HMMM & BANG: AN ESSAY IN VERSE ON THE OCCASION OF LETRAS LATINAS’ ONE POEM FESTIVAL

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INTRODUCTION

I have invented a form of thinking about literature — Hmmm & Bang —
which may appear playful (because it is) but which (make no mistake)
is a challenge to our dispositions, our ungainly knack for categories.

I have broken this thinking into three strains: Hmmm & Bang,
a dichotomy to diminish division; Identity, which encompasses
community & which masterful Curation can make into unity;

& last but not least, Latinos & Poetry, which is as much about me
as it is about politics, & as much about politics as it is about poetics,
a strain of thought I have to engage, I who am a Poet, who am Latino. 

HMMM & BANG

My pal recently divided literature into two obvious camps: male & female. 
First of all, boring. Second of all, wrong. Hmmm invites, it’s delicate & sparse,
it contemplates the social like Oppen & the celestial like Sor Juana. It orbits

devastation; writing sad shit (devastation) is hard as fuck — there’s an abyss
every corner & the page is a terror & you want to tear the page into pieces 
& are already torn; but you write to mend the tear — consider the rose.

Its thorn borders Hmmm & Bang. Run your finger along the thorn, Hmmm.
Press your finger on the pointed thorn until the skin inaudibly pops, Bang.
Bang is gutsy. It’s the Marquis de Sade on audiobook with a smutty accent.

It’s eyeballs falling out of sockets in Cormac McCarthy. It’s blood sport, punctum,
nightmarish surprise. Bang bucks—bucks hard—but the best of the Bang
straps you in. Hold on! If you do, it’ll give a pretty good bang for its buck.

IDENTITY & CURATION

I, you, us: why does I feel vulnerable & you pointed;
indeed, why does us, until it’s inclusive, feel removed?
The festival’s 1^st poem, Rigoberto Gonzalez’s “Carnivore,”

gyres Multiple Sclerosis. MS is visceral, stomping out my heart.
MS is afflicted, Oh I used to be. It hits poetry’s bittersweetspot,
where the Hmmm & the Bang swirl, I’m consuming myself.

Gonzalez’s MS embodies nature’s indifference & vindictiveness;
it attacks Gonzalez’s self, yet the poem attacks self-centeredness;
Gonzalez’s body will go, yet what of his poetry, of his peoples?

The periods in his poem reveal the impossible burden of the I: I. 
… gazelle. … me. … silence. … lonely. … me. … me. … this. … His I
needs: but what does it need? A you? An us: a community of I’s.

Jasminne Mendez’s poem “My First Thanksgiving on Hispaniola”
turns Gonzalez’s swirl into a responsorial; couplets her bread & butter,
Mendez’s opener provides a beloved & her final line displays an us.

She makes you into a royal you — If you love a place, at best you’re a patriot, at worst
you’re a nationalist, & I wish to be neither of those things. — denying dichotomy’s curse 
while planting her own agency, her dichotomy serves continuity & overlap; back-&-forth, 

fluidity; rejecting this & that, she triggers the possible. 
Recognizing our post-colonial options, she ennobles
newness. Antidichotomization lets this festival flow.

LATINOS & POETRY

In 2015, I attended the President’s rally,
where chanting — Build! A! Wall!
— erupted. The end all be all

of politics since I’ve been of voting age
is the man my aunt calls Cheetoh, Donald J.
His golden elevator speech is legendary

for the people who would eventually
enact national deportations & family
separations. In 2015, approvingly,

he pointed at a sign, Latinos For Trump, & directed
his captured crowd to chant, Latinos! Many called
him 45 after he won, to refuse him the power

of recognition. He won again & I went to his inauguration
& there, in the Capital One Arena, they called him 45 & 47.
Apt, as it is typical of fascists to pervert & to co-opt language.

The Golden Age of The USA, that’s what they called the years to come.
Here we are, with many years to come: infringements of habeas corpus
left & right; so-called riots composed of those who from their depths 

of understanding go out & protest. 
There are grandmothers under arrest.
Our poetry is a chorus of unrest.

