Feasting on FETISH: Installment number 1

The poet and critic Barbara Claire Freeman once wrote:

“The generic convention of the book review is monologic; however nuanced and subtle, the constraints of the form typically allow the inclusion of only one perspective.”

She was introducing a collection of 23 short texts, each responding to a different poem by Brenda Hillman from her collection, Pieces of Air in the Epic. In other words, a collective review—published in issue 33 of Jacket in 2007.

That review served as a model for what Letras Latinas Blog will be presenting here, albeit on a less ambitious scale, but in the same spirit. But rather than publish all the pieces at the same time as was done in Jacket, we are going to roll them out 2 at a time.

We’ll be responding to 10 different poems in Fetish, a collection by Orlando Ricardo Menes, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2013, and winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.

Thade Correa on “Fetish”

In “Fetish,” Orlando Menes’ poetic vision lifts the veil separating the natural and the spiritual, the colonized and the colonizer, the body and the soul, etc., by a delicate rendering of an Eleggua that the poet glimpses standing curiously—and dangerously—close to the altar of Our Lady of Regla Church in Cuba. Eleggua—a trickster god of the crossroads in the Cuban religion of Santeria, often portrayed as a child—is known as the “Way-Opener.” Normatively, the presence of such a figure in a Christian sanctuary would be anathema, but not so in this case: in Cuba, the native spiritual tradition has not been entirely displaced and crushed by the colonizer. The Eleggua has endured, and stands as a holy object among other holy objects, shattering the authoritarian myth that the sacred belongs only to the Western world. Menes’ poem pays homage to this endurance as well as to the Eleggua’s subtle shattering of cultural hegemony. 

Like the fetish of Eleggua itself, Menes’ poem is a magical verbal object, a way-opener that offers a glimpse at a psychic crossroads where the grim realities of cultural and spiritual conflicts and their historical contexts are not mended or collapsed into an undifferentiated unity but rather collide and so give birth to a radiant gesture of compassion for the Outcast. That is to say, the poet does not attempt to resolve the tension between the pagan fetish and its postcolonial environment but rather elegizes and praises the Eleggua as a symbol of all that which survives oppression. Despite its presence in the sanctuary, the fetish is not at home where it is, and so the poet wishes to take it back with him to an even more alien (and presumably Midwestern) landscape, “where snow / & hail fall from brittle clouds / that phosphoresce the night sky.” The tenderness that pervades the last lines of the poem in which the poet addresses the fetish is heartbreakingly moving:

Don’t fear. Snow is coconut flakes,

hail rock candy. I will paint

gouache jungles with aquatint vines,

         ochre ceibas, orchids that grow

in gessoed moonlight, your lair

of Spanish moss by a bay window

where you will eat red papaya,

drink rum, sun like an iguana

on a yagruma tree.

The landscape of the new home that the poet wishes to grant the Eleggua will be far from comfortable and familiar, and so the poet offers the activity of his own imagination to the fetish to make up for this alienation. In a stroke, the poet’s devotion to the fetish transforms the bleakness of a Midwestern winter into an endless tropical summer.      

However, this act takes place only in the imagination and the fetish remains standing where it was first glimpsed. Presumably, it’s still there, still alien, still Other. Yes, it’s true that “poetry makes nothing happen,” as Auden wrote. Yet in spite of this, Menes’ poem affirms that both poetry and love are way-openers, and that the activity of the human imagination, which fuels both endeavors, can and does transform and transfigure the downtrodden and grant new life to the oppressed. It’s also true that poetry

makes anything happen. It only depends how deeply one is able to dream.

