Letras Latinas, Part 22: Poets & Art with Adela Najarro

Episode Topic: Poets & Art with Adela Najarro

Poet Adela Najarro was in residence with Letras Latinas and the Raclin Murphy Museum Art in March 2026 for the second event of “Poets & Art: Ekphrasis at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art,” a multi-year partnership between the Museum and the Institute for Latino Studies. Enjoy a reading of her poems and an exploration of poetry and the visual arts in conversation with one another.

Featured Speakers:

• Adela Najarro, poet

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/3b86d2.

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

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Transcript

Speaker 10 0:00

Welcome to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. My name's, uh, Joe Becker, and I'm honored to serve as, uh, the director. Thanks for joining us, uh, on a late afternoon where I think winter is maybe gonna turn into spring by the time we, uh, leave here. Um, this, uh, is the second, uh, step forward on a beautiful path in a, uh, relationship with Letras Latinas. Sorry, Italian was coming out. Uh, uh, some of you were here for the,

Welcome

Speaker 10 0:30

uh, first round, which was, uh, wonderful, and I think we're gonna be delighted, uh, once again. Before I turn things over to, uh, Jason Ruiz, um, who's the, uh, uh, director that will keep this process moving along, a few things that are happening here at the museum just in the coming days that you might wanna know about. Uh, tomorrow morning at nine thirty, we have our monthly mass, uh, up in the, uh, chapel, which I'm looking forward to 'cause it's the Feast of St. Joseph. Uh, tomorrow night will be a busy evening here at the museum. There's a gallery walk at five thirty. Uh, we also have, uh, a DJ here and, uh, art-making scheduled. On the twentieth, uh, something very special that we do, uh, every Lent with, uh, original works of art spread throughout the museum, uh, Stations of the Cross, um, at three thirty. And then I'm sure most of you here probably know about this wonderful workshop this Saturday from, uh, one to four. So thank you for being here at the museum. Uh, thank you for the partnerships, uh, that are, uh, bringing forward some really wonderful things.

Speaker 2 1:34

Jason? Thank you,

Speaker 3 1:42

Joe. It's exciting to hear about so many amazing, um, activities ahead and events, uh, in store, uh, through the Raclin Murphy. We really wanna thank you for your hospitality and sharing this gorgeous space with us. As Director of the Institute for Latino Studies, which was established in nineteen ninety-nine, I have the great pleasure of working with our literary initiative, which, as Joe mentioned, is called Letras Latinas and which is led by its inimitable director, Francisco Aragón. Francisco has been organizing convenings like this, as well as building an archive of oral histories by writers and artists at Notre Dame for more than twenty years. Letras Latinas is, in fact, one of our institute's five main areas of focus and truly a kind of a tent pole program for us that we're so, so proud of. Uh, our other programs include, uh, supplementary and major and minor in Latino studies here at Notre Dame, which actually has a hundred and fourteen of those majors and minors, which, which we're really proud of. We host a life-changing merit scholarship for trailblazers in their Latino communities. We have a graduate and postgraduate working group, uh, that is producing new research on Latinos every day. Uh, we're a robust institute with thirty-three faculty fellows drawn from all over the College of Arts and Letters and truly all over from Notre Dame. All united in our singular mission, which is to support research, teaching, and most importantly, understanding of Latino communities in the US. Today, we are very honored to co-sponsor Poets and Art with Adela Najarro, a very special event in partnership with the Ratcliffe and of course, with Letras Latinas. This collaboration helps us to achieve our mission, in fact, which as a premier teaching and curricular institute at Notre Dame, we strive to be a model and leader among institute of its kind across the university and of course, beyond our nation. Now more than ever, this mission is extremely important as ethnic studies comes under fire and under threat across the US. We're extremely proud to host events like this and to hear from a leader in, in her field in, uh, in the form of Ms. Nara- Najarro, excuse me. This is certainly part of our bigger mission, and we're so proud to host you here and to welcome you. And with that said, I'm gonna hand it over to Professor Aragón.

Speaker 4 4:04

Thank you, Jason. In one respect, our distinguished guest this evening is here because of something that transpired in two thousand and two, where it was at an Erasmus conference in New York City that year that the then director of Notre Dame's Creative Writing Program, Valerie Sayers, met a young Nicaraguan-American poet named Adela Najarro. During that meeting, Valerie, in her capacity as the founding editor of the Notre Dame Review, invited Adela to send some poems. When Valerie returned to the Notre Dame campus, she spoke about Adela to a Notre Dame MFA student named Francisco Aragón. In the summer of two thousand and three, at a restaurant on Mission Street in San Francisco, La Cenateca, Adela Najarro and I sat down to a plate of pupusas, our first face-to-face encuentro. The following summer, I put together a forty-page book proposal that would become, in two thousand and seven, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, a University of Arizona Press anthology that included a selection of poems by, you guessed it, Adela Najarro. The rest, as they say Is history. Events like the one this evening would not be possible without the generosity of Letras Latinas benefactors. One will be in town from out of town next Wednesday for a Letras Latinas community event at the library downtown featuring another Central American, the Salvadoran American fiction writer Rubén Reyes Jr. But I want to take a moment to thank two local longstanding benefactors who are with us this evening, Dennis and Donna O'Leary. Dennis, in addition to being a good friend, is a class of 1973 Domer.

