[APPLAUSE]
So maybe a question or two or comments.
Yeah.
Just raise your hand.
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
I'm like, all right!
I've got you!
I hear you
I like how you read.
Do you do any of your books on recordings, or CDs, or--
Wow, well-- Thank you.
I appreciate that compliment.
You know, I don't.
The thing is that we don't really understand
the sound of our voice.
We have a different sense of voice than other people, right?
So it's hard to take that compliment because I remember
my days-- remember back in the days
when we had those answering machines?
And I hated having to put my dumb voice,
I was like, oh, I sound so terrible.
So I still hear that voice, you know?
But I'm glad that what you hear is actually beauty.
[LAUGHTER]
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
I'm from Colorado, and I thought you might be interested to--
Yes.
At Ludlow, the miners provided shelter
for men who were working.
But the reason there were the pits
was because there was nothing provided
for the women and children.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Had to make--
Yeah.
--whatever makeshift protection for themselves.
Right.
Yeah, and also on that and the reason the men were not there.
They were out.
They were out striking at the mines,
so it's the women and the children that were stay behind
during the tents and the tents.
And that was the thing when they heard the--
because they were told, you know?
You hear anybody coming, just hide.
Right?
Hide inside that, and that was what went wrong.
It began with gunfire, that particular battle,
and some people died in that confrontation,
but it was that--
but, interestingly enough, after that the tide
changed in terms of the rights of workers, which
is why I thought that 2014, 100 years later,
we're going the other direction.
Right?
And that's the real tragedy, I thought,
and that's why I felt compelled to write about this because me
and my own family, we were three generations
of migrant farm workers.
And my grandparents were union members.
My mother was a union member.
You know, my first--
I have a photograph of me at the age of three
on my first march in Delano with Cesar Chavez
and the big strikes of the '70s.
So that meant a lot to me, and I felt this is again another sign
that the tide turning is not for the best,
and we need to push back.
If we don't push back, then we're
just going to be taken by that flood.
Right?
And then you know what?
Don't complain.
Yes.
Thank you very much for the beautiful reading, Rigoberto.
Can you say a little bit more about your two-year hiatus
from poetry?
I'm interested in what years those were
and what motivated the break.
Yeah.
And what did you do?
What were you reading and writing--
Yeah.
Well--
--during that time?
--I was working on some larger project.
I was working on the What Drowns the Flowers in your Mouth.
The larger projects, right?
But poetry is always my first love.
I know I do all these other things,
but poetry is my first love, and when I write poetry,
I really do want to give it my attention.
It's kind of intuitive.
You'd think that if I was working on a larger
project, that's when I need more,
but for me it's really poetry.
I really need that space and the time,
and also I was really refusing to accept
that this next book was not going to be about mostly
in the voice of people because I had gone
from my first book of poetry.
I call it a love letter to my country, Mexico.
The second book is all about men,
and the third book is all about women.
The fourth book is all about ghosts.
It's Unpeopled Eden.
Right?
So I thought, what comes after that?
What comes after this?
Well, there's another little layer of ghosts, right,
that's the land.
But it was such--
and the air, the elements.
I knew that I needed to let something really stir inside.
I didn't want to write it too quickly, you know?
And yet that's what ended up happening.
I ended up doing that.
I was actually in Italy for a month
and it just poured out of me.
And I was telling somebody at lunch that during that time,
because those Europeans they eat so late.
I'm like 5 o'clock, all right?
That's it, don't bother with it.
But in Europe, it's like 9 o'clock when they eat.
So I was having my meals and I would want to go to bed.
And when I go to bed with my stomach full,
I have nightmares.
So I started having nightmares.
And a couple of things that I write in the book
were actually from those nightmares.
Because I would wake up and I go, that was horrible.
And I thought, wait a minute.
That's actually kind of cool.
I think I'm to put that in the book.
So I began to keep documenting these things.
And I saved those and eventually I found stuff.
So it just happened that way.
I'm never going to do it again.
I don't recommend it.
I'm always working on something.
But for me, I really wanted to be sure that that's really
what I want to do.
And I thought, if I begin after a two year hiatus,
if I go to this book and I lose that interest,
then it really wasn't meant to be.
Because it doesn't hold my attention anymore.
For me, that's my test.
I held off on it, I thought about it.
Now let me start working on it.
And I abandon many projects that way.
I thought about it, I thought about them.
OK, now here comes.
Now, here's a time to do it.
And then, eh.
I guess that was a false start.
Not going to happen.
But with that one, it did.
It stuck.
And I think maybe it was those nightmares.
And I thought, well, how are those nightmares
at night different than the nightmares I'm
seeing on the news?
The nightmares that we're living?
So I accepted those as gifts from my subconscious.
I said, you know, this is all part of the--
put it in there, put it in there.
And so and I thought, you know, no matter how crazy the images,
it's already here among us.
Can we imagine anything that's worse than what we
were seeing every day, right?
It's sort of like that-- what was that I always think
of the Lucille Clifton poem.
She wrote a series of poems to Superman.
And one of the poems, one of the lines that I always remember
was that, Oh Superman, there's--
because she's identified with Superman as an alien.