Thade Correa hails from Northwest Indiana. He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame (2013), having previously studied at the University of Chicago (M.A., 2010) and Indiana University, Bloomington (B.A. 2006). His poetry, translations, and essays have appeared (or are forthcoming) in various venues, including Poetry City U.S.A., Vol. 4, Bird's Thumb, The Ostrich Review, Actuary Lit, Prime Number, RHINO, Asymptote, Paragraphiti, Ibbetson Street, The Aurorean, and Modern Haiku. In 2012, a collection of his poetry garnered him an Academy of American Poets Prize. A composer and pianist as well as a writer, he currently publishes his music with Alliance Publications. Currently, he teaches writing and music at Indiana University, Northwest and HGS Music Studios, respectively.

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Nayelly Barrios on “Village of the Water People”

        

In Orlando Ricardo Menes’ “Village of the Water People,” the narrator is in search of spiritual renewal. He looks for this, according to the poem’s epigraph, in Western Cuba. The opening stanzas of the poem expose the reader to the rugged landscape through which the speaker treks in order to reach a hut in the mountains. There is an interesting mirroring of the speaker’s spiritual thirst and the horse’s thirst for water in the fourth stanza, “I almost fall / when my horse races to water” (38). Right after this, the speaker is met with the woman they are in search of, Marilú, who feeds him, “grassy coffee, coconut cakes, juicy mango slices” (38). The manner in which the speaker describes Marilú makes it clear that she is a curandera, or spiritual healer. In her hut, which is decked out in lit candles, lithographs of saints, and clay saints, the speaker drinks a concoction out of a calabash cup. Marilú explains that her hut is where individuals come to heal, and that he must drink, “in sips / and slurps. No rush, no quaffs, she says, let the taste linger...” (39). The speaker never reveals from where he traveled, but I am reminded of the contrast of this idea of no rushing: a city life. Perhaps the speaker has traveled from a city where he has not dedicated time to his spirituality, hence this need for spiritual renewal. The speaker seems to be so far removed from just relaxing that Marilú has to teach him. He says she takes his hands and shows him how to slowly intake the liquid from the calabash. The intake of the concoction is followed by prayer as Marilú runs her hands over the speaker. In the fourteenth stanza, the speaker begins to experience the spiritual healing, “I’m a believer, she says, / but just don’t know it” (39). There is a sense of confession, and burden seems to be lifted from the speaker, “My image in the cup told her secrets” (39). After this confession, he is told to “submit, be reverent...feel the grace of wet earth / on your feet, rain’s tingling mercy on your skin” (40). Marilú advises the speaker to allow himself to become one with nature, the same nature that just before this experience tired him out, or perhaps the nature from which he is escaping which has driven him to this spiritual renewal. He is then carried out of the hut by strong arms where “water people hold hands, / pray in a circle, drink from the sky...” (40). As he enters this moment of spiritual hyperawareness, I wonder how much of this experience is merely a mirage or hallucination, but perhaps that doesn’t matter, because there are multiple manners in which one can come into a personal spirituality. In the penultimate line in the final stanza of the poem, the speaker says, “I take small soggy steps, join the circle, / sit in a puddle, hum a hymn, spider lilies in the wind,” (40) and we know that, whether real or imagined, he has entered to the place he yearned for.

Nayelly Barrios is a Rio Grande Valley native. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Puerto del Sol, Boxcar Poetry Review, The Paris-American and elsewhere. She is co-editor and co-founder of Ostrich Review.

AWP: New Kids On The Block/Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry

Marcelo Hernandez at the podium

Carmen Gimenez Smith recently asked me--on Facebook, of course--"How was your AWP?" Increasingly, these past few years, I find myself choosing to visit with individuals in place of attending panels. But I did get to the one on Latino identity and was totally seduced by Daniel Borzutzky's talk, which managed to be both hilarious and acutely insightful.

But if forced to hone, the highlights of this year's conference were two. The first: watching and listening to Lauro Vazquez, Marcelo Hernandez, and Nayelly Barrios give their presentations at the panel, "New Kids On The Block." But also listening to the words of Lauren Espinoza (who had to miss the conference), as spoken by Nayelly. This was the first time Lauro, Marcelo, and Nayelly had ever presented at an AWP panel and it was a pleasure to behold. The panel had to do with a new initiative whose aim is to create a space of support, what we're calling a public square, for those Latino writers who decide to pursue graduate degrees in creative writing. It was heartening to see so many friendly faces and allies in the audience.

