>> Catalina Gomez:
Good evening, everyone.
Welcome to the Hispanic Reading
Room of the Library of Congress
and Happy Hispanic
Heritage Month, everyone.
Yay!
[Applause]
I am Catalina Gomez.
I am a reference librarian and
a curator here in the Latin American,
Caribbean and European Division
of the Library of Congress.
I am part of a team of librarians here.
And let me just say that for us
in the Hispanic reading room
every month is Hispanic Heritage Month.
Every day is Hispanic Heritage Day.
The study of the histories and
the cultures of Latin Americans
of Spanish, Portuguese, Latino,
and Latinx peoples is what we
live and breathe and what we do
here every single day.
It is such a thrill to have you
all here today for this event.
We are hosting today's program
in collaboration with the
Library of Congress Literary
Initiatives Office and also in
partnership with Letras Latinas,
the literary program of
the Institute for Latino Studies
at the University of Notre Dame.
Special thanks to Clay Smith and
Rob Kasper from Literary Initiatives.
Francisco Aragon
from Letras Latinas,
Allison Williams and Suzanne Shaidle
from LACE, as well as to the
library's events office,
multimedia group and everyone
who's making this
event possible today.
Our panel tonight will feature
a delightful and brilliant group
of poets and writers.
I could not be more excited.
With us is former US Poet
Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera.
Award winning poet and
author Maria Kelson.
Yeah, we can clap. You guys can.
[Applause]
Very exciting.
An award winning poet, author
and anthropologist Ruth Behar.
[Applause]
A discussion following the
reading by our three poets
will be moderated by the poet Dan Vera.
[Applause]
Juan Felipe Herrera was born
in Fowler, California in 1948.
He is the author of more than
30 books of poetry, including
Half the World in Light,
New and Selected Poems.
Notes on the Assemblage and
Every Day We Get More Illegal.
He has also published multiple
young adult and children's books.
Herrera served as the United States
Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017.
As a Poet Laureate of California
from 2012 to 2015,
and some of his other honors
include fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, the
National Endowment for the Arts,
the Pen USA National Poetry Award,
the Ezra Jack Keats Award,
and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Maria Karlsson writes crime fiction,
short stories, essays and poetry.
She is the author of
the poetry collections
How Long She'll Last in This World,
Flexible Bones,
and her most recent book,
the crime novel Not the Killing Kind,
was just released nine days ago.
Her poetry and prose have
appeared in Poetry Magazine,
Orion, Myths Magazine, Flash Fiction
Magazine and numerous anthologies.
She currently teaches
literature and writing at
Pueblo Community College
in Pueblo, Colorado.
Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba.
Known as a writer,
anthropologist, and professor,
Behar is the author of
close to ten books, including
Santa Maria del Monte, The Presence
of the past in a Spanish Village,
Translated Woman: Crossing the
Border with Esperanza's Story,
Lucky Broken Girl, and recently her
historical novel Across So Many Seas.
She has contributed to numerous
anthologies and publications on
Cuban feminist and Jewish subjects.
Behar has been awarded a
MacArthur fellowship,
the Belpre Medal,
and the Pura Belpré Author Award,
among other honors.
She currently resides in Ann
Arbor and is a distinguished
Professor of Anthropology
at the University of Michigan.
[Applause]
Dan Vera, our great moderator
today is an American poet of
Cuban descent, born in southern Texas.
He is the author of two books of
poetry, including Speaking Weedy, Weedy
and The Space Between
Our Danger and Delight,
and he has an upcoming book
coming out next year.
He was also the editor of the book
Imaniman: Poets Writing in
the Anzaldua Borderlands.
He is the publisher
of Souvenir Spoon Press
and the Chair of Split This Rock.
So before I turn things over
to Dan, I just wanted to briefly
mention that in addition to
highlighting the work of our
poets here today, we
wanted to celebrate.
We really wanted to celebrate
this event with this event.
Some of the really wonderfully
rich connections that have
emerged between these poets,
their work and some of our
collections and offerings here
at the Library of Congress.
Our four participants tonight have
all become, in the last ten years,
part of the Palabra Archive,
which is a collection
of audio recordings of Hispanic
and Latino authors reading from
their works that has been curated here
in the Hispanic
Reading Room since 1943.
By adding their voices to
this historic repository,
our poets have joined a project
that now contains more than
850 voices that spans 33 countries
and more than 15 languages, and
that includes figures like
Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Pablo Neruda, Gabriela mistral,
Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo and
Isabel Allende. In addition,
some of the new exhibitions
opening here at the library
are featuring audio excerpts of
these poets Palabra archive
recordings, a listening station
including Ruth and Maria's poems.
Among the poetry of other
palabra recorded writers is now
part of the recently inaugurated
Collecting Memories exhibition.
And if you guys haven't
had the chance to see
this exhibit, I would really
invite you and urge you to go
see it. It's really, really beautiful.
And audios featuring Juan
Felipe's work have also been
selected for an upcoming
orientation gallery that will be
opening in the next couple of years.
So we invite you all to check
out the Palabra Archive and
the Collecting Memories exhibit.
For the former, you can visit
our website at loc.gov and
search palabra archive and the
Collecting Memories Gallery is
located on the second floor
here in the Great Hall of the
Jefferson Building.
Um, last but not least, I also
invite you all to check out our
Latinx alcove, which is a
little corner here in our
reading room that some of you
might have seen when you walked in.
Our wonderful Latino Studies
librarian, Danny Thurber,
curated the space with
a lot of love and care,
and it is a new reference collection
that is devoted to Latino
studies here in our reading room.