Speaker 2 6:45

Thank you. One of the pleasures

Speaker 4 6:54

of directing Letras Latinas is forging new meaningful ties. Miriyam Parsikar is one such connection. An ILS Latino Studies Postdoctoral Fellow this year, Miriyam is teaching a course this term titled Central American Narratives in the United States. Her office is just around the corner from my office on the third floor of Bond Hall. Among the books her students read this semester was Variations in Blue by Adela Najarro. Miriyam welcomed Adela into her class yesterday and has graciously agreed to introduce her. But before I invite Miriyam to the podium, let me also share that in addition to being a fine scholar, she is also a poet. Miriyam will be part of a group of poets participating in an ekphrastic workshop here at the museum in early June, a convening that will be led by the current Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, Brenda Cárdenas. The workshop is part of a larger initiative that will culminate in a new anthology of emerging Latinx poets slated for, for publication in late 2027, a Letras Latinas partnership with Graywolf Press. Please join me in welcoming her to the

Speaker 2 8:24

podium. Miriyam Parsikar. Thank you so much, Francisco.

Speaker 5 8:34

Can everybody hear me okay? Okay, great.

Teaching Poetry Reading

Speaker 5 8:37

Um, so when I thought about how I wanted in, to introduce Adela's work to you all this evening, uh, I found myself thinking about poetry from the perspective of a teacher Uh, so as Francisco mentioned, this semester I'm teaching a class on Central American narratives in the United States, where we study narratives in the most capacious sense. We cover an array of literary, aesthetic, and cultural works that examine Central American experiences as inflected by US intervention in the region, as well as how being of diaspora in the US shapes one's relationship to place between homeland and empire. But putting poetry in a class about narratives, I found, sometimes takes the students by surprise. Um, and I think sometimes we take for granted that poems, in fact, do carry stories, just not in the way that we maybe expected, um, especially in the US, where I think poetry doesn't get as valued as a literary form as some others. Early in the semester, when we began looking at poetry in this class, some students expressed a little trepidation. Um, for many years as a teacher, I've heard the same question that they were asking me, which is, "What's the right way to read a poem?" Um, because so often as readers, we're conditioned to pursue the most correct interpretation of a work of writing, and the consequence is that there's this fear that gets in the way, right? The fear of getting it wrong somehow. But poetry is so generous, you know. It, it's a form that really can defy such tendencies. And when Adela visited our class yesterday, uh, she told us something very important along those lines, and these are her words that she said in the class. Um, "There's a philosophy that the poem is not finished until the reader reads it." Let me repeat that. "There's a philosophy that the poem is not finished until the reader reads it." And it's with that reminder that I want to introduce you to her work today as I was introduced to it, uh, through her most recent collection, Variations in Blue, published by Red Hen Press in two thousand twenty-five. In Najarro's collection, at times the speaker describes poetry as something that arrives in the poet's consciousness out of memory, contemporary encounters in one's daily life, and the imagination. Poetry compulsively sculpts language out of the sensations and images that pass through the mind. "When a poem falls from heaven," writes Najarro in one of my favorite poems from this book, "I listen to my mother's phrases. Her vowels cry in my ear. It is necessary to hear her life as she blinks, smiles, turns a ring on her finger. Let us focus on the words from my mother's lips. 'Mija, ven acá.' My mother never kissed me. Will you?" So I love that this poem ends with this image taking final form in the question to you, um, because it's the poem, it's the you that's to the writer, but it also kind of extends into us as readers. It becomes this beautiful invitation for the reader to sit with the image and the voice of the mother. She emerges at the bookend of a whole cosmology of scenes made from cracked domestic objects, a nighttime drive- Uh, a beach in Nicaragua spun out of the fog of San Francisco Bay and surfacing alongside expired groceries, overdue bills, and dirty dishes. If it is up to the reader, to the extended you to finish the poem, that invitation comes through prismatic memories of family, the distant diasporic homeland across the collection, uh, domestic violence, as well as the inheritance and witness of immigrant displacement. In that process across Variations in Blue, we're also invited to bear witness to someone constantly giving shape to her feminine power by invoking these scenes alongside maternal ancestors, volcano goddesses, and La Virgen. So I'm thinking about how all of this shapes Najarro's work as a poet who writes closely with visual art. If a poem isn't complete until a reader reads it, certainly the same could be said of a painting. What I love about Najarro's ekphrastic poems is how they can take you into unexpected turns to address the migrant experience. In Variations in Blue, this often happens in her study of figurative works, but one of my favorites focuses on abstraction. It has a long title. Um, this is the title of the poem, "What Comes Back While Standing at the Museum Viewing Rafael Soriano's Un Lugar Distante," A Distant Place, "1972, Oil on Canvas." So Soriano's painting, um, as described in the poem, is brown and yellow-hued, and it emerges, um, you know, this is not in the poem, but the context is that it emerges from this diasporic nostalgia from Cuba, for Cuba. But the surprise of the poem is this: it retranslates that nostalgia as a Martian landscape that emerges alongside her own childhood memories of her uncle Ernesto because her uncle is a painter. She writes, "My tío painted geometric abstractions, his reality flat, straight, and pure." But Soriano's painting becomes the grounds for her to describe Ernesto's queer diasporic life as joyful in its peculiarity. And then another surprise. In the last stanzas, she pivots us from the Martian landscape into another ekphrastic study, a home movie of Ernesto at a parade crowned by its pageant queen. "All glitters in sixteen millimeter as my tío waves and blows kisses," she writes. If part of Najarro's work-- It's a beautiful poem. I love it so much. Um, if part of Najarro's work is to write Latinx into our literature, she does so by bringing a family member's life into conversation with what hangs in a museum. The painting opens another possibility of understanding entirely. At the same time, the lesson I take from the poem as both a reader and a Latina poet is that every deep act of looking has the potential to be a deep act of remembering We never know what will surface when we stay with an image long enough, and perhaps that is one of the most generous ways for us to approach Najarro's poetry, as an invitation for us to observe our own peculiar landscapes of memor- memory that emerge alongside her own. I'm very much looking forward to Adela Najarro's time with us this evening.

