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/a
Poetry Now, which is meant to take a snapshot in 2011, 2012,
2013 of younger contemporary Latino poetry.
I'd 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.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, maybe the anecdote might be the place to begin,
which is how we met, and 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 Elective 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
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 exploding 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 to now, do you
see or have any of you identified
any poets with whom you share affinities among our elders?
Sure.
I mean, the thing is, it's like, 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, I'm reading Scalapino.
I love them both.
I'm reading them 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.
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 these writers
that exist within that paradigm that are doing these really
kind of innovative, questioning, pursuing,
challenging these structures.
I know we mentioned Gronk earlier, Asco,
in 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
in 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 kind of 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 sort of say,
is it doing this?
I don't know.
I think Alurista and Juan Felipe Herrera are
kind of 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 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?
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 a lyric
experience of just the self.
I have a couple questions that I'll throw out there.
It could be for any of you, and you
can do what you want with them.
One is that you all 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 vice-versa.
And second is that one of the things that I notice
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,
how you consider biology and poetry in relation
to each other.
What was the first question again?
I had an answer, and then it went and 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 as 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, I mean,
what I would consider like their epistemological approach
to kind of just world experience.
And when I put on that guise, 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 the aesthetic.
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 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 my body is quite literally a symbol
of imperialism rooted off kind of 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 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.
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.
A woman is a body first.
That's one of the first things.
It's a site of violence.
It's the first site of violence in many cases
and many contexts, and so it's hard for me
not to think of myself as a body.
And it's sexy, too.
I agree.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll talk about amoebas.
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 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 politics?
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, just her filmworks, which
will be an 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 through 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, right?
Hence we find it, right?
I love art, visual arts, so much,
and one of the reasons that it plays a major part in my work
is 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 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 kind of 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
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.
So--
What is a poetic consciousness?
You're looking at it.
[LAUGHTER]
That was my escape.
[LAUGHTER]
A really great quote that I read today
was this interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, or yesterday.
It was on the flight over.
And he was doing an interview, and he
referred to kind of Hegel's definition of a subject,
simply that which 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.
I mean, that's my kind of haphazard way
of negotiating that concept.
Any other questions?
OK, thank you all so much for coming.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]
Thanks to the poets for sharing their work.
Francisco, thank you so much for bringing this event here.
Everyone, please buy some books and get them signed over there.
[APPLAUSE]