Letras Latinas, Part 10: Four Poetas on Catholic Imagination

Episode Topic: Four Poetas on Catholic Imagination

Experience a Letras Latinas reading and conversation featuring Adela Najarro, Natalia Treviño, Gina Franco, and Sarah Cortez at Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture fall 2024 conference Ever Ancient, Ever New: On Catholic Imagination. These writers of faith continue to draw on the wisdom, wonder, and beauty of the evergreen Catholic tradition to inform a particular mode of understanding and engaging with the world around them.

Featured Speakers:

• Francisco Aragon, Director of Letras Latinas, University of Notre Dame
• Adela Najarro, Poet, President on the Board of Directors for Círculo de Poetas and Writers
• Natalia Trevino, Poet, Professor of English at Northwest Vista College
• Gina Franco, Poet, Professor at Knox College
• Sarah Cortez, Poet, Founder and President of Catholic Literary Arts

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/2f8e4e

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Letras Latinas.

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Transcript

Introduction to Letras Latinas

1 0:06

My name is Francisco Aragon, and I am the director of Letras Latinas, which is the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies. This is actually Letras Latinas third time participating in the Catholic Imagination Conference. We put together a panel for the very first one in 2015 at USC, thanks to the encouragement of Dana Joya. And we put together another one just before the pandemic at Loyola in Chicago. But it's very special to be hosting the conference this year. So I'm going to start off by reading a quote to frame our time together, and then introduce our first reader. Dana Joya, in his essay called The Catholic Writer Today, says, There are at least three degrees. of literary Catholicism, each interesting in different ways. First, there are the writers who are practicing Catholics and remain active in the church. Second, there are cultural Catholics Writers who were raised in the faith and often educated in Catholic schools. Cultural Catholics usually made no dramatic exit from the church, but instead gradually drifted away. Their worldview remains essentially Catholic, though their religious beliefs. if they still have any, are often unorthodox. Finally, there are anti Catholic Catholics, writers who have broken with the Church but remain obsessed with its failings and injustices, both genuine and imaginary. All three Of these groups have legitimate claims to literary attention. And so we're gonna hear from four poets today who self-identify as both Latinas, but also as Catholics. And our first reader today is Adela Najaro, who is the author of the Poetry Collections, split Geography, twice Told Over My Children's and Volcanic interruptions, her forthcoming book Variations in Blue. Was selected by the Letras Latinas Red Hen Press Collaborative and will be published in 2025. The California Arts Council recognized her as an established artist for the Central California region and appointed her as a 2023 Individual Artist Fellow. Adela serves as President on the Board of Directors for Círculo de Poetas and Writers. And works with the Latin X community nationwide, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice. Her extended family left Nicaragua and arrived in San Francisco, during the 1940s. After the fall of the Somoza regime, the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. Please join me in welcoming to the podium, Adela Naharo.

Adela Najarro's Poetry Reading

3 3:05

Thank you, Francisco. Thank you all for being here and thank you to all the organizers and workers behind the scenes. Much appreciated this opportunity. I'm going to read for you three poems. The first one is La Virgen de las Patadas. Upon viewing Esther Hernandez's La Virgen de Guadalupe, Defendiendo Chicanos, 1975, etching and aquatint. It's an aphrastic poem based on a tint of La Virgen de Guadalupe. She kicks the moon in black and white, a karate side snap paired with a power punch. Her legs strong and powerful, her hair brown and straight. India, Mexicana, Americana at the U. S. Mexico border. La Virgen de las Patadas, a powerhouse for women caught underneath bridges. For men resting in blue, palo verde shade. For boys in mismatched tennis shoes. One tattered bra left. Roadside, one pair of jeans discarded, a sun faded box of gamessa saltine crackers, and an empty plastic water jug next to stones bleached dry. A lizard, too much sun, an archangel of the Americas, un luchador, ready to pounce, holds up a crescent and la virgen. For a prayer y una ofrenda, she'll shoot a frozen star across night sky. With her blessing, todo estará bien, you've reached the other side. My next poem is En la voz de mi madre. So this is a poem that I am, a dramatic monologue in the voice of my mother. What Lola wants, Lola gets. Once I stole onto a train and rode all the way to León by myself. I was fourteen. I wanted to leave ese tío malvado and be with my brothers, but they sent me back. I didn't stay long. My first job was smiling. I was a receptionist behind a counter. I knew how to work, but they didn't pay enough. A Pan Am flight me llamaba a los Estados Unidos, San Francisco, L. A., Downey. My kids, my job, my money that I earned. My house that I bought. Oh see what I have seen. Oh taste what I have tasted. We all have our secrets. I don't regret a thing. I hang a picture of Papachus above the TV, our souls in the hands of the Father. No nos dejas caer en tentación y librarnos del mal. I still say it in Spanish, even though it's been over sixty years. Stepping on las playas de Ponoloya, my shoulders burned. Freckles cover my back like a shawl of stars. And then my last poem is called Between Two Languages. Misericordia translates to mercy, as in God have mercy on our souls. Ten piedad, pity us, the poor and suffering, the lost and broken. Have mercy, ten piedad. Misericordia, a compassionate forgiveness, carries within miseria, misery. The stifled cry on a midnight bus to nowhere, the hunger, a starless night's piercing howl, the shadows within shadows under a freeway overpass, the rage that God might be laughing, or even worse, silent, gone, a passing hallucination. Our nerve wracked bodies tremble. Our eyes have trouble peering into night. Señor, ten misericordia de nosotros. And if we are made in the image of God, we can begin heading toward the ultimate zero, the void, that is not empty. Forgive ourselves. And remember the three seconds when we caught a glimpse of someone else's stifling cry. Compassion. Then miseria, our own misery intensified by the concorrent ringing of some other life, our ultimate separation, our bodies intolerably unable to halt the cacophonous clamor of unanswered prayers, but nevertheless, we must try for no reason at all. Once more, Señor, ten misericordia de nosotros, forgive us for what we cannot do. Thank you.

