I'm going to open it up for questions.
But I want to actually ask an introductory question
to break the ice.
As I was listening to the three of you
and I'm thinking in my mind why I brought the three of you
together and thinking about the larger gesture of Latino poetry
now, which is meant to take a snapshot in 2011, 2012, 2013,
of younger contemporary Latino poetry.
One of you or all of you to take a shot at,
as you just experienced each other's work
to situate yourselves as a group,
as a trio within the constellation of Latino poetry.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, maybe the anecdote might be the place to begin,
which is that how we met and that's meaningful.
And so far as I think that the three of us here,
our commitments have been long and continue
to be associated with what might be called
research-based or investigative poetrys,
experimental poetrys and yet our concern for the culture concept
in which many identities are able to be enacted
in the kinds of poems that we're interested in producing
had a very limited reception at a certain given moment
in the very recent history.
And so I think the reason I spoke of elected affinities,
it soon became very clear that I was beginning
to read poets who identified as Latino or Latina
and who were asking the kinds of both formal and subject based
questions that to me were the compelling questions,
the questions that I think poetry is a place of knowledge
building should be asking.
And to me it seems that what I think the three of us
are interested is exploring the notion that there are scripts
that we are asked to perform simply because
of our last names or our cultural background
and that certain ways of enunciating
that identity of proper behavior.
And so I think the kind of work that we tend to explore
is one that would rather be unruly in accepting those given
social scripts.
One follow up and then I open it up.
So when you think about your work within again
the constellation of Latino poetry
say from the late '60s till now, have any of you
identified any poets with whom you share
affinities, some among our elders?
Sure.
I mean the thing is it's like those aren't
solitary in the sense of being an exclusive
to certain cultural conceptions and cultural identities,
but rather those share the same space with--
a story would be to explain how I was reading James Wright
and then my professor was like, who else are you reading?
I'm like, reading Scalapino.
I love them both, I'm reading that same week.
But in so doing, reading Jimmy Santiago Baca, the same week
that I'm reading Rosmarie Waldrop,
I don't find different contrasts in aesthetics,
but just as when I read a certain trajectory that's
been produced to represent Latino/Latina writing,
I understand it's a cultural production
but there's still a lot of these writers that
exist within that paradigm that are doing these really
innovative questioning, pursuing,
challenging these structures.
We mentioned the Gronk earlier, ASCO, and a variety of even
what I'm looking at, late 19th century work that's already
pursuing this prior to the European
based historical avant-garde, the US.
So I think that to try to portray
a particular historical perspective on what
has come to be known as Latino/Latina writing
can be disrupted and reorganized to demonstrate
that these type of moments have been
occurring throughout 20th century, 19th century
et cetera.
I mean, I think it's complicated to look back
and say, is it doing this.
I don't know, I think Alurista and Juan Felipe Herrera
are experimental writers.
You know what I mean?
They were groundbreaking and they did things
that people hadn't done before and their work has
this political charge that's really significant.
But again, I think it's who's making the decisions about how
a work gets contextualized.
I think of Juan Felipe Herrera than writing Akrílica just
as the language poets are coming up and I'm wondering why
isn't there a conversation there.
So I think there's lots there.
Roberto, I was really taken by the phrase
you just used about poetry as a place for knowledge building.
Would you say a little more about that concept?
To be brief I would just say that there
is an understanding of art making that it comes out
of what might be experienced.
And what I'm about to say does not
negate that poetry comes out of experience.
We had a conversation with the great undergraduates
this morning about how does one process experience.
But it seems to me that poetry has a commitment
as well because it is a legitimate inquiry
into the world, that it has the ability.
It's a powerful technology, it's a powerful tool
to ask questions about history, about the present,
where does that subject fit into the present,
how is one an historical actor, where is desire in that,
have a spirit and fantasy play into subjectivity
in the realm of social disaster for example.
So it seems to me that I like to see the ambition of poetry
taking on more than just what might be called lyric
experience of just the self.
I have a couple questions that I'll throw out there
and it could be for any of you and then
and you can do what you want with them.
One is that you all have do work editing as well too.
And I'm curious the relationship between how you conceive
editing versus how that informs your creative work and vise
versa.
And second is that, one of the things that I noticed
between all of your work is biology and bodies and organs
and organisms coming up.
I'm curious if you think that a poem is an organism itself
and then more in sort of a conceptual frame
like how you consider biology and poetry in relation
to each other.
What was the first question again?
I had an answer then it went got intense.
Relationship between editing and writing.
Honestly, for me reading is 60% of my writing.
So I read a lot more than I do write.
And I think editing goes into that.
As like when I read this other work,
I'm encountering my process and experience and digestion
of language and then that totally helps me
in what I end up doing, as I want to push it
because I see these other writers doing
these type of moments--
I mean, what I would consider, like,
their epistemological approach to kind of just world
experience.
And when I put on that guys, how does that manifest?
Because most of my work are exercises
that I base off of other writers because I
want to kind of inhabit how they make knowledge,
how they make the world.
And I don't think this knowledge-based pursuit
is a new thing.
