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Letra Latinas, Part 12: A Conversation with Aleida Rodríguez

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Episode Topic: A Conversation with Aleida Rodríguez 

Listen in to an oral history conversation with award-winning poet Aleida Rodríguez, interviewed by Karla Yaritza Maravilla Zaragoza, English Ph.D. student and a Joseph Gaia Distinguished Fellow in Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Aleida discusses how a fortuitous 1973 call from a pay phone in a Chinese restaurant marked the beginning of her career as a published writer, and how ‘rare bird,’ the term of endearment she shared with her childhood best friend, became the inspiration for her to found rara avis literary magazine and Books of a Feather press, both the first to be founded by a woman, Latina, and lesbian in Los Angeles history.

Featured Speakers:

  • Karla Yaritza Maravilla Zaragoza, University of Notre Dame
  • Aleida Rodríguez, poet

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/2f8cf5.


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

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1

Good morning. Today is April 3rd, 2025, and we are here in the HU Dining Hall at the Morrison on the University of Notre Dame campus. My name is Kala Rizza Mada. I'm an English PhD student here at the University of Notre Dame, and I'm here with bilingual poet essays translator Aida Rodriguez, 1998. Winner of the Catherine a Morden Poetry Prize for her poetry collection, garden of Exile, which also received a Penn Center USA literary award. She was the founder of the magazine, ADA, and the press books of a Feather, both of which ran from 1977 to 1984, making Los Angeles history as the first magazine and press founded by a Latina and lesbian. Thank you for being here with us today. Thank you for having me. So my task today is to conduct this interview. Which will be archived as part of the reina's Oral history project available for current and future poets and scholars to study and find inspiration. And so I thought we'd begin by looking at your origins as a poet and looking at your poetic aesthetic a little deeper. So you've had a remarkable career describing yourself in a personal bio that I found online as a poet, essayist, translator, artist, and even as an activist. But I wanna look back to your origins as a poet. Could you share a memory of the first time you felt the power of poetry? Was there a specific poem, book, person, or moment that made you realize you wanted to be a poet?

2

there was nothing in Cuba because there are no books in my home. but there was a cultural, kind of tradition, of Demas, which my father participated in. It just young men grouped around the street lamp at night. They would risk on something that happened, you know, something with their friend or something they had experienced together. And so they're rhymed, couplets, 10 lines. And it sounds a little bit like the American blues, where it's like da, like that. And it sounded the same, but the words changed. So that was, I think, my earliest memory of any kind of poetry.

1

Wow. that's very exciting for me to hear about like the oral aspect, but also the communal aspect, especially because I had something very similar with my father who would sing Corridos of your day while driving you to school in the car. So yeah. Thank you for sharing that. something else I wanted to ask you, and I feel like this is a cliche, but usually most of the time people ask what is, what was the first poem you wrote? But I wanna diverge from that. I want to know what was the first poem or piece of writing you ever shared with someone else? I feel like that's a very important part of being a poet, finding community and sharing poetry.

2

I think the first time that I shared anything was in junior high. I had been writing before then, but I had been in a foster home in Illinois. Then I moved to LA with my parents once they arrived from Cuba. And in junior high, I found my best friend Peter, and he was a poet too. And so we wrote and shared whatever, and it was, I think the most writing I ever did in my life was in junior high, because not that they were very good poem, I don't think they were. But, we exchanged, and not only between us, I wrote a poem about Turp Sary that got us a dance for my dance teacher and another friend. I wrote another poem and they would, and I didn't even keep copies, you know, they, they were just that what I did and I didn't think I was being a poet, you know, I didn't think. In terms of careers or anything like that. But it was what I did naturally. It was the way I expressed myself.

1

And how did people within junior high react to your poetry?

2

You know, I didn't know anything until quite recently. There was another, a lady who died, she was a translator, I think, from Emory University, and people thought it was me. And so they came out of the woodwork talking about me and, saying that they remember, and now I'm not on social media. I don't do Facebook or Instagram or any of that, but they, among themselves talked about, oh yeah, I remember when she wrote me this poem about such and such, or I remember her as a poet. She was writing even back then, you know, so it was sort of like dying and hearing what people would say at your funeral kind of thing. But yeah. So people already, even though I wasn't identifying like that yet. people were seeing me as a poet who's someone who was writing all the time and sharing my poems.

1

And did that alter your confidence in any way? Did it improve it?

2

since I only found out about how they viewed me recently, it didn't affect how I saw myself. And I sometimes people go, I wanted to be a poet. I never thought it was possible. You know, I'm working class. My parents never went beyond the third grade, so I had no expectations of myself and that way. And in the foster home, I had been put in theater. So my first experience of self-expression was actually theater. And when I went to the Boston Conservatory, though, I played the clarinet. It was theater that I went there for. So I wasn't even, I took all my poems with me. So I was still identifying as someone who wrote, I. But that I didn't study it, you know, and I didn't think I'm going to be a poet someday. I wasn't thinking along those terms at all. So how did it happen? How did you become a poet? I just kept doing it and when I found myself in the middle of it, I thought, oh, I guess this is what I'm doing. You know, it wasn't, I'm not a self-promoter, so it wasn't like I was trying to get my name out there or trying to get published. The first publication, excuse me, happened when I returned from the conservatory. My friend Peter was attending Los Angeles City College. Excuse me. A couple of students there were coming, you know, putting out a new magazine called Citadel. And, since through him I learned that they were, you know, accepting things. So I thought, I've written, you know, some things. I'm just gonna send it to them. And so I submitted it to them. And I've told this story several times. I had returned from the conservatory, so I was still living with my parents before moving out. And the only address and phone number I had was theirs. So I remember one day actually getting a phone call from the editors and they were calling me from, there were no cell phones, no internet. Then, you know, this is like 1973. So they were calling me from a payphone in a Chinese restaurant and they were looking at poems there, and they decided to publish some of my poems and they were calling me to tell me that I was accepted. And I remember the scene vividly, my parents blue green bedspread, my talking on the beige phone. and it was exciting. It was like that was the first time and I had, there was no even an, ambition to publish, but it had happened naturally through that way because Peter said. They're looking for pumps. And I'm went, oh, okay. I'll send them some things. And it happened like that. And that was a big boost, I think at that point it went, oh, hey, maybe I had other things. They will be published too. But I was still not thinking of myself as a career public.

