Latin@ Featured Poets: 4 Interviews

William Archila @ The Poetry Society of America

In addition to being the author of The Art of Exile, which won an International Latino Book Award in 2010 and was honored with an Emerging Writer Fellowship Award by The Writer's Center in Bethesda, William Archila is also winner of the inaugural Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Poetry Prize. Archila is currently featured over at the Poetry Society of America’s series of interviews titled Red, White and Blue: Poets on Politics. In which Archila discusses his examination of “anything men and women struggle against in this world” as valued experiences which when translated by the poet into literary experiences can move a reader into maintaining or opposing a status quo “where misery is visible everywhere you go and only a small amount of people, a minority, benefit from the wealth of the world.” Writing is an act with real consequences, Archila seems to say. And whether one writes—knowingly or not—to uphold a conservative status quo or to break fissures in it, poetry will always be part of that particular human experience. But poetry for Archila (an exile from El Salvador’s civil war) is more than that, more than what fits into neat political spectrums, poetry he seems to say is memory and refuge, his only home:”

“This is what drives my poetry. It seems like I'm condemned to see and hear that which once was lost and which can only be saved through words. For that reason, I try to construct a language of mourning where the driving force is memory. I believe that to remember is an act of struggle against history. It is an acknowledgement of one's time and one's acceptance of it. As it's been said, forgetting is passive, but remembering is active. And remembering is the ideal vehicle for poetry.”

           

            [Continue Reading.]

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Richard Yañez @ The Latino Author

Richard Yañez is an associate professor of English at El Paso Community College and the author of a collection of short stories El Paso del Norte: Stories on the Border and the novel Cross Over Water: A Novel, both from The University of Nevada Press. Richard is currently featured in an interview for The Latino Author in which he discusses his growing up in El Paso, Texas and how the landscape of that city and his childhood have served him as a rich canvas for his writing and his imagination. Yañez also shares the lessons learned from writing his first book, El Paso del Norte: Stories on the Border, and the success he felt at “writing a strong female character” for his second book, Cross Over Water:

“And based on various responses, I believe that I succeeded in the writing of Cross Over Water.  The main story centers on Raul Luis “Ruly” Cruz, a curious child of the border, but Laura, his older cousin is the tether that keeps him in orbit.  Together, they learn about the geographies of their bodies, their emotions, and their culture.  I feel good about having addressed a limitation in my writing and await the next challenge. “

           

            [Continue Reading.]

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Laurie Ann Guerrero @ Poet’s Quarterly

Of Laurie Ann Guerrero’s manuscript, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying,( winner of Letras Latina’s fifth edition of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize) Francisco X. Alarcón had this to say: “This is the poetry of both saints and sinners (and even murderers). The poet conjures up Pablo Neruda, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sylvia Plath, and rooted in the best Latin American, Chicano/a, and contemporary American poetics, is able to render an effective poetic version of Nepantla, the land where different traditions meet, according to Anzaldúa. These poems make the reader laugh, cry, cringe, lose one’s breath, and almost one’s mind, at times.” Guerrero is currently featured in an interview for Poets Quarterly where she discusses the poetic forces that have shaped her: storytelling and the landscape of West Texas. And more importantly, she offers some advice to other women who want to go “down the path” of being a writer:

“I think it’s important, too, to trust your gut. As women, we are not taught to believe in our instincts. We’re labeled emotional or overly ambitious or just plain crazy.  These are all things I’ve been called—by those I love and strangers. Because I was moving 2000 miles from home to go to college, I was told I was “acting white.” Because I was taking a 7 year old, a 4 year old, and a newborn, it was said I had post-partum depression and was not thinking clearly. Because my husband was not divorcing me meant that I had emasculated him and that he had no voice. But none of this was true, and in my gut, I knew it.  I trusted it. It was never easy, but it was never wrong. I’ve been told I can’t or I shouldn’t all my life and for a while, I believed it. I don’t have to challenge that anymore.  My life speaks for itself.”

            [Continue Reading.]