Speaker 2 15:12

Hi, this is-- Oh, definitely working. Oh,

Speaker 6 15:16

well, thank you so much, everyone. Um, my time here, I've only been here a few days, but I have been moved at every single moment that I interact with faculty, staff, students. This really is a special place, and I so appreciate, uh, being invited to s- to speak here. Um, so I'd like to begin with an interview David Marchese did with Rebecca Solnit earlier this month on her new book in The New York Times. Uh, her book is The Beginning Comes After the End. And they were discussing that one way to find hope in the challenging times we live in is to realize that the future is not set and that we need to see the bigger picture. Solnit responds, "I feel part of the future. The best future we aim for is built by going back to the oldest stories, back to recognizing that patriarchy is not inevitable or natural or the only way that people have done things. I think you can move forward with anchors in a deeper past." I'd like to start my talk on ekphrastic poetry with that idea, that by engaging the past, we build and anchor ourselves into the future. And what better place to do that than a museum? The artworks on display at the Raclin and Aum museums are artifacts created by human beings at some point in the past, and they record the human journey. Just as these artists lived their lives, we too live our lives seeking meaning and understanding of our place in the universe, society, culture, and the everyday. Ekphras- ekphrastic poetry, poems inspired by and that comment on a work of art, connect us to the past as we live in the present moment and step into the future After surveying the Raclin online collection, I selected these three pieces for the stories they tell about the feminine divine throughout history. I'm not gonna debate whether the Garden of Eden actually existed or is metaphorical, but the story is foundational in our cultural past, as is Mary and the idea of the feminine as the Madonna, woman with child, bringer of life and redemption. These three artworks tag human thought through time, and in the current day, we can converse with the artworks and the past to create a greater understanding of how we got here and the possibilities for the future. I wrote a poem on these three that I would like to share with you, and it's a triptych, so there's three poems. Those are three sections to

Speaker 2 18:32

the poem. One, Eve. El

Speaker 6 18:39

espíritu de la mujer empezó with a breath of God, but it took a while to get there. First, the spinning of mud into blood, veins, sinew, and bone, but that wasn't enough. To enclose the Holy Spirit in female form, it was necessary to tear asunder a rib, have it crack, split, the marrow spill onto pristine soil. It was done. Two beating hearts. In Aldegrever's print, Eve stands tall on equal footing with Adam, listening as God raises a finger admonishing his children to not reach for

Speaker 2 19:27

the stars. We know how that went. Two, Mary. As early

Speaker 6 19:37

as 1478, she lit up the night sky. Mechem the Younger prints her image as a revelation of the sun's burning power to cleanse and renew for a price. In those times, you could buy your way to heaven. Mary must weep at our foolishness. How much we think we know. How cruel we can be to a fallen sparrow, to an open hand asking for change, to little girls in school in Iran who will never witness starlight arising from the breath of God. We fall to our knees. Mother, pray

Speaker 2 20:19

for us. There is so much wrong in what we do. Three, the dispossessed.

Speaker 6 20:29

She's an ordinary woman arising from the breath of God. A loving mother. She holds a child, a human soul swathed in white, but I don't want to write white. I'm done with whiteness. Whiteness as a calm, innocent beauty. Do I have to explain? That look? A black woman in the United States. Exasperation. Can you hear her exhale? She wonders. What will happen next? There will be no surprise. She's seen it before. The door shut closed. The skin pinched. A cold wind barrels through torn stockings. She is as her child, the light. On a clear spring day, cast over a lake. All she needs

Speaker 2 21:30

is a thin sweater to keep her warm. As with all the

Speaker 6 21:39

aphrostic poems that I write, I write to discover my connection to the past. And with these three artworks, I saw how Eve is equal to Adam, how Mary redeems, and how the Madonna is all of our mothers. I was empowered as a woman after writing these poems. We are divine, beautiful, and strong, no matter how the winds of society may attempt to crush our spirits. To witness these artworks is to witness our divinity, which at times is difficult in a patriarchal society.