Natalia Treviño's Poetry Reading

1 8:01

Thank you, Adela. And our next reader is someone I've known for a number of years from our affiliation with the Macondo Writers Workshop in San Antonio, born in Mexico, Natalia Treviño, authored Virgin X and Lavando la Dirty Laundry, which has been translated into Albanian Latin. Thank you. She works as a professor, and her awards include the Alfredo Cisneros de Moral Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and the Menada Literary Award. Her poetry appears in a variety of journals, including Border Senses, Accentus Review, Plume, Floricanto Cien Años de Poesía, And her prose appears in Mirrors Beneath the Earth, short fiction by Chicano writers, and most recently in Latinx Poetics, Essays on the Art of Poetry. Her third book of poetry, titled Socorro, is forthcoming in 2025 with Flower Song Press in collaboration with Letras Latinas. Please join me in welcoming Natalia Triviño.

4 9:13

Thank you so much, Francisco, for this invitation. It is such an honor to be on this sacred ground, and thank you to Justin, who helped us coordinate this beautiful gathering and this entire university, and each of you who've made this pilgrimage to poetry today. This is Mary, mother of fractals, mother of sorrows. Mother of Mercy, Queen of Heaven, Cause of our Joy, Lady of Peace, The Lake, Snows, Loretto, Lourdes, Nazar, Solitude, Of Perpetual Help and Confidence, Miraculous Medal fashioned at her request, Our Lady of Grace, Gate of Dawn, Good Counsel, Guadalupe, Good Health of Fatima, Good Help, Charity, Our Virgin of the thirty three who freed Uruguay. Our Lady, Great Lady, Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos, San Juan del Valle, and Queen of Mexico, Queen of Heaven, and of the Rocks, of the Pillar, Miracle of Salt. Diluted for wounds, immaculate conception, Virgen morena to count you Is to number atoms of oxygen in holy water, Of moisture in breath. These names, morning star, Lady of Aparecida. Self pollinate, mystical rose, float like dandelion seeds, streamlined in balmy currents. Life giving spring, sinner's refuge, on new ground, you land with feathery. Precision, Nuestra Señora de la Asunción. These names contain the whole and the fraction of you, Virgen of Suyapa, factors and multiples of you, divided by millions, multiplied by the eggs who wait for release inside the twin white ladles. All the ovaries, the ova, the stamen, the seeds, the pistils and anthers, the semen, all the growing, all the buried, all in flight. This is Migrating La Virgen. Oh San Juan de los Lagos, your ladies do not, your eyes do not look down at us. Half shut. It is your dream, the whole earth, you carry above your head, where we do not fight for land and we do not cross one another or jagged borders with our own travel sized miracles. Miracle of a bottle of water. Miracle of a photograph tucked under a bra. Miracle of a sandwich shared, made 300 times, 300 miles away. You want us to swim in the one ocean, el mar, maría, your liquid effigy. Madre as the dream, as the dreamer. I've crossed the brown Rio Grande 300 times or more with my green card, then my blue card, while other children crawled across pale deserts. HID under helicopters, formed bridges with their water bottles, their bones, Madre de mother of misery of mercy. The difference between these children and me was the color of our papers. We have papers. My father always said, we have papers. Though I'd asked him once if I, if he could tell mom to please dry my back better after my shower so the kids would stop it, stop saying it, because somehow my back stayed wet all day long. And his face turned to ash, realizing what he'd done. To bring me here. Your passport is the prayer card with your name, your photograph just like mine. Your name, the same Asita Maria De Mother of Mercy. I am still learning the difference between the prayer and the one who prays. I'll read one more, part of the same series. This is From One Eye to the Other. And think of the eye of the needle. My grandmother held your image only slightly larger than her painted thumbnail, whispering Esos a mi. She Or maybe it was both of you crocheted in the light of most afternoons. Masses of geometrics, yarn spun from her hands, constellations of thread to warm our beds, to drape over the largest of our human possessions. A table. A television. Couch. Whispering the colors into the eyes of her needles. mí. She knew the story of the Nahual child, the 16th century caretaker, a sweeper in the sanctuary in San Juan, who watched the acrobat family practice on high strings, saw the youngest daughter fall to her death. The Nahua child raced off to bring you to the family. You, a small wooden figure then, sculpted in yesol, painted with juice of orchids, the pith of corn. Careful not to break you in her grip. Her heart thinned into a string as she ran, gave you to the parents. Screamed, pray to her now, and the acrobat's daughter revived. Proof for pilgrims to come for what could save us now, not after death. To disappear the cries of sick, to return missing sons, smooth, stiffening limbs. Bind, split bones, split minds, split marriages. Cure the curse of too many babies, too few babies, and too much blood after the baby. Bring an end to too little corn and too many bruises after the husband went drinking. Bring enough money for bread, for shoes, for doctors. Offer milagros by the handful. Pour out ofrendas, open mouthed and fragrant as spring lilies. Virgen morena, seven flowers, mother of his good deeds. Sihuapili, great lady cuatlicue. Tonantzin, millions of travelers holding their breath and thin prayer cards like vouchers for their dear lives. Knowing you honor the ticket, we'll step off the train of your throne for a bit, cross the border where the grim and crowded stalks of our lives look nothing like the blue of promise. Thank you so much.

