Re-visiting Minneapolis: (after Macondo)

Shannon McCarville, the volunteer and events coordiantor at The Loft, sent me a CD with photos she took on May 31, at the second installment of

"The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry ON TOUR."

As a way of continuing to document and archive this Letras Latinas / Guild Complex initiative (with partial funding from The NALAC Fund for the Arts), I've made a selection of the photos below---perhaps in anticipation of our next stop: Richard Hugo House on September 25. The University of Arizona Press has recently updated the tour's web page to include biographical sketches of the Wind Shift poets slated to read in Seattle. Have a peek to see who they are. Thank you, Shannon, for sharing these photos:

Carl Marcum

Carl Marcum

Emmy Pérez

Emmy Pérez

Urayoán Noel

Urayoán Noel

poets take questions
@ Q & A

Carl Marcum, Francisco Aragón, Venessa Fuentes,
Urayoán Noel, Emmy Pérez

***

San Antonio has been a mainstay this summer: I had the immense fortune of participating in NALAC's 8th Annual Leadership Institute---a week-long training session for arts administrators working out of a Latino context. The highlights were many, including inspiring talks by Tomás Ybarra Frausto. The entire faculty, really, were extraordinary. But perhaps most meaningful was being in a room with people from all over the country who were also making a go at being cultural workers. The sense among us was, simply: we're not alone in the work we're trying to do. The comraderie by week's end was palpable.

Then it was off to Chicago to launch the tri-collaboration between The Guild Complex, the Cave Canem Foundation, and Letras Latinas.

And then back to San Antonio for Macondo.

***

Finally, stay tuned: LETRAS LATINAS BLOG will be issuing a press release in about ten days to announce the winner of the third edition of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. The poet has been notified, but we are awaiting the final judge's award citation in order to include it in the announcement.

July 27 - August 2, 2008: San Antonio, TX

COMPASSIONATE CODE OF CONDUCT

For one precious week out of each year, we come to Macondo to share our work, to learn from each other, to befriend one another, and to re-commit ourselves to our writing in a supportive environment. We have an opportunity to create the world we would like to live in every day — to create a kind, generous, respectful, creative, and passionate community. We also have an opportunity to be our most generous selves — engaging in the daily work of creating Macondo, checking our egos at the door, recognizing the divine spark within others, fostering creativity and well-being in others, and sharing what we most authentically can offer.

In order for this work of creating community to flourish, it is necessary to establish certain boundaries. These boundaries are not meant to curtail individual freedoms or to spoil anyone’s fun. Rather, they are self-preserving and community-preserving. To put it simply, we forefront the practice of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is a spiritual cornerstone derived from Macondo’s Buddhist, Feminist, communal, and activist roots. It is a practice motivated by having witnessed marginalization in our communities, and it is a compassion applied with the resolve to treat each other better. We approach each other as guests from different worlds, with the common impulse to create. Mindfulness serves to ensure that we, as individuals and as a group, envision and re-vision what compels us to work together towards the Macondo mission of art for humanity’s sake.

This is not to say that we avoid conflict. Because we are a community of writers learning to be better artists and better people, we understand that in questioning the world, we sometimes question each other. In many cases, the friction between our fruitfully disturbed worlds necessitates another Macondo virtue — learning from Difference. We acknowledge that respectful disagreements can be extremely productive in many settings, including our workshops. Even when it is uncomfortable, challenging each other’s work or ideas is an essential part of growing and learning — as writers, activists, and human beings.

Many of us come from places where we’ve been involved in long-term conflicts and have learned extremely valuable survival skills, including persistence, skepticism, and a willingness to confront others. But in declaring ourselves present, we do not get to silence anyone else. In fact, such behavior is paradoxical. Our community is collective; by suppressing another voice, we shut an unrecognized part of ourselves down. Everything is an ongoing discussion. No one should consciously or unconsciously be working to shut down dialogue. No one can expect to have the last word or to persuade everyone of the rightness of their opinion. Our words can only open the next door, the one out to a night time back yard where we realize how small we stand beneath the sky.

* ---from here at the Macondo Foundation website

The Guild + Andrés Montoya + Cave Canem =

PRIZE WINNING POETS TO READ IN CHICAGO
The Guild Literary Complex, Cave Canem
and Letras Latinas launch collaborative program

CHICAGO, IL -- On July 23, 8:30 pm, poets Dawn Lundy Martin and Sheryl Luna will read from their prize winning books at the California Clipper Lounge, 1002 North California Avenue, Chicago. Recipients, respectively, of the 2006 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the inaugural Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Martin and Luna will appear in connection with a cohort residency at The Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL, piloted in 2008 by the Guild Literary Complex, Cave Canem Foundation and Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. With support from the Joyce Foundation, in addition to a two-week residency, the organizations awarded each of the poets a $1000 honorarium. The California Clipper's doors will open at 8 pm. The public, 21 years of age and older, is invited to attend.