Thank you again for coming. Please
note that this event will be recorded.
So your entry and presence of
the program constitutes your
consent to be filmed
or otherwise recorded.
There will be time for audience
questions at the end, so please
wait for the microphone that
will be circulating around the room.
And without further ado,
I will turn now things over to Dan.
Thank you so much.
[Applause]
>> Maria Kelson:
Well, welcome everyone.
Dan gave me the go ahead to
kick things off, so I appreciate
that. I've known Dan for about
15 years and I hope you'll look up
his poetry if you
don't know it already.
And I hope you'll go to split
this rock if you don't go
already. It's just a tremendous,
tremendous festival.
So I have 3 or 4 poems
I'm going to read.
I'm going to time myself so that
I make sure it's nice and short
And, I also wanted to mention,
you know, um, Catalina
mentioned Juan Felipe's
children's books.
So I just want to put a shout
out for, uh, Super Cilantro Girl.
Super Cilantro Girl.
A favorite in my house with my kids.
Yes, I'm getting some 
fist pumps back there.
So if you're looking for your
next children's picture book,
Super Cilantro Girl is
one I would recommend.
So thank you so much, Catalina
and my fellow speakers for
celebrating Hispanic heritage life.
And thank all of you for coming
here to celebrate with us.
This is just a wonderful event.
So the first one that I will
read here is from the Green Book.
I have two collections of poetry
and think of them as the
Green Book and the Beige Book.
And I think they're both here.
Uh, I live in Wyoming now, and
my husband and I moved back
in May after having lived there
almost 30 years ago, 27 years
ago. So this poem was written
in Wyoming when we lived there
in 1997, and I was having my
first baby while we were there,
and at the time it was a
Mecca for tourism, the part of
Wyoming we were in, the
Grand Teton National Park area,
and it is even more a Mecca for
tourism now for good reason.
It's beautiful. But at the time
there was a well-publicized
immigration raid in the area.
And, um, that was at the same time
that I was having my
son around the same time.
So that inspired this poem.
"In the early months of
snowmelt, 1997, in a cabin
on the Upper Ditch Creek drainage
of the Jackson Hole Basin in Wyoming.
Thick weekly paper,
laid out tabloid style,
brought word of a mudslide
in Hoback Canyon
and a roundup of Mexicans,
over 100 of them hauled out of town
in windowless silver trailers.
Meanwhile, the elk were offered
refuge on the valley floor
in Meadows near the hospital
where I'd recently labored
to add one quarter of a Mexican
to the population
and discovered my life to
be profoundly mammalian.
What could I say about the trailers?
The dirty business of keeping a limited
class at leisure in mountain resorts.
Besides the newborn, I carried
new depression around
Sorrow near to me as cord blood
disguised as one of
life's essential fluids.
In my teens, I'd hiked the Tetons
practicing the work that scientists do,
describing the moss campion
and the class three ram,
slogging through mud to
revegetate horse camps.
But I was utterly unschooled
in the foolish dialects of heart,
required to answer another
whose needs had latched
completely onto mine.
There is no field camp for
breastfeeders in training.
Walking on, walking underfoot.
Earth turns.
Streams and mountains
never stay the same.
Trudging with baby around our orbital.
On the campus of Teton Science School.
Cabin to dining lodge work in
the office dining lodge cabin
I lugged a diaper bag
stuffed tight as a summit pack
Two burp cloths, extra onesies,
change of clothes.
At least six diapers.
Huggies Velcro when
we could afford them.
Box full of wet wipes.
Fleece bodysuit.
Hat and mittens. Plastic bags
for leaked on clothes.
Pacifier. Thin swaddling blankets.
Thick playtime blanket to
spread on wooden floors.
Chew toys. Changing pad.
Nursing pads, diaper cream.
A neighbor, young woman sneered
at me as she sauntered out
To her evening ski.
It's all that really necessary?
On a rare walk alone to Upper Meadow,
I tried to identify the green shoots
growing up between the bones
of an old moose cow
winterkill from years ago
Her stout skeleton still guarding
the remains of an unborn calf.
Trips to town were my more
typical adventure.
Teton Valley books
and the county library
housed in an old log
building on King Street.
I checked out books on big
things to keep me company,
as I cared for a tiny person in my
one room home with my one body
torn and swollen.
Sometimes I'd read out loud,
sitting on the bed with a small boy
propped in the bend of
my knee, blinking up at me.
Stories and poems come to us by
way of a Columbian, a Wyoming,
and a mountaineer of the mind.
The titles may be familiar to
any woman or man who has ever
tried to rise from the billowy
weight of a long winter.
100 Years of Solitude.
Resurrection update.
Mountains and rivers without end."
So that poem includes a few lines
from each of those books
that kept me going during
post-partum depression, which
I'm happy to say lifted, but
which was real at the time.
A part of my learning to be a mother.
And so, um, those books by
James Galvin and of course,
Marquez and Gary Snyder, who
was one of my poetry mentors.
Um, those books really
sustained me during that time of
snow and learning to be a
mother and nursing and, um,
moving through postpartum
depression to find the other side.
So two more.
This next one is called El Villain.
And for you poetry fans, that
title is joking with the poetry
form called the villanelle,
which has three lines per stanza
and has a repetition in a
certain pattern.
And it's in this book where
Dan Vera's poetry is also to be found.
Also released last week,
the Latino Poetry Collection
in the Library of America, so be
sure to put that on your TBR also.
"El Villain."