Nayelly Barrios at the podium

As for the shadow conference---that is, the off-site events---the launch of the anthology, Theatre Under My Skin was another highlight. A few years ago, Emma Trelles introduced me to (at an AWP conference of course) Alexandra Lytton Regalado, who was on the ground floor of starting Kalina, a publishing project in El Salvador. This recently released anthology is their latest title. Here's the cover:

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And here are a couple of pics from the anthology's off-site event:

Lucia De Sola, Tania Pleitez Vela

& Alexandra Lytton Regalado 

launching Theatre Under My Skin

Emma Trelles reading Susana Reyes

Nayelly and Sara at Squaw: a conversation

Nayelly Barrios

Sara Borjas

I think Squaw is the wild and mysterious stranger who pulls you out on the dance floor whether or not you know how to dance. It takes you out whether or not you are too scared to dance. I think you end up dancing with your poetic apprehensions and insecurities. We get in tight with them, feel the warmth of their breath on our temple, and step on each others’ toes in the process of really getting to know what we’re really afraid of and why we fear this.

                                                         —Nayelly Barrios

Since I’ve been back from Squaw—I have been writing things I would never feel were acceptable before. The other day, I referred to my body as “two gallons of infinite milk” in a poem, thinking of those two-packs you can buy at Costco. This may not blow anyone’s mind, but for me, it is a huge leap to say something that is not literally true, or to use something as strange as a gallon of milk to approach some fantastical truth about my life.

                                                       —Sara Borjas

Several weeks ago, Nayelly Barrios shared with me how her experience at Squaw Valley this past summer was very valuable. Specifically, the poetry workshops held there every summer. Barrios also mentioned that, in addition to having a productive week at the poem-a-day week-long gathering, she met Sara Borjas, a poet from Fresno who completed her MFA at UC Riverside this past spring. Having in mind that Nayelly is set to complete her MFA at McNeese State University next spring, Letras Latinas Blog pitched the idea of a conversation between these two MFA-ers*—specifically, about their experience at Squaw.

Among other attendees at the Squaw Valley workshop, in recent years, have been: Angel N. Garcia, Ruben Quesada, Marcelo Hernández Castillo, Blas Falconer, and Javier Zamora. Are we before a case of a well-kept secret among Latino/a poets? Whatever the case, I think you’ll find Nayelly's and Sara's charla engaging and, in a way, moving. Here are two poets not shying away from articulating what many artists often experience as they move through the world, but perhaps aren’t so ready to admit.

Regarding that asterisk: Letras Latinas Blog is posting this conversation the same week that the Letras Latinas Writers Initiative (one aspect of it, on Facebook) has launched. Both Nayelly and Sara, in their capacity as MFA candidate, and recent MFA graduate, respectively, are part of that gesture, as well. In fact, this very dialogue you are about to read embodies what the Letras Latinas Writers Initiative aims to foment: spaces—both virtual and physical—of mutual support and risk-taking, where the practice of art is concerned—among those Latino/a writers who have entered the academy to further their training.

—Francisco Aragón

Institute for Latino Studies

University of Notre Dame

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Nayelly Barrios:

Have you been to other writing conferences/seminars/residencies/etc, besides Squaw Valley.?

Sara Borjas:

AWP is the only other conference I’ve been to, both in Chicago and Boston. Both were exciting but also a bit intimidating. There were so many people who were interested in doing the same things I was! I learned about Squaw Valley in my graduate program at UC Riverside. I’ve been interested ever since, especially with staff poets like Sharon Olds and Robert Hass. I also thought it was the Squaw Valley that was close to Fresno (where I am from). I was planning a family & poetry trip if I got accepted. Wrong Squaw Valley.

