The age of social distancing has left even the introverted among us seeking community. For poets in particular, whose work continues to seek establishment and verity through the inherited traditions of oration and public gatherings, being deprived of the physical realms in which one can share and revel in poetry together has been especially lonesome. As we adapt, rally, and shift into virtual spaces, however, one encounters equal joy and substance in the connections fostered beyond the locality, as notions of community expand beyond physical closeness. One momentous event that took full advantage of this moment in time was LatinX: International Poetry Familia, which connected a brilliantly variant array of Latinx poets from the U.S. and the U.K. in a celebratory reading. With bodies of work that newly tread and interrogate the disparate facets of identity, these contemporary poets embody a politics of pride and revelation, lessons learned during the journey one takes to arrive at oneself. Asymptote’s own assistant editor, Edwin Alanís-García, reports from the event.
Lest locked up poetry aficionados forget, there was once a time when people gathered in public spaces to hear poets read or recite their work. For the uninitiated, such events help poets stay connected with their community and fellow writers, while helping grow a (hopefully book-buying) fanbase. At the risk of waxing poetic (no pun intended), these readings are the heart of an ancient vocation—a tradition going back to the epic poets, who sang about transnational sagas, and later the wandering troubadours, who brought their musical repertoires to the countryside. Even now, poets tour their countries like rockstars, sometimes to the same acclaim. Or so they did, until the pandemic hit.
For those ensconced in major literary hubs such as London or New York City, the shift to virtual readings was—and perhaps still is—a pale simulation of the real thing, a necessary adaptation meant to keep newly published books marketable. In the rest of the connected world, however, this shift has opened new doors for rural and otherwise isolated audiences. And within certain literary circles, it has created entirely new forums for artistic exchange.
One such event took place this past June. The transatlantic reading “LatinX: International Poetry Familia” was meant to celebrate the diverse roster of Latinx poets in the United States and the United Kingdom. Featured voices from the U.S. included Francisco Aragón, José Olivarez, Jasminne Mendez, Antonio López, Janel Pineda, Malcolm Friend, and co-hosts Carlos Andrés Gómez and Diannely Antigua. Among their U.K. counterparts were Leo Boix, Maia Elsner, Patrizia Longhitano, Kat Lockton, Marina Sanchez, and Juana Adcock. The nearly two-hour event was organized and co-hosted by scholar, artist, and activist Nathalie Teitler, co-founder (with Leo Boix) of Invisible Presence, a U.K. initiative dedicated to promoting the work of British Latinx writers; Teitler is also credited with founding the country’s first mentoring and translation programs for exiled writers.
The reading was in celebration of two recent anthologies of Latinx poetry: The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT, published by Chicago-based Haymarket Press, and Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers, published by London-based flipped eye publishing (sic). Each participant was invited to preface their reading with a one-minute excerpt from a Latinx song of their choice. Dancing (albeit socially distant and through a Zoom screen) was encouraged; as Teitler said in her opening remarks, it was the readers’ way of affirming that, “yes, sí, we’re still alive.” Her words can be interpreted as a statement about our collective resilience in the face of the pandemic, but also a poignant endorsement of poetry as a tool of resistance across Latinx communities—a testament to Latinx survival in the face of colonial and anti-Black violence. The entire event, in fact, was an extended moment of resistance.
Several songs directly related to their corresponding poems. Jasminne Mendez’s “Learning to Dance” was written (and sung) in conversation with Joe Arroyo’s “La Rebelión,” while Malcom Friend’s “Ode to Tego Calderón” (Or “The Day El abayarde Dropped Was Maelo’s Resurrection”) draws inspiration from Ismael Rivera’s “Las Caras Lindas.” Other selections spoke to participants’ varying aesthetic influences and concerns. Before launching into his poem “Mexican Heaven,” Olivarez chose Noname’s “Ace,” which proved a fitting theme song for the entire event—a shout-out to Chicago and London comradery. Joked Olivarez, “Is this a Latinx song? I don’t know, but it’s a song I love so I’m going to play it.” Maia Elsner’s choice of the Mexican classic “Bésame Mucho” spoke to the importance of touch in a time when so many of us are physically distanced. Poet, translator, and Asymptote contributor Juana Adcock chose Ana Tijoux’s “Antipatriarca,” an apt preface to her cerebral, multilingual, and politically poignant poem “The Truth is Structured Like a Fiction.”
