tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39339429976955264962024-02-19T07:04:33.953-05:00Literati BoricuaEvent postings, updates, writings, essays, and observations on Latino literature and culture. Also, the occasional heartfelt tribute to coffee.Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.comBlogger124125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-43531547214372542622014-11-22T21:32:00.000-05:002014-11-22T21:32:02.046-05:00SHUT EM DOWN SHUT SHUT EM SHUT EM DOWNTHIS BLOG HAS MOVED!<br />
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Go to:<br />
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<a href="http://www.literatiboricua.com/" target="_blank">http://www.literatiboricua.com</a><br />
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See you there,<br />
RichRich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-70277430219799654742014-11-05T11:00:00.002-05:002014-11-05T11:05:26.482-05:00The Hangover, 2014 Edition. Or: Gerrymandering and You. Or: Why My Non-Voting Friends Are Smarter Than Me.<div style="background-color: white; margin-bottom: 6px;">
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">I'm gonna tell you a story, then I'm gonna tell you how I voted. </span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">After this is done, I'm going to need everyone to stop badgering people for NOT voting. It'll be long, but it'll be worth it.</span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Have you ever wondered why the House of Representatives has 435 members? It's not a magic number. It was a number arrived at via legislation. The Constitution requires Congress to apportion Representatives according to each state's population (counted every 10 years in the census), and they did precisely that until 1913, when the number was fixed at 435. That number was made permanent in 1929.</span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">I don't need to tell you (or maybe I do?) that when it comes to counting bodies in this nation, we have had...well, a hard time. Chief among the reasons for the 1929 law was the concern that states with cities in them (i.e. large urban populations) would out-proportion and out-balance states that were rural. </span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Do I need to tell you who inhabited the cities in increasing numbers in 1929? Do I need to remind you what kind of atmosphere this nation presented for our citizens of color in 1929? </span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">The Constitution provided little guidance as to how to proportion Representatives, except for two major provisions: 1) that the number could not exceed one Representative for every 30,000 citizens, AND, 2) we could only count 3/5 of the slave population of a given state. We've given up on even approaching 30,000 citizens per Representative. The 14th Amendment (1865) now requires us to count every citizen equally in the census. But, if you think we've quit thinking about race as we apportion legislators, I heartily welcome you to Fantasyland.</span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">In New York State, where I live, the process of gerrymandering is alive and well. Every 10 years, the states are subject to a mathematical formula to determine how many House seats they receive out of the available, set-by-law, 435 seats. Gerrymandering is the process by which a party in power draws the district boundaries to consolidate their party's power. In a two-party system, it's a pretty effective way to guarantee that a desirable Representative stays in his seat for a long time. In practice, district lines have been drawn in a way to maintain separate constituencies based on race, class, ethnicity...and socioeconomic status, of course. Rich people don't mix with the brokeasses, and such.</span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">I need for you all to understand exactly where you are living. I need for you all to realize that we have literally been reduced to a situation in which people select colors (red and blue), and listen to well-paid and corporate-funded experts, to tell us--NOT what to vote for, but how the people in this system EXPECT YOU TO VOTE. And I need you to understand that the system you're voting into is largely rigged. And it's been that way since the founding of the Republic. </span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">If you watched CNN last night (I did), you received a treatise on political strategy. Not actual politics, mind you. Every person on the network panels has bought into the mentality that created the current, permanent condition of the House of Representatives, and the local legislatures, and the White House. The anger on "the issues" could only be discussed in context with who and why is holding power. The voices of people like you and me, who are drowning in bills and suffering the hangover of a nation built on separating people, are lost. </span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Obamacare sucks not because the idea is bad, but because an industry, and the money it pours into this beast, could not, at any cost, be inconvenienced in its implementation. So, in order to express its discontent, an electorate was forced by habit into choosing the Other. That's not democracy. That's robotics. And if you think it doesn't work the other way around, consider that in order to vote out a warmongering party, liberals were forced to vote in another warmongering party, twice.</span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">As for New York's gerrymandering habit, Governor Cuomo has come out hard against it. He's outraged, and he put a measure on the ballot to change things, in the only place he felt he could: within his own state. Legislators can't be trusted to redraw their own districts every ten years. So he proposes a solution.</span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Instead of state legislators choosing districts, an independent committee will draw them. That committee will be chosen by—state legislators. Half from the Red Party, and half from the Blue Party.</span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Robotics.</span></h2>
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<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Despite the logical sense it made for me NOT to participate in this farce, I actually voted yesterday. I voted Green. Another unfortunate color choice, but at least this is the unrepentant socialist color choice. I was one of 1000 people in my county who did this. And I'll do it again.</span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">But, for those of you who did not vote, you will receive no judgment from me. I get your frustration. The only thing I'll say is, you should learn to articulate your frustrations. Get educated. Get pissed. Understand where you live, and shake some shit up with your precisely worded dissent.</span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">The rest of you, who are currently badgering the non-voters and shouting down the Republican Party, I'm really gonna need you to shut up. Because, really, who did you show up for? Do you really feel GOOD about who you voted for? Do you actually think any of these candidates are willing to shake this system to its core? If you believe they will, call into CNN and let the panel know, since they now speak for you.</span></span></span></h2>
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Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-26106151177443966272014-10-22T20:12:00.001-04:002014-10-22T20:12:41.007-04:00Buy the book!To the right, you will find a link to purchase my first book, COMPREHENDING FOREVER...while the supplies in my possession last...<br />
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$20 gets you a personalized signed copy shipped and delivered to your door. Get at me!<br />
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Praise for COMPREHENDING FOREVER:<br />
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In the spirit of Neruda, Comprehending Forever becomes that initial kiss we never forget accompanied by an aubade underneath a full moon. From collected raindrops off the skin, to the smells of Bustelo percolating at dawn, and bay of Luquillo, Villar reminds and redefines the essential beauty of why and how we need love. <br />
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~Luivette Resto, author of Unfinished Portrait and Ascension<br />
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Reading this book is like listening to those last few notes of an Al Green slow jam. Known widely for his ferocious and incisive political poems, here Villar turns his gaze toward the politics and pains of romantic love. In this debut collection, the battle rhymer turns soul singer. And damn if he doesn't work it out! <br />
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~John Murillo, author of Up Jump the Boogie<br />
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Rich Villar’s first book is a lyrical collection of love poems, and a great deal more. There are echoes here of Lorca and early Neruda, surreal, ecstatic, sensual, electrically charged. The poet not only praises his beloved; he celebrates the world around him, from Bustelo to the bossa nova, from the Triborough Bridge to Luquillo beach. The title poem is a tour de force, as Villar transcends a history of brutality and grief to find redemption and healing in the embrace of another human being. In the words of Whitman: This indeed is music! <br />
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~Martín Espada, author of The Republic of PoetryRich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-29332917552109757982014-08-25T13:25:00.001-04:002014-09-19T15:14:27.600-04:00Fall Workshop Schedule: La Sopa NYC, Capicu Culture/Boricua CollegeGente:<br />
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This Fall, I'll be at Boricua College teaching a workshop for La Sopa NYC, Capicu Culture's School of Poetic Arts, alongside Keith Roach (performance).<br />
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The workshops run from October 4th through November 8th.<br />
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$100 for one workshop or $150 for two. You can view course descriptions and sign up for a workshop by going to the link below:<br />
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<a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lasopanyc-the-capicu-school-of-poetic-arts-fall-2014-tickets-12757346567">https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lasopanyc-the-capicu-school-of-poetic-arts-fall-2014-tickets-12757346567</a><br />
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The Sacred Word: Poetry, Clarity, and Spellcasting in a
World of Sound <o:p></o:p></div>
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with Rich Villar</div>
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La SoPA NYC cites certain progressive movements as the basis for its mission:
namely, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Poets, the Black Arts Movement, and the
Nuyorican Movement. In this workshop, we will look at the writers, poets, and
literature of these historical moments, as well as their origins; where these
movements intersect; and how they have played into the development of contemporary
poetry. With this history as our framework, we will generate new poems with <i>concrete intention</i> and <i>clarity</i>, and look at our present poems in
a historical context—both as writers and as citizens of an increasingly complex
world. We will explore how sound and
lineation interact on the page and in your performances. We will look at ways
to edit and prepare your work for presentation in multiple venues (theatrical,
literary, and in between). We will discuss our identities as poets in the wider
literary world, and what these identities imply. And we will discuss the "absurd"
notion that we bees actual, real-life wizards—capable of poetry, spellcasting,
destruction, and creation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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(The title of this workshop is taken from the poem
"Ka'Ba," by Amiri Baraka.)<br />
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Where's My Dramaturgy?<br />
with Keith Roach<br />
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Performance in many considerations, from how a poem is presented on the page to the act of reading, or reciting the poem to an audience. A look at the history of slam or performance poetry in NYC and the US of A with the aim of exposing students to the possibilities inherent in their own work and approach to presenting their work. The aim of the class is to have participants prepared to present their poetry in feature readings as well as and/or presentation on the page. Reading off the paper & Reading from memory. What is easy and not so easy regarding each format. The joys and perils of editing, both the writing and the reciting. Recording performances and critiquing them as a group activity. Finally, “where's my dramaturgy?” How to prepare for a feature reading/ performance.<br />
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Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-26351943626979151462014-05-21T20:40:00.000-04:002014-06-14T16:03:37.477-04:00The Immense Suggestion, June 15-August 3. <div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>The Immense Suggestion: Claiming Poet as Your Master Status<br />An Eight-Week Poetry Workshop at La Casa Azul Bookstore</b><br />
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June 15-August 3, 2014<br />
Sundays<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small; font-style: italic;">Creole wasn't trying any longer to get Sonny in the
water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling
the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">-James Baldwin, <i>Sonny's Blues</i></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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The term "master status" is defined in sociology
as the primary character identity of a given individual, an identity that pervades
and influences all other characteristics. It's the capital letter at the
beginning of words like Mother, Father, Philosopher, Historian, Teacher, Laborer;
to name a few. Most of us learn, eventually, that we must possess several
master statuses at once, if we are to survive in this time.<br />
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For eight weeks at La Casa Azul, we will cultivate the master status of Poet. We
will discuss the various ways in which the title Poet has changed (and not
changed) over the centuries, the development of the different genres of writing
(and how they relate), and the different ways in which we claim the title Poet today.