Gina Franco's Poetry Reading

1 16:41

Thank you, Natalia. I met Gina Franco in 2004 at the AWP conference. She might remember that anecdote. So it's been a while. Gina Franco is the author of The Keepsake Storm, published by University of Arizona Press, and The Accidental. Which was awarded the 2019 Canto Mundo Poetry Prize and listed by NBC Latino as one of quote ten books from 2019 by and about Latinos you shouldn't miss close quote. Her poem, The Line, Recently appears in the Library of America's poetry anthology, Latino Poetry. Her work also appears widely in journals and other anthologies, including one that I edited a number of years ago called The Wind Shifts, New Latino Poetry. Her work also appears in 32 Poems, Agni, American Poetry Review, Narrative, and on the website of the Academy of American Poets. And Poetry Magazine, please join me in welcoming to the podium, Gina Franco.

5 17:49

Thank you so much, Francisco, and my beautiful fellow panelists and readers really amazing women. It's great to be up here with you. I'm going to read three poems, one short, two longer. One short. It's an apple sized poem called Ghost Apple. Ghost Apple. To eat is to want to eat. The inside of the inside ghost. The haunt of fruit, most inward pit. The stone most fed to flesh the home. The ghost must get. To get the mess that rots, that gives from glass a past. A shell of ice that drips and thins to air in hand. The fist, the part, the fast bleeds out in one fell fall. And whatever that is, it lives. I think the only thing you need to know about this poem in advance is that my husband and I had a house fire several years back. It's about that event. Likeness makes its solitary way, seeking the lost whole. Never mind about belonging, whether it is enough to have a place to be, without also wanting to be in the right or truer place. If truer as an idea isn't a lie, if gratitude that is partial to some right impression isn't among the narrow minded illusions I keep living by. A homesickness that goes hand in hand, withholding what? Wonder, perhaps, or exuberance, or even fulfillment, because it requires so little effort to be heart sick at the thought of moving back into the house that destroyed itself just as it revealed itself to be a boundary, a threshold, nothing more. Call it an echo, like a sketch of the moon as the moon lies in silvery forms around the front rooms of our living space. The bare walls, a carousel of turning shadows, the house raised briefly, seemingly from its hollowness. Then the dead complain again about being dead, about forgetfulness and all that becomes part of its dark sided existence. What is left outside, unsheltered, to rot. What is gathered for the fire, for nothing but the fire, in the parable of the tares that grow in the sun. Beside the new wheat, and pass for wheat, but not for bread. The clouds opened a thin eye, the moon broke in and turned the house to mirrors, and the shadows took their lives into the back corridors, where denial goes to be forgotten. In this place, that is still, surprisingly, not a place, but a recurring thought, recall it again, why the moon's bewildering absolute night. If not for this wildfire roaring in space, the sun among throngs, immensities of fire, why it spins, why it glints in this direction, why the stars, why us? This is called The One Throne, and it's the final poem in a longish sequence called simply Throne. The One Throne. A thorn. When our father died, we stood as if beached against a sea that dreamed all possible future spontaneous uncreated forms, and the sea was a figure for the mind. And the beach was a figure for the hourglass, sand within sand turned glass, in which grain by grain, entire deserts slipped into the crevice, the waste a slim measure of days. And the sea had theories, and the beach was either the end, or the beginning. Or the obstacle, something in the way itself the way, no other way to sort out loss from being lost. Sit here a while, father. Remember when we used to visit the dump to look for parts. Remember the chair you made for yourself by the backyard rows from lesser things. Found odds and ends. So long at odds, they no longer resembled one another. People have said of us. I don't remember kindness. Symmetry, both concentric and parallel, that might make up for difference. Mind in time against time. I understand I don't have the whole of it. Between forgetting and not knowing. A confusion, deep seated, like a throne, like a thorn. Thank you.

Sarah Cortez's Poetry Reading

1 22:26

Thank you, Gina. I first learned of Sara Cortez's work over 20 years ago from the poet Rigoberto Gonzalez, and he recommended that I read her book, How to Address a Cop. Sara Cortez, writer and editor, has taught creative writing in first grade classrooms, juvenile detention centers, festivals, police departments. universities, high school, and corporate boardrooms. She is a member of the Texas Institute for Letters at several universities and non profits. Her poems, essays, book reviews, and short stories are anthologized and published in journals such as Rattle, the Midwest Quarterly, Southern American Literature, and Presence. She's also a contributing editor for Catholic Arts and Arts Columnist for St. Austin Review. And she writes for National Catholic Register and Texas Catholic Herald. She has 14 published books and is developmental editor for several publishers. Please join me in welcoming Sarah Cortez.

