Letras Latinas, Part 15: Poets & Art with Brenda Cárdenas

Episode Topic: Poets & Art with Brenda Cardenas 

Award-winning Poet Laureate of Wisconsin Brenda Cárdenas was in residence with Letras Latinas and the Raclin Murphy Museum Art in late September 2025 to launch “Poets & Art: Ekphrasis at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art,” a multi-year partnership between the Museum and Letras Latinas. Enjoy a reading of her poems and an exploration of poetry and the visual arts in conversation with one another below.

Featured Speakers:

• Brenda Cárdenas, Wisconsin Poet Laureate

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/b980f1.

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

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Transcript

Introduction to Letras Latinas and the Catholic Imagination Conference

1 0:06

Thank you for joining us on, uh, finally a spot of sunshine in our day, uh, this afternoon. Uh, it's great to be together. My name's Joe Becker, and as some of you know, um, I'm honored and privileged to serve as the director of the, museum. two pieces of introductory information that I think are, significant. this tonight, obviously is the launch of a multi-year partnership that we're, quite honored, uh, to be a part of. but this is also the first, uh, event that the museum is hosting with our newly, uh, adopted mission statement. So if you'll, uh, give me a moment of grace here to share that with you, because I think it resonates with what we're doing tonight. Through its collections, exhibitions and programs, the Rockland Murphy Museum of Art serves and welcomes all to engage in wonder spiritual reflection, inquiry and research. And several of those boxes will get checked tonight. As I said, we're going to launch a very special series, poets and Art. Uh, this is a, a significant partnership that we have with the Institute for Latino Studies and in particular, uh, LA Latinas. we, are thrilled, uh, to have such a renowned poet with us, not just for today, but for the, week. Uh, there are a few thanks to put forward. first I need to thank, uh, Bridget Hoyt and the members of the education department for putting all of these many, uh, elements together, the logistics, uh, in particular, uh, certainly this would not happen without Francisco GaN, who's been the champion for this project and, has been instrumental in launching this. And to you, Jason, in your role. Both of these individuals are such great users and supporters of the museum. Please allow me to applaud you both. So my words are pale in comparison to the words that, uh, will be shared later on. So I'm gonna, turn this over. And Jason, I think you're next.

2 2:22

Thank you so much, Joe, for the hospitality in this amazing space that we're sharing today. And it is great to see such a large crowd. As Joe mentioned, my name is Jason Ruiz. I'm the director of the Institute for Latino Studies, and it's a real honor to welcome you here tonight for such a special event. As many of you know, LILS is dedicated to advancing research into Latinx lives in the United States for more than 25 years. A key part of this mission has been research to research and celebrate Latinx contributions specifically to the arts. Which is what really tonight is all about. And I think it's kind of doubly about the arts'cause it's art about art, which I can't wait to hear about. Brenda Cos has been a friend to ILS for some time. And just last year we celebrated our 25th anniversary and a huge part of that was a poem that Francisco Professor Akon commissioned and to celebrate and mark that occasion. So I'm grateful to be with you again tonight, since you've been such a great friend to ILS. And you have marked it in such a beautiful way through your words. In fact, it is now a pleasure to welcome you back, Brenda, in fact, in this glorious setting of the Lin Murphy Museum of Art. I want to back up just a little bit and talk just a, just for a minute about the amazing individual who put this all together. A real reason why ILS has been so enmeshed in the arts is through the Herculean efforts of one person, professor Francisco Ragone, who is, yeah. Whoa. You dream about being on a, at a, at a podium with massive applause, but it was for you. he has been the director of the Let Let Latinas, initiative for 20 years, which he celebrated last year. Uh, and I'm really, really proud of that. I'd like to thank him. I'd like to thank you, Francisco, for all of your work, in this fantastic lineup of several events with Ms. Cardenas. In fact, that she will be coming to Notre Dame. Uh, it's really through Professor Aragon's dogged determination that we have such an amazing literary branch of the Institute for Latino Studies, which we're very lucky to have. I also want to point out that last spring, in addition to celebrating the 20th anniversary of Let Latinas, professor Ade Goen was honored with the faculty award from the Soos ND project. So of all the, all the Latino studies, ILS faculty, affiliated faculty, uh, this was a huge honor for us to celebrate that Francisco himself won that award. So congratulations Francisco again on that. It's a real testament to the hard work and dedication, uh, that he's put into the institute, our students and his own. I mean, I hope I'm not oversay it, your really, your life's work, your life's mission of advancing Latinx poetry and literary efforts. I'm really pleased to call Francisco a colleague and welcome him to the podium to tell you a little bit more about Let Latinas and help kick off tonight's event. Thank you.

