I just have a really quick question for Natalie.
Can you just tell us a bit about the work
that you do with language revitalization?
It's related to poetry in that poetry is language
and we're here in the house of language.
And you're a poet, and you also work in the language
in this other important way.
Well, I'm really lucky because we have
what we call in my home [SPEAKING MOJAVE]..
So there are people who lead the way for us.
So we have Ofelia, who--
I'm really lucky to have known her first as a language
activist, and then I was wowed and amazed by her poetry.
But we-- at Fort Mojave, I have--
I feel like-- [BEAT BOXING] I feel like I should beat box
every time I get one of these.
We used to do this when we were little.
Do not beat box.
But I work with the last of our speakers at Fort Mojave.
So my youngest fluent speaker just turned 85.
And he's really ornery.
And I had to call two of them at 6:00 AM
before my day started because I'm away from home.
They're really supportive of me to be here.
But I'm really lucky because I think,
working with our language, it's giving me
an extra layer of attention to words
and understanding the meaning and the weight
of words and all the things they carry.
Because when you grow up and if English is your first language,
or any one language is preference,
you start to lose the value of it,
or you just don't learn to appreciate it
right off the bat.
It becomes a utilitarian thing.
But because our language has been,
not quite sleeping, but a little bit sleepy for quite a while,
we're getting to see things in a very pure way.
So I'm really lucky to be able to do the work that I'm doing,
and it's more important than any poem I will ever write,
for sure.
Thank you, Natalie.
Here we go.
[INAUDIBLE] what's one thing about your poetry
that hasn't changed since you started writing?
I'm sure you've grown and progressed a lot
and changed your style or your approach or the way
that you deliver.
But what is the one thing that hasn't, that's stuck with you?
The one constant I think is how hard it still is to write.
I sit down at a desk and see a blank page,
and I want to run screaming out of the room.
That's what sticks with me.
And that's also what keeps me there, the challenge
to actually write something that I think belongs on a page,
I guess.
I think for me it's just--
I think I made a choice during my MFA
that I would just write whatever I had to write.
And I think especially-- like I said,
we've talked about this with the classrooms today.
No matter who you are or what you are, where you come from,
as soon as you start to do anything,
people want you labeled.
They want you to be that thing so that they
can understand you better.
But something that's been really important for me
is that I can be all of the things that I am,
and I can be all of those things on the page in one poem
or across the span of three poems.
So I'm not writing to meet anybody's expectations,
and I think that's important.
I know some friends who've struggled
with it along the way, and I was just
lucky to very early on say, we're poets for F sake.
It's not brain surgery.
You're not saving the world.
You're a poet.
And you have one job, and it's to chase down
words and language.
And it's a pretty easy job when you think about some
of the other jobs that are out there.
And so it's been something that I've been able to stick with me
and carry with me.
Natalie was a much braver student
than I was because I was a terrible graduate
student, because I was writing poems to please my teachers
and colleagues.
Don't do that if you're a student.
I think my MFA years stunted my growth as a poet,
because of the program itself but because of my own attitudes
from the program.
And so don't be like me.
Take risks.
Be bold.
Be like him now.
No, no, no, no.
He's all right now.
It's an honor and pleasure reading in front of Ofelia.
I just haven't worked on any poem that begins with a line
from one of those poems.
We were just talking about you today, twice.
Twice today.
So it's good to see you there.
Hello.
This question is for Eduardo.
We were reading your poems in class today,
and there's a specific poem.
I'm not going to read the whole thing,
just read the first line.
This should be an incentive for people to buy your book,
I guess.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
[LAUGHTER]
You get a cut.
It's all right.
The "qué chido his chistes" poem if you--
I'm pretty sure you know.
We were trying to put together the picture you
were painting of this person.
I just wanted to know--
I don't know if this is a personal question
or not, but who were you talking to?
Who was he?
The José Montoya poem?
The "qué chido"?
Yes.
That's a composite sketch of all my undocumented relatives
across the border and who are working
as dishwashers, janitors in Casa Grande, in Phoenix and Mesa.
And I was just struck with the privilege and luxury
I had because of my parents' hard work,
that I could spend my days working on the page
and writing and reading and traveling
because of their hard work.
And I wanted to think about their hard work,
and I wanted put their language on the page.
Yes.
Good.
This qué chido section has so much Spanish slang,
working class Spanish, that really belongs--
that you only really hear in certain neighborhoods
and in the kitchens, in the hallways of hotels,
in the back rooms.
And I wanted to honor that, and I
wanted to enlarge the possibilities of diction
in American poetry too.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Yeah, I did learn a few things at the MFA program.
[LAUGHTER]
This is for Eduardo too.
You invoked a poet I absolutely love, Ronald Johnson, as one
of your foundational poets.
And to me, Johnson is this poet who
creates these vast arcs of visionary experimentation held
together by images of light, rhizomatic themes,
and not at all really narrative poems.
And it seem so different from what you do.
So I wonder, what did you feel you
got from Johnson specifically?
Well, even from his big project like Ark [INAUDIBLE]
The Shrubberies there's always an intense musical gaze.
And he's really sonically interested in the world,
the natural world, and he wants to render it
in musical ways on the page.
And that's what I got from him.
That's why I quote [INAUDIBLE] music.
And to me, even when you're trying
to write about people crossing the border and dying, as a poet
it comes to you in beautiful ways.
