Jose Angel Araguz's Blog, page 10

sprained & rotten thoughts

Photo of three rotting tomatoes by Wendy Wei.

Checking in this week after being absent last week due to spraining my ankle while going downstairs doing the laundry. Been describing my foot as looking like rotten meat. Like, Charles Baudelaire would’ve written about it rotten. Like, Upton Sinclair would’ve seen in it a metaphor to use in The Jungle rotten.

But I’m back at it, life. Last night, I had a blast reading as part of the Pangyrus issue 8 reading alongside Pam Painter, Joelle Fraser, Ryane Nicole Granados, and Artress Bethany White. Highlights included White’s poem “Outlander Blues” and Granados’ essay “Love Letter to My Soon to Be 13-Year-Old Black Son.” We also had a lovely conversation among the readers afterward, moderated by Greg Harris. At one point, I took a shot at the Norton anthology and suggested that lit mags hold the real lively canons of our times. Do with that what you will.

Another highlight of my week was sharing the work of J. Jennifer Espinoza with my literature students. Espinoza’s “Makeup Ritual” (second poem at the link) in particular led to some engaging conversations about human experience and the value of daily rituals to provide grounding in a world constantly upended.

I wish y’all happy reading. May you (pues, tambien yo) continue on the mend in our respective ways.

Pangyrus virtual reading!

Poster for Pangyrus virtual reading.

Just a quick post to share an upcoming virtual reading I’ll be participating in: Join Pam Painter, Joelle Fraser, Ryane Nicole Granados, Artress Bethany White, and myself as we celebrate the release of Pangyrus eight!

Pangyrus Literary Magazine’s 8th issue launches with this reading on Thursday, March 11 at 7:30pm EST.

I’m grateful to be reading alongside such dynamic writers. At the virtual event, folks will have a chance to meet the editors and authors who’ve made Pangyrus one of Boston’s most dynamic literary journals.

To learn more about this reading and register for the event, go here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/online-launch-party-reading-for-pangyrus-8-tickets-141737389347.

survival & understanding

It’s been wild y’all. Some minor emergencies. Some heavy conversations in and out of the classroom and mentoring spaces that I work in. The thread continues to be survival and understanding, in that order.

These themes run through Dash Harris’ “No, I’m Not a Proud Latina” which I taught this week. This article, which calls out issues of anti-Blackness in the Latinx community, stirred up a number of reactions which had me lecturing on speaking truth to power, how marginalized writers are often necessarily making decisions at the intersection of politics, culture, and experience in order to survive and understand this world. I also spoke about how community should hold space for the positive while also acknowledging and working through the negative. That for community to matter it must be an inclusive practice, not just an ideal or romanticized gesture. At one point, I found myself talking about identity, how in the U.S. we often discuss it in terms of a possession or territory. The trope is how we have to “find ourselves” before we can be ourselves. What else can it be beyond this? What if identity, or really identities, are sides of the self we’re privileged to be able to honor and exist in, however briefly?

I also caught up with Aurielle Marie’s latest letter for The Offing and their efforts to engage their literary network in social justice and a value shift toward equity within their respective organizations. In “The Other Side of Imagination,” Aurielle Marie details their experiences and realities in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Some moments that hit for me:

Photograph of the U.S. Capitol Building as seen through a security fence with a soldier standing guard.

On that violent Wednesday, some of my community organizer friends were checking in with one another in group messages. A good friend remarked with fatigue that he believed we were being out-organized. I disagreed. “White supremacy means we out-organize our oppressors, word-for-word, bar-for-bar… it means in the heat of battle we don’t miss… and we STILL lose,” I offered, “because our oppressors do not need intention or strategy to have their ultimate political goals met.”

*

Black people have always had to prepare themselves, their children, their communities for the impact of state violence. This, too, is an imagination of some kind, the preservation of the very people being hunted by the State. My partner and I, like many Black and Brown folks across the country, spent the 6th and the days following planning against some of the terrible possibilities that could find us as two Black queer femmes in a Southern state. This imaginative genius, this survival is exhausting, and this month, I have only that: my exhaustion. 

I appreciate Aurielle Marie’s honesty about this event and personal aftermath. Part of me has been working non-stop, another part of me remains shaken and beside myself. If you’re reading this, I wish you deep, necessary reflection as well as rest.

writer feature: Saddiq Dzukogi

Book cover for Your Crib, My Qibla.

This week I’m delighted to feature friend and poet Saddiq Dzukogi whose book, Your Crib, My Qibla, is currently available for pre-order from University of Nebraska Press. Here’s a bit about the book:

Your Crib, My Qibla interrogates loss, the death of a child, and a father’s pursuit of language able to articulate grief. In these poems, the language of memory functions as a space of mourning, connecting the dead with the world of the living. Culminating in an imagined dialogue between the father and his deceased daughter in the intricate space of the family, Your Crib, My Qibla explores grief, the fleeting nature of healing, and the constant obsession of memory as a language to reach the dead. (book description by University of Nebraska Press).

