Down These Mean Streets Poetry Reading: May 12

Hiram Maristany, Hydrant: In the Air, 1963

(full credit below)

 

Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies—in partnership with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM)—is pleased to present, “Down These Mean Streets Poetry Reading,” featuring Martín Espada, Naomi Ayala, and Samuel Miranda. The event takes place this Friday, May 12 at 6:30 PM at the Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium at SAAM in Washington, D.C. The reading coincides with the opening of, “Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in UrbanPhotography,” a SAAM exhibition that runs through August 6.

The poets will be responding to specific pieces in the exhibit, including pieces by the late Frank Espada, father of Martín Espada. Other photographers whose work has inspired some of the poems to be shared that evening include, Manuel Acevedo, Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, and Winston Vargas.

Frank Espada, Untitled, 1981

(Three boys, Sheldon Cafe, Hartford, Connecticut)
(full credit below) 

This collaboration between Letras Latinas and the Smithsonian American Art Museum is an outgrowth of a previous one: “PINTURA:PALABRA, a project in ekphrasis.” 

“A number of years ago, I approached and pitched to E. Carmen Ramos a project to be carried out in tandem with, Our America: the Latino Presence in American Art, the wonderful exhibition she put together at SAAM. Several months ago she reached out and asked if Letras Latinas would be interested in collaborating again, this time with the “Down These Mean Streets” exhibit. Letras Latinas is pleased to have curated the participation of Naomi Ayala and Samuel Miranda for this event,” said Francisco Aragón, Letras Latinas director. “As for Martín, we are pleased to be collaborating with him again: a number of years ago he served as the final judge for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize--one of two national book prizes that Letras Latinas oversees,” Aragón added.

For those who can’t get to the event in person, or those not in the Washington, D.C. area, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has arranged for a live webcast:

The poets:

photo credit: David González

Martín Espada is an award-winning poet, essayist, and attorney who has dedicated much of his career to the pursuit of social justice and Latino rights. His critically acclaimed poetry celebrates—and laments—the immigrant and working class experience. Espada will read poems inspired by his father, Frank Espada, whose photographs are featured in Down These Mean Streets. Espada will be joined by DC-based poets Naomi Ayala and Samuel Miranda:

photo credit: E. Ethelbert Miller

 Naomi Ayala is the author of three books of poetry—Wild Animals on the Moon (Curbstone Press), This Side of Early (Curbstone Imprint: Northwestern University Press), and Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations (Bilingual Review Press). She is also the translator of Luis Alberto Ambroggio’s book The Wind’s Archeology/La arqueología del viento, which won an International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation. She lives in Washington, DC, where she teaches poetry and memoir to English-language learners at the Carlos Rosario School as founding teacher of the Write Who You Are Program.

photo credit: Thomas Sayers Ellis

Samuel Miranda grew up in the South Bronx and has made his home in Washington, DC. He is a visual artist, poet and teacher who uses his craft to highlight the value of everyday people and places.  His work has been heavily influenced by Puerto Rican culture and family history, as well as his interactions with the people in his city, his students, and people he encounters in his travels.  His poetry has been published in anthologies and journals and he has performed his work at venues such as the Smithsonian Museum of African Art and the Kennedy Center.  His art has been exhibited throughout the DC metropolitan area.

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Full photo credits:

Hiram Maristany, Hydrant: In the Air, 1963, gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum, museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center © 1963, Hiram Maristany

Frank Espada, Untitled (Three boys, Sheldon Cafe, Hartford, Connecticut), 1981, gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum, museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino   

Review Roundup: June 10, 2012

Kristin Dykstra reviews Urayoán Noel  

Kristin Dykstra of Jacket 2 reviews The Wind Shifts featured poet, Urayoán Noel. The review titled “On equal footing” is a review of Noel’s most recent works: Hi-Density Politics (BlazeVOX, 2010) and Kool Logic/La logica kool (Bilingual Press, 2005).  This multi-book review successfully condenses the defining aspects of Noel’s work: his double fluency, where Spanish and English “are on equal footing,” his playful take on language and traditional forms, his adept use of performance and his courageous tackling of the “stateless,” a place of flux in-between the U.S. and Puerto Rico as well as in-between textual forms (print, web, etc).

Here is what Kristin Dykstra had to say:

“The author of several books of poetry and translation, Urayoán Noel brings a satirical voice and a contemporary urban consciousness to the traditional notion that the poet will entertain and enlighten. The results, in his hands, are a well-done weird. Inevitably, they’re also compelling, and then a penny drops, and they provoke.”

                [Continue Reading.]                                                                      

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J.D. Schraffenberger reviews Martín Espada’s The Trouble Ball (W.W. Norton and Company, 2011).

J.D. Schraffenberger of RAINTAXI reviews former-Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize judge, Martín Espada’s The Trouble Ball in a review for the Spring 2012, online-edition of RAINTAXI. Martín Espada, along with Luis Rodriguez, were the first “Latino/a” poets I encountered. I read both poets in high school, I still don’t remember how I came upon their work but the recognition I felt in their work and in their names was incredibly gratifying. 

