Hello.
Welcome.
Hey, it's nice to see you.
Lots of good folks in this audience
today that I recognize.
We took a moment to talk.
I'm trying to keep us on task, on time, right Tyler?
But there's a lot to say for folks that are here tonight,
and Martín, that was amazing.
Thank you so much.
And I think you've heard about Poetry of Resistance
in the introductions, and how it came into being,
and its response to SB 1070.
But I think it would be great to have Martín just take a moment
and talk about a conversation you had at the airport,
or in the cab, right, and what it brought in terms
of our discussion earlier as like,
do people here remember SB 1070 and HB 2281,
and what those laws were?
Do you remember?
Do you remember these laws?
Do you remember the fights of these--
I know [CHUCKLES] you guys do.
I know you guys do, but the person--
the cabbie did not, right?
It was somebody I spoke with at the airport,
and I wasn't entirely surprised to find out
that this person didn't know.
I, in fact, assume that people don't know what I often
consider to be common knowledge in my circle, and my community.
You better believe that people in Boston
don't remember that case.
As a matter of fact, after the initial uproar
around that case, it faded quickly from national view.
So that by the time those brothers were sentenced--
and by the way, they were sentenced to 3 years and 2
and 1/2 years respectively--
it was local news.
It was reported in the Boston press,
it was not picked up by the national press.
So part and parcel of the problem
that we face as activists or as poets
is the problem of collective amnesia.
And that is true even among those of us
who are well-intentioned, even among those of us
who would be outraged to know these things.
Nevertheless, when you think about what
we are dealing with in terms of the things that compete
for our attention, what gets crowded off
the page within minutes to accommodate the next thing.
I didn't think I was going to bring it up this soon,
but what's very much on my mind right now
is the aftermath of the hurricanes in Puerto Rico.
And the headlines about the hurricanes of Puerto Rico
have already been crowded off the front page
by a sexual predator in Hollywood.
It's amazing what competes for our attention.
And it's all deserving our attention,
and yet it's up to the poets to bring us back.
I agree with that.
I agree with what you're saying Martín, because I mean,
there was--
Harvey also happened right before that,
and Houston was underwater.
I've been living in Texas now for about two years
and living on the border, but I know
that Houston is home to probably the largest
Black population in Texas.
And we don't know what's happened
to people that were missing.
We don't know if even-- what's going on with that.
The hurricanes in Mexico--
I mean the earthquakes in Mexico also,
we haven't heard anything about that.
And Puerto Rico, if something doesn't happen fast,
we're in trouble because--
they're in trouble, but we're in trouble too,
because we have family.
We have friends and loved ones.
And Trump's now saying he's going to pull out the aid.
He's going to eliminate the aid or something.
You could talk a little bit more about that.
Yeah, there was an article that everybody
should know about in The Guardian about FEMA.
And FEMA estimates that the people of Puerto Rico
require 2 million meals delivered today.
FEMA is currently delivering 200,000,
so people are starving.
My father was born in a mountain town
called Utuado in Puerto Rico.
That town isn't there anymore.
I'll come back to this later.
OK.
So why Poetry of Resistance?
But the greater conversation, I remember
when the book was published, Festival of Books
comes along at the weekly rerun of a story
and a cover theme on Poetry of Resistance.
And before the next issue, I get a letter, addressed
to the editor from a local poet known in certain circles,
upset that, what is this Poetry of Resistance?
It is a mystery to us, and brown people writing simple poetry,
and getting all this attention and--
but it brought up a discussion on--
and actually, I allowed Odilia to respond.
And she did a beautiful erasure letter,
or erasure poem using the letter from this poet in a response.
It was a great issue.
I loved it.
But it's this whole thing of--
so it's like, duh, poets have always been responding, right.
But what is it that nowadays is making
some people think otherwise?
And I wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit about that.
Well, it's interesting that I responded to him
with an erasure poem because I feel like what this country has
always tried to do is erase us.
And when I say us, I don't mean just Mexican-American people
or Native American people or Puerto Rican
people or African-American people,
I mean all people that are other.
And that's what Poetry of Resistance is about.
That's how we started, because SB 1570 is a racial profiling
law, so it means anybody who's brown.
And today, at the hotel where I'm staying,
I actually started talking to the women who clean,
and I spoke to them in Spanish, thinking they were Mexicanas.
And they weren't.
They were from Nepal.
And we smiled at each other when I talked to them in English,
and I said, wow, I really thought
you were-- because brown doesn't mean that you're Mexican.
And I think that eight years of Obama
made people think that racism was somehow over.