BACKGROUND

In 2006, Ellen Wadey, Director of the Guild Literary Complex, conducted research about diversity initiatives at artist residencies across the country. She learned that many writers of color are unfamiliar with residency opportunities, and that many of those who do attend feel they are overly representative of their racial and ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, participants cited benefiting from the creative space and camaraderie the experience provided. Wadey's findings formed the basis for piloting a cohort residency for the winners of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a first book prize for African American poets, and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a first book award for Latino/a poets.

THE POETS

Dawn Lundy Martin was awarded the 2006 Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Carl Phillips for her manuscript, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007). She is the author of The Morning Hour, selected in 2003 by C.D. Wright for the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship. In 2002 and 2006, she was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Artists Grant for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including Callaloo, nocturnes and Encyclopedia. She is the founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets, and is the co-editor of a collection of essays, The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminisim. She is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Pittsburgh.

Sheryl Luna's collection of poetry, Pity the Drowned Horses (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), was selected by Robert Vasquez for the 2004 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. A graduate of Texas Tech University, she earned a doctorate in contemporary literature from the University of North Texas and an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso. She also holds an M.A. in English from Texas Women's University. Her work has appeared in Amherst Review, Feminist Studies, Georgia Review, American Literary Review, Notre Dame Review, and many other journals. She has received scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Napa Valley Writer's Conference. She was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Perugia Press Prize and the 2006 Colorado Book Awards. She teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The Guild Literary Complex, Chicago, IL, is a community-based organization that presents and supports diverse, divergent and emerging voices through innovative programs, including performance and readings. For nearly 20 years, the Guild has looked at literary culture and asked, "What's missing?" The organization twice has been selected as a model literary center by the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to the Andrés Montoya and Cave Canem cohort residency, its signature programs include Palabra Pura, Poetry Performance Incubator and the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award.

*

NOTE

The winner of the 3rd edition
of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize
will be announced in mid-August.
The final judge,
who is still deliberating,
is Martín Espada.

adding to the chorus: Alfred Arteaga

His slender Chusma House volume Canto was the first thing I read back in the late 80s. I remember misplacing it, and buying it again a few years ago.

I've often thought him the most under-appreciated Chicano poet.

I loved Red (Bilingual Press), its unapologetic use of Spanish, long stretches of it.

His work never flinched at challenging our linguistic assumptions.

Chicano Poetics (Cambridge University Press) a seminal work.

But for a few gracious e-mails a couple of years ago, I never had the pleasure of being in his presence.

Frozen Accident (Tia Chucha Press) his latest book:

here's a review of it;

an interview that talks of its origins.

El ALMA de las PALABRAS: John Chávez

When done well, catalogue poems, or poems that deploy some sort of repetition as an aesthetic strategy, are fun to read. I once heard Charles Bernstein perform a longish poem that repeated the comparative construction:

"A [a] is like a [b]
A [b] is like a [c]
A [c] is like a [d]
etc...

The fun resided in the idiosyncratic ways the objects were being compared. My interest as an audience member was engaged and maintained throughout. After Bernstein concluded his performance, someone in the audience--an English professor--made a comment, explicating the various elements of the poem and what they may have "stood for." It was quite an impressive and plausible speech.

Afterwards, in private, when I commented to Bernstein how much I enjoyed his poem, he seemed to suggest that the driving force behind it, as it unfolded, were not what the words were saying, but rather how they were saying it---in other words, the sounds the poem made. He pointed out the pleasure he got from cobbling together certain internal and slant-rhymes throughout the piece.

This is what I think about when reading "The Soul of Things" by John Chávez, a poet-critic from Colorado Springs, currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of Nebraska, in Lincoln. I got to spend quite a bit of time with him in Omaha last Saturday. His chapbook, Heterotopia (Noemi Press, 2004), will be reviewed in Latino Poetry Review in the Fall. Here it is, I hope, for your reading pleasure:

THE SOUL OF THINGS
(Or beginning with a line by Enrique Gonzales Martínez)

There are hours I imagine that I am a sleepless bird
an ambulance ululating at dawn
that I am flailing in the great American escape
in the second of three minor ambitions
of the uninterrpted mind
that I am a shadow descending a mountain
a marble remnant of daylight
that I am a subject not belonging to the world
but to the limits of the world
that I am the first of two curtain calls
critically praised & garnering applause
that I am a whirlwind of vicissitude
& incantatory anaphor
that I am humorless & devoid of wit
a garden a jungle a terrific constellation
of unjaundiced stars
that I am a soundless & blue winter moon
paler than lamplight under a blouse
that I am a coterie of rooftops in a midnight mist
a set of somber & nude chimneys
that I am moving through my own limitations of language
vowel-conscious & tasting every sound
that I am a broken line of sparrows
banging inside the atmosphere of a man's body
that I am a garden of sunflowers
emptying a red southwestern sky
that I am perpending the brave machinery of birds
speeding through the high trees
that I am a translucent pond
cradling, on its water, the sky's golden coin of fire
that I am a book of questions
a meadow in late autumn's last trapping of warmth
its drumbeats cloying & yellow explosion

--John Chávez

"The Soul of Things" originally appeared in Heterotopia, a title published by Noemi Press, a literary press run by Carmen Giménez Smith in Las Cruces, NM, and whose current poetry editor is Rosa Alcalá. It later appeared in Xantippe in 2007, edited by Kristen Hanlon. The poem is posted here at Letras Latinas Blog with the permission of the author.