We will analyze how home, place, influence, education, and other factors affect
the way we claim our poetic selves, in relation to our other selves. We will also look at the unique activist/truthtelling role of the Poet in society at large.<br />
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You will develop the language you need to describe your individual voice. You
will use the poetic forms you already possess (even if you think you didn't) to
stretch that voice. And you will write toward the beginnings of a manuscript:
ten new pages (at least) of well-crafted poems. We'll meet every Sunday from
June 15th-August 3rd, and each participant will have a one-on-one session with
me.<br />
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We'll also look at the ways we distribute our work, and how to present our
poems in professionally performed or published forms. <br />
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At the end of the eight weeks, you will have the opportunity to share what you've written with an
audience at La Casa Azul Bookstore. And you will go forward knowing what a Poet's
mission is, knowing a new way of seeing the world. With the immense
suggestion, of course, that you speak--both for yourself and for the world you want to see.<br />
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(Plus, if you know me: there may be just a <i>little</i> tomfoolery during the workshop. :-) It can't be ALL serious, can it?)<o:p></o:p></div>
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To sign up for the workshop, please send five to
ten (5-10) pages of poems (10 poems maximum), along with two paragraphs on 1) how you came to poetry,
and 2) what expect to glean from your time with the group. Send these asap to r.villar@gmail.com.<br />
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Seating will be limited, so don't wait!<br />
<br />
FEE:<br />
$300 for 8 sessions.<br />
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The PayPal link at the right of this page can be used to pay. If you need a payment plan, email me.<br />
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EMAIL ALL SUBMISSIONS AND QUESTIONS with the subject line "Immense Suggestion" to r.villar@gmail.com.<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /><br />Rich
Villar is the author of <i>Comprehending Forever</i> (Willow Books, 2014). He has been quoted on Latino literature
and culture by both <i>The New York Times </i>and the <i>Daily News</i>, and his poetry and
essays have appeared or are forthcoming in <i>Black Renaissance Noire, Hanging
Loose, Beltway Poetry Quarterly</i>, and <i>Sou'wester</i>. He is a co-founder of Acentos, a grassroots project fostering audiences for Latino/a literature.</span></div>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-54549215958246640822014-03-18T11:51:00.000-04:002014-04-23T18:04:53.732-04:00Comprehending Forever Book Tour Dates<div>
Gente:</div>
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I'm going out on tour in support of my new (and first!) book, <i>Comprehending Forever</i>. I would love to see any and all of you there!</div>
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The tour has a really simple and compact title:</div>
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THE OFFICIAL APRIL 2014 RICH VILLAR <i>COMPREHENDING FOREVER</i> REGIONAL BOOK TOUR VIA TRANSPORTATION MODES THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY WOULD PREFER TO SEE OBSOLETE<br />
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April 4th--Wildwood Writers' Festival, Harrisburg, PA</div>
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April 5th--Big Blue Marble Books, Philadelphia, PA (with Edward Garcia, F. Omar Telan, Yolanda Wisher, Patrick Rosal, Shane Book, and Raina Leon)</div>
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April 6th--Hoboken Art Museum, Hoboken, NJ. SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW (JERSEY): A Tribute to New Jersey Poets (with Danny Shot, Mary Rizzo, Reg E. Gaines, Joan Cusack Handler, Vivian Demuth, Eliot Katz, Herschel Silverman, Cat Doty, Alicia Ostriker, and Teresa Carson)</div>
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April 10th--Howard University, Washington, DC (with Ekere Tallie and Bonafide Rojas)</div>
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April 16th--Palabra Pura, Roberto Clemente High School, Chicago, IL (with Laurie Ann Guerrero and Eduardo Arocho)</div>
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April 17th--Northwestern University, Chicago, IL (with Laurie Ann Guerrero)</div>
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April 18th--Africaribe Cafe, Chicago, IL (with Johanny Vasquez Paz and Luis Tubens)</div>
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April 24th--CUNY-College of Staten Island, Staten Island, NYC<br />
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May 4th--Harlem Arts Salon, Harlem, NYC (with Willie Perdomo and Ekere Tallie)<br />
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May 9th--Nine on the Ninth, Busboys and Poets (14th and V Street), Washington, DC</div>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-70133463642629430272014-01-09T20:40:00.004-05:002014-01-09T20:57:28.788-05:00The Book, The Rumpus, and Some Thoughts on Amiri BarakaMy original intention for returning to this blog was to point you to <a href="http://therumpus.net/2014/01/the-rumpus-interview-with-rich-villar/" target="_blank">my interview at The Rumpus</a> and to tell you that my first book, COMPREHENDING FOREVER, will soon be available through Willow Books. <br />
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Excited and grateful as I am, both of these facts are overshadowed by, and tied to, the transition earlier today of Amiri Baraka. I could say there was something that made me point to Amiri during my talk with Rochelle Spencer, but the truth is, I've always been laboring in his giant shadow--not since I first started writing, but the moment I decided to claim a political identity for myself as a writer. Really, the moment I decided on a life as a literary activist for Latino/a writers. <br />
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Doubtless, I owe debts to many: Martín Espada, Willie Perdomo, my friends and colleagues at Acentos and louderARTS, Aracelis Girmay, and so many others. My own work is laid out to do for the next several decades (God willing), and I'll be at it until I can no longer draw breath.<br />
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I went to Amiri's <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/amiri-baraka" target="_blank">Poetry Foundation biography</a> and was blown away by their detailed career retrospective on him. When you think of writers like Sekou Sundiata, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Jayne Cortez, or June Jordan, of course you consider the length and breadth of their literary output, and you damn near genuflect at their feet when you meet them. But at their death, you are confronted--literally confronted--with their bibliographies, and you realize that the word "prolific" is thrown around way too much to describe your contemporaries.<br />
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Amiri's bibliography and CV reads like history. It is. The Black Arts Movement was nourished at his hand and the hands of his colleagues. He wrote <em>Blues People</em>. He wrote <em>Dutchman</em>. He wrote <em>Preface To a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. </em>So many plays. So many essays. And these are only the things we have archived. As Brian Gilmore reminds me, Baraka was that dude who would come to a reading with some joint he literally stapled together THAT DAY. Not some old shit, either--brand new essays or poems that he wanted you, that day, to read and absorb and reckon with. The man wrote non-stop for decades. I can't even say that. That's a goal I'd like to attain. One to strive for between tweets, I suppose.<br />
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Which reminds me. Amiri Baraka was social media before there was an INTERNET. His words were nothing but available...if you really wanted to hear them. Though he was sought after, no one needed to publish him. He would publish himself, get seen himself, do readings himself. And travel. And speak. And send you emails. And post diatribes on websites with complicated URL's. <br />
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And he'd ask you: "Where's your book?" Every single time he saw you.<br />
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Truly. Every time, even if he didn't remember my name. I'd tell him who I was, and what I do, and what I hope. And the question was the same: "Where's your book?"<br />
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My book is coming, Baba Baraka. I had hoped to see you in person to give you a copy after all these years, but I guess I'll have to leave that to the universe and just know you got it.<br />
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What's my debt to Amiri? What's ours? If you're a writer of color in this country, and you feel empowered to speak truth to power in ways that make you very unpopular, if you speak the hard truths without shame, and if you feel the mission is important enough to staple together your own damn books and make them available without the permission of the dominant culture, then you carry some of Amiri's fire with you, too. If you're a writer of color who carries forward the utilitarian, afrocentric view of art--that it's meant to DO things, not simply BE for its own sake--then you carry with you the Black Arts, the Nuyorican, the Chicano, the Queer lit, the Feminist lit. In short, when you write with purpose for your people, unapologetically, and when you choose to be a part of your history and your survival, and when you choose to document it, then you are writing in the tradition of Amiri Baraka, now our ancestor. <br />
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Where's your book?Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-70374771270073803332013-08-15T06:18:00.000-04:002013-08-15T06:18:31.939-04:00Dispatch from Bread Loaf Mountain<style>@font-face {
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Michael Collier, in 1981, phoned the woman who was to become
his wife, excited to share every single hour of the forty-eight he had
experienced at Bread Loaf up to that point. I have him beat. It took me one.</div>
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There was one phone here then, and you dumped quarters into
it. Things are slightly different on this mountain now: you can get on the
internet and Skype your life away if that's your wish. Thus far, I've called
home, I've tweeted, I've Facebooked and Skyped. It's what we've learned to do,
at least those of us who use the internet to get others involved with poetry.
You have to promote the reading. You have to get the word out. You have to make
people aware of what's going on. This is, admittedly, an extension of how we
have learned to grasp the world. Everything's a social event. Everything needs
to be experienced with a comment stream, links, and pictures. It's all public,
and fast, and now, right now. And you know it's unwise. But you do it anyway. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To hear Michael tell the story at last night's welcome
gathering, it sounded like his wife greeted his enthusiasm with much wisdom.
An innate instinct that the experience he was having was
much better experienced…well, being <i>experienced, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as opposed to being </span><i>documented. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">There's not much room built into the schedule for writing, though I
can't ignore the instinct. I'm up, and typing, at what I'd normally call an
ungodly hour, except there's something sacred about this hour, in this setting,
that keeps me from saying the adjective. I don't know if this will be my ritual
while I'm here. It might be. What I know for sure is that except for this one
entry, it won't be public. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There's simply too much happening to tell you about. And by
happening, I don't mean that things are taking place, events are transpiring,
drinks and jokes and fellowship are being swallowed whole. These are happening,
too. But what I mean is a process, a mode, the difference between documentation
and direct experience that Erich Fromm talked about in <i>To Have or To Be. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">To report is not to breathe in. Being on the spot is
not being. Having an experience is not the same as experiencing. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Don't get me wrong. I'm recording everything. There are
things—you know, <i>things</i><span style="font-style: normal;">—I can tell you.
Satellites cross the night sky up here with as much frequency as airplanes do
in New York. The weather changes rapidly—it is a mountain, after all—and I
truly did need a hoodie last night. If you wanted, you could drive for five
hours on nothing but coffee and a bag of grapes. The conference is diverse.
Different ethnicities, backgrounds, styles of writing. Yet everyone seems to be
from Brooklyn. Water is not property, not if you judge by the cold clear rivers
I've seen thus far. And I want to make a thousand stacks of pancakes when I get
home, just so I can put some real goddamn maple syrup on them. They sell this
shit by the boatload up here.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I'm going to resist the urge I normally feel to report every
experience like I need a companion. Something you learn within five seconds of
seeing a mountain range up close is that you really only need breath. Water,
eventually, but essentially, breath. I'll write, and you'll read, but I suspect
what I post here will be infrequent. And it'll be writing <i>in </i><span style="font-style: normal;">a place, not </span><i>about </i><span style="font-style: normal;">a place. There are people looming large in my mind,
and this summer was not an easy thing. That's what I carry with me, mostly. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But I also have to say that I feel like I am here on something
like a community scholarship. Real talk: this shit is pricey. Worth it, but
pricey. If my family, my friends, and my colleagues had not gotten together to
send me here, I would not be here. And it isn't just about money, either. I'm
here on the power of pure love, and I don't doubt for one second that I am part
of something larger than myself. A community. I know there are writers who shit
on that particular word, some who should know better, frankly. What I know, at
6am on a Thursday on the side of a mountain, is that I'm a Nuyorican poet, sent
here by family—by blood and by choice—and that I am exactly where I belong. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I
can be solitary, but I will never be alone. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bueno. If I had a hot plate, it would be Bustelo time. I'm
going to have to look into that. </div>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-16601864837132094652012-09-26T21:51:00.000-04:002012-09-27T13:08:42.112-04:00The Decisive Act: On Orwell, Arizona, and 50 For Freedom<style>@font-face {
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
They didn't show up, and I shouldn't be surprised. A press release was generated, an email
address and phone number was distributed, the messages went to the right
people, and my phone didn't ring, and no messages hit my inbox. None of them showed up, and I suppose I
shouldn't be surprised, because there are always more important things to be
discussed, like Mitt Romney's ignorance about the physics of airplane cabin
pressure, or striking football referees, or the technical specs behind the
iPhone 5. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There will be no articles written, no reporting, no witness
from the press (except for what we do <a href="http://www.beinglatino.us/comunidad/striking-out-against-banned-books/">on
our own</a>, clearly). They've got
to report on the Presidential election, and the issues surrounding our economy,
and health care, and illegal immigration.
No time for a bunch of rabble rousers talking about banned books, books
you can still buy on Amazon.
Because if you can still buy things on Amazon, then all is well.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Did you know that Amazon once <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1203527/Big-Brother-Amazon-automatically-removes-1984-Kindle-e-book-reader-warning.html">banned</a>
George Orwell's <i>1984 </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and </span><i>Animal
Farm</i><span style="font-style: normal;">?
Of all the books to ban.
Supposedly it was a dispute over rights, but it led to a massive
outcry—similar, it could be said, to the outcry over Tucson's book ban. But it's okay, Amazon said at the time,
because it offered refunds to the buyers.
Point being, the technology to control what you read exists. Point being, if Arizona had known this
sooner, perhaps they wouldn't have to physically remove any books from the
classroom. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let's be clear.
The issues in Arizona are only peripherally about books. Though it should be said, the first
thing you do—if your aim to disappear a nation—is to throw their literature in
the trash. Burn it, ban it, box
it, just don't read it. And so
they did just that, Arizona: they banned the books, and they boxed the books,
and they made the Mexican-American Studies program in Tucson disappear, along
with their teachers, along with any mention of it in the schools. Ah, but they told us, they reassured
us, that the books are not banned.
They just can't be used to teach Mexican-Americans about being Mexican-American. And they told the rest of their
teachers, that any attempt to teach any of the banned literature, all 80 titles
on the list (it should scare you, to death, that there's a banned books list,
and that it used to be a curriculum), could result in their termination, should
any complaint about their rabble-rousing content be raised by a concerned
parent. Or, anyone, really.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is where the story ended, even after Tony Diaz and the
group Librotraficante had the audacity to quote the law in public, show its
unconstitutional application toward one group of people, report to us the
students' discontent, and organize a series of panels and lectures around the
years-long battle between Arizona and the teachers, which is still ongoing in
the courts. They told us about the
school district suing the former teachers for damages. They told us about the threats to other
people's jobs, to keep them in line, to silence them. And they (meaning Luis Urrea) told us about the Orwellian
implications of banning books, unbanning Shakespeare, and rewriting history,
and covering themselves in doublethink and Newspeak.<br />
<br />
We gathered, though the press did not, last Friday at the 50 For Freedom of Speech reading, because this is not simply about banning books. <span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua"; font-size: 12pt;">Banned author Martín Espada
knows that; which is why, when I asked him to do the reading, he brought
himself from Amherst, Masschusetts, on his own dime, to be with us, the very
night before another reading in Boston.<span>
</span>And banned author Luis Urrea knows that; that's why he drove straight to
La Casa Azul from the airport when Tony Diaz made the call.<span> </span>(And Tony flew up from Houston
himself.)<span> </span></span>
It's about freedom, the fundamental right to know that down is down, and up is up, and that 2 + 2 = 4. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What do you think it means when a government entity does not
want you to read a book called <i>500 Years of Chicano History</i><span style="font-style: normal;">? Do you
honestly believe it has anything to do with the ideology of the authors? Has anyone in the state of Arizona
actually met these authors on the banned list? They are not concerned with how well the students do in
school. They've admitted that
much: despite the success of the program in sending children to college, the
program was cancelled anyway. The
state of Arizona is concerned with what, and how, children learn in
school. But it is not the facts
they're concerned about, specifically.