I have had the pleasure of knowing Dzukogi over a number of years, sharing correspondence over poems and life. In his work, I have always found a paced, meditative way with the line that develops emotional depth across images that hold for a reader like sunsets: intense, clear, and with a momentum one can feel.

“Wineglass” below is a good example of this. Through intimate narration, the poem develops from its title image into a vessel of its own, holding the speaker’s grief while also moving through the experience of it. Physical details such as “Hands, cloudy from rubbing the grave,” evoke the speaker’s state of mind through the image of cloudiness and emphatic action of rubbing, while the word choice of cloudy/grave parallel the speaker’s desire to mix and be heard across worlds.

Saddiq Dzukogi

Wineglass

When your mother found strands of your hair
hung up in the teeth of your comb,
your father squirreled them into a wineglass.
It bites him hard that your life happened

like an hourglass with only a handful of sand—
this split to the seam of his body, a split
of darkness that won’t kill him but squeezes
adrenaline into his veins, so he lives

through the pain of your absence. He’s not alright
to speak. His voice rims with bereavement,
and he wants to sing by your grave, child,
now that birds blow songs through

the window—counts sadness on the prayer beads
necklaced around his collar. If he had known the sky
would inhale you out of him so quickly,
he would have stayed with your toes forever

in his hands. Your face is still everywhere,
even in the places he is not looking.
He presses a deep kiss on your grave,
on your forehead.

Hands, cloudy from rubbing the grave,
as if on your tender skin.
The distance he feels is more

than the 400 kilometers that often stands
between you. He will travel this far
to hold you against the moon.
They say you are like his reflection

pulled out of the mirror he stares into.
To pull you out he plunges his hand
inside himself and pulls.

*

Your Crib, My Qibla is available for pre-order from University of Nebraska Press.

Photograph of Saddiq Dzukogi

Saddiq Dzukogi holds a degree in mass communication from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (Nigeria), and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. A 2017 finalist of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, he is the author of Inside the Flower Room, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. Dzukogi’s poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, World Literature Today, New Orleans Review, Oxford Poetry, African American Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere.

Author’s Twitter: @SaddiqDzukogi

viscacha vibes & recent pubs

Meet my new friend, the viscacha. He’s got a look that is simultaneously wise, weary, and worked-over. While I can’t claim to be wise, I am definitely feeling weary and worked over by the world. Introduced this friend to my students this week and one responded with: “What does he hear that we don’t that he needs ears so big?”

As I continue to ponder that, I thought I would share some recent happenings:

My poems “Youth” and “To Silence” were recently published in the latest issue of Pangyrus along with a short statement on their origins and meaning in a new manuscript.Also, my poem “Birthday Dirge” was published in Boog City.

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re managing.

Also, if you find out what the viscacha hears, do let me know.

viscacha vibes, recent pubs, & upcoming virtual event

Meet my new friend, the viscacha. He’s got a look that is simultaneously wise, weary, and worked-over. While I can’t claim to be wise, I am definitely feeling weary and worked over by the world. Introduced this friend to my students this week and one responded with: “What does he hear that we don’t that he needs ears so big?”

As I continue to ponder that, I thought I would share some recent happenings and upcoming happenings:

My poems “Youth” and “To Silence” were recently published in the latest issue of Pangyrus along with a short statement on their origins and meaning in a new manuscript.Also, my poem “Birthday Dirge” was published in Boog City as part of the lead up to… …the “Welcome to Boog City 14.5 Arts Festival.” The festival is happening virtually on Presidents Day, Mon., Feb. 15, at 12:00 p.m. My own reading slot is from 2-2:10pm EST.

The festival will stream live at the following links:
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/115605743040
Twitter https://twitter.com/boogcity
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGD_RIKdy7P9fdpIugMgoLg

Check out the illustrated festival schedule for more info. The line-up includes a great group of writers including Ananda Lima, Gretchen Primack, and Sam Cha among others.

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re managing.

Also, if you find out what the viscacha hears, do let me know.

in memory: Alfonso M. Gomez

Poetry’s ability to connect with us in essential ways cannot be stressed enough.

This is a sentiment I share on a regular basis in my teaching and conversations with writers. As much as I repeat it, I can’t claim it. What I can claim is the evidence that fills my life and the connections my life is blessed with through the work of poetry.

This week, I dedicate this post to the memory of Alfonso M. Gomez, father of friend and great poet, Rodney Gomez. I have admired Gomez’s work for years now (here’s another point of connection and another). I have shared his work in classes at both the undergrad and grad level (his “Our Lady of San Juan” is one in particular that keeps teaching me). He has also been kind to my work as well.