1

Okay. that's so interesting because building off of the spark that you've kind of introduced to us, you were also the first woman, the first Latina and lesbian to found and edit literary magazine in a press in Los Angeles. What inspired you to start rave in books of a feather?

Adela Najaro's Poetry Reading

2

There were no other Latinas or lesbians around. I mean, the first time I found I came across a lesbian. They were all white, you know, and at the woman's building or someplace like that. but when I did readings like a Beyond Baroque or open mics or whatever, there were no Latinas in the audience. No Latinas doing open mic and no place. I didn't see anybody like me. So there, all the magazines were edited by men in Los Angeles. Their table of contents were like 99% men. Occasionally you'd see a novelty woman, you know, managed, you know, penetrate their, like Eloise k Healey or Dina Metzker, who, you know, who were known in Los Angeles at that time. And I went to poetry readings a lot by these people, Eloise and Holly Prato and Tina Metzger. I would go to bookstores to hear them read Never any Latinas anywhere. No, magazines existed even for women. Period. So one day I was looking through the directory of little magazines at presses, trying to find places to send my work to. That was 1976, I think. I was already working in a publications firm, so I had learned how to produce everything from the rough manuscript, the printed object. I knew all the steps. So I thought, why don't I just start one? I mean, here are all these people. Who are doing this, why can't do it. I do it. I have the skills from being involved. That's my job. So that's the first thing that came to my mind was Ra avi, because my friend Peter and I used to call each other that in junior high, just as just, you know, and what does

1

it mean ra

2

it, rare bird, but it's a literary term. I mean something, you know, outstanding or, you know, exceptional.

1

I mean, and I wanna build off of this, this gap that you kind of perceived and I was really impressed when I was reading this personal bio that I found of you on poets and writers.org. And you had talked about, you had described yourself as an activist, and I saw that you've taught writing in diverse settings, which includes schools, community centers, and even a woman's prison. How have these experiences shaped your understanding of poetry's role in society?

2

I always felt that even when I taught children, like I first started teaching by, getting a gig, doing. Poetry in the schools, like California Poetry in the schools projects, which is called sea pits. So the first one, I was living in Venice then, but my first gig was in Echo Park where I ended up moving in a year or two after that. And there were just third or fourth graders who were Latino kids because of the neighborhood that it was in. And it was, you know, wonderful and eyeopening. And they hadn't seen, I mean, they thought the definition of a poet was somebody who was dead. Oh. They didn't know they could be living poets. So that was interesting. But, I got to work bilingually with them and teach them things like sub, you know, the idea of sub and then submarine and subconscious for subconscious. I had them get under their seats, which of course some of them, you know, through spitballs and whatever, but some of them did really interesting works and did secrets about their family. Oh

1

wow.

2

I think when one. Introduces people who will not grow up to be poets to poetry and the self-expression. They don't have to write it, but we create readers that way.

1

And we especially need that now, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. it's shown a decrease in literacy rates and, K through 12 education, no longer has students reading full novels anymore. Just excerpts. Yep. yeah. Thank you for that. Yeah. you talked about how you would teach these young children in Echo Park, through, you know, English and Spanish being bilingual, and due to the circumstances of your own childhood coming to the US through operation Peter Pan, you grew up bilingual. How did language shape your understanding of the world as a child? And were there moments when Spanish and English clashed or harmonized in ways that felt maybe painful or meaningful?

2

I wasn't bilingual at first. I mean, when I came to this country, I hadn't spoken English. I didn't, I knew nothing about English. but placed in the foster home, I arrived in their house in August and by Christmas I was already fluent In English because there was no bilingual education, so it was just thrown into the classroom. because I had a list, I was put to work with, a woman that I thought was teaching English, because there were little books with oil cloth covers, you know, that really shiny Stuff that's used mostly for tablecloth and stuff. So there were these little books that were focused on strange aspects of the English language, like one just OUGH and how it can be pronounced any number of ways. Which I always disliked. I thought in Spanish, what you see written down is what you pronounce. So there are no tricks to it. These, this is a weird way to have a language, but it, by doing that, I think it expanded my view, my. While I was being taught like that by her, the other kids in my classroom were going off to art class, so I never got an art education. I never got exposed to art. So working with her like that so intimately and focused so closely on language, I think might've pushed me, I mean, to writing and becoming a poet. But the family that I lived with had this, schedule. It was like, you know, one of those efficiency experts. They had seven kids. It was like 13 to 15 to this activity, you know, nine to six to this activity. So every Saturday morning after swimming class at the Y downtown, we would go to the library and we were able to check out 10 books. So I read absolutely everything. And you know, I think that reading in English and there was nothing to be read in Spanish, but that immersion for two years. They wouldn't, my sister was in the same household as she was seven years older, but they wouldn't allow us to speak Spanish because they thought their excuse was that it would, stunt our development and we wouldn't learn English. But I think they didn't want us to talk about them in Spanish privately. So by the time my parents arrived two years later, I understood everything they said, but I couldn't make anything come out of my mouth. So it created this complete rupture with my original language. And it was living with my parents again, that I learned Spanish by going, how do you call this? What is that? And then not only that, but why is it called that? Why is that word used? And of course, they couldn't answer'cause they had only got to the third grade themselves.