Natalia Treviño's Poetry Reading

3 5:25

Thank you all for being here. One brief passage of Notre Dame 2033, A strategic framework, which is to say the university's future aspirations reads as follows, the arts initiative brings together the people and programs of the university's extended arts community to foster interdisciplinary collaboration. Another section of this document is titled, engagement with South Bend and the Region, and Goes On to Encourage our campus to strengthen ties with our neighbors. And because we are an institution of learning, I think we can also assert that our students, the education of our students should be woven firmly into this fabric as well. And so the banner, so to speak, that the museum and the Institute for Latino Studies is raising this week reads Poets and Art, a crisis at the Lin Museum of Art. For the next three years, we will be striving to deliver on these aspirations. Starting with this morning. This morning for example, she engaged with students in my literature class here in this building. Over lunch, she held a colloquium with MFA students in our creative writing program. In a moment, you'll hear a PhD student introduce Brenda tomorrow morning. This same student will conduct an hour long interview with her. As part of the Let Latinas Oral History project, which since 2005 has conducted an archived over 75 interviews. Tomorrow at 5:00 PM Brenda will visit youth at Lata, which has been serving the South Bend community for over 50 years. And on Saturday South Bend, residents will set foot in this museum for a community workshop led by Brenda on art inspired writing and the better part of tomorrow and Friday. Brenda will be poet in residence in these galleries, filling her notebook with an eye towards creating new literary art and dialogue with visual art. It is apt therefore that the inaugural theme of Notre Dame's Arts Initiative is symbiosis, and I want to thank Michael Reer and Rebecca str, who are at the helm of this campus wide initiative for their encouragement and support of this initiative. This new partnership has meant working more closely with colleagues at the museum, which has been especially meaningful for years. Bridget Hoyt, curator of Education Academic Programs was the person that'd emailed once a semester to confirm the date to bring my students to the Sny Museum. But a year and a half ago, something about the beauty of this building prompted me to finally reach out. And arrange to have coffee just over there to have and enjoy a face-to-face conversation. In a subsequent meeting, we were joined by Sarah Martin, curator of Education Public Programs, and before long our conspiracy was underway. We are thankful to have the Arts Initiative as a sponsor alongside the other campus units listed in your program and among our private benefactors. If few are with us this evening, Jim Wilson, who flew in from Washington, DC and Dennis and Donna O'Leary, local Notre Dame stakeholders Beyond being steadfast supporters of Let Latinas, Jim, Dennis, and Donna speaking personally for a moment, our friends, and now please join me in welcoming to the podium. The up and coming scholar and poet, I invite you to read more about in your program. Carla Marilla.

5 10:25

Thank you. When my mentor, Francisco Aragon first asked me if I would like to introduce an interview, Wisconsin State poet Laureate, Brenda Cardenas, I felt both honored and a little intimidated. He told me he trusted my artistic voice and he liked my approach to interviews. I had some experience having introduced the US poet Laureate ADA Limon, and having interviewed poets like Haiti, Andrea Rhodes and Rodriguez. But I had to admit something. I was unfamiliar with Brenda Cardenas work still. I said yes immediately. Maybe it was because I was a third year PhD student staring down my qualifying exams and looking for a side project. Or maybe it was because I've always believed that the best way to learn is to dive headfirst into something that makes you a little uncomfortable. For me, that discomfort was a drastic poetry. Since undergrad, I had mystic Frass as a crutch for writers that lacked energy in their writing. A process that relied too heavily on an external image instead of a poet's own imagination. I even thought of it as elitist tethered to knowledge of Rembrandt and Venetian plaster finishes. Harsh. I know, and although I had written some poems myself, even published one I never admitted nor revealed its origins. It was published without an image because I never really understood the form and I never wanted to date it to my language. But when I began reading Garas from the tongues of brick and stone, boomerang and trace, all while simultaneously immersing myself and Mexican New Wave cinema for a film course and annotating the books on my exam list, something shifted. Reading and watching so much art in conversation with one another opened my eyes. Suddenly I saw like Face Everywhere and how Ncot Mama Day and Housemate of Dawn sketches motion into stillness like a portrait in Steinbeck's fascination with magic lanterns and desiring his words to be the shadows on the pages and the Grapes of Wrath. And in the countless ways, writers have always been in conversation with other arts, not because it made them look smart, but because it brought them into dialogue with other artists. Suddenly I understood that writing could be communal, not solitary, that it could reach beyond the page to converse with image, sound, and history. The poem that finally converted me from skeptic to believer was Brenda's poem, Y's daughter, written after Anta Triptic on Giving Life from 1975. I've always loved Triptychs and how they gesture toward ritual and the sacred, and I've always loved Anna Mineta, whose art made me feel safer as a bisexual teenager, exploring the fluidity of gender in my early attempts at androgyny, so when I read Car NA's line quote, if you reach into the frame, you can pluck a read, rub it between thumbs, make it whistle. I thought my blood go sweet. That image of reaching into the frame of entering a photograph or an art piece, it made me want to slip inside poetry itself, maybe to not feel so lonely anymore as a scholar in a room of her own, and yet no one to share it with. What was it about FRA that can make a dialogue, intertextual and communal? In her essay, poetry and Concert with the Visual Arts, Garas describes how Latinx poets have redefined akra as not as an elitist form, but as one rooted in promoting visibility, community, companionship, and friendship. In the Latinx diaspora. When describing past RAC projects, she states, quote, some of these engagements have been more successful than others, but they have always led me to a more multifaceted understanding of the artist's work and a deeper appreciation for the concerns it expresses. That vision has reshaped how I think about poetry. Not as a solitary act, but as a conversation, not as a diagnosis, but as an act of care. And now I'm interested in seeing how working with other artists can lead to the birth of a new dialogue that acts as a new communal and migratory beast. We can trace across the verse and the image. And so like many of you here tonight, I am ready to learn from Brenda carna, not just about what Astic poetry is, but what Astic poetry can teach us about seeing, about listening, about creating in community. And we're better than here in the Rachlin Murphy Museum of Art. So now please join me in welcoming Wisconsin State poet Laureate Cardenas.