The diversity of musical genres—everything from Midwestern hiphop to Guatemalan rap to Parisian electronica-tango to classic American (and Colombian) salsa—drove one of the reading’s central points: Latinidad contains multitudes. As poet and educator Willie Perdomo writes in the introduction to LatiNEXT, “Poets, voluntarily or not, consciously or not, are engaged in a moment of resistance to definitions, monolithic stereotypes, and outmoded ways of looking at the Latinx experience.” To be Latinx is to be part of a nebulous, infinitely rich web of identities, an array of intersecting races, gender identities, languages, religions, and nations. Poets featured in this reading and its two related anthologies also represent the gamut of poetic styles: conversational confessionalism, virtuosic hip hop lyricism, language-pushing avant-gardism, and more.
While the aesthetic differences between these poets are vast, there are clear topical commonalities. Recurring themes in many of their poems speak to the existential concerns surrounding Latinx identity, namely the consequences of colonialism and diaspora, and the anxieties over having to shift between disparate worlds, be they national or linguistic. In Kat Lockton’s surreal poem “Mi Lengua,” the speaker’s tongue falls out and swims in her bowl of cereal as she ponders the rigid gender roles enforced in her household; true to the title, each line occurs first in Spanish and then in English. Maia Elsner’s “On Not-Translating Neruda” meditates on the intimacy that can be lost in translation, drawing on the example of the word contiene, which can be translated as either contains or holds (“will he contain his lover / will he hold his lover’s tears”); meanwhile, the heart-wrenching “I Cannot Promise You An Eternity” portrays the pain of loss across nations and languages. Janel Pineda’s “English,” written just before the poet’s year abroad in the U.K., beautifully captures her anguish over the colonization of her many tongues: “English was patient / because it knew / it would win.” Says Pineda, “as a bilingual person, as the daughter of immigrants, I have a complicated relationship to English”—an all-too-relatable sentiment for many Latinx writers in the Anglophone world.
Several readings focused on the complex linguistic schisms across nations, just as others were explicitly geared towards the physicality of national borders. Leo Boix’s “Between Argentina and Paraguay” illustrates in lush (and sometimes grotesque) detail the sights, sounds, and conflicts arising between the urban and pastoral settings of the Argentina-Paraguay border. Marina Sanchez’s “Wall” speaks of the plight of immigrants attempting to cross the southern U.S. border, culminating in a desire to wish it back into nothingness: “I will not question how another has brought down / the sky and painted the beach and sea, so that / seen from afar, part of the wall will vanish.” Brazilian-Italian poet Patrizia Longhitano’s “There Are No Volcanoes Here” summons childhood memories of Brazil and reflects on how, even if highly factual, they still “feel like something from a fairy tale.” Antonio López read an excerpt from an epic poem, a remix of Homer’s The Odyssey in dialogue with contemporary greats such as Danez Smith and Ross Gay. Like Elsner’s poems, López’s epic chronicles the precariousness of finding sanctuary between national boundaries, and the flimsiness of the concept of “home.” As he stated in his introduction to his reading, “all the diasporas can be on the table and celebrate, but also have time to grieve.”
Sharing co-hosting duties with Teitler were Dominican-American poet Diannely Antigua, author of the 2019 collection Ugly Music (winner of the Pamet River Prize and recipient of a 2020 Whiting Award), and Colombian-American actor and poet Carlos Andrés Gómez, author of the 2019 collection Hijito (selected by Eduardo C. Corral as winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize). Both Antigua and Gómez read from their critically acclaimed collections, as well as from their own contributions to the LatiNEXT anthology. The event also welcomed a very special guest: poet Francisco Aragón, founding director of Letras Latinas, a program based out of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. Letras Latinas seeks to promote, support, and build a sense of presence and community for Latinx writers, so it was smart of Aragón to partner with Teitler and Boix to extend this mission across the pond (when introducing him, Teitler credited him with making the introductions that launched the collaboration).
It’s bittersweet to think that what made this transatlantic reading possible was the sudden need to break with age-old poetic tradition and host it remotely due to a global crisis. Regardless of the reason, what matters is that it took place, it was a success, and as the organizers stated, it won’t be the last of its kind. If anything, such events serve to demonstrate how close the global Latinx familia has been all along.
Edwin Alanís-García is a writer, philosopher, and cultural critic. They’re the author of the chapbook Galería (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019) and their poetry has appeared in The Acentos Review, The Kenyon Review, [PANK], Peripheries, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. They’re an assistant editor for Asymptote, where they curate and edit Translation Tuesdays for the Asymptote blog. A graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing Program and the Harvard Divinity School, they divide their time between small-town Illinois and small-town Nuevo León.
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