IDENTITY & CURATION: THE BEAUTY OF CATEGORIES

The official title for this festival is The Chorus These Poets Create:
Twenty Years of Letras Latinas. By calling it a chorus, the curators
make us privy to the coming harmony, stimulating our imagination,

& their task is to make this meld without droning or cloning & I ask
how does a community come to sound like itself? There are two risks:
homogeneity risks incest; heterogeneity, bedlam. Community respects

autonomy, while ensuring each poem’s pizzaz. The poet — freely
bound to tradition — opens their doors & is always welcoming.
In the home of the poet, the rule is relax & see what art reveals.

Here, we have a neighborhood, a skyscraper, a small town, a cul-de-sac;
there are similarities, which we can group, identify & make into categories,
to help us find what we love. Where there is one, there are sure to be many.

HMMM & BANG: THE SPECTRE OF THE SPECTRUM

Would it be a total copout to say every time we make a spectrum
it’s not to pigeonhole but to invite cross-categorical recognition?
While I do appreciate fluidity, I must also persistently shun

the thinking that fluidity reveals anything not already felt
& widely ignored. It’s strikingly condescending to suggest
otherwise, to insist there are those who have never awoken

& who do not witness their own life like so many dominoes,
the days all collapsing atop each other. Behold! Woe to poets
of all persuasions who seek to persuade! Behold! We coalesce

around convictions. Only we who make community can celebrate.
We do not rage (as these last 9 damning lines), nor do we berate.
Tapped into the body politic & the body poetic we hmmm & bang.

Neither are the body politic nor the body poetic abstract.
Adela Najarro’s “What Poetry Told Me” states, in fact,
Poetry…prayed for us. Words as omens and talismans.

What are omens & talismans? An omen is when the outside affirms
the inside, when the external relays. It comes from the Greek for bird.
Talisman comes from the Greek, telos, end. A theologian at a university

may construct a teleological argument about how our day-to-day
should be made to bring about Heaven on Earth. Poetry…prayed
for us. Najarro’s poem Hmmms: it wants there to be a community

of poets, in spite of the unruly & untamable nature
of Poetry, which leaves flour all over the counters
but which, before leaving, burns down the barriers

between us. Here it is! Behold the poem! The thing that unites us.
Michelle Otero continues this united celebration in “Communion,”
especially with her quick-altering image, equal parts Bang & Hmmm:

Said he rode a jackrabbit                     said
I know you think it’s impossible but
                                                        I had a       tiny      saddle

Her sly speaker plus her rodeo-in-miniature evoke the contemplative,
the Hmmm; yet, my own imagination manifests a parallel superlative,
where the jackrabbit bucks like a bronco thru an audience of dandelions,

where I, as the reader, play the most important part of the poem,
the imaginative participant. Whether it’s Hmmm or Bang depends
on my mental landscape, what I ate for lunch, if I still text my ex,

etcetera. Nevertheless, I insist that my spectrum is neither arbitrary
nor superfluous. To rip off Eliot’s dichotomy on good versus great:
a good poem has both Bang & Hmmm, but a great poem is all Bang

or all Hmmm. In the same way, a good reader can make any thought 
into Hmmm or Bang, but a great reader can’t help but have thoughts
that are all Hmmm or Bang. The insanely great Cormac McCarthy

explained his inspiration for The Road. He was in a hotel room in Texas
with his young son & he looked out the window & imagined apocalypse:
the city ablaze, its people all on fire, the already-black highways as ash.

The necropoetic contains an inherent Bang (as the phrase ‘not with
a whimper but with a bang’ indicates), though Carmen Calatayud’s
“In The Surgical Ward” potentiates Bangs for her Hmmms to diffuse:

her hospital’s twisted saws become a long drive into the amygdala;
her titanium flesh, instead of a critique, becomes Neptunian dust. 
An opioid episode, her poem Hmmms along, through a trance. 
Necro (from Proto-Indo-European for violent death, Latin
for killing, & Greek for dead body) in the hands of Calatyud
becomes biohistorical & cosmic. If art is a time machine,
hers Hmmms at lightspeed & community is its engine.