"I fled the West Coast to escape them,
but I still see illegals Everywhere,"
whines a letter-writer
in our rural Utah paper,
Applauding a local ICE raid.
"How does it feel to be a problem?"
Everyone (no one)
wanted to ask Du Bois,
Circulating his elegant
Diction and mixed race face
among Atlanta glitterati,
turn of the century,
when the White Sixth Sense was
"I can smell Negroes and Jews."
The question ices my
hair and eyelashes,
All Raza one family of suspects
in this age of round-ups;
Am I to breathe in prejudice,
breathe out light?
How does it feel to be a problem?
Some well-meaning white
ones want a Christ of me,
sacred heart on display.
Where are your documents
naming this pain?
They hope for a nibble of rage.
I see Lourdes, Seven years
old and sin documentos,
Embrace my daughter.
embrace my daughter hello, Goodbye,
every day on their
school's front steps,
the two of them giddy with girl pacts.
When Lourdes solves
subtraction problems,
safe at her dim kitchen table,
how does her mother, Elva,
feel, as her daughter works
a language that will
never add up to home?
Down the street I see
Rodolfo from El Salvador.
Legal refugee. dance the
glee of Utah Jazz victory
in front of his big screen.
Ask him how pupusas feel in his mouth,
corn-dough communion with patria.
His wife, Inés is fourth generation
Mexican American from Salt Lake City.
Hell with these pedigrees.
How does it feel for
Rodolfo, Inez, Lourdes, me,
to be seen as not-quite-right,
not quite us,
not from around here, are ya?
I will not say.
I will not display our stigmata.
We shouldn't need papers to
cross from familia to politics.
Ask the seer of illegals, the
maid of ethnic cleansing,
how it feels to hold a
broken feather duster."
So as a Mexican American woman,
as a Chicana with citizenship
privilege, I've always had a
concern for undocumented people,
especially from Mexico.
That's where my father's family
is from, but from anywhere.
And it's been very stimulating
to me how I can,
I can connect and offer support
and take a role in, in
justice for people without
documents on the one hand
and on the other hand, there are
some things I will never know
about my friends who are
undocumented about their lives.
So there's a, like, a border between
us or a barrier between us.
So that's something I
explore in this new book,
Not the Killing Kind.
That's part of what led
me to write a crime novel.
How we define what's
criminalized is sort of
determined, uh, in part
by citizenship privilege.
So I'll close with the poem
that's in the exhibit in the
other room, and I hope
you'll go listen to Ruth.
You can hear Ruth read her work
over there and Juan Felipe and
see Ruth's dress that she's
going to tell us about.
So this one that I'll close
with is called Westerner exiled
to the Affordable Midwest Comes Home.
It's written with a little bit
of a comic opening in the idea that
you want to be happy where
you are because you're alive.
You're on the right side of the ground,
but some places you just can't.
Some places you just can't even.
And unfortunately, I couldn't even
where it was so gray in the Midwest.
And I'm used to the Mountain West.
I'm used to the Mountain West Country.
So Westerner Exiled to the
Affordable Midwest Comes Home.
The epigraph is from Louise Gluck.
Also a little comic couplet.
"I thought my life was over
and my heart was broken.
Then I moved to Cambridge.
After years of my discernment
organs failure, when tree after tree
turned its back to me and sighed.
After seasons of the whole
earth's silent treatment.
I'm starting to believe
in Eagles again.
Gilbert Sorrentino said,
what's dead in you is dead.
Don't trouble yourself
with trying to be whole.
Just go on down and visit those
old parts now and then.
No, I was dead to leaves and dead
to sun, to feathers, beaks and seeds.
But finally we're moving.
While driving a life loaded
car through a long curve
on eighty-nine out of the
Wasatch, not having to be
jealous of people who say
things like out of the Wasatch.
I swear to dog and coyote
I started to scan the uplift
the high bare cliffs for whitewash
below ledges for nests."
Thank you.
[Applause]
>> Juan Felipe Herrera: Well, let's
give her another big hand.
[Applause]
And let's give Catalina Gomez,
our, our emcee, a beautiful hand
because it was such
a great introduction.
[Applause]
I guess this is working, right.
It's working well.
Well.
It's great to see you and
so many friends also.
And actually a couple of cousins
I didn't know I had,
right over here. Quintana
sisters and their mom, Marina.
So let's give them a big mano también.
[Applause]
And this beautiful place, isn't it?
It's great. Let's give a hand
to this beautiful place.
[Applause]
Well, you know, I got a call
from a Syracuse University,
the Centro Cultural, some time ago.
Upstate beyond
upstate New York.
And Juan Felipe, can
you send us 15 poems?
I said whoa, whoa, whoa, what?
Can you send us 15 poems?
Well, I can send you 15
poems if you want 15 poems.
And so I'm going to read my
chicharron sombrero from those
15 poems right now.
So I had a lot of fun, you know,
just write, you know,
just, you know, just have fun.
And I had a lot of fun
writing those 15 poems.
And thanks for talking about Wyoming.
It's just a beautiful place, really is.
I'm going to put this to the side,
wherever the site is.
It's a spatial problem.
And I want to put on my, uh, my
close up glasses, uh, because
my right eye had a cataract.
So they put a, you know, a
robotic lens in it or something
like that. So if I have these glasses
on, I can read a little bit better.
I was in Sacramento.
I couldn't see anything.
And I said, well, thank you very much.
That's about it.
That was my poem.
[Laughter]
Really, because you can't read,
you know, because my eye requires
this kind of lens.
So I can actually read the, the
language down here, the typing.
So everybody ready for chicharron?
My chicharron hat.
Yeah. Everybody say we are
ready for my chicharron hat.
>> We are ready for my chicharron hat.
>> Oh, yeah. So let's do this together.
Okay, I'll say the line, and you
just jump in and repeat the line.
Okay? Here we go.
Uh, my chicharron hat.
Uh, my chicharron hat.
>> I'm acting strange today.
>> I'm acting strange today.
>> Maybe it's because
the blue black sun.
>> Maybe it's because
the blue black sun.
>> It's pouring it's hydrogen
gum rays on my chicharrones.
>> It's pouring it's hydrogen
gum rays on my chicharrones.
>> And my stylish lapels.
>> And my stylish lapels
>> The shape of furious pelicans.
>> The shape of furious pelicans.
>> My chaps, you ask me.
>> My chaps, you ask me.
>> From 1955 on Lincoln Road.
>> From 1955 on Lincoln Road.
>> You are right. Totally right.
People laugh. People squint.
>> You are right. Totally right.
People laugh. People squint.
>> Who will be the next president?
>> Who will be the next president?
>> They collect tiny reddish stones.
>> They collect tiny reddish stones.
>> And search [Inaudible]
>> And search [Inaudible]
>> Where is she?
>> Where is she?
>> Where is me?
>> Where is me?
>> What is life now?
>> What is life now?
>> I've been here and there.
>> I've been here and there.
>> It curls, it sizzles.
>> It curls, it sizzles.
>> It is part of something.
>> It is part of something.
>> Unknown.
>> Unknown.
>> Multiplying.
>> Multiplying.
>> On your head.
>> On your head."
There it is.
[Laughter]
[Applause]
I had a lot of fun.
I want to pass this. What am I passing?
What am I passing? Something?
Who knows? Life. Maybe.
I'll put this away.
I'll put it away. These are the 15.
Thank you. Muchas gracias.
Uh, so that's one of the 15.
Did you like that one?
>> Yes.
>> Juan Felipe Herrera: I just said
I'm just going to put down, you know,
whatever comes to my mind,
and I'm going to have some fun.
And I just throw in some
interesting phrases and let them
pop a little bit and things
that we usually wouldn't say,
but I'm not going to say them.
That's what those 15 poems did,
you know, and I'm going to go to
this book now.
Every day--
Everybody say every day.
>> Every day.
>> We get
>> We get
>> More illegal.
>> More illegal.
>> Qué esta pasando?
>> Qué esta pasando?
>> Right. You know what's going on?
You know. And now we got some
other things going around.
Plus little cats and
little dogs, you know.
Yeah. Come on, you know.
You know. Let's keep it.
You know, they're good friends.
So this is one of the poems from
Every Day We Get More
Illegal, you know?
I began to feel like all of us.
That every day it
appears as another law.
There's another idea.
There's another effort.
There's another project that's
made, that's put together and
released through political zones
and laws to be applied
on migrants. I remember
signing and filling out the
registration alien form for my mother.
I was in middle school and
we used to hang out at the
El Perro, which is the bus depot.
We go to the perro because
the perro was cool, you know.
There was a jukebox machine,
and there was aisles where you
could sit down and watch people
go places, and there was
shoeshine and there was candy
and there were magazines.
It was a cool place to be.
That was my entertainment center.
It's true. So this thing
about alien and illegals,
we've been dealing with this quite
a while, so you and I, we're going
to take care of that, aren't we?
We're going to take care of it. You
want to take care of it a little bit?
From a little bit to a lot of bit.
Okay. So let's take care of it even
it's a little bit or a lot a bit.
And a poem is a good step.
So your voice is an excellent step.
And your true inner self
expression is a super step.
So feel free to just come on out
with your real feelings
and express yourself.
We don't express ourselves.
We're going to be invisible.
And expression is so beautiful
because it's a human being.
It's almost like a song.
Our voice is like a song.
So let's sing and
let's express ourselves.
This is called We Were
the Invisible Ones.
And that's still kind of happening.
"We were visible.
We were visible then invisible.
We were visible.
Ocean and geometry.
Ocelot and panther.
Then invisible, then deeper.
Available and visible.
Then pyramid, then sulfur.
Then rainforest. Audacious.
Origin of the strings in the field
grain of slaves, then visible.
Then lines of protest across
tiny ranches and boulevards.
Then invisible ones.
Then offices of straw in the fires,
then visible
Time, stone, light and more light
Twirlers. Then the invisible ones
More suns and divisions then visible.
For a moment we existed.
Jaguars see mist in between the
cement and between lorries and shackles
in between migrant porches.
We were the visible ones."
So let's stay visible.
That's this poem from here.
[Applause]
Can you help me get you this one?
>> Maria Kelson: Let's get to that one.
>> Juan Felipe Herrera: You know.
our good friend Rob Casper.
Robert Casper.
Uh, he's a great guy.
He's part of the laureate, uh,
department and the poetry
department that we have
had here a long time.
Uh, it was a great, great
experience, uh, to be with him
and, with Catalina and all our
brothers and sisters that were
part of the laureate project.
And I came on, which was
amazing and beautiful to visit
so many places across
the United States.
Here is this one.
Every Day We Get More Illegal.
Yet the peach tree still rises
and falls with fruit
and without birds eat it.
The sparrows fight
Our desert burns with trash and drug.
It also breathes and sprouts
vines and maguey.
Laws pass laws with
scientific walls, detention cells.