Gina Franco's Poetry Reading

6 15:33

Thank you so much. Thank you. That was such a beau. I don't think I've ever received such a beautiful introduction in my life. Thank you. You are brilliant. and I, I have to, there's so many people to thank, um, and I just won't rename them all, but everybody here at the Rocklin, and, um, especially Bridget, with whom I've been conversing about this project now over some months, um, I so appreciate, just how great she's been, through this and, and welcoming. And the campus here is always so welcoming. Um, there, it has a beautiful spirit. Um, and Jim, who, is a great, supporter, right of the arts in general and of Letras, Latinas and of course Francisco. not only for this project, but for his vision throughout so many, many years. I think Francisco is responsible in a large way for. The visibility of Latina Latinx literature, and especially poetry here in the United States. So thank you to everybody. I'm very happy to be here. So, I'm going to do a talk, with some poems interspersed and show you slides of the artwork that inspired them. And I'm just going to start with, a, a, some brief, some introductory information. So the term fra comes from the Greek word Eck, which means out and phrase, which means tell, declare, pronounce it. It is a writing practice or mode that dates at least as far back as the elaborate description of Achilles Shield in Homer's the Iliad. And some readers cite even earlier examples. The traditionally accepted definition of frais has been James Heffernan's, a verbal representation of a visual representation in his book or set forth in his book, museum of Words, which frames the exchange as or translation. However, many contemporary scholars and poets find this definition way too limiting when they consider what expresses can do beyond representation and the wide variety of approaches poets have taken to working in the mode, they argue for more fluid and dynamic definitions. Certainly most drac writing will contain some description of the artwork. Or allude, however, slightly to some of its visual aspects, but the best astic poems move beyond mere description and representation, and instead engage in a conversation with the art or become what Katie Geha and Travis Nichols call quote, A process of correspondence between words and images, between signs between marks on the page and marks on the canvas between texts. They discuss the Astic poems in their catalog, poets on painters as a non sites that represent the paintings without resembling them. In museum meditations reframing Afra and contemporary American poetry. Barbara K. Fisher makes a space for Afra as. An interpretive occasion and a critical tool, a mode that involves description, enumeration analysis, comparison, citation, questioning, critique, assessment, summation and judgment. Fisher also points out that many contemporary AraC poems address nonrepresentational works. While some may not represent their subjects at all, riffing off their visual sources more tangentially or interrogative. And I thought I would pause here for a moment and read a poem that I think fits that to some degree, that last, idea of hers, of riffing tangentially off the artwork. I mean, some folks might even say that's not an RAC poem, and that's okay with me. the art came into the poem later. so, oh. Boop. boop. Okay, I'm gonna have to go back and forward. So here we go. Mark Rothko. Who with with whom? I'm sure you're familiar. Right. Two Mark Roth. Two Mark Rothko pieces. And the poem I wrote is called Rothko with roadkill and ash. It's time we stop gushing over paper bags picked up by the wind mistaken for ghosts. Death is theft. And even when you know that your roadkill tortoises, deer, jubilant sparrows will yield mushrooms and lush green leaves even when you want nothing more than to stuff your mouth. With a handful of blueberries growing right next to your kin, you are left in a firefight with grief. It will take half your life to put it out. A generation for a forest to pulse through the ashes, and you will always smell the smoke because you've been taught too long for eternity. Serenity, symbols, you'll gravitate toward rothko's untitled, 1954, convinced of sunrise at the beat. But off stage you would winnow everything down to untitled 1970 to remind you that gray exists despite the black cave of your throat and the abyss behind your closed eyes when you refuse, as you might to open them, look straight into that shock of light. Is that AraC? Um, I'm not sure. Right. I was writing the poem, which of course is dealing with grief. But, but, you know, mark Rothko kept coming to mind, the black and gray painting. And so he had to come into the poem. those works had to come into the poem. Okay. back to what I was saying about frais in their article, RAC Spaces, the tug pole collision and merging of the in-between Cassandra Atherton and Paul Heatherington explore the Way RAC poetry develops complex and inter art relationships that cause a fracturing and or stretching in the perspectives of both the poem and the artwork. It invokes a powerful in-between or liminal RAC space is created in which meanings tug pull, and swir. Right. And I think one of the things about the mode, that is, for me anyway, so compelling or interesting is the way that when we read Antic poem and then look at the artwork, and not that we have to, but when we do that, we have to attend twice at once. And, and there's something about that I think it opens up our perspective on both the artwork and the poem. So, yeah, that, that's some of it. and finally, in, in these notes, Janae Bauer, I wanted to mention her book, the RAC Writer. In it, she notes that Fraus might allow for a deeper knowing as it asks writers to respond to something outside their usual experience and to dwell in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. She provides a list of 20 different stances the Astic writer might adopt, and it is far from exhaustive. I've chosen to share poems of my own with you this evening that illustrate some of those approaches. So, first, and let me see if I can make this work. Oh, this is a little film, but I'm not quite sure how I make it. Oh,