Variations in Blue Origins

Speaker 6 22:24

José Rodiero's painting serves as the cover for my collection. He painted this while on Fulbright to Nicaragua and captured the reverence Nicaraguans have for an esteemed poet, Rubén Darío. Darío's most important work is called Azul, and my title of my book, Variations in Blue, harkens back to Darío and Nicaragua. So you can see the book there with the title Darío, and it's in a blue landscape, right? In Variations in Blue, there is a series or set of variations on ekphrasis. Most of the poems began with another Letras Latinas initiative, Pintura Palabra, where along with other Latinx poets, I spent time viewing the Smithsonian exhibit Our America, The Latino Presence in American Art. It was held at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, California. They're in the first section of the book, which begins with this epigraph. Remember. Remember was now the theme of all our conversations. That's by Julia Alvarez from Last Night at Tía's. The poems each dive into the artworks, and each allowed me to have a conversation with the past, whether it was my family or society. I would like to share a few with you. And I forgot to turn on the timer. Okay, there we go. All right, so here, um, uh, Mariam, here's the, the painting that she discussed in, uh, her introduction. So Un Luga- Un Lugar Distante, A Distant Place by Rafael Soriano, uh, 1972. When I saw this painting in the Crocker Museum, I immediately thought of The Martian Chronicles 'cause to me, that's, that, those look like spaceships and all the, the build, the, the way buildings would be constructed in Mars. If you've ever read Ray Bradbury, it just kind of fits. And, um, and then of course, from that memory was my tío, my uncle. So, um, let me share the story of, of that. Let me read you that poem. It is on page 23. And I'm not gonna read the title. It is very long. It would've been fall. Before Halloween and Thanksgiving, Tío Ernesto painted in the garage. There were magazines, book boxes, tools, and brushes, a TV turned to a football game. I had read The Martian Chronicles and thought of settling on Mars. I would roll over red rock canyons in a dune buggy. My tío painted geometric ex- abstractions, his reality flat, straight, and pure. He held my hands, spun me around, the petals of my skirt twirling in the afternoon. My Tío Ernesto cooked homemade stews for his perritas and would whistle for us primos to come running through Kmart. My tío and Mars, Mars and my little girl brain, an empty red planet filled with ghosts, Martians who turned into Jesus, Martians who bounced as golden spheres of light, Martians who were no longer afraid. They had returned to stardust. My tío sang his own body. There were home movies, birthday parties, Christmas, El Rojo, Tío Ernesto's more-than friend, his probable amante hidden behind bags of groceries and a smile. In one film, there's a parade. Tio Ernesto runs from one float to the next. Finally, he climbs up and kisses the beauty pageant queen. She crowns him with her tiara. All glitters in 16 millimeter as my tio waves and blows kisses. The paint- this painting sent me into my personal and familial memories of the past. But as I was speaking with students, um, all this past few days, I kept repeating how in my personal, in my experience as a poet and an artist, I have found that starting in the personal makes me reach out into societal and to greater knowledge. And so, yes, I love my tio. He was like my father. But it's also sad that he died of AIDS without his lover by his side, ashamed of who he loved and who he was, and I loved him so much that I wish that hadn't been so. I, and so, so I can put his story there, and then maybe that'll add to the conversation about how we should allow people to love th- each other. Okay, so my next, uh, one here, oh, this one, this one's a big one. Um, I've been talking with students all, all f- past few days, and we've been talking about immigration. And when I saw this poem, I immediately thought of immigration, um, because it made me think about how immigration has changed in the past 20, 25 years, um, not from Florida, New York, Texas, California, but now it's going into the Midwest. And speaking with students here at Notre Dame, they were all from the Midwest, and they were Latino of many different, uh, uh, origins, El Salvadoran, Mexicanos. But, um, the, the story of, of Latin American immigration to the Midwest, and that's what made me, um... When I saw this poem, that's what I thought there. So Areli, M- uh, Mia, Mariana, Elena, Marcela, Alex- Alexandra, and so many other students are here on this campus due to immigration and the stories of immigration of grandfathers who were, were in the Bracero program, working in the fields in Virginia and in the South, stories of migration due to economic necessity to find work and healthcare and education in the States. Some of the stor- students told stories of their immigration journey of being born in other countries and coming here, while for others it was their grandfather or their grandmother who came first, and then the family followed. There, there were so many stories, including that of going back and forth. In Texas, between Mex- Mexico and the U.S. border. All of these stories are alive here on the Notre Dame campus and within the students that walk these halls and, and, um, are here. And so I'd like to share with you the, my interpretation of, or my interaction with, uh, Arturo Rodriguez's painting. And maybe you, as I read my poem, maybe you can see the images in the, in the painting. La Tempestad. Upon viewing Arturo Rodriguez's Sin Título from the series La Tempestad, 1998, oil on canvas. As Dorothy speaks Spanglish in Kansas, her neck spirals past barns, chicken coops, and soybean fields. A cultural migration. But she doesn't go it alone. Un mijo holds onto a kite. Another boy wears a homespun mask. Autumn light fades fast. He raises his hands, not wanting any trouble. Boo-hoo, this is not a hold-up. I don't want your money. Dorothy's thin body turns some more as one handmade corn tortilla browns in a skillet. She can't get back since she is Dora, Dorita, facing nowhere, nothing. She traded her ruby slippers so los coyotes would leave her body alone. Her head hangs low. She is downcast and off-center. Tree branches frame an ancient face of the Americas. Her body frail, emaciated. She holds a root in her palm. Inside her fingers clenched tight, the power to bear fruit. If only she can change una curandera into a good witch and click her heels three times. Okay. So yeah, so I, to me, this poem captured the energy and the flow of immigration and the difficulties of assimilating, and I just think it's just absolutely so powerful. Um, here's another, uh, amazing work. All of these are in the Smithsonian American Art, I mean, the Smo- Smithsonian American Art Museum. La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Chicanos by Esther Hernandez. And Esther Hernandez has a series of these where she reimagines, um, the Virgin Mary as a modern Chicana woman. And, uh, if you like this paint- this lithograph, look her up and look at all the other ones. It's amazing. She's, she's absolutely fabulous. Um, okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'll, I'll read that one Well, no, I'll read this first. Okay. So this slide reflects back to the Raclin selections in that Hernandez shows that each woman is La Virgen de Guadalupe and has the strength to knock out all adversity. But I didn't end up writing about that. Instead, I wrote about the immigrant journey and how La Virgen looks after us all. What does it take? Imagine, what would it take to leave your country, walk thousands of miles, learn a new language and culture? You'd need La Virgen on your side. La Virgen de las Patadas. She kicks the moon in black and white, a karate side snap paired with a power punch, her legs strong and powerful, her hair brown and straight. India Mexicana Americana at the U.S.-Mexico border. La Virgen de las Patadas, a powerhouse for women caught underneath bridges, for men resting in blue palo verde shade, for boys in mismatched tennis shoes. One tattered bra left roadside, one pair of jeans discarded, a sun-faded box of Gamesa saltine crackers and an empty plastic jug next to stones bleached dry. A lizard, too much sun, an archangel of the Americas, un luchador ready to pounce, holds up a golden cre- crescent y La Virgen. For a prayer y una ofrenda, she'll shoot a frozen star across night sky. With her blessing, todo estará bien.

