Well, the time has come to say goodbye to this blog. Although my interest with bilingual authors will continue to flourish, I will no longer take a few hours out of my week to analyze the book I'm currently reading. I enjoy taking an in-depth look at poetry books and videos of poets performing their work, but when it comes down to it, I'd rather just be reading it than writing about it.
What I think has been most interesting about covering bilingual authors is that I've noticed recurring themes. No matter what country the author is from, almost all of the Latino/Chicano authors I've analyzed have written about the following two themes:
Loss of language
Cultural prejudice and discrimination
One author in particular seems to frequently write about these themes: Demetria Martínez. My classmate and editor-in-chief, Megan, and I wrote this story about her, where you can also view video clips of Martínez reading at the Tucson Festival of Books.
In her poem, "Song," Martínez wrote, "When the West was won and paved, the topsoil with all my words blew away." This is a small line, but I believe it represents so much about her work. Just like most of the other authors I focused on in this blog, she uses Spanish words within her mostly-English poems to keep her language from "blowing away."
As comfortable as I am in school in Tucson, it's time for me to get uncomfortable and move to the city I've always dreamed of living in: New York. I've found my apartment, now the really hard part: finding a job.
I discussed slam poetry and Elizabeth Acevedo a few weeks ago, and now I'd like to return to the topic. There is a new show on HBO called Brave New Voices featuring some of the best slam poets in the country.
The embedding for the videos does not work in Blogger, but you can watch clips from the show and even the entire first episode here. For now, you can watch the trailer:
The show is a seven-part series that features teenage poets and their mentors from San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, Santa Fe, Ft. Lauderdale, Honolulu and Ann Arbor as they prepare for Youth Speaks' 2008 Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Finals. As you watch the show, you may be surprised to find such a high level of talent, confidence, and eloquence in poets that initially seem so young.
Many different nationalities are represented on Brave New Voices, but one poet that stood out to me was Aysha El Shamayleh, a former gymnast from Amman, Jordan. On her biography page on the Brave New Voices Web site, she talks about first arriving in the United States:
"I was sensitive because I did not know how Americans would react to me being an Arab," she says. "I didn't know what they'd think, and I was scared. A lot of my American friends—I was the first Arab they ever met."
This insecurity about being an outsider is interesting because it is something Aysha has clearly grown out of. She is now a fierce competitor, stating loud and clear for her audience: "And I will not sit and wait for the day when you are that soldier behind the shotgun."
The first episode aired April 5, but tune in Sunday nights at 11 p.m. ET/PT on HBO for the rest of the series.
Daly writes his own poetry and fiction, but he is best known for his translations of Pablo Neruda. I have previously discussed translations of Neruda, but he is such a huge source of inspiration for so many poets, I thought he deserved another look, especially since I had never read this particular book, World's End, or Fin de mundo.
It is not a random collection of poems, but rather a cohesive sequence Neruda wrote later in his life: 1968 and 1969 (he died in 1973). The poems are political by nature--Neruda believed many things were wrong with Chile's government. As any poet knows, there is a fine line between rhetorical and preachy poems, and Neruda always transcends a preachy attitude. I think his use of metaphors of the natural world aid him in approaching political subject matter. "The Door" ("La Puerta") in the books Prologue begins:
What a ceaseless century!
The third stanza of the poem:
It was always agony, it was always dying, it dawned with light and in the night was blood: it rained in the morning, by afternoon it cried.
Here, Neruda effectively describes Chile's somber atmosphere without saying something cliche or excessively rhetorical. He begins with simple statements and ends with a beautiful, complicated image (how exactly does an afternoon cry?).
Let's look at the first stanza of "Once Again" ("Otra vez") in Part I of the book:
We went, recently resurrected, again seeking the ambrosia, seeking the linear life, the cleanness of rectangles, the geometry without twists: the women and the antelopes again gave off their scents, the gillyflowers, the bells, the drops of the sea in winter, and again the dying in Europe shipwrecked us on blood.
What I like about this stanza is how effortlessly it leaps to a new image and emotion. It begins with a hopeful resurrection, looking for simple pleasures and natural beauty, only to find "again the dying in Europe," shipwrecked. This stanza proves to me that Neruda was hopeful in his political fights, but most certainly had times of pessimism and hopelessness.
This book is Daly's eighth and final translation of Neruda. In the book's acknowledgments, Daly says he is thankful for the time he has been able to spend with Neruda's poems and his opportunity to "sing along in English." When I saw Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel perform her Neruda translations, I thought about how much she must love Neruda's work to be able to devote her life to translating him. Now I think the same of Daly. It really demonstrates what an inspiration Neruda is to poets of all languages.