4 24:30

there, here we go.

Introduction to Adela's Poetry

6 24:45

Is a sculpture or assemblage and the artist is the one turning it and opening it for us. Alright. And, um, the poem I wrote, I was actually asked to write this particular piece. there, there was, um, an exhibit in Madison at, uh, art Museum in Madison that, this piece was, part of it was all Wisconsin artists, and they invited, they invited people to write a commentary on the piece. I'm, I'm not writing a commentary, I'm writing a poem, so, so I might have been the only one in there that wrote, wrote a poem. Okay. Um, the artist as you see here is Katie Hudna or Hudnall, and she calls this piece symbiosis Number two Pair of Cabinets. And this is the poem, opening doors when you open the door to my Naughty Heart piece together like a puzzle. To place a blue egg on its middle shelf. I umbrella. You offer spokes of shade, but never fully shelter your mind from the sun. Never block your thoughts from buzzing and hovering like dragon flies above my mind's eye, watching them take shape. Shape. And haven't you always done the same for me? Architects of each other's joy. We teeter-totter to the dance floor where you are so nimble. I'd swear you wrote in on wheels. Our steps mirror each other until I lean back, grasp your fingertips, and we spin like our children used to do before falling into mounds of leaves or snow. You always managed to keep our precarious balance despite the screws in your knee and my spindly spine. All are reclaimed parts, adding one more ring to our trees trunk. Such are the mathematics of marriage. Some mornings I look like a raggedy old fence and you feel like a TV antenna in a storm. But we glide through most days in our wooden canoe river streaming beneath us. Pine needles spicing the air and a great blue heron standing tall in the reeds as if we had never seen one before. We point in unison and say, look over there one day, we won't need cabinets, canoes, fences, or antennas, not even our dancing shoes. But for now, let me hide a surprise on the shelf in your heart while you open an umbrella to the rain. Soaking my grateful. Um, thank you. So, so one of the approaches, right, uh, that Janae Bogger talks about in her book is personifying the artwork, right? And making the artwork speak where there's another long, fancy term for it, which is proso, right? Making the artwork itself speak, which in that poem I was doing, making the cabinets, talk, right? Um, another, another very closely related possibility, right? And po possible approach is to make a figure in the artwork speak. and in this one, I became entranced, right? With this, the work of, uh, an artist from Mexico. Ricardo de I was in a tiny little shop in New York City one day and found this alternative RIA deck. Um, if you're not familiar with the Game of Loteria, it's a game played in Mexico. It's often also played in the United States by Mexican Americans. It is somewhat similar to Bingo in that we have a card, but instead of numbers on the card, we have little pictures of, they're very in the, in the regular looked at. He had deck. They're very simple pictures. They're like, you would find in a, a school primer, right? And then there will be the word of what's being depicted there underneath. So you'll have a picture of a very simple tree and it will say, el underneath it, the tree. Okay. Or you'll have a simp, a picture of like a liberty bell and it will say, Ana, underneath it, it can be used to teach children vocabulary. uh, and it also, the, it's played, you have a caller just like you do in Bingo, who will, who can call out La Campana, and then you cover the bell. However, the best callers, the great callers will, instead of saying the word, they will give you a little riddle or a little poem, a little, and you have to guess which one it is, right? Which picture it is. Um, and so he, artists have been taking that concept of laia for many years and making their own RIA decks. And so Del made this deck that, that he calls, something like 100 names for death. and there's a hundred of them. And when he was asked, well, why do you have all these depictions of death? He said, because as Mexicans were obsessed with death. I've been with these cards, writing poems for a while now, and, I'm going to read the one that I wrote, in response to or in conversation with these three, LA The screwed one, right? La The Bones, right. And she's carrying this child on her back, carrying weight on her back. And so this poem is titled The Screwed Ones. Um, and it, again, in here, I'm making an image in the artwork speak. We are bent from the loads we've carried, strapped to our bony backs, sacks of Mais, YBA Frijoles, bundles of firewood, Jerry Jugs of Precious awa. Each Saturday we haul tall stacks of caged birds to the Mercado to sell their captive songs. Their laments, our heaviest burden hobble a mile in our ragged ce holes in their tire tread souls. Follow us to the village of whispers where the only ritos belonged to the wind. Empty doorways grown over with weeds. Our men's dusty boots waiting years for their return. Then look into the es of our eyes. You'll find no fish, no floris, no only sacrifices with their mouths full of mud and the dread of our itchy grins, then tell us you would never risk wrapping your little lamb in our reso. Grabbing your withered staff and heading North Devil Sun, scorpion, migra be damned. You'd fly for the birds whose latches you could not unlock. You'd fly. So the only satchel your daughter hoists on her shoulders is heavy with Liros lap. You'd fly, not believing they would rest her from your back and lock her in a cage. So thank you. Thank you. So I mean, I wrote that, under the first, Trump administration when we saw the, children being caged at the border. Um, and there was something about seeing these images and seeing the weight each of the women is carrying. And thinking about, the weight that people carry, whether or not they're literally carrying anything right to the border, when they come to cross and then when they get here, so often that weight becomes multiplied. Right? And in particular, obviously when they're caging people, imprisoning people, and deporting them and children that they were caging children. So that poem, it, you know, a classic poetry, it comes from the art, but it comes from everything else too, from our own personal lives, from the larger world, out there. And they, those things come together. okay, so another approach that poets take to this mode is narrating the artwork or telling the image's story. and then another one is describing something outside the frame of the artwork. I felt that this poem did both of those things. it narrates, it tells a story and it goes outside of the artwork. It, it, it references the artwork too, but it moves outside of it as well. and this one, if you were there last night, you heard this one last night as well. So, this is the reproduction