It's the narrative they're worried about. The story. They
are concerned, as Big Brother was concerned, with controlling the past; as
Orwell points out to us, whoever controls the past controls the future. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The United States has a past that it would like to
forget. The United States has, in
its past, summarily executed brown people, Hispanics and Latinos from every
walk of life. The trouble for
Arizona, and everywhere else, is that there are history scholars, activists, students, thinking people, some with U.S. college educations, who had the audacity to write textbooks, and to think to themselves the following: Hispanics
and Latinos did not drop from the clear blue sky, or from some mystical
war-drawn border. In Arizona,
we're actually learning the same story again, about whitewashed history, and
changed facts, and misleading narrative.
We're learning about context, the same kind of context that created
activists like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Pedro Albizu
Campos, Lolita Lebron, and James Baldwin, who was also banned in Arizona. Today, it's Mexican-Americans. Take you pick as to who's next. Who's due, as it were. Where the fire will be next time.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If Chicanos have a context, and a history, before the advent
of white supremacy, before the advent of European conquest or Pax Americana,
there might be a reason for them to walk a little straighter, to understand
their histories in context, to see themselves in a continuum from Aztlan, to
zoot suits, to The House on Mango Street.
500 years ago, Chicanos existed.
Africa existed. Latinos
existed. They had just different
names. When will we learn these
names?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And when will the media learn to write long pieces about the
systemic dismantling of civil rights?
When will they show up to poetry readings by authors on the banned list,
in community spaces like La Casa Azul bookstore, in other states besides
Arizona and Texas? When will they
tell you about Latinos uniting against their own genocide? When will they tell you about the
counterspells being cast by poets and writers, the ones who still believe in
language, and history, and meaning, and roots? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maybe when they find themselves being downsized, or
commanded what to say, by their bosses, by their governments, by financial
concerns. Maybe that day is
already here. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What's left for us, poets, Latinos, is to wake up and
understand what is happening, to understand it in the context of lightning-fast
information being passed and passed over.
We have to speak, and we have to speak often, in new ways and old ways,
to keep these fights fresh. And we
must always be ready to tell the world our history, never tiring of the truth,
never weary when people tell you they don't get it. Never scared when the media doesn't show up. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And we have to remember love: that's what was present in massive amounts last Friday at
the Casa Azul, and in many places around the country, reading banned literature
out loud, casting counterspells into the universe to reverse the trends, defy
conventional wisdom, and survive the way we always have. We have to remember love because our
children thrive on it, because we thrive on it, because we will not become
automatons unless we allow ourselves to be. We have to remember love, because love banishes
indifference, and because love will keep us rooted, our histories intact, our people whole. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Remember love, now and until the day you die, by reading every
book that the state of Arizona tells you not to. Read them, and quote from them, and steep your children in
them. Love every day, and do not
give in to indifference. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While you're at it, write some of these things down. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"To mark the paper was the decisive act." </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
–George Orwell, 1984</div>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-53254818243121084972012-08-28T21:15:00.000-04:002012-08-28T21:21:47.916-04:00Counterspell: 50 For Freedom of Speech/NYC, in protest of the banning of books in Arizona<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
If you're not familiar with the story in Arizona, then take a few minutes to get educated:</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
From Barbara Norell, on January 17th, 2012: <a href="http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2012/01/custer-huppenthals-last-big-lie-seized.html%20" target="_blank">http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2012/01/custer-huppenthals-last-big-lie-seized.html </a></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
From The Progressive, January 2012: <a href="http://www.progressive.org/banned_in_tucson.html">http://www.progressive.org/banned_in_tucson.html</a></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Here's the Salon article cited by the Progressive: <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/whos_afraid_of_the_tempest/">http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/whos_afraid_of_the_tempest/</a></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
And here are a few videos to drive home the point. </div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Tony Diaz, founder of </span><a href="http://www.librotraficante.com/" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" target="_blank">Librotraficante</a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">, explaining the practical impact of the Arizona law, the end of Mexican-American studies, and the banning of books, at a panel organized by students and scholars at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City:</span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/-jT61NqpP-s?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
And here are Sergio Troncoso and myself at the same event, on Latino literature and censorship:</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q6R95aR0hX4?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/MXNkrdL5CLc?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
The actions of a few politicians in Arizona, riled
up by the hate in the hearts of those without empathy or human
understanding, constitute a spell against intellect, against immigrants, against education, and against dignity. And make no mistake, it is spreading from state to state.<br />
<br />
I believe in counterspells. </div>
<br />
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
This is why Acentos is joining up with <a href="http://www.librotraficante.com/" target="_blank">Librotraficante</a>, and a coalition of like-minded Latino creatives in NYC (<a href="http://www.latinorebels.com/" target="_blank">Latino Rebels</a>, Sangre Viva, <a href="http://capicupoetry.com/" target="_blank">Capicu Cultural Showcase</a>, and <a href="http://www.lacasaazulbookstore.com/" target="_blank">La Casa Azul Bookstore</a>) to participate in a <a href="http://librotraficante.com/index.php/component/content/article/12-current-news/56-50-for-freedom-of-speech" target="_blank">national day of action</a>...a zafa, if you will...against the de facto banning of Latino literature in Tucson, Arizona, and wherever else it's being considered.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span itemprop="description">The New York City gathering will feature
the banned Puerto Rican author and award-winning poet Martín Espada
(<i>Zapata’s Disciple</i>), as well as Tejano author Sergio Troncoso (<i>The
Last Tortilla and Other Stories</i>), as well as the public readings of
other banned book texts by some of New York City’s top Latino academic,
literary and spoken word talent.<br /> <br /> Also reading are Bonafide
Rojas, Miguel Ángel Ángeles and John Murillo; Peggy Robles-Alvarado,
María Rodríguez, and Nancy Arroyo-Ruffin will be reading from Sandra Cisneros' <i>The House
on Mango Street</i>; Juan “Papo Swiggity” Santiago, Mark Anthony Vigo, and
José Vilson will be reading from Luis Rodriguez' <i>Always Running</i>; and John Rodríguez,
Grisel Acosta, Isabel Martínez, Elizabeth Calixto, and Vincent Toro will
be reading from Rodolfo Acuña's <i>Occupied America</i>.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
The reading will be taking place on September 21st, from 6pm-8pm at <a href="http://www.lacasaazulbookstore.com/" target="_blank">La Casa Azul books</a>: <span itemprop="description">143 East 103rd Street, NYC (6 train to 103rd St.) </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span itemprop="description"> </span> </div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
I posted the following on Facebook a few days ago. It bears repeating, and sharing...</div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
What we need to understand is that the banning of books in
Arizona, the end of Mexican-American studies in Arizona, did not happen
yesterday. It happened in January. And the debate is even older than
that.<br />
<br />
We waited until the administrators of the
Tucson school district marched into classrooms, boxed up books, and
physically removed them. And when we found our outrage, the national
media turned away from the story and stood by, again, when teachers and
administrators were fired. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
It has taken the efforts of tireless
educators, activists, and groups like Librotraficante to keep our
attention focused, and to keep the heat on Arizona, a state which has
already shown the nation that they are willing to throw civil liberties
and young people under the bus. And still, I get email and notes from
otherwise thoughtful people who are only now hearing about the banning
of books, who are surprised this could happen in the United States. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
How
long do we wait to stand up to genocide? Understand, the first step
in erasing people is erasing their literature. How long do we wait?
Until the authorities find it in their interests, or in the interests
of "the citizens," or in the interests of national security, to round
up whole groups of people by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands?
Do you think it impossible? Or confined to Arizona? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
You will be
erased if you don't wake up. Your history will be invalidated. And
the authors of your destruction will hide behind the law to do it.
Don't let them.<br />
<i><br />
</i>“I know what the world has done to my brother and
how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and
this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and
for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that
they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives
and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one
must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction
and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we
have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of
mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation
should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the
crime.” </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
-James Baldwin, THE FIRE NEXT TIME<br />
Banned in the Tucson Unified School District</blockquote>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-19592540752287596212012-08-24T13:13:00.001-04:002012-08-24T19:17:23.707-04:00The Poem Comes Back...<style>@font-face {
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Not even twelve hours later, the poem came back to me, courtesy of T. Rasul Murray. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My recollection was a little off, but not the sentiment. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was the reflection, indeed, that she saw in his heart, not an image, or a picture, or an otherwise artificial representation. She saw herself in him, unaltered and true. How love should be, what it should inspire. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I want to be the kind of man that inspires this kind of love.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
The Photo of Love<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>for James E. Miller III</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Almost everyday</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
I see my reflection in your heart</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
No longer a superimposed image</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Hidden in shadows of metaphors</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
No imaginary house playing</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
where children dream</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
where teenagers grope</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
The picture has become clear in scope</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Has become a smile up from my toes</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
You have presented me with a gift</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Framed in gold</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Fragrances of jasmine and Spanish Moss</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
And you've given me an open heart that</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Calls to the woman in me</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
I answer you in song</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Primal celebrations</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Life finely focused</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">--Brenda Connor-Bey</span> </div>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-27678543531321160462012-08-24T03:44:00.001-04:002012-08-24T13:02:55.691-04:00Damn Near<style>@font-face {
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
My job is to make her laugh at the most inappropriate times
possible. That's how we always understand it, whether it is at
the Hudson Valley Writers' Center, or at the Port Chester poetry festival, or
at a reading, or milling about in a parking lot. I tell the joke, it is utterly wrong, and Brenda assumes the
face: one that says, "I know full well that joke was funny, but it would
not be proper to laugh out loud here."<br />
<br />
Brenda Connor-Bey is always the most elegant woman in the
room. Of course she'll put you at
ease, or coax conversation from you, or make you smile. If you are in the room, you are her
guest, even when the event is not hers to run. It's a certain orientation toward the world, one that
radiates pure love, that is anchored in the mode of openness and kindness. For if you are in the room with Brenda,
more than likely you are there to celebrate poetry. And poetry, Brenda knows, unites people, and erases
differences. It makes you a little
more human. And if you know poetry
like Brenda knows poetry, it amplifies your spirit, and your spine—and yes, it
brings you grace and elegance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So it is always my pleasure to watch her face break when she
takes joy in my humor, even when it's not appropriate. And it was her, I know, that tapped me
on the shoulder after the third lovely tribute in her honor, at her
funeral. "Hold it together,
Rich," she said, finally getting a measure of comeuppance. "You don't
wanna die at a funeral home."
It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Not that we didn't laugh from the things that were
said. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think Jim Miller knows he's a quiet man, not necessarily
because he was born that way, but because he's been told this by everyone who
knows his wife. If you know Jim,
and you know Brenda, you know the drill: Brenda walks in and spins gold out of
thin air with sheer charm. Jim
shakes hands, and is polite, and possesses an air of wisdom that doesn't
require him to express it. And
then he'll become quite unobtrusive, either in his own seat, or standing up,
and he'll observe the room. You'll
watch him and know that he is observing everything, and he is sizing up
everyone. And you'll know without
having to be told that he is in love with his wife. Sometimes he'll jostle her, or she him, and sometimes
they'll exchange looks. But you
know that behind those looks is something pure and beautiful. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the podium, Jim spoke more words than anyone in the room
had probably ever heard from him.