Husband with his son, wife and
the daughter who married a citizen.
They stay behind broken,
slashed half shadows
in the apartment to deal
out the day and the puzzles.
Another law.
Then another Mexicano
Indian Spirit
Exile. Migration. Sky.
The grasses mowed,
then blown by a machine.
Sidewalks are empty, clean,
and the red shouldered hawk
peers down from an
abandoned wooden dome.
An empty field.
It is all in between the light.
Every day this changes a little.
Yesterday, homeless and without papers,
Alberto left for Denver.
A Greyhound bus, he said.
Where they don't check you.
Walking, working under
the silver darkness.
Walking, working our mind, our life."
That's that one.
[Applause]
Can you help me get to that one?
Thank you. You know, some poems
are more direct, don't you think?
Some poems are more direct.
And other ones, we really weave
and embroider and paint and jump in
and experiment and break
lines and have a lot of fun,
like with sombreros made out of
chicharrones and some, you know,
have pauses in them.
They jump. A word jumps to
three words later.
So, you know, we kind of have
to flow in and out of the poem
as opposed to trying to
squeeze it and make it solid.
We can do those too.
It's like how we think, how we feel.
Sometimes we have the full
feeling, sometimes we have a
burst of feeling and then, you
know, pause and then ooh,
and then more feeling.
So that's the way poems work.
We come in and out.
I want to speak of unity.
This is the third poem, right?
This is the third poem.
This is the last poem.
All of a sudden. I told Robert.
Robert Casper said, Juan,
don't talk so much.
Just do the poem.
And it is true.
I discovered I'm a blabbermouth.
[Laughter]
It is true.
I didn't start like this.
I started very quiet, I never spoke.
I didn't know how to have a
conversation. I didn't know how
to respond to the teacher.
I was afraid, I was ashamed,
I was nervous, I was filled with
anxiety. That's how I began.
Until I jumped into choir.
So I want to jump into choir,
because if I do that, they're
going to make me express myself.
They're going to make me get
in front of everybody, and they're
going to make me sing.
They're going to make me follow
the notes on the piano.
So I said, I'd better do that
because I'm going to keep on
hiding. I don't want to hide anymore.
Otherwise I would have to meet
up with my cousins, Quintana,
and they would make me do
20 push ups right on the spot
because they're solid Marines.
Okay, they're solid Marines.
So I have to really, you know,
watch what I do.
I Want to Speak of Unity.
"I want to speak of unity that
indescribable thing
We have been speaking of since 67
When I first stepped into LA with
a cardboard box luggage piece
I was distracted by you,
your dances askew and somersaults.
The kind you see
at shopping centers
and automobile super sale events.
I'm having a hard time reading.
The horns and bayonets.
Most of all, I wanted to pierce
the density, the elixirs of
everything. Something like
Max Beckmann's paintings did in
that restaurant painting of
1937, or was it 1938,
exiled from Germany, banned
and blaming Black jacket that
everything in a time of
all things in collapse
that embrace that particular
set of syllables of a
sudden attack or just a breath
of a song, the one I would hear
back in the early 50s when I walked
the barren earth with
my mother and father.
The sound of one when I went
loose was still, still lived,
and Philippe still
parted the red lands,
and no one knew we
existed in the fires,
the flames that consume all of us now.
That's that one.
[Applause]
>> Ruth Behar: Another hand for
Juan Felipe Herrera, poet laureate.
[Applause]
Wow. Well, I am so incredibly
honored and grateful and feeling
very blessed to be here and
also extremely humbled to be
here with maestros
and maestra of poetry.
So thank you so much.
Happy Hispanic Heritage
Month to everybody.
I'm feeling a lot of
Latina pride right now.
How are you all feeling?
[Laughing]
I think Latina, Latino, Latinx,
Hispanic pride.
Um, really amazing.
So, so delighted to be part of
this community.
Um, so thank you so much.
Thank you, Catalina,
for organizing this.
And thank you all for
being here tonight.
So I've got a couple of things here.
I just have to bend down.
Let's see what we got here.
I'll do it in installments.
Yeah. Okay.
So the last time I spoke here,
I was in conversation with a
who'd come from Matanzas,
Cuba, to speak about
and share his work around
the art of the book.
That was in 2018.
We had hoped to do another
presentation together, focusing
on the spectacular poetry dress
he had made that I think many of
you have seen. And here's
the interesting thing.
He made it to fit my measurements.
We would communicate on
WhatsApp and one day he just
called me and he said, I need
all of your measurements.
And I said, okay, well, I can
measure it, get, you know,
my chest and my waist and hips.
No, no, no, no, I need every
single measurement.
Your shoulders, everything.
You said you have to go
to a professional tailor or
seamstress and get all your
measurements. And so I did.
And it was to make this dress
that was made to fit me.
And it has all these scrolls
hanging from it, 45 poems by
American and Cuban women.
And we collaborated on this.
And it's an amazing work of art,
of poetry and a rethinking
of what the book can be.
The book can be a dress
with poems hanging from it.
So unfortunately, he died in
January of 2023, but he felt so
blessed that the poetry dress would
have a home at the Library of Congress.
He would always say,
[Speaking in foreign language]
He was so incredibly proud.
And now it's part of the
Collecting Memories exhibit,
and it's amazing. And I get
goosebumps, escalofrio,
every time I see it there.
Estevez and I met in the 90s,
a long time ago when I began to
travel back and forth to Cuba,
trying to search for my roots.
He encouraged me to write
poetry, to write in Spanish
as well as English, and I remain
grateful for his mentorship and
all that he taught me about poetry.
