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With Dedication: New Poems amid Pandemic

7/9/2020

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Cover for "With Dedication: New Poems." Click on the PDF (at right) to read.
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Congratulations to my now published poets(!), participants in the "With Dedication" poetry writing workshop that I taught online across 5 Mondays in May and June. Their collection is a testament to their collective will to write: through pandemic, through protest.

Here is the introduction I wrote for the book:

Dear Reader,
 
Participants in our “With Dedication” workshop met across five weeks to discuss and write poetry that would recognize, celebrate, and elevate significant people in their families, communities, and lineages.
 
We met in an online classroom since public spaces were closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. At a time when social interaction was severely limited, we unmasked in front of our screens, and practiced praising our particular language—and each other.
 
Some of these poems took the form of dedication proposed by the workshop; others followed conduits that beckoned more urgently.
 
Shortly after our second meeting on May 25, Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. Video of the killing ignited protests across the nation and world.
 
Part of poetry’s power is that it can speak to readers of any time or place. Yet all poets write in specific times and places. It feels important to note the larger context of where and when these poems were crafted.
 
Langston Hughes’ “problem world” remains our world; the tools of reading, learning, and dreaming are yet how we “make our world anew.”
 
Our book opens with Ayoka Drake’s “Freedom” breaking the “rools” of spelling. Answering Hughes’ call to realize dreams “unfettered, free,” Drake demonstrates that poets must do the work of dismantling in order to find truth in new language. Each poet of “With Dedication” does this in their own way: making sense through the five senses, forging together a truly original collection.
 
The book closes with Abria Smith’s pair of “delicate copper leaf earrings,” an image that speaks of craft and achievement. Like the poetry herein, what was once “raw / Unimagined” has been “etched” into something tangible, beautiful, and enduring.
 
We hope that you enjoy reading, and that you find within, perhaps, seeds for your own language to grow from.


Each time I teach, I try to offer students the opportunity to make something--often a book--together. While the experience of the classroom or workshop is transient (and necessarily so), a book endures as a collective record and shared achievement. It is a community of pages. Here's a photo of some of the student, neighborhood, hospital, and workshop collections that I'm proud to have helped put together in recent years.
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Mapping America: July 4th in the Time of Trump

7/3/2019

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I remember the first time I saw a map of the world flipped to show a perspective from the southern hemisphere. The shapes were familiar yet the view was disorienting. The world was upside down.

I’ve been thinking about maps ahead of July 4th. Despite having many natives names, the American continents were stamped with the moniker of an Italian mapmaker, Amerigo Vespucci. 

Just as in Vespucci’s time humanity came to understand that the Earth was round, you and I have had to learn that there are infinite perspectives on our globe. And that the map we studied in textbooks or often see replicated around us--perhaps the one that centers us, our perspective, enlarging us--presents just one, flattened viewpoint.

In Vespucci’s time, people were afraid to travel beyond the known map, because there were sea monsters way out or one long cliff into oblivion. Today, it seems, we’re subject to the same fears. 

But seeing the world through new eyes, while disorienting, won’t make you disappear. Vespucci didn’t sail over a cliff, and you won’t either. The truth is that seeing another’s viewpoint illuminates your own. 

In his poem “Song of the Open Road,” Walt Whitman claimed that encountering others and learning about their lives expanded the map of his own humanity. He wrote, “I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held such goodness.”

The lateness of America is our ongoing failure to incorporate the diversity of our peoples into the mapmaking of our nation. The only greatness of America has been in our potential to do so. Even as one bloc of voters seeks to reduce this country to a Mercator Projection of mean distortion,  that potential--though dimmed--endures. 

I’m finding it hard to map my own hope in the United States right now. Independence Day? Who can claim independence in a nation where children are locked in concentration camps along the border, where racists wield power from the White House to the court house, where women are stripped of autonomy over their own bodies, where LGBTQ people are told that prejudiced religious “beliefs” have rights that trump their own, where science is disbelieved, where the free press is attacked, where guns infiltrate our schools and houses of worship, where the rich get richer, where military spending dwarfs all else, and where the so-called president is hateful, dishonest, and cruel.

Yet this fight--this fight that the American reality might live up to its American ideals--has always been there, beckoning our collective compass. The luminous James Baldwin wrote that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” 

Writers like Whitman and Baldwin speak to us through the pains of history, helping us navigate our American struggle today: to know ourselves, know each other, keep striving.

