A stage for poetry
Houston and Texas become inspirational inkwells for Latino writers
Poetry is flying around Texas this month. CantoMundo, one of the most respected Latino poetry programs in the nation, brings poets to Austin for its annual national retreat, and Houston is presenting some of the writers for live readings and performances.
Houston’s Tintero Projects (Inkwell Projects) presents four young CantoMundo fellows in two performances.
Thursday brings a performance by Denice Frohman, a young Nuyorican now living in Philadelphia, has won numerous awards and a massive social media following, with videos of her powerful performances going viral.
That was the case with her poem “Dear Straight People,” which has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube. Questioning the origins of hate and bullying, Frohman asks:
“Did you notice that hate is alive and well in too many lunchrooms?
Taught in the silence of too many teachers?
Passed down like second-hand clothing from too many parents?”
Lupe Mendez, the founder and organizer of Tintero Projects, says that each of the four poets coming to perform in Houston are outstanding writers and performers, “but to see them paired up and presenting their work is truly a blessing.”
Frohman will perform with poet Yesenia Montilla, a Domini-Cuban from New York.
Montilla, who published her fist collection of poetry “The Pink Box” last fall, explores identity, love and the use of language that molds our ways of living.
A fragment of her poem “Imagining Him Running at the Sight of Deer” reads:
“Say mystery Say the lover’s soft back in moonlight Say fear Say the smell of honeysuckle in a barren field Say hunger & I say run run It’s the only thing our body does well enough
good enough to stay alive”
In the Sunday performance, Tintero Project will present poets Malcolm Friend, from Seattle, and Raina León, from California. With a clean and tender lyrical style, Friend plays with languages in his poems, as in the following fragment of “Clemente Dreams of Death.”
“Sometimes I think she sees what I see, dreams what I dream.
Que linda, que bella…
Some nights I sit awake for hours after the jolt. To ease myself to sleep I remember the lullaby my mother used to sing: Que linda manita que tiene el bebé. Que linda, que bella, que preciosa es.”
The other poet presenting in Houston is Raina León, a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective and founding editor of the international quarterly journal The Acentos Review, which is dedicated to promoting Latino arts. She is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Explorative and bold, León likes to play with syntax, as in this bit of “poet on watching her lover garden”:
“we were eden once / the first ones with vines for veins / entangled in the passionflower / mouths bursting in fig / you do not know his secret / the fire mark still on his hip /”
For six years, CantoMundo was based at the University of Texas at Austin. But it will move to Columbia University in New York City after this year.
“It’s been a wonderful relation with the University of Texas for so many years,” said Celeste Mendoza, co-founder of CantoMundo.
Another prominent Texas program for Latino writers, The Macondo Writers Workshop, just finished its annual national workshop at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio last week.
That program was founded by author Sandra Cisneros (“The House on Mango Street”).