His voice was strong and sure, and through tears he was able to deliver
one of the most heartfelt tributes I've ever heard anyone deliver, from a man
who has clearly studied his wife, not as one in nature, but as someone in love,
who respected her, and was invested in her. "I'm someone new in her life," he joked at one
point. "I've only known her 30 years." They have always been newlyweds.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He asked us all to look around and talk to the person next
to us, rightfully pointing out how mixed and various the individuals in the
chapel were. Here were gathered
teenagers, adults from every spectrum, every race, every ethnicity, every
economic circumstance, every location and background. This was Brenda's gift: bringing people together through
empathetic gestures, through spirit, and through poetry. He reminded us also that she was a gift
to American literature, not just to the people in the room. And he reminded us of the true power of
poems, the power that Brenda wielded every time she stepped into a classroom,
or behind a microphone—the power to create life, to sustain life, and to cause
us to live a life of contemplation, never one of powerlessness or inertia.<br />
<br />
He closed his tribute with the last
section of the poem "Thanatopsis," by William Cullen Bryant, a
section which by some coincidence, it seems, contains that same character he's
only known for 30 years.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">So live, that when thy
summons comes to join</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">The innumerable caravan which
moves</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">To that mysterious realm
where each shall take</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">His chamber in the silent
halls of death,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Thou go not, like the
quarry-slave at night,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Scourged by his dungeon; but,
sustain'd and soothed</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">By an unfaltering trust,
approach thy grave,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Like one who wraps the
drapery of his couch</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">About him, and lies down to
pleasant dreams.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I've loved incompletely. My thoughts these last few weeks drift back and forth
between worries about career, craft, and the empathy I need to show to my loved
ones. I'm not always good at that,
but it's not because I don't know how.
I was raised with care, and with faith, and with the knowledge that God
is always watching and willing to guide us into our own strength. I don't pray in desperation anymore,
and I don't pray vainly for things I desire. For better or worse, God made me a poet, and that means, as
the pastor said, that my brain is teeming with ideas that need to be put on
paper. It also means I am capable
of loving the way I saw at that funeral home: actively, as a verb. And empathy, I realize, is not an object
to be taken like money, but an orientation that leads into faith. So, when it comes time to pray, the
prayer is a humble recognition that what I seek is already found, is already
within me; that the dream I had last night is as real as Brenda's voice in my
head, as the voices I miss some days, as the people I love with my entire
heart. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of the words I heard at this service, there were several
phrases that stood out especially, because the truths contained within them
seem to follow me wherever I go, in the heart and the mouth of my beloved.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I Corinthians 15:51:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">"Behold, I shew you a
mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed..."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[People are energy.
They don't die. They
transform.]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Psalm 23:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">"Thou preparest a table
before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my
cup runneth over."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[Worry is always wasted energy.]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I Corinthians 15:58:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Therefore, my beloved
brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord,
forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[Doubt is self-destructive. Your only limitations are self-imposed. Nothing is more important than love and
truth. Pray with faith, knowing
that the victory is yours.] </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The last phrases I remember were written on the back of the
program, and I don't have the program anymore, and I don't have the poem
memorized. It was a love poem from
Brenda to Jim, one of the most beautiful ones I've ever read, and it describes
how a woman sees herself in the heart of a man, as a reflection, not as an image. I may be projecting,
but I think it has to do with how two people bring out the best in each other. I know I will get this poem back. I have faith.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I know because on my way out of the funeral home, I was
crossing in front of a car full of people I hadn't met, who were there for
Brenda. The man at the wheel asked
to see the picture on the front of the program. I handed him the program, and he handed it to another woman
in the car, and she showed it to a woman standing beside.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Are you family?" I asked.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Damn near," the man replied.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I let them keep the program. "He's clearly one of Brenda's friends," said the
standing woman. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That I am.
Present tense.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The poem will come back to me, and when it does, I will show
it to you, too.</div>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-80689259793892865002012-08-23T02:10:00.000-04:002012-08-23T02:14:58.353-04:00I Want To Write Poems.<style>@font-face {
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Look. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wanted to write a complete, full-blown thesis on
factionalism within American literature.
But then I got to thinking, that's not really what's bothering me right
now. That, and I'm actually
helping with the preparations on a day of action organized by Librotraficante,
to address precisely that problem, so maybe an essay is not what is called
for. Not right now, anyway. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As is my m.o. (sometimes), I've been trying to make a small
pet peeve into a bigger, more universal issue. Mountains, molehills, and the like. But the peeve and the cultural issue
are not precisely related. Well,
maybe they are. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Can I just say this?
Stop me if this makes sense. Poetry is not professional wrestling. Nor is it a series of battles against
roving gangs of zombies, wizards, wolfpacks and vampire clans, medieval
nobility, mafia families, or vatos locos.
Of all the things I hate in my professional and artistic life, nothing
bothers me more than the feeling that "Poetry" has become a
playground for people without any real combat skills to pretend that they
belong to a gang. Jets. Sharks. Iowa.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can barely open my email without hearing about some kind
of disagreement over </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
something bothering them about the community of writers they
belong in, and almost none of those issues have to do with the
actual craft of writing. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can trace my involvement with the literary world back to
2002, when I first stumbled into the back of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe. I'd heard about these things called
slams, the Nuyorican poets, and Def Poetry, and I wanted to see it up close and
figure out what was so sexy about it.
And it was sexy, of course.
You'd walk into a confined space and see these people you'd seen on HBO,
or in the Piñero movie, or in a book you'd read, and you'd desire to be a part
of it, because frankly, the last poet on stage was not that impressive. By 2003, I was hopping into my car, or
an airplane, or a train, to travel the country and participate in what I'd
seen. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don't regret that part of it for a second. My involvement in poetry has
brought me, either directly or indirectly, to the Sandia Mountains in New
Mexico, to the greatest hamburger I've ever eaten (Bobcat Bite, outside Santa
Fe), Harvard Yard, City Lights Books, the St. Louis Arch, rural Indiana, the
steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, and to Wicker Park in Chicago. When I return to Cuba, I can go visit
Nancy Morejón. There are no words
for the privileges I have, thanks to literature, thanks to my writing life.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet, most days I feel like writers, some I have called
friends, spend their days wringing their hands; walking on eggshells with some University administrator with a
tenure-track position to hand out; getting depressed because they have
submitted with no luck to dozens of book publishers or prizes; politicking on
who picks who to read poems at a bar or a bookstore, lamenting over not being
chosen to do so. They fret when a
space closes down, when a workshop stops running, or when a reading series
switches venues. They spend their
waking hours on Facebook arguing about spoken word versus page poems, slam
versus academia, MFA versus no MFA, instead of writing the things, living the
lives, that inspire them to walk the lines, or erase them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am not the pot calling the kettle black, though. I've been all too familiar and invested
in these arguments myself. And to
be clear, I'm not speaking of arguments on access: I believe that the fight for
equal time in the publishing world, the right of marginalized voices to be
heard, is a civil rights issue, an issue about the proper framing of history,
and the telling of every American story.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Simply put, I'm no longer interested in engaging the egos of writers and
poets who view their participation in American literature as a game. I am uninterested in poets who view
poetry as a way to gain entry into a clique, to look down on the ones who
aren't in it. I am tired of
professional performers who are not interested in poetry beyond finding the
next gig. I am tired of the
phenomenon of the poet thug, the streetwise wordsmith who just wants folks to
wake up to injustice, while living a life that does not reflect those
ethics. I'm tired of poets who
compete with one another for attention and mic time, and who throw you under
the bus when they don't get it. And
I am beyond fed up with idiots, frankly, who claim some level of imaginary
leadership status within the poetry "scene." You know the ones. They use bluster and bravado as a way
to justify their own existence as a writer, or mask their own deficiencies as
poets, as human beings. If you
think about it for three honest seconds, they'll come to you.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I know them, because I used to be around them. Wanted to be them. And I just can't listen to all that
noise anymore. I want to write
poems, and I want poets to be heard.
At my core, that's my mission.
Everything else is bullshit.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There's only one way to be a poet: write poems, read poems, live honestly and openly, and
listen. That's a lesson I learn
day in and day out, and something I need to be more mindful of. I'm trying. I'm succeeding more, and I'm trying.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am uninterested in politics. Or identity politics.
I'm more interested in deconstructing identity, especially in a world
where my identity is easily tracked, manipulated, erased, or reinvented,
without my consent. Talk to me about people, not systems. Talk to me about people, not Republicans and Democrats. I'm about to
be 35 years old, and my time on this planet is not guaranteed. I want to write poems. I want to see things for what they
are. I want to be able to frighten
you when I show you what I see, and how I see. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mostly though, I want to support the real organizers of
poetry and literature and cultural change, the ones you don't hear from because
they're too busy writing, and getting your writing seen and heard, to concern
themselves with the game. Miss me with the bullshit, folks. I want to write poems.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-73321735641646893212012-08-21T00:32:00.000-04:002012-08-21T00:32:04.343-04:00Mantra:<h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":1,"tn":"K"}" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: normal;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="messageBody" data-ft="{"type":3}"><span class="userContent">"I
bless you in the name of all that is good and strong and beautiful,
Antonio. Always have the strength to live. Love life, and if despair
enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle
and the owls sing in the hills. I shall be with you."</span></span></span></h6>
<h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":1,"tn":"K"}" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: normal;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="messageBody" data-ft="{"type":3}"><span class="userContent"> -Rudolfo Anaya, <i>Bless Me Ultima </i></span></span></span></h6>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-17073103397867415282012-08-20T00:53:00.002-04:002012-08-20T00:54:26.775-04:00In Which Rich Tugs at his Ear on a Monday<style>@font-face {
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
-Somebody wrote a really long poem today.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-One of the more popular features on my former Facebook page
was a little segment known as "Fun With the Parentals." It was the easiest feature to write,
because all I have to do is prick up my ears and copy down what they say. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My father is Cuban, and 78. My mother is Puerto Rican, and...not 78. They've been together since 1974, which
means they lived through disco, Fania all-stars, new wave, freestyle, the Sugar
Hill Gang, Family Ties, Family Matters, the Spice Girls, both President Bushes,
and Justin Bieber. Tie all that
together with Don Francisco, Iris Chacon, and nonstop work for people they
don't like, add five children (including a poet) and you get comedy gold like
this:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
POP (to me, in the living room): ¿Se levantó la vieja?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
MOM (from the bedroom): ¡Viejo seras tú!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(To my non-Spanglish speaking readers: Don't worry, we'll
keep you hip somehow.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am keeping my ears up, and out, and tuned. No, they have no idea I do this. Eventually they'll catch on.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-NYC BOROUGH OF THE WEEK: Queens, y'all.
They got quenepas and pinchos and two airports. Do you need anything else in life? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If I was Carol Burnett, this is the part where I tug on my
ear.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-I am still figuring what this blog is supposed to look
like. I have poems and essays I'd
like to share, but sometimes it's easier just to tell you what I'm thinking. It's also easier to write funny crap,
because most of the time I'm funny.
Let's see what happens.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-Day 7 of my Facebookless existence. Did I mention that I have poems and
essays to share? That's because I
found the time that I was throwing down the rabbit hole. Go figure. </div>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-14170208737854522062012-08-19T02:38:00.002-04:002012-08-19T02:38:35.990-04:00Thoughts for a Sunday morning-Sunday. Maybe these are prayers? <br />
<br />
-There's a blog in the Netherlands that links to this blog. Apparently, I get a lot of traffic from there. Hello to all my European visitors! I hereby apologize for the American literary landscape, but let's be honest: We learned it from you.<br />
<br />
-The previous statement should not be interpreted as my refusing an invitation to read poetry in Europe. Should you wish to book me for a reading in Europe, you can reach me at r.villar@gmail.com. I hereby apologize for the American tendency toward self-promotion. I learned that here.<br />
<br />
-Something comforting about 2:30am on a Sunday. I end up writing at this time. Aubades. Makes sense.<br />
<br />
-I have spent the better part of two weeks doing nothing but thinking. I have so many things to do, so many other things to makes amends for.<br />
<br />
-Always treasure the friends who give you honesty. That is not the same as friends who give you honest opinions. Honest opinions are often too crafted, and too phony. Honesty has an edge to it. <br />
<br />
-If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, and one of them yelps, that's probably the one you hit.<br />
<br />
-Love is an action. Love requires you to be your best self while seeing the best in others. <br />
<br />
-Empathy is an action, too. To put yourself in another's place, to see what others see, feel what they feel, you can only learn to love better.<br />
<br />
-Lord, let me live a life of action, and empathy, and love.Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-50203078254871083522012-08-18T01:41:00.000-04:002012-08-18T02:24:52.673-04:00Of Grape-Scented Plastic, Harvey Pekar, and the Swamp Fox.<style>@font-face {
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
They used the room, normally, for typewriting practice. It was four rows of eight typewriters
at various ages, all with newish dust covers, so the room smelled, I thought,
like grape-flavored plastic. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No
windows, as we were in the rear of the basement of the building. It was surrounded by cinder
blocks. Depending on the day, or
your mood, they were white or light beige. You walked in and felt like an appliance yourself, a cog in
a machine, artificial. Along the
back wall, six computers, upon which we learned computer keyboarding, word
processing, and some very basic programming language. We knew these computers were the wave of the future, but
beyond letters and numbers, we weren't sure how just yet. This was 1994, and the word that stuck
in my head from everything I knew about computer hardware and software were the
words "Microsoft," "Windows," and
"multimedia."
