>> Those were the early days.
I think when the poem just came out of us, well, they still come out of us.
When that was a workshop, poetry coming out of us
and no matter how the poetry comes out, it's great.
And when I used to stand on corners with stacks of poems in my hip pocket, waiting for reading.
I'm ready to read.
Hey, hey, hey.
I got poems.
Hey! Ok. Can I come over?
I got poems.
I got to go all the way to San Francisco but I don't have any money.
But I got poems.
I'll get there.
I'll be there.
So we drove to Austin, you know, eating crackers and tuna out of a can, dancing,
got invited to Northern New Mexico with drums and dancers.
And the drums, you know, were hanging halfway on the side of the car, falling almost.
We didn't have any food and we finally made it to Northern New Mexico
and we were two hours late to ABQ, but everybody was still there and we had guitars.
So as soon as we got out of the car, we put on our guitarist, we strapped our guitars
and the the band begins drumming, and began sing and the dancers went to the back
and put on their outfits and feathers and danza azteca and we began singing farm worker songs
and songs we have learned and made up on the way.
And the people were happy.
And it was a great.
So those are the early poems and these are here.
It was beautiful to go to Nuevo México and to Arizona in those years.
This is called Arizón Maricopa tempe tu tierra roja.
Arizón maricopa tempe your red earth.
Arizón Maricopa tempe tu tierra roja sangre tu vereda, blood your trail.
Arid sunset sweet arizón, cactos, espigas de espinas, vines of thorns, brazos verdes,
green arms, llantos altos, long cries, almas ramas pulmones, [inaudible] and souls
and branches, pizcando el cielo, harvesting the sky.
Arizón, campesinos levantando algodón, lifting cotton, estrellas de oro, stars of gold, blanco,
white, pa'l ranchero, for the rancher.
Nubes de sal, clouds of salt, sellos de sueldo, seals of pay, pa'l que hace labor,
for the one that works, cuerpos roJos, red bodies, climbing cotton flowers
to the dawn weaving, una risa sin dolor.
Weaving a song without pain.
Arizón, a las tres de la mañana, three at dawn.
Hay que rajar la raíz del tiempo, we have to cut the root of time,
es que campesinos si nos hay muchos, there's many of us,
levantando el cielo por el campo, lifting sky from the earth.
Arizón, pima, xicano, pápago, apache, tiné, arizón.
No zon nombres, zon rimas y un ritmo, energía de un principio.
Rhythms of a rhythm.
Energy of a principle.
Si nos levantamos, if we rise, campesinos, levantamos cielos, we rise, we raise skies,
por los pueblos, por los pueblos.
Cotton. Flower.
Suns. Thank you so much.
[ Applause ]
What originally went through my mind when I was writing that poem Arizón,
that I just finished reading with and particularly cutting the roots of time,
what was I -- What was I thinking?
Well, you know, thinking and poetry is a different kind of thinking.
It's kind of a different wavelength.
It's almost not thinking and cutting the roots of time.
So I was kind of going through time, going beyond time, to timelessness.
So when we are together here today, for example, listening to Sherwin's poetry and song
at the same time, and time seemed to disappear.
And so, so, so Sherwin's song and poem did that for me and if we can do that in our lives,
as a community, perhaps we can touch something deeper,
like I think we did, and I did with Sherwin's work.
And if we can do that, then we are really in touch
with ourselves and definitely with each other.
And I was thinking of Arizona and its peoples.
And I was very interested in doing that, creating unity, not just being so concerned
about being chicano or being a particular ethnic group or locked in by history,
but cutting through it and embracing each other.
>> Sherwin and most recur, both in your first book and also
in what you read today from Flood Song.
Antelopes, elks, hawks.
Do these different animals have specific meanings that you attached to them?
>> Did you guys all hear the question?
Right. Okay.
So he's asking about the animals in my work and if they have meaning.
I think some of them do.
Definitely a coyote is in shapeshift quite a bit and he's also in Flood Song,
where he leaves some [?
trail poems ?] onto a ladder slick with coyote sweat, you know?
So it's kind of -- He's leading the way or he is crossing the road
and all of that has meaning in Navajo cosmogony and thought.
I think it's easily -- Points in the poem where there might be some sort of tension or omen.
I feel like that is occurring at the moment.
Definitely owls, I see that.
Two owls coming from the East, you know?
So those, those kind of things are kind of emblematic of probably tension
or something foreseeable that is kind of, you know, something to be cautious about.
But the way of thinking about Flood Song is there's all these birds and I realized,
I was telling a friend of mine today that throughout the song, eventually,
all the birds start -- They're also trapped.
They all become trapped in things or they're falling.
So, and then, like if I read the whole poem to you,
you would definitely see this cascading of animal life towards the end.
I mean, I felt really sad, you know?
