On June 22 & 23, CantoMundo, a fellowship organization dedicated to Latinx poetry and poetics, will hold its public readings at Barnard College. (Here’s more information on attending the event). I’ve written many times, especially on this platform, about how CantoMundo changed not only my writing, but also gave me happiness in writing, which I’d lost during graduate school. I look at the poems and prose I’m writing now, the kind of risks I’m taking, the elation in experimentation, and can trace back quite clearly just where this began, at a CantoMundo retreat.
I also engage in poetry with an even greater passion than I’ve ever had before, a passion I lost in my MFA program and a few subsequent years following it. I’ve learned most of all that gratitude is a practice and a continuous giving-back. It’s sharing spaces, new work, joys, obsessions, frustrations with others you always want to know, keep knowing, letting them know you are thinking of them even when you are not present in one way or another.
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Lately, I’ve been thinking about the two very different writing traditions from which my writing stems: one filled with solitude and long days of deciphering Hebrew text with a father who answered my questions with his own questions, rarely reaching a clear answer, getting further tangled in a single Hebrew letter’s numerical value, followed by long periods of silence as we quietly read side by side; and another tradition in which the stories of my mother’s family were passed down through tongue, forever changing, forever communal, forever a conversation, heated argument, unfolding secret, as one great aunt explained just how my maternal grandmother escaped from her family in San Nicolas de la Garza, a small farming town in Northern Mexico, while one of her sisters had a completely different memory of the events.
Both traditions, in their own ways, are a form of language-making and language sharing, a continuation of familial and cultural history, a growing and growing-up with prayer-giving and prayer-receiving. I have been both uncomfortable in these spaces and right at home; I am of them, while not quite belonging to each one completely. I’ve learned to accept this– to revel in this sort of realized free-floating space, actually.
And this is how I write: both present in the moment and away; multi-storied while investigating a single word’s intention, origin, placement; needing both solitude and community, needing my own kinds of spaces while looking to make room for others.
After CantoMundo, I learned that this kind of work itself— how one writes and in what kind of (head)space(s)— is never really finished. It too is a process, changing according to the times, to political outrages and social movements, to keeping alive historical memories that, if forgotten, would whitewash whatever advances and strides were made by a people, a language, a single soul who took action to make change.
I’m always thinking of this space here at The Kenyon Review in particular.
Some of my fellow CantoMundo poets shared with me recent new work, interviews, book due date announcements and more– their own work as well as the work and news of other CantoMundo poets– and I’m sharing it with you here. For those poets on Twitter, I’ve linked their accounts (click on their names) so you can follow them and read more of their work. I’ve said it once before, but our time here on earth is short as each moment is fleeting. Poetry is where I’d rather attune my own personal clocks to. While it will be three years since graduating from CantoMundo, I’m forever grateful for that that space lives on for other Latinx poets to find themselves as much as community, in all the ways one chooses to define, create and celebrate it.
-Rosebud Ben-Oni
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Got poems (and prose)? Jasminne Mendez, who is now an editor at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, is looking new work on the theme of “Where Are the Children.” (See the submission call here.) Mendez also has three award-winning poems, selected by poet Major Jackson, in COG: “Run, Irelia, Run,” “Return to Water,” and “Bounty.” Read them here, and her new essay “The Burden of Teachable Moments” over at The Rumpus.
“Roll out my ligaments, unwrinkled fibrous tissue, party ready.” Suzi F. Garcia writes in her explosive-sensory poem “Self-Medicating I.” Read the rest, along with her other new poem “Lodestar,” here in Nat. Brut.
“One morning the spirit of my lover’s uncle returned,” begins Ruben Quesada in his haunting new poem “XI”, “there was no fanfare no terror only a blue silhouette.” Check out the poem in full here at POETS.org (with audio).
Carolina Ebeid has two new poems over at The Rumpus, “The Terrible Years” and “Night Became a Long Volta”, the latter of which is a favorite of mine because of how Ebeid enchants with such short, striking lines, as well as a new poem “Weight” in BOAAT and “What Hereafter’s Life” in The American Poetry Review.
Over at Gold Wake Live, Octavio Quintanilla has a fascinating illustrated, handwritten poem “Cuervo” (with translation beneath) that investigates erasure and space in history and language. Read it here.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal has an incredible new video poem “Exercise in the Face of Divorceafter David Campos” in The Rumpus. “On our old coast,” Villarreal reflects, “the hurricane drowns our hometown, drowns/the islands. Our lives flood with disaster, and rich men abuse of their power./ Everything is trying to kill me, and I have to survive you/now too.”
J. Michael Martinez‘s newest collection, Museum of the Americas, selected by Cornelius Eady as the Winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, is available for pre-order.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is teaching a contemporary poetry class this fall at Ashland University’s two-year low-residency MFA program, and there’s still a few spots available. (Learn more here.) Meanwhile, check out this interview with Hernandez Castillo for the Poetry.LA series, featured on Poets & Writers.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes has a new play, premiering at the Brick Theater, called Birds of Pray. Here’s a short synopsis: “Shaquille’s attempt at suicide is disrupted when Jem, the ghost of a fellow soldier killed for being gay, suddenly appears and makes a proposition: Shaq must share his body with Jem’s soul instead of sacrificing it to the vultures in exchange for absolution. With an impending hurricane forcing his hand, Shaquille must quickly choose between saving a fellow soldier he failed to save at war or escaping his worldly problems by starting over in the afterlife. This theatrical journey into PTSD explores the hidden corners of American history and the legacy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell through magical realism, dialogue, and dance.” Showtimes are Sunday, June 17th, 4-5 PM and Wednesday, June 27th, 7-8 PM. Get tickets here.