Either the internet was too new or too scary to introduce to the
students. In all honesty, I can't
remember if we even accessed it. I
was a junior at a private, fundamentalist Christian school in New Jersey. I
didn't have to attend public school in Paterson. I was a teenage Latino male from Paterson and had access to
a high-quality, old-school education.
By all conventional wisdom, I was lucky. I was one of twelve students who would graduate the next
year, but today I was in the room for a one-on-one career counseling
session. The only one I'd had up
until that point. The only one I'd
ever have.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was good enough to be placed on a track the school
referred to as "college prep," a term I was pleased to be labeled
with. I've always been pegged as
the student with aptitudes toward English and writing. I had entered poetry contests in junior
high school and freshman year. I
won one of those contests, a statewide contest for which I received ridicule
from the rest of my classmates.
They even recruited my English teacher to participate in a practical
joke: someone wrote a fake letter from the contest stating that there had been
a miscalculation in the judging, and that my prize was revoked. I imagine my classmates wanted to knock
me down a peg or two, especially if I had reason to be proud, and as high
school freshmen, one could imagine their enthusiasm at the prospect of watching
my emotions boil over. They knew
me enough to know it would happen.
My intelligence had made me a social pariah. Who was I to dispute it?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Late homework assignments, boredom, and discipline issues,
as best as I can recall, dropped my overall GPA to a little over 2.7 by the
time of my junior year. So when it
was my turn to see the guidance counselor, I couldn't have been shocked when my
dream of attending a four-year college was, in her assessment, a dream deferred,
at best.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don't want to tell you that I identified, and hard, with
the underground comics writer Harvey Pekar, but I did. Tonight I watched the film American
Splendor, detailing his career writing the comic of the same name. It's not that he was a recluse, or
antisocial, or even particularly disagreeable; it's that he made these
characteristics work for him, to the point of getting a slot on the David
Letterman Show, and writing and editing for major publishers. He had his narcissistic tendencies. He had his fears and insecurities. Yet he was a man who was brilliant
enough to know that the mundanities of his life were not really mundanities at
all. Like Bukowski, he turned his
angst into existential brilliance, his quirks into critical analysis. And he was able to show us that comics
are not just for children, that it could be an art form like film, a reality
show before reality television.
For a man who seemed so hopeless, his comics inspired a lot of hope. I think I want to be him when I grow
up, but with a lot more empathy. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Harvey Pekar dropped out of college to join the Navy, and
like most of my 20th century heroes, he was largely self-taught. He did not shy away from big
conversations, but it does not escape me that he felt himself somehow on the
outside looking in. He was banned
from Letterman (besides for being an asshole) for going on a rant against
General Electric. He was honest, I
believe, in a dishonest world...even in the movie he ended up starring in, with
the real life characters from his books.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He once said this:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">"There was a survey done
a few years ago that affected me greatly. it was discovered that intelligent
people either estimate their intelligence accurately or slightly underestimate
themselves, but stupid people overestimate their intelligence and by huge margins.
(And these were things like straight up math tests, not controversial IQ
tests.)"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">"...no business can
possibly equate happy workers (community) with profit (effectiveness). Happy
workers are much more productive workers and hence contribute to profit, but no
organization is formed for the idea of pleasing its employees."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">"I called up my
grandparents who I hadn't spoken to for over three years. I called my mother,
who I had recently told to stop calling lest I contact the police. I sat with
them all and it was normal and fun and good. I'm even ready - maybe - to speak
to my father. Superman doesn't get upset at the people who shoot bullets at
him. I get why, now."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wonder how Harvey would have written the scene as it
played out in that grape-flavored plastic room with my guidance counselor in
1994. I'll recount it as best I
can. There may be some snark, but
we'll work that out as we go.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think she had rehearsed this speech a bit beforehand, but
I can't be entirely sure. More
than likely, she'd read it in a handbook on how to handle underachieving brown
boys in a mentee-counselor setting—a manual written in 1952. The bottom line came hard and fast and
I had no questions for it: While I had certain aptitudes and test scores, to
shoot for a four-year college would probably be a fool's errand with my
GPA. It would be better—easier,
wiser—if I aimed my sights at community college, obtained my associate's
degree, and transferred at some point to a state school. The ivy league was out of the
question. Out-of-state schools
were not discussed. This was the
path I was presented, based on the numbers I'd spat back at them, and even if I
moved to Florida, as I'd mentioned, this would be the path of least resistance
to what I'd said I'd wanted—law school.
We did not discuss the LSAT, graduate school, or anything beyond the
next two years except for the possibility of moving to a four-year school. We certainly never discussed those
strange screens at the back of the room, or the poetry I'd been reading and
writing, or the subjects that fascinated me most. I think the whole thing was over with in five minutes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This was the extent of my career counseling, and while I
can't sit and say that I had it rough in school, I can say without question that
no one was interested in developing any sort of intellect in me. Challenges to teachers were discipline
problems, largely. I was not
expected to grow. I was expected
to obey, to read the Bible, and to pray for Republican Presidential
candidates. I was expected to
believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution threatened the concept of
states' rights. And I was expected
to remember, in my senior year of U.S. History, that Francis Marion was also
known as the Swamp Fox. (This is
literally the only thing I remember from that year of instruction.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Honestly, my experience in high school could be a memoir, a
cautionary tale at that, about the dangers of mixing fundamentalism and
education with class and racial assumptions, in a fishbowl-sized school
attached to a church. That's an
entirely different book. Briefly,
I'll say that as an adult, I learned that our, um, Highly Revered school
board literally panicked when the school experienced an influx of Hispanics in
my last year of junior high. They
couldn't bear the thought of having their daughters marry up with any of those
brown savages from Paterson via Puerto Rico and Colombia and everywhere
else. Not sure if our education
mattered any more than our parents' tuition dollars did, and they shelled it
out by the boatload to keep their children from getting killed, literally, at
Eastside High School or Kennedy High School. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What I need for my Conservative friends to understand is
that I first learned about the politics of low expectations from you. I was taught by Conservatives and
directed by Conservatives to community college. Imagination was drilled directly out of me, first by my
peers, and then by my teachers. I
was not encouraged to go directly to the four-year schools with my above-average
writing ability, my SAT scores, and my GPA. Might they have told me no? I doubt it, but even if they did, the idea of shooting above
my head was not an option to the five-minute counselors of my high school. This is private school we're talking about. I haven't really talked about public school. Do I dare?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What I want to know: how much has changed since I went to high school? Where are our kids going now? Are these racist mentalities gone? Do we grow humans who expect themselves to be great, or do we grow fearful hamsters content to spin safely in place? And who decides who gets to spin where? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I want to divorce the words "school" and "system." "Political," and "science." We don't need systems. We need new minds. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Harvey. We live in an age of grape-scented plastic, and I'm only now understanding that it
needs to die, so we can live.</div>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-32068733248133061052012-08-16T00:26:00.002-04:002012-08-16T00:29:05.885-04:00Lessons from Pop at Age 78<style>@font-face {
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<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua"; font-size: 12pt;">My father is 78 years old
today. He's a Leo, which means
that everyone in the world should know, even if he doesn't get around to
telling them, that it is indeed his birthday. He's never had a Facebook account, a blog, a Twitter handle,
or an email address. He exists on
the computer for one reason only: to more easily facilitate his habit of
betting on horses. He has learned
where to click, what to type, when and how, in order to analyze speed ratings,
jockey statistics, and track conditions.
Don't ask him where your letter is on the desktop. You should have saved it.</span>
<br />
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Every once in a while, we'll get on him for being a stick in
the mud, for not adapting to newer technologies. We'll think, though we'll never say, that his one and only
connection to the computer is a bit of comedy. That it's funny how the computer only mystifies him when it
has nothing to do with horses. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And then I'll remind myself that he does stand at rapt
attention whenever I get on YouTube and find some black and white clip of Beny More, or an audio file of Vicentico Valdes or Sonora Matancera. When the machine at his desk is able to
bring back some music he had forgotten, or an image he loves, sound and
pictures that conjure and summon and remember, the machine is useful. On those occasions when he is able to
get to a real life racetrack, he will always take the time to get outside and
admire the animals up close, not because they win him money (they rarely do),
but because they are beautiful, and intelligent, and powerful. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pop remains as curious as any teenager I know. He is unafraid to ask things, even as
he believes he's seen everything. Knowledge serves him, and he serves knowledge. Technology is only part of that so long as service is part of the equation. I'm
going to remember this lesson today, as I consider the essay I'm in the midst
of writing, and as I consider the fact that at age 78, my father is still
learning, and remembering, and marveling. </div>
Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-47915865509041336292012-08-11T12:13:00.002-04:002012-08-11T12:13:30.690-04:00*Waves at you.* *Realizes this is not a real emotion.* *Demands better for himself, and others.*Try writing a letter. Do it at a clean desk with every writing implement imaginable. Do it however you choose to do it: to music, to silence, in your partner's loving embraces, in complete solitude. Feel the power of your words pulsating under your hands, your original thoughts, meaning something to somebody. Perhaps even yourself. <br />
<br />
Now, do the same thing, but imagine that your desk is surrounded by speakers, televisions, and drawings, some awe-inspiring, some funny, some maddening, some stupid. Thirty separate objects designed to get your specific attention; each stimulating a different sense, a different emotion, or both; and each of which entreat you to interact with them. And virtually every five seconds, a new object pops up on the desk, also designed to get your attention, because a machine has told those objects what you like. <br />
<br />
That's what's it like to be me, on social media, and still try to write poems. I like mystery. There is no mystery on the internet anymore, and this is not a particularly original insight, either. So here's where I'll stop, and tell you that I've deactivated my social media accounts and decided to write poems and essays instead.<br />
<br />
You won't find me on Facebook. But here's the fun thing: you won't find me here, either. This is where you'll find my writing. If you want to find <i>me</i>, you'll have to work a little harder than your search box.Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-86495773962121386652012-08-08T01:44:00.001-04:002012-08-08T01:44:26.332-04:00Confessions.<style>@font-face {
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><i>Espada: In order to write
poems, you have to make yourself very vulnerable. There are many poets today
who are afraid to take risks, who are terrified of expressing emotion openly.
