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,
like 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.
Well, maybe the anecdote might be the place
to begin which is that how we met
and that is-- that's meaningful.
Insofar 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 poetries,
experimental poetries, 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 with 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 I found--
to me were the compelling questions,
the questions that I think poetry
as a place of knowledge building should be asking.
And so to me it seems that what I think the three of us
are interested in is exploring the notion
that there are scripts that we are asked to be--
asked to perform simply because of our last names
or our cultural background and 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
would you say from the late '60s to now, do you see or have you
either any of you identified or is
any poets with whom you share affinities,
some among our elders?
Sure.
I mean the thing is it's like those aren't--
those aren't solitary in the sense
of being exclusive to certain cultural conceptions
and cultural identities, but rather those
shared 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 Rosemary Waldrop,
I don't find different contrasts in aesthetics, but I do--
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 structures.
We mentioned 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 think it's complicated to look back
and say, is it doing this like, I don't know, I think Alurista
and Juan Felipe Herrera are kind of experimental writers.
You know what I mean?
Like they were groundbreaking and they did things
that people hadn't done before and their work
had this political-- 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 writing Akrílika 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 this 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 one--
where does that subject fit into the present,
how is one an historical actor, where is desire in that,
how do 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 got intense.
The 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.
I was 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 because I want to push it because I
see these other writers doing these type of moments.
What I would consider like they are epistemological
approach to 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 inhabit how they make knowledge,
how they make the world.
And I don't think this knowledge based pursuit is a new thing.
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 went to this morning.
For me the body is so central concerning my own biology.
And it's that I cannot abstract my body,
whether it be racially, the various genetic things that I
have based off my father and agent orange,
the fact that they-- like my body is quite literally
a symbol of imperialism put it off a genetic disorders.
To me I can't escape that experience
as it's always present and always siphoned through it.
And the body is pretty sexy.
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 and refining it.
And I like the collaborative practice of editing.
I learn a lot from it.
And so I don't know.
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, I don't know if--
a woman is a body first.
That's one of the first things.
It's a side 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 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,
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 the just
for the other--
the importance of visual culture,
obviously you wrote about.
I don't know.
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 her early-- just her filmworks
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--
I don't separate the two identities.
And increasingly I separate them less and less
in my professional environments, but that is the--
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.
One way of establishing the difference
between self and others is through the 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 vise 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 there are--
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 in such that it fits nicely with the end result
that we were hoping to find, hence we find it.
I love our visual arts 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.
So I try to use--
I think about what they're doing,
what different visual artists are doing
and then say, how can I make that,
how could I enact that in a poem,
and-- and that back and forth is ongoing.
It's I think it's going to be a constant source for me
in my work.
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
like 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.
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 kind of Hegel's definition of a subject
simply that which kind of can inhabit in self contradiction
and there's obviously 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 about it.
I mean that's my kind of haphazard way of negotiating
that concept.
Any other questions?
OK, thank you all so much for coming.
Thanks to the poets for sharing the work.
Francisco, thank you so much for bringing this event here.
Everyone please buy some books and get them signed over there.