Along with poetry, we share South Texas between us. Much of my childhood was spent with driving from Corpus Christi to Matamoros, often stopping to visit folks in Brownsville, where Rodney himself was born and raised. Through South Texas, we have mesquite trees and hot summers and community forged through a mix of perseverance, hard work, and hope. Now, we are connected in absence.

Life in the pandemic has made it hard for me to reach out to everyone I would like to when I would like to. I saw news of Rodney’s father passing online and sent my condolences to him. When Rodney later shared the art piece below, which he said was inspired by my poem “Scripture: Hour,” it is not enough to say I was moved. I felt seen. This particular poem–one of a sequence of poems that engages with how little I know of my own father’s death, down to not knowing what day he died–was a hard fight to get right.

“Right.” Not sure what I mean by that. I do know that I wanted those flies in there to keep moving beyond me. Then years later, to have them visualized like this by another poet. Well, damn. It’s an honor to connect. to have one’s work read, and to have insight into how others see it. As much as I make a life out of words, I cannot stress how important, how precarious, yet how necessary connection is.

To all of you affected by the pandemic, by life itself, I wish you kindness and strength.

To Alfonso M. Gomez, I wish rest. ¡Presente!

An art interpretation by Rodney Gomez of a poem by José Angel Araguz

writing prompt: predictive text

Back to teaching full time this week. Been exciting and inspiring, while at the same time very real. What I mean is that the more I teach, the more I feel myself be more myself. And it’s not a thing I can summon or call forth. The space held in shared open questioning and conversation calls it forth.

Tangentially connected, at one point this week I watched this interview and supplemental writing “exercise” clips between Trevor Noah and Amanda Gorman that are illuminating. In the interview, Gorman speaks of poetry as water, a way to “re-sanctify, re-purify, and reclaim” the world around us. Her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” and its consequent impact on our American conscience at this moment in time are a solid gesture and step in the direction of this work.

In the second clip, Noah and Gorman engage in a predictive text writing exercise. It’s the kind of thing I see on Twitter sometimes and can’t help but join in on. Engaging directly and purposefully with predictive text can at times feel like having an echo of your latest obsessions as well as the way you articulate yourself in daily life cast back at you. Sometimes the screens in our hands look back, yo.

Noah and Gorman’s parameters were to start with the word “Roses” and limit themselves to 15-20 words. I went ahead and tried a few of my own. Feel free to share in the comments should you try this out yourself

Photo of roses by Aleksandar Pasaric

exercises in predictive text

Roses and the other one of my friends that I nominated for an oppositional the same situation that is

*

Roses are you doing well today so much going to congratulate someone to take care if you have a great weekend

*

Roses and I have a few things I would do anything to make sure you got the most important part

what I cannot call hope

Another round-up of thoughts as I’m finding myself consistently and effectively overworked but wanting, needing to connect, to word here:

That it’s been hard to hear others speak of hope this week. That it’s been hard to hear others sign off on emails with some reference to vaccines being “on their way!” As if they had a hand in the accomplishment. As if it brought loved ones back.That it’s been hard to feel what I cannot call hope but can neither call despair. That it’s been hard to hear others share that they feel relief for the first time in four years.That I’ve been feeling what I cannot call hope but can neither call defeat much longer than four years.That what I cannot call hope has me like the speaker of this poem by Rio Cortez, wary, certain while also uncertain of what’s there ahead. A close-up photo of birch by Harrison Haines

This be stark, I know. Times be, too.

Something that brought some insight and inner movement was the latest letter, “On Resolutions,” by Aurielle Marie in their “series of 10 dedicated to engaging The Offing’s literary network in social justice and a value shift toward equity within [their] respective organizations.” In this letter, Marie pushes against the usual practices of New Year’s resolutions, which typically emphasize discipline while arousing shame and fear, and shares how:

It would serve us all better to start our year with an acute awareness of how we want to live it, to be loved inside of it, to learn from it, and to lose ourselves within it. What do you want — really want — for this country and our world in the new year? What political goal or dream comes to mind when you allow yourself the capacity to imagine?

Aurielle Marie

This sentiment gives me something I cannot yet call hope, but I want to, as it implies ways that hope can be sparked, invited, gestured, and called forth from within who we are and where we’re at.

Wherever you’re at, may you be kind to yourselves.

brief dispatch: sharing is caring

This week has me busy at the Solstice MFA low-residency program’s virtual winter residency. I’m having a lovely time spending time with this great community. The workshops are virtual, but the vibes are all real, ha. Even shared a shape poem exercise I wrote about here a bit ago.

Also shared this week:

A photograph of four haiku by Richard Wright.This cool introduction to the haiku of Richard Wright.This poem by Kenneth Koch.And this speculative wonder “Emily Dickinson Attends a Writing Workshop.”

The latter was shared with me. I share with y’all. It’s all just moving words around, no?

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re able to be kind to yourself while remaining aware of the world around us.