LETRAS LATINAS BLOG

another kind of Poetics

2009-07-13T08:38:00.002-05:00

Progress of a Poet: Oscar Bermeo

2009-07-08T10:02:00.009-05:00

In Anywhere Avenue, it was "Sonnet for the Lexington Avenue Express--Mt. Eden Stop" with its use of form to inform---in the speaker's case, the exhilaration of riding public transportation without paying a dime. In Palimpsest, "Fire Escape" is a long piece that relied on a particular brand of repetition that's pulled off admirably and which I'd read in a literary journal. There were others I enjoyed, to be sure, but these are the pieces that immediately come to mind.

I'm speaking, of course, of Oscar Bermeo's collections. He seems to be putting them out at regular intervals and I've come to look forward to them. I was delighted to find Heaven Below in my mailbox at work a few days ago. Before I say something about about a couple of the poems further below, I want to say something about what I'm coming view as a particular gesture of generosity in putting these out in this fashion: I especially enjoy and appreciate Bermeo's attention to particular details, from the copyright page which states:

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To a view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/license/by-nc-na/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

To the dedication on the same page, which reads:

For Jack Agüeros, the poet activist who taught me to write sonnets and psalms.

To the inside cover at the back, where he's been including, in addition to the habitual acknowledgments and expressions of gratitude.... another section he calls "Influences." It reads:

"Influences

A partial list of literary influences that have helped me in this project:
*187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 by Juan Felipe Herrera (City Lights Publishers, 2007)
*The Cricket Sings: Poems and Songs for Children by Federico García Lorca (New Directions, 1980)
*Dérive by Bruno Mori (poems) and Matthew Kinney (paintings) (Meritage Press, 2006)
*Easter Sunday by Barbara Jane Reyes (Ypolita Press, 2008)
*Lord, Is This a Psalm? by Jack Agüeros (Hanging Loose Press, 1996)
*Nathaniel Mackey (poems) and Hafez Modirzadeh (music), performance at the de Young Museum Poetry Series, Koret Auditorium, September 7, 2007
*The Splinter Factory by Jeffrey McDaniel (Manic D Press, 2002)
*Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori (W.W. Norton & Company, 1994)

I hadn't given these sections much thought until recently. In an interview I read many many years ago, Thom Gunn asserts, matter-of-factly, that he considered himself a "derivative poet." He meant it as a positive---that he was part of a tradition and didn't write in a vacuum, and he wasn't shy about stating which poets he strove to emulate and was inspired by. Bermeo recently mentioned on his blog that one of the items of feedback he got at the recent VONA conference was that he

need [ed] to get past [his] attribution poem phase. [He's] imitated and borrowed from a variety of authors but [he] need[s] to risk more and trust in [his] voice.

I might have said: keep doing what you're doing because you're doing it well, AND consider venturing beyond what might be considered a comfort zone. And yet when I read that list of influences above, I read a serious and dedicated artist who is wonderfully promiscuous.

Don't stop. Don't subtract. Add to. Expand.

Which is a good way to transition into two terrific poems that illustrate, I think, what I mean by Bermeo's promiscuity. First off, one of the things I love about these collections is how they mix their genres: verse and prose, prose and verse. "Ash Wednesday," a prose poem is an absolute gem. It starts:

as you enter paradise as you enter with smoke as you enter with accelerant as you enter with perfume with gasoline with flint with spice your mouth full your mouth full of ritual....

and continues on, bereft of any punctuation whatsoever, ending:

this willingness to accept this smoke this prayer this test this fate this lift this dust this

I was reading this and no: I wasn't thinking or hearing Eliot. I was thinking and remembering:

and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes

But I wasn't reading James Joyce I was reading Oscar Bermeo but also hearing Joyce and hearing Bermeo and enjoying it very very much very. Having said that, it's crucial to underscore that what seduces me about "Ash Wednesday" isn't the mere fact of this punctuation-less, stream-of-consciousness technique, but rather Bermeo's careful and effective deployment of it. The words are carefully placed so that the reader is invited to collaborate: through the poet's very deliberate use of word and phrase repetition, readers are playfully challenged to provide their own pauses and stops---in short, to join forces with the poet to help create the poem's own organic rhythm and grammar. It's this process of physical collaboration (speeding up, slowing down) that produces the poem's aesthetic pleasure. Indeed: as I progressed, it felt like I was uttering a prayer.

*

"Orchard Beach: Section Four" (After Robert Francis' "Silent Poem") has not, as of yet, prompted me to go seek out Francis' poem. I love the poem without knowing its inspiration. I love its particular "meter:" its use of two-syllable words in "lines" that alternate between four words/two words/four words/two words. Sometimes they're verbs; sometimes their nouns. What they share in common is that they are all (with the exception of "orchard," which frames the piece) compound words, words made up of two words. (I thought of Heaney; I thought of Pound's ideogram....) And I was thinking about the song "Under the Boardwalk" as I read:

boardwalk beercans boombox bodyrock
...
suresurf shorebreak gonebreath nosleep
...
handhold armknot legtwine hiplock

It's Bermeo trying this or that poem on for size, but bringing his baggage---and I mean baggage in a good way--- to the piece, transforming it, making the work his own.

Letras Latinas Young Writers Initiative: Rex Ovalle

2009-07-06T12:51:00.008-05:00

Rex Ovalle was one of the first Cristo Rey students to benefit from the Letras Latinas Young Writers Initiative---a partnership with the Young Writers Workshop, a wonderful program founded and directed by Alison Joseph. LETRAS LATINAS BLOG recently caught up with Rex and conducted the following e-interview with him:

I understand you’ve just returned from another session at the Young Writers Workshop, founded by Alison Joseph, and conducted by the MFA students at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Could you share with readers of LETRAS LATINAS BLOG your history with this particular workshop, and what role it has played in your development as a writer. When did you first attend?

The Workshop was my first exposure to the writing world. In high school you only read the classics and what is considered the canon, so when I was shown the contemporary world of creative writing I became excited. The concept of the MFA was what fascinated me. So whenever I could I would try to have extensive conversations with the MFA students. Those conversations helped me really figure out who I was as a writer. The first workshop, in 2007, I have to admit though was more about being surrounded by other literary teens.

Could you talk a bit about the challenges you faced as a writer before you began attending the Young Writers Workshop. In other words, what kind of encouragement, if any, did you get in elementary school and high school? Did you have any teachers who encouraged your writing and if so, could you say something about them.

My family was arguably the biggest hurdle I had to face. They were not at all very supportive at first. My parents would encourage me to go to these programs, but my writing was just a hobby to them. After I came back from Iowa, however, my agenda had switched dramatically. All I ever wanted to do was write after that. Writing was simply invested in my soul. So I returned to SIU two years after with the intent of learning as much as I could possibly take in from the MFA students and Alison. I would have to admit that my mentor from Iowa, and my junior year English and poetry teacher, were the most encouraging and influential. I most certainly learned the most from them. Michelle Taransky whose book is about to be released, may have been the single most important person as far as my writing goes. She is the person who introduced me to form and the careful calculations behind the craft of poetry.

How has your life as a writer been since entering college? I understand you are a student at Middlebury College: how has that been? Have you managed to connect with other students and/or campus groups who are also interested in creative writing.

Middlebury is a great place to be a writer. It has a strong tradition and community as far as writing goes. Some of my closest friends at Middlebury are writers who take their writing as serious as I do. The creativity just flows between us. I hope to be starting a project on campus soon with my friends, but we’ll see what happens.

Could you share LETRAS LATINAS BLOG which writers you have particularly enjoyed these last few years. Are there particular books that have nourished you as a writer these last few years? Which ones?

My favorite novel will always be The Picture of Dorian Gray. My favorite piece of nonfiction is between Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris and Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. My favorite collection of poetry is without a doubt, The Dream Songs by John Berryman. John Berryman for me is as good as it has gotten as far as poetry goes.

Last question. Can you talk about how your background and the neighborhood (s) you grew up in have influenced your writing Were you born and raise in Chicago?

Being of Mexican decent has really let me or at least has caused me to explore some topics with confidence. At the current moment I am obsessed with Aztec mythology and how it contrasts with Classical Mythology. Being a first generation American at times almost feels like the two cultures are constantly at battle. The land we used to be part of versus the land we are currently part of. I do feel that unintentionally I bring this conflict up in my writing. Part of me embraces the writing of this conflict the other part shuns it in fear of cliché.

In his own words:

Rex Ovalle grew up on the southwest side of Chicago in Little Village, a majority Mexican-American Community. His childhood was spent mostly inside due to his parents’ fear of the gang trends growing and occurring during the earlier 90’s. The time inside was spent reading and attempting to tackle pieces like Moby Dick. The transition from grammar school to high school spurred him to start scribbling in his notebooks. During junior year at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School Rex took a semester-long course in modernist poetry. The structure of the class was partially workshop-style. The first workshop and the first truly motivational teacher gave him the confidence to apply and attend Southern Illinois University’s Young Writer’s Workshop and the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio. The summer of the 2007 would be where he would learn one of the writing world’s secrets: “It’s less about talent and more about craft; perfecting that very craft.” Rex is currently attending Middlebury College in Vermont and is working to earn his BA in English and Classical Studies. He considers himself an academic and poet obsessed with the literary community's history and timeline.

Innovative Programming: The Writer's Center

2009-07-02T19:43:00.004-05:00

The Writer's Center Announces Fellowships for Emerging Writers

The Writer’s Center, metropolitan DC’s community gathering place for writers and readers, is currently accepting submissions for several competitive Emerging Writer Fellowships. Emerging Writer Fellows will be selected from applicants who have published up to 2 book-length works of prose and up to 3 book-length works of poetry. We welcome submissions from writers of any genre, background, or experience.