IDENTITY & CURATION: THE ELECTRIC TOUCH

Imagine you want to put together a bang without strings or wind or brass.
At your disposal are only the poetic voice’s valences — Hmmms & Bangs
— it’s an unstable symphony or rather (less pretentiously) it is like DJ’ing.

DJs help us have each other, they give us fun, they maximize experience.
Aren’t poems maximizations? Mouthfuls? Making poetry an EDM festival?
If so, we need a line-up, hired & passionate help, to show off the ensemble,

exemplars, who, by bringing many together, make pitch perfect possible.
For this fest of Latinx poetix, they’re Francisco Aragón & Laura Villareal.
Their touch sparks, makes both power & power outage possible. Electrical

undercurrent, circuitboard operator, this is the invisible job of the curator,
who puts poems together according to their frictions & pleasure centers.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s “God Was Not” begins with an Octavia Butler

epigram: All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes
you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change. Bermejo narrates
three moments of touch, the first & the last both forceful if mundane,

not quite violent, but certainly not tender. The first is how you liked
to say goodbye…to lift my body from the ground till bones cracked;
the last, a nightmare….your hand pleading with my breasts — Awake!

— Alive! — Stay! I caressed your beard. The moment in the middle
is a conversation at a diner, a glance of God inhabiting their quiet dicho,
which isn’t spelled out but which may be A quien le dan pan que llore:

who is given bread cries, which ressembles the plea of the Our Father,
give us our daily bread. Bermejo Spanglishly jokes thatTengo hambre
translates to have a hunger. I make a similar joke, Tengo Harambe,

about the gorilla mourned by Musk & who in 2016 received 11,000 votes.
Bermejo pairs change with immutability & violence with closeness —
the changes in her lover’s expressions over & above his muted violence

— so a poem is also curation. Every line is tightly curated by its author.
Intentionality (a term tossed around in our studies) is par for the course.
The curator identifies said intentions then ties them together with peers.

Curation occurs everywhere: on channels & playlists,
in friendgroups & on bookshelves; we curate our outfits;
when curation’s cogent, we anthologize its aesthetics.

Artists have phases, eras aesthetics. Poetic festivals: what have they?
Dan Vera’s “Instructions Upon Arrival” insists us reader-enjoyers say
the dozens of names the immigrants brought … [&] Record the shapes

— but why? To what end? To do what the festival hopes:
to make an ark (one by one) & make of its makers a home.
When I ask do I like this poem what do I want to know?

The same way we might like a person, a poem, too, we can like.
Rhetorical segues aside, the key word really is like, which invites
simplicity & which might be maddening, but which I hope is right.

Can I laugh with this poem? Can I learn from this person?
Does this person delight? Does this poem surprise? Poem
& person, they’re alike. The late Louis Gluck once said,

of reflecting on past poems, that they were proof she existed,
not she necessarily, but a version of herself, with its inflected
moods & sights & feelings & all the past particulars of herself.

Pastness stands in stark contrast to a home’s central feature: stability.
The home has a foundation of concrete, it hopes to facilitate stability,
to be a covenant between its children & its parents; without stability

there can be no home. Instead of stability, I could also say permanence.
Community is a way of combining concepts of pastness with resilience.
This is where I am going with this: the festival’s curators express latinx

poetix as something eternal,
cross-generational & stable.
It’s religious, on the whole.

I began this section by reflecting on Bermejo’s poem, “God Was Not.”
I continued by looking at Vera’s poem, which is abundant in religiosity;
are a wing-shaped chorus & flowers like trumpets not quite seraphic? 

Vera’s exclamation like nothing else in the world! is nicely apophatic,
that is, built on the proposition to treat the world as if God were in it.
This one poem festival of Latinx poetix is often religiously explicit,

unitarian, with its Kingdom of Heaven on Earth composed of poets.
In the 11th century, Hugh of St. Victor described it, It is the trumpet,
it is the mountain, & the desert, & the promised land. It is the ship,

it is the way across the sea. It is the ark … the flock … the garden,
If you have this, then you have everything. … & your heart is at rest….
We must built it within ourselves, so that we can live in it within ourselves.