“I must run, because all I thirst for,” José Angel Araguz writes in his evocative new poem “Conditioning (Run Study)” in Hunger Mountain, “are syllables, and when someone says to me/no vales mierda or Latino? What’s that? I gulp, keep score.” Read the poem here.
Carl Marcum’s A Camera Obscura has won the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, selected by Carmen Giménez Smith who states that: “Reading A Camera Obscurais like having your head in the clouds, like understanding the source of stars, a book ‘so vast it stays captured’ in your imagination. And this is precisely what Carl Marcum pulls off in this stunning work.” His book’s due date is 2021. Read the official press release here.
And speaking of Carmen Giménez Smith, her next poetry collection, BE RECORDER, will be out in early August 2019 from Graywolf Press.
Carina del Valle Schorske, along with Erica Mena, incoming Cantomundo Fellows Ricardo Maldonado and Raquel Salas Rivera, collaborated with CantoMundo and the Poetry Coalition, to sell bilingual broadsides for hurricane relief: “Produced in studios across the diaspora—and at La Impresora, in Santurce by Nicole Delgado—these broadsides testify to the necessity of collaboration and repudiate the American call for ‘self-reliance,’ so often a brittle mask for colonial neglect. In what language does this body—of poems—speak? ‘America’ brands us with citizenship and in the same strike asserts the supremacy of its own national dialect. To quote Lara Mimosa Montes, speaking it finds us: ‘snarling behind the barricade (because) at some point we stopped feeling (like language could say).” Read their Editors’ Introduction here and check out their website here.
Over at COLORLINES, Raquel Salas Rivera, who is Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate, discusses their new book, “lo terciario/the tertiary,” Puerto Rico, disaster capatialism and queer futures. “If you’re a queer person in the United States and have grown up [here] and feel part of the United States,” Rivera shares, “it’s very important to listen as well to other experiences and not believe that you have an idea of what it looks like to be free as a queer person that’s the only idea out there because each person experiences their queerness through the place they’re from and it can vary very greatly.” Read the interview here.
Ricardo Maldonado has a new heartbreakingly-wonderful poem, with accompanying essay, “Un pájaro para Felipe, un pájaro para Damián / A Bird for Felipe, a Bird for Damián” over at POETS.org. Read it here.
I love this kind of dialogue between fellows: Millicent Borges Accardi interviews PaulA Neves in The Portuguese American Journal on her work, queerness, Portuguese community, and more. “As I watched my mother cross the parking lot festooned with multicolored plastic banners and Portuguese and American flags snapping in the wind,” Neves recalls to Accardi, “the thumping of Luso-Latin pop music and the laughter of festa-goers rebounding everywhere, and saw her disappear into the streets of the Ironbound, I felt profound saudade.” Read the interview in its entirety here, and check out Neves’s new poem “Intersections Part 2“ in Newest American’s Brick by Brick.
Speaking of collaborations, Carlo Matos and Amy Sayre Baptista have four epistolary poems from their manuscript The Book of Tongues, in Jet Fuel Review, based on the real-life saga of Prince Pedro, his lover, Inês, and his wife, Constança. Read them all here. Carlo also has three new poems (with audio) at Menacing Hedge.
Lupe Mendez has a new prose piece “MIJA” in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and these lines are indeed like a prayer that the speaker invokes: “I run across the news run a tennis ball across my wife’s back run my forearm against tears down my face run a cup of ice water to my lips run a prayer in my throat.” Read the poem here.
Over at The Sundress blog, Steven Sanchez, interviewed by Laura Villareal, discusses his debut collection, Phantom Tongue. “When I started questioning who I wanted to access my poems,” Sanchez shares, “I realized I didn’t want to write for an audience who had a litmus test for the ‘authenticity’ of my identities. I felt relieved, in a way, because it opened up a space for me to begin interrogating my own concerns about internalized racism, internalized homophobia, my inability to speak Spanish, and how those all affected me.” Read the interview, including advice he’d give his younger self, here.
Juan Morales has five new stunners in The Chachalaca Review that span across different themes, such as Wild Tongues and Homecoming, all separated into different sections: “Homecoming”, “My Mother’s Daily Phone Calls,” “Poco a Poco,” “Standing on Top of the Interchange” and “Aubade,” the latter in which the speaker asks: “Are you waking/yourself to the subwoofer’s rattle of music/or are you homebound after a night/mourned like a cigarette crushed/but unfinished?”
In her prose poem “Black Unicorn (after Audre Lorde’s ‘The Black Unicorn’)” in Origins Journal, Ysabel Y. Gonzalez pulls the reader straightaway into her world: “From clickity-clack hooves through pointed steeple, she’s sublime, watches herself in a cold pool of water, kicking out feral front legs as if Black is searching to take down wool and silk.” I’m going to teach this poem next year, both in form and how one poet honors another. Read it here.
Over at Poetry International, you can find Francisco Aragón’s talk, “Translation as Activism” that he presented at Split this Rock on Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Also featured over at The Poetry Foundation, Aragón discusses how “new biographical information about Darío which changed his approach to the translation.” Aragón’s ideas and approach make for an interesting discussion on poetry and historical biography, especially for translators.