of a, this is a, an, IM a, a photograph of a postcard. That was, the postcard that was advertising the exhibition by Roberto Valez. The artwork itself is gone. The actual painting was very large. Someone bought it. He doesn't know where it's okay. but at the time, Roberto, he had come to, he, you know, his family migrated from Mexico. He had come. To Chicago and just fell in love with the blues. Right. And at the time there was, uh, a market called Maxwell Street. If you know Chicago, you may be familiar with Maxwell Street, which was a gigantic flea market, right, of sorts. Um, the original Maxwell Streets centered at Maxwell and Halstead Streets and stretched from Roosevelt Road to 16th Street. and it was the impromptu market. It was started in the late 19th century by newly arrived Jewish residents from Eastern Europe. It was a Sunday only affair at, at first, and a precursor to the flea market scene in Chicago. Maxwell Street Market was officially recognized by the city in 1912, and over time became a multicultural phenomenon. It was actually kind of centered between the African-American community. The Mexican American community. And so those two groups of people came in a lot of contact with one another at the market. in the thirties and forties, it became known as a place where many black musicians, especially those, the Delta Blues men who had come up, from Mississippi, where they, they played under a tree called the Blues Tree. and Jimmy Davis, um, was one of those musicians, and he played in that area for over 40 years. the artist, Roberto Valez documents it in many, many paintings of portraits of the blues men, beautiful portraits. Um, but also he had this particular painting. And so the poem. Called at the base of the blues tree un nda, or an offering an altar, right for Jimmy Davis Chicago Blues Man, the hands of this telling tree. Pull him from the cobalt bowl of sky. Bring Jimmy back to the ruins of Maxwell Street, hunched in dusk. He stood where strings intersected, frets like tracks. Meeting ties on the Illinois Central's passage from the Mississippi Delta, then followed breadcrumbs of troubadours to this steel city. 12 hour shifts back in Mexicanos North, on the Union Pacific from Piera Negras to Pilsen back of the yards. How many grandparents, mothers and fathers pounded steak into soil, snuck or were shoved into box cars, leapt onto the train's iron rungs as it shuttered along the rails to foundries where they poured molten metal faced hot licks of the blast. Furnaces growl and hiss how many lugged themselves north to slaughterhouses that drool rink puddles at their feet. This so sons and daughters might step off into another era, choose instruments of wood and metal axes of their own. Timur this so Jimmy might mix his own palette, tune each turquoise pitch and purple tone into an electric blues old es corridos, but knew to the Mexicanos who came each Sunday to the market at Maxwell. New to the ears of Roberto, a boy who would keep his ranchera rhythms close as a pair of old jeans, but grow into the blues as he listened to the heirs of Papa Jackson, Johnny Young, howling Wolf, Nighthawk, and Maxwell. Jimmy. Now Roberto sits in overalls at an easel, splits the hairs of his brush over how to compose the sonda. This homage, how to take Jimmy back in time to the market whose merchants once hustled with tricks for trade, ancient as Africa as toll tech, Mexico Maxwell, whose live blues bands and car radios, belting norteno mixes made every Sunday a session. How to take Jimmy back to Maxwell's gathering spot. Where he guzzles from an aluminum garden blooming atop his amp, swings his ax, fingers climbing its trunk plucking twigs. While our feet tap the roots of this wailing tree, notes skip through alleys of his voice, like gravel pinging off. Windshields. Lift a pitch high enough to cinch the autumn sky cousin to the red and gr gritos of the barrio only blocks away 12 bars spin like metal rims stack like hub caps cords crackling in the tin barrels of his laughter. When people gather he sputters, what did the one-eyed woman say and waits for them to peer into the devil's draw of his eyes before he roars? Where is my one-eyed man? But we barely get to the punchline. To the end of a set before the mayor swings his ax a claw that rips this audible de blues up by its roots before Chicago swings its wrecking ball to level homes, stores, restaurants, bars before gr before troops, graffiti, blast scrub, and cinch sack at all. But one empty wall where someone has scrawled Jimmy's name among others in this hall of fame, Willie Hound dog, honey boy Sal, the many legends who've shared the marrow of their music of Santana's hardy Soup with the bone still in it, steaming with sabor and sometimes weeping. Thank you. Oh my God. Okay. Thank you very much. So another approach, is analyzing an artwork and also incorporating aspects of the artist's life into the poem. And for that, I'm going to read you, oh, first I just wanted to show you how the poem looks on the page. that you see that there's an erasure of the first half of the poem and the bottom of the poem in the second half. And it was written, in response to this piece by Anta from Silta series, from her, um, SILTA series. let's see if I can find it. It's, here it is here. One second. Sorry. Okay, here we go. so this is the poem. Um, um, the, photograph of the artwork. Anna men was always placing her own body, or she was tracing into the earth. She was either putting her body there and photographing it, or she was carving or tracing into the earth. And there are a lot of, um, scholars who've written on her work and why she may have done that. This is called Our Lady of Sorrows. Our lady of Sorrows has appeared to the mountain dwellers, her grief engraved, where stone softens to clay. Keep your eyes sharp for a dagger in its hilt. You'll find her face pressed to the earth's cheek. Kiss this sacred spot before the rains. Wash it away like her orphaned feet. Notched heart cradles a planet heavy with nightmares flying into empty mouths. Listen for their thirsty murmurs. She'll push her ponderous child into the dew of a San Felipe dawn. Name him Salvador. They'll rest beneath a web spun, umbilical. Eclipsed from our human eyes. Our Lady Stone, clay, earth. Rain orphaned, heart eclipsed. Um, okay. Um, and this one I also wanted to show you the poem. Because it's actually what I call it, a disintegrating palindrome. So it's a palindrome, but in the second half I've taken a number of words out and specifically spaced it so that it would be exactly, you know, as it is in the first part. of course, backwards as a palindrome. And this was written after. Roy Dab is a, a, an artist who does earthworks. Um, he uses materials from the site, the area where he is placing the artwork, and I'm just really taken with his work. and so you can see some of the slides there, so I'll leave it on this one. And this poem is titled Chiro Formation.