So I want to begin by reading
a poem that I dedicated to him
called Island of Tears or Isla de
Lagrimas, and it was published
in a handmade book called
poemas vuelven a Cuba.
Poems Return to Cuba.
Poems returned to Cuba,
and later he made a one of a
kind book just for that
one poem, Isla de Lagrimas.
Island of tears.
I don't know if you can see it
from where you are, but.
So it has these images of me and him.
And then the island of Cuba
is stamped on our foreheads.
You can see that.
So quite incredible.
And so he had an interesting story.
His family left Cuba in 1969.
His parents and his sister left.
She was eight years old at
the time, and he was 15,
so he wasn't able to leave Cuba.
That was considered
military age at the time.
So he stayed behind.
And the idea was that
eventually he would follow.
He did, and he felt very
abandoned because of that.
And that was a sadness
that he carried with him.
So I want to read this poem to you.
I'm going to read it in Spanish
because I actually wrote this
one in Spanish first.
Isla de lagrimas.
[Speaking in Spanish]
[Applause]
Here, if you can see it has
our tears joined together there
at the back of the book.
It's really beautiful.
So I'm going to also read
it to you in English.
Island of Tears for Rolando Estevez.
"Don't cry anymore.
It wasn't your fault.
Take this handkerchief.
Stretch it if you want,
from Matanzas to Miami,
then let it go so
the wind will carry it
very far to that country I know exists.
Made of everything we've lost.
Of all the tears that no longer
fit inside you or me.
Let's create another country
where breakfast consists of
macaroni and hot sauce.
And in the night lit by fireflies.
You hear Martha Valdés sing.
If you return, return so
that life can flower again.
Written in Spanish on June 9th, 1995.
At one in the morning in Ann Arbor.
Remembering Matanzas."
There you go.
[Applause]
So he was part of a collective
that made handmade books
called Ediciones Vigia,
and this was the first book that
they published in Cuba
by a Cuban American.
So that was a very
new thing at the time.
Okay.
So sorry, I'm a little
discombobulated.
Okay, there we go.
So here we go.
So later I wrote poems
that appeared in another
handmade book.
Everything I Kept: Todo Lo Que
And these poems.
I later tweaked them, change
them a little bit and then
they are printed now in this
lovely edition of
Everything I Kept: Todo Lo Que,
which has beautiful art by
Esteves in it as well.
So these poems were inspired by
the work of a Cuban poet named
Dulce Maria Loynaz.
And I had the incredible honor
to get to meet her in Havana
before she died at the age of
95, in 1997, and by that time
she was very hard of hearing.
And so she asked me to sit very
close, and I read some of these
poems to her.
So that was really amazing.
And there's a poem here.
Well, let me show you the cover
before I read the poem.
So this book has a
suitcase on the cover.
And Estévez was very aware of
my diasporic heritage, how I was
also as an anthropologist,
always moving around and
carrying a suitcase with
my things wherever I went.
And so it has a suitcase on the
cover, and when you open it,
there's an image there, if you
can see, of Dulce Maria Loynaz
and then of myself.
And then the suitcase is filled with
sand from Varadero beach in Cuba,
because he knew that was
where my parents had honeymooned.
And so he gathered that sand.
And I'm pretty sure I may have been
conceived on that beach, too.
[Laughter]
So I have a poem that I want to share.
Well, more than one I'll share
two that's in this book.
And I'm going to read it
from the print edition.
And this poem is called
Letter or Carta.
And it is dedicated to
another artist friend.
Letter.
"My dear friend.
I have the autumn leaves.
You have the blue ocean.
I have the wide and terrifying
highways of the world.
You have the crumbling
streets of our island.
I have the fear of a lamb
in a den of wolves.
You have the courage
of a samurai warrior.
I have silver and steel.
I have a house too big for me.
And a calendar marking the days
when I will be away.
I have tomorrow, and
tomorrow I have everything.
You have the witness of your eyes."
And in Spanish it's a little different.
That last line.
Tu tienes la mirada de tus ojos.
So, having been born on an island,
surrounded by the sea,
on all sides, being the child
of many diasporas, my ancestors
crossed many seas so I could exist.
I guess it's not surprising
that the sea is a major
protagonist in my writing.
I love the sea, but I'm also
very afraid of the sea.
So I'm going to read you a poem on
this theme called Freedom or Libertad.
And you can see this section
of the book begins with some
beautiful artwork, again
by Rolando Estévez.
Freedom.
"At last, I went to the
ocean today all alone.
Why did I wait so long?
Such beauty could have been mine.
Days and days ago.
But at least I went.
I sat in the sand and opened my palms.
I waited, I forgot I had been afraid.
Soon I stopped waiting
and felt freedom.
Vast. Huge. Unknowable.
Ravishing. Divine."
So I'm going to end here.
Just a brief note about my new
book, which is a young adult novel
Across So Many Seas.
And so I want to tell you,
Across So Many Seas,
and in Spanish, a través de Los mares.
It features four girls of
Spanish Jewish ancestry living
in different historical moments
and in different cities.
Poetry and song are at the
heart of their identities.
The first girl, Bienvenida, is
about to depart Spain in 1492,
and she writes poems that
will later be found by another girl
centuries later, whose name is
Paloma, and who may well be her
descendant. And she will gaze
at the stars and at the sky,
think of the ancestors and ask,
when they gazed at these same stars,
did they wish for some
of the same things I do?
Freedom. A home where we are
welcome and where we can also
welcome others.