Emerging Writer Fellows will be featured at The Writer’s Center as part of their Emerging Writers Reading Series. The readings, held on Friday evenings, bring together writers in different genres with a backdrop of live music. The Writer’s Center book store will sell titles by the Emerging Writers throughout the season in which they appear in an effort to promote them and their work to a wide audience.

Selected Fellows are invited to lead a special Saturday workshop at The Writer’s Center, with compensation commensurate with standard Writer’s Center provisions.

Fellows receive an all-inclusive honorarium to help offset their travel costs in the amount of $250 or $500, depending on their place of departure.

Fellows for Fall 2009 include novelist Alexander Chee (Edinburgh), novelist Lisa Selin Davis (Belly), poet Suzanne Frischkorn (Lit Windowpane), poet Aaron Smith (Blue on Blue Ground), Canadian fiction writer Neal Smith (Bang Crunch), poet Srikanth Reddy (Facts for Visitors), and poet Nancy Krygowski (Velocity).

Their events will be held in September, October, and December. See our events calendar for more information.

To be considered, please send a letter of interest, a resume or CV that details publication history and familiarity facilitating group discussions, and a copy of your most recent book. Self-published or vanity press titles will not be accepted. A committee comprised of The Writer’s Center board members, staff, and members will evaluate submissions on behalf of our community of writers.

The deadline to submit is August 15, 2009.

Applicants are encouraged to call Charles Jensen, Director, for more information at 301-654-8664.

The Writer’s Center, established in 1976, is one of the nation’s oldest and largest literary centers. We provide over 60 free public events and more than 200 writing workshops each year, sell one of the largest selections of literary magazines in our on-site bookstore, and publish Poet Lore, America’s oldest continually published poetry journal.

GEMS THAT CROSS MY DESK: Rubberroom by Yago Cura

2009-07-01T12:23:00.013-05:00

Heaven Below by Oscar Bermeo was sitting in my mailbox at work yesterday. I took it home only to bring it back: this morning I read it in one sitting while waiting for the subway, letting Metro train after Metro train leave without me at the Courthouse stop in Arlington, VA. When I finally stepped on board to head into the District, I resolved to make good on something I've been meaning to do for some time now: post here, now and then, some commentary about stuff that crosses my desk which I think is worthy of mention. Heaven Below falls into this category and I'll get to it very soon (and thank to Oscar for sending it and prompting me, indirectly, to get this other strand of LETRAS LATINAS BLOG up and running):

I want to comment on a chapbook I received sometime ago by Yago Cura. I was aware of his work because he'd submitted a manuscript to the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. His was among the manuscripts that were forwarded to Martín Espada for final consideration.

Cura's chapbook, Rubberroom, is a poetic sequence made up of acts, each act with different scenes. Here's what Cura writes, as a kind of preface:

The premise of "Rubberroom" rests on the idea that teaching is a function of acting. In other words, teaching is performative because every classroom is a controlled audience. Every time a teacher stands in front of a classroom, they are playing a role. I am not the person in real life that I am in front of my students, however my persona of teacher contains strains of the real me. Another idea very dear to this work is that teacher's colleges inundate teachers with useless theories and practicum. Schools and institutes that prepare teachers to helm classrooms in the inner-city do not fully acknowledge the social and psychological turmoil new teachers undoubtedly encounter the minute they are thrown into the maelstrom of their first classroom. This work serves as testament to the countless errors and missteps first-year teachers commit, but also has the confidence to embrace those mistakes because teaching is nothing if it is not a trial-and-error endeavor. The "Rubberroom" is formally dedicated to all teachers that trudge through that first year in the inner-city classroom all over the world and to Paolo Freire who is credited with stating that, "I cannont be a teacher without expressing who I am." Hopefully, after reading "Rubberroom" you will get an idea of not only who I am but how I am.

Among the things I appreciated about the sequence was how unflinching it was in presenting a world I'm completely unfamiliar with. In other words, we've all read (or read about) those nonfiction books, or newspaper articles that aim to present what I'm going to call "the inner-city classroom," but I'd never read poems about it from the perspective this perspective in quite this way. Here's a sample:

ACT TWO, SCENE ONE: ANGER THEATER

Yes, I hurled a chair
at the smartass
blackboard;

it might have ricocheted
and nicked a student, or two.

T-Bone's in the room, tells me,

Get a hold of your fool!

Splash cold water on your neck!

And that's just what I did
except, I did also get some things
off my chest in dialect Dynamite.

And came back, tore up
the bathroom pass, exclaimed,

No More Bathroom Pass, Ever!

All the while, my charges giggling
guffawing, snickering hyena-type
and falling to stitches.

Not because my production of
"Mister Lost His Shit"
tickled them so

Not because tirades
are a function of interior sloppy

But because monologues
presume audience innocence
and my little shits
were as guilty as me.

***

Things I especially liked:

Get a hold of your fool!

*

off my chest in dialect Dynamite

*

guffawing, snickering hyena-type
and falling to stitches

and the way "stitches" rhymes with

"Mister Lost His Shit"

*

are a function of interior sloppy

*

Rubberroom, in addition to unfolding its plot skillfully, is filled with fresh takes (on language) like these.

***

Here's what we learn about the author, as of 2006, at the end:

"Yago Cura was a NYC Teaching Fellow in the Kingsbridge/Bedford Park section of the Bronx. He teaches 11th grade English Language Arts at Discovery High School, one of the small high schools inside the Walton Educational Campus. During the 2004-2005 academic year, Discovery's principal, Scott Goldner, played an integral role in salvaging Yago's fledgling career as an inner-city high school teacher.

Yago would like to thank Aviva Dalin (for her guidance), Joe Pandolfo (for his sense that a wrong was being committed) and all the people that supported him during his stint in teachers'-jail. Yago's work also appears in Lungfull!, Exquisite Corpse, COMBO, and Skanky Possum. In edition, Yago co-edits the literary journal, Hinchas de Poesia with, Lauren Ireland and Will Esposito"

*

I don't know how many copies of Rubberroom Hinchas de Poesia produced, but I consider my two chapbooks collector's items, and I'm delighted to have them.

Yago Cura blogs HERE

John Chávez: 2009 Letras Latinas Residency Fellow

2009-06-29T11:49:00.010-05:00

Before I had the pleasure of meeting John Chávez in person, I read him, and heard about him from third parties. I read his Noemi Press, chapbook, Heterotopia, which is reviewed in Latino Poetry Review, number 2 by Peter Ramos. Carmen Jiménez Smith, who knew John while he was pursuing his MFA at New Mexico State University, spoke very highly of him. And fellow Macondista, Joy Castro, told me about him since John was pursuing his doctorate at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where Joy teaches.

I finally had the pleasure of meeting him in Omaha, NE about a year ago when I was at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art to give a reading. He drove over from Lincoln and we had dinner and hung out for a few hours. The following is a brief intervew with him conducted over e-mail a few days ago.

--FA

INTERVIEW

John, I'm glad to hear that you are having a productive time during your Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship period at the Anderson Center. The principal aim, of course, is to give an emerging Latino/a writer quality time to work. Can you share with readers of LETRAS LATINAS BLOG what you have been working on this past month, and your hopes for this particular project?

Knowing my Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts theses weren't so much book mansuscripts as they were collections of poems, I've worked in the last month to conceive, reconceive, draft and revise my doctoral dissertation, which I plan to be my first full-length book. Trying hard to have no preconceived notions in mind, I arrived at the Anderson Center on June 1st & brought what felt like a skelton of a draft. I had the shape of the book in mind, but I didn't want to force it so much as follow the book's energy to completion. Nearing the end of the residency however, and much to my surprise, I've written what feels like a strong, working draft of the book manuscript, tentatively titled Dawn of the Dispensable City. With some more tightening and a bit of planning, I hope to send it out to a number of writing contests this coming fall.

As I understand it, this is your first experience with an artist residency. How has it been? Could you describe a bit how your time evolved, if you developed any particular routines as the month progressed.

Yes, this was my first experience with an artist residency of this nature, so I didn't know what to expect. To Letras Latinas and the Anderson Center's credit, the month was amazing! The day I arrived, Robert Hedin, the director of the Anderson Center, gave us five residents a tour of the grounds. Starting with the main house and finishing with the individual studios, Robert recounted the history of the Anderson Center—built by his grandfather A.P. Anderson—and its tie to the community of Red Wing, MN.

By the second day, work was calling. I started by spreading the manuscript out across the floor of my bedroom and reading it aloud. This exercise allowed me to hear the poems, word for word and line for line, and to see how the shape of the book was driven by the initial organization. Once I drafted, which was every day, I spread out individual sections to see where they were headed.

I used this routine as a model to continue to imagine the book, to listen to where particular poems might be placed. Once I wrote a new poem, I read each section of the book to see where the poem best fit. Though the process felt methodical, it in fact turned out to be more organic—in essence, the new poems entered the manuscript on their own terms. Not mine.

The Anderson Center residencies are rather small in that at any one time, there are only five artists in residence. Could you talk a bit about what that experience has been like, and what kind of connections you’ve made, and if you foresee any of these connections lasting beyond the residency experience.

Not having been in residency before, or in an artist's community with so few people, I really didn't know what limitations such a number would pose or what kind of bonding would take place. I'd have to say that my four housemates and fellow artists and I bonded rather quickly. We were all on such different timetables career-wise, but at what place we were didn't matter. We were more interested in each other's art, conversations about art, politics, identity and culture and the confluences of each that we felt like our concerns were intellectually similar.