They are terrified of appearing vulnerable on the page. They are ultimately
afraid of being accused of sentimentality. That’s the greatest crime in our
contemporary world.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><i>Rail: You have to be a
cool customer.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><i>Espada: Exactly. Detached,
hip, cynical, and absolutely invulnerable. And we all know that that’s a dishonest
pose.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><i><span> </span>--from "A Bard From East New York," interview with
Martín Espada, </i></span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">The Brooklyn Rail, <i>April
2007.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have become that cynical bastard.<span> </span>This is not what a poet should be.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don't know if I can or should blame high school, or
college, or anywhere else I learned how to hide my skin from the world, or how
to tell jokes, or how to sniff the air.<span>
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mind you, I never hid my skin for its brownness.<span> </span>I've always been the brown guy and I've
been okay with the ignorance thrown at me, because no one else knew, the way I
did, how amazing it is to be Cuban, and Puerto Rican, and Latino, and
Hispanic.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Never had a problem playing the Spanish music, never had
issues with picking up and learning where jazz used to live and lurk in the
shadows of the Caribbean, never had issues pretending how to mambo on any dance
floors.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I would say these things loudly to anyone who pricked their
ears close enough.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But if you've ever stood in line at the grocery store and
heard a little kid ask his mother why that man is so fat, and mean you; </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
if you've ever had your face three inches from another guy's
ass because he is hovering over it, because you are trapped between seats on
the bus and it's fun to torture the crying boy for being sensitive; </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
if you've ever been ignored because why not, because he's
strange, or smart, or smiling; </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
maybe you'd hold your heritage high too, because it was the
one thing no one faulted you for, since you were surrounded by brown boys and
girls similarly situated.<span> </span>Maybe
this is another essay.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or maybe it's not.<span>
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maybe the urge to insulate yourself from feeling reaches
into the realm of empathy now.<span>
</span>Maybe you live long enough in college, learning or not learning enough
to understand that you will never understand why the world can't be fixed.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So you drown your hopes in Immanuel Wallerstein.<span> </span>You explain capitalism and communism to
yourself and understand that it's all the same, really, so why bother trying to
get it.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You invest heavily in your need to know and finalize and explain.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You question God so many times, you forget you ever had a
religion.<span> </span>You nail religion to the
same cross that freaked you out as a child.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You eliminate mystery from your life.<span> </span>You know without being told why no
woman would ever find you attractive in your twenties, and you are okay with
it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is not the story to get you to hit the "like"
button or comment a thousand times on Facebook, or to be in solidarity with me,
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
or offer to help me heal, even though I have friends that
would do so, in a heartbeat, and I am immensely grateful for them.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I'm here to tell you that even when we are aware of past
hurts, even when we change our behaviors, there are ways to see the world that
affect the way you write, the way you react, the way you empathize.<span> </span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Which is to say, often you forget to
empathize.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You know how.<span>
</span>You love someone and your love tells you how.<span> </span>Reminds you how.<span>
</span>Is angered by your forgetting, and rightfully.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Your heart still turns one way or the other when you realize
your parents are aging, and cannot do or act or feel how they used to.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You remember an ideal.<span>
</span>You used to write the ideals down in your journal.<span> </span>You used to fight for them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And, you used to speak.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You used to feel.<span>
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You used to document, and criticize, and mean things.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You used to use language that was concrete and
specific.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You would listen to your teachers, you would hear a theory,
and you would know why you rejected it or accepted it because you have weighed
what you know to be right and wrong.<span>
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You didn't have stock answers.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You used to know who you were, but somewhere it became
easier to simply be a gear in a clock, a piece of something, and not something,
or somebody.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
**********</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Everything I know, I know because of language.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I was three, my father wrote in the sand of Luquillo,
Puerto Rico, to prove that I could read.<span>
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In elementary school, I learned how to fill a page with
words, that they could do whatever I asked them to do.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In high school, when my friends failed me, I had poems.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I could not speak out loud, I knew I could write the
way e.e. cummings wrote and have it make sense to no one but me.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When all I did was speak out loud, I knew I could write the
way Martín Espada wrote, and Willie Perdomo wrote, and have everyone in the
room listen.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I wanted to speak in Spanish, I wrote what I heard
growing up.<span> </span>When I wanted to speak
in English, I wrote what I knew to be a lie.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The world is not a thing all its own.<span> </span>It is made up of human beings that
love, and think, and feel, and live, and can be killed.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My senses are only mine because they relate to the outside
of me, because someone poured a sidewalk to walk on, because molecules are
shaped into taste, because the absence of all other colors is the presence of
yellow.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All choices are collective choices.<span> </span>I got off lucky.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am alive enough to tell you what the air smells like after
a rainstorm.<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have enough imagination, enough empathy and humanity, to
know the ears of the dead and the poisoned.<span> </span>I know what 50,000 pairs of eyes feels like as you speed
through Havana, in your American skin. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
How could I live so long imagining that what I am really
matters in the long run?<span> </span>Why else
am I here?<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Am I here to churn out a book every two years because
writers are producers of writing?<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Did the boy on the bus live through what he lived through so
he could grow up and be silent?<span> </span>Or
can he speak for the boy who assaulted him, who grew up into drugs and escaped
somewhere, and managed to find God too?<span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span>***********</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span>Can you tell me what terrorism is? Can you show me what it smells like to starve to death? Can you sing to me in the voice of my brother, resurrected and dancing?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You dream some things, and you love a seer who loves you enough
to say things out loud.<span> </span>You live
here, on this earth, in this age, where we don't seek out reality so much as
meta-reality.<span> </span>This is not the time
to forget where you came from, but neither is it the time to spend so much time
weeping for one person, for yourself.<span>
</span>Language itself is under attack from every quarter, from politicians to
advertisers on bathroom walls, to the very writers themselves. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you reach back through your own history to the sand of
Luquillo, you must tell her about the sand under your fingernails, the halo of grey
encircling the rain forest.<span> </span>And she will either love it, or hate it, and she will speak back to you.<span> </span>In a world growing more and more
inhuman, we need you to give humanity back to language, and language back to
humanity, and color back to your dreams.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You haven't done that.<span>
</span>But you can.<span> </span>You are a poet.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And you are a poet because someone named you so.<span> </span>As God once did.<span> </span>As we have done in succession, again
and again, through history, through fire, to where you are, where I am.</div>Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-28794877539338772542012-06-16T04:15:00.000-04:002012-06-16T04:16:53.683-04:00La Revolución Will Not Be Reviewed In The New York Times<style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Disclaimers: </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>I'm a poet. I
talk a lot about poems. I realize
that the argument is about literature in general. </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>You will also notice a lot of politics in this essay. </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>These are not apologies, just recognitions. There's not a damn thing wrong with any
of that. My argument is about influence, and who's listening, and why, and why
not.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Listen. Here
are some things I have told people recently.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1) William Carlos Williams was Puerto Rican. "But he
didn't claim it," some Williams scholars will tell you. Actually, he did, but the fact of his
claiming or not claiming does not change his parentage, or the fact that it was
thus a Puerto Rican poet who wrote the introduction to <i>Howl</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, invented the variable foot, championed the American
idiom in poetry, and constructed a modernist epic known as </span><i>Paterson</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.
Important poet. Puerto
Rican. End of text.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2) You can make the case that Hart Crane and William Carlos
Williams were responsible for championing the American idiom in
English-speaking poetry. In 1932,
however, one of their contemporaries was recording a different kind of American
idiom: that year, Sterling Brown published <i>Southern Road</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, a book of poems which captured African-American
voices, in dialect, in the South.
His contemporaries included Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and
his students included Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Kwame Nkrumah. All of them spoke, speak, English. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
3) The Harlem Renaissance was not limited to Harlem. Langston Hughes and the Cuban poet
Nicolás Guillen were lifelong friends.
Guillen and the Puerto Rican poet Luis Pales Matos introduced
Afro-Antilliano, a genre of poetry expressing African life in Cuba and Puerto
Rico, also in vernacular speech.
In Spanish.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
4) The Harlem Renaissance was not limited to Harlem. In conversation with the American poets
of that movement, there rose a French movement called Negritude, which
expressed anti-colonialist and native African voices from a region of the world
that had come to be dominated by France. One of those poets, Leopold Sedar Senghor, became the
president of Senegal. Another of
them, Aime Cesaire, was given a state funeral by France in 2008. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
5) The Harlem Renaissance was not simply a literary movement. Selah.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
6) Walt Whitman's picture hung in the study of Pablo
Neruda. Jorge Luis Borges and
Federico Garcia Lorca praised Whitman, as has the current president of
Venezuela.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
7) The Cuban intellectual Jose Martí wrote essays on Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman, using their ideas as the basis for
his writings extolling the virtues of a free Cuba. Martí was also a poet.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
8) The Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, considered by
Neruda to be the greatest of her generation, died in East Harlem. Her grave remained unmarked for three
months.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
9) The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca lived and wrote in
New York City. As did de Burgos,
Martí, and the Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Velez.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
10) Pachuco culture, characterized by the zoot suit and
spreading westward to El Paso and Los Angeles largely during the 1940's from
(yes) Harlem, was written about by the Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; as
well as by Luis Valdez, in the play <i>Zoot Suit</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, which debuted on Broadway in 1979. Valdez also directed the film </span><i>La Bamba</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in 1987.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
11) Every Spanglish poem written in America owes as much
debt to the Caló dialect and Sterling Brown's <i>Southern Road </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as it does to </span><i>Leaves of Grass, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">imagism, or</span><i> Howl.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
12) Before the Harlem Renaissance, and before Afro-Antillano
poetry, Cubans and Puerto Ricans were fighting against the Spanish, and a
Puerto Rican named Ramon Emeterio Betances suggested the idea of a Antillean
confederation, or a union of Caribbean islands, as a bulwark against domination
by the Spanish, or by the United States.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
13) Martí, having lived in the United States, wrote the
following in 1889: "What is
apparent is that the nature of the North American government is gradually
changing its fundamental reality. Under the traditional labels of Republican
and Democrat, with no innovation other than the contingent circumstances of
place and character, the republic is becoming plutocratic and
imperialistic."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
14) Literature is not just pretty stories. Literature is the written history of
the nation. And writers, poets,
and essayists influence world politics.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
15) Everything you just read is American history. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
16) <i>The New York Times Book Review</i>, and much of the literary
world, suffers from the same disease that is killing the United States: amnesia. And a touch of delusion.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
********************************</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There must be books.
<i>The Fire Next Time, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">by James
Baldwin; </span><i>The People's History of the United States, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">by Howard Zinn; </span><i>Leaves of Grass, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">by Walt Whitman; and two titles in the political
science section: </span><i>Blowback</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, by
Chalmers Johnson, and </span><i>Racism in U.S. Imperialism: The Influence of
Racial Assumptions on U.S. Foreign Policy, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">by
Rubin Weston. There are enough
divergent views of the United States in these books to peel back the wig of
even the most ardent patriot—or at the very least make a very discernable frown
appear on his face. Read these, or
read them again.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You'll have to color me unsurprised when I <a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/06/where-things-stand/" target="_blank">read</a> that the <i>New
York Times Book Review </i>found a grand total of nine books by Latino authors, one
of whom was a woman, to read in 2011.
This is not to say that I don't have a vested interest in seeing more of
our names in print, or more of our books being reviewed. But I am a Latino writer, and I have
read the books above, and I understand that this culture has not been trained
to receive what I do as literature.
I can't even be sure that literature is ready to be received as
literature.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or perhaps it is.
What is literature, anyway?
Do we view literature as the place we turn for our values, for our conversations
on the American way of life? Or do
we view it as escapism? Do we read
books to connect to humanity, or disconnect from it? Do we get our philosophy from the great novelists and
memoirists and poets of our time, or do we get it from the television? Even more relevant: are you more likely
to read a novel or a self-help book?
Will you pick up philosophy from the fiction and literature section of
Barnes and Noble, or from the section marked Philosophy, or self-help? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I'm anticipating the counterargument for what I'm about to
suggest. Literature is the mirror
by which we view society. If this
is true, we can be cynical and say that the American book business, like
American entertainment in general, loves to cater to American society in all its
excessive, hyped-up meta-reality, with books as companion pieces to blockbuster
movies, or the place where HBO gets the material for its original series, or
where self-help and diet gurus find their niche. Or, we can look to literature as we people of color have
seen it: as a mover of history, a shaper of politics, and the place where ideas
spread, even beyond our borders, ha, ha.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, if I mention the American book business, the
metaphorical giant bookstore, and forget the fact that we are talking about a
business, I miss a rather large piece of the argument. When the marketplace demands, the
marketplace receives. The
bookstore makes room for Latino literature if we demand it. And it will make room for
African-American history, women's studies, children's books, self-help, comedy,
CD's, Blu-rays, and a large selection of Moleskin notebooks. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It's been suggested elsewhere that the <i>New York Times Book
Review</i> is a vehicle for the sales of books, that it serves the American book
industry more than it does the American Latino, or more broadly, American
culture. But I don't think I buy
that. Not if you peruse just a few
of the choice phrases describing entries from this week's NYT Book Review
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html" target="_blank">website</a>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-Books that are considered "Editor's Choices,"
broken down by editor.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-A new book by Paul Krugman about the world economic
slowdown.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-A review of <i>Boleto</i>, by Alison Hagy, a novel about a horse
being trained for polo.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-An interview with the author of <i>Eat, Pray, Love</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-A review of a new book about Michelle Obama's family, by
Times reporter Rachel Swarns.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-A review of a book about life in the suburbs: "Dan Gets A Minivan."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-A review of <i>The Syrian Rebellion</i>, by Fouad Ajami.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
-Essays on slavery, the world economy, American leisure, and
e-books.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yes, there are sections broken down by sales category, but
this is not one mere section of a metropolitan newspaper. This is the Books section of a
prominent publication, one that has worldwide distributions, one that clearly
has an editor interested in books that examine both life and politics in the
United States and abroad. This is
an institution attempting to serve as a representative for the literate
culture—a culture, it seems, interested in seeing society not as a group of
customers, but as an entity with a history and current pulse. That pulse, according to the New York
Times Book Review, is a white pulse.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The facts don't lie.