I decided to try to uncover some lesser-known translations of Neruda on YouTube and was surprised at how many different types of videos I found.
First I found this video of a man named Dave Fitzpatrick reciting a translation of Neruda's poem, "I Don't Love You," in West Cork, Ireland.
Next I found this video of singer Luciana Souza recording a song for her album, "Neruda." Here she sings "Sonnet 49" and plays the kalimba.
This collection of videos shows that Neruda continues to affect the entire world with his words, even decades after his death. Neruda's poems were specific to his own life and country, but the sentiment of the poems transcends boundaries and translates into lives all around the world.
This week I'd like to discuss something I have previously ignored on this blog: slam poetry. This type of poetry defines itself by its emphasis on performance and sound. The slam poets I know say they are very influenced by the rhymes and delivery of hip hop lyrics. The performances require a confident, dramatic, confrontational style to invoke a good score from the judges and audience at a poetry slam.
"The spoken word revolution is led a lot by women and by poets of color. It gives a depth to the nation's dialogue that you don't hear on the floor of Congress. I want a floor of Congress to look more like a National Poetry Slam. That would make me happy."
While researching bilingual poets in the slam scene, I came across this video of Elizabeth Acevedo, a New York poet who performs with confidence and grace. Watch her perform "EduCanción" on a segment from Current TV:
The title is great because it fits so well into the content of the poem. "Canción" literally means "song" in Spanish, but she is also playing on the sound of the English word "education." This goes perfectly with what she says later in the poem about the mixing ("mezcla") of languages.
Acevedo works primarily as a spoken word poet, not a published one, so I do not know where she would stop her lines or use punctuation in this poem. But in part of the poem, she reads:
...Where school is the enemy and learning is the challenge, I tell them education is the remedy. They must use it to their advantage. We are the best dreams our parents ever dreamt, living language-less. Because I speak Slanglish, Spanglish, and King George English but have no translation for the stagnation of my people.
What a beautiful way to discuss Acevedo's frustration with the wasted potential she sees within her culture. I also love the emphasis she places on the importance of education:
I choose to be more and deny nothing, I come from where I come from. Immigrant parents with broken English, streets of rap and slang, and I choose to read and understand Shakespeare.
This reminded me of what I heard poet Jimmy Santiago Baca say at his reading at the Tucson Festival of Books two weeks ago. He said that young people owe it to themselves to finish high school so they can learn the skills necessary to express themselves. This seems like a similar sentiment to what Acevedo is saying in "EduCanción."
I'll end today's blog with Acevedo performing an amazing poem about voting. In this video, you can really witness the power that sound, rhyme, and performance can have on a poem.
You want me to speak out. But I don't even own a language.
This week I am continuing to focus on authors that will be reading at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend. Today I will talk about author, activist, lecturer, columnist, and poet Demetria Martínez.
She is reading at the festival tomorrow--this Saturday, March 14 in the Integrated Learning Center, room 120 at 2:30 p.m. with Rebecca Seiferle.
I would like to start today's blog post with a video. Here is Martínez reading from Mother Tongue, a book she wrote about her experiences as a reporter covering the plight of El Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees in the mid-1980s. This January 1998 reading was part of the University of California's "Artists on the Cutting Edge" series.
The video is long, but just from watching the first few minutes, you can see what a strong, confident reading Martínez gives. She says that the first poem she reads, "Wanted," was inspired by Allen Ginsberg. This is something we may have determined ourselves due to its confrontational, political nature.
I've mentioned before on this blog that I'm typically not a huge fan of political poetry. However, "Unwanted" is an example of how creative and original a rhetorical poem can be. Martínez does not speak condescendingly, instead she personifies America, talking to it as if it were a lover who had betrayed her (I have not seen the poem on the page, so I don't know where she breaks her lines):
America, I don't want progress, I want redemption. Cut the shit, we could be lovers again, don't hang up.
Martínez also does an excellent job of including cultural elements into the poem, making her message more personal. Here's a line that stood out to me from this reading:
Remember. Remember who you are, America. Purple mountain majesty above fruited plains worked by Mexicanos.
As I continued to research Martínez, I found another book of hers: The Devil's Workshop. One poem in particular stood out to me, and I think it's a good place to start when looking at Martínez's work.