The poet Ronaldo Wilson and I discussed a number of issues, including being a member of a minority community and poets interested in the avant-garde. He was wonderful to talk to and because of our similar concerns and interests as poets, we shared email addresses and information about upcoming conferences meant to highlight such cultural work. Also, my fellow writer Kate de Gutes discussed the spaces in which we are allowed and seemingly disallowed to be or become ourselves, a central concern and meditation of my manuscript. In short, they were both marvelous, giving people to meet.

As far as the visual artists, both Ellen Petraits and Joyce Ellen Weinstein were awe-inspiring. They opened up their studios a number of times to share with us their process and projects' composition. These nights usually ended with us talking until midnight about our lives, the lives of others, and how our interaction with world informs our art. I couldn't have asked for better people to spend time with in residency.

Another part of the experience at that each resident has to do some sort of "community service" while they are there. What did you do, and how did that go?

I spent some time with a number of families at St. Joseph's Catholic Church, and the nature of my time centered on talking about my educational experience and the hardships I've faced to become a first-generation college graduate and doctoral candidate. Adriana Thuerauf was my host for the evening and translator, and she was simply remarkable as both a person and community activist.

Having lost my language (Spanish) at an early age, I discussed how my educational experience shaped me and how my experience might parallel my guests' kids' lives. From what I understand there are very few Latinos living in Goodhue county, and of those who attend high school some don't finish.

I was lucky in that my surrogate high school counselor, Carlos Montoya, pushed me to have higher expectations of myself. It was this kind of support from my educators and family that I wanted to share with Adriana's parish.

Now that you have experienced a month-long artist residency, what advice might you give to next year's recipient of the Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship or, for that matter, any writer coming to an artist residency for the first time?

Gloria Anzaldua comes to mind in that I learned to develop a tolerance for contradiction, a tolerance for ambiguity. By this I mean that next year's recipient might be prepared to fight with her or himself about where her work is going, she might be prepared to be amazed, to push herself, to be kind to herself.

He might be prepared to let the world slip away, to become raw, to listen to himself, to take a ride along the Cannon River and let the quiet wash over. And she might be prepared to be delighted by the humbleness of her fellow artists, their willingness to share, and she might be prepared to be willing to share with everyone her notion of where her art is going and she might prepared to share her notion of the world writ large. But above all else, be prepared to write every day as though it were your last. What your words gift you is incredible and so full of potential.

***

Speaking of residencies, the Alliance for Artists Communities has recently announced that their Midwestern Voices and Visions initiative, with funding from the Joyce Foundation, will be accepting applications for their next grant cycle. I was fortunate enough to receive one of these in 2006. I did my residency at the Anderson Center----which directly resulted in establishing the Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship. Below is the link with all the pertinent information. In a nutshell, it is a program aimed at supporting artists of color who live in a midwestern state who have never experienced an artist residency. Please spread the word. The deadline is in mid-August:

http://www.artistcommunities.org/MWvisions/index.html

Courtesy of Dan Vera: Lorna's DC Workshop

2009-06-28T22:10:00.004-05:00

Lorna Dee Cervantes punctuated her week-long stint in Washington D.C. yesterday, Saturday, June 27, by teaching a workshop. Here are two photographs, taken by Dan Vera:

Chicago Dispatch

2009-06-27T23:50:00.006-05:00

I've come to love the Windy City. The main reason for this trip was to attend a day-long board meeting with the Guild Complex this past Saturday. I remember the first time I became aware of the Guild: they were the home of Tia Chucha Press. Today, the Guild, as you know, is the home of PALABRA PURA. And yet, in a strict sense, the Guild doesn't have a brick and mortar "home." We're a "scrappy and resourceful" organization, which suits us just fine.

And speaking of PP, at the least two installments I had the pleasure of running into, saying hello to, and chatting with, Katie Hartsock. Katie is a poet and she is a media assistant at the Poetry Foundation. She's become a loyal supporter of PALABRA PURA and she recently alerted me to a piece she wrote in Literago---an online publication I wasn't aware of, but which I'm so glad exists---about the Wind Shifts reading in May. Here's how Literago describes itself:

"Launched in March 2007, Literago.org is intended as a portal to news and information about literary goings-on in and around Chicago. The site features a curated calendar with a corresponding weekly newsletter, news, and post-event reviews. Literago is meant to show the world that Chicago isn’t an illiterate sinkhole, but a city with a vibrant literary community. It’s intended as a service to Chicagoans interested in literature: to give them a one-stop shop for noteworthy literary events, happenings, and information. Chicago has a vast number of literary projects — everything from small presses and magazines to giant lit organizations —and the Literago editors would like to see more cohesion, promotion, and community evident outside of events like Printer’s Row Book Fair and the Printer’s Ball. The editors hope Literago will be a useful tool for people like them."

I have nothing but immense admiration for enterprises like this. Hats off to the two co-founders and editors:

Eugenia Williamson & Gretchen Kalwinski

*
Coming soon at LETRAS LATINAS BLOG: an interview with the 2009 Letras Latinas Residency Fellow, John Chávez, who is winding down his one month stint at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN.

Kevin A. González at Cave Canem

2009-06-24T22:00:00.010-05:00

I was on the phone yesterday with Cornelius Eady. He was in Pittsburgh at the Cave Canem workshop and he called to confirm that 60 copies of The Night Tito Trinidad KO'ed Ricardo Mayorga had arrived and had been passed out to all the fellows. I had chosen this Momotombo Press title specifically.

One of the conversations Cornelius and I have been having these past few years, since he became a colleague at Notre Dame, is how to enhance relations and communication between our respective poetry communities. On the surface, it sounds, and still sounds, a bit too abstract. Some initiatives between Letras Latinas and Cave Canem have resulted (with the brokering of the Guild Complex) and I'll talk about those in a bit. There's also been a fruitful dialogue with Alison Meyers, the Executive Director of CC, and we are developing one idea that we intend to carry out in the District.

But it occured to me a few weeks ago that one next gesture would simply be to give away Kevin González's chapbook to the 50+ fellows while they were on their retreat; that having Terrance Hayes introduce them all to Kevin's work in his generous introduction would be a good thing---perhaps even lead some readers of the chapbook to seek out Cultural Studies (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009).

Dialogue, bridge-building, getting better acquainted: one reader at a time.

PALABRA PURA Recap: Emma and Jacob

2009-06-23T07:30:00.008-05:00

NOVENA PODEROSA

by Emma Trelles:

Fill the glass; light the wick,
prick three drops upon the sheet.

Honor the dead with gardenias,
stuff throats with the scent of forgiveness.

Honor the living with seasoned timber,
there is reckoning found in patience and plank. [...]

from Little Spells (Goss 183, 2008)

Emma was joined by Jacob Saenz last Wednesday, on June 17 at Decima Musa in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. We had a good-sized, attentive crowd. Emma sold books. It was the first time I'd had the pleasure of hearing her. I'd heard Jacob at the One Poem Festival at the JAZZ SHOWCASE last February in Chicago, but never a whole set by him. Both were excellent readers (which isn't always the case). Jacob read some great"zombie" poems! The following pictures are from Trelles' Facebook album. I only lament there wasn't one of her reading. I'll have to track one down.

One of the things the Guild Complex is working on for their website, and hopefully they'll get it up and running soon, are audio files from these readings. We've been recording them, but they still need to be edited, etc. The goal, really, is to make PALABRA PURA more of a national presence, through the web. We've come to think of the series as being a part of our literary community and thus want to do what we can to bring it to online audiences. It's the next step for the series, which is now in its fourth season. Funding for our 2010 season is off to a good start with a modest award from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the Joyce Foundation. It's a welcome boost as we move forward.

Jacob Saenz

I'm holding Little Spells, sitting beside our visiting poet, who flew in from Miami.

Good crowd that night, though it was still light when we started.

Los Poetas

*

July 15, 2009,

PALABRA PURA

presents

Javier Huerta & Luis Valadez

The Writer's Almanac: Linda Rodriguez

2009-06-22T13:40:00.007-05:00

One is particularly pleased when good fortune visits someone who is not only talented, but who is also, quite simply, buena gente---that is: an individual who approaches whatever it is he/she does---paint, write, drive a cab, wait to ascend to the Supreme Court---with a warm and generous spirit. It's a way of being in the world that can't be helped.

Linda Rodriguez, whom I've had the pleasure of spending quality time with this year, is one such person.

Recently, the Macondo Foundation bestowed upon her the Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award. Named after Sandra Cisneros' mother (1929-2007), recipients are selected for exhibiting exceptional talent, a profound commitment to their chosen form of expression, and dedication to the work of nurturing the creativity of others. It is the foundation’s hope that recipients will make use of the award to nurture their own creativity and wellbeing.

Therefore, it's a particular pleasure to announce, here at LETRAS LATINAS BLOG, that tomorrow morning, June 23, 2009, Garrison Keillor will be reading "The Sun Grows in your Smile" on The Writer's Almanac. And on Saturday, June 27, Keillor will read "Meditation on the word Need"---both from Heart's Migration (Tía Chucha Press, 2009)

The District of Columbia welcomes Lorna

2009-06-20T10:14:00.003-05:00

Paul Martínez Pompa & Lorna Dee Cervantes
@ Moe's Books

"The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry ON TOUR" has two installments left: one on September 23, 2009 in Kansas City, MO, and the grand finale on October 29, 2009 in New York City. When it's all said and done, though, it may be that the stop that meant the most was the one that took place where it all began for me, where poetry is concerned: Berkeley, CA.

