WEBVTT

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And so, again, just still
going along with this.

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Not such a great experience, I
would say, in graduate school

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being told by a professor at the
time who's no longer with us,

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but who is a Pulitzer
Prize winning

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author who said there was
no place for bilingualism

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in poetics.

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And I've shared this story many
times in this poem, many times,

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but it really is
an important poem

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because I was the only person
in the space of 10 students who

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was writing in
Spanish, so it was

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a very passive
aggressive way of saying,

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your poems are not valid,
and your language is invalid.

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And again, it was a really
disheartening thing to hear.

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I was fresh out of college
and first year first semester

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of graduate school.

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So definitely one of those
moments that was not fun.

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So I got really ticked off.

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And one of my mentors,
Martín Espada,

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was teaching right down the
hall, and I went to his office.

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And I was really ticked
off, I tell the story

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because I was just so upset.

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And I said, I can't
believe this man said this.

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And Martín was like, put your
earrings back on and write

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about it.

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You need to write about it.

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And so I did.

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And this is what I came up with.

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And it's a pretty
straightforward poem

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with the title "A Poem
for the Professors Who

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Say There's No Place for
Bilingualism in Poetry."

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"That afternoon, as he took
the last drag of his cigarette

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and moved on to the next
topic, all of the Spanish words

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angrily rose from my stanzas.

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Scratch their
accents and tildes,

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dubious at what they heard.

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They yelled for revolution,
demanded protests and marches.

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They held nightly
meetings on my desk

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surrounded by a dictionary
underneath a poster of Zapata

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and Che.

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The ñs led discussions on
military tactics and guerrilla

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warfare as the
double R screamed,

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we should have stayed
in Neruda's pages,

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at least there we were
considered genius.

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Where did they belong?

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What was this
thing called place?

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And why couldn't all
words exist there?

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News spread of the old men
who deny words of place

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as different languages held
caucuses asking questions,

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where do words with accents,
tildes, and apostrophes

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go when they are shunned
from the page and mouth?

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If English is not your first
but your second or third,

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why is it permitted
to cut in line?

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The French letters
wondered where Eliot fit

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in this monolinguistic theory.

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The Italians wondered
about the cantos.

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All the words
organized and packed

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their bags, traveled through
deserts and mountains,

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founded their own place where
the old men are prohibited

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from issuing prohibitions."

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