1

I have similar experience with my parents as well. even growing up in the United States, I mean, we're encouraged within the public K through 12 system to kind of not speak Spanish. And I did grow up a little intimidated speaking Spanish in front of like my family members, but coming to Notre Dame has really opened my minds to being cohesive within the community, and I'm getting back into it, so thank you. Thank you for sharing.

2

Yeah. I would use bad syntax. You know, I would put the wrong ending on words and I would put, you know, the feminine, you know, pronoun before, you know, at Math Word. Oh, yes. You know, things like that. And I still do that. Yeah. Yeah. So it was really bad for a long time, but I also had to serve as their translator in society. So I had to use it and I had to learn the way they spoke and then translate that to the, you know, other people outside and then translate that back in Spanish in a way that they could understand. You know, my mother would bring back, Words that she had heard during the day, and they were completely wrong. Like she worked, the first job was cleaning floors in an old folks home. And of course, in Cuba, everything is tiled. So you threw buckets of water on the ground and You know, everything was cleaned that way. But this was linoleum. So when she started doing that, it peeled up and made the tiles all stick up. But one day she was cleaning the floor and she hurt this woman. And I, she said she was calling her husband. And I said, how did you know she was calling her husband? And she said, because she kept saying, hell. And I, where was she? And she said she was on the toilet. And I went, I think what she was saying was help. Hell. Oh yeah. But it was like that not only translating to actual words that were real from the outside world, but things that they had misheard or You know, misunderstood. that was interesting.

1

Yeah. No, I would do my parents' taxes from a young age, so I can completely relate to that sense of maybe having to act as like translator, intermediary for our family from the internal world of our home to the external world, which is like society or a small town,

2

which did a weird thing with the family dynamics too, because I had no power. But I had all this responsibility.

Natalia Treviño's Poetry Reading

1

I wanna move now into looking back on your collection, garden of Exile. your collection explores themes of displacement, identity, belonging, but as you discuss in your essay, the glass cage, your work has sometimes been confined by external expectations of what a Latina poet should write about. Has the reception of Garden of Exile over time reinforced or challenged that sense of a glass cage for you? And has it shaped how you approach your work? Since

Final Reflections on Language and Emotion

2

I think it's still happening. we do get whatever identity we are, whether it's an immigrant, an exile, a Latina, a lesbian, whatever it is that you are, certain expectations are made of you and what your correct subject matter should be. Or if you venture into other things, it's oh no, that's white territory. You can't write about psychological states or about your interest in science. Or even interest in visual art. You know, you can't talk about those things. You have to talk about the things that we already think you do, your home, the food you eat. Stuff like that. So I think it's still happening and you know, I do get pigeonholed and that I object to that. I. I wanna write about everything. I want to write the what every anyone else in the world would be writing, because I think the imagination doesn't have that kind of external label. You know, the imagination doesn't know that it's Latina or immigrant or exile or lesbian. The imagination goes, what is out there that I can relate to, but it's out there. That is a spark for what I'm thinking.

1

And the reason why I wanted to ask you that question is because coming to University of Notre Dame has brought with it so many opportunities, but also so many challenges when it comes to sharing my poetry and finding people that can be, open-minded to my poems Within workshop. I still have many people who I will literally only have one word in Spanish, and they will refuse to read the poem in its entirety because they did not understand that one word and they didn't really have the energy or the motivation to look it up and kind of learn for themselves from it, right?

2

Yeah. We find, French. German Yes. Hearing in poems all the time. And we're expected to know those languages. Yes. And I mean, all the ways that we are taught poetry along the years, you know, everybody like Europeans, especially inserted words in other languages. However, Spanish is not often used because it was seen as a lower, you know, language. So when I wrote Rosario Beach House, and that was in my late twenties, I think. it goes back and forth between Spanish and English. And at that time in la, called the Pocho form was Happening. And I heard a guy read a Beyond Baroque, one written that way. And I was sitting on the table in the very back of the room and I, at the end, I thought, I couldn't remember which parts were in English and which parts were in Spanish. And I really liked that. It did something weird to my brain. So I was starting to. Sort of explore my childhood. I'm just taking T classes. So I was meditating and words in Spanish would bubble up. That didn't, I mean, there was very surreal phrases, like phrases from dreams. And so I was writing those down, but I thought, you know what, this bilingual thing might be a good way to address the Rosario beach house memories that I'm having. I had, chronic, first I almost died from whooping cough, and then I had chronic bronchitis. So I was placed with my grandmother at the Rosario Beach in this old wooden house, and I was there for a year. So the way I saw my childhood was in a single day how the, how that, the experience of living in that house with her. From the moment, you know, the sun is rising and we go out to the shore and some fishes and whatever, but I. The lapping of the water, like the, it's in the southern part of Cuba, so it doesn't have like big waves. It's just gentle lapping. But you could hear it lap back. And I thought that's kind of like how language, it's for me, you know, the Spanish and the English. So I thought of placing the lines in the kind of lapping way. And when I chose to put something in Spanish, it's because it was my heart, my emotions. And when I then described something in English, it was my American head, which is more my intellect. And so it was this interplay between my American head and English and my Spanish heart. And that's what a poem is, bilingual. But the first time it was reviewed, the line and the review was, she refuses to translate for us because I'm not repeating the thing. I'm not going ika at my house. Yes, exactly. You know, it was a different line. and I wasn't filling in the blank.

1

something I've done as well within my poetry is that I no longer put my Spanish and metallics anymore. I, I no longer tried to distinguish it from the other words on the page.