It was easily the reading where I knew the most people in the audience, including a former high school teacher, siblings, fellow Bay Area-based poet-friends, and Lorna Dee Cervantes. It touched us all to no end that she made the track across the bay from San Francisco to offer her support, in the flesh, to the Wind Shift poets that evening. At was after this reading that Lorna graciously agreed to support Paul Martinez Pompa's forthcoming Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize-winning book.

I'll get a chance to thank her personally this Sunday, when she reads in Washington DC at the Sunday Kind of Love series at Busboys & Poets.

Advance praise for My Kill Adore Him:

Paul Martínez Pompa deconstructs with a deft sword. Straddling literary strategies, no supposition nor paradigm is safe. He slays the stereotypic dragons within as well as without, putting popular culture, elegy, nightmare, personal narrative, identity and gender politics in the same hat, and drawing from the source, Pompa plays a poetic hand for keeps. Every turn of trope is more delightful than the next — a breakaway collection from an exciting new writer.

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Emma Trelles / Emily Pérez

2009-06-17T13:27:00.008-05:00

PALABRA PURA's visiting feature tonight is Miami-based poet, Emma Trelles, author of the book shown above. I met her for the first time back in February of 2008, when made the drive up to Palm Beach to attend the first installment of "The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry ON TOUR." Needless to say, I'm looking forward to her reading tonight.

Here's LPR reviewer Emily Pérez on Trelles:

"[ ]..It was a pleasure to read Emma Trelles's work for the first time; I was struck especially by the structure of her poems. The pieces get off to a running start, aided by their titles, which serve both to set the stage and draw the reader in: "How to Write a Poem: Theory #62," "What Would Have Happened If I Had Married You," "In an Alcove Between the Beacon and the Avalon," and "Autumn, Unexpected." Her language is crisp and dense, marrying the specific and the abstract, such as in these lines from "How to Write a Poem": "She's buying toilet paper and Mahatma rice. This is her life/ and you happened to ease into it at the wooden lull/ between explosions" (14). I love the subtlety of the rhyme and the contrasting order of magnitude in the pair "rice" and "life," a juxtaposition echoed in the errands and explosions. Trelles also knows how to craft an ending, bringing her pieces in for landings while keeping them aloft, such as in the last line of "Autumn,
Unexpected": "Kites spin above heads. Dust rises into light" (15). This is work I will seek again. [ ]"

from her review of MiPoesías' "American Cuban" issue in LPR #2

Emily Pérez grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. She earned an MFA from the University of Houston in 2006 and a work-study scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2007. Her poetry has appeared in /nor, Ocho, Third Coast, Laurel Review and Borderlands, and in addition to work in Latino Poetry Review, her reviews can be found in Gulf Coast and American Letters & Commentary. She currently teaches English and creative writing in Seattle.

*

Emily Pérez on:

Blas Falconer (LPR #1)

Sheryl Luna (LPR #1)

Mónica Teresa Ortiz (LPR #2)

***

Palabra Pura: Tonight @ 7:30 p.m.

Emma Trelles and Jacob Saenz are the features for June's Palabra Pura.

Emma Trelles is author of, Little Spells and teaches writing workshops at the Art Center of South Florida.

Chicago's own Jacob Saenz served as editor of the Columbia Poetry Review. His poems have been published in a number of magazines including Poetry.

7:30 p.m. start time. All ages. Free admission.
Decima Musa, 1901 S. Loomis, Chicago
Limited open mic starts the evening.
Come down for dinner beforehand. The guacamole is delicious

Emma Trelles & Jacob Saenz @ PALABRA PURA

2009-06-15T21:50:00.004-05:00

Emma Trelles

Jacob Saenz

PALABRA PURA continues to be one of the initiatives I feel most fortunate and privileged to be a part of. This Wednesday, we're back to our typical format after having our Wind Shifts reading last month. The visiting feature is Emma Trelles, who will be flying in from Miami. Our local Chicago-based poet is Jacob Saenz.

*

I'm still waiting on some pics from Ricardo Pau-Llosa's Notre Dame visit. When I get a few, I hope to write more.

*

On the horizon: a teaser

2009-06-11T11:04:00.003-05:00

Ricardo Pau-Llosa: poet, art critic

2009-06-09T07:35:00.010-05:00

The Cuban-born poet is spending a few days at Notre Dame. Tomorrow night he's giving a reading at the Snite Museum on campus. Born in Havana in 1954, he's the author of six poetry collections, his most recent, Parable Hunter (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008). He's also distinguished himself as an art critic, particularly Latin American art.

The NewsHour Poetry Series on PBS did a profile on him.

Here's his website.

Here's an interview:

Manoa, Vol. 15, No. 1, Summer 2003

Defying Time and History: Interview with Ricardo Pau-Llosa,

by Alberto Milián

With The Mastery Impulse, his fifth collection of poems recently published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, Ricardo Pau-Llosa has entered a phase of his career where his ideas, background, and aspirations are of interest to a growing body of faithful readers. His previous titles are Vereda Tropical (1999) and Cuba (1993) both f rom Carnegie Mellon, Bread of the Imagined (Bilingual Press, 1992), and Sorting Metaphors (winner of the first Anhinga Prize in 1983). Nor are his publications limited to poetry, although the list of literary magazines and anthologies that have carried his work over the last two decades is staggering. He is one of the premier art critics on Latin American art; a guest curator at the Lima Biennial; author of major critical texts on Olga de Amaral, Rafael Soriano, Clarence Holbrook Carter, Rogelio Polesello, Fernando de Szyszlo and Cuban art in exile; and contributor to many art magazines, including a decade-long position as a senior editor for Art International magazine. Pau-Llosa's short fiction has also been well received, including a piece in Norton's acclaimed Sudden Fiction International (Continued) anthology.

Despite his presence in anthologies and special issues of magazines dedicated to Latinos, and in spite of Pau-Llosa's own passionate identification with Old Cuba (as he refers to Cuba before Castro) and his frequent presence as a curator, lecturer and critic in Latin America, there is no way of seeing him or his work as ethnic. Like all true artists, Pau-Llosa delves into the regional in order to articulate what is universal, or what is common to the human condition just about anywhere. He is a consummate poet of reflection, as much at home with German philosophy as with pre-Columbian artifacts. His poems, often replete with metaphors and other tropes, fuse ideas, passion, and the pleasures of language.

The home he shares with his wife Morella in Coral Gables, Florida is a veritable museum of modern, contemporary, folk and tribal art. Works by Victor Vasarely, Jesús Soto, Clarence Carter, Ana Albertina Delgado, Carlos Alfonzo, Cundo Bermúdez, Bárbaro Rivas, George Segal, Luisa Richter, José Bedia, Maria Brito, Olga de Amaral, Amelia Peláez, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, Mario Carreño, Luís Felipe Noé, Enrique Castro-Cid, Antonio Henrique Amaral, among many others, as well as ritual objects, weavings, and masks from Africa, the high Andes, and the Amazons proliferate between Persian rugs and baccarat crystal chandeliers in a restored home built in the late thirties. Pau-Llosa is particularly fond of the many folk carvings he has picked up in his Latin American travels.

Pau-Llosa's home is an environment which reflects the hedonism of his poetry, indeed the luxury of his mind and appetites, not least of which is his penchant for fine cigars, the incense of which is ubiquitous. He is a sophisticated Hispanic Caribbean man of the old school, which is to say he is a witty, self-confident Mediterranean cosmopolitan who is painfully aware of history, madly in love with beauty, and stubbornly romantic in his hope for freedom in his native Cuba and justice in his beloved Latin America.

The following interview was conducted over three sessions during the weekend of November 2-4, 2001, at the poet's home.

Q: Tell me about your childhood and what events or aspects of it do you think influenced your becoming a poet.

A: The problem with the Influence (gestures quotations with fingers) is that the last person who can truly determine it is the one suffering it. I come from a family which rose, through tremendous hard work, from poverty when I was born to middle class status by the time I was six. That was in Havana during a period which most Americans see in only the bleakest nightmare terms because it was the time of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship [1952-58]. Despite the political crisis in which the young Cuban republic always found itself in, Batista--who was a dictator and a crook--ruled during a time of great economic and cultural expansion in Cuba. It would come to be known as Cuba's golden age, despite his dictatorship, and unfortunately I was born at that time and not twenty years earlier so I could have enjoyed it as an adult.

Q: But what specific aspects of your childhood. . . . (interrupts)

A: These are the aspects. It's not just about the kind of house I lived in, or the school I went to, or the kind of parents and siblings I had, or what religion or what toys, what TV shows I watched. It has always been, for me, a question of the dense historical juncture into which I was born. That awareness shaped my life as an adult and most certainly has impacted my work and emerged many times in it as a theme. The reality of that Cuba into which I was born and would be expelled from at the age of six is made all the more dramatic by the complete distortion with which most Americans, indeed most Cubans my generation or younger, view that period of Cuban history. The facts speak for themselves: Cuba was the only nation that was modern in style, outlook, dynamism and Latin American in essence. Indeed, more than any other country in the region Cuba shaped what everyone has come to think of as ALa tin American,and it did this through its music, its attitude toward life, and its pioneering literature and visual arts. The loss of this unique homeland was at that time, when I was six, very painful for me, and has become only more so with time.

Q: You would say, then, that exile and the loss of homeland influenced you to become a writer.

A: Indirectly, perhaps, yes. Indirectly in that I was immersed in an environment, first in Chicago then Tampa, that was not only completely different from Havana but the people I encountered had no idea where I came from. Later I would come to realize this was an experience I shared with all immigrants who came to America--the Old country could just as well have been Mars, as far as most Americans were concerned. Most of them knew nothing about the rest of the world, and despite cable tv, the internet, and travel, most still don't. Later, when I was 14, we moved to Miami.