What other conferences have you been to? Did the word “community” come up there? And if it did, how did you feel about it in those contexts?

Nayelly Barrios:

I have participated in three conference/seminars, two of those while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA). In the summer of 2007, UTPA held a three-week writing seminar that consisted of one week of intense poetry coursework, discussion panels, and readings (8 am-8 pm daily, for a week). The last two weeks consisted of independent study, at the end of which one was to complete a small chapbook of work. It was the first time I did something like that and it was exhilarating, to say the least. During the seminar, I studied poetry with Emmy Perez. By that point, I had just started my study of poetry (fall of 2006), so, as great as it was, it was also intimidating. Given the busy schedule the first week and the independent component the last three weeks, there was not really a sense of community at this seminar, though there was more dialogue between participants during the reading and craft sessions.

My second conference experience happened during the summer of 2008 when I had the opportunity to attend the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. This was a three-week conference and the sense of community with the other ten fellows was amazing, especially since we all workshopped and attended craft sessions together on a daily basis. We even went to lunch, breakfast, and dinner together at the university cafeteria. I am still in contact with a handful of the fellows even though five years have passed since Bucknell.

During the summer of 2010, I attended the Juniper Summer Writing Institute held at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst where I workshopped with Matthew Zapruder, whose work I really admire. The craft talks were out-of-this-world brilliant and it was a great learning experience. Another great aspect was that the readings were not just poetry, but fiction and memoir, as well. It was nice to break the reading routine up with the varying genres. I did get to bond with my roommates during the institute, but I am no longer in touch with any of them. Overall, every single residence/conference that I have attended has been extremely beneficial to my growth as a writer.

Squaw could not have happened at a better time! I have been having an extremely difficult time writing the last couple of months, so much so that it has made me weep many a night :( While at Squaw, we had to write a poem a day in order to workshop it the next morning. There was no way around it. Write a poem or show up to Sharon Olds’ workshop empty-handed like a loser. Plain and simple. I had no choice but to write _something_. Anything. I surprised myself by writing things I didn’t feel needed to be burned at the stake. I mean, they weren’t poems to write home about, either, but they were pieces I could live with for some time and make better over time. So worth writing for me. On the first day of the conference, Robert Hass delivered a very motivating introductory speech. What stood out the most to me was his encouragement to take risks in our work that week. He told the group that we were all here to read each others’ first drafts and that is what was expected. He said this and I believed him. This took a huge load off of my anxieties. During her craft talk, Sharon Olds also encouraged us to write every poem that comes to us. Otherwise, how will the poem under that one ever surface? That question really struck something in me. Even if we don’t mean to workshop or otherwise share a poem, it must be written. These two simple, yet very meaningful, pieces of advice helped me jump into my notebook fearlessly.

Sara Borjas:

I completely agree with you about the apparent excellent “timing” of our attendance. It seemed like I was destined to be there, just having graduated from an MFA program the week prior and feeling ruled and consumed by my thesis. I was making a transition to a more solo style of writing life.

And to be honest, the first few days of Squaw were difficult for me. All I wanted to do was write those poems that would fill the holes in my manuscript’s narrative. I wanted to fix things that already existed-- I was not interested in creating the new. When everyone was talking about experimenting, and like you said, taking risks, I was like, ‘what for? I have a book to finish! Help me with that!’ I did not understand what everyone was so happy about. Poetry was serious to me those first few days. Too serious.

But after about three workshops, where writers were calling their fantastic and heartbreaking poems “experiments,” and calling my half-alive poems “new, naked, and ready,” I not just realized, but remembered, how beautiful and satisfying process is. Before, I was objectifying poetry and my poet self, placing value on end products and my own imaginative abilities, or at the time it seemed, limitations. But that was because I was so deep in my own head in the months leading up to Squaw. Not to say that the final form of poems are not important and what often drives me, but that’s not everything for a poet. The best poems take you with them, they struggle. I had to re-accept that struggle. At Squaw, everything created was somehow “correct”-- either mystically, emotionally, or spiritually. They were raw and full of possibility. I do not think Squaw could have come at a better time for me, or-- if I could have come, the way I was, at a better time for Squaw.