2 23:35

Thank you, Francisco, for the chance to be here, to learn more about the careers, passions, and poetry of my fellow panelists. What a gift. We panelists are united, along with Francisco, in trying to make the world a better place through our art, our teaching, and our particularized versions and vision of God's creation and our relationships within it, particularly together. Those relationships with our students and those we seek to inspire. The poetry I'll read today will seek to move us through the complexities of loss and love, memory, its power and failures, and the mysteries of our incarnated place in creation. First, two poems in honor of the memories of a first marriage during that special honeymoon stage. Rainy Sunday afternoon, Brioche, France. If I'd insisted, you would have humored me, grinning the way new husbands do, to stay that winter day and watch the traveling circus, its cold elephant, sad monkeys. Tigers on sick paws. One girl, damp and pouting, wearing pink tights, waiting for the muscle man to hoist her on broad shoulders. A glittering promise. Inside a golden ring of fire. The next poem is written in a form that's an echo of the sapphic form with counted syllables, four quatrains, first three lines of eleven syllables, and a final line in each quatrain of five syllables. La Belle France. Autumn, 1999. A trip to France before our wedding to meet your family in Lyon. My diary reads, rainy, cold, happy. And indeed we were then. Before the divorce, we walk through Leon's 18th century glory and Roman ruins, sleeping well between cold sheets. The glove shop, its glass fronted drawers of color, hued rose, soft kidskin. We stroll with your younger brother, who's in love, the woman, apparently beautiful and thoroughly addicted. Pills. Alcohol. Sex. A graceless trio of crises that will occupy your brother for decades as we unravel, strip marriage threads, clean off the leaves in these public gardens where we are walking Reach through the profusion, Blossoms and stems, While roses strew their brown tinged petals. I don't speak French, So I ignore your handsome brother's desperate anguish. I'm content. In the chilly sunshine, watching verdant vines twist vigorous splendor in those raised beds around metal cages. Spring will come, a future to some. The next is a very short poem. It's in a fixed form, the Rondeau about a photograph I saw many years ago that haunts me. Black and White Photograph, Sophia Loren, Naples, 1948. Sophia smiles a shadowed grin that people say leads men to sin those liquid eyes. That coiling hair, our beauty's promise and its snare as near as breath upon the skin. Despite her heartbreak born within, she grins. The man adjusts, zooms in, his cautious fingers reach with care, Sophia smiles. Unsure, she stands dead still, he grins and winks then has her lift her chin, he seems to care, and smooths her hair, then compliments her dress. It's flair seen under lights, too bright for sin. Sophia smiles. The final two poems I'll read, I'll reach into very different places. One is a place of darkness. One is a place of great joy. I promise to bring you to the great joy. The first is written, for those of you who may or may not know, I've had almost a thirty year. career in police work part of that full time patrol police officer. And so I brought my investigator's eye to a pretty famous serial killer in a series of cases in Houston, Candyman. I am the boy they never found. Buried too deep, my hands still bound with duct tape, gray and strong. Still gagged, I lie between sheets of blue plastic he bought by the roll for the boat shed's burial ground. I hear the sound of shovels scraping oyster shells and white lime, but they stop too soon. Each layer of dead boys gagged the detective with hot summer stench. They found my plaid shorts, a bright orange comb, three pennies in a mound. They were so close. They couldn't know the other lives they didn't save. My big brother, Frank, who searched the neighborhood at night, calling my name. My dad who reported me missing three times to no one who cared to look. My uncle who worked construction on the apartments across the street while I suffered. Bound all those, all these who died of grief or guilt going into Houston's clay ground, waiting for me to call. I'd tell my story if I was found the plywood cage in his white paneled van, the handcuff board, the glass pipettes, the sound of my leaking life on black plastic taped. To the carpeted floor. The construction crew across the street joking at noon while I prayed to die soon. Candyman liked us young, skinny, hard, whimpering while bound. He chose us, sunburnt, freckled, mostly blonde, but now there's no gold in my hair. No chance of a tan. No rest here, seven layers down. The detectives called off digging in the sweltering heat, but I tried to reach them. I tried speaking with the force of bone. Please find me. Don't leave me here soaked in dripping death. I want to be clean, rinsed from his dog rut desire. If you save me, I'll forget his naked lust and bare feet and blood, his brutality, his bestial sounds. If I'm washed, I can die, but I must be found. I would like to end, for all of us to end, in a place of great joy, because I believe that's what God calls us to do. This poem started out as an exercise to try to make up language, to talk to God, to write about God, and is entitled, O Good and Great God, O Creator, O Lord of limitless beyonds and unbounded vistas, O Eternal Lord of muchness and more thans, You, O God, who are halo crested and tornadoes splendid. Oh, Lord, the mountain we must climb and the air we seek to breathe. Oh, delicious, splendissimus! Oh, you beyond all beyonds. I love you. I love your creation, white flowers whose petals are a love song to bees. I love yellow tuna, coral reefs that grow in water too beautiful to comprehend. Creatures who hop or slink or stare with yellow eyes. Birds of every feather who call and clabber, hiss or tweet without a need for humans. I love tall men in blue blazers and red ties. Women in diaphanous grounds trimmed in seed pearls. I love these just as I love the secrets of lavender twilight under old oaks when the bats begin to dart in black ballet. I love it all because inside some great question mark, you chose to call it and us into the explosion of synapse, hemoglobin, thorax, corpus, tendon, etc. And bone, and into the green underside of veined leaves, into the dust moats encircling planets of pink white galaxies. And you breathe life into this creation, so it can be gemstone gorgeous. Outlandishly fevered and grackle graced in beauty worn by every critter, creature, plant, human, element, and all of it so generously spiked, plumed, sputtered, or ruffled with your own godly joy that we can't see any of it without seeing you. Oh, extravagance. Oh, Lord of breaths and movements that are so crayon hued and hyena laughed, tumbling out of your great fathered godness, tumbling out of your never tiring, outspread arms, O King of all, O King of me, I can't understand you or your love except by saying thank you again. And again, Amen.