LATINOS & POETRY: IT TAKES A VILLAGE

In truth, it takes a ragtag posse of poets, a wrangling group of wordsmiths,
who are not quick to reject, shirk or exclude, & who have no shibboleths
but communal views. Contemporary Latinx poetix has few pre-requisites:

– location, though said location can be anywhere on North or South America;
– political position, though it mostly checks the box for None of the Above;
– heritage, though it’s constantly fluid & canonical hegemony is anathema.

Luivette Resto’s “What the Moon Said to the Poet” fits this capacious set
— with its location, Lake Arrowhead; though, location serves as criticism,
countries figure out how to inhabit me / instead of caring for their own inhabitants.

— Save this biopolitical dig above, little if anything is said of politics;
freedom (the brightness of the day & this season’s intentions) seeks 
a poet. — For heritage, how’s, Rituals performed beneath my beauty.

Resto’s poem, which turns location into criticism, politics into a wry elsewhere,
& heritage into something hyper-private & intimate, is comparable to “flowers 
for Robert Waddell: an elegy” by Grisel Y. Acosta in their shared personal flare.

Acosta’s elegy reminds me (due to its dissimilarity) of Merwin’s one-line elegy
Who would I show it to? A poem is when author, audience & form make a seam.
Merwin sees no audience for an elegy: written for the dead, its audience is dead.

Acosta’s elegy denies death; its title indicates this denial.
Flowers show a life can continue if it’s remembered well.
He renders his poem tripartite, by bolding it in the middle:

we kill begins the bold & it ends you are. Permanence begins
in death. Eternity commences when life’s action rolls to Fin.
This poem ends with you are alive in me but begins we kill:

Acosta recognizes as Resto recognizes, there’ll be dead entities;
Acostas denies as Resto denies, you & I won’t be what dies;
Acosta celebrates as Resto celebrates, memory & flesh are alive.

HMMM & BANG: TRANSCENDENT FLESH 

Think of touch. We lick fingers to flip pages in books. Keyboards,
we tap & type on. Mouth & tongue are the embodied source of words.
Love language includes physical touch. Sign language, of course.

Poets have a personal touch, imprint intimacy, which appears as either
Hmmm or Bang; either-or, fact is, both allude to sex. Hmmm precedes
the climactic Bang; a mental muse, the initial should we, shouldn’t we,

& it also follows the Bang; the cuddles, the pillow talk. Bang is now:
brace for impact—bodies on one another—when tongues touch wow.
As so many Hmmms lead to the Bang, so the Bang is the backbone

of Poetry, while Hmmms are its feelers, that big sexy brain, its hairs,
which love poems parse, making of each follicle a forest or tangle
or as Darrel Alejandro Holnes in “Transcendental Love Song,”

a lust like hydrogen or helium … to be elemental, to be beyond
city or state. His Bang is the Big Bang, & also the animal, raw,
and rocket shipped. Holnes juxtaposes salt-of-the-earth & star

whereas Aleida Rodriguez, in “Pamela Franklin’s Neck,” doesn’t go planetary
but smooshes head & body onto nape, keeping both her feet on this planet.
Both her eyes are glued to the TV, where the screen is for the earth a net

that collects the evocative. All said, Rodriguez’s poem stays in the realm
of the Hmmm. In her last stanza, her speaker-voyeur sees the actual Pamela
but their eyes meet fleetingly. This muse, described merely as horizontal,

stands in quiet contrast to Holnes’ galactic love-fuck. Rodriguez provides
her muse attention, I can identify her from behind within seconds. Collide
is how Holnes loves. Rodriguez loves by appreciating, by standing beside,

almost alongside, letting her go her own way. What we talk about when 
we talk about love is how individuals become pillars for eachother, as in
Ada Limón’s “While Everything Else Was Falling Apart,” a sonnet; it begins

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen 
years ago now, the L train came clanking by

Union Square symbolizes togetherness—you can’t abbreviate Union Square
without US. The L symbolizes separation, this line going here, that line there,
& also momentary connection, when intersection makes what’s known appear.