Speaker 2 33:57

You've reached the other side. And I'm gonna continue with the

Speaker 6 34:06

idea of immigration with this ser- with this poem. And this poem was not at the, um, at the Smithsonian. It was actually, uh, on loan from the Mexican Museum in San Francisco to my local museum in Sacram- in San Fran- in Santa Cruz. And, but the painting was, uh, from floor to ceiling. So as large as that one, and then there were three of them. So it took up the entire wall. And, um, if-- what I noticed was all the, uh, kinetic energy in, in, um, the artwork, and it kind of matches the kinetic energy of my poem. I don't know if you can see it, but usu- usually, maybe I should just show you the comparison. I like things to be ordered, so I write in couplets. So usually my poems are ordered, and, but this one, it kind of falls onto the page with the lines being different sizes because of the Pictures kinetic energy. All right. On viewing il, Gronk's illegal landscape pase- Pasaje Ilegal. Gronk's three panels splatter the browning of America from ceiling to floor. The view remains undetermined. On which side of the border? Corn grows in suburban backyards. A woman's clavicle beautiful in every color. Gronk's fence is rusted, a double string of barbed wire anchored at the bottom of the painting. The fence tears blue tongues, snags Chiclet teeth, cracks open a Molotov cocktail. Such violence. Boom! Explosion. Chocolate ice cream melts. A designer handbag crumbles into a pile of cement bricks. Jaguar paw prints saunter past swimming pool reflections. Delicate fingers pick at fine silks. The cone is a volcano, el volcán, an Aztec warrior. The warrior points toward a city landscape after safe passage. Cement, glass, asphalt.

Immigration Is Messy

Speaker 6 36:35

So this thing, uh, to me immigration is not easy or simple. It's complicated. It's difficult. It's messy. Um, after the blessing from La Virgen and you're here, it's still so difficult. There's a lot of volatility, and fitting into a new country is never complex

