Latinx Poetics
Essays on the Art of Poetry
Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry collects personal and academic writing from Latino, Latin American, Latinx, and Luso poets about the nature of poetry and its practice. At the heart of this anthology lies the intersection of history, language, and the human experience. The collection explores the ways in which a people’s history and language are vital to the development of a poet’s imagination and insists that the meaning and value of poetry are necessary to understand the history and future of a people. The Latinx community is not a monolith, and accordingly the poets assembled here vary in style, language, and nationality. The pieces selected expose the depth of existing verse and scholarship by poets and scholars including Brenda Cárdenas, Daniel Borzutzky, Orlando Menes, and over a dozen more.
The essays not only expand the poetic landscape but extend Latinx and Latin American linguistic and geographical boundaries. Writers, educators, and students will find awareness, purpose, and inspiration in this one-of-a-kind anthology.
As a Latinx writer, I found the experience of reading this book to be one of expansion, illumination, and even validation, and I imagine many readers will have a similar reaction.
This innovative collection introduces readers to a diverse collection of Latinx poets who are all transforming and rethinking the art and practice of poetry in the early twenty-first century. Its breakthrough comes in the access it gives us to the poets’ thoughts about their creative process, to their relationships with art and politics, and to the complexity and variety of their unique experiences of latinidad.
Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry offers a unique and refreshing look at Latinx poetry by showing the breadth and richness of Latinx thought and sensibilities in the creation of poetry.
Ruben Quesada is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal and the translator of a collection of selected poems by Luis Cernuda titled Exiled from the Throne of Night. He has served as an editor and coordinator for The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, AGNI, Pleiades, and the National Book Critics Circle board. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Foreword: The Mindful Space of Joyous Creation
Juan Felipe Herrera
Introduction
Ruben Quesada
The Horse and Rider
Tomás Q. Morín
Poetry in Concert with the Visual Arts: Latinx Ekphrasis and Other Inter-arts Fusions
Brenda Cárdenas
What the Neoliberal Policy Labs Eat and Shit: Horrific Fables for a Specific Universe
Daniel Borzutzky
Glorious View: Landscapes of Memoria
Francisco Aragón
Peopleness: Ethnicity and the Latinx Poem
Valerie Martínez
My Latino Aesthetics. Or Not.
Steven Cordova
An Afro-Latino’s Poetic and Creative Hungers
Sean Frederick Forbes
Trauma and the Lyric
Sheryl Luna
La Desembocada: Healing the Wound That Never Heals
ire’ne lara silva
Longing for a Language That Joins: Class Consciousness in Portuguese American Poetry
Carlo Matos
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off: Or, the Possibilities of a Contemporary US Latin@ Poetry
Rafael Campo
How I Came to Identify as a Latina Writer
Adela Najarro
A Graffiti Artist in Academia
Michael Torres
Puerto Rican Poetry and a State of Independence: A Family Affair
Blas Falconer
Notes on Teaching and Learning the Mother Tongue
Juan J. Morales
Duende the Poem, or Poetics at the Intersection of Realities and Identities
Raina J. León
Testarudo: An Essay on My Poetic Vocation
Orlando Ricardo Menes
To Have and Have Not: Uncovering the Cultural Identity in Twenty-First-Century Portuguese American Literature
Millicent Borges Accardi
Invention as Discovery: An Essay on Latino/a Poetics
Andres Rojas
Notes on Writing Poetry and the Function of Language
Eva Maria Saavedra
Stealing the Crown
Laurie Ann Guerrero
Knocking on Heaven’s Couplets: The Nature and Function of Poesía
Natalia Treviño
Contributors
Index