2

I did because I'm an editor. And I'm a stickler for doing things correctly. Yes. You know, I do care about how language looks on the page and I know and have seen when people have done that. But for myself, I liked sing the Spanish and italics.

1

thank you for that. You talked a little bit about your grandmother within Rosario Beach House. Something that stuck out to me within your collection. Garden Exile was, first off, I wanna tell you my two favorite poems in your collection were, it was my mother's art and my mother in two photographs, among other things. But my favorite one especially was my mother's art, because I had a similar experience with my own mother, where we would wake up every morning, she would turn on PBS, she would pull out these easels from Dollar Tree and like the cheap paints from Dollar Tree, the little acrylic ones. She would follow along with Bob Ross. And growing up I was just amazed at the fact that my mother knew how to paint and the fact that she could do this when she was someone who was agoraphobic, by the way, never left the house, but it was just so exciting to see my mother kind of put herself in, into color, onto, the canvas. And both of these poems that I mentioned in your collection offer intimate glimpses of your mother, whether through her creative work or the way she's captured in photographs. And I just wanted to hear a little bit more about your mother's influence on how she shaped your poetry. Both thematically, but also stylistically.

2

My mother did not paint. she came from a family that was, you know, almost completely destitute. My grandfather, had suffered from tuberculosis, so he was gone a lot of times. And, you know, respiratory asylums, you know, recovering. So my grandmother, Basically raised you know, six children. My, my mother was the only girl, and at the age of eight, she was farmed out to another family in the family, I think it was her uncle, but just as a slave essentially. And the other girl in the family, painted, you know, she sat on a little cushion and she painted and whatever. And my mother really wanted to do that, you know? Really wanted, not the paint necessarily, but have the luxury of doing something that wasn't cleaning out the pig and You know, she dropped outta school at, in the third grade because she didn't want to be poked awake at 5:00 AM so that she could get all her chores done before going off to school. So she thought if I give up school, I could sleep in a little later. It was totally practical thing like that. So she didn't have any way that she expressed herself artistically, but I was away at the Squaw Valley writers thing, and they make you, write a poem every day and submit it in the morning. And I had a dream when I got there of my mother on the floor painting these paintings, but it wasn't a dream. She never did anything like that. But when I woke up, I had that sense of she really was an artist, but it never hit the canvas. She was an artist in other ways, in the world.

1

Wow. that's very fascinating. The way that you were able to kind of embed like this dream logic within your collection.

2

what My dreams often influence how I think I wake up with very, I feel like I've traveled somewhere. Very vivid, images of where I've been.

1

And then you answered a little bit about what went behind my mother's art, but what about my mother in two photographs, among other things

2

that is an actual. These are two photographs. The first one, when they arrived in Springfield, Illinois, we made the newspapers.'cause we were like The only, you know, Latino family. And also at the news of the headline was, or the caption was, family of Cuban expatriates reunited here. And then it told a little bit about how the children had been living with this, the Philip family and who were associated with Westminster Presbyterian Church. La da. and it showed us embracing and the bus station, because they had to go to Spain for two years and get their visa before they were allowed. The whole Bay of Pigs thing happened, so no flights. and then they landed in Chicago and from there they took a Greyhound bus. So this, the reunion happened in a Greyhound station and the photographer got, you know, a photograph, which I have still have a very yellow, almost brown. Newspaper cutting, clipping, and my father's embracing my brother and my sister, and my mother is wrapped completely around me, and I'm looking at the camera completely spooked. we are so exposed here. And I'm sure I was embarrassed by the spectacle. We made, so that was one thing. I had that photograph of her. And then right after I came to this country, one of my cousins had a birthday party. So my mother is, you know, lying behind the cake with my grandmother who died like three months. I was, after I was in this country and, you know, my cousin and her mother and blah, blah, blah. They were a tiny fa family portrait around this cake. And the cake, there was no table. You could tell that it was a sewing machine because it had to lift it apart, and then it went down on either side. That was the other photograph I had of my mother when my grandmother was still alive. So I had these two pictures of my mother of, before my grandmother died, and still in Cuba, and then their arrival in the US and I thought that I could talk about her via these two photographs.

1

And what was your relationship like with your mother?

2

my mother died in 2000. I took care of her for the last two years. she got cancer, interestingly. She never smoked, but my father smoked like crazy and he would be one of those people. Like he also never drove. She drove, but he insists that the keep all the, you know, the windows rolled up in the car. He didn't care that I had respiratory hormones. It's forget it, I'm gonna smoke. And it was like, not only cigars, which are bad enough, you know, but cigarettes. And when she went to the doctor first after having, breathing problems, he said, how long have you been smoking? Lungs are completely black. And she said, I've never smoked in my life. So it started from there, but I'm sure you know, like she would have these allergic attacks going down the aisle in the supermarket of detergents and things like that. And I think it was you from her contact bubble cleaning solutions, you know, all that stuff. she got bladder cancer and then it was taken out and she had a urostomy and it just, you know, like that, it continued like that until the tumor grew too large and they couldn't remove it. So yeah, she died in May of 2000.

1

And the reason wanted to ask that out is because all the mother poems within your collection are so positive, so generous, and I was wondering if this was in your way, maybe kind of memorializing your mother.

2

I had a good relationship with her. I mean, she didn't really. Accept me as a lesbian, she'd pretend that wasn't really happening, but she wasn't mean to any of my partners, you know? they were welcome at family dinners or whatever. There was never any, you know, things that my father was a different matter. He would spew epithets every time he saw me or my girlfriend or a friend come over or whatever. You know, it's like constant things. But she never did that. She preferred to think that it wasn't really happening. And in a way I think she liked that I wasn't involved with men because then I didn't have all those complications that she had, you know, like the abuse that she suffered with my father. So I would, you know, joke with her. I would make fun of some of her strange beliefs and, you know, they were also virent Republicans because they feared communism. You know, people who come from communist countries have unfortunately are prey, you know, to. Republican propaganda. So I would, you know, argue with her all the time. I said, you're afraid of the red Communist, but you have to be afraid of the red Republicans are using you. but I could do that. I didn't have to be respectful and, you know, any, you know, uptight way. So we had a good relationship and even when she got really ill and I would drive her to her chemo appointments, I would she would be in a glow state and I would like, make fun of things, you know, and try to get her out of her mood. And, we had a good relationship. We had a close relationship.

1

No, very similar to my relationship with my mother. I'm actually bisexual. And similarly, my mother wanted to pretend that whenever I did have girlfriends that they were not really real or not really there, but she never called me out on it and she never really judged me openly for it, like my father. Yeah. But, and then even now, she kind of treats that it was like maybe just a part of my life, like a face because I got married and I have a husband now. But yeah, no, I think it's very interesting how our relationships with our mothers kind of influence, like our poetry or style, but also the way we kind of look back on memory.

2

She was also powerful. I mean, she was abused by my father, but in another way she didn't think of You know, she would, you know, speak up. My father was, his father died when he was 16, and he would often go into this whole, oh, I am sad that my father, I didn't have my father after the age of 16 and blah, blah. And she would say, oh, shut up. You have to go so far to look for something bad. Think about it. That's the last thing you had that was bad in your life is that your father died when you were 16. So that was fun to see that she would stand up in that way.

1

moving away from mothers, I. I wanna kind of go back to Art. Marilyn Hacker in the forward of your collection describes you as quote, a writer using her own voice as the paintbrush, chisel, and engravers tool. This is pronounced in many of your poems, which have a painterly quality to them with rich imagery and attention to light, texture, and movement. And I see this especially in plain, in your poem, plain air. How does visual art influence your poetic process? And do you see your poems as engaging in a kind of Afra, even when they're not directly responding to artworks? And, but also like this, the question I wanna get at the most, are you an artist in real life?

2

Yes. I make things. The original word for poet in the Greeks was the maker. It wasn't poet. I make all sorts of things. Sometimes I drew in parts of my life, I make little objects. Things that are tact. I love handmade things. I appreciate when other people make things that, and you can see a human hand in it. my house is filled with craftsman furniture that I picked up for 2 cents, you know, like when people were throwing it out. So those are handmade things. So I appreciate anything that shows a human hand. And I'm a visual thinker. I often go back to that meeting with a woman who taught me English, and try to get rid of my lisp, is that if I had gone to art class and that hadn't had that connection with her, could I have learned the language of art and have become a visual artist instead of a poet? was at the pivotal point in my life. But nevertheless, I look at the world visually. I love film, for instance. film is often a trigger for me for writing. I love the things that it, makes me think about the analogies that I get from film. Not action films or, you know, crime stuff, but I fell in love with European film when I was in my teens. And I would go often, you know, to the movie theater, which was just a buck then. And, you know, see all sorts of, you know, jewels and Jim, and, you know, all the Bergman films, you know, all that stuff. So in fact, the only word I know in Swedish is ing, which means nothing. And that is from, you know, Ingmar Bergman. And I love that he was such a nihilist, And that the word that I learned through his film was nothing. I love that.

1

I love that too. you, that's so exciting. something else that I also noticed was that your poems weave references to myths like Sisyphus and narcissists as well as fairytales. Fairytales is such a big thing within your poetics. You always come back to the fairytale within like your setting. reimagining them in deeply personal, unexpected ways, like the reflection of a forest in a glass of water. What draws you to these stories and how do you see them functioning in your poetry? Are they a lens for understanding personal experience, a means of resistance or something else entirely?

Gina Franco's and Sara Cortez's Poetry Reading

2

The first book I was given once I read in This Country, the first book that was written, I had a Frosty the Snowman Coloring Bow was the very first thing I was given. You can imagine a kid from Cuba being given a book about a snowman. But, the first thing in writing that I was given as a gift was, hands Christian Anderson's fairytales. Yes. And those were great fairytales. Ursula Le Gwen writes essays about some of, Hans Christian Anderson fairytales. Like one of my favorite essays of hers is, about the child in the shadow. And, where the guy's on a balcony and he's looking, across at this beautiful woman and the other, house across the street. The light is behind him. So the shadow projects into the house and he thinks, and this is the cancer Christian Anderson part, he thinks, what if his shadow can go in there and introduce himself to the princess or this beautiful woman and get away from, it gets away from him, you know, and it starts to talk to her and convince her that the man is the shadow and the false one, and that he is the real one. you know, Hans, Christian Anderson are like the grim brothers. They don't always have positive ending, so the real man tries to go there and convince her. He's the real guy. But the shadow has gotten there beforehand and convinces the princess that he's the real one. So when he arrives, he's killed. He had his head chopped off or something, so the shadow wins, but it was because of that. Thing that he had initiated that of what he wasn't, he didn't have the bravery to go and talk to the princess himself. So he projected his shadow, you know, across, so Owin has a wonderful essay about that and what it means. and I have read it several times because I always wanted something new in it. yeah. Yeah. I like fairytales and I like when people refer to fairytales as analogies for other, psychological states or whatever.

1

your poetry also often weaves together the natural world with these themes of exile memory. And I was particularly interested in how the garden functions as a biblical metaphor in your work. And I was going to ask you, do you see it as a space of permanence or transformation?

2

although I was baptized Catholic,'cause my mother was superstitious, she had been abused by nuns in Cuba. So there was no way I would go, I was being sent to a Catholic school. So I didn't have biblical training. I never read the Bible. I know what I know about the Bible is from what other people know and how they use it in their work. but I couldn't tell you like on Jeopardy, that would be a subject, you know, a category that I could never, ever get right, because I don't know who's who, I don't know who Ruth lived with or you know, what's, you know, 3.16 who, what that means, you know, that kind of thing. So I can't tell you anything about the Bible. So any kind of formal religious thing, I don't, even though it's Eden, I know about Eden and I know that's a biblical reference, but to me it isn't Eden just as an origin story. And the school then in Cuba that I was sent to was not Catholic. It was American run and it was Presbyterian. So there was a little tiny chapel's church in the middle of town. That you were encouraged to go to if you went to that school? So that's where I had, I guess you could call it Sunday school, although I don't remember really learning anything religious there. But I think in one of my poems I mentioned that I wanted, I had fallen in love with my Sunday school teacher, Ava, and her name of course was Eve. And of course it made me think of the Garden of Eden and all of that. So no one wanted to volunteer. All the kids were like this. When she asked who wants to volunteer a prayer. So my first poem, as it were, was this prayer, and I just looked out the window and I started praising the hibiscus and the clouds and the things that I could see out the window. So the natural world, I'm like a natural pantheistic person because the natural world was my first connection to any kind of notion of spirituality. My garden is very important to me in the things that grow, and I am revived and I'm refreshed by When you plant the seed and it goes through all its things and it starts to branch on and you finally get a tomato, you know, I love that whole process. it feeds me.

1

I wanted to ask you a question about the first poem in your collection, which is titled Archeology, and I thought I'd just read just a little bit of the first part. I thought at first it was a bullet metallic synical. One end rounded the other flat, but once on earth from the garden, the little wheel design of plastic jewels, the color of watermelon, term line, or spraying grasses, roadside through New Mexico, blurring past the windows, told me what I'd found. Though its identity, el alluded me, retreated into guesses about it. What was it? What was

2

it? It was lipstick. It was lipstick. Yeah. I, in it, I say that's called now code switching, but I call it, okay. Yeah. I was digging in my garden and in those days my house was from 1932, there were incinerator from the backyard. So my neighbors had been removed. I still have mine. I like the way it looks. This weird structure looks incredibly ancient. it's made outta concrete and had these, you know, kind of striations through and it doesn't work and you can't burn anything in it now. But his, all the houses are like this on my hill. So when his thing was taken out, some of the dirt fell into my yard, and I'm sure it went further down than that. But I was planting something and came up. And I would come up with, little pieces of glass, you know, from old medicine bottles And things like that. But this day I found this little tube and I brought it, and I never had been able to open it. I still have it in a box of things that I saved, but I brought it inside and I washed it. I washed it and, you know, started thinking about it. And the way that it got patented through being buried, just like it was partly greenish And partly rusty. And so I, it set me off and thinking like, what is this? And where did it come from? And what is it trying to depict? So I started envisioning a garden somewhere, and because of the green and, you know, so it just, it set me off. But I think part of the impetus for writing the poem is that it remained a mystery. I could never, ever get it. I mean, I didn't wanna smash it with a hammer or anything. I wanted to keep it intact. So I could never find out what it really was, but clearly some woman had used it at some point. And then, I don't know if it's all used up. Who knows? Is there a little bit of lipstick still in there? but the interesting thing about that poem, since it's the first one in the book It was the last thing I wrote before the book was compiled. Really? Yeah. And when, after I finished and I thought, this is the first poem, because in a way, then I start digging. Like I initiate the book this way because the book is all about, and as a sense, you know, archeological explorations. I use archeology a lot. I like, I, you know, I have written a poem where I say that I wish I had become a scientist instead of a poet.'cause I like digging in the ground or I like looking up in the sky, you know? so yeah. I found that interesting too, that. I thought the book was complete. I had now done, and then I wrote the archeology poem from that event to finding the little tube. And I thought this is the first poem. I had to wait all this time for the po first poem to arrive so that I knew how the book would begin.

1

In talking with you, I'm, I feel like I'm learning so much about your imagination, your creativity, the way that you're able to kind of envision yourself as like a painter, an artist, but also as like an archeologist. but it's causing you to think a little bit more about something that I kept seeing throughout a lot of your poems, and it was doorways and thresholds and you repeatedly lock in on this, and you even quoted in your poem threshold, Annie Dillard from God in the Doorway. And I wanted to know what was the significance of doorways or liminal spaces in your everyday life in poetics?

2

From my crib in Cuba, one of the first images I had. It was an old wooden house that actually belonged to a relative where I was born and the doorways were, shaped What I thought from my crib, I mean, I actually, I went back to Cuba and I thought, why am I having, when I was 26, 17 years after leaving, and I was thinking, why do I think there were people standing over my crib? I see people almost like aliens. It was like, like this, and then shoulders and then a round part, right? And I, that's the way in the doorways. Those were the hallways through the house where had these shapes. And it, you know, no wonder I thought people were standing around. But I love arches. My house right now has pointy arches. and it's called Hispanic Mosque. It's the style. And, I love doorways and the, and because I like things handmade and hand. Hu I love the way that they're shaped. I like, another thing I love is, Architecture. I was for a time editor at Architectural Digest, and it was wonderful food for me. Reading about all, I mean, it was all that fruit, fru, horrible, you know, celebrity, big houses, blah, blah, blah. But when you got into the details about why this was called that I even took a class at that time when I was working at architectural digests in, decorative art at UCLA and the excuse was'cause it was taught by one of our consultants who would come in and look at what we had put together and find the errors and correct and whatever. So he was teaching this class at UCLA and I took it ostensibly because it would support my work, but it was because I'm really interested in decorative arts. For instance, windows were never flat. Why were they never flat? Why do we see, when there are period films, why are there those circles? all they could do is blow glass in that circular form. And they could never, it was only after it became industrial life that then glass was put on rollers and made flat. But that's why you see, that's why the windows are made of that, you know, little circular, you know, pieces of glass and there are a lot of things like that. But I learned from that. But I love architecture. Recently I was, I think, watching a documentary where it said that architecture was frozen music. And I think that's true. Isn't that lovely? Yeah, that's very lovely. Yeah.