And I really had a hard time reconciling
that for the longest time.
I'm talking about the deaths of some of my relatives
crossing the border, yet it's beautiful language.
How can I get away with that?
How can I make myself OK with that?
So he's one of the examples because he
talks a lot about the AIDS epidemic
and what eventually made him--
killed him.
So the language is so beautifully,
imagistically and sonically, that I took away
from his example.
It's possible to do that.
And you have to if you call yourself a writer.
I still can't call myself a poet.
I get embarrassed.
I'm shy.
I'm a southern boy from Arizona.
[LAUGHTER]
It seems like both poets use a lot of food imagery associated
with somewhat biblical references.
She asked [INAUDIBLE] as we have become poets.
Poet [INAUDIBLE]
There's a slight differentiation, one associated
with the soul [INAUDIBLE] Other one is a little bit
more carnal, body like.
Corral's poetry starts with the [INAUDIBLE]
and ends with New York's Hell's Kitchen.
Whereas Diaz's poetry starts with all this biblical imagery,
starts with the gospel like, turns into blues, jazz.
At the end, it just turns into hip-hop.
So is that a natural progression?
[LAUGHTER]
Natalie.
I'm still thinking about what we ate for dinner.
No.
I think, just for me, I like to push the boundaries of form,
and I think I come from a musical place.
And I also come from--
it's crazy for me when you look at the way
our history in Mojave has been talked about.
It's called, the Mojave creation myth.
Yet you have Christianity, and that's considered OK.
You never attach the myth to that,
unless you're in a university.
But so for me--
and not that there's anything wrong
with being in a university.
But for me, I like to be able to exist within those boundaries,
I guess, of Christianity storytelling
because they're so accessible.
But then I like to get them and turn them on their head,
and and not to make them my own, but to say that I can--
my ways of storytelling can exist right next to those
and be just as clear and accessible to people, I guess.
So I do play a lot.
And also, my father is Spanish.
My grandparents are from Spain.
And my mother is native.
So I had both of those inside my house.
And not one of those was wrong.
Not one of those was right.
They were just there, and we moved in and out of them
very easily.
And so it's really easy for me to move in and out
of those on the page because it's very normal.
So it's just being able to hold a lot of different truths
in my head at one time because that's
what we know in my house.
It gives me a lot of freedom.
I feel like I can go any place and use anything to get there,
regardless of whose god it is, because we have our own.
[INAUDIBLE] Who were your early influences?
Who were your early literally influencces?
Can you repeat the question?
Who were my early influences?
Yeah.
I was a basketball player, so to be very honest, Jordan.
That's what helped me, and that's what got me a little bit
able to go outside where I was.
And I didn't-- when I was in third grade,
I knew that's how I was going to leave.
The odd thing was is I'm back and I'm home.
And it's home.
I never felt like home until I've come back home.
But some of the--
the biggest influence for me, and we
talked about this a little bit this afternoon,
but Tim Seibles, who's a Black poet.
He's at Old Dominion.
And I knew him as an athlete first.
He played on our--
my women's team had a men's scrimmage team
because you had to be faster and stronger
and all of these things.
So we scrimmaged against the men.
And during the summer, we weren't
allowed to come home-- some of us weren't allowed to go home.
So the inner city kids and then I
wasn't allowed to come home during the summer
so we wouldn't get in trouble.
And so we stayed there.
And he was on the summer men's practice squad.
So I only knew him as an athlete.
He's a big man.
He's a good basketball player.
He played like Mark Jackson, though.
He backed everybody down.
[INAUDIBLE] shot.
But he--
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
So that one semester, probably my sophomore or junior year,
I got put into an introductory writing class
because they thought it would be a an easy course for me.
And I walked in, and Tim was there.
He was my teacher.
And so I saw him, and we talked all about basketball.
And I sat down and class started.
And he started-- he didn't say a word to the class.
He just read a poem.
And I heard him read that poem, and I just--
I never knew poetry could be what it was then.
And it stayed that same thing for me.
Poetry's still to me what it was when I first heard
him read that poem in class.
And so that is really my first influence.
And it was him as an athlete first, and as a poet second.
And I wish I had a canon of Native writers to list,
but that's--
Had it not been for Tim and athletics,
I don't know that I would have found the door to poetry,
at least not soon enough.
But that's my--
I think it's OK for us as writers or poets
to say that our lyric influences or ancestors are not always
the people in the textbooks or people you expect.
I think in my high school years, and I was
a terrible high school student.
I was a terrible graduate student
and a terrible high school student.
What am I doing up here?
What have you read?
was crappy Star Trek novels.
[INAUDIBLE] language--
[INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE] I draw the line there.
[INAUDIBLE] but I really wanted to drop out.
What made me stay was thinking of my [INAUDIBLE] my aunts,
my mother in the kitchen when I was alone with them
and no other men were there.
I think they felt safe with around me
to let down their guards.
And I noticed the way they were speak was different.
The language.
The vocabulary.
The music.
The shrieks.
The screams.
The crying.
It was different from the voices they
had outside that kitchen, outside the home.
I'm like, oh, I want do that with my own work,
find a new way of saying something [INAUDIBLE] So
they're not always--
Shakespeare's OK.
[INAUDIBLE] Sometimes [INAUDIBLE]
non-literally sources are influences.