I felt I read the whole thing after I heard that and I was like wow, you know?
I just, you know, see this sort of mass array of this exploded piece.
So they didn't mean whatever they mean.
It might just be about the times we live in now, you know?
I constantly hear terrible news with animal life, I think,
and we are definitely animals too.
So, I think some of them do and some of them don't.
Like I have a mole, I think, or something spiraling inside a river, you know?
And it becomes something else, you know?
In my next book.
So some of them have meaning and some of them are just observations.
Thank you.
Oh, so many.
It's, gosh.
Yeah. I don't know.
I mean, it's just everybody, you know?
I definitely have my -- All these people who I've read and that --
I come back to them at different times in my life.
I feel like, you know, there's a different poet right now.
I'm kind of interested in Wallace Stevens.
I'm kind of looking at his work.
Other times it's my grandfather, you know?
Listening to the traditional songs.
And so, it's everybody.
I don't know if there's one person that I have been influenced by.
They're just many.
I'm sorry.
[ Inaudible ]
Yeah. The other one big poet.
>> Yeah.
>> So, yeah.
[ Laughter ]
>> I mean that's right.
You know, that's right.
That's it.
Yeah.
[ Inaudible ]
You know, it's a -- That's a tough question.
At what age did we discover that words can flow out of us as writers, or speakers-writers, both?
I had a big struggle, you know?
Like I said, I grew up listening to my mother's stories and my father's stories.
We didn't have books and magazines.
We did, but you know, they came and they went.
Life, you know, Life magazine was about life, I think.
And but I had a hard time because, you know, I wasn't allowed to speak Spanish in school.
And I had such a tough experience in the first year,
I was in first grade, that I shut myself down.
So I didn't speak and I was afraid to speak
and I definitely didn't want to volunteer or anything.
So I went through that.
So to think of myself as a speaker or writer or a person of words was kind of out of this world
and almost impossible, until I forced --
Until third grade, my teacher Lucille Samson wanted me to sing.
Imagine that.
Being invited to sing and you never really have seen yourself as a speaker, worthy of words,
in a classroom setting, or anywhere really.
It once it happens there, it kind of shut down everywhere.
I think at home I was I was a little different.
So -- So in third grade I was invited to sing and that highly encouraged me.
And then, in seventh grade, I was invited to be in a band, which I wanted to be in.
I wanted to be the saxophone, but I figured I would hide behind the saxophone
because I was hiding already.
So I said I want to play the sax but I'm not going to because I don't want to hide behind it
because that was my natural -- I had grown to become a hiding person.
So I forced myself to join the choir which is the last thing I wanted
to do because imagine what that means.
You got to get called on to sing by yourself in front of everybody,
but I figured that's the medicine I needed, so I did that.
So it took me a long time.
Probably in University days, at UCLA, during the free free speech era
and civil rights times a lot of people were speaking up.
So I really admired them and I felt the dynamite inside of me wanting to finally blow
up because I just couldn't swallow it any more.
So I got on podiums but I squat and screeched quite a bit.
>> The annals of hiding people or the hiding person.
>> That's right.
>> I think, for me, I was really, really terribly shy and coming from two languages,
I kind of spoke probably with English when I was growing up, because I heard it all around me.
And I know that language made people laugh, I know if I could --
If I said something and I would somehow get attention for it.
And so I think from a very early age I knew somehow that language made people do something.
So one of our earliest memories, probably I was in probably preschool age
and I saw these black cows, you know, on the side of the road and I was like looking at them
and I'm like you know -- I said [SPEAKING NAVAJO], you know?
Which [SPEAKING NAVAJO], you would associate with like a burnt piece of wood,
like charcoal wood, and then [SPEAKING NAVAJO], you know?
The black cows, right?
Or whatever they are.
And I said [SPEAKING NAVAJO], right?
They're burnt.
Those cows are burnt and they're just right there as ashes, right?
So -- And so everybody started laughing like you don't say that, you know?
They kept saying you don't say that, you say it this way.
And I would look at the moon and it was a big tortilla.
I don't know if all kids do this.
But it was a big tortilla in the sky, you know?
And I would be like look, [SPEAKING NAVAJO].
And that's how-- they'd point and Everybody would be like -- You know, it still seems funny.
So I knew somehow the language at that point did something, you know?
So throughout the years, I think in a way poetry sort of brought me back to language
because I knew that there's something I could --
I could put two words together and it would -- There would be a charge there.
So I feel like that's kind of how I came into it, just that that language itself has energy
that is combustive and they can create and it can suspend time.
I don't know if I'm being hopeful but I think that's where I come to it from.
>> It's great.
That makes sense, yeah.
>> I think that we're running over our time.
>> Ok.
>> I want to thank the poets and all of you for coming today and enjoy the festival.
[ Applause ]