A guest post by Rosebud Ben-Oni
This past March, I shared my current reading list with Poetry Magazine; later, I realized just how many Latina/o authors dominated my list: J. Michael Martinez, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Carmen Giménez Smith, Ruben Quesada, Cecilia Llompart and Roberto Montes. I did not intentionally plan this, and yet it is somewhat of a victory, even if an unconscious one.
During my university days, Latina/o authors and poets were largely relegated to elective courses, with some Richard Rodriguez prose thrown in, perhaps a translation of a Pablo Neruda ode. This is not to say I’m not grateful for discovering poets like Guillaume Apollinaire and Nazim Hikmet, whom I cherish; what I mean is that my students days were, unfortunately, the pre-Eduardo C. Corral “Slow Lightning” years.
Over the years I continued to read work by Deborah Paredez, Norma E. Cantú, and Rigoberto González, to name a few, but I read these in solitude, just as I had in university. I didn’t really understand the idea of a Latina/o poetry community until 2013 when I applied to CantoMundo, an organization dedicated to fostering the growth of Latina/o poets. Since then, I’ve spent the past two summers at our fellowship retreat at the University of Texas at Austin bonding with Latina/o poets, discussing poetics and writing new work. In less than 3 years, this bond has proved most fruitful: I’ve curated conversations on Poetics, Identity & Latindad for The Conversant (and published here in full by Essay Press), and guest-edited a feature for Luna Luna Magazine featuring 30 Latina/o Poets in 30 Days. The goal is to promote new Latina/o literature and reach a wide audience— especially students whom might not know that Latina/o poetry and literature is thriving, regardless of what is taught in academia (though this is changing for the better).
This is my last retreat year as a CantoMundo fellow. I’ve been thinking about how much the new work of Latina/o authors like Loma (Christopher Soto), Wendy C. Ortiz and elena minor has meant to me over the last few years; then there’s Francisco Aragón, an incredible poet in his own right, spotlighting Latina/o poets (especially new voices) at Letras Latinas at the University of Norte Dame. As I “graduate” from the program this summer, I wanted to ask fellow CantoMundo poets to share their own influences. Here is a taste of contemporary books by Latina/o authors that have made an impact us. Please let us what Latina/o poets and authors have influenced you in the comments below.
Javier Zamora
The love of reading and writing came later than most for me, primarily because of the now redundant, “I didn’t see myself in the books I was given:” me, Salvadoran, me, immigrant, me, a teenage Latino male who liked to get drunk way too much and not yet question his patriarchy. So of course I gravitated to Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta. Autobiography’s speaker is tired of his life as an attorney that handles the fucked-up cases of “minorities,” leaves his job, and gets high and drunk with his white friend, Hunter S. Thompson.
In the drug-fueled road-trip from San Francisco to Mexico, the speaker arrives at his chicano identity: he realizes that even though he was born in the US, he doesn’t belong there, but also doesn’t belong in his parent’s land of México. In Revolt, the speaker (and real-life author) becomes the lawyer for the 1970 Chicano Moratorium. Both of these novels revealed the duality of feeling “othered” in this country, and also the “othering” done by my family and friends in El Salvador; I was now more Americanized and less Salvadoran.
Due to the in-class discussions about the protagonist’s machismo—like most men in the Chicano movement—I began to question my own machismo, though that has taken longer to actively question and actively shed. In the same course, we ended with Sandra Cisnero’s Loose Woman and Anzaldua’s Borderlands. Both of these books challenged my straight cis-male privilege and what it means to carry a border within my own identity. Anzaldua and Cisneros gave me the freedom to question my culture’s and other culture’s own prejudices about race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Carolina Ebeid
I perpetually have trouble identifying the works that have stamped their influence upon my imagination. In my heart of hearts, perhaps, I believe to talk about them is to reveal secrets—-like a magician telling the how of her tricks. “Influence” is such a wide, roiling word. I can make it smaller somehow if I focus on the three years I was at the Michener Center. What work was I reading while I drafted the poems of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior—my own first book?
The books of three contemporary Latino poets were always near me. The first was Cynthia Cruz’s The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012). I’ve been reading her poems since we first met in Lucie Brock-Broido’s workshop in the late 90’s. When I think my poem has become too mannered, too beautiful or spiritless, I turn to Cruz’s work where I find the ferocity of adolescence, and a kind of philia & phobia of the strange, the dirty. Her work incorporates Scripture, political philosophy, film, postminimalist art, autobiography in search of mystical-real life: “My brother stands / Before me // Reading the Gospel of Mark / From inside the bare palm of his hand.” I’m in search of something like that.
J. Michael Martinez’s first book Heredities (Louisiana State University Press, 2010) demonstrates for me how to compose a collection, that a book can be carefully composed; his becomes a thick tapestry on my lap. The work stitches together prose, verse, marginalia, anatomical drawings, OED entries, all of it surveying a painful but beautiful history that is both personal and ancestral.
Anthony Madrid’s poems had a similar wilding effect on me. His book I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium Books, 2012) teaches me how a poem can be made of beginnings, of swerves & manic voltas, an associative swinging forward. He renovates the ghazal form with its conventional use of the poet’s name in the final strophe, which Madrid uses not for self-aggrandizing, but to chide and heckle the brilliant poet that he is.