Indeed, contemporary authors and artists are doing this work, too: inviting us into essential understandings of racial, gender, and cultural identities. The truth is that we have never had so many mapmakers at work in this country, and the number of platforms through which they can create--and we can access--their maps is unprecedented, too. If we can just set out, if we're willing to journey.

I am grateful each time writers, artists, friends, and neighbors show me the world through their eyes. They are my mapmakers, and they give me hope. 

The political landscape is daunting, yet the frontier of discovery still exists in each of us, our own personal America that synthesizes and empathizes across the boundaries of individual experience. 
​

Our national mythology would have us believe that the individual can travel this road to America alone, but the truth is that we only ever could get there together.
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On Venezuela

1/31/2019

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When I lived in Caracas in 2006, I would walk from the residential Parque Central towers along the Avenida Urdaneta to get to my job teaching English. Avenida Urdaneta was always crowded with commuters and buhoneros who sold everything from lampshades to lingerie, while food carts offered hot dogs topped with fried eggs and potato chips.

Every few blocks, there was a newsstand where readers had a choice between Chavista papers or Opposition rags. Even the country’s largest newspapers fought to uphold objectivity under the polarizing leadership of Hugo Chavez--up for reelection that year.

Across seven months in Caracas, I interacted with all types. I taught English at night to adults. I got a part-time server position. I nannied for a family who lived in Chula Vista. I volunteered with a group of hospital clowns. I tagged along with Venezuelan friends to nearby beaches and Leones home games at the baseball stadium. I played futbolito in Parque Los Caobos and hiked the Avila on weekends.

In all this time living and working in Venezuela, I encountered advocates for both political sides equally. I listened as each argued their case for or against Chavez.

While Venezuelans could be eloquent in addressing me, I rarely heard dialogue or acknowledgement across the divide. Each person seemed to be telling me that there was one story to be told, the truth about their country. With the Venezuelan media split, anyone could subscribe to the news that affirmed their perspective.

Chavez was a powerful storyteller. He offered a narrative that promised an historic role for Venezuela: fulfilling Simon Bolivar’s dream of a united Latin America and opposing the interventionist U.S. imperialists. Chavez espoused a kind of destiny for his people with roots in the past and offering a future he called 21st Century Socialism--one that could raise all boats on the nation’s oil wealth. What’s more, and importantly, Chavez looked and sounded criollo criollo. Masses of Venezuelans looked at him and saw themselves.

On the other side, the Opposition--then led by Manuel Rosales--told a story of a nation beset by bureaucratic corruption, urban insecurity, dire economic forecast, and the dangerous implications of Chavez’ new friendships with the leaders of Iran and North Korea.

Chavez’ story won him reelection. While a record number of Venezuelans turned out to vote for the Opposition in 2006, a kind of blue and yellow wave, even more red hat wearing Venezuelans showed up to reelect Chavez.

Though the Opposition’s story held important truths, it seemed that those who voted for Chavez preferred the truths contained in his version.

Buoyed by oil, Chavez' administration built housing and schools, opened missions to assist poor communities across the country, recruited medical and university exchanges with Cuba, all sustaining the faith of his base.

But the price of oil dropped, the Opposition grew, and in 2013, Chavez died.
​
Chavez’ successor, Nicolas Maduro, has tried to carry forward Chavez’ legacy, but the seeds of 21st Century Socialism haven’t borne fruit. The country’s plunge into poverty is well documented. Millions of Venezuelans have fled their homeland, a nation rich in natural and cultural resources.

Maduro maneuvered to consolidate power by rewriting law, imprisoning political opponents, censoring the media, deploying armed troops to quell protests. All while using the U.S. as a foil to keep his followers riled up.

Maduro turned Chavez’ story from beacon to bludgeon, stoking fear and a divisive patriotism, while negating the existence of any other narrative. Before he earned the moniker "usurper" (of the presidency), he usurped the national story.

When Juan Guaidó swore himself in as interim president last week and was recognized internationally including by the U.S., Venezuela‘s Opposition reclaimed its side of the national narrative.

But what is Guaidó’s story? And how much authorship will the international community endeavor to take from the Venezuelan people who deserve to write their own way forward?