Of the 742 reviews of books in 2011, 655 of them were of Caucasian
authors. Of the eighty-seven
writers of color, nine of them were Latino. Of the nine Latinos, one of them was a woman. This is not the society I live in, and
this is certainly not the literature I know and grew up with. This is not American history. This is a travesty. If the Book Review is telling us a story,
the story is incomplete. The story
is stuck in the past. It's the
story of the conquistadors.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
*******************************</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But Rich. We
should make our own shit, then. To
hell with the <i>New York Times</i>.
They're not for us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wrong. Of course we make our own way, our own institutions, and we have succeeded, but there
are 50 million Latinos in the United States. We will be the majority by 2050. Please understand that those institutions that keep America
blind are already your institutions.
You will run them. You will say what goes. Please understand that American history is a large and complicated
thing, and your stories are not only necessary, but inevitable. And we are, by and large, here as the
result of large-scale thinking by large-scale thinkers, some of whom were born
here, and raised here, and had their ideas tentacle throughout the larger
América, whether those ideas were poetic, expository, or political. There are so many
different barrios, with so many different characters, large and small, rich and
poor, with a thousand different backgrounds, a thousand different points of
view, all of which could potentially carry the label "Latino" or
"Latina." We must define these things, and we will, but no power structure—even
one as silly, quite frankly, as the American literary culture—is going to concede
your story to the center of its existence. Certainly not when your history is largely unknown, stereotyped, mass-marketed, and/or misunderstood. <br />
<br />
We must define the world we live in.
I believe it starts with words, and thus it must include the literary
cultures and subcultures that produce it.
If we truly wish to have our stories in the world and have them
represent and mirror the real world we live in, let us start with those
institutions charged (or self-appointed) with keeping the literary gates. A good way to start would be to find
those organizations that deem themselves national, or even simply general, and
either ally ourselves with them, or call them out on their failures: The National Book Foundation. The American Library Association. The New York Times Book Review. The L.A. Times Book Review. The PEN American Center. The Poetry Foundation. The Poetry Society of America. The New Yorker. Best American anything. The Pushcart Prizes. The Pulitzer Prizes. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Because to fail to define your world, your nation, means
disappearing from it. Latinos, they're
banning your books in Arizona, and no one is saying anything about it. They're failing your children in cities
across the nation. Your elders are
dying off, and are being forgotten.
They want you gone, forgotten.
They don't want to hear your voice, because your voice complicates the
story. Who's they? You tell me. A complicated story is a true story. And you are not at the margins. You are a Latino writer. You are the mainstream. Be heard.</div>Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-1525625052440891782012-06-02T22:03:00.001-04:002012-06-02T22:11:20.279-04:00At La Casa Azul Bookstore, Opening night.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTh-nv4XBy3H9gZ4hRpXEJJR8ZPKnNf-WUWGNz8MoA8YKBOtF_A2wCGW7hCzxC_axD2lxYIk-JwfP9uyYh_3x1sxVwy2z_38_JLWHq90z09enqr5qYO990yPX5385XnnC5gNuYfSYPBw0/s1600/casaazul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTh-nv4XBy3H9gZ4hRpXEJJR8ZPKnNf-WUWGNz8MoA8YKBOtF_A2wCGW7hCzxC_axD2lxYIk-JwfP9uyYh_3x1sxVwy2z_38_JLWHq90z09enqr5qYO990yPX5385XnnC5gNuYfSYPBw0/s640/casaazul.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
Don't let the picture fool you. The opening day crowd at <a href="http://www.lacasaazulbookstore.com/home.html" target="_blank">La Casa Azul Bookstore</a> was much bigger than the 200 RSVP's they received. (You know how the gente do.) I snapped this picture at 5:45, when the media and the guest speakers started arriving, and shortly before my phone died.<br />
<br />
After a short ceremony, and a ribbon cutting ceremony featuring representatives of the City Councilperson's office and the Boro President, owner Aurora Anaya Cerda, her mother, and a whole bunch of tears, the guests began to stream into the place. When's the last time you've been to a bookstore that needed crowd control? See the dude in the white t-shirt out front? He told me, point blank, that if I tried to rush past him and cop Luis Valdez's ZOOT SUIT without waiting my turn, he'd pop me dead in the jaw. True facts!<br />
<br />
I do believe that every person Aurora knows was in the store this evening, and she has a lot of friends (which you would know if you've ever seen her on Facebook). And I do believe that every Latino writer in the country has dreamed of a space like this. I know I have. Over the years, my partners and I at Acentos have daydreamed about and worked toward spaces with the name on it. Acentos Cafe. Bookstore. Or, ahem, <a href="http://www.acentosreview.com/" target="_blank">The Acentos Review</a>.<br />
<br />
If anything, looking at Aurora's house come together reminds me that Acentos has many lives to lead still. I'm hoping to bring the Acentos workshops to La Casa Azul come fall, and a new Acentos series will appear at the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe this summer. (Details on all these to come.)<br />
<br />
This bookstore is a mecca. It is a home for Latino writers and readers of all ages (and the <a href="http://www.lacasaazulbookstore.com/calendar.html" target="_blank">programming</a> reflects it) and will be for decades to come. Aurora and the staff and La Casa Azul Bookstore are already an inspiration, and they've only been open since Friday.<br />
<br />
So, what did I buy? <br />
<br />
ZOOT SUIT, by Luis Valdez. Groundbreaking work of Chicano theater.<br />
THE BURIED SEA: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, by Rane Arroyo. A stunning collection by the late Boricua poet from Chicago. Heartbreaking and wonderful.<br />
<br />
Go. Buy some books. Support this institution, and say what's up to these trailblazers. I'll be back Monday.Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-70048048827614871852012-05-31T20:07:00.000-04:002012-05-31T20:13:33.550-04:00From Here<style>
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<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">My dentist's father used to work in roofing, and my father was his boss. This means that my dentist used to know me as a baby. This means that my dentist has license to be familiar in a way no other dentist would probably dare. "Hold this mirror," he said, "while I pluck stuff out of your teeth and show it to you." He didn't say exactly that, but he wanted to, and he really did offer me the mirror to view his handiwork. "Thanks, no, I trust you." <br /><br />What else can you do but trust the man with the 8-foot needle who knew you before you had proper bowel control? I hear his father's voice commanding me to bite down on my new filling. Which, incidentally, when did they stop stuffing lead into cavities and start stuffing them with Plaster of Paris? Anyway, it's disconcerting, because dude looks so much like the man who helped my father mop every roof in Paterson with hot tar, and I am not supposed to be 34 and in need of dental care from him. <br /><br />I'm in Bergenfield, Bergen County, New Jersey, which is not New York City, and is thus cheaper to live in. This is still one of the most affluent counties in the country. Why is part of me still surprised that my dentist, nervous monkey that he is, would have a successful Spanish-dominant business on Washington Street? His clientele is predominantly Latino, he tells me, and business is good. So good, in fact, he's able to leave me to fight with the mini shop-vac in my mouth and go see what's good with the weather. Outside. While his secretary watches Univision. When I am done with the filling, she says, very nonchalantly, "Did he tell you when the next appointment is?" When I say Tuesday, same time, she writes it down in a paper planner. Appointment cards do not exist here. There's a computer. She's on Facebook.<br /><br /> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Another she is wearing a summer dress and shades and doesn't give a rat's ass for your opinion, because you are a gentrifier, and she grew up here. Baby's dad is on the phone. He is not happy. He is never happy. I don't know if I would call her expression world-weariness or aloofness, but there is philosophy coming from her mouth, and it is coming at 200 miles an hour. I have a gift for her baby, one which I've been holding onto for a couple of months, because she has been trained to hide by the CIA. Or she's just really fucking hard to find. When I give her the gift, her face melts, because love for the baby is the same on 125th Street. No one needs to explain it.<br /><br />I make my way to 104th Street and Lexington Avenue. El Barrio. All I want today is coffee. My friends have their fair share of drama, and today I've gotten an earful of it. I will drown it in Guatemalan coffee. Sister behind the counter doesn't say a lot, but I call her dear, a habit I've picked up from a different dear one, and sister cracks her first smile in what seems like weeks. Today, I will finish the essay. This is a phrase I like to say a lot.<br /><br />Two friends of mine walk in. They are Puerto Rican. I cannot speculate on the ethnic makeup of the rest of the clientele, but whatever the demographics, there is a giant banner on the light post outside with Julia de Burgos' picture on it. There's a center named for her across the street. And one of my friends laments how her work has been translated over the years. From here, I can see the Valencia bakery, which has lined the pockets of many of a Barrio dentist over the years. There are Puerto Rican flags hanging over 105th Street. I see them on my walk to the car, and I see the viejitos outside the stoops yelling at each other in accents I recognize. There are three taquerias on Lexington, two of them franchised, and a Mexican dive bar up the block. There is a Latino-themed bookstore, La Casa Azul, coming to this neighborhood, and it's not just this neighborhood that knows about it. There are Latinos in DC, Texas, and California, and their hearts are with it. There's a blogger who has walked into the coffee shop who knows it. <br /> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The weather has been hot, extraordinarily so for May, so I open up the sunroof on my car. This neighborhood is pure beauty at 7pm, pure love and smiles and early summer, children's laughter, and the sound of Metro-North trains traveling to the same points north I'm traveling to. I snap the picture of the flags on the line: six Puerto Rican ones and an American one, and hell no, they are not the same. Down the block, my heritage is painted on the wall: Che Guevara and Pedro Albizu Campos, superimposed on the Cuban and Puerto Rican flags, a mural recently restored. <br /> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Piri wrote this, all of this. Is this my history? I am not from this neighborhood anymore than I am from Bergen County, or Rockland County, or Cuba, or Puerto Rico. I can tell you I was born in Edison, and I was raised in Paterson, spent some time in Florida and Bed-Stuy and Highland Park. Where I am from, ultimately, has no address. This air, this precise moment, wants to be toxic, but I will breathe it in anyway, all of its smoke and fried chicken, cuchifrito and asphalt, because every human lung must fight for its oxygen, no matter what the tinge. <br /><br /> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">You want me, brown and Spanglish-speaking in America, to believe in percentages and post-racial theory while I tell you what precise shade of blonde my grandfather's hair was, what blue his eyes, to your cognitive dissonance. This is the problem with American history, but it's not my problem to solve. It's only mine to write. You must read it, the same way I did, the same way you asked me to believe in William Carlos Williams' English grandmother. I am your baby, too, to paraphrase Patricia Smith. Born here. Bred here. Loved here. And I love you. I still long for you to understand me, to live here with me in the same house. I come with baggage, too: not all of it inflicted from without. But here's a book. And here's a book. And here's an article. And here's a television network, a zoot suit, a poet's cafe on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a bookstore in East Harlem full of our stories. They are just as old as your stories. They are from here. I am from here. Listen.</span></div>Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-36016453886407588662012-03-26T03:46:00.000-04:002012-03-26T03:46:19.206-04:00Complicating the Story<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<i>"...to be perfectly clear,/ my enemies are not
hungry." -Aracelis Girmay</i><style>
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If you know Aracelis, it's hard to imagine her with enemies. Lately, I think I understand. Empathy, which she has in spades, makes
all the difference. I wonder most
days where our collective empathy has gone. I wonder where my home is going. </div>
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A poet makes linkages to things. A poet is a creator.
This is the root of the word Poetry: <i>poeisis</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, from the
Greek, a making or creating. </span></div>
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If I wasn't a poet I would at least be suspicious. If I wasn't someone who was interested
in history, I'd like to think my ear would be disturbed, at least. But I'm a poet. Age 34. I have a long way to go in this world (I'd like to think)
and there are things about this country that truly frighten me. Not enough to leave it. Enough to shape it, reshape it, maybe.</div>
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The last year has been a steady stream of bad news. Literally, news. The news media reports these things,
and we're supposed to make sense out of it. They try to help, but they rarely do. And I think that's because the news
largely lacks historical context, obviously, but it's a lack of the right kind
of historical context. </div>
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This is what my brain looks like today: The attack on the undocumented in Arizona. The defeat of the DREAM Act. The attack on ethnic studies in
Arizona. The fact that it loops
back to Arizona. Banned Latino
books. The shooting of Representative
Giffords. The Republican
Presidential candidates. The tea
party. Trayvon Martin. War, endless. The defense budget.