Q: Who's we?

A: My family and I, my parents, a sister four years older than I, and my maternal grandmother. My father died of a heart attack ten years ago, but my 96-year old grandmother, a tough asturiana [from a province in northern Spain], is still with us, in great health and lucid.

Q: So the culture shock of coming to America, made all the more intense because you were a six-year old, impacted your future development as an artist. But how, exactly, do you feel that influence or impact occurred?

A: The first contact, as it were, with America would, unfortunately, become a paradigm that would repeat itself countless times and still does. I found I had to explain the world I came from because others could not form a picture of me without a sense of that world, and because they had a dim or distorted sense of that world their view of me would also be dim or distorted. Had I found an environment where my Otherness (gestures the quotation marks) would have been of no consequence, where I would have been accepted or rejected for other purely personal or routine reasons, then the image the natives had of my origins, however inaccurate or simplistic, would not have been an issue in their dealings with me and, consequently, Cuba would have melted away in my child's mind. It would have probably become a place I had been born in but not one I was attached to. Ironically, many Cuban-Americans who were brought up in Miami or New Jersey--surrounded by other Cuban exiles and their descendants--have become assimilated in the classical sense; they lost all links to the old country. Although they grew up in a much more Cuban environment, say in S.W. Miami, or because they grew up in this environment, they feel Cuba as a vague, distant point of origin. They are not inspired or driven by it or its history and least of all by its culture--about which they know close to nothing. They didn't have to Cubanize their sense of themselves to stave off a hostile environment.

Q: You said the first contact served as a paradigm, that it would repeat itself.

A: Still does only the distortion is now ideologically driven. It is no secret that our cultural, academic, and media elites are overwhelmingly supportive of the Castro regime and exhibit a knee-jerk antagonism toward its exiles. This became glaringly obvious during the Elian saga. The internal pro-democratic dissident movement, operating under extreme suppression inside Cuba, is utterly ignored by these liberal or progressive folks who have championed similar dissidents struggling against right-wing governments. For these people, my position as a vocal opponent of the Castro regime is a source of mystery, dread or revulsion. Recently, in an article on Miami, Jonathan Kandell, a former New York Times correspondent writing for Cigar Aficionado, referred to me as the rarest of specimens because I was both a poet and an anti-communist. This coincidence of artist and anti-communism amazed him. Later, in correspondence, I pointed out to him that the only pro-communist or anti-anti-communist artists and intellectuals are those who have never experienced that system in any way, shape or form, but who have read its propaganda. More significantly, they endorse such tyrannical states because it enhances their radical chic image hence facilitates their professional status as artists and intellectuals here, in the US, a capitalist democracy that nurtures them. This is a source of distortion about Cuban history and culture which is not based on ignorance but on calculated maneuver, on the willingness of cognizant individuals to use the suffering of a defenseless people and don a political disguise in order to advance their own interests.

Q: But, getting back to the cultural as opposed to a political sense of these things, you feel Cuban and not American, although you've lived here for 41 of your 47 years?

A: It's not that simple! I am no longer Cuban, that's obvious. The Cuba I am speaking of, the one I had to reconstruct and preserve, and read up on, and experience mostly through the stories and accounts of elders, perished in the early sixties. Were I to go to Cuba today it would no doubt be a very foreign place, more so than other Latin American countries which have evolved and changed in a more normal way. Cuba, thanks to its government and system, is a totally bizarre reality, a once modern nation reduced to feudalism in the name of socialist progress. Of course I don't belong to that Cuba and may never belong in any future Cuba, either. I live a kind of dual citizenship--my lifestyle is American and my imagination is Cuban, or old Cuban.

Q: But didn't your education in America, the fact that you write in English and teach and live here, have any influence in that imagination? Didn't the writers you read and studied who were American have any impact?

A: Of course they did. What a question! You are assuming Cuba and America have impermeable boundaries. Cuba was a very Americanized place, and a very Latin place. In other words, had there been no communist takeover over four decades ago and I had grown up in the country of my birth, there might not have been such a huge difference between the man I am now, culturally speaking, and the one I would have become. The duality of which I speak would have been possible, albeit in a different form, had Cuba not plunged into totalitarianism. The old Cuba also deeply influenced America, and her absence had a negative effect on America, too. Cuba had a lunar relationship with America, tugging at the uptight, Protestant American psyche and infecting America with a sense that pleasure was not only OK but essential. Had there been a Cuba-US link during the sixties, that period might have been less convulsive in America, less drug-crazed and self-destructive, for Cuba was the role model for America's budding hedonism after WWII. Cuba functioned in some ways as America's anima. Americans today have reduced this view to a caricature--pre-communist Cuba as brothel. Ironically, it has been the communists who have turned Cuba into a premier spot for pre-teen prostitution en masse. Nonetheless, often in the sphere of cultural criticism we speak as if cultures were encased in themselves and a person in one country can only absorb the culture of another by moving to it and living in it. This is a central tenet in the American mythology of immigration, yet it is a woefully simplistic view of cultural interaction.

Q: What American writers influenced you, especially in your college years which, I would assume, is when you began to commit yourself to the writer's life?

A: The list would sound like that of many others, for one can't help but be influenced by the masters, the canon, especially the great writers in the language in which you are launching your creative efforts. In highschool I loved García Lorca. Wallace Stevens during my college days was the American writer whom I read with most interest. I wrote my master's thesis on Stevens, and for a while thought I would write my dissertation on his work as well. I admired Stevens as a poet-thinker, as someone who made no distinctions between philosophy and poetry. Later, it would be Hart Crane, James Dickey, Richard Wilbur, and Derek Walcott. All the while I was also reading Spanish and Latin American writers--Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Jorge Luis Borges in particular. Borges for the same reason I admired Stevens. In fact, I had the opportunity to visit Borges at his home in Buenos Aires in August 1985, about a year before his death. And I mentioned to him that what I most admired in his poems was precisely that they seemed like thoughts caught in the mind of the thinker, and that this was a translucent quality I hoped my work would attain someday. I think it was the only thing I managed to say the whole morning which he seemed pleased with. At any rate, I was influenced by philosophers and historians as much, if not more, than by poets. And by painters and sculptors, too.

Q: Which philosophers and historians do you think influenced you?

A: Edmund Husserl, the father of modern Phenomenology and its subsequent off spins, Existentialism among them, has been and continues to be the greatest influence on my work as a poet and as an art critic. It took forever for me to feel like I had gotten his ideas, and I am by no means a scholar of his work. I can only nibble at his light. But I kept at it because I realized that he was the watershed, the true creator of what we think of as modernity in the world of ideas. Through Husserl I got into Heidegger for a while, and Merleau-Ponty, but Husserl is the enduring giant. I loved reading history; while in college I read for content--classical and medieval history of Europe especially. With time I came to savor the style of the historian as much if not more than the focus of his tale. Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Thucydides. Tacitus. Gibbon. I loved Frances Yates' book The Art of Memory because it gave memory a space, a history, and a shape. Memory itself may well be an art as much as a faculty of the mind. Memory theaters. . . I feel I've been building and living in one all my life. Among the modern philosophers of ethics, apart from Albert Camus, the Russian Nicholas Berdyaev is important to me. His book Slavery and Freedom is monumental. He is an ignored moral genius.

Q: Why Husserl? Can you go into more detail on his influence?

A: Husserl's focus on consciousness itself, as the act that embraces world and mind, struck me as wondrous and simple and obvious, yet, because of these qualities, ignored or overlooked for ages. He conceives of awareness as one extension, unbroken by dualism, a field or sphere with two poles which correspond to the old designations of mind and world. The break with dualism that Descartes resisted and Kant pointed to, Husserl brings home. Dualism is the fundamental crack from which many of our great evils come. Without dualism, without that severance between mind and world, the brutality of our religious authorities and ideological leaders would not have been possible. Dualism opens the door, at its very onset in Socrates, to the totalitarian prototype of his Republic. The breach between mind and world mirrors the gulf between man and God in Judaism and Christianity. It is a breach that must be filled by faith and what attends to faith--intolerance, orthodoxy, liturgy, hierarchies of authority in spiritual matters, all that arrogance of soul we call religion. Dualism is the manna of the messianic tyrant. Husserl took consciousness as the parameter of reality, the base of his epistemology. His is a philosophy that elucidates continuity, takes it as premise, because it's not about the presence of the world in the mind, but about the inextricable presence of both in consciousness. Husserl's foregrounding of consciousness would include our consciousness of the past, our memories, and the accounts of others. Intersubjectivity itself. That is why Husserl was so valuable in my approach to Cuba.

What Cuba was historically and culturally can be reconstructed from data, even from the evidence of what's left after 42 years of communist tyranny and imbecilic destruction. Havana, for example, is still a wondrous place, a city built by immigrants and by its bustling middle class from the early thirties through the fifties. That's not the only Cuba I am speaking of, however. Cuba as a context for an imagination and from which many great artists emerged simultaneously is another Cuba altogether. That Cuba isn't so easy to subject to suspensions, reconstitutions, or other self-reflective cognitive acts. That Cuba is still alive, is still feeding the imaginations of those who tap into it. When a place becomes what I call a renaissance point, it doesn't die, or doesn't have to. It becomes a nurturing confluence of creative possibilities, a way of dialoguing with identity and fate and the mysteries of life itself. It becomes a language, a logic, a set of rules for the creative imagination to come to life in and through. But that language can't be activated unless the historical Cuba is clarified, because an artist enters that language with heart and mind and imagination and not just intellectually. Perhaps the death of Cuba as a culture was the beginning of its life as timeless renaissance point. Or perhaps it was the senseless and sudden and cruel nature of that death, for had the Cuban renaissance petered out, that descent might have diluted its presence. Indeed, Cuba is Firenze-like in that way, Minoan. A burst of light, then a sudden darkness brought on by the implacable if fortuitous triumph of chaos.