4 44:53

Okay. This is a strange one.

Law Enforcement and Divine Grace

6 44:56

I'm just letting you know. Buck tho saplings curve into hoops linking bows. Ring around the rosy four staked crowns, etched surface, barbed shiver. Pocket full of hands. What do you net in the intersect when you walk on water? A forest, my haunted face crowing cumulus algae. Our ashes child slim as a reed. What does a lemon skate? I'm sorry. Where does a lemon skate? Drift? Chiral. Twin wander When the sun falls down, downfall sun wander in Chiral drift. Skate. Where? Reed Child, our. Cumulus crowing. Haunt my forest water. Walk insect. Do what? Full pock. Barbed face. Etch own ache. Rosy rounding ink. Oops. Playing. Okay, so that was illustrating, this concept of describing the form or the shape of the artwork, thinking about the artworks materiality adopting or trying to adopt the artist artistic style. Right. So it's a disintegrating, it's a disintegrating pallin drum because that artwork, Roy's artwork disintegrates in the environment. It's left there, and over time it's just washed away. Right. So the reason I did the poem like that, I'm gonna skip that one because I'm running short on time. This always happens, and I wanna get to the last two. Um, because, Francisco really wanted me to read these two. Okay. and this is, I'm showing you the poem for, I'm trying to show you the, border that kind of naturally goes down the middle. this poem, actually came out of an assignment a long, like a gazillion years ago when I was in graduate school where the professor asked us to write an old English alliterative verse. And I said, what? Uh, I'm like, how am I gonna do that? And put my context to that. And then I happened to go to the Detroit Institute of Art and see an installation by Remo Gomez Pena and Roberto Sifuentes called the Temple of Confessions. And Lo and Beholds, the poem appeared. Okay. and made it possible for me. So where are you? Temple of Confessions.

