Big Austin Sendoff Scheduled For Prestigious CantoMundo Poetry Workshop

AUSTIN, TX -- CantoMundo -- the nation's only poetry workshop series designed to foster the Latino poets community worldwide -- will stage two days of public poetry readings this weekend.

And what a lineup. Among the poets scheduled to recite their works are two past poet laureates: U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and Poet Laureate of Texas Carmen Tafolla. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway will be at the readings, although not scheduled to give a reading.

Music will be provided by Leticia Rodriguez, an Austin native and one of the first internationally recorded bilingual artists enjoying crossover success.

Readings by Herrera, Tafolla, and Tretheway will take place at Spider House Ballroom, 2908 Fruth St., from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Friday, July 22, and Saturday, July 23, to be followed by Rodriguez and other performers from 10:45 p.m. until closing.

Carmen Tafolla

Other musical acts will be on hand Saturday in what turns out to be a sendoff for the prestigious CantoMundo workshop. This marks the last season it will be staged locally at the University of Texas at Austin before the workshop moves to New York to be housed at Columbia University next year.

CantoMundo is a national organization that cultivates a community of Latina/o poets through workshops, symposia, and public readings, according to its website. Founded in 2009 by Norma E. Cantú, Celeste Mendoza, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Deborah Paredez, and Carmen Tafolla, CantoMundo hosts an annual poetry workshop for Latina/o poets that provides a space for the creation, documentation, and critical analysis of Latina/o poetry, the description reads.

The current Organizing Committee of CantoMundo includes co-founders and co-directors, Celeste Guzmán Mendoza and Dr. Deborah Paredez, as well as CantoMundo fellows Barbara Brinson Curiel and Leticia Hernandez-Linares.
"Inspired by Cave Canem and Kundiman (organizations for African American and Asian American poets), we issue a national call for applications every year and select approximately 10-12 new fellows who, once accepted, are eligible to return to the annual writing retreat up to three times, thereby fostering long-term support and collaborations," officials explain. "They join another 12 fellows who return to satisfy their three-year commitment."

CantoMundo's first gathering convened in 2010 at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Subsequent workshops have been staged at UT Austin.

The faculty included: Martín Espada; Demetria Martinez; Naomi Ayala; Benjamin Alire Sáenz; Aracelis Girmay; Roberto Tejada; Willie Perdomo; Valerie Martinez; Lorna Dee Cervantes; Dr. Rafael Campo; Sandra María Esteves; Leticia Hernandez-Linares; and Barbara Brinson Curiel.

Keynote lecturers, selected from among nationally-recognized literary activists, have included Toi Derricotte (co-founder of Cave Canem); Vikas Menon (Executive Board Member of Kundiman); Ethelbert Miller, Natalie Handal, Sherwin Bitsui; and Tim'm West.

HALF-MEXICAN

By Juan Felipe Herrera

Odd to be a half-Mexican, let me put it this way
I am Mexican + Mexican, then there’s the question of the half
To say Mexican without the half, well it means another thing
One could say only Mexican
Then think of pyramids – obsidian flaw, flame etchings, goddesses with
Flayed visages claw feet & skulls as belts – these are not Mexican
They are existences, that is to say
Slavery, sinew, hearts shredded sacrifices for the continuum
Quarks & galaxies, the cosmic milk that flows into trees
Then darkness
What is the other – yes
It is Mexican too, yet it is formless, it is speckled with particles
European pieces? To say colony or power is incorrect
Better to think of Kant in his tiny room
Shuffling in his black socks seeking out the notion of time
Or Einstein re-working the erroneous equation
Concerning the way light bends – all this has to do with
The half, the half-thing when you are a half-being
Time
Light
How they stalk you & how you beseech them
All this becomes your life-long project, that is
You are Mexican. One half Mexican the other half
Mexican, then the half against itself.
◆

OCUPANDO MI VOZ

By Carmen Tafolla

A spreading of full-bodied wings
moist with afterbirth and heavy, unfolding stiffly,
shedding dark pasts and cramped confines
That’s what the rebirth felt like,
a jubilation of our voices’ singing flight.
Behind us the blood-in-our-lungs taste of conquest,
the silencing of tongues, mutilation of spirit,
the victor’s spoils sign branded on our foreheads,
visible on our skin, in our names, on our lips.
But oh the dance of liberation sprouted from our very core
From every line our history bloomed
The power of words to re-define our lives
The power of story to reclaim who we are
what we can be
It was only thirty, forty years ago, this renaissance
hardly enough time to lay these bricks of books along a path
And then, the dry dust of conquest settles once more
in the hollow of my throat
Shadows of silence scream with no tongue
The ownership of what was ours
has passed into new hands.
Yet those new hands should know
we will not bend our backs and fade into the branded scars
for we have occupied our voice
our bodies
our being
burnt the deeds of ownership
sung the dance
and spread the wings
We have occupied the books, the hands, the eyes, the lines
and we are there forever, around you,
invisible and loud

◆

ELEGY
For my father

By Natasha Tretheway

I think by now the river must be thick
with salmon. Late August, I imagine it
as it was that morning: drizzle needling
the surface, mist at the banks like a net
settling around us — everything damp
and shining. That morning, awkward

and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked
into the current and found our places —
you upstream a few yards and out
far deeper. You must remember how
the river seeped in over your boots
and you grew heavier with that defeat.
All day I kept turning to watch you, how
first you mimed our guide’s casting
then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky
between us; and later, rod in hand, how
you tried — again and again — to find
that perfect arc, flight of an insect
skimming the river’s surface. Perhaps
you recall I cast my line and reeled in
two small trout we could not keep.
Because I had to release them, I confess,
I thought about the past — working
the hooks loose, the fish writhing
in my hands, each one slipping away
before I could let go. I can tell you now
that I tried to take it all in, record it
for an elegy I’d write — one day —
when the time came. Your daughter,
I was that ruthless. What does it matter
if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting
your line, and when it did not come back
empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,
dreaming, I step again into the small boat
that carried us out and watch the bank receding —
my back to where I know we are headed.

Pictured above: Juan Felipe Herrera and Natasha Tretheway via Poetry Foundation website