Panel Discussion, the Power of Bilingual Poetry

1 33:55

Let's give it up one more time for our poets. And now they're each going to pose a question to one of their co panelists. And we're going to start with Sarah.

3 34:05

Me see. There we go.

2 34:07

So it is my honor to read this question for Adela there at the end of the table. Atella, your poems offer a rich, sensual experience in the voices of women whose stories become mythic through imagery and action. Yet, many key moments are written in Spanish. How do you feel about the exclusion of Spanish speaking readers and listeners to the full experience

3 34:32

of the poems? Thank you, Sarah, for that question. So I write poems in either 100 percent English or Spanglish. And I think today's poems, most of them were in Spanglish, the combination of Spanish and English. And since we're here in this conference, ever ancient, ever new on the Catholic imagination, I'd like to approach this question through the lens of humility. And because if I, as poets are philosophers and critical thinkers about the meaning of life, at least that's why I approach poetry and how when poems, when we make our poems. Through that lens, I think about what is the, one of the major causes of the downfall of humanity and it's arrogance and pride. And I'm sure you've all read the many. Bible stories about arrogance and pride. So humility to me is the opposite of that. And it's being open, it's being open. And bilingual writing doesn't exclude anyone because it is the linguistic expression of the lived experience of Latinos in the U S and other peoples and other cultures, wherever you have borders. We'll have a patois or a cross dialogue or a where the two languages interact. And so to go back to humility and its opposite, arrogance, it is arrogant to demand a monolinguistic approach to poetry because English is not the only language in the world. And English is not static. All language is not static. Language continuously moves and changes. And here, for example, is Shakespeare. If you read Shakespeare, that does not sound the way we speak today. And it's just evident from those classics that language has changes and moves and evolves. And that's what is happening in poems of the Latino poems or other cultures where they mix languages, is showing the lived experience of how language is changing in the moment. Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands La Fronteras, she writes, So if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity. I am my language. I'm both English and Spanish and Spanglish. And Spanglish is not about not knowing Spanish or English. It's actually the opposite. Bilingual people have two linguistic registers. You have twice the amount of words and understanding. And when Spanglish is being written, it's because the Spanish is the only way to say it, or it's the best way to say it. Ask any translator. The translation is not a one to one business, right? Hopefully, what I'm hoping, if we go back to humility, is that the monolingual reader will look at the bilingual poem and view it as an opportunity to see and understand the other. Why is this poem being written? With these two languages and like the poem that I wrote with the, my mother with the Spanish prayer at the end, maybe it's not clear that was the Spanish prayer, but if you put it in a Google Translate. It might pop up, and then there'd be this amazing connection in the mind of the reader, seeing the connection between themselves and something they didn't understand before, right? And that's like the power of humility, of being open. So yeah, so that's my answer to that question. Okay, thank you.

4 38:12

What a beautiful answer, Adela. Thank you so much. I was writing things down. My question I'm asking you oh, I wrote it down.

5 38:21

I've got, okay. So my question is for Natalia. Your poem, Mary, mother of fractals, takes up the role of motherhood. It's vast mystical role in forming lineage, ancestry and descendants. And it speaks to our sense of belonging to our common births and deaths. In a way that I find consoling. How do you think about the relationship between motherhood, human origins, human migration, and fractals in terms of writing and poetic expression?