Those are the things I wish for too.
Thank you.
[Applause]
>> Dan Vera: If you notice, I didn't
have a lot of commentary in between
because I really just
wanted to hear their poetry.
Please, let's give another
round of applause.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Maria. Felipe. Ruth.
I just have a few questions.
Maria, the last time you
were here, um, you know,
I've taken the opportunity to
listen to the work that's in the
collection, and I was really struck
by a line that you wrote.
Destruction hasn't
been your only story.
All living things beyond you
that you've loved, you've made
love live in them.
Uh, from your poem,
Good News for Humans.
This fantastic bestiary. And I guess
I sort of wanted to use that line as,
an opportunity to ask you
about sort of, kind of your
commitment to ecopoetics
and how that how that sort of
affects your writing and how
that's influenced the writing
you've done. And specifically
because you've got a new book of
prose out how that's kind of
extended itself into your prose work.
>> Maria Kelson: Oh, sure.
Yeah. Thanks for the question.
The two books of poetry, the
The Beige and the Green,
do have quite a bit of poetry that
is considered environmental or
eco poetic, as Dan said.
And I think one of the
challenges with that is that
I'm an enthusiast by nature.
I like learning about plants.
I like learning about birds and
trees and mountains and, and
people and when you take a
scientific, ecological gaze,
there's ways of saying yes to things
and ways of saying no to things.
Um, in terms of what's
like, for example,
invasive plant species,
from an ecological view,
you need to say no to them,
but from a poetic view you say,
well, there's another living thing
that I'm that I'm interested in.
So that kind of tension was,
I think, fruitful for me.
I wanted to write into that tension.
And then I also wanted to write
into the tension of affirming
existence as it is, which is a
hot mess in many ways.
Existence as it is, is a hot
mess in many ways.
But we have brains,
many of us, that are wired to
talk about what's wrong.
And that can't be the only story.
There have to be other stories
about what we do for and with
each other and with our
fellow living beings.
So I'm glad you brought up
that line, because I would
consciously try to say, let me be sure.
I'm also telling the stories
of what we're doing
that's life affirming
as well as destructive.
So that answers that and
how it fit into the novel.
I think the novel was more about
relationships in a certain place.
It's set in Northern California,
in the Redwood Country.
And so it was more about
how human relationships
form within a specific
ecological place.
>> Dan Vera: You mentioned Gary
Snyder as sort of like an influence.
And I guess that made me
think about sort of the sense of
sort of our writing as being in
conversation with other writers
that kind of influenced us.
And, Juan Felipe, I'm
remembering the, I mean,
I live here in D.C. I've gone to
many, many poet laureate
openings and closings and I
don't think that I'm, um,
under speaking when I say that
your presentations as poet laureate
revolutionized my sense of
sort of what the laureateship
can do. That opening
presentation was a celebration
not only of your work, but also
the work of a community of
writers and lineages of writers
that sort of influenced you and
that you were in community with.
And so I guess I'm, um, you
know, in this kind of month of
sort of celebration and in this
space that's sort of kind of
filled with historical figures,
if you could, I don't know,
like how important is lineage
and sort of how do you
find new ways to sort of be in
conversation with those writers?
>> Juan Felipe Herrera:
That's a cool question.
Well, you know, uh, my mother,
um, kicked it off and my mother
was always singing, uh,
she told me, she only,
my mother only went to third
grade, and that was a high grade
back then.
It was like high school, almost,
uh, because my mother
was in, um, in an asylum.
[Inaudible] What a terrible--
In Spanish,
you sound, so, you know, it's
like [Inaudible] or something.
It's cruel.
Uh, an orphanage during the
Mexican Revolution in 1910.
And then, um, you know, then
my mother, eventually, with my
grandmother and my Tia Lila,
uh, they got on a train and
a little tiny train or a big
train and Mexico City
and came north somehow, uh,
to Ciudad Juarez somehow.
And Pancho Villa was going
the opposite direction.
That's a time period.
Hey, Pancho. Yeah.
Okay. Come on by.
It's better over here, Pancho.
So they arrived, and she
was at Juarez and made a
little life. You know,
it was difficult.
Regardless, though, she
would sing me songs, and she
told me that she had
wanted to be a dancer.
She wanted to be in theater
because in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez,
the little [Inaudible],
the little theaters,
the little vaudevillian theaters
were happening.
And the major and major, major
radio stations were set up
in the late 20s.
So she wanted and it was
auditions, a call for auditions.
And she wanted to get on that
stage, and she wanted to get all
dressed up, and she wanted to
wear the color red
which was a taboo color, you know?
And red shoes was another
taboo thing for, for women.
So she wasn't allowed.
And so she told me later on,
you know, when I was already,
uh, early teenager or so.
She goes, I wasn't allowed to express
myself and dance and perform and sing.
But I want you to be free.
I wasn't allowed to be free.
But I want you to be free.
So that got me rolling.
That got me going.
And like I said earlier, I didn't
know how to speak really.
Get enough courage to get
up on a stage and
face everyone and say things.
And my little, you know,
my little bird voice,
my nervous bird voice,
I didn't want that to,
you know, be exposed.
And it even happened at UCLA
when we got to UCLA and
affirmative action, which
was kind of hilarious.
And it was also cool and hilarious
because the guys would
walk around with big old giant
briefcases and I said, hey,
Cricket, what you got there?
Yeah, man, I got my
briefcase one. Yeah.
And I said, well,
what do you got in it?
Nothing.