Q: Is the idea of old Cuba as a renaissance point related to the often cited opening sentence of your essay on Cuban art in Outside Cuba/Fuera de Cuba, that every exile knows his place, and that place is the imagination?

A: Somewhat, I guess. That sentence, which Gustavo Pérez Firmat has cited and commented on but has not really gotten, is a simpler statement. It plays with the cliche of knowing one's place, poignant for the exile who is not at all a native and is made to feel not as good as one. The exile is always aware of his condition as an escapee from a culture that failed terribly in some way, unless he is a refugee from an invasion or occupation--a different kind of exile. There's the guilt survivor and the heroic survivor. The place the exile makes his own is possible by activating one of the highest functions of the imagination, the act of belonging but in this case it is indistinguishable from reviving and possessing. One belongs to freedom, not to a place, but it needs place as a compass needs north. I'm not talking about a passive, feel-good, or fuzzy membership in a legacy, or the kind of strident ethno-babble that passes of multiculturalism these days. In this sense, the place of the exile is the memory theater which focuses all that is known about a condition and its history, and puts it at the service of wisdom, for lack of a less mangled word. Exilic imagining is a defiance of history, as true creative imagining is a defiance of time. More precisely, exilic imagining at the service of creativity unites both defiances.

Q: Can you explain how all this might have influenced the conception or execution of particular poems?

A: What is cause and what is effect is hard to say. I'm not sure either of these analogies is to the point. I didn't want to write riddles, nor did I want Neruda-type odes to everyday things, although both of these influenced what I was experimenting with. I wanted the poem to capture the processes of suspension and reconstitution simultaneously, or superimpose them. Now these are poems about perceptions in anyone's everyday world. The exilic dimension came through for me in the poems of my third book, Cuba (Carnegie Mellon, 1993). You asked for particular poems. From that collection, I would point to Frutas as a poem about perception and intersubjectivity, although for some it is a poem about the la tina grandmother and nostalgia. Yuck! Yes, my grandmother is the protagonist, along with the mamey (a rare tropical fruit) we are tasting after many years in exile not having had a mamey. But Frutas is my parody of Plato's Cave, and self-parody too. The poem is making fun of the very enterprise at the heart of the book, the recovery of Cuba as an act of the imagination. It ends with the boy persona failing to adjust the real mamey before him to the fabulous mameyes of old Cuba the grandmother is recalling. He is exiled, for a second time, from his grandmother's range of experiences. He is made to realize that they are not and never can be his because every act of consciousness, even a shared one like this mamey, is unique to the subject enacting it. Husserl referred to what we share in experience as the life-world or lebenswelt. At the end the boy's questioning the grandmother leads to an abrupt answer that unveils what has been going through her head, as opposed to his innocent or childish endeavor to reconstruct a real mamey from her recollection of the old days. Next you'll want to know how we lost a country, is her unveiling of how exiled she feels, again, in the face of this not quite good enough fruit. He can't get this. No going home again, not even for dessert. Of course, the grandmother is also dismissing Plato and his realm of ideas.

Q: You mention the visual artists, and you have published extensively on Latin American art. How has the art you've studied impacted your poetry, and vice versa?

A: The vice versa is everything in this matter. As I write an essay about an artist's work I will also be spinning off poems based on the images, or sometimes I start with poems and when these are more or less done, I feel the need to write an essay to clarify concepts which the poems can't accommodate. They are complementary approaches to the issue of intersubjectivity, only the other subjective realm before me is already present through images and tropes as a work of art. It is not, in other words, another person whose inner life I must intend. When dealing with paintings as a poet, I must create another work of art capable of being had, as a dream is had, as a painting is had and not just seen, independently of the painting which triggered it. That is one reason I have chosen to write poems based on works by Latin American artists who are largely unknown in the US. I am obviously very familiar with these works and the traditions that inform them, but their anonymity to the poetry reader presents a greater challenge than writing poems about famous European or North American artists. It also enables the reader to intend the poem rather than the poem-painting duality.

Q: In what way do you see the artist as being different from non-artists?

A: If we're talking here about the genuine artist, rather than the careerists who have come to dominate all aspects of cultural life in the developed world, then the artist is different in countless ways. The artist is, he doesn't do. That is, art is a complete giving over of oneself to what one creates. Yet the artist's life, whatever images it may provide, is of little consequence to the work itself. He cannot inhabit his art, for that dwelling privilege belongs to those who come to his art, who wish to have this art in their minds. It is the height of rudeness for the artist to be seen still in his art when someone else is trying to move into that house. This doesn't mean at all that the poet cannot use his own experiences and memories, only that they must be used to serve the general theater of transmission involved in someone else having the poem.

Paradoxically, only the artist can sustain his identity as public force, for his public may not be his contemporaries. There is a great deal to be said for the old system in which artists very consciously worked to change the way the future saw its present and its past, and not working so much to obtain prestige and accolades in the artist's lifetime. Ironically, artists have continued to pursue the old dependencies on patrons, although these come in the form of academic positions or other forms of support from politically defined groups, invariably of the Left. This has produced a monstrous careerist artist type in our time--the opportunist who pretends to be an independently minded professional but who will do whatever, say whatever to secure the support of his patrons. The result is a careerist who justifies his utter lack of political ethics, who disdains the masses he often pretends to speak up for, and who will quickly align himself with fashionable tyrannies while denouncing only what his faction decides is worthy of denunciation. It is precisely in the realm of civic behavior and ethics where the artist is no different from anyone else, yet it is in this realm where it has become acceptable for artists in our time to differ most radically from other people.

Q: Are you a bitter man?

A: I am not whining, if that's what you mean. I don't whine. I denounce.

Q: Can you expound on what you mean by theater, a word you have used often in this conversation and, I feel, means various things to you?

A: I have used that word to describe Latin American visual thinking, particularly the refusal of this tradition to look at representation in negative terms, as occurred in the North, for example, and in many different schools and movements in European modernism. Modernism, or as it is called in Latin America la vanguardia, sought to broaden the power of representation in painting, not bracket it. The result is a modernism whose paintings are theatrical in that they consciously put images in play, in action among themselves, borrowing from plot and narrative a reverberative sense of meaning, but not really telling a story as it were--something pretty hard to with painting, as Diego Rivera's obtuse murals evidence. Theater, then, denotes a cognizant ambition of the work of art to dramatize ideas. It is most salient in painting, that of Latin America especially, because of how different this makes it from parallel movements elsewhere in the West. But it is a reality also in all poetry where the break with representation did not occur except in the curiously named LANGUAGE experimenters whom I don't think of as poets. They're retro-Dada and remind me of many so-called conceptual visual artists who have no concepts. Still, North American poets are not great at embracing the theater of the poem, the sense that you can inhabit the poem, that it gives you a habitat for mind, senses, imagination, and memory. Latin American art gave me that sense, that need in the poem. That, and not the triggering or inspiration a painting might provide as a launching pad for a poem, is the most important lesson I have taken from the world of the visual arts, as a poet.

Q: I would like you to conclude with comments on what comes after The Mastery Impulse and on where the art criticism is taking you.

A: The art writing is always going on. I've just finished a long essay that will be coming out in a book on Nicolás Leiva, and have several articles coming out in art magazines. I am nearing completion of a collection of poems, written in both Spanish and English, which I've begun to publish pieces of in magazines. It is titled Crab and it consists of short poems set on a beach whose protagonist--there's the theater metaphor again--is a crab. These poems began in Spanish, which is the first time since I was a teenager that I've written poems in my native language, although I have written many articles in Spanish, lectured, etc. Then I translated some of them into English, then wrote others in English and translated those into Spanish. At some point, and this happens when you are translating your own work, you really are writing in both language at once, or with awareness of both simultaneously as you are making corrections that reverberate from one tongue to the other. I am also working on a collection of poems which I am dedicating to my wife, Morella, a wonderful venezolana who has connected me to nature and living in all sorts of new ways. Left to my own impulses, I'd never leave the city. She's taken me into the high Andes, the Amazons, virgin beaches in the Caribbean, into deserts and jungles. I who dread heights, who cannot climb past the second rung on a ladder, have walked cheerfully through waterfalls behind her in Canaima in the Amazons. As an art collector of many years, she's also taught me a thing or two about appreciating art, and of course everything about love, kindness, and patience. I follow her studiously in all the things that matter about living, and I've come to see that attitude as the only certain sign of love.

Q: What does your wife Morella make of your work, especially the new poems in which she figures?

A: She puts up with my cigars, and smokes one herself every now and then.

Alberto Milián, an attorney and journalist, hosts a daily news talk radio show in Miami on WKAT-AM.

Forwarded to me by the ILS Archivist: Tracy Grimm

2009-06-05T10:42:00.002-05:00

One of the things I've really come to appreciate and value since becoming an employee of the ILS is the idea of preservation. That is: saving for posterity all forms of documentation (art, objects, correspondence, etc etc) that will allow future generations to know our stories....

Immigration files to become part of National Archives

The 'A-files' include interview transcripts, health records, photographs, marriage licenses and recordings. The first batch will include 135,000 people born before 1909 and who arrived after 1900.