4 38:53

Thank you so much. And I apologize for that. What. An amazing question. I really took some time with it and it excited me because my brother is a physicist who we cheered in high school when he earned a D in but yet he fell in love with physics. So we have had very interesting conversations about math, science, quantum physics, and fractals. I want to explain what they are in case we aren't all looking at math, and he explained that fractals are a mathematical shape that is complex and exists in a pattern that repeats forever and ever, regardless of how zoomed in you are, or how far away. This the part always looks like the whole. What a miracle that is. Snowflakes, opals, amethysts. Copper, ice, all appear in this pattern. And so with your question, I want to focus specifically on the question of human migration. Human migration is the great pattern of humanity, isn't it? It's a shape we recognize that's in our public discourse right now, of course. And most of us are here in this room as a result of migration. And so is every cell in our body constantly migrating and moving to where it needs to go for a refill or to deliver the goods that it has for the rest of our bodies. We are in a constant state of migration internally. And, of course, externally, and of course, even COVID is is migrating from one body to another, just looking for a place to feed itself, a place to populate, a place to reproduce the flu virus, everything that God created. And so is motherhood, a pattern as well that repeats itself and repeats itself. And that did not necessarily begin with the Holy Mother, but she's a part of this pattern that goes back to. The first woman who is called, oh, I can't remember her name, the Genetic Eve, somebody here might know about that original woman that all women apparently through this, we all have her cells in our bodies. So if this is a shape in nature, and so if it is a fractal, then we know there is a designer. There is someone who, a being, a mind, a presence that created these amazing patterns that repeat themselves. And in expression and poetic expression, especially, which is a place to take notice, a place to honor, a place to express our awe or our dissatisfaction or our horror at the crimes of humanity, as we notice them, we honor them. That itself is a fractal too. Poetry is comes in multitudes of shapes. And with an endless variety of patterns that sing to us, sing to our bodies, sing to our souls. So it is my turn to ask my question to Gina. And but I also want to thank Adela for your answer. It was so beautiful. So Gina, thank you for your reading, by the way. I was so transported by it. When I hear and read your poetry, I am transported to my philosophical self, where big questions and concepts reside and are often unanswered. But you answer and you complicate the questions offering spiritual insight. One way that you do this is by giving nature a consciousness and a role as a participant in the plots of your poems. You say, The clouds opened a thin eye. The moon broke in. In your poem, likeness makes its solitary way to seeking the lost hole. And you say, And the sea had theories. In the One Throne, the poem about the father who died. I think about the burning bush. I think about Deus Ex Machina in the ancient Greek plays when I read your work because you give assurance that there is more to the world that we can see and that there is some intervention there. What is at the heart of your choice to feature the active and elusive role of the natural world in the human experience? Thank you.

5 43:15

That is such a, it's such a beautiful and big question, so I'm going to do the best I can to try to address what is really at the core of this. I was delighted by your question because I felt a little caught out, actually. Those moments in the poems where the speaker steps back and he's introduces some detail that comes in from the outside world in some way, right? From the external world to the interior world, there's a giant step, maybe even a misstep that takes place. And so I the skeptical part of me gets hung up on human projection all the time, right? And I'm fascinated by how. What happens for me is I have to take language and apply it, and language itself is weird because it's sound that's been codified into text, and then I write it down. And so there's this great divide somehow between what my experience really is and my understanding of it. And then on the other hand, I do have a great deal of faith that When I'm caught up in a moment of some kind of sensory experience or an event, and this can mean an event that is also one of horror or of terror to or disappointment, all of these experiences that catches up in some way. A leaf blowing, little light shines through it, and suddenly humility, right? Suddenly openness. And I didn't have anything to do with that. I'm just swept up in it. And suddenly I'm in a state of, it's humility because it begins with wonder. What is happening? What is actually happening here? And can I address it effectively in language? No. I can't, but I can try somehow to wrestle with that. And so there's this wrestling match always going on where I am interested in how that imagery is functioning in the poem because it was functioning in my life in some way, but I'm also, skeptical enough to recognize that I don't want to superstitiously say that there is more happening than what I'm reading because I am reading the world and I think human beings are caught in that or trapped in that space where we read and then we articulate and I will, I'll add a little secret, the part that feels like you caught me out I have this secret desire to believe that All of creation is somehow in its capacity calling itself out as sacramental. That those moments where I'm caught up in a mystery, that's sacramental. It's a sacramental moment for me. But I'm also married to a theologian and I know that there's bad theology possibly going on in there. So I'll stop short of insisting that all of nature is sacramental. I'll just stop there.

3 46:11

Thank you, Gina and Natalia. Love being here. Thank you, Francisco. Okay. So now I'm going to ask Sarah, my question. Working in law enforcement, you've experienced individual officers as heroes offering salvation and grace to victims, such as depicted in Candyman. At the end of this poem, the child's spiritual release relies on human beings countering the evil that has occurred. How does the glory and bounty of God's salvation and grace temper human failure in your poems? What is the connection between our failures and God's grace in your poems?

2 46:51

Thank you. Gosh so I'm going to take a little walk around the park with the way I as a human person think about God and think about human beings and think about the nature of man and the nature of God, because I think your question beautifully is geared around some of those issues. For me, both as a Catholic and as a thinking person the nature of God is completely different from the nature of man. And so we, however, mankind, womankind, whatever you want to call it we as creatures hope to reach or called to reach the ultimate meaning of our lives, which is God. In making that reach now that we're here, post lapsarian time, after the fall in the Garden of Eden, we are here. Handicapped as it were by the human natural conditions that we all see in ourselves and see in others, impatience, anger et cetera. And so we're grappling somehow to be ethical creatures. And if you are depending on your faith tradition, you may be grappling with that in particular ways. You may be within the Christian tradition, the Jewish tradition, and other traditions. So I believe it. Let me put it that way. I don't want to get in trouble with my verbs here because there are theologians in the audience. And heaven forbid any of you are philosophers because I really hate reading philosophy, but I think I've finally come to enough Aristotle and Aquinas to understand what I need to know. I think we as human creatures can be conduits of grace which is a gift from God, which can allow us to both help each other and find answers, but the answer really isn't a human answer. It's what we have received as gift from God, and that we can give those to other people. So let me, I have 30 seconds left because we're going to move to a Q& A here, but I would like to say that One of the things I find most interesting about trying to write within a sacred or theological vocabulary is that, taking thousands of years of tradition, including vocabulary, and trying to bring that into our contemporary world. I think for me I've been writing poetry since the late 80s, you mentioned I have 14 books out not all of them are in poetry. Many are. I'm best known as a poet and a memoir writer and trying to go from somebody not being in the Catholic church for years and having a very secular literary existence and then trying to learn and transform my writing into the part of my life where I am writing. about sacred things has been the most difficult shift of my life, I think. Anyway, let me stop talking.