It is titled, "Ars Poetica," which essentially means writing about writing, or writing a poem about what poetry means to the author. Martínez wrote a found poem to express what poetry means to her. Using a flier from a Tucson taquería, she wrote:
I found this to be a very endearing poem. It's simple, unpretentious, and uses a creative way to express what poetry means to her. Poetry can be all sizes and structures--big or small, she'll take it!
Another poem from The Devil's Workshop I enjoyed was, "After a Reading in Arizona, the Author Is Detained by the U.S. Border Patrol in Las Cruces, New Mexico," a poem Martínez wrote for Roberto Rodriguez. I found many people with that name when I Googled it, but without further information from Martínez, I cannot figure out which one he is. So, for now, we will assume he is a Chicano writer that was detained after a reading. The poem begins:
They are doing exploratory surgery On your car again--hubcaps
Gouged out again, canines Sniff at empty sockets.
I like how Martínez starts with the image of surgery, creating an invasive, condescending atmosphere. These two stanzas illustrate a form that Martínez consistently uses: capitalization at the beginning of each line.
This may seem like a small detail, but this is a decision that I have not seen many poets make, so I have to wonder why she chose to write this way. One thing that happens with this kind of capitalization is that each line begins to read as its own fragment. Let's look at another two stanzas from this poem so you can see what I mean:
Ballpoint pens to shoot Up with, red and black
Ink ruining our youth. Handcuffed, you ask for water
Because of the lack of punctuation in the first stanza, we read it continuously: "Ballpoint pens to shoot up with." But what if we slow down and read each line on its own? "Ballpoint pens to shoot." "Up with red and black." "Ink ruining our youth." You can see how different meanings can arise from forming the lines this way, and I think this is what Martínez may have intended.
We can see the variety of tone and subject that Martínez works with. In just three poems, we've discovered her thoughts about America, what poetry means to her, and some injustices that Chicanos face in our society. Make sure to attend her reading at the festival tomorrow!
More information:
Watch Martínez give an hour-long lecture about religious, gender and ethnic concerns in narratives and poems.
Photo by Karlis Pakarklis, courtesy of Rebecca Seiferle.
This week I am continuing to focus on authors that will be reading at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend. Today I will talk about poet and translator Rebecca Seiferle.
She is reading at the festival this Saturday, March 14 in the Integrated Learning Center, room 120 at 2:30 p.m. with Demetria Martínez.
When I looked up her name in the stacks at the UA Poetry Center, I found a title that intrigued me: Wild Tongue.
The back cover of the book reads, "In an interview, Rebecca Seiferle said that 'one should always read a poem as if it were a matter of life and death.' Wild Tongue suggests a similar belief about writing poetry." In this book, Seiferle's fourth book of poems, the tongue is representational of both language and body.
I could not find any video or audio of Seiferle reading, so unfortunately we will have to wait until Saturday to hear how her poems sound when read aloud. For now, we can look at what's already on the page.
One poem I noticed right away because of its topic: translation. The poem is called "The Muse of Translation," and it begins:
"There is no muse of translation," the translator reminds as he struggles with Pindar's victory odes, and what he means is that the imagery is overwhelming"
The diction here is low, so at first glance the reader might think the poem is rather straightforward. However, just in the first three lines we can already see many different things happening.
First of all, what does that translator's quote mean? Seiferle never comes out and fully explains its meaning, leaving the reader to interpret it. I think Seiferle is referencing the fact that translators have very limited creative freedom because they must stay true to the original poem. I also like how Seiferle gives a voice of authority to the translator, only to subtly undermine him by essentially saying, "He says this, but what he really means is that translating is difficult."
These lines are toward the middle of the poem:
and it's just there that I think perhaps all being is translation; the child I was at the kitchen table, translating my mother into my father, my father into my mother; each one's "inviolate honey" becoming the "blameless venom" of the other.
I love the line where she states that "all being is translation." It fits with poets' use of metaphor: everything is everything else. Her mother's words turn into her father's, perhaps even her father is turning into her mother--the ambiguity here works great for the topic of translation. I am almost positive the "inviolate honey" and "blameless venom" quotes are from Pindar, the poet Seiferle uses as her primary subject for this poem.
The poem ends: (the word in bold was italicized in the original text)
Is it too much love or too little that I have translated into being? Oh by now I'm mistyping forget your tongue upon the anvil that the tongue itself has made.
The anvil is an image that shows up before in the poem. It is perhaps another Pindar reference, but I am unsure. I get the feeling that this poem is pretty academic, but what I love is that I can still enjoy the poem without knowing the references. Lines like "Is it too much love or too little that I have translated into your being" are personal and touching, allowing many readers to grasp at least some meaning from the poem.