[Laughter]
Because you want to look
like a student, you know,
university student.
So my mother sang me songs
and she did a lot of and I used to
learn her songs and
corridos and ballads of
the Border Patrol, picking up
migrants and throwing them into
a van and shackling them
and taking them to prison.
Those were the kind of songs
I started with my mother songs.
Corridos.
El contrabando del paso.
That was the name of that Corrido.
[Singing in Spanish]
>> Dan Vera: Bravo!
[Laughter]
>> Juan Felipe Herrera: So there's
a lot of singing and a lot of riddles.
It was a world of riddles, right?
Remember that your parents had
all kinds of little stories and
riddles, and they're
picking your brain.
And, Juan Felipe, you see.
Juanito, get over here.
See, mama, she said,
[Speaking in Spanish]
Okay, Juanito. What is that?
Uh, well, can you do
it one more time, mom?
>> Dan Vera: We're going to have
to bring you back for another riddle.
Just just another riddle.
>> Juan Felipe Herrera:
So I'll finish it up. Okay.
[Speaking in Spanish]
What's the answer?
[Inaudible]
The term sibuyas
was deep into that puzzle.
So then I began to learn how to
break open the puzzles and find
hidden words. So my mom
was the agent to all this.
>> Dan Vera: At the beginning?
>> Yeah.
[Applause]
>> Dan Vera: Well, I guess, boy,
you know, we could spend an hour
with each and every one
of you, and it's--
This is a taste of this great work.
Ruth, my last question
really is for you.
And, I was really kind of
struck with, you mentioned
the corridos,
this new anthology that
Rigoberto Gonzalez put together
has a one of the first sections
is corridos, which he sort of
includes as sort of a sense of
sort of the historical
basis of, of our poetry.
And you're mentioning Dulce
Maria, her work, the kind of
Emily Dickinson of Cuba.
I guess if you could tell us
about sort of how our, our work
is in conversation with poets outside
of the territorial United States.
And I know that's a
lot to sort of put on.
>> Ruth Behar:
Oh, I love the question.
And, you know, I had never
heard of her until I went to
Cuba. I knew, of course, about
Jose Marti, but kind of going on
what Juan Felipe was talking about.
I mean, I grew up listening to
Cuban music because my parents
were always playing Cuban music
and dancing to the cha cha cha.
And of course, the most popular
song was Guajira, Guantanamera,
# Guantanamera. Guajira Guantanamera #
You know.
But then it has these verses.
[Speaking in Spanish]
And I didn't know that those
were the poems of Jose Marti
that were in that song, that
had been brought to that song,
and that I learned much, much later.
You know, so that I was like,
already hearing poetry when
I was listening to that very
popular song, Guantanamera that
every Cuban knows and sings,
or at least in my generation did
and before. So, so I also
had the musical influence.
But then in Cuba, it was like
it was like getting an education
in all the things Cuban that I
didn't know because I didn't
learn them here.
And, and then when I heard
about Dulce Maria Loynaz and
read particularly poemas sin
nombre, her nameless poems,
their prose poems,
and I just found them.
So they are like Emily Dickinson's.
I mean, they're just very
profound and deep, but also
written like with a sincerity
and simplicity of language
that I just found
very, very compelling.
And then I had this
opportunity to meet her.
And what was so interesting
about her was that after the
Cuban Revolution, she
kind of went underground.
She stopped writing, you know, the
last poem she wrote was in 1958,
ultimos dias en una casa,
The Last Days in a House.
And it was like on the
eve of the revolution.
And then her poems didn't seem
revolutionary enough in those,
particularly in those heyday
years of the 60s, 70s and 80s.
So she kind of stuck around.
She could have left Cuba, but
she stayed in this mansion that,
you know, she had lived in forever.
And it became more and
more dilapidated.
But she hung on there and, you
know, kind of like, you know,
she was like very sure of
herself as a poet, but didn't
have anything new she wanted to say.
And then everybody started
discovering her when she was
in her late 80s and early 90s.
People were rediscovering her,
and Rolando Estevez himself was
rediscovering her and telling
me about her.
And that was how I first
learned about her and the way
things were in Cuba at that
time when I went in the 90s, was
you could knock on the door of a
famous person like Dulce Maria Loynaz
and say, hi, I'd like to meet you.
And she'd go, okay,
come on in, you know.
And one of the things I
remember in her house that
really struck me, she had a
large glass case, and inside
she had a collection of abanicos
of fans of beautiful handmade,
hand-painted fans, a huge,
huge display of them.
But she was very kind and very modest.
I even went there with my
husband at one point, and our son,
who maybe was like five years
old at the time and was
running around inside this
falling apart mansion while
we were talking about poetry.
But she was very open to it.
And and I never knew whether
she liked my poems or the fact
that I would bring her cookies from
the United States every time I visited.
>> Dan Vera:
Probably a little of both.
>> Ruth Behar:
Probably a little bit of both.
>> Dan Vera: I just wanted to add that
you mentioned Marty and Guantanamera.
To the circles within circles,
Marty wrote that in upstate New York.
He wrote [Inaudible] that Cuban
of most Cuban songs.
He wrote, you know,
in a small village in a--
Yeah. So, you know, that's an American.
Those are American poems
written by Cuban living in-- Yes.
>> Ruth Behar: And written in Spanish.
>> Dan Vera:
Written in Spanish.
>> Ruth Behar: Written in Spanish
in the Catskills. It's just--
Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah.
>> Dan Vera: So, anyway.
Let's please give another round
of applause to these great poets.
[Applause]