And so, again, just still going along with this.
Not such a great experience, I would say, in graduate school
being told by a professor at the time who's no longer with us,
but who is a Pulitzer Prize winning
author who said there was no place for bilingualism
in poetics.
And I've shared this story many times in this poem, many times,
but it really is an important poem
because I was the only person in the space of 10 students who
was writing in Spanish, so it was
a very passive aggressive way of saying,
your poems are not valid, and your language is invalid.
And again, it was a really disheartening thing to hear.
I was fresh out of college and first year first semester
of graduate school.
So definitely one of those moments that was not fun.
So I got really ticked off.
And one of my mentors, Martín Espada,
was teaching right down the hall, and I went to his office.
And I was really ticked off, I tell the story
because I was just so upset.
And I said, I can't believe this man said this.
And Martín was like, put your earrings back on and write
about it.
You need to write about it.
And so I did.
And this is what I came up with.
And it's a pretty straightforward poem
with the title "A Poem for the Professors Who
Say There's No Place for Bilingualism in Poetry."
"That afternoon, as he took the last drag of his cigarette
and moved on to the next topic, all of the Spanish words
angrily rose from my stanzas.
Scratch their accents and tildes,
dubious at what they heard.
They yelled for revolution, demanded protests and marches.
They held nightly meetings on my desk
surrounded by a dictionary underneath a poster of Zapata
and Che.
The ñs led discussions on military tactics and guerrilla
warfare as the double R screamed,
we should have stayed in Neruda's pages,
at least there we were considered genius.
Where did they belong?
What was this thing called place?
And why couldn't all words exist there?
News spread of the old men who deny words of place
as different languages held caucuses asking questions,
where do words with accents, tildes, and apostrophes
go when they are shunned from the page and mouth?
If English is not your first but your second or third,
why is it permitted to cut in line?
The French letters wondered where Eliot fit
in this monolinguistic theory.
The Italians wondered about the cantos.
All the words organized and packed
their bags, traveled through deserts and mountains,
founded their own place where the old men are prohibited
from issuing prohibitions."