1

Yeah. Oh, okay. This is like a perfect segue into, let me find the poem In Plain Air, I have to say, this is such a lovely poem. Something that I can't really get outta my head is because I, when I was learning poetry for the first time, my mentor, when they were teaching me, they were like, the writer's toolkit when it comes to words should be seen as like the painter with their paints. And there is$10 paint or$10 words, and then there's a hundred dollars paint tubes, a hundred dollars words. And you say, in plain air words, one could pick up and squeeze a little bit of on a palette at a splotch of medium and swirl to just the right syrupy consistency. And I see that within your poetry and you're even saying it right here. And so I wanted to ask you about the significance specifically of three colors that are recurring within your collection, which is yellow, green, and blue. and why was yellow, green, and blue so significant to the construction of this collection?

Introduction to Adela's Poetry

Sarah on Law Enforcement and Grace

2

yellow is really, it makes other colors different. You know, you add it to red or you add it to blue and you make green. So it, it's sort of a, I mean, it's a primary color, but it alters other colors. And I was living with a visual artist, and what I was doing is envying the beginning of the poem begins with I wanna tell you why, and You know, it's more difficult to write with words than it is to paint, because I felt like wor, and this is true, words have everybody's fingerprints on them from the world, from the way they're misused. and so you can't take this pristine thing out of a box and start working with it the way she could. She could open her up her paint box, set up the little, you know, glass thing and start mixing the colors and it was all play for her. She didn't know if she was gonna do that thing, and she would just, you know, paint. I couldn't do that. Things were, it was too heavy and the words were too charged. So I wished I envied that. Clear minded, wordless thing of paint. They're not thinking about how this color has been used before or what it has meant in the past or, you know, any of that stuff. And green is my favorite color. Always has. I had a parrot for 47 years. She just died in December and I think it became more my favorite color the longer I lived with her.'cause she was a, a yellow Amazon parrot. And so her green, and they come in a lot of different shades of green, but her green was, like an emerald green that started kind of like turquoisey green from the top. Like that. And she got more, I thought she would lose it. She was like that as a baby. And I thought she would lose that, per, you know, like turquoisey thing. But she didn't. And so I think the more that I lived with her. The more green became my favorite color. I always liked green, but I think her particular shade of greens really, I mean, my neighbors all know that green is my favorite color. My house is painted green. You know, when I buy cushions, they're green. You know, things like that. I think by doing, by using colors in my work, I am trying to do what my partner was doing with the paints. You know, I can't have the actual physical paints. I can't do that, but I can mix these paints in my head to achieve different things. Like that poem is a, I don't know if you notice, but it's a double petro and sonnet. And I ambit ator and I gave that to myself as an assignment. You know, I looked in the book of forms and I thought, what form can I, you know, learn. Another one that I did that with was, the first woman, the one about Ava. That's a terra, and that's why. Has envelope rhymes. And the reason I came, I chose the Sima for that subject matter. Is because I felt like I was in a romantic triangle with Ava, Adam, and me. Adam was her husband. Ava's husband. So the Sima allowed me, I have, because I taught myself all these things, I didn't, no one put an idea in my head of this is what this form does, and this is why this exists. I had my own personal associations with why I wanted to write a particular form, why a particular form attracted me. And so this is what happens with the Terra. You have a B, A. And then you take the B out of the middle and it becomes the first one and the second. And it goes B, C, B. And then you take the C out. And in that way it felt like I was unpacking. So it was great for talking about my transition from Cuba to the us. Because they were little suitcases and I was taking out the middle rhyme and exposing it. And then almost Russian, you know, boxes? Yes. the center one was then becoming the outer, and then I, there were two ways to end it, and one of the ways was to have, a couplet. And I thought, there are ter that don't have that couplet, but I wanted to have the couplet because they were my two feet landing in the new world. So these are very deliberate. No one knows why. No one cares why, but I cared.

1

No, that's so beautiful. Like the way that you're describing poetry as something that's like an active embodiment of the self. I love that. I love that. It's not passive. It's active. There's movement involved, there's a fluidity. We only got about 12 minutes left in this interview, and I've told you so many poems that I love within your collection, but I wanna hear which one is your favorite? And if you could read it to us today.

2

I have a very gravelly voice today. I don't know what I would call my favorite. I was saying to Francisco, yesterday that I was glad that I waited this long. It was 40, I was 45 and I'm almost 72. I'll be 72 at two months. and it waited till 45 to publish my first book of, I had every thing is in magazines for years. But, my first collection was at 45 and I was glad that I waited that long because I would be embarrassed now to have a collection of my stuff from twenties to thirties or whatever. Yes. And I didn't want, I didn't wanna have a book that would go, oh, forget about that one. I just look at this. I wanted to have the first book that I put out being fully cooked, not raw in the middle, you know, I also like to cook. So I have, you know, associations with that, how food is prepared and, you know, care of ingredients and that kind of thing. So I'm not embarrassed by this even at 72 when I look back at it. I'm not embarrassed by the poems in here. I think that I did good work and if one can say that about itself, so I don't necessarily have, oh, you really marked this up. yeah, I don't know if I have a favorite. because they each touch a different part of my personality. you know, all the things I've described of like architecture and music and, you know, archeology and whatever. And so they're my favorites of that ilk, you know, kind of thing. gosh, I don't know. Maybe I should read the first woman so we can, you can hear this. And also, I don't like rhymes. I talked about this before. I don't like rhymes that are too direct.