So I wonder now, was I ready for the Squaw experience? Or is Squaw an experience that pulls you to the poetry dance floor no matter who or where you are? And who or what do you end up dancing with?

Nayelly Barrios:

I think Squaw is the wild and mysterious stranger who pulls you out on the dance floor whether or not you know how to dance. It takes you out whether or not you are too scared to dance. I think you end up dancing with your poetic apprehensions and insecurities. We get in tight with them, feel the warmth of their breath on our temple, and step on each others’ toes in the process of really getting to know what we’re really afraid of and why we fear this.

Personally, that is my biggest struggle. I can study and read all the poetry and craft I want to, but in the end my apprehensions are the ones holding me back from writing. I can learn all the dance steps to all the dances, but, all too often, I am too scared to go out onto the dance floor. I think Squaw is perfect for anyone in this situation, but not limited to such individuals because of the diverse writing styles and writing processes of the writers in the workshops/houses. My housemates, for example, all had a different writing process, but we all worked together beautifully. Some of us sat in the hum if each others’ silence in the open kitchen, dining, and living room area, while others preferred to write in the privacy of their rooms, and emerged at midnight to share their work (it was our custom to share aloud what we wrote on a nightly basis). It was lovely, lovely, lovely.

I love what you said, “The best poems take you with them, they struggle.” What brings about the struggle between my poems and I is my insecurity. My apprehension has always been that I just can’t or shouldn’t write a poem, either because I am not a good enough writer to be writing or because a poem will not be accepted by an audience. I don’t allow the poem to take me with it, its crevices, its landscape, to its universe. At Squaw, the daily deadline forced me out onto the dance floor that is my notebook, the landscape that is the workshop, where I was face-face-to face with these insecurities, and the nurturing environment was reassuring. Really the nurturing environment in the workshops at Squaw are what made me feel comfortable writing out of my comfort zone and taking those risks that Robert Hass encouraged on day one. As I am sure you remember, the environment in workshops was nurturing and positive. For example, most workshop leaders focused on what the poet and poem were “doing right” and only focused on “what to fix” as a secondary discussion point. I feel I heard enough about what my poem was “doing right” to know what direction to continue into, and enough about what needed “fixing” to know where to bring out the monkey wrench...but not so much to where we were beating the poem dead (I dread over-workshopping poems).

How do you feel this nurturing environment influenced you/your work? Or maybe you don’t feel it was as nurturing as I felt it. What was your experience with this aspect of Squaw?

Sara Borjas:

Since I’ve been back from Squaw-- I have been writing things I would never feel were acceptable before. The other day, I referred to my body as “two gallons of infinite milk” in a poem, thinking of those two-packs you can buy at Costco. This may not blow anyone’s mind, but for me, it is a huge leap to say something that is not literally true, or to use something as strange as a gallon of milk to approach some fantastical truth about my life. That is because of Squaw.

The workshops encouraged us to go there, then, to really go there. And like you, most of my struggle comes from my apprehension to call myself a writer, or feel like I have anything real to say. I did not grow up believing I could become a poet or a writer. My father was a math teacher and I grew up watching my mother be a housewife. And I vacuumed and dusted after school. I scrubbed the bathrooms on the weekends. I always felt that was what I was going to do, keep the house like my mother and all her sisters. And honestly, I still struggle against feeling that way. I still doubt whether the value of my experience, or my mother’s experience, is so that someone would read it and feel something-- love, disgust, fear, anything. I still doubt whether I have the language or a life valuable enough to write about and call myself a poet. But at Squaw Valley I was sitting in a circle with twelve people every morning that were step-parents, grandfathers, absent mothers, lawyers, yoga teachers, hairstylists, aging, in their prime, fighting their children to practice their piano while they were gone, hoping their husbands would not be buried in a pile of pizza boxes when they returned home, feeling guilty, still, for not saying goodbye. They helped me to realize that what I tend to shy away from writing about-- my life as someone’s daughter and sister, working at McDonald’s and doing drugs in a fig orchard in Fresno-- was not dull or banal. It’s real and it is interesting. It is “a gallon of infinite milk.” It is their life, at some point, in some way, also.