Superman, there's no planet stranger than the one I'm from.
Right?
Superman, you think this-- there's no planet stranger.
Your planet is not strange, my planet is strange.
And I always think of that line from Lucille Clifton.
Final questions?
If not, we can just buy books.
Give you something to do, right?
[INAUDIBLE]
Thank you.
Hello.
I have part personality question, part craft question.
All right.
I'm ready.
Bring it.
When something pops into your head
or you see a person or something happens to you, how
do you know when it's going to be like,
oh, this is going to be an essay,
this is going to be a story, this is going to be a poem.
How do you figure that out?
Or is it just like I'm to try it here, experimentation.
Instinct?
I was hoping to ask that personality question first.
That's the personality part?
I'm just joking.
OK I got it No, that's a good question.
In the beginning--
I think that I was very deliberate.
I was going to set out to write a poem,
I was going to set out to write an essay.
And usually was determined it for me, you know,
most of my poetry is not autobiographical.
For me, it's fiction.
Poetry is fiction.
I said, if I'm going to write something that's
very personal about me, I'm going
to put that material into my nonfiction.
If I'm intrigued by an image or a word
or that I feel is not really going
to fit in with the kind of stories
I want to tell in my memoir, then
I know there's a place for it in poetry.
For me, the linguistic pleasure of poetry
is really what draws me to it.
Somehow I've been doing this now for two decades, right,
just all that entangling happens somewhere in here.
That I don't have to think about it.
And that's the great gift.
There are two things I love about getting older.
One is that-- there's only two.
One is that I don't have to overthink things anymore.
And it just feels so great.
It feels so wonderful.
It's like, look, all right, I made a mistake.
And the other thing is my long term memory kicked in.
Oh my goodness, I love it.
You know I can't tell you what I did this morning.
I forgot.
But I can tell you something that happened 20 years ago
with such clarity of detail.
And that's something that older people didn't tell me.
So I'm telling you now.
Long term memory is kick in and all
of a sudden, oh my goodness, I have all this new material.
People always ask me too, you're still
going back to writing about your family
and you're going back to the same moment.
Why is that?
Because I'm remembering again.
That's why.
I'm remembering.
And that's the greatest gift I think for me as an aging
writer.
I love it.
All this coming back.
But yeah, but it used to be deliberate.
Just like, for example, when I write a poem,
I tell my students--
basic reminders.
You know when you write a poem, the sensory components here
of this poem, everything's so visually driven.
Can I hear something?
Can I taste something?
Can I touch something?
And I said, do it deliberately.
Be aware of it.
Circle it, underline it.
What are the senses that you're employing in your poems?
And they ask me, do you do that?
I said, I did in the beginning.
Absolutely.
Now I don't have to.
I've internalized it.
It's part of my process.
So it's just a matter of keeping at it.
It's a matter of it's OK if you're aware and hyper
aware and conscious of it.
Because that is you, the craftsperson going in there.
And making sure that this piece that you're writing
has the artistic merit to it and the artistic value to it.
But also the personal value, right?
And after a while-- and this is like a sad old person answer,
oh, it'll just happen on its own.
But it does.
Eventually it does.
That's the beauty of it.
So that's one wonderful thing you have to look forward
to when you're getting older.
The knees?
Forget it.
I was having a hard time getting up from that chair at dinner.
Can I just ask you really fast--you're so--genuous--
Hi.
I'm generous and genuine, yes.
And this is actually just excuse me
can you talk a little bit more because it's fun.
But specifically, would you talk a little bit
about your attraction to Lorca?
Oh yeah.
I mean, isn't everybody attracted to García Lorca?
I mean, definitely.
My education has all been in English, right?
I was exposed to all of the writers who wrote in English.
And I myself, even though I had gone to school in Mexico up
until the sixth grade, I didn't--
that's the extent of my education.
So I always get asked, do you write in Spanish?
I said, yeah, I can write essays.
But I can't write poetry in Spanish.
It's very hard because my vocabulary is very limited.
I love to read in Spanish, though.
So one thing that I did in order to continue my relationship
with that language and to learn more of it
is I really I love to--
Neruda and Lorca and any other Spanish writer
who writes in Spanish, I read them in Spanish.
Like right now this summer my gift to myself is I'm going
to reread Cien Años de Soldedad but in Spanish.
Because I read it in college in English.
And I realized that and I'm going
to read it in Spanish because I can savor it
and I don't have to write a paper on it.
But García Lorca is particularly important to me.
One, because later I found that he was gay.
Two because of the darkness in his imagery
is something that I also am drawn to, the darkness.
And to read a or to even experience a García Lorca poem,
you understand that even the ugly has a kind of beauty.
Even the dark has light, right?
He'd be writing about a horse festering outside of the road.
And yet the language, it's frightening,
but it's also beautiful.
And that kind of complexity of language
is what really attracts me.
And I hope I'm doing that.
Sometimes I read some of these poems
and I look on the audience and somebody is horrified
and I'm thinking, you're not getting the full effect.
You're just connecting to like the awful, terrible things.
There's also beautiful things.
And look how he describes the end of the world.
There's magic in that too, right?
So anyway, thank you very everybody.
Muchas gracias.