and complete as the 4,000 year-old embrace pictured on the cover of this collection. There is something reminiscent here of Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets, but Lorna’s poems are not just earthy and sensual, they are also humorous.  If for many young-poets, like myself, Neruda is a literary father then Lorna is her feminine counterpart.  Like Neruda, Lorna’s work is revolutionary precisely because it is guided by feelings of love. Here await 100 poems like 100 pearls—dive in for the treasure.

Here is what Yvette Benavides of the San Antonio Express had to say:

Love poems. Enough to make us swear off poetry forever? Maybe, but only when they're schmaltzy — the last word anyone would ever use about the latest collection from San Antonio's Wings Press by Lorna Dee Cervantes, “Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems.”

Cervantes, who reads from the new collection Friday at Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, blazed trails in the 1970s when she was an active member of the new Chicano Movement. In her work, she speaks to the conundrums of alienation and identity.

The full review can be read here.

Daniel A. Olivas reviews Juan J. Morales’  Friday and the Year that Followed: Poems in Latino Poetry Review Issue 1

One of the greatest assets of being part of the Notre Dame community is without doubt its library. And one of the many privileges of my work at Letras Latinas is my exposure to the many voices in the chorus of Latino letters. One of these voices is that of Juan J. Morales whose work I found at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh library. Juan, like myself, is a CantoMundo fellow and the co-editor of the CantoMundo newsletter. His collection of poems Friday and the Year that Followed: Poems is a haunting collection; it is a poetry of storytelling and of unspoken places. It is important to mention that this is not a new review but an older one from the first issue of Latino Poetry Review. Having said this, this reposting of older reviews is an initiative on my part to give Latino Poetry Review pieces a second opportunity for new and wider readership. 

Here is what Daniel A. Olivas had to say:

In his debut collection, Friday and the Year that Followed: Poems, Juan J. Morales uses as a palette his blended (and sometimes competing) identities rooted within the cultures and histories of Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and the United States. Indeed, Morales segregates such identities within a triptych structure perhaps with the intent of controlling, defining, and illuminating the various voices that he must inevitably rely upon to tell his stories. I say "stories" because Morales, at heart, is a mature and compelling storyteller who uses poetry in the same manner novelists and short story writers employ prose.

The full review can be read here. 

Jonathan Yardley reviews Daniel Alarcón’s novel Lost City Radio

Daniel Alarcón’s novel Lost City Radio is set in a fictitious Latin American country where a decade-long war between left-leaning guerrillas and the government has finally come to an end and the families of the many dead and disappeared have finally begun searching for one another with the help of Norma, the host of the most popular radio program in the country: Lost City Radio. Somewhere along the novel Alarcón describes the violence between the insurgency and government forces as a mutually bloody dance where the only victims of the violence are the very same people both government forces and revolutionary fighters claim to be fighting for. To read Daniel Alarcon’s novel is exactly that: to be thrown into a dance with dynamite.  

Alarcón’s novel was published in 2007 and this is thus an older review of the novel but I am reposting it here to take the opportunity and announce Daniel Alarcón’s up and coming reading “At Night We Walk in Circles” at Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center on October 4th, 2011, an event co-sponsored by Letras Latinas. And to say that I will have the honor of interviewing Daniel Alarcón for the Letras Latinas' Oral History Interviews. These interviews are truly a a small treasure onto themselves, please do check out the many interviews. 

Here is what Jonathan Yardley had to say:

Daniel Alarcón's thoughtful, engaging first novel is set in a fictitious South American country where the reader will immediately recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and, most particularly, Alarcón's native country, Peru. No name is ever given to the country: Alarcón means the novel to be a fable about civil wars and their repercussions, rather than an account of a specific war within a specific place to which we bring all the baggage of familiarity.

With the publication of Lost City Radio, Alarcón is off and running. His collection of short stories, War by Candlelight, was published two years ago to deservedly high praise. Now still in his late 20s, Alarcón has an impressive and rather unusual background. He was brought to this country when he was very young because of the dreadful violence that swept through Peru in the 1980s and '90s during the terrorist uprisings led by the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru movements. In recent years, he has spent a lot of time in one of the poorest barrios of Lima, and much of his fiction is about the people who live there.

The full review can be read here.

I first met ire'ne lara silva in the context of the Macondo Writers' Workshop a few years ago. More recently, her presence at the second CantoMundo gathering reminded me of what I'll deem a spirit both generous and fierce at once. At the opening circle, she made an interesting comment about how anger, at times, can be useful. At the Fellows reading she performed a powerful piece about family relations who've had to battle diabetes---the image that drove the piece (losing limbs, or pieces of limbs to this illness) was haunting. Anyway, she and fellow CantoMundista Juan J. Morales are starting a CantoMundo newsletter. And she has started a blog. Here book, Furia, was nicely profiled at La Bloga a while back, as well.