HOUSTON: SWAMPY, SWEATY, FULL OF POEMS
Iwas honored, earlier this month, to be named Houston’s poet laureate. My work is rooted in this city, and in the lives my family and I have made here. I am a Houston native, and generations of my family were born and raised in Houston since the early 1900s. My great grandfather, Florencio Martinez Contreras, owned a blacksmith shop where the current Downtown Aquarium now stands. My great-aunts, Della and Dionnes, were artists — one a pianist, the other a painter (Dionnes actually painted the flowers on the panels surrounding the room of the Ideson building) — and their brothers, including Carlos Contreras, my grandfather, were some of the first Mexican-Americans to attend the University of Houston and receive degrees.
I’m saying all this because I associate this city with the idea of family and community, and the belief that opportunity through education, study and hard work could be obtained in the city of my birth. I grew up in
Aldine, attended Aldine schools, graduated from Eisenhower
High School, and later attended Rice University.
I found support in seeing myself as a poet, from the teachers and administrators who supported me when I presented my first poem at the Acres Homes Library in northwest Houston, to the encouragement of my older brother, who gave me his college literature-class books when I was a young teen.
My childhood was also filled with the sounds of my dad playing the oldies and the blues on guitar, and my mother, a naturally creative person, as a master seamstress, able to make a wedding dress or a costume with ease. Both of them emphasized the importance of education and the beauty and importance of the arts.
Our personal connections to poetry and literature keep bringing us back to its power. From the time I was a child, when my father read the same dog-eared books to me each night, I understood the power of words existed not in a vacuum, ink on a page, but in the contexts in which we experience them. And to me, the writing, reading and appreciation of poetry, will always be experienced in joy, in understanding, in connecting with other people in ways that are often difficult in conversation, in day-to-day interaction.
In a way, you can say I have studied and written poetry to retain the feeling of being a child next to father, reading to me, the same nursery rhymes full of humor and life, reminding me each night that there can be beauty, that one can find beauty between the pages of a book, and in the careful voice of someone you love dearly who wants new ways to say they love you.
Like the stitches in the handmade clothes my mother sewed for us, art and creativity hold a language of life, an expression of emotions that make us human, and more humane. Let me
clothe you, our creations say, or,
Let me soothe you. Let me tell you how it felt.
Who can argue against the need for more beauty, more creativity in this world, this city? Perhaps more important, poetry, through its beauty and power, also has the potential to create change by empowering people, providing opportunities to create and to express deeply held ideas, beliefs and share experiences — across all walks of life, across economic and ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds, across educational or language proficiencies, across any circumstances a person is born into.
I believe that art, including poetry, belongs to and is available to everyone — and it certainly belongs in Houston.