Firing teachers. Trayvon
Martin. Trayvon Martin. Trayvon Martin.</div>
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There is much to be said about this, both as a political
question and as a literary one— a question which I have come to know as one in
the same: Otherness is the central
issue of American existence. </div>
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Call
it race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, what you will: the dominant classes seek to define that which is wholly
American, and shun all else. The
idea is that there is one American narrative, one center, one standard, and
that the things that deviate must be made to conform, or be destroyed. This is the mentality that led to
lynching and segregation. It also led to the construction of the classic
American capitalist work ethic, the American dream, and the related
continuation of Cold War troop levels that have placed American soldiers on
every continent, in 150 countries.
It's a mentality that leads to neighborhood watches, police brutality,
and dead unarmed teens. And it is
wholly and utterly incorrect. </div>
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Our inability to see stories from outside what we are
presented is directly responsible for violence in this country. That's not my theory, it's bell
hooks'. It's Baldwin. We are living in the era of <i>The Fire
Next Time</i>. And as such, it is
incumbent upon the poets, the writers, to rethink the stories that are given to
us daily. </div>
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Because we must. Because we define language, which in turn defines the world itself. Without language, there is no scientific theory. Without good storytelling devices, there is no molecular physics, no theory of relativity. With words, we create the world, break it down into its component parts, and reconfigure it, every single day. If you don't believe me, look to Shakespeare's language and life philosophies, which are present in his plays. You know them like the back of your hand, because we have incorporated his sayings into our lexicon. You may be doing so without even knowing it. Poets are more than unacknowledged legislators. Poets are creators. We always have been.</div>
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There is no one central
American story. There is no one
center. There are thousands of
centers. If it is a poem, it is an
anthology. If it is a book, it is
a series of books. If it is a story,
it is a complicated story.</div>
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Poets, when you write, you must check yourselves. You must complicate the story. You must take what the nation knows
about the American dream and explode it into a million unique pieces. This is why we have a thing called
Latino literature. Latina
literature. African-American
literature. Gay lit. Feminist lit. It is not racist, or counterproductive, to look at ourselves
as a community while at the same time pondering how we mesh with the society at
large. We don't end the notion of
otherness by pretending it doesn't exist.
You can't throw punches in the dark. Where we fail, perhaps, is when we fail to address the
dominant culture, to challenge their assumptions to their faces, and even challenge
our own assumptions, while we fight the various good fights.</div>
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In the coming weeks, I want to delve into these questions of
otherness, and examine where our politics and our poetry intersect, and see
about complicating the story. </div>
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Good night for now.
Or, good morning?</div>Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3933942997695526496.post-69431036638986497042012-03-07T21:49:00.000-05:002012-03-07T21:49:15.839-05:00Louis Reyes Rivera on the A Train To Harlem<style>
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At 42nd Street, this family of French hipsters boarded the
uptown A train.<span> </span>The daughter, who
couldn't have been more than 16, pulled out a stuffed purple bear from a paper
bag and nuzzled its face, leaning up against the door, not seeing or caring
that anyone was watching.<span> </span>Her
sisters made fun of her in French.<span>
</span>Her mother and father smiled knowingly.<span> </span>Then she pounced on the first open seat she could find once
the train emptied at 59th Street.<span>
</span>I thought to myself, this could be her first trip to Harlem, or her
fortieth.<span> </span></div>
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Baby girl is definitely dressed the part:<span> </span>smart ankle-length boots, black
cashmere waistcoat, pink scarf, black fedora with a stylish black flower,
velvety, adorned with a silver butterfly in the center.<span> </span>And her dad seemed to be straight out
of a French jazz club:<span> </span>leather
waist-length jacket, dark blue jeans, perfectly shined black square toes.<span> </span>Bald head.<span> </span>World-weary.<span>
</span>The sisters and the mother could have been in a Bennetton ad.<span> </span>There was a lot of hair among the three
of them. <br />
<br />
Why did I think "hipster" when I saw them?<span> </span>Well, the image of the hipster started with white kids in
the 1940's; who wore pork pie hats and snapped fingers along with Charlie
Parker and Lester Young; the white kids who wanted to follow and emulate the black musicians
they idolized.<span> </span>Jack Kerouac knew
hipsters.<span> </span>Allen Ginsberg called
them angel-headed.<span> </span>Nowadays, I
move out of their way when they bar hop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or Fishtown,
Philadelphia.<span> </span>I hate hipsters because
none of them know Bird anymore, and they generally mean gentrification, but
then I say to myself, what makes you any better?<span> </span>You can't afford to live here, but you would if you could.<span> </span></div>
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The French family leaves the train at 125th Street, and I
imagine what they encounter on their walk east:<span> </span>The Studio Museum.<span>
</span>Starbucks.<span> </span>Manna's.<span> </span>The Apollo Theater.<span> </span>The Adam Clayton Powell Building.<span> </span>Jimmy Jazz.<span> </span>The Golden Krust.<span>
</span>Starbucks.<span> </span>H&M.<span> </span>I wonder if they're on their way
home.<span> </span>I wonder if their on their
way to LaGuardia Airport, and a ride home to some flat in Paris.<span> </span>I wonder if they know what a hipster
is.</div>
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When someone said that Louis Reyes Rivera had passed away in
his sleep, I was annoyed at first, because the news cycle kills celebrities prematurely
every day.<span> </span>I hate rumors.<span> </span>But then I think, Louis was not a
celebrity in that way, so why would anyone make that up?<span> </span>I shoot an email to Shaggy Flores,
certain he would know for sure, since he is Louis' mentee, and he named an
award after the man.<span> </span>It was the
first Shaggy had heard of it.<span>
</span>Suddenly, I'm the one spreading rumors.<span> </span>But Shaggy calls Louis' wife, Barbara, and it is not rumor
anymore.<span> </span>Louis is gone.<span> </span>And Shemal Books is gone.<span> </span>And "Cu-Bop," and
"Bullet Cry," and <i>Jazz in Jail</i>.<span>
</span>Gone.<span> </span>Then I think of Tony
Medina, his co-editor on <i>Bum Rush the Page</i>.<span> </span>I think of August 2003, at the Acentos reading, where I
first met Louis, and where Louis held court and signed books for impromptu
students in a cipher on 139th Street in Mott Haven.<span> </span>I think of November 2011, me freshly divorced, when he
said:<span> </span>"Hey.<span> </span>It happens, brother.<span> </span>You still doing that workshop in the
Bronx?"<span> </span></div>
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And suddenly, there is a void.<span> </span>And I log on to Facebook, where everyone is standing on the
corner, so to speak, simultaneously posting clips of Louis from YouTube.<span> </span>This is how we find things out in the internet age.<span> </span>This is how we are shocked,
how we wail, how we begin to mourn.<span>
</span>We are simultaneously lucky and unlucky.<span> </span>Louis belonged to us, to the poets who looked up to him,
even to the scholars who feared him, and definitely to the history of New
York.<span> </span>And he belonged, as he/we
would say, to the Independent People's Republic of Brooklyn.<span> </span>Believe that.<br />
<br />
My phone died on the train from Jersey.<span> </span>Just as well, I suppose.<span> </span>I spend 45 minutes thinking about Louis and his legacy,
wondering what needs to be done, what needs to be written, what needs to be
defined and catalogued.<span>
</span>Documentation is a behavior I learned from him.<span> </span>Archive is a survival instinct he
tried to teach us all,</div>
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so of course the word hipster climbs into my brain in the
context of some jolly Europeans on an A train to Harlem.<span> </span>I know history, and I know etymology,
not because I find it a cute hobby, or something to do on my lunch break, but
because Louis Reyes Rivera at one time nurtured in me a curiosity for the human
condition that I seek to satisfy daily, in and out of books.<span> </span>In film.<span> </span>In poetry.<span> </span>In
visual art.<span> </span>And not just
curiosity, but social justice:<span>
</span>that concept that not a lot of folk from the dominant culture are very
keen on.<span> </span>So I find myself on an
uptown A train, thinking of Louis, thinking of gentrification and 125th Street,
and preparing myself to view Precious Knowledge, a documentary film on the end
of ethnic studies in Tucson, Arizona.<span>
</span></div>
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At the gallery space, an independent gallery space called
<a href="http://www.azucareranyc.com/" target="_blank">Azucarera</a>, we are simultaneously surprised and unsurprised at the rank racism
on display from the right wing power brokers in the state of Arizona.<span> </span>At the beginning of the night, a conch
shell is passed by a former teacher in the Tucson Unified School District, and
we are asked to remember an ancestor.<span>
</span>I am, for the first time, choked up as I invoke Louis' name, and I did
so because Louis knew that the poet is an cultural worker, that the two need not be
mutually exclusive.<span> </span>Because he was
knee-deep in the fight for Ethnic Studies at CUNY in the 1960's.<span> </span>Because so was his friend, the poet
Sekou Sundiata, and because Louis and Tony Medina published Sekou, along with
dozens of my peers, in a volume called <a href="http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/search/apachesolr_search/Bum%20Rush%20the%20Page" target="_blank"><i>Bum Rush the Page</i></a>. <span> </span>Because these are the poets I am still
in awe of.<span> </span>The teacher blows the
conch shell, in an independent gallery space in the middle of Harlem, and I am
aware that this is what Louis gave his life to:<span> </span>the idea that we need not ask for permission to honor, and
teach, and fight.<span> </span></div>
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Louis Reyes Rivera will always be the gold
standard.<span> </span>The day I grew the
cojones to disagree with him is the day I felt ready to assert my identity as a
poet, w<span></span>ith all the responsibility
that word entails.<span> </span>I am confident
in his legacy, and I am confident it will be set down to paper, because he did
so, and he taught us well, and he taught us to remember, never to forget.<span> </span>And because he said the title <i>Jazz
in Jail</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> so many times, because Tony Medina is a
scholar to all-be-damned, and because there is a generation of us who knew Louis
was our own personal Afro-Latino Yoda, I know the man is still alive,
and chillin' on the A train to Nostrand, a cane in one hand and <i>Scattered Scripture</i> in the
other. </span></div>
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I am writing this piece in Nyack, New York, right around the
corner from Edward Hopper's house and Nyack Beach.<span> </span>The moon is out over the Hudson, there is a jazz soundtrack
in the cafe, and there are million-dollar homes five minutes from two independent
bookstores and a fine chocolatier.<span>
</span>The place is as idyllic, meditative, and sleepy as <i>Nighthawks</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the iconic diner painting that was Hopper's magnum
opus.<span> </span></span></div>
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There are two white men to my right discussing the American
preoccupation with the horror genre in literature and film.<span> </span>One of them is waxing philosophical,
and slightly long-winded, on how the moment we came to our disastrous
consciousness in the racial politics and war footing of the 1850's and beyond,
we filled our artistic psyches with <i>The Cask of Amontillado</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the stories and theories of dark continents and
darker people, yellow journalism, zombies, Jim Crow, and </span><i>Birth of a
Nation</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.<span> </span>I am fascinated by this discussion, and I join in,
mentioning how Mat Johnson investigated Edgar Allen Poe, and this particularly American anxiety of
otherness and literature, in his novel </span><i>Pym</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.<span> </span>And I mention Louis
Reyes Rivera, who always said that racism was a sickness, one that went back to
the first Spanish sailors in Puerto Rico to hear the word "Taino," which was not a
name, but a warning.<span> </span>Back to the
first Spanish soldier who set incredulous eyes on Tecnochtitlan, the capital
of the Aztec Empire, a civilization so advanced, they could barely describe
it.<span> </span><br />
<br />
The verbose one, a white man, a local artist and scholar who may have been any
nationality on the planet, begins to reminisce on the time he met Louis at
WBAI; and </span><i>he</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> deconstructs for </span><i>me</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, the angry Puerto Rican poet, the myth of the
American dream; and how white people were those allegorical Platonic cave
dwellers who stole history from Africa, and the Americas, in a fit of rage and
jealousy; and how this is the history of Western Civilization, the very same
one that Arizona now seeks to strip from the children of Tucson, all
children.<span> </span></span></div>
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This is too good to be true, and I decide this is going to
be the end of the essay.<span> </span>Until his
companion, who to this point had been quietly writing down names and web links,
responds to an offhand comment I'd made about white picket fences:</div>
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"Put this in your essay.<span> </span><span> </span>The white
picket fence is where we have impaled ourselves."</div>
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Louis Reyes Rivera. <i>Presente. </i></div>Rich Villarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07880914119997022819noreply@blogger.com2