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Carmen Tafolla @ New Border

Poet Laureate of San Antonio and CantoMundo cofounder, Carmen Tafolla in a moving interview for New Border: Criticism and Creation of the U.S./Mexico Border describes what it was like to be selected as San Antonio’s first Poet Laureate while at the same time becoming banned in the state of Arizona’s k-12 Mexican-American curriculum for her book Curandera. Tafolla, a long time teacher, also reflects on her childhood elders—the grandparents, aunts and uncles—the storytellers of her barrio who declaimed and recited poems and stories out loud and whom were the first to shape her as a poet and writer. And to her students and other youth Tafolla advices to look beyond the world of verifiable date and into the depths of the imagination:

“That the physical world, the modern scientific world, the world of “validated data” is only the tip of the iceberg and that human beings respond to, impact, and are influenced by a huge non-visible world that we have not “validated” yet in the data.  That is, standardized tests do not tell us what students have learned, pharmaceutical medicines do not treat all our ills, and the world of emotion, spiritual energy, respeto, and peaceful attitudes toward our environment has an immense and tangible impact on how smart, healthy, and happy we end up. This means that there is a place in our world for curanderos, traditional folk wisdom, and poets, and that you are more than just a number or a score or even a label—your powers are limitless.”

            [Continue Reading.]

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s The Strange House Testifies (Bilingual Review Press, 2009)

Back in November when installment one of Latino/a Poetry Now kicked-off with the Poetry Society of America’s second roundtable featuring Rosa Alcalá, Eduardo C. Corral, and Aracelis Girmay, I offered you this synopsis of that e-conversation.  I remember being deeply moved by Maria Melendez’s closing statements: Speaking on the issue of race and other barriers of exclusion that emerge in this discussion, Maria Melendez manages  to reaffirm her belief in the need for these three poets “to be more widely read, heard, and discussed” as an antidote to exclusion.

And now that installment two of Latino/a Poetry Now has concluded I find that Maria Melendez’s preoccupation with a lack appreciation and exposure to this new generation of poets showcased in this national reading series contributes to a form of censorship that is more silent but by no means less excluding than that of book banning. For example, in preparing for this e-conversation between Ruth Irupé Sanabria and William Archila, nowhere did I find a single book review or piece of literary criticism on Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s The Strange House Testifies.  In an attempt to breach this gap (even if it is just a little) I humbly offer you here my own book review of Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s The Strange House Testifies.

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In her first book-length collection of poems, The Strange House Testifies (Bilingual Press, 2009) Ruth Irupé Sanabria explores the power of language to destroy and re-create. The book, while divided into three sections, reads as a two-part book. In the opening half of the collection Sanabria opens up with poems that explore the genocidal dictatorship that began in 1976 and which was responsible for the deaths and disappearances of thousands of Argentineans:

            It was the first reunion for MR. and Mrs. S—

            and their 4-year-old daughter

            since Argentine police arrested the parents

            at their home on Jan. 12, 1977

            and imprisoned them on

            unspecified charges.

            Mrs. S— commented that she had been kept

            in a 9-foot by 9-foot prison cell

            for almost three years and thousands

            like her are still in prison in Argentina.

            “Yesterday was the first time in three years

            I have been able to touch my daughter,” she said.

                        I vomited in the clouds

                        above the ocean

                        between Buenos Aires and New Orleans[…]

                        One stewardess gave me a hard American mint,

                        red and white, to suck on

                        and pinned a pair of plastic wings on my chest;   

                        said it was the shock of clouds

                        that had made me sick (6-7)

The poet’s juxtaposition of the language of official narratives, of Nunca Mas (the official report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared and which documents the human rights abuses), with the language of poetry offers not only a new insight into social justice but also into poetry itself. While a poem alone may do little to stop the historical, social and economic forces that create conditions of suffering for the innocent, these poems remind us that a literature that is deeply immersed with the problems of its times can only but aid in resisting through language—like here:

            When a family which was to be chupada, had children, the

            following methods were employed:

            1  The children were left with neighbors to be looked after[…]

            3  The children might themselves be abducted and eventually

                 adopted by a member of the armed forces […]

            6  They could be taken to the secret detention centre, where they

                 would witness the tortures inflicted on their parents, or they

                might themselves be tortured in front of their parents. Many of

                these children are now among the list of “disappeared.”

            Behold apricot chin,

            toddler nostrils,

            flared and boogered.