Speaker 2 36:54

and, and never easy. And so, um, I'd like to

Speaker 6 37:02

go back now to, uh, family. And so when I was at the S- um, viewing the Smithsonian collection, this painting so gri- so caught my attention. My mother is the youngest of eight, and I have six uncles. And, um, if you notice his shoes right here and, and those socks, I know my uncle wore those. It's... And those socks. Those are, those are my uncle's feet. And, um, I was so captured with this painting, and I think what, what I was trying to do here is that too often there's a stereotype about the Latino man as being a drug dealer, a criminal, as being somebody not worthy of being in the United States. And instead, my experience, and I can tell Treviño's experience, is, um, of these hardworking men who support their families and work two jobs and All of those things. And so the painting I think is so beautiful and uplifting and positive, and, and so I wanted to engage with that and also write about, um, these men who, who l- love their families, right? That that's the Latino men that I know, um, from the neighborhood. Oh, if you've read my book, I sometimes say things about my dad. So they don't have to be perfect and you can still love them. Okay. From the neighborhood. Have you seen Treviño's hermanos? A portrait de los seis sitting on a fence. El chiquito, plastic cup in hand. Otro with mis tío's sunglasses. I see Guillermo y Esteban. El guapito lifts his chin, and we all know the trouble he's been in. Then Beto with wine, the fine suede shoes and trouser socks. Center straight up is the one who will be papi. Somebody's dad, her darling husband, the one who works, sweats, and pays the bills even after his preciosa muchachita stays out one night too late and her dancing ends up as trouble. Yeah, we know what that is. But see, that's, that's, that's the thing, is that Dad will still be there, right? Even when his muchachita gets in trouble, Dad's there. Now, of course, that's I don't wanna say every single Latino dad is, you know, perfect, but the thing is that I'm trying to, uh, counter that negative image about the Latino dad and instead put out the image of my uncles who resemble these, these men here. Okay. So Francisco, I think I went a little fast. So we can still... Okay. All right. All right. Um, so let me, let me go over to, let me see if I can go this way here. So I wanna show you a little something here. This painting here is actually, um, from my friend. Her name is Janet Trenchard, and during the pandemic, her and I made a chapbook called Volcanic In- yes, Volcanic Interruptions. And I'd like to read to you a poem that is in Variations in Blue because the, the chapbook came before and then the Variations in Blue. Yeah, so this one here. So, um, you mentioned one of the things I'm doing with the poems is I'm looking back at Nicaragua And I'm trying to think of Nicaragua and reimagine what it's been like, and I also do a lot of research. So one of the things I found were, um, goddesses, and the one that captured my imagination is Chantico, and she is, uh, the goddess of fire, the hearth, and, uh, um, warriors. And so I love that a goddess is, you know, the goddess for warriors. They would pray to her and sh- to, to bathe their hearts in fire so they would be strong enough. And so this painting by my friend Janet, I can imagine this is where Chantico lives, and I see her dancing inside the volcano. Uh, you know, that might be my imagination, but that's what it is. So, so let me, let me read you my poem, Chantico Swims, I mean, Swings. Chantico Swings. She doesn't speak German, English, or Spanish. She is prior to the four directions, prior to Sandino, Somoza, US Marines, AK47s, cocaine, and communists. She is queen of the underworld inside the Masaya Crater. After bathing in the fires of lava, of a lava lake, she dances on red-hot boulders. When she drinks foaming elixirs, seance tables rise and tambourines sound the failed heartbeats of the dead. Sometimes when the dead are too chatty, she opens a bottle of Flor de Caña so that all will have breath sweetened with rum. Before Pan Am flights out of Managua landed in San Francisco, Chantico was one of many girls. Then she trembled and a plaster wall joining her bedroom to the kitchen cracked. Bricks tumbled. She was a woman now. After a swill of methane, she exhales like Marlene Dietrich, only smoke remains. So Janet and I, let me... Um, Janet and I collaborated on a chapbook, and which then became Variations in Blue. And so this painting here, um, did not... No, it is in the book. But, uh, what happened is Janet was painting po- uh, these paintings, which I thought looked an elemental like lava and dirt, like the, the core of the earth imagined into a painting. And since I was writing about volcanoes and goddesses in Nicaragua, we thought they matched. So then we did this, we did this collaboration. So here, the, in the back is Janet's painting Embers, and on the front is, uh, my po- lines from my poems. And so I'll read it to you, and it can be read multiple ways, so it can go, uh, backwards and sideways. So I'm gonna read it twice, okay? After the volcano ate the moon, perricos emerged violently squawking All children of the Americas inhaled ash on that finca. We all went away from the sun, dodging ballistic boulders sent shooting across sky. We bleed lava lakes. I write on the margins after the volcano ate the moon. Pericos emerged violently squawking. All children of the Americas inhaled ash on that finca. We all went away from the sun, dodging ballistic boulders sent shooting across sky. Too many have withstood the failed heartbeats of the dead until there is only ash. And so to me, the, uh, the collaboration between my poems and Janet's painting just created this sim- this connection and, and bubbling of energy. Yeah. Okay. And so, um, and the, the collaboration was both ways. So this one is actually the cover of the art. And so, um, Janet, uh, who, who is Anglo-American, has now a series of her artworks all labeled in Spanish and, um, dealing with the book. So we collaborated cross-culturally and cross-artistically as a symbol of how to create community. And so she calls this painting Momotombo, and it's what rumbles deep below the volcano.

Speaker 2 45:11

And then that was the-- it became our cover. Right. Okay, so let me go back. Ah. Am I... Okay, so we're

Community As Hero

Speaker 2 45:26

here.

Speaker 6 45:26

And before we start the Q&A, I just wanted to st- w- end that I began this talk with how Rebecca Solnit reminds us that the past anchors us into the future, and that might be a personal future or our future as society. I can imagine all of us engaging with the works in the Raclin Museum to learn what has come before while conversing about this very moment that we live in. Through contemplating the past, we step into new possibilities, whether that's a poem, a personal insight, or the momentum to cast our votes in the midterm elections. In the interview, Solnit emphasizes that the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Maybe the community is the next hero. Changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. She wants us to understand that the most-- that most of the important work is collective. And that's what we're doing now, contemplating the interaction between poetry and art. It's what I've been doing here during my visit with students and their curiosity that crosses disciplines. By reaching back into the past, into what we don't know, we can forge a future that we all want to live in. So thank you.

Q&A

Speaker 2 47:05

Woo. Questions from the audience? When you

Speaker 7 47:18

are- when you get inspired, do you have a thought in mind before you see the artwork, or do you, say, wander a museum or wander an exhibition and something strikes you and that inspires you?

Speaker 6 47:35

So, so I wander the museum, and then something strikes me, and then from that idea, that's where, that's where I'll sit down and the poem will begin. And I don't know where the poem's going to end, 'cause the process of writing is discovery and, and, um, the process of revision is also discovering why that work of art resonated with, with me. I did that today as I was walking through, and I was taking pictures like, "Okay, I'm gonna come back to that one, I'm gonna come back to that one." And, uh, Bridget says I have to spend three hours at each painting, so I'm gonna be

Speaker 2 48:09

here a long time. Is there another question? Um, thank you for your

Speaker 8 48:28

readings. Af- uh, the poem After the Volcano Ate the Moon, I really like how creative you were in putting that together and the way of reading it. How, how often do you write with such creativity, with such flexibility?