As Rodriguez & Holnes
are two sides of distance
Limón is to knownness.

On the other side, Valerie Martinez, who displaces
knownness (subject, object, act) with consonance
in “between our legs all manner of.” The poem’s

title indicates a plural first person, which the body
of the poem (with rarest exception) doesn’t need.
She replaces the titular bodies—the you & the me

by transforming them into sound: salt tin coins dropping; echoing;
belly; field; blue-green; murmuring; expanding; deep—stiching
them into her 13 line sonnet, syllable by syllable, indeed, ee by ee. 

And er by er: ear; rose; dirt; here; word; there;
in this poem, the you is the ee & the me is the er; 
exquisitely intimate, the ee & er become hammering.

All this to say, love is one of the festival’s themes. Personal bonds
are, like so many paper links, stapled & draped, a unified response.
Another theme is pain. Love in spite of pain. Pain because of love.

LATINOS & POETRY: GRITOS & GUMPTION

I’ll jump right in. Sheila Maldonado’s “strategic” slips words between
sounds: a scream / through a / screen / I see / unseen / I’m seen / obscene.
Since an obscene event is an apocalypse, so an obscene sound is a scream:

what is obscene is what should not be; that it is not, hinges
on it being kept from occuring; it’s a happening that’s restricted.
War is obscene because it’s perpetually possible but reigned in.

It’s a very simple logic. Those who want to wage war are told no
so there is none. For there to be war—obscene—the wrathful soul
must be released, equipped, endlessly & enthusiastically bolstered.

In war, there are screams
—war cries for victories,
the deafening screech

of the obliterated—their alternative is resigned silence,
well-known on city streets, the death of resilience.
Maldonado’s scream illustrates how those of us

who want to scream are made—by a monitor / in the middle / of the Americas
—into the monster. You aren’t supposed to scream in our disneylandified USA,
well, unless it’s on a roller coaster or at a concert. Be quietly content, just okay

with the way. Pop champagne if you win. Politely clap, or you’re a sore loser.
Winners versus losers, a contraption for forgetting that life is full of abusers,
against which there are no recourse. When the President, the big who’s who,

is the very pinnacle of abuse, when resigned silence briefly speaks
only to flippantly utter unsurprise, what right is left but to scream?
The next (& final) two poems join Maldonado’s perfect screaming.

Carmen Giménez’s “Screaming” (things really can be too on-the-nose)
narrates her geriatric mother’s grunts & cries, like mis hijos, mis hijos,
her barbaric yawp, to which Giménez responds, I scream back into

the chirp of cicadas…the scream vibrating outwards, send it out to touch the edge
of her scream, so she feels me, hija. Not unlike Maldonado’s scream, Giménez’s
is a last resort, something to do against that about which there is nothing else

to be done. Every scream has commonalities: a pressing need,
which sits in the gut or the chest so heavy it requires release;
a refusal which is refuse, yet more coherent than any screed;

in fact, to give more content to a scream than its exhilarating expulsion
would be (in a strange application of the rule less is more) a reduction;
it’s self-sufficient; it shall continue until the vocal chords or lungs give.

In Richard Blanco’s “/ For / After / Jan Beatty /,” fuck
is the scream that keeps on giving: fuck this-fuck
that-fuck them-fuck me-fuck it all, he chucks

out his regular rules to cap off the poetry festival.
True, people say fuck like it’s going out of style.
True, poets stear clear of obscenities, out of a mild 

temperament or unquestioned habit or a practiced belief
that le mot juste isn’t ever shit, fuck, damn, hell or queef.
Or, as Maldonado & Giménez show, that there’s a scream

in obscenity, emanating from it & encapsulating it.
By divying his scream into individual fucks (literally
having many fucks given), Blanco’s scream is direct.

He directs it at his own fractured forgiveness: at his mother
who never read his poems, at his grandmother who slurred
fuck’n faggot, at his grandfather, & for waiting to whisper

te amo on his deathbed, at his father. Perhaps the difference
between expletives, composