OK, we're going to be beginning, so if you are standing
please take a seat please.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Diana Delgado.
I'm the literary director here at the Poetry Center.
Yay!
[APPLAUSE]
And I'm really, really excited to stand here
after summer passed so quickly, and we've
been through so many things.
And we had Anthony Cody here and Mai Der Vang,
but I'm really excited to have Lorna Dee Cervantes here
tonight to start our fall reading series.
So let's give a hand to Lorna for coming out
to launch her book.
I'm going to read a brief introduction
that I wrote for Lorna, but before I
do I want to just sort of share of three things with you, four
things, actually.
The first is that we worked really hard.
We always work really hard here at the Poetry Center,
but as a team, we really have been
more thoughtful with making sure that the poets that are
visiting and reading, that we give them an opportunity
to work in the community with you
all in the form of a class or a workshop.
So I just want to just remind everyone
that next week we have a class, Political
Lyric with Aria Aber, The Poetics of the Future
with Shayla Lawz.
After that, in October, we have generative poetry workshop--
Let's Play! with Victoria Chang.
And I think we may have one more spot--
we have a few more spots in November with Sandra Cisneros
and Liliana Valenzuela on The Useful Joys of Translation
for Poets and Translators.
And we have one class in October, going back to October,
Matt Bell's Rewriting and Revision at Every Stage.
So I just want to remind everyone about those classes.
We're hoping to get those filled up so that we can encourage
other poets who are visiting to say, oh my God, people
are so excited to take a class with you.
Please teach a class with us.
So just keep that in mind.
Also, want to remind you that next week-- next Thursday--
we have Aria Aber and Shayla Lawz, who will be reading.
After that, in October, Victoria Chang.
October 13th, Rita Dove will be coming.
So stop there-- it's dramatic.
And stop there.
And we normally think about a paper calendar
that we put out way, way ahead of time.
And we all work feverishly to get it done
and to bug the poets.
And our whole team works on a paper calendar
that we love to get out to you very early
so that you can register for classes
and also make time to come to our readings.
But unfortunately, that calendar is not here,
and so we just want to apologize to everybody for that.
There have just been a whole bunch
of things that have sort of prevented us from getting that
to you on time, but in the future
we're hoping to get that to you at an earlier time.
But if you're really interested in the paper calendar,
they are coming.
They're just delayed.
OK.
Remember, after Lorna's reading, we're going to sell books.
She has her newest book, April on Olympia, there.
And now I'm going to launch in to introducing Lorna Dee
Cervantes.
It is impossible to introduce Lorna Dee Cervantes
without briefly taking a moment to contextualize
her more than 40 years of impact on the development of Chicano,
Chicana, Chicanx poetry, which began
in 1981 with the publication of her watershed book
Emplumada, which won an American Book Award.
Since that publication, she has published five more books,
the most recent April on Olympia, and her body of work
has redefined working class narratives
by centering the experiences of women and that of historically
oppressed communities including, my friends,
one of our most marginalized ecosystems, the earth.
Operating from American and Indigenous
poetics and in addition to branches of philosophy,
science, and linguistics, Cervantes's poems
are vivid and realistic portrayals
of the oppressive conditions that Brown people endure
in their day to day life and at the same time
possess the notable hallmarks of the surrealists
Neruda and Lorca, symbolists known for their ability
to leap from image to image and produce
an effect that Cervantes herself has called
the unexpected inevitable.
In a 2003 interview with Cervantes
titled "Memphis Minnie, Genocide, and Identity
Politics," interviewer Alex Stein
said this about Lorna Dee Cervantes:
"She talked until I ran out of audiotape, some four or five
hours.
I got the feeling she was just warming up.
She's an enchanting monologist, full of feints and thrusts,
half-stops and mad dashes.
For every sentence she finishes, she
leaves five sentences dangling.
At times listening to her, I felt
that I was being engulfed in a whirlwind in which caught
up and swirling around my head were
the bucking, tumbling pages of 1,000 half-tamed poems."
Agreed.
One often walks away from the poems
of Lorna Dee Cervantes feeling that one
has encountered a master.
Yet this master defies categorization
in that the voice, her voice, has traveled a long way
to be here with us, perhaps ascending from the pit of earth
to share.
"I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates
whose history reveals what words don't say."
Or as the essayist David Shields has
said on what one must accomplish to be considered a master,
"One must dissolve a genre or invent one."
I met Lorna Dee Cervantes more than 20 years ago.
On the page through her poem "The Poet
is Served Her Papers" while enrolled
in literature of the Mexican-American
at a community college that was filled with first generation
southern Californian Chicanos.
And I read her poem "The Poet is Served Her Papers,"
and it began, "So tell me about fever dreams,
about the bad checks we scrawl with our mouths,
about destiny missing last bus to oblivion."
And that poem not only took my head off but split me in two
to show me a place and an art form that
had previously only been shown to me
through the lens of whiteness.
In short, she created a bridge between the two cultures
I was living in, that of the dominant
and that of my world, Latinidad.
And now here we have Lorna Dee Cervantes here
to read from April on Olympia, which
is politically driven and reflective, again,
of Cervantes's dedication to the self and the earth.
"You gave me springtime in the haunting thrushes cry,"
she writes.
And later, "Show me a map where the countries aren't women."
The poems in this collection are for the dead
but also for us that continue to live on and choose
to heal in our short but always significant life.
Thank you for helping me welcome la maestra, Lorena Dee
Cervantes.
[APPLAUSE]