3

Okay.

2

When I was very young, like a teenager, I started reading Sylvia Plath. Oh yes. And I found the book where her Lia appeared at the back and I thought they were just as good as adult pumps. They weren't, didn't feel young. But the thing that kept them very modern feeling to me is that she loved slant rhymes. She never did that cat sat map kind of thing. And I think that's a personal quirk. It's like, why you like jazz and you don't like, I dunno, blues or something. I am prefer, I remember talking to my friend Murray Poso, the late Mary poet, meeting with her in her apartment in New York and say, and she always wrote a form and she did direct rhymes and stuff. And I said to her, I don't like direct rhymes. I, she goes, oh my dear, that's because you haven't learned to do it. You know, and I, and it made me laugh because that's why I like old ladies. They just give it to you straight. Yep. And, I wasn't offended. But I thought she didn't completely understand that it is a very personal thing. It isn't about that. I can don't know how to do it correctly. And some of them are closer to be direct, but I like slant rhyme. There's something about a slant rhyme too that helps the en enjoyment of the next neck line. Oh, that, The flow. Anyway, the first woman, she was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor and albino alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse pink skin that looked like it might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child's mind, it made great sense that she should fall in love with him. He was a. Before the fall and afterward, her invert twin and she, Eva, was blonde as well, though more robust light leave. Almas. I loved her honey hair, her full lips, her green eyes, and nameless sin. Not that I worried all that much. The church was Presbyterian in Sunday school. Her way to teach those kids to pray was to comment on all the beauty we could touch or see in our environment. My hand was always in the air to volunteer my sentiment. Since other kids considered prayer a chore, the floor was usually mine. My list of joys left out her hair, but blessed the red hibiscus seen through the windows while others bowed their heads, her heart. I schemed to win with purple prose on meringue clouds. For who was anyway I thought, but Nada spelled backward. hers reversed called that Ave. The lyric of a bird. Born and airborne on the same day. But it was night when I saw her outside the church for the last time. Yellow light mosquitoes summer. I shaped a barking dog, a fine but disembodied pair of wings with my hands. She spoke in hushed tones to my parents. The next day I would find myself up north in a strange house without my tongue and almost blind. There was so much to see. This caused Cuba my past to be eclipsed in time. But Eva stayed a loss ave. I learned meant also this farewell. I haven't seen her since. I was talking last night about it, even when, you know something, look it up in the dictionary because it may yield up other things. And when I was writing this, I looked up Avi just for the, all of it. And that's how I discovered that it also meant for, I didn't know that at that point. second guessing yourself by looking at sources is really good. You never know what it's gonna trigger. So I got the, you know, the co the couplet at the end. I got that from, you know, distrusting my knowledge of the word and looking it up. So I would never have known that it meant farewell and I wouldn't have had my endings. Building

1

off of this advice that you've now shared about, research within poetics, I have one final question for you. What advice would you give to poets who, like you may struggle with the constraints of the glass cage? The pressure to conform to expected narratives for visibility. How can they navigate the tension between external expectations and their own creative instincts when starting a book or joining a workshop?

2

I think people rushed too soon to publish. I remember my earliest workshops that I taught to people I knew who was going to be, go further their and deeper into poetry from the more superficial types, because the superficial ones would ask you, how can I get my thing copyrighted? It's you haven't written anything. Don't think about copywriting now. Don't think about polishing now. Get the damn thing on the page and do it. So about the glass cage, it's at first, you know, it bugged me, you know, and I obviously wrote the glass cage essay because it was such an annoyance, you know, and a restriction. But, in time you just have to go. I. The reader will make of it whatever they want on the page. I know what my intention was. I can't be affected, like opinions, I can't be affected by if someone judged me for being lesbian, if someone judges me for being, in exile or Latina, I have done readings in places like Beyond Baroque, where there, you know, and this is not too long ago. it was in the eighties, but to me that's not too long ago when I was supporting, it was a reading and support of, the struggles in Central America and El Salvador and Nicaragua. And it was a fundraising thing for medical, supplies. And I was doing a reading and I said before reading, I support these revolutions, but we must keep our eyes peeled because I have been betrayed by revolutions before. And so we can't just buy everything wholesale, you know, parse it out, inspect it, make sure that it's sincere and true and good and authentic. Someone from the audience, a Latino yelled at Guana, which is what the epithet that, Cuban egg valve were called. Because fidel's thing about people who left Cuba was that, they were worms gusanos who were fleeing this healthy place called Cuba to go, you know, devour the rotting carcass of the us. you know, that's a very dirty word. That's you know, calling someone, you know, another dirty word for being gay, you know? So you don't do that. And especially if you're Latino, you should be better educated to know that you don't call someone that. But that's what I was called, and it was among, quote, unquote my people. So I can't be, I mean, I still remember, and I'm telling you the story because it's there. But I can't be affected by how people are gonna judge how I feel about poetry, how I feel about. My life, how I feel about relationships, how I feel about any of those things, because they're mine. It's not about them at all. So they can say whatever the hell they want about it. It doesn't affect me anymore. And that way I think the fault is in them. The lack of compassion isn't them. I have no control over that. I can only control what I do and what I write and what I like. So that's what I would tell any young poet that don't pay attention to what the outside voices are telling you. That has nothing to do with what you will do with the page.

1

Thank you so much, Anita. Thank you so much. Thank you. Nice meet. Thank you for watching.