4 47:48

Okay. I think, uh, 55. Okay, here we go. Add them all marked somehow. Oh,

6 48:10

here we go. Okay. Report from the Temple of Confessions in Old Chicano English. Canyons in their confessions language lies across the barbed lines. Piles of its limbs, pierced, sorry. Risky recordings reveal what we think of the other offering. His objectified body. To the river rats who ride his wet back, the who crave his flesh, the way faced who whisper their sin in his ear. The translators who trap and trade his tongue, laa, who receive him laa, who repel him in this chamber. The chill of chicken flesh, the black body bag of the repatriated. Here the distorted words of debutantes e do-gooders of No no betters. I neo-Nazis of Beal wolfs and other born again beasts of sandal Soros sleeping under cacti of Machiavellian mente I mouths of anthropological ethnography of pretend peeling their layers of preachers and poets with puckered lips of the misused multicultural machinery of the Hispanic hodgepodge hiding their Indio of the Al Cos, concealing their conqueror Deo marking its turf. Here the Hemat stitched hemispheres blend, a vacuum of voice voices absorbed in the velvet paintings of slick of the Aztec icon at the altar of Aslan tripping and turning transvestite warrior of the cyber cholo. Stripping down si the VA liquid all lures us over borders. They're blurred, tumbling barriers, calling us to come stare into the cage. The table turned and tacked to the wall lit with votives licking our luscious breakfast bowl of Ccha on their backs squirming to free their feet and fly. So three alliterations per line. Two Hemi stitches. I followed the rules. Okay. And, uh, the slides were to give you a sense of that installation. Right. Uh, and lastly, I will close with, a poem called a Roll Call. and, and again, I'm showing you here that I often will try to take the shape of the artwork into the poem when it's not too cheesy to do so, when it makes sense to do so. So, that the last one that I read and this one are illustrating, responding an approach they call responding to the artwork's essence or mystique and providing cultural context. Those are two of the approaches that I feel I was doing in the last poem and in this poem. So here's the piece of art. It's graffiti art by Chaz Boor, a, um, Los Angeles artist. And

4 51:30

okay, where are you? Here we

6 51:41

go. Roll call. and I began with an epigraph from the artist himself. Chaz said if the city was a body, graffiti would tell us where it hurts. And this one is very in Spanglish, so if you don't understand Spanish, just kind of ride the rhythms of the poem. Okay? And this block would shout these baton cracked ribs, this black and blue street dizzy ente blades. Kiki, Larry Snow, Enrique, Connie, Elton King, David Kelly, Jeff Raton. This roll call won't be silenced, not by Glock, not by choke. Hold this our temple of ruins, our tomb. Its GIC curve and flow writ acrylic. This our relic, our scroll, unrolled and catacombs. Our flex of subtext still buzzing aero sweat. Hang your head out the window that it cracks the pavement. Summons our dead to dinner. Turn the tonal kaleidoscope. Then pause. Catch your breath so you don't miss the illegible moment where all the mystery lifts there. Decipher that. Thank you Gracia. Gracia, thank you so much.

3 53:42

We have time for, we have time for a few questions. I'm

6 53:44

sorry, Francisco. I went over. Okay. I always go over. Okay. Any questions? I'm so happy to answer any questions you might have about this. It's not a genre of poetry, it's a mode. Right? So questions you might have about this mode, about my work, and this isn't all I do, right? I mean, there will be some RAC poems in a book, but there are a lot of other poems as well. Um, but, but any question, any questions you might have. Or if it's not about ais, that's okay. Yeah.

7 54:17

So I not look at any or published work. When you publish a book of these kind of books, is the art look side by side or you have to find the artwork and then read the bullet stuff that

6 54:31

Yeah, most often It's not side by side because reprinting artwork, most of which is in color, is incredibly expensive. And it's usually small presses that are publishing poetry books and they just don't have the budget for that. If you become very, very famous Okay. Then that you might have the artwork in there. But what I do is in the back of the book, in the notes I give, websites and where people can find the art. so they can look at it if they want to. But my hope is that the poem, and I think some of them do this better than others, that the poem will stand on its own. You don't have to look at the artwork to get something out of the poem and to have an appreciation for the poem. And I think, again, some of mine do that better than others. what you lose then though, is looking at the conversation, right? So it's great. I mean, I love like exhibits where the artwork is on the walls and the poem is hanging on the walls as well. and I've been part of those kinds of, projects, which are just great.

7 55:35

Yes. I just want to say that the, um, but, inspired by esis Uhhuh painting was a, a great example of poly form, right? Because I was feeling the blue, I was feeling the music. So, I wondered if you could talk about it being, not, not just this interplay between word and image, but also sound.

