So now we're moving into the question and answer period.
So they've asked us to do a Q and A.
How much time do we have?
10 minutes.
OK.
So questions for any of the writers?
Anybody that you heard tonight?
you can raise a hand and pass a mic.
I have a microphone.
OK great.
It's a little loud.
I can just turn it down.
Shall we take this one off, too?
And just pass them to the writer and the--
we could do that?
OK.
Just yank it.
Questions?
Anybody.
OK.
I was wondering if you and Sherwin could talk a little bit
more about the festival you mentioned in Colombia?
That was the inspiration for this.
That sort of can you talk--
elaborate a little bit more on that?
Well, he invited me to go, so I'll let him talk first.
It's like 2005, I gave a reading with--
here on the University, and I'm not sure
if it was the University of Arizona,
or if it was a Poetry Center thing.
But I was still a student, and I had just published Shapeshift.
And I read some poems and there were
some international professors of literature from--
I get they were Italian?
And after I gave a reading, I read with N. Scott Momaday,
and I think, Luci Tapahonso, and Ofelia Zepeda.
and after, one of them came up to me,
she says there's this festival in South America,
I'm going to pass your name on.
And then so, maybe about two years later, I got this invite.
So then they asked me to come and it's
the international poetry festival.
So it's the largest poetry festival in the Americas,
in the Western hemisphere.
And you go there and actually there's
about 4,000 people in the audience, cheering, wave--
I mean, like you're a rock star.
They have big old banners, and they have big old signs
it has big old hearts on it.
We love you poets.
And then if they really love you,
they give you a bouquet of flowers.
And you just feel loved.
And you're there with international poets
from all over the world, and I'll
let her explain a little bit more
with the intent of that festival,
but it brought us together with some indigenous poets
from South America, who we probably
wouldn't have met otherwise.
And then that's where we met Hugo.
And then the first year we met Artie--
Ariruma Kowii, who was a Quechua poet.
And then the following-- several years
later we ran into Hugo again, and then we
met Fredy Chicangana.
Good.
You can stay up if you want to.
OK.
So we got down there and Ariruma and Hugo Jamioy,
approached us and said that they had been waiting for us.
And we got very close, very quickly.
And--
10 days.
10 minutes, OK.
We'll make it really quick.
We were there for ten days, but I think we were close
after the first day and a half, I. Think we were pretty close,
and at one point in time, we went out in the country
together, some things happened that were very personal,
to us and to them, and we were told, or I was told by Hugo,
that they were told that I would be the one to unite
the poets in the Americas.
And I was like, OK, and I got to think about this.
And the next morning I got that email from Oregon State
asking me to collect for the international edition To Topos
and that's when I said, OK, well,
we want to do Western hemisphere.
So that was the first effort there.
And I thought, OK, that's what that was.
All right, so we'll get started there,
and we've been working on it ever since.
I brought up Hugo, I facilitate and nominate a panel
for the UN, it's the only Indigenous panel
on native literature during the people's forum,
an indigenous peoples forum in the spring.
I've been involved with that for several years.
And so I brought up Hugo and Ariruma
both to speak at the UN.
Afterward, I also then went to Venezuela and read,
and to Argentina and read.
And then I went back to Colombia asked
Sherwin to come back with me.
So the second time I asked him to go.
So he kind of returned the favor.
And we then met Fredy Chicangana and some other poets
there that we got close with.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah too.
And also brought it to the UN to speak
and started kind of touring around bring him up
to see the cranes.
Brought them up to Monument Valley.
And kept going back and forth and meeting more people.
And reading with other people.
There were some Mayan poets who read with me in Venezuela,
but they were from Mexico, there and there.
Some Mapuche poets from the Chile,
Patagonia region were there, and we brought them up.
And they're in the book.
So a lot of these poets are people
that I have read with over time or have
come to know very personally.
There's actually very few people in the collection
that I haven't worked with in some way, shape, or form.
Although, there was an open submission
call both for this, and for the original edition.
So some of the poets I have not been that familiar with.
However, I want to get back to the one point
that the festival's intent is to bring peace
into a place of war.
And so a lot of the times you're reading,
you're reading on places where there's been mass murders.
Where things have happened that are really critical.
And the first year we went down and it was very tense.
The year before, there were notes
left under the poets pillows, that they
could be kidnapped at any moment and this kind of thing.
And there had been a bomb, at one time,
placed in a Botero sculpture, during the poetry reading that
exploded and killed 40 people, and it
was replaced with 40 doves.
So a lot of the places we were reading, it was very tenuous.