And I got asked in an interview about Poetry
of Resistance, how long will this book be relevant,
because it came out of SB 1070.
I said, well, as long as racism and xenophobia exist,
this book will be relevant.
I wasn't here when this poet said what he said,
and I don't know who it was, but I can
imagine I've met him before.
[LAUGHTER]
I've talked to him before.
There are some odd parallels, this notion
that political poetry is somehow an oxymoron.
You think about it.
Over and over again lately, African Americans have been
told when they can or cannot kneel.
When is it appropriate to protest?
When is the right time and place to protest?
And it turns out the answer is never.
And just as you're not supposed to kneel during the anthem
before an NFL game, so you're not
supposed to stand up in a poem.
And that has always been thus.
And I was raised with that conventional wisdom.
But my own experience and the experience
of the community around me led me to reject that wisdom
just as quickly because it didn't
square with either experience or common sense.
So it is amazing that this keeps happening, but I've learned--
the funny thing is, I've learned to erase that guy.
Well he was erased, I erased him.
It's over, it's over.
It's passed.
So what I guess now, I mean, the resistance continues,
and both of you continue to write as you have before.
Do you want to let us know a little bit of what you're
working on right now and what's important to you right now
to focus on?
Sure.
Well, after the maestro Francisco passed away,
then I took on the whole project.
And one of the things that he asked me before he passed
was to make sure that we continued it.
And not so much the stuff I took on about the book itself,
but just the project of making sure that these issues are
addressed.
And I said, of course, it's been the work that I've always done.
And what I'm writing right now is I'm working on a memoir
about my-- it's actually--
I don't know what it wants to be, a memoir or what it is.
But it's a book about my family.
And a lot of the poems that I'm going to be reading tonight
are about that, because when I'm trying
not to write the book, then I write in poetry.
That's about the same topic, which
is about living on the border and those ancestral lands
that I come from, which I write there.
The border's heating up a lot because people
are protesting the wall.
They're not taking into consideration
what that's going to do to the earth there,
the estuary for birds.
And people will probably be more apt to protest that,
that it's going to affect birds than the fact
that it's going to affect the people that
live on the border, that have crossed the border freely.
The only people who say that you can't build it
on their part of the-- is the Tohono O'odham people,
who said you're not 72 miles of this border.
You will not build your new wall on it,
because we are not going to let you.
So I mean, there's--
[APPLAUSE]
Yeah.
And you all know these people because they're there
from right here.
So it's important to keep talking about the stuff
and keep it alive.
And like Martín said, not let the latest thing let us forget
what's happening in the world, the tragedies that are
happening.
There's fires burning in California right now,
but this man is saying there's no such thing
as global warming.
Come on.
So we need everybody.
So I'm working on two books, actually.
I'm working on a new collection of poems.
You just heard one of them.
But strangely enough, or perhaps not strangely at all,
the same collection is going to include a number of love poems,
because right now we need those too.
In addition, I'm working on a book proposal
for an anthology I want to edit which is tentatively
titled Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump.
And what I have to demonstrate to a prospective publisher
is how I would market this book.
And I've been asked already, well, who's going to sell it?
To which I reply, Trump will.
So I think we're going to have a best seller there.
He'll be tweeting about it.
Yeah, I'm hoping to draw a tweet fire.
And that would be, I think, the first book
of poems to receive a tweet fire from the White House.
I'd be deeply--
I might be as proud of that as I was at being banned in Tucson.
Odilia, it was an anthology that was banned in Tucson.
By the University of Arizona Press.
That's right, U of A Press.
Francisco was a person who was joyful about poetry,
I would say.
Wouldn't you say that about him?
And he really felt that poetry was for everyone,
and that everyone should have their hearts immersed in it
and be in love with it as much as he did and really shared it
with everyone, wanted everybody to feel
like they could participate.
All of you here, Francisco says you're all poets.
It would be what would happen if we were at a party
or workshop with him.
And I guess I would be curious, not just thinking
about Francisco and that love of poetry and sharing with people,
but what both of you, what your philosophies,
for the lack of a better word, are about that and sharing
it and writing it and your work, and also just life
after Francisco, too.
OK, well I come from the school of poetry
of all the poets in the room.
So I came up with Francisco, and people like Lucia Corpi,
and our last poet laureate.
We all wrote together, and nobody
thought that their work was any better than anybody else's
work, and we encouraged each other to write.
And that's what I do.
I bring all the voices in the room
and try to get them to write because we all
have something to say.
We all have a voice.