I also really enjoyed the use of the word "tongue." It feels like there should be a comma after "forget" but there is none, so the last line reads oddly and ambiguously. Is the speaker mistyping the words "forget your tongue" on an anvil? Is the speaker mistyping the word "forget" and then imagining a tongue upon an anvil? And how can a "tongue itself" make an anvil? It is a very mysterious last line that is perhaps not meant to be understood on the first read.
My other favorite use of the word "tongue" was found in the book's title poem, "Wild Tongue." It is a very long poem, so I will just share a few lines from the middle that I liked the best:
In our mouths, the tongue's a knife, each word a wild edge, where we stammer only our own wound
Head to the Tucson Festival of Books this Saturday to see Seiferle's wild tongue speak for itself!
Poet Jimmy Santiago Baca will be participating in two different events at the festival on Sunday, March 15. First, at 2:30 p.m., he will do a poetry reading at the Student Union Ballroom South on the Barnes & Noble Stage. Then, at 4:00 p.m. in the Student Union Gallagher Theater, Baca will show documentary films by himself and by Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit foundation Baca created in 2005 "to give people of all walks of life the opportunity to become educated and improve their lives."
Before I discuss Baca's work, let's begin by seeing him perform. Here is Baca in 2003 reading an untitled poem on HBO's Def Poetry:
You can immediately see the passion Baca embodies within his poetry. He says in this poem, "She's changed and washed a million sheets and still no change in the way society treats her kind." Later in the poem, Baca further describes the poem's subject: "That's the Julia I'm talking about: a brown woman who waits at the bus station praying she ain't gonna get arrested for being brown."
Although Baca gives his character a gender and a name, as well as many other details, I believe he is speaking about something much larger. He is giving a face and a narrative to the issue of institutional racism that perpetuates its cycle throughout generations and "a million sheets."
Baca's poetry has a bluntness to it. He typically does not use flowery language to dance around his political views, instead opting for word pairings like "ain't gonna." Baca has a strong rhetorical message in his work that leaves little room for lyrical sentiments.
According to his web site's biography, Baca was born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent. He was first raised by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. Baca began to love poetry only after running away at age 13 and spending five years in a maximum security prison.
One of many moving poems from this collection is one titled, "So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs From Americans." I love the first three lines of the poem:
O Yes? Do they come on horses with rifles, and say, Ese gringo, gimmee your job?
The title is so matter-of-fact that it almost turned me off from reading the poem. I typically stray from political poetry, but Baca's satirical tone was humorous, and almost inviting. Of course the poem's humor stops almost immediately, jumping to different violent scenarios of Mexicans stealing jobs:
Do they sneak into town at night, and as you're walking home with a whore, do they mug you, a knife at your throat, saying, I want your job?
Baca is using exaggeration for effect here, and taunting the people who claim Mexicans are taking their jobs. Did they threaten your life and steal your job? Of course not. The claim is unfounded, and Baca uses his confrontational voice to say so.
The poem ends with this:
Mexicans are taking our jobs, they say instead. What they really say is, let them die, and the children too.
You can see the poem's progression from humor to sobering reality just through these small excerpts. In this collection of poems, you can really sense Baca's urge to speak for those who cannot speak. The themes of inequality and discrimination arise throughout the book.
The book's title poem, "Immigrants in Our Own Land" begins:
We are born with dreams in our hearts, looking for better days ahead.
Later in the poem:
Our expectations are high: in the old world, they talked about rehabilitation, about being able to finish school, and learning an extra good trade. But right away we are sent to work as dishwashers, to work in fields for three cents an hour.
Toward the end of the poem:
Some will make it out of here with hate in their eyes, but so very few make it out of here as human.
And the very last line:
so long gone from life itself, so many things have changed.
Baca paints a very solemn, yet strong portrait in this poem. He really embodies the voice of a hopeful, good-hearted immigrant whose dreams are shattered. I especially love the duality of the last line when he says, "so many things have changed." The line works literally for the immigrants who have changed for the worse in a society that does not accept them. But I think Baca also meant the line to work ironically, saying that not much has changed at all―discrimination persists.
I'll end today's blog with a longer (28 minute) video of Baca reading selections of his work. This 1997 reading was part of the University of California's "Artists on the Cutting Edge" series. (Beware of the seizure-inducing introduction)
My name is Chelsea Hodson and I am a senior at the University of Arizona. I am majoring in journalism and minoring in creative writing with an emphasis on poetry.