I mean, you can go back to Shelley, to the Greeks, where--
exactly-- this is something that's
quite classical in the sense of how conceptions of the world
are created vis-a-vis language and aesthetic.
And as far as the body, we talked
about this earlier, this question in the classroom
I went to this morning.
For me, the body is so central concerning my own biology
and that I cannot abstract my body, whether it be racially,
the various genetic things that I have,
based off my father and Agent Orange.
Like my body is quite literally a symbol of imperialism
put it off genetic disorders.
So to me, I can't escape that experience
as it's always present and always siphoned through it
and the body is pretty sexy.
[LAUGHTER]
I like editing a lot.
It's one of my favorite things to do
and I'm very good at very few things, but one of them
is helping people imagine how a book can be
and what a book can be and what it means and refining it.
And I like the collaborative practice of editing.
I learn a lot from it.
And so to me, I guess, being a writer
is also about being a citizen in this community.
And so whatever resources you have
that you can offer to the community,
you should offer them.
And so that's part of the reason that I like to do it.
But I think it's exciting to help someone bring out a book
and put it in the world and help them get an audience.
There's just nothing that's better than that, I think.
Even publishing your own books is
one thing but helping someone else publish a book
is fantastic as you know.
So I think that's part of it.
Similarly to J. Michael, a woman is a body first,
that's one of the first things.
It's a site of violence, it's the first side
of violence in many cases, in many contexts.
And so it's hard for me not to think of myself as a body
and it's sexy too, I agree.
I'll talk about amoebas which is that one
of my favorite writers, Roger Caillois,
wrote about amoebas as exemplary of an important surrealist
motif which is that the degree to which my body becomes more
specific, my surroundings become less specific
and the more specific my surroundings become,
the less specific is the body.
He writes about camouflage and praying mantis.
So it seems to me that in biology are
these models for thinking about the social organism
of human activity.
Roberto, and maybe the other panelists here,
I know you as an art historian as well.
So can you talk a little bit about that mambo between being
a poet and an art historian.
And then just for the other, the importance of visual culture,
obviously you wrote about Ana Mendieta.
And so what is that and how does that get into your poetics?
I'm very excited about Carmen's writing
on Ana Mendieta because actually, I'm
supposed to be writing right now a piece on Ana Mendieta early,
just her film works which will be
in exhibition sometime in the next year or the year after.
Mambo is a great word.
It's a dance, In other words, I don't separate the two
identities and increasingly I separate them less and less
in my professional environments but it seems to me
that much of my poetry is about looking and observation
and how looking at things is a way of activating
fantasies and fears and desires about them.
And it's only by way of looking that one way of establishing
the difference between self and others
is through vision and perception.
And so I would say that it's very likely that something
begins as what might be a poetic project
and ends up being art history and vice versa.
They're almost inseparable.
Naturally, the end result, they do end up
in being different kinds of results.
But actually the book I'm writing right now wants to--
If there's one contribution I think
that I can make as an art historian is
to bring the idea that the developmental account is not
the only account and that poets and other creative writers
can find techniques to activate histories that
don't necessarily point to an inevitability.
But some versions of history would
like to write it such that it fits nicely with the end result
that we were hoping to find hence we find it.
I love visual art so much and one of the reasons
that it plays a major part in my work is that--
for two reasons.
One of them is that I think you can look at art
and then understand the historical period from where
it comes from in this way that's amazing and important.
And so I like to look at it in that context.
But I also think that when I look at art,
sometimes visual artists are doing
what I want to do as a poet and so I
try to understand that those impulses and try to translate
them into language because I can't even draw a stick figure.
I wish I could.
If I could, maybe I would.
But I can't, I think about what different visual artists are
doing and then say, how can I make that?
How could I enact that in a poem?
And that back and forth is ongoing.
It's I think going to be a constant source for me
in my work.
I mean, when I think of whether it be criticism or poetry,
I think poetry is a term that operates like the term
subjectivity, like the term white, like the term Latino,
these kind of broad strokes that attempt
to encapsulate and generalize about a certain activity
that when one looks at it quite particularly,
that general term is vacated from any essentialism.
And so when I think of these academic categories of study,
I really don't believe in poetry versus visual art
or because they're both manners of thinking.
And poetry doesn't necessarily end up with a poem.
You end up in a variety of different aesthetic creations
in the act of inhabiting a poetic consciousness.
What is a poetic consciousness?
I'm looking at it.
[LAUGHTER]
That was my escape.
A really great quote that I read today
was this interview with Jean-Luc Nancy.
Yesterday I was on the flight over and again,
he was doing an interview and he referred to Hegel's definition
of a subject simply that which can
inhabit in self contradiction.
And there's obviously like this kind of reach
to Keats in that moment to dwell in mystery.
And I think in some ways that's inhabiting that liminal space
where self contradiction can be both present
and allow a vacating and an openness.
I mean, that's my haphazard way of negotiating that concept.
Any other questions?
Thank you all so much for coming.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks to the boards for sharing your work, Francisco.
Thank you so much for bringing this event here.
Everyone please buy some books and get them signed over there.
Bye guys.
[APPLAUSE]