Whether it's poetry or whether it's
writing a letter to the editor or whatever, that's empowering.
And that's what Francisco would want people to do.
He would want people to keep using their voices,
because they might come--
Martín was saying that earlier, that thing about they came
for them and then they came for so and so and whose--
and that was with the poem that I read a minute ago is about.
It's like, who's going to talk?
Who's going to speak for you when they come for you?
And we need allies.
It's not about the Republicans and the Democrats now,
it's about saving this world.
And we do need love, I agree with Martín.
A lot of my poems that I write are about love,
because it's so needed right now.
We cannot be this mean-spirited country.
When I get into this conversation with people,
I often get this question.
Why poetry?
Usually, that's framed in a sneer, why poetry?
And I could be snarky right back and say, why not poetry?
But I do think there are certain elements of poetry that
convey ideas and feeling with an immediacy
unlike any other art form.
I do believe that poetry humanizes
in the face of dehumanization, especially when that poetry is
grounded in the senses, is grounded in the image
as I try to do.
So I try to bring that poetry to places
where it's not supposed to go, to
the so-called non-traditional audience that turns out
to be the most traditional audience of all.
So last Christmas Eve, I guess it was,
I did a reading in a jail, the Franklin County jail
in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
And I can often be found in such places as a visitor.
But when I do a reading in a jail,
it always turns into a revival meeting
because first I read my poems, then they read their poems,
then everybody is slapping everybody else on the back.
And there is something in the air that would not otherwise
be there.
And I think that's what poetry can do.
And it's poetry resistance, yes, there
are ways in which poetry articulates resistance better
than any other way I know.
So one last point of convo, and then we'll
get back to the reason why we're all here-- to hear more poetry.
I imagine what's in your heart right now is home.
But I'm wondering, how do we resist now?
I mean, what do you, in terms of folks here
or yourself, personally, or just even taking care of yourself
during this time-- we talk a lot about that at my office,
and how do poets take care of themselves?
But I mean, how do we all do that collectively?
And if you're thinking about the people in Puerto Rico
and what they're dealing with, but also just--
for you, climate change is in global chaos,
or global climate chaos is an issue that you take to heart.
So what now?
How do you recommend we all move forward?
How do poets take care of themselves?
Not very well.
I'm going to say that, especially
if you're an activist also.
I took a delegation of poets to the International Poetry
Festival in Havana in July.
Robert Hass was also there with another delegation,
and I contracted the Zika virus.
And so I didn't know it and I just kept going, going, going,
and then was just knocked down for about a month,
and just am now going--
I actually got out of bed to come here.
Well no, to go to Norman, Oklahoma first,
and then to come here.
But I think, especially now that we're aging,
we do need to take care of ourselves.
But when I saw the tweets today from 45,
I decided that I was going to try
to organize a big event in the Bay Area for Puerto Rico,
and that's what I'm working on.
And that's what I do.
It's like, I can't stop.
I mean, it's hard for me to say to you or to say to all of you,
take care of yourselves.
I mean, we do take care of ourselves the best way
that we can.
Try to get more rest, try to get exercise, try to eat well.
But at the same time, there's so many things
going on that we have to continue to resist,
and we have to continue to work in our lives
and take care of our children and all the things that we do.
Where we go from here is we continue to resist
and continue to organize and continue
to write poetry, which is really how I take care of myself.
Well, if it makes you feel any better,
I can't take care of myself either.
And I mean that in one sense particularly, I need community.
I need gatherings, I need people coming together.
I need this because the alternative
is isolation and then despair.
And I think about, again, of course, of Puerto Rico.
And where I live in Western Massachusetts,
there is a huge Puerto Rican population.
But it's very segregated into towns
like Springfield and Holyoke.
And we felt over the last couple of weeks terribly alone,
terribly isolated.
And then we came together for a rally at Hampshire College,
and there we were.
And people saw each other.
We began talking and hugging and crying and listening
to each other's stories.
And listening to this one talk about getting
a phone call or an email finding out
that their great-grandmother is OK, that she's 99 years old
and says, this is nothing, you should have been there
for the hurricane in 1922.
And I realized that we have to preach to the choir.
How many times have you heard that?
Oh, don't do that, don't preach to the choir.
And that's often the way, in fact,
in which political poetry is dismissed,
as preaching to the choir.
Well, the choir needs to be preached to these days.
We need it as much as anybody else to keep right on singing.
Well, thank you both.
It's been an honor sitting up here with you
and talking for a little bit, just a privilege really.
And I just-- anyway, thank you both.
Thank you.