            And this one, glossy whites of eyes rolled,

            just a quarter moon of honey showing.

            Or here, sweetly milk-toothed and swinging on the walnut tree,

            and oblivious playing with blue toy blow-dryer

            in a box of brown sand. (17)

Or here:

            I would transform

            helicopters

  into seed

            and nectar loving

            birds colored lilac (74)

The second section follows the adventures of “ghetto girl” and explores—through poems infused with the music of Latinos and jazz and the everyday rhythms of African-American and Latino speech(s)—the racism and violence of growing up Latina in the U.S.: “I arrive unannounced” declares ghetto girl:

           trappin’ and slappin’

           your ignorance

 with my brown

 cape

this is no super joke[…]

and we’re coming

to a theater near you

to rescue

all the spics and niggas

stuck in naked freeze frames

big butt monkey sex scenes

illiterate dope dealin’ rice and beans

stereotypes

in

stereo sound (45)

And here too the poet dares to summon the hallucinating bird of poetic language, bird that has landed

          upon our rusted chain link fence

          has escaped

not only the cage

but complete ownership. (63)

Bird that “does not trust human hands” and sings a “wild-wing-growing” and shoots free through the roof of the earth.  

Latino/a Poetry Now in Washington, D.C.

I think the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University may have set some sort of record: the event was on Tuesday and the video of the reading and the moderated Q& A afterwards is already up on their website, thanks to Caitlin Tyler-Richards. It's nicely produced with proper credits and even some soundtrack at the beginning and the end: John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" (curated by William Archila):

Ruth Irupé Sanabria(as read by Carolyn Forché) and William Archila | 2011-2012 Readings and Talks Series from Lannan Center on Vimeo.

In this regard, it's quite nice to have video documentation for readers of Letras Latinas Blog. Ruth Irupé Sanabria was not able to be there, as planned, as she is giving birth to her daughter this week. But as you will see in this video, Carolyn Forché was stellar: she read a statement Ruth wrote for the occasion, and followed by reading some of Ruth's poems. William Archila then read his work, and took part in a moderated discussion with Darrel Alejandro Holnes of the Poetry Society of America. It's all there: yes, watching this video supposes an investment of time, but one well worth it. So make a date with yourself in the near future, sit back, and enjoy. In the meantime, here are a few photos, courtesy of Dan Vera:

Carolyn Forché reading the work
of Ruth Irupé Sanabria

William Archila

William at the podium

William and Darrel Alejandro Holnes

Notre Dame's national series with PSA continues

Letras Latinas, the literary program of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America (PSA),  presents the second installment of “Latino/a Poetry Now,” a multi-year initiative that launched at Harvard University last November, and concludes at Notre Dame in October of 2013.

Georgetown University will host this national tour on March 20th in a collaboration with their Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. Additional sponsors include the Library of Congress’ Hispanic Division and Poetry and Literature Center, respectively.

The featured artists are Salvadoran-born poet William Archila and Argentinian-born poet Ruth Irupé Sanabria. Archila’s distinctions include an International Latino Book Award for his collection, The Art of Exile. Sanabria is the author of the acclaimed book, The Strange House Testifies.

Both Archila and Sanabria discuss their work in a dialogue moderated by Notre Dame M.F.A. candidate Lauro Vazquez, which appears on PSA’s website. “These online discussions are a crucial element of “Latino/a Poetry Now,” said Francisco Aragón, the director of Letras Latinas. “Our hope is that they serve as pedagogical tools in the classroom,” he added. Before Archila and Sanabria give their public presentation in Washington, D.C., they will be visiting the Lannan seminar on the Georgetown campus, where their work is being taught this semester.

Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies, seeks to enhance the visibility, appreciation and study of Latino literature, both on and off the campus of the University of Notre Dame, with a focus on projects that identify and support emerging voices.

The nation’s oldest poetry organization, the Poetry Society of America was founded in 1910 for the purpose of creating a public forum for the advancement, enjoyment, and understanding of poetry. Through a diverse array of programs, initiatives, contests and awards, the PSA works to build a larger audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the art, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.


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Note: a  photo gallery of Emma Trelles' recent visit to Washington, D.C. is forthcoming, as well as visual documentation of the second installment of Latino/a Poetry Now.