It did not matter if it made sense, intellectually (which seemed to be a large hang up for workshop participants in most of my experience). If a line of a conceit made sense spiritually, or emotionally-- it could be true. I could be invisible-- a penny stuck in our brown carpet at home-- and so could the wealthy Silicon Valley start-up guy with the wife who paid more attention to her yoga classmates than him. The workshops at Squaw encouraged me to use my imagination and ever since, I’ve trusted it more. I find myself sitting down to write, without expectations, and with excitement. Feeling proud almost to just be there. Weird!

This makes me think about how it feels to be a Chicana poet. I always feel a little like I’m avoiding my responsibilities as a Chicana by immersing myself in poetry. By loving it so much. I feel that kind of love is reserved for family. What did you want to be when you were young? How did you feel the first time you told someone you were a poet? How was that different from introducing yourself to others at Squaw Valley? Who was the person you were most surprised to vibe with?

Nayelly Barrios:

When I was little, I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. I can’t see myself teaching tiny kids now, but I do love to teach. So that is what I do, and look forward to continue doing, for a living. What I actually want to be is an accordionist, but, since I don’t even know how to play an accordion, I doubt that will ever happen --sigh--. I don’t think I have ever told anyone I am a poet. If a writer asks me if I am a poet, I say I write poetry. I don’t feel comfortable referring to myself as a poet, at least not yet...but, honestly, Squaw made me feel somewhat comfortable with the idea of myself as “a poet.” I have always felt apprehensive about calling myself a poet, but seeing all these poets, like you mentioned, from so many different walks of life and so incredibly talented, I felt safe, but in a freeing manner, like I could take risks in my writing, as opposed to a too-comfortable-to-want-growth manner.

When I was leaving Squaw that last day I remember telling myself, “From now on, when I am too afraid to write freely, I will write for an imaginary Squaw. The Squaw that is in my heart. The Squaw where I will write a poem just because I can, and because I will share it with my housemates.” It feels good to feel like that about a writing space. It is important for the growth of my work. That is the main thing I took from Squaw.

Sara Borjas:

“The Squaw that is in my heart--” you’ve said it exactly. That’s also what I left with when I got on the bus to leave. I left with a new place in my heart where there is no fear. A trusting place. And everyone from Squaw and everyone I’ve ever known is there now.

I went to a reading by Red Hen Press last night at The Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica. Brendan Constantine hosted beautifully. The night was sea themed, and at the end, Brenden reminded the crowd that poets will never make a ton of money from poetry and we write knowing that. He talked about memory and how the sea mimics it. He said “The sea's most enduring token is what it carries away.” Thus, the best thing we can do for other poets is go up to them and tell them that their words will stay with us.

So I think that’s what I am trying to do. I’m trying to tell you, Nayelly, and everyone else I had the pleasure of listening to at Squaw, that I have carried your words back home with me. It is the most enduring and most endearing--as Brendan said-- thing I could have asked for.

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Nayelly Barrios is a Rio Grande Valley native. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Puerto del Sol, The Paris-American, and elsewhere. She attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers this past June where she wrote poems and made friends.

Sara Borjas is from Fresno, California. She recently received an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. Her poetry has appeared in Stone Highway Review, Verdad, Other Poetry, Yes, Poetry, and is forthcoming in The Packinghouse Review and The Finger. She is the editor for Juan Felipe Hererra's LoWriter of the Week poetry series, a bartender in Baldwin Hills, and soon to be instructor at La Sierra University. She lives in Los Angeles.