1 49:52

Thank you all for your wonderful answers. When Dana Joya conceptualized this conference, when I, my early conversations with him, he liked to think of this as a gathering more than a conference, and he really wanted to emphasize involving the audience and having it be going both ways. So I'd like to invite anyone to ask a question for our panelists. I want to reserve this time to enhance this dialogue. George.

6 50:15

I have a question prompted by Adela's comments. Because I struggle trying to read poems that are a combination of English and Spanish because my Spanish is so minimal, and I oftentimes have to guess at what the Spanish word is. That's my problem. It's not the poet's problem. And my question to do is you were talking about the energy of language, the chemistry of language, and that each language has its own chemistry. And I'm wondering if you can extend that too to Spanglish. Are there things like immigration, the agony of immigration, that can only be expressed in a combination of Where the person came from, Spanish, and where the person ends up, English, you get Spanglish. Could it be that that created language is best used to express what? is inexpressible in either Spanish or English.

3 51:15

I teach creative writing in many different ways, and I just thought of a wonderful prompt to capture the essence of immigration, beginning in Spanish and having the poem transition to English. I think you're absolutely correct that, yes I think that is probably why we would include the Spanish in English dominant poem is to actually capture those moments of language that. Exemplify the immigration experience and like again, I was saying is that this mixing of languages happens wherever two cultures meet worldwide. So that would probably be true for many other places throughout the world.

6 51:55

Yeah. Thank you.

7 51:56

Thank you. Yeah, I'm not sure how to frame this question. So I apologize in advance if it's scattered. I have listened and have been overwhelmed by the mystical dimension to the language. I teach in high school and I just can't help but wonder how the kind of enlightened secularism has swallowed up the world. And how many of our youth are now antagonistic to religion, to the sacred in favor of the secular, the technological utilitarian moreover, even more pointedly right in the Latino, Latin X, Chicano communities many of our youth and whatever, feel as a. religion, Catholicism is a product of colonialism. And so I wonder how, if you can address the kind of tension in that as a writer, as an educator, and whether or not it's our duty as teachers or writers to at least demonstrate the reality of the sacred or to demonstrate the truth propositions of God and Christ and Mary.

2 52:56

I'll take a stab at that because I've taught high school and. I have a non profit that teaches children, teens, and adults, creative writing very successfully, and the majority of our students are Hispanic. So I'm gonna address it not in terms of, Hispanic, non Hispanic or any other sort of temporal, division. But I'd like to address it in terms of what we owe God. And I'm very serious. I'm a serious girl. So forgive me. There's going to be a serious answer. But I think, or my understanding, let me just put it this way, my understanding of what I owe God, not only is it here, my adherence in my broken human way to. The laws that he's established or rules or whatever you want to call them, a way to live but also to try again as best as I can in my own broken human way to live out those truths. And so I think failure to live out those truths is not the way to go. Now, we all each have our unique histories, our unique personalities, and that's part of our human journey, right? To hone those personalities and histories to try to heal from the wounds we all suffer growing up to, to become a man or woman of God who is living out the best that we're called to live out. I think that also means, the eternal truths are God's truth. They're not yours or not mine. They don't belong to any one of us. They're His. And to try to live those out. In the best way we can, and the other human being, because we all have free will, will either choose to respond or not, and they may choose not to respond now, believe me, I was like a, sort of a bitchy teenager too, but maybe some point later they'll come back or see it in a more nuanced way.

5 54:46

I don't teach high school, I teach college, and I teach for an institution that is culturally very secular very nervous about religion, does not even want a religious studies program has found a way to even pare back on, we have a director of spiritual life, That person is half time, even though there's actually a benefactor who has given us the money to hire someone who's full time, and it's that kind of nervousness. I can't use the word God in my classroom. Never. Never. It's too wounding. For good reason, it's too wounding for many people, because they've been seriously wounded. But, what I have found is that they're very hungry to talk about love. And God is love. So I try to approach it from where they're already hungry. Cause they are hungry for love. They're hungry for mindfulness, right? This is the term that they're receiving now. This term mindfulness, we all have to stop and be mindful. So we're not anxious. We have a solution to that. To be mindful, to be open, to be humble, to be aware, to be aware of our fellow human beings and what we owe to one another in community. These are all values that I managed to somehow bring into the classroom and they don't know it's sneaky religion. Sorry, but yeah

4 56:07

Beautiful question and I just want to echo I'm so glad to hear your answers we've met very briefly and of course deeply in our poetry But your question brings us to the tangible the application of these ideas. And so I want to echo what Sarah said about living out what I know with my students. I've taught high school, I've taught middle school, and I now teach college. And that is the best way to show them that respect, to honor them as sacred beings. And they feel that, so if they're curious, they might want to have another conversation with me. But honoring them as sacred is my answer for that. There might be another question.