By Anna Gorman
June 4, 2009

Historical government files that chronicle the lives of immigrants in the U.S. will become part of the National Archives instead of being destroyed, officials announced Wednesday.  The files could reveal the untold stories of millions of immigrants, including scores of Jews who fled Europe after World War II and Chinese who came to the U.S. as part of the diaspora. The "alien registration files," or A-files, document both legal and illegal immigrants' interaction with the government through registration forms, interview transcripts, health records, photographs, marriage licenses and recordings.   

"The files are incredibly rich," said Cynthia Fox, a deputy director at the National Archives. "These will allow people to trace back to place of birth where their family actually originated. . . . This will be their whole story, not just a piece of their story."   

On Wednesday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began transferring the documents for preservation by archivists during a signing ceremony at the National Archives in Washington. The immigration agency maintains about 53 million A-files and will transfer them beginning 100 years after an individual's birth date.  

The first group to be archived is composed of 135,000 people who were born before 1909 and arrived after 1900, including Spanish painter Salvador Dali and French performer Maurice Chevalier. The first files are expected to be available to the public starting next summer.  

In the past, A-files were considered "temporary records" and could have been discarded 75 years from the date of last action. Now, they will become permanent records to be housed in either San Bruno, Calif., or Kansas City, Mo.  

The A-files, which began in 1944, may include registration forms with a person's name, address, physical description, employer, where and when they arrived, and whether they came as a passenger, crew member or a stowaway. They may also include transcripts from deportation proceedings, tapes from interviews and affidavits from neighbors.   

"Individually, A-files represent the story of one immigrant," said Gregory B. Smith, associate director of the citizenship agency. "But as a collection, they document the story of American immigration from the mid-20th into the 21st century."  

Smith said the files showed how the government interacted with Japanese in internment camps, Chinese who adjusted their immigration status after the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed and people who petitioned for their relatives under the Immigration Act of 1924.  

UC Davis immigration law professor Bill O. Hing said he thought the files of his parents, who immigrated from China, would be among the first to be transferred into the archives. He tracked down the files years ago and read about how his parents entered the U.S., including the transcript of an interview where his father was caught in a lie.  

Hing said the files were a great opportunity for historians and people interested in immigration policy.  "

It really gives you rich details as to how the laws were implemented and some of the unintended consequences," he said. "Because you can actually see the faces of the people who are actually affected by the laws, it makes a difference."  

The New Yorker: Ada Limón

2009-06-03T22:11:00.006-05:00

The double issue (June 8th & 15th) of The New Yorker, the Summer Fiction Issue, is out. One of the articles that's been getting some attention on the web is Louis Menand's "A Critic At Large" piece titled, "Can you teach creative writing?" There's also a piece on Sonia Sotomayor in "The Talk of the Town."

BUT what really caught my attention, and which delighted me, was to see that PALABRA PURA alum, Ada Limón, has published a poem in The New Yorker---one called "Crush."

Congratulations, Ada!

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

2009-05-28T20:07:00.015-05:00

Photo essay courtesy of Rich and Carolina and Pablo

Johanny Vázquez Paz
poet, long-standing MC of Palabra Pura

el público en Decima Musa

Rosa Alcalá

Kevin A. González

Carolina Monsivais

Paul Martínez Pompa and Rosa Alcalá

Hugh Schwartzberg* and Kevin

The Talent

*Hugh is a beloved fixture in Chicago's poetry scene, and has been video recording poetry readings in Chicago for over thirty years.

Latino Poetry Review (LPR): número dos.

2009-05-27T14:31:00.001-05:00

Latino Poetry Review
number 2
Spring 2009

Bienvenidos Sonia Sotomayor

2009-05-26T09:09:00.007-05:00

America

understand

once and for all:

...

our faces
reflect
your future

Francisco X. Alarcón

from "Letter to America"

Chicago Dispatch on behalf of SALT

2009-05-20T11:55:00.006-05:00

Something is unfolding in one corner of the poetry world, on the web, today.

I was over at Facebook, and noticed that the director of Salt Publishing was making an appeal (see below).

Last fall I was in Cambridge, England for a week and was impressed, while browsing in a bookshop, by the quite handsomely produced hard cover titles Salt produces.

I know them mostly through the John Matthias and John Tranter titles I've acquired over the years and, more recently, John Wilkinson. They also published fellow Macondista Deborah Miranda in their indigenous series.

Having said that, I sometimes wonder about the wisdom of publishing the sheer number of titles that they do---which is why it will be interesting to see if they manage to overcome their current financial challenges.

But I'm rooting for them. The poetry scene is a more interesting place with them in it. They also seem to be on the cutting edge of finding new ways to use technology to promote their titles. Check out their relatively new "Virtual Rep" initiative on their website.

So, if you feel so inclined, lend them a hand. I can't think of another publisher as ambitious as them, where world poetry in English is concerned. What they're asking is pretty modest. I ordered a title by an Irish poet, Chris Agee.

"Saving Salt Publishing: Just One Book
Today at 10:56am

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we've £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

Here's how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds of authors around the world.

JUST ONE BOOK

1.
Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

2.
Share this note on your profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

With my best wishes to everyone
Chris
Director
Salt Publishing
http://www.saltpublishing.com"

President Obama at Notre Dame

2009-05-17T22:17:00.008-05:00

Watch it HERE

NEWS THAT SPEAKS FOR ITSELF & SENDS A MESSAGE

2009-05-16T10:26:00.005-05:00

2009 graduates honor Father Jenkins with Senior Class Fellow award

by Dennis Brown

The University of Notre Dame’s Class of 2009 has selected Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., the University’s president, as the Senior Class Fellow. Voted on by seniors, the award is an “accolade traditionally given to a member of the Notre Dame community who has had a significant impact on the graduating class,” according to W. Joseph Brown, senior class president.

“I can think of few honors that would mean more to me, and I am deeply moved by this award,” Father Jenkins said. “I feel especially close to these seniors since they enrolled at Notre Dame (in 2005) at the same time I began my presidency.”  The award was presented to Father Jenkins on Thursday night (May 14) during the seniors’ traditional last visit to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes on campus.

One of Father Jenkins’ presidential predecessors, Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., is among the past recipients of the Senior Class Fellow award. Father Jenkins was elected president April 30, 2004, by the University’s Board of Trustees. He took office as Notre Dame’s 17th president July 1, 2005. A professor of philosophy and member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1990, Father Jenkins served from July 2000 until his election as president as a vice president and associate provost at the University. Prior to his service in the provost’s office, he had been religious superior of the Holy Cross priests and brothers at Notre Dame for three years. Father Jenkins was ordained a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in 1983. He served as director of the Old College program for Notre Dame undergraduate candidates for the congregation from 1991 to 1993.

*

---Eve of President Barack Obama's commencement address at the University of Notre Dame

A RECENT ONLINE ROUNDTABLE: Poetry Book Reviews

2009-05-13T15:51:00.009-05:00

Travis Nichols over at the Poetry Foundation, a few days ago, published a post about an online roundtable discussion (titled "Some Darker Bouquets") that was prompted by a recent essay at Poetry Magazine by Jason Guriel about the dearth of (and need for more) negative reviews, and by Kent Johnson’s response to that essay: another essay in which he makes an argument for bringing back anonymous reviews.

As I prepare to write my "Editor's Note" for Latino Poetry Review #2, I took the time to go to the online journal in question—it’s called May Day—that commissioned this roundtable. Over a few days I read all of the contributions of the roundtable—all thirty two of them. What I found myself doing, as I was reading, was cutting and pasting excerpts that I found useful onto a blank WORD document for future reference. And I found myself identifying the authors of the various excerpts I was saving. There was one response I enjoyed so much that I cut and pasted the whole thing.

My plan was to offer my findings here. In the end, though, in the spirit of what was proposed---more anonymity---I offer them below without attribution. The one I quote in its entirety includes its title, in bold face. If you’re interested in reading the entire roundtable (and maybe match excerpts with authors), go HERE.

Here they are:

There is no more value to a mere expression of praise than there is to a mere expression of blame, except insofar as these expressions might help us climb the ladder of the poetry world, or throw some other people off it. The relevant distinction we should make as readers of criticism is between reviews that are willing to make arguments and reviews that are only willing to make assertions. This is the difference between a good review and a bad one.

***

Silence = death for all writers, so a blast in print may be more useful than no response at all.

We DO need to have a culture where the issues of review & reflection are robust & we are engaging with work which leaves us unmoved or angry. We also need to be able to do this with some kind of generosity of intention & knowledge of where this lies in a larger human context. I think we can do this through right intention & seeing all of our writings as a serious form of play.

A good negative review, I think, should at least provide the author in question with some hard questions & the possibility of some options.

I don’t think it is a question of whether passionate / critical discourse should take place—of course it should—but how it should take place.

***

But one problem with provocation is that its traffic in hyperbole and empty generalizations often makes it inimical to intelligence. Controversy is not always a synonym for debate, and when provocation is done poorly it ends up sounding like a bad Slate article.

To my mind the most underrated way to avoid dullness is to make intelligent, instructive arguments: about goodness, yes, but also about how poems work and why they are (or are not) important.

The need for this kind of poetry reviewing would seem to be obvious, since poems (good ones, anyway) don’t surrender their secrets at first touch. But major print outlets seem much more interested in finding instructive reviews of fiction than they do of poetry.

***

There’s no reason why those disenchanted with the state of poetry criticism can’t start their own reviews. Yes, the going will be tough and the rewards initially small, but who ever became a poet to take the easy road? Moreover, if the last few years have demonstrated anything beyond the overwhelming absurdity of market capitalism, they have demonstrated that there is a large and hungry audience waiting for just such publications. Create them and they will be read.