6 56:02

Yeah. Yes.'cause the poem is, it's musical expresses as well. Right. And there is such a mode, um, and it's a, and like, just like we can respond to art, we can respond to music. and so, and this poem that, this poem took a long time to write because I was trying to do all of that in it in one poem. and it, I, I had, first, I had many conversations with the artist, and with him about his own experience, right? With the blues, with the Delta Bluesmen. And I as well, when I lived in Chicago, uh, they were elderly, but a lot of those bluesmen were still around. And so Roberto Varde the artist, had become friends with a number of them, as did my friend Pete Rodriguez, a photographer. And they lived in an apartment above a wonderful cafe called the Cafe Jumping Bean. And those blue, they knew the blues men, so the blues men used to come over and hold sessions on the roof, and we would crawl through Pete's windows to get out there and listen to them play. And so I did experience that myself, right? So it wasn't like I was trying to write about something completely foreign to me, but spending that time with Valez, the artist, hearing his stories about coming as a child and just sort of growing into the blues and then being compelled to paint these portraits, which are, he's a phenomenal artist. If you ever get a, he's got a, a website. It's not fancy, it's just painting after painting, after painting. But I would say, look at it. Does that answer?

The Challenge of Translating Poetry

7 57:36

Yes. I'm so amazed at what you do with Cartoon two under the poem. Like for Lady Uhhuh, I know about The House or Carol. Out of all, what I'm wondering is how did you decide to create a, another voice in HER two? how did you, it's not a Ian, it's not a Ian, or how did you decide what

6 57:59

happened? Well, in those poems, I decided to do what I did there, because, so in the Roy Stab chiro formation, right? He created the piece with these reeds on a lake, little lake, so it's in the water. So you all, you have all this reflection happening, and you see things that aren't really there because they're, there're reflections in the water. So I wanted to make the poem a palindrome because an appal, a palindrome reflects right. And then I decided to drop words out of the palindrome. Because the artwork is ephemeral, it will disappear with that water and wind and time it will disintegrate. So I, what I'm doing is I'm thinking about the form and the materials of the artwork, and I'm trying to reflect that in the way that I create the poem. Right? And with Ana Mantas piece, I also dropped, I made it the second, an erasure of the first, because her piece will also disappear with time. but also because Anna Manta disappeared unfortunately when she was very young, like 30 years old. she fell or was pushed from like, I don't remember the floor, the, the 32nd floor or something of her apartment in New York. she was married to the sculptor, Carl Andre. Many people feel that he pushed her and killed her, but he was acquitted. so you can't say for sure whether he did it or whether she fell. Some people say she committed suicide. I don't believe that.'cause it was at a, she was at a very good point in her art. Yeah. One more question.

4 59:43

Yes.

6 59:53

Uhhuh, well, I almost always read them, but I read them after I've spent some time with the art because I wanna, I want to see what I think about it first, right. And what my interpretation of it is. And then I'll go back and I'll look at those, didactics or whatever you wanna call them, and see, you know, um, what it is. Oftentimes they'll launch my research because they will say something interesting about the context around the art or the artists, uh, medium or whatever it is that will make me want to learn more. and sometimes I'll disagree with them. You know, there's in, in one case, um, I'm working on a poem, about, the artist, um, Martin, um, oh, what was his last name? Martin. Huh? Yeah. Wait, say Ramirez. Yeah, Martin Ramirez. Sorry. who, you know, was what? He was a self-taught artist. Uh, they often use the term outsider artist, but I don't like that term. Um, and he was, he came from Mexico after the ERO Rebellion, and it was the time here where we had, the Great Depression, so, you know, people were being deported and he, was found in the streets sort of wandering and babbling. And so they deemed him insane and they put him in an insane asylum and he created art, amazing art on the floor between the beds in the insane asylum. By taking any candy wrapper or any scrap of paper, someone would drop and putting them together using mashed potatoes and his saliva to create a canvas. And then he drew, when he finally got materials from a doctor who recognized his talent, he would draw on that. and I don't know where I was going with this. Oh, so in, in Milwaukee at the Milwaukee Art Museum, they did an, Martin Ramirez exhibit, and they had, um, pieces there that he drew that people call Madonnas. And the curators said that they, these were representations of a kind of a Mexican Madonna, but also the Statue of Liberty. And when I looked at them, I said, no. That is the vie de Guadalupe that is not the Statue of Liberty. Right. And it's not it that is the vie de Guadalupe. Right? So in my poem that I'm trying to work on, I'm taking issue with that curator's interpretation, but I, I don't spend most of my time arguing with didactics. It was just that, in that one case, right? In that one case. But yes, they, I think they are important, and they're especially important for people who don't normally come into art museums, right? Who, for, for whom this is a, you know, a, a very uncomfortable space, right? It at least gives them a lead right into the piece. So I hope that helps. Is that it? Thank you.