“tesoritos:” Oral History Project Interview with Poet William Archila

tesoritos  might be a bit deceiving to describe many of the Letras Latinas Oral History Project interviews that are buried here. Not because of difficulty in locating and unearthing them from this treasure map called the Internet but rather because—at an hour apiece—they can be taxing. But what I love about these interviews is that they offer a refreshing viewpoint to many of the Latino poets and writers—Martín Espada, Richard Blanco, Naomi Ayala, and Brenda Cardenas to name a few—that we have learned to love and read, presented in a format that is conversational and flowing and simply put, fun.

In the hope of arousing your curiosity I offer you here a preview of one of these interviews, with poet William Archila. Archila is the author of The Art of Exile (Bilingual Press, 2009) and along with poet Ruth Irupé Sanabria is slated to read on March 20th at Georgetown University in installment two of Latino/a Poetry Now. Also be on the lookout for a Poetry Society of America roundtable featuring William and Ruth coming out in early March.

In his first collection (and in this interview), William Archila chronicles his childhood in El Salvador—a county small as a “paper cut”—its premature disruption by political violence and his family’s displacement to the United States. Without casting fault or blame and showing the outmost compassion, Archila summons a language that “enters evening like a boatman standing in the mist, feeling waves roll underneath, pulling me through the slow nights of a small war.” To read a poem by Archila is to witness a summoning of language that becomes a caress on the mouths, on the memories of the dead.

And in this Oral History interview Archila explores his fascination for the language of the poetic—a language that while different from the language we use everyday can compensate for what is said or isn’t said on a daily basis. In the opening minutes Archila speaks to the experience of a childhood disrupted by the witnessing of a growing wave of violence and disappearances and his eventual exile in the U.S., his first attempts at writing—at a “yearning for union” with Salvadorans and other immigrants.  While at the same time addressing the influence of Jazz over his work and the healing effect this music had in him and in his poetry.

For some poems by Archila click here.

Watch the interview here.

  

Review Roundup--November 6, 2011

Publisher’s Weekly reviews Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia (Boa, 2011).

Back in 2007 when Curbstone Press released Aracelis Girmay’s debut collection of poems, Teeth, Aracelis quickly established herself as brave and refreshing new voice in American poetry. Of Teeth, Martin Espada wrote: “In the title poem, Girmay describes a woman’s teeth as “bullets of ivory,” a fitting description for the poems in this collection: hard, cutting, brilliant, beautiful.” Bullets indeed. And in Kingdom Animalia Aracelis keeps on firing her bullets in celebration of life from the exact center of death and sadness. And this November 8^th at Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room, Aracelis Girmay along with Rosa Alcalá and Eduardo C. Corral will kick-off installment one of Letras Latinas’ multi-year reading series Latino/a Poetry Now—a collaborative initiative with the Poetry Society of America. 

Here is what Publishers Weekly had to say:

Girmay’s poem “Arroz Poetica,” from her 2007 collection Teeth (2007), continues to catalyze antiwar sentiment. This six-part book of verse ends with a short “Ars Poetica”—“May the poems be/ the snail’s trail.// Everywhere I go,/ every inch: quiet record// of the foot’s silver prayer./I lived once./ Thank you./ It was here”—that points up its simultaneous strengths and limitations. On the one hand, there’s nothing as clear and timely as “Arroz” here; it’s almost as if Girmay needed an entire book to write past it and back into a voice that can reflect her own life. On the other, the “foot’s silver prayer” of the “Ars” seems, in this collection, to take in a great deal of America and its global history. Girmay has Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African-American roots; the section titled “a book of erased cities” brings a poignant, multifaceted sense of loss to poems like “Mississippi Burial, On the Ferry to Algiers”: “it is possible to wear your ghosts like a face,/ which is to say, my face has been here before.” So while there’s nothing as immediately gripping and galvanizing here, the book’s “snail’s trail” offers plenty for the patient.

The full review can be found here.