***

I think this practice would encourage reviewers to be more honest and, more specifically, to take the reader’s side. As Kent points out, most reviewers at the moment are poets and, as such, are not really acting in the interest of a poetry reader’s needs and point of view. Since their names are involved, they are most likely acting in their own interest, as poets making a career. Anonymous reviewers could be more honest and, I hope, would be more likely to take on the responsibility of standing in for the reader rather than for po-biz. The reader would benefit, and poetry would benefit.

***

I’ve always been more interested in reviewing works that I find interesting rather than pummeling those that I don’t, although I enjoy a carefully written disemboweling as much as the next person.

***

Possible and Impossible Truths About Reviewing

Snottiness, contempt, unfairness, mockery, drollery, cruel wit: These are signs of vigor. So is generosity.

Vigor in art creates vigor in criticism, not the other way around.

Of course there should be negative reviewing.

Anonymous reviews may be entertaining, but seem unlikely to be useful. We may enjoy seeing poems we loathe (or poets more successful than ourselves) savaged, but how many of us really take seriously the anonymous reviews at Amazon?

Kent says editors would need to be responsible for holding anonymous reviewers to certain fairness guidelines. When have editors ever been nobler, or fairer, than the rest of us?
When a certain film critic for a Philadelphia publication says a movie isn’t funny, I know I will find it hilarious. When she finds a movie poignant, I know I will find it revolting. If she and her fellow reviewers for this publication wrote anonymously, I could no longer rely on her unreliability.

Critics who are consistently wrong are the most useful critics.

I don’t mind other people writing anonymous reviews. But I think I wouldn’t do it myself.
Maybe I would. If you paid me enough. I review for money and to engage deeply with work that interests me. But if someone likes my reviewing, positive or negative, maybe they’ll look up my poems. Therefore, for selfish reasons, I’d rather put my name to my reviews.

The important thing is to quote enough of the work so the reader can figure out if she likes what she reads. One of the worst reviews I ever got, from someone who really hated my work, quoted a huge amount of my poetry, so I felt I had been done a favor.

Even a negative review is better than damning with inept praise.

Irrelevant aside: Any review that uses the words “well-honed,” “well-crafted,” “wordsmith” or (usually) “verse,” is not to be trusted.

Many negative reviews incorrectly identify a book’s weaknesses, just as many positive reviews incorrectly identify a book’s strengths. Most people have no idea why they really like or dislike a poem, and some of those people write reviews.

Negativity in reviewing is no guarantee of reliability. A negative review may be reverse puffery to get in good with the other school. Other ways negative reviews can be irresponsible:

Blaming the poet for not writing the way the reviewer would have.

Blaming the poet for not fitting in with the overarching theme the reviewer developed in desperation as her deadline approached.

Blaming the poet for his blurbs, connections, prizes, popularity or media attention.

Nitpicking the poet on minor points of syntax or lineation when it’s clearly the poet’s politics that put the reviewer off.

One-liners designed to show off the reviewer’s cleverness are welcome, provided the reviewer is truly clever.

Often the reviewer is not all that clever.

Would even clever one-liners be pleasurable if delivered anonymously? Consider initials in old-fashioned newspaper gossip columns. Would anyone have cared that X was sleeping with her chauffeur and Y was seen lurking out of an opium den if they didn’t know exactly who X and Y were?

How often do you read negative reviews out of pure shadenfreude?

Me too.

Not being a poet does not prevent a reviewer from being wrong-headed, biased or just plain stupid about poetry. Neither does being a poet.

Excessive, continuous and repetitive lack of enthusiasm renders the reviewer unreliable.
Puffery kills the puffer’s, not the puffee’s, soul. Actually, maybe it kills the puffee’s too.
It’s probably best to be generous with, or else ignore, poets’ first books. There’s no point in telling people not to read what they weren’t going to read anyway.

Famous poets are fair game. As are critics who write poetry. And poets who write criticism.
Samuel Johnson: “No man rises to such a height as to become conspicuous, but he is on one side censure by undiscerning malice, which reproaches him for his best actions, and slanders his apparent and incontestable excellences; and idolized on the other by ignorant admiration, which exalts his faults and follies into virtues.”

The crimes of poets worth reviewing are generally the same things that make those poets worth reading. Few contemporary reviewers realize this.

Poets who receive negative reviews should toughen up. Either the reviewer is right, or she’s an idiot. Either way you learn something.

Friends of poets who receive negative reviews, who write in protesting the negative review, seldom do the poet any favors. Usually they end up repeating, unintentionally or not, the charges against the poet, without successfully refuting them.

We don’t need a lot of daring critics. We need daring critics.

Daring Critic: More or less of an oxymoron than Daring Poet?

Anything that gets people talking is good.

All assertions are to be met with suspicion, or why are you even in this game?

How often do you see a letter to the editor about a positive review?

***

There are now tons of different ways of getting one’s work into print and circulation. However, it seems the criticism has lagged behind. Brilliant work lingers in utter obscurity because it’s hard to get the word out there and if one manages to get a review it most likely will either be blandly praised (and thus defused) or criticized. But most likely it will just be ignored. The result? The same old hierarchies persist. People end up reading books published by University of California Press because they publish fancy looking books and they’re a university press, they have the old-fashioned caché.

***

What I have in mind is not hit-and-run criticism that relies on hostile generalizations and tiny out-of-context quotations, but conscientiously substantive, argumentative criticism.

***

What one sees in lieu of broader considerations is (mostly) balkanization into bold little republics and self-promoting fiefdoms, a happenstance exacerbated by ex cathedra tribal (elder) railings, divisive pronunciamentos labeling (and dismissing) various “camps,” slights made repeatedly by those unable or unwilling to read beyond their own provincialisms.

***

As a reader and as an editor, I want mostly to know that a reviewer has taken time and care with the art under consideration. If it deserves derision, I want that cut with something more interesting than mere wit—I want to be reminded of what’s at stake. And if it deserves praise let’s indeed get beyond the blurb-friendly milk of human kindness, and begin the hard work of excavating a space to consider why significant new work truly matters.
In calling for “more enigmatic” bouquets to be thrown at every new bride of a book, Johnson speaks closest to my desire that reviewing go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down binary and say something that causes one to think.

***

Poetry criticism can similarly bring the news from Poetry Land to those who will never buy and rarely read a book of new poems; there’s an important place for essays which chart the terrain, inform an otherwise uninterested readership about the ranges of poetries being written, published, translated, and not-yet-written in/into English. Not everything need be an agôn of praise and blame; criticism can also be pedagogical.

***

What a review should be is critical; that is, it should view the work at an arm's length, identify its formal and cultural logics, understand them, and evaluate them plainly and clearly while also acknowledging one's own biases.

***

And I’ve always favored harsh reviewing over its cousin, the practice of simply avoiding what one doesn’t like and praising what one does. In theory (and for a few talented critics, in practice) this latter approach is a way of sorting out the good from bad without resorting to deliberate unkindness. But it can have unfortunate consequences. It can overstate poetry’s weakness and criticism’s strength. It can also lead to a culture of condescending silence, in which writers aren’t challenged to their faces, but dismissed behind their backs. So I prefer harsh reviewing; it keeps us all reasonably honest. But – and this is my reservation – it’s not to be engaged in lightly. As Clive James once wrote, using “someone else’s mediocrity as an opportunity to be outstanding … is getting pretty close to malice, for all its glittering disguise as selfless duty.” It is, at least in my experience, a chastening and useful thing to know that your name will be attached to whatever you write.

***

I ask myself what I mean to do when I review a book and the answer is this: I mean to enmesh myself in the poems, to learn as much as I can about how to read them and, if I enjoyed the experience sufficiently, to recommend others learn how as well.

In other words, the standards that inform our decisions about the aesthetic value of a poem rely on highly particularized experience. But what matters is that we, as reviewers, can draw together the specifics of our perceptions of a verse with enough cogency and skill to convince a reader that the poem under consideration is worth experiencing (or not) for herself.

*

I think we must view contemporary poetry reviewing practices with suspicion, but then the question for me becomes: where do we put our trust? And my answer is: where it always should have been: in valid, persuasive argument.

***

What I miss are not negative reviews, but what I guess I have to call—although I know it sounds kind of boring—judicious ones. Where is the critic who understands the value of the work of, say, Clark Coolidge, but can explain the difference between a great work by Coolidge and just an average one?

***

Many people apparently think that criticism and reviews are the same thing, but I don’t: I’d call Craig Morgan Teicher a reviewer and Herb Leibowitz a critic. Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and New Pages publish book reviews; New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Essays in Criticism publish criticism. One isn’t better than the other, but they’re different.

For the most part, critical writing has been outpaced by the kind of prose that goes up on blogs, and by the daily-dish chatter that gets vacuumed into interviews, memes, and other instruments of the intellectual shortcut. I love blogs, tweets, and my Facebook friends, myself, and don’t want to return to the musty uncut pages of the past. But if the age doesn’t demand excellence in criticism and reviews then heck, there won’t be any. And that excellence requires the skills, finely honed, of having, documenting, and articulating an opinion - positive or negative.

***

A call for “necessarily skeptical” reviews sidesteps the issue of what makes for the best reviews: that they are informed, descriptive, substantive, insightful, and make plain the values of the reviewed text and the values of the reviewer. I read reviews to decide whether to read a book. I like reviews best that describe a book accurately, whatever the reviewer thinks of it.

Still, informed insiders can often be insightful, certainly more than hostile outside reviewers who are ignorant (perhaps willfully) of a text’s methods or intent.

***

fin