Yesenia Montilla
What I find most striking about Latin@ literature of the last 15 years is how it has ascended to a place of fearlessness while simultaneously descending into the body and showing how these bodies navigate the world. Junot Diaz’ s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao really turned my entire perception of “American” writing on its head. The great American novel became palpable and relatable, its prose unafraid of speaking the unspeakable and of loving a culture so deeply that the critiquing of it was the only way to truly worship it. Aracelis Girmay’s Teeth reminds me to face the horrors of the world, to live in those ugly and violent spaces. It reminds me that facing these horrors that we bring upon one another and acknowledging them is its own act of rebellion. Girmay’s writing tethered me to a sense of place and belonging. When I meditate on brown bodies and how they are continuously challenged in America, how the microaggressions that we suffer are re-lived horrors, how our body processes the pain through millions of cells that remember conquistadors and enslavement, I think of Laurie Ann Guerrero’s A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying. I think of how complex, how tightly woven and how powerful her work is. I can’t walk away without discussing Slow Lightning by Eduardo Corral, how it made me bravest because it dared me to put my language first, to stop italicizing my Taino, Yoruba and Spanish words, to never do that, not even when dreaming. The Pink Box my first collection due out this Fall tries so hard to pay homage to these writers and so many others that I did not mention here but who have built me up and shaped me into this body and this fearlessness, and for all of them I’ll be eternally grateful.
Ruben Quesada
When I think of the present and future of Latina/o poetry, I turn to the extant ideas of poetry that have forged the social function of poetry. I look to the ideas of mimesis and decorum to find the resiliency of poetic composition that will outlast us all. To voice one’s view of the world is as necessary as for an audience to see people and experiences like their own represented genuinely and with accuracy. Over the last fifteen years Latina/o poetry has become more heterogeneous. Latina/o poetry of the 21st century has shown me that there are singular voices within the moniker of the Latina/o identity.
It is important to remind myself to ask if the poetry I read is saying anything important about being alive. I don’t mean to ask the seemingly reductive question, what does your story tell us about the human experience that we haven’t already heard? But more importantly what is this poet saying that enables the reader to understand, fully, what it means to be alive? What does it mean to be Latina/o?
Latina/o poetry reveals the nuances of being Latina/o and it is these differences that make it the most diverse type of poetry in America. Latina/o poetry encompasses not a singular narrative or objective view of the human experience. It is a rich and subjective representation of people within the varied Latina/o community; take the work of J. Michael Martinez, Carmen Giménez Smith, Juan J. Morales, Ada Limon, Blas Falconer, Cynthia Cruz, Dan Vera, Jen Hofer, or Tomás Q. Morín to name a few. Poets like these have shown me a visible landscape of identities that include representative cultures throughout Central/South America, and the Caribbean. I’ve learned that I can belong to a greater community while maintaining my own sense of identity.
Amy Sayre Baptista
The influence of Latin@ writers on my work was in part the rhythmic sensation, to borrow a culinary term, the mouthfeel. The combination of languages, and sentence structure vastly different from the white male writers taught in public school. When I think about who influenced me as a poet, fiction comes to mind. Reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and his short stories, particularly, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”, opened a new way of seeing what writing could be. Katherine Vaz’s Saudade was seminal because as a Portuguese-American in the Midwest, I often felt as if all our writers were from a faraway time. When Vaz published Mariana, that was a pathway connecting me to our culture, history, and myths that I was starving for. Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros offered a tongue of multiple languages, and taught me that a world I create is mine by right. I came to Lorna Dee Cervantes work by stealing her poem “Love of My Flesh, Living Death,” off a professor’s door and getting caught. He loaned me From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger. This book gave me the courage to write about body, and turn loose a kind of sacred rage in a poem. Lastly, Os Cus de Judas, retitled, The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes and his Return of the Caravels. Here is a wilderness between covers; poetry grown wild inside prose. I come back to all of these writers over and over, their influence is continual.
José Angel Araguz
Books Written in the Twenty-first Century by Latina/o Poets That Have Made Me Braver
Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Elegies In Blue: Written early at the turn of the century, this book stands as a living elegy for both the century that’s passed and the century that continues to grow in the echo of Sáenz’s words: “Perhaps, this year, a harvest for the poor./At last. This year. A harvest for the poor.”
Rosa Alcalá, Undocumentaries: In “Speaking of the Tree,” Alcalá brings together tree mythology, her father, hurricanes, German walds, the Texas/Mexico border, Vermont, etc. – all in a poem whose meaning keeps growing like a tree in both directions, skyward and earthward. Its song and lament holds praise for the lives touched by trees, and a lament for what passes across them. In this collection, this kind of lyrical nerve and ingenuity establishes a poetics of what goes unsaid and “undocumented.”
Rigoberto González, Red-Inked Retablos: I can’t stress enough how powerful the impact of reading the speech “To the Writer, to the Activist, to the Citizen.” From the call for Latina/os to fight with intelligence and be empowered in our public presence as well as to conduct more literary criticism, stressing that we must “generate praise for those who are [our] colleagues not [our] competition,” he makes being a Chicano writer seem like the inevitable beat of my heart.
Carmen Giménez Smith, Milk and Filth: Lastly, I keep this following excerpt from “Parts of an Autobiography” written on the first page of my writing journal as a kind of reminder of what is at stake in navigating the worlds of identity and poetry:
53. The writing is not the catharsis. The decision to excavate is the catharsis. The transformation from dreadfulness to art is the catharsis, but the art is the art.