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Pansy Poetics reviews Rigoberto González’s Black Blossoms (Four Way Books, 2011)

In Other Fugitives and other Strangers (Tupelo Press, 2006) Rigoberto González presents us with a compelling recollection and a fierce homage to the lives of men and their sexuality and in his third collection of poetry Black Blossoms, González follows up Other Fugitives and Other Strangers by presenting us with a beauty of diametrical equivalence: Black Blossoms—a brave exploration into the lives of women of color and their journeys: A collection that I look forward to reading as Letras Latinas prepares to offer an interview with Rigoberto González who is slated to read at Macalester College in installment three of Latino/a Poetry Now.

Here is what Pansy Poetics had to say:

I believe the dead listen to us. After his poetic mentor, Ai, died, Rigoberto Gonzalez wrote quite movingly about her: "Even in my third book (which I dedicate to her memory) I can still detect traces of her influence--we shared a love for the dark and disturbing narratives and gave them homes on the page."

Never mawkish in his elegiac statements regarding Ai, Gonzalez has always appeared respectful and honorable. No doubt Ai appreciates his prose tributes, but I strongly believe what would matter most to her is the development of his poems. With Black Blossoms, his new collection, Gonzalez has performed the ultimate tribute: he has made his poems better than hers. I have no doubt she is still listening and learning from his work.

The full review can be read here. 

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Rigoberto González reviews Dagoberto Gilb’s Before the End, After the Beginning (Grove Press, 2011)

Rigoberto is not only an accomplished writer but also a generous and visionary man. As book reviewer for the El Paso Times, Rigoberto González has been hard at work promoting and enhancing the visibility and appreciation of Chicano/Latino writers for the last ten years. In his latest review Rigoberto writes of Dagoberto Gilb’s newest collection:

The lives of Chicano men caught in the struggle between the classes is the dominant theme of Dagoberto Gilb's resonant third collection of stories, "Before the End, After the Beginning" (Grove Press, $24 hardcover).

For the penny-pinching musician in "Cheap," what begins as an effort to save money on having a room painted turns out to be a battle with his conscience as he witnesses a contractor's exploitation of undocumented workers. The bilingual musician can speak to all parties involved, yet nobody's able to translate his good intentions when he makes kind gestures toward the Mexican workers and attempts to teach the Anglo boss that "you and me are lucky to be born on the rich side of the border." As a middle-class Chicano, he's perceived by all as a disengaged outsider.  

The full review can be read here. 

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William Archila’s The Art of Exile (Bilingual Review, 2009) is reviewed in Voices Education Project.

Yes this is an older review, but it is re-represented here with the conviction that the reposting of these critical reviews, in these Review Roundups, will lead to further appreciation and promotion of the work of Latino/a authors. And so it is the case with William Archila whose debut collection The Art of Exile takes its readers in a hallucinating journey into landscapes seldom explored by American readers: the violence of the Salvadorian civil war of the 1980s and its displacement of Central American immigrants who now claim the U.S. as home. And keep in mind the relevance of Archila’s work as he is slated to read at Georgetown University in installment two of Latino/a Poetry Now.

Here is what Renny Golden had to say:

In The Art of Exile William Archila's poems are hauntingly beautiful in their evocation of the loss of his country, of his Salvadoran friends, of a beloved father.  He risks language about those war years when He couldn’t bear all those open graves, / black mud, hyacinths falling apart. Archila was a child watching his country move inexorably toward the rising flood of terror when the

cemetery washed into the city.

Bones began to knock and knock at our door.

In a few years no one cared about turtles banging their heads against rocks…

parrots that kept diving into creeks,…

the dark swelling of the open ground


or at night the knife

Grief has a voice. It is why music follows him, always the music of those who, too, give sorrow language. Coltrane, Mingus, Duke Ellington cross the border, with him, sax and trombone, sad enough, undefeated, their language deep enough. But grief is not the last voice for this poet. As Yusef Komunyakaa states in the Forward, William Archila's poetry "does not serve as avenues of escape, but as mechanisms of confrontation, paths toward wholeness, always shying away from any kind of diminishment."  This book is a requiem, yes. There are memorials for friends lost: Memo, Henry, Chico and Luis. It is also a celebration of love, a refusal to let the dead be forgotten or anonymous: how soon we forget the red clay of men/ scooped out of the earth, the gods/ who spit down upon them. 

 The full review can be read here. 

--Lauro