Speaker 6 48:47

Which poem was it?

Speaker 8 48:49

Um...

Speaker 6 48:52

I'm sorry. I, I have, uh, hearing issues. Yes. So it's, it's not you, it is me. My hearing issues.

Speaker 8 48:58

Yes. After the Volcano Ate the Moon.

Speaker 6 49:00

Oh, yes. What about that? Yes.

Speaker 8 49:02

I really love, uh, the creativity that you put into it and being a- being able to, um, as you said, read it in more than one way, more th- more than one direction. And so my question is, how often do you get into that flexible way of reading and, and writing your work?

Speaker 6 49:22

So, so a long time ago, when I was developing or emerging as a, as a poet, I had to dis- figure out how I wanted to write. And so, um, what I w- one of the things I wanted to do was to be clear, but I also wanted to have deep layers in my writing So when I'm creating a poem, uh, like that poem that ends the collection, the, the through line is that I'm on a bike ride. And so I wanted to make sure that it's clear that I'm on a bike ride. But then all the things that are seen as I'm riding the bike, they contradict, they don't match, and, and they're all upside down and right side up. But the point, but the, the, the point of that is that that mirrors our ref- our society and our lived experiences. That even though we might be driving straight, it's not a straight road, right? Everything's up and down, there's positives, there's negatives, and somehow we have to manage to make it through the ride while balancing all these different ideas. And y- I'd like to answer your question with thanking the professors here at, um, at Notre Dame. I sat in their classes and they were explaining my poems. And I was like, "I did it. I actually did it." They actually, you know, other people are seeing what I, what I wanted to put in the poem. And so thank you, thank you very much for, for explaining my poems and, and, um, and doing that. And so, so i- I hope that the book, um, is accessible and can be read, but I also hope that the book is also discoverable as it's, as, as more and more, um, layers come out. And, and as I said to the students in a class, po- uh, have a book of poetry by your bedstand, nightstand, and read one poem a night, and let it seep in and think about it and what it means one day, it might mean something ne- else the next day and grow. And then your understanding joins in with it, and all of a sudden there's new creation, new insight, new, um, uh, knowledge made in the individual and in the world.

Speaker 2 51:34

Oh, there's another question. Thank you. It's, the mic's coming. I'm, I'm,

Speaker 9 51:44

I'm wondering whether you were inspired in any way by, um, the 1946, uh, poems and artwork by Elizabeth Catlett-

Speaker 6 51:55

By who?

Speaker 9 51:55

Called Elizabeth Catlett.

Speaker 6 51:57

No, I don't know her.

Speaker 9 51:59

Oh, okay. So Elizabeth Catlett, 1946, she did a series of linocut prints, uh, called Negro Woman, and in those prints, she depicted, uh, Black women at that time doing, um, normal things in a very special way. But she titled each one a phrase. And so the series of linocuts, uh, each one of them was a poem, and the title was a phrase and, but all together, all of the prints together was a visual poem and a literal poem.

Speaker 6 52:32

So I, I bet that Esther Fernandez knew of that work And, and, um, you know, it's, it's that whole thing of, of what one artist, writer can- contributes ideas to the next, right? And so if you're a writer or an artist, you look and see what has come before, and then you, you, you-- It's, it's not a copying. It's being influenced by powerful ideas and moving those ideas to the next level. And it's not a better level or a worse level, it's a different level. So I'm sure because Esther Hernandez's print, this one here, was in the 1970s, and she was a young woman when she was making these. So if yours-- if, if your artist was in the 1940s, I'm sure Esther saw those and then thought, "La Virgen." You know? That-- And, and, and so that's, that's what I was talking about in my, in my talk about how we build community and change through, through interacting with each other and building upon our-- one idea builds upon another idea to actually, um, evoke and envelop our humanity in all its complexity, not in its sameness, in how we are uniquely different

Speaker 2 53:43

but aligned. Thank you. Is there another question? Hi. I'm curious about your

Speaker 10 54:01

time with the students and how they're doing as artists and, you know, people who are so sensitive to the world because they're artists. And what's a highlight of your time with them, and maybe what's something surprising about your time with them?

Speaker 6 54:20

My time here or just in general?