Three years ago, the U.S. presidential election gave me the feeling that we were living in Venezuela in 2006: a divided populace further polarized by a divided media. With social media, the fracturing has accelerated.

Consider the confrontational video taken recently on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. On The Daily podcast, they described it as a political rorschach: you see what you’re primed to see.

So we must invest in and protect the work of journalists who tell our national narratives with nuance and complexity. We also need leaders at both national and local levels who can author a more powerful, cohesive American narrative than the current White House occupant offers. And we must foster a culture of more empathic storytelling.

In my life, I’ve found this culture most consistently in literature, which Ezra Pound called “news that stays news.”

As I followed news of Venezuela’s political and economic descent from Boston, I reached out to Venezuelan poet Mariela Cordero whose poem “Cuerpo Público” gives an intimate, personal voice to the human fallout in Maduro’s Venezuela, one in which the daily reality seems ruled by “las jaurías.”

We need survivable spaces, like poetry or stories, in which to feel the pain of injustice: from Venezuelans in street protest to American government workers enduring the shutdown. Change begins in empathy.

Cordero's poem also pens its own solace, a meagerest place in which to harbor hope. In the last lines, Cordero writes:

Yo me acurruco / y espero que el amanecer / nos asombre con la evidencia / de que ambos, / este cuerpo donde habito y yo / sobrevivimos / a la larga noche / de las jaurías.

I curl into myself / and hope that morning / astonishes us with proof / that both / this body I inhabit and I /—survive—/ the long night / of the pack.

Today, I’m thinking about the Venezuelan people, hoping that their hope can endure. And that hope is a story we can all author going forward.
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New piece: "Are You My Uber?" on McSweeney's Internet Tendency

6/29/2016

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... Check out my new piece "Are You My Uber?" now posted on McSweeney's Internet Tendency (thanks McSweeney's for this awesome cover image!).
Here is the link to read "Are You My Uber?" on McSweeney's site.
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Know thy self (Publishing)

3/18/2015

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Gabby Wallace sat at one of my tables back in 2010 when I was a server at a Latin American restaurant in Brookline Village. We got to talking about travel and language, and she bought a copy of Wonder/Wander. 

Today, Gabby is a language teacher and entrepreneur based in Tokyo. She recently interviewed me for her Laptop Language Teacher blog and we continued our conversation started back in Brookline years ago.

This is one of the pleasures of publishing: finding common ground and connection with people whom you might not otherwise meet, being part of a conversation that compels you and is bigger than you.

Self-publishing is not equal to being selected by an established publisher in many peoples' eyes, even as the line between them becomes increasingly thin. As a writer, it's worth considering: what will satisfaction look like when your writing is complete? 

During the creative stage, you control the quality of your writing, as well as the time and effort you put into the work. Self-publishing takes your control one step further, ensuring that your work is able to be read. Yes, I wanted the publisher's seal of approval for Wonder/Wander (I sent it as an unsolicited manuscript to Graywolf, Coffee House Press, and Milkweed Editions in 2009). But deeper than that, I wanted to share my experience and myself through what I had written. I wanted to make my book.

Publishing brought satisfaction in quiet, intimate ways: when I held my book in my hands for the first time; when I gave copies to my family and closest friends. And this: meeting like-spirits, like Gabby, who find the book and share their stories; who join me in the conversations, which illuminate our larger work.
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Harvard Interview: Writing at Children's Hospital

1/24/2015

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I met Julia Moss a couple of years ago at Boston Children's Hospital where she--as a local high school student--volunteered with our Creative Arts Program by sharing her cartooning skills with patients. Now she's a freshman at Harvard and co-founder of the Harvard College Medical Humanities Forum (HCMHF), designed to create opportunities for students to discuss and write about the intersections between medicine and the arts/humanities.

Julia interviewed me about my work as Writer in Residence in the Creative Arts Program at Boston Children's Hospital and the edited transcript is now posted on the HCMHF blog (MedHum.tumblr.com). Read the interview here (or click "read more" below).

Thanks, Julia, for the great work you do: lending company and levity to the patients at Children's Hospital, and bringing awareness to the vital overlap between medicine and the arts.

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    Welcome to The Park.

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    RubioLand--my bilingual blog about Ricky Rubio's first season with the MN Timberwolves--is long since done, but you can still find it in the archives. 

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