Desde OMAHA

The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska is host this weekend to a quite ambitious "creativity festival." They have an Artist-in-Residency program, and since they were one of the participant venues in the new Midwestern Voices and Visions project, which involved seven artists at seven different artist residencies last year, they invited us all to Omaha to take part. Most importantly, I've been able to meet and learn about the work of:

Reginald Baylor
Cecil McDonald
Robert Karimi
Tomiko Pilson
Artur Silva
Thu Tran

I spoke at length with Robert Karimi, about whom Brenda Cárdenas had spoken to me on a number of occasions. What I didn't know was that he has deep Bay Area connections, and that he had once served as Artistic Director of the Guild Complex. He's currently living in Minneapolis. His residency was at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, which has an interesting residency program unlike most.

With the exception of Tomiko Pilson, who couldn't make it to Omaha, the rest of us took part in a panel discussion yesterday to talk about our residency experiences. One of the highlights of the festival has been visiting the work/living spaces of the current artists-in-residence. I had a great chat with Janelle Iglesias, a New York-based artist who sometimes collaborates with her sister, Lisa. Check them out at Las Hermanas.

I also had a chance to meet Magdalena A. Garcia, the Executive Director of El Museo Latino, which would like to explore the possibility of hosting Poetas y Pintores in 2009.

One of the goals of the Midwestern Voices and Visions project is to increase the number of minority artists who experience, and benefit from, artist residencies. Here are the colonies that said YES to being a part of this worthwhile initiative, funded by the Joyce Foundation and administered by the Alliance for Artist Communities:

Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota---partner for the Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship, whose first recipient, Michelle Otero, is winding down her month in Red Wing; and one of two partners for the Co-hort Residency Program involving winners of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and the Cave Canem Prize, with the coordination of the Guild Complex: they will be hosting Gabe Gomez and Ronaldo Wilson next summer.

Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois---the other partner in the aforementioned Co-hort Residency Program who will be hosting Sheryl Luna and Dawn Lundy Martin this July.

Prairie Center of the Arts in Peoria, Illinois.

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.

Ox-Bow in Saugatuck, Michigan.

Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska.

John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.


Consider applying to these colonies.

Letras Latinas colabora con ParaEsoLaPalabra (PELP)....

...para presentar:

Urayoán Noel
(photo credit: Emmy Pérez)

Carlos Parada, a Salvadoran-born poet I met in October of 2006 in Washington DC, is who first spoke to me about ParaEsoLaPalabra. PELP is a collective who puts on Spanish-language cultural events that typically include poetry, music and the visual arts---evenings that are multidisciplinary in the best sense of the word. The events take place at the Haskell Center, which is part of the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capital Hill. Last friday, I attended for the first time:

With Naomi Ayala's assistance, Letras Latinas partnered with PELP to feature Urayoán Noel, who performed from his recent Spanish-language book (with companion CD), Boringkén, published in Puerto Rico by Librería La Tertulia and Ediciones Callejón.

Also performing that evening were Gabriel Lora and Paco Galarza, who form the Latin Jazz duo Smooth Continent. The evening was rounded out with the presentation of selected works by Cuban-born artist, Lázaro Batista.

And after the event itself is the post-event: a two block stroll to a local Greek restaurant where a few tables are put together and the PELP folks, along with invited artists and guests, sit down for a late dinner---not unlike, one might say, what PALABRA PURA and The Wind Shifts TOUR attempt to foster: breaking bread, drinking wine---in the company of new friends.

And among those new friends (though he didn't make the meal) was Bronx Boricua transplant in DC, Sami Miranda, recent reader at ACENTOS and author of the chapbook, landing, is always a roll of the dice, with beautiful cover and interior art by the aforementioned Lázaro Batista. Miranda, along with Batista and a few others form part of a collective called Tres Raices Arts Collective.

And really, that's what's been on my mind lately: collectives; collectives with common goals doing their thing. Another one I got a glimpse of last week was the Brookland Area Writers & Artists (BAWA), founded by poets Dan Vera and Michael Gushue. The concept is simple: monthly gatherings in an art gallery space to read poems (usually other peoples' poems) around a particular theme. The one last week: dogs. I read "Yoko" and "Sissy Boy" by Thom Gunn and Steven Cordova, respectively.

Special thanks to Neida Pérez, steering committee member of PELP, as well as her colleagues Sonia Gutiérrez and Arturo Salcedo.

*

Naomi Ayala and Diana Pando read tomorrow at PALABRA PURA

*
Letras Latinas would lastly like to join
the celebratory chorus for the launch of
The Acentos Review.
Congratulations to co-editors
Raina León and Eliel Lucero