You didn't know who was what, and in the states,
they like to pound these things off as left, right,
and they get money from both of those communities
and the states, and what it turns into for Indigenous
people is you have one group on one side of the village,
and one group on the other side of the village,
and they're mowing through Indigenous people
to take the land.
So left, right, in-between, they're
all killing Native people.
And so coming down there and seeing that for ourselves
was a big eye opener because it's professed very differently
in this country and elsewhere.
And so seeing it for ourselves and getting to the Indigenous
people going through that was a real eye opener.
Much like the American Revolution
in the Northeast and Southeast part of the United States,
that same type of thing.
So it's a very dangerous period of time for a lot of people
in the world still.
Things have lightened up.
When we went back in 2007, it was not nearly as tenuous.
However, there is still a lot of killing going on,
a lot of people disappearing, so this continues.
Some of the children are kidnapped
from the village at a very young age and used as child soldiers.
And they are told that if they tried to escape,
entire families will be killed, and they
have been for generations now.
So these poets that we work with don't know a time without war.
They've been raised in this ever since McCarthyism and the CIA
sent down hitmen to take out would-be political leaders,
that the US did not want in place.
And so they've grown up in the aftermath of that.
And up here it's become, oh, it's a drug war,
and it's a war against drugs.
It's anything but, and it's got a very long history.
And we really need to come together as Indigenous people
and stand up for our brothers and sisters to the South,
in my opinion.
And this work in the collection, is
that work for peace and for that effort,
but also, bringing those voices to attention.
We did-- the press was very gracious with leaving us
more page count for the Indigenous voices
from war torn areas.
And I'm very thankful for that.
And the two middle sections are all multilingual.
So Indigenous language, Spanish, and English.
And I hope you guys enjoy that part of the book.
I think that's pretty great for that show.
Do you want to add anything?
No, thank you.
You did really great.
No, that's good.
Good?
OK.
All right.
Except they would tease us like crazy.
They do tease us like crazy.
He's mister down there.
He's mister.
They would look at a Botero painting, and then point at me,
and put it the Botero painting because the little chubby
guy with the big cheeks.
Can I tell them the shopping story?
No.
No?
OK.
We have-- we get
No, not the shopping story.
One more question?
Another question?
The shopping story's good.
Hello.
Hi.
Thank you so much.
I really enjoyed everything this evening.
Very inspiring.
I wanted to ask you Allison, a little bit more about your role
as editor.
It must be really hard given so many wonderful poems and poets
and writers, so I'd like to understand a little bit more
about that process.
Well, the book is choreographed to read as a volume.
So as a poet myself, and to approach
poetry is always an honor and privilege
of other people's work.
So the way that I coordinated the book was
to work with the individual poems repeatedly
and laid them out, like you do your own book,
trying to figure out how to orchestrate it, or choreograph
the poems so that the read is intentional and purposeful
throughout.
And so that was a big, I guess, drive for me.
There are some poems that I wish were still in the collection,
but because the page count, we had
to release some of the poems that I wanted to be in this,
and that happens.
It's just something that is par for the course
with publication.
You get in what you can.
However, I think that the ones that are in here
are really significant to our time.
All of these voices are contemporary poets,
everybody is writing today from Maurice Kenny,
down to the youngest writer.
And we had two deaths during the process of this book.
One was Jack Forbes, and he always
wanted to be known as a poet.
And he was more known as a Native studies person,
lit crit person, but he wanted to be known,
first and foremost, as a poet.
So I'm really happy that his last publication
is with us in his poetry.
And John Damon, who is a colleague of mine,
who actually went to the University of Arizona,
and was a linguist.
And he was a big scholar of Ofelia's, and so he
taught that language at the University of Nebraska.
And when he was dying, he was having liver failure.
Waiting for a transplant, I asked him
what would be his birthday wish.
What can I do for you for your birthday?
I have this reading series.
What do you want?
And he said, if you could bring out Ofelia he said,
I could just die.
And I said, then I'm not bringing her.
And he goes, no, I'll come to the reading, he said.
And I did bring her, she came.
It was very quick notice, I had very little funds to bring her.
She said, of course I'll come.
So she came out and did a brilliant reading for John,
for his birthday.
She asked him if he'd do the translations
for this collection and make sure it was right.
And so it was his last work, as well, before he passed away.
So we did have two deaths.
But I think for me as an editor, the most or the greatest
privilege of the collection, the work in conveying what we were
looking for, the identity of this volume,
was to demonstrate the uniqueness and individuality
of all of these poets and to ensure that the poetry is
seen as poetry.
I hope that answers it in some way.
Thank you.
Cybele, do you want to tell them about the reception and such?