Speaker 10 54:22

Here,

Speaker 2 54:23

or in general, but here specifically. Hmm. Well, s- uh, what, what impressed me of-

Speaker 6 54:32

with all the students, all of them, in the classroom, as we were having dinner, every single student I met, was the engagement with big ideas and the desire to learn and have an open mind. I thought that was the beaut- beautiful, um, like, like I, I was-- re- reminded me of my college days and like, "Oh, wait, I wanna go back and do that." I remember those days where you're wa- like, we would go to class, and we'd walk across the quad and the, and talking about, you know, these huge ideas. What is knowledge? What can be known? You know, all these things. And, um, so that, that. Every single student I saw in the classes and in, at dinner was, was like that. And y- I'm sure you guys are like that too. And, um, and, and so-- And then my takeaway, though, my takeaway is, um, with the Latino students is, uh, how difficult the struggles are to achieve a higher education at an institution like Notre Dame with All of the challenges that immigration and being a bilingual person brings. And we were talking, uh, today at lunch, and I, I w- I wanted to tell the students that those challenges that they were facing were real, and that it is, um, for example, the ICE, what's happening with ICE. So a Latino student reads in the paper maybe ICE raid here or maybe in their home state, and immediately they're worried about a family member, a friend, maybe just in general their community, maybe themselves. And then they have to walk into a philosophy class and think about Descartes, right? And so that burden, that burden is real, and I w- I s- I was wanting to affirm the students for them to know that what they're doing is so powerful to pursue all the different forms of education that they're doing while going through with these challenges. And then the most beautiful thing is each one of them was ready to make change, positive change in the world. And, and it, it, it's, um, that Stolen Interview, if you guys haven't seen it, I, I suggest to go see it. Um, you know, she was saying that the change doesn't come by a hero. We don't need a hero to fix our country. We need all of us, one step at a time, to move us toward a more equitable future. And I saw that in the

Speaker 2 57:06

students today and yesterday and the day before. Is there another question?

Speaker 10 57:16

I was wondering if you'd be able to share a little bit about your, uh, creative process, particularly the sensations, um, that you experience in the beginning, in the middle, in the end. Is it always the same? Is it vary? Is it fear, intimidation? Uh, tell us what you can.

Speaker 6 57:36

Sure, sure. So, so one of the things, oh, uh, it doesn't happen anymore, but a while ago, maybe 15, 20 years ago, no, may- may- I don't know, somewhere around there, I was worried that if I didn't write every moment of every day and write poems all the time, it would vanish. Um, and then I realized, no, it's never gonna go away. And it doesn't. It doesn't go away. I sit down, and all of a sudden it flows, and I have, you know, I have a draft. And, um, in one class there were a lot of, uh, student athletes, and so I was talking with them about the flow. You know how you, when you're jogging or you're running, and I knew they understood that. And when you're writing a poem, you get into that flow. And so that flow is there until I get a sort of a draft. You know, somewhere I've, I, I end somewhere. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes it takes a while. And, um, but, but I'm in that flow. And writing for me is a joyous process. And, um And then when I stop that first time, every single time, it's like, "Oh, I've written the best thing ever. That poem is amazing. It's fantastic. Yes!" And then I let it sit, and then, you know, three, four days later or a month later, I'll look at it again and I'll be like, "What? What was that?" You know? And then I'll edit it and revise it, and at the end, again, it's the best. It's fabulous. And then, you know. So, so, um, so for me, writing is really is a joy. It's the joy of creation and the joy of thinking and the joy of imagining and the joy of creating, um, art for other people. I always, I'm always thinking that I'm, I have a reader, and that, um, putting these out into the world for other people to enjoy and think about and, um, and I do think poetry is, uh, political. So I'm pu- I'm putting out my tío. You all know my tío now. And, and I wanna do that consciously through, through sharing

Speaker 2 59:33

these works, these poems with you. Oh, it was actually

Speaker 11 59:41

just gonna be about, uh, one of the things I loved about your, the mix of the essay and the poetry is that we get a sense of what you think about ekphrasis, but also how you do it. And so one of the things I was gonna ask, it's maybe a little bit of a technical or a craft question, uh, because I think it's really intriguing how your poems do take different shapes based on the painting.

Speaker 2 1:00:01

Yeah. And

Speaker 11 1:00:01

you talked about the different paintings differently. So you can talk, can you talk about anyone who's interested in, or for anyone who's interested in writing ekphrastically, how do you actually approach it at the level of craft?

Speaker 2 1:00:13

Hmm. Because

Speaker 11 1:00:13

how do you match a painting? And these are, well, you know, there's some that are very abstract, some that are- Right super representational- Yeah some that are kinetic, some that are still lifes. So how do you actually make your lines and your word choices match what you're seeing? Uh, it's really fascinating. Thank you.

Speaker 6 1:00:33

So, so if I, if I could give one pointer, I s- if there's a poi- such a thing as a pointer, would be to follow your heart. So that's what I do when I'm writing. So a poem gravitates, and I follow, I follow that impulse. What was that? And, and it's in the process of revision that I then can come up to, I think about things of how the line break should be, and th- so there I, I don't remember exactly how many times I wrote this Gronk poem, but I'm sure I tried to put it in couplets, and couplets is organized. It's twos, right? And it's a, it c- well, I think of it as a, as a yes and no or an A and B, i- in kind of on ideas. And, and so it's very organized. A couplet or structure is, is a, to me, is a very organized structure where the ideas cascade and then fall into s- a new discovery at the end. So- But that wasn't this poem, I mean this painting. This painting was volatile and so it couldn't be in the couplet form. But that comes after. The first thing is just to free write and then to come back

Speaker 2 1:01:45

and shape what's there. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Is there another question? We have one more. Who's going to be the last question? No? Okay.

Final Thanks And Signing

Speaker 2 1:02:04

Dylan's book is

Speaker 4 1:02:04

for sale and she'd be happy to sign the books.

Speaker 6 1:02:08

Yes, thank you very much and it's been a pleasure to be here. Thank

1:02:13

you.