3 56:53

We all love that question. So I'm a teacher, too, of community colleges, and Gina, you said it so well. Perfect. And the role modeling? Excellent. And you too, Sarah. It's just amazing. I want to reiterate all of what they've said and I also tell them that I go to church on Sundays. And it's hard in my secular classroom to say I go to church on Sundays, but I do, and then I'll make it simple like you said, Gina, because I'll say, because it's about love. So get rid of the rules and the this and the that, and you have to, and focus on what you said, Gina, about the love, right? The young people are hungry for love. They're hungry for justice. They're hungry for the world to be just. They want to fight injustice. They don't want hatred, right? And when you start talking about those things then students, they feel affirmed.

2 57:43

Young people and old people as well, maybe all people are hungry for meaning.

8 57:48

Thank you for all your beautiful readings. I want to return a little bit to the question of translation. Poetry to me has always seemed like the very hardest kind of writing to translate into another language. But before today, I never thought about the challenge you might have if you're a poet writing in two languages, and then your poetry is going to then become a third language. And so how do you preserve the depth of the two languages? Then moving into a different space where it might not be obvious it's coming from two to one. How do you all deal with that?

4 58:21

It's a great. That's a great question. I'll talk a little bit about that. It was a complete miracle In my life to come across the first Latina poet who wrote in a bilingual way. Her name is Pat Mora and I was an English major. I was doing creative writing and I loved Keats. I think he's amazing. And I'm trying to write poems about flowers. But I come across Pat Mora and I understood the poem with my entire mind. Yes, I am someone who migrated here to the U S, but I have an entire consciousness, more than a language register, a family, a culture, because my family traveled back and forth. So there was, and is a border between the two languages in my mind, but she created the bridge so I could understand the whole poem. And she allowed me to hear my entire voice. So my entire voice. Is influenced by the syntax, the memories, the histories of my mother, my grandmother, my primos, my primas. And to be able to use all of that is such a privilege and a gift on the page. And so the awareness is as natural as it would be for a monolingual reader writer and to create the depths that they want to create in their poem. Because that's there already. So I say for me, it's using the whole mind and not a deliberate choice necessarily to say, Oh, a Spanish word will go there. Because of the musicality, it's more, it'll come in draft zero, draft one, and then yes, of course, we'll play with it because we are architects of these words and poems.

2 1:00:00

And I would just add a tiny PS for, because I did not grow up speaking Spanish. My family's been in the US five to six generations. And typically, if you look at the research, By the fourth or fifth generation of any type of immigrant to the United States, there's no Spanish and typically my Hispanic students at university don't speak Spanish. So the two languages for me. It's not so much English and Spanish, but what I mentioned before, which is the difference between what I would call liturgical or theological application of language and image so the whole figurative realm from, that comes forth from the tradition of the Catholic Church. And whatever isn't that switch for me is more the two languages and how to imaginatively, people talk about the Catholic imagination, the title of our entire conference there's steps to build it. Some of those are artworks, some are language, some are, if you want. The Latin language I speak, I know I can translate Latin, liturgical Latin, easier than I can Spanish, because, different experiences.

9 1:01:16

Thank you very much. This has been very interesting. First of all, I'm going to out myself as a Catholic priest and a theologian.

3 1:01:23

Oh.

9 1:01:25

Oh. And I've had the great experience of having studied both in Italy and in France, in Italian and in French. And so one of my greatest joys has been celebrating the sacraments in English, French, and Italian. But of those, I think confession has been the most eye opening for me. Because I learned that people's sense of sin is very culturally and linguistically bound. And so I think that for me was an eye opener about how language controls the way we even think about our lives. But something that when, Adela, when you were speaking about this Spanglish and bilingualism, it reminded me of recently, in recent years, I've been going over to St. Mary's where they have an international novitiate of sisters who are from Bangladesh, India, Uganda, Ghana, Brazil, and Guatemala, a few other places. And so I go over to do their confessions twice a year. But it's always interesting that they're able to tell me about their sins in English, but when we get to the act of contrition, they always ask if they can do it in their own language. And I just think that there must be something so deep and personal about that to express repentance and sorrow that it really can't be done in another language. Otherwise, it just gets too far out there. It's got to be done very close and personal. And I'm wondering If that's why, like you say, you just drift into these words, you're not actually saying, Oh, I think it'd be good for a Spanish word now, that I think that so Natalia, you said about that and Adele.

3 1:02:52

I think you're saying it exactly correct. And I have a, if we're imagining, a Catholic imagination, imagining the future. And I think what you just said was so beautiful because you're communicating with so many different people. In the different languages that they have, and back to Gloria Anzaldúa, if you really want to hurt me, you speak badly about my language. Imagine changing English only to multilingual and how many languages are there in the world? Where we all started searching for different languages and interacting with people in the way they speak exactly because of what you just pointed out. How it is through our language that we reach our heart and those words that capture our essence. And I think that's a beautiful thing.

4 1:03:37

That's so beautiful. You're helping me think about the anatomy of the mind and where our emotions are in our mind, where they're housed in the brain and where the language centers are going to be close to those emotions. Because the emotion of humility is not one we, contrition is not a fun emotion to have, is it? So it is not just private. But it brings out our most vulnerable self, most vulnerable in an act of faith, of course, which is another emotion. So to touch it in that home language where those early linguistic centers were formed makes so much sense. So that is a fascinating observation, just in terms of the human mind and how it works, its biology, but also in how. Language is where it is in the brain. Amazing.