Here is what J.D. Schraffenberher had to say:

“The title poem of Martín Espada’s The Trouble Ball is dedicated to the poet’s father, Frank Espada, who is pictured on the cover of the book as a young ballplayer in 1947, his leg kicked high, his arm reaching back with the ball mid-pitch, as though it’s the book itself he’s delivering, the poems in its pages meant to “trouble” something inside us. The poem recounts a trip Frank took as a child to Ebbets Field, where he expected to witness the pitching of the great Negro League player Satchel Paige: “¿Dónde están los negros? asked the boy. Where are the Negro players? / No los dejan, his father softly said. They don’t let them play here.” Among the intriguing and playfully named pitches Satchel Paige invented were “The Trouble Ball, / The Triple Curve, The Bat Dodger, The Midnight Creeper, The Slow Gin Fizz, / The Thoughtful Stuff,” this last pitch so called because it gave hitters something to think about as the ball crossed the plate. Over the course of his career as a poet and a poetic “troubler” of official narratives wherever they assert themselves too emphatically or unjustly, Espada’s stuff, like Paige’s, has been nothing if not thoughtful. Here he recognizes the national shame of racial segregation, but the poem does more than simply point out injustices of the past, filling in some historical blank or other; rather, it transforms the past so that “It is forever 1941,” and we’re asked as readers to try our hands at pitching, or catching, or taking our best swings at Trouble Balls of our own.”

[Continue Reading.]

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Thelma T. Reyna reviews Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Emplumada (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).

Another review ( a new one) of an older but classic work by Lorna Dee Cervantes. Lorna Dee Cervantes is of course another luminary of Latino/a letters, her influence on American letters extending now for over thirty years despite authoring only three poetry collections besides Emplumada. These are: From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991); DRIVE: The First Quartet (2006); and the most recent Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (2011).

Here is what Thelma T. Reyna:

“Her poetry makes us weep in recognition. Or weep for the deep slashes to humanity that she lays bare in her unvarnished way, capturing the pain we often inflict on one another in unconscious or purposeful ways. Her book begins with one of the more powerful poems, “Uncle’s First Rabbit,” a compressed retelling of 50 years of misery. At the age of 10, Uncle is forced by his drunken, violent father to shoot, then bash to death, an innocent rabbit. The rabbit’s dying cries remind the child of the night his father kicked his pregnant mother till her aborted baby died, his tiny sister’s cries like the rabbit’s. Throughout his military years and his own marriage, the Uncle is haunted by his father’s abuse, and he can’t escape the “bastard’s…bloodline” within himself, a man tormented by demons who one night “awaken[s] to find himself slugging the bloodied face of his [own] wife.” The Uncle’s humanity gasps its last breath as he watches his dying wife in bed and thinks: “Die, you bitch. I’ll live to watch you die.”

                [Continue Reading.]

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Nick Depascal reviews Fred Arroyo’s Western Avenue (University of Arizona Press, 2012).

Fred Arroyo, fiction writer and Letras Latinas Oral History Project interviewee, speaking (in this blog-post) of his novel The Region of Lost Names (Camino del Sol, 2008) and which chronicles the submerged stories of Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants laboring at the Green Giant cannery in the region of Michiana—an intersection of sorts of northwestern Indiana and southern Michigan:

“I can remember as a child driving in a car out to Green Giant (I assume to pick-up my mother’s sister from work), and in the glass lobby being enchanted by the tall jolly Green Giant reaching to the ceiling, his body clothed in vines and leaves. As an adult, long after the cannery had closed, I would drive past and be filled with a loss in the face of those ruins. There were stories there—still lingering in the strong stench of manure from growing mushrooms that never went away—I wanted to listen to and write.”

Arroyo has followed that novel with a collection of short fiction which painfully and beautifully captures the immigrant work experience in the United States.

Here is what Depascal had to say:

“Throughout Western Avenue, the same characters reappear at different times and stages in their lives. Arroyo—an assistant professor of English at Drake University in Iowa—could have created a novel given the overlap, but couching these vignettes as stories rather than chapters in a novel allows him some freedom with chronology and development. Indeed, each of the recurring characters gets developed, some more than others. Since the stories are linked mostly by character and not causality, the reader is generally willing to give the author more leeway in the associative leaps between stories. Arroyo also gains the reader's good graces with his ability to swiftly develop characters in great and meaningful detail.”

                [Continue Reading.]

Announcement: Martín Espada Kicks Off The Writer’s Center 35th Anniversary Reading Series on Saturday, September 10th in Bethesda, Maryland.

On Saturday, September 10th TheWriter’s Center will kick off its 35th anniversary reading series with Martin Espada. Of course most—if not all—the readers of Letras Latinas Blog will be familiar with Martín Espada’s work and the fact that he was the judge who selected Paul Martínez Pompa as the winner of third Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, which resulted in the publication of My Kill Adore Him (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).

In January of 2010 in Merida, Mexico I attended a poetry workshop for the first time. I remember being the youngest person there—just twenty-one—still an undergraduate and still trying to find my poetic voice. I was surrounded by older and more established writers and feeling a little out of place. Among the poets conducting the various workshops was Martín Espada.

I remember after the first day of workshops coming out from the hotel where I was staying and strolling into a plaza adjacent to that hotel. Martín Espada was sitting by himself on a bench, observing—just observing the comings and goings of the people in that plaza. I sat across from him and struck up a conversation. We talked about washing dishes, his work as a bouncer, about Chicano and Latino poets and an old anthology of Latin American revolutionary poetry, published a few months after the 1973 coup that ended the Chilean presidency of Salvador Allende.

What had first attracted me to Martín’s work was his steadfast belief that writing poems is a revolutionary activity, a subversive act which in some small way contributes to making the unattainable attainable; that the writing of political poems in unjust societies is practical precisely because it imagines the impossible: a more egalitarian society.

Martín’s ability to marry social consciousness to the creative consciousness of language is masterful. It is pure music—and it is a music that resounds loudest when hearing Martin read his work. It will come without saying, that this is a highly recommended reading. If you are in the greater Washington, D.C. area, this is a reading not to be missed. And if your are not in the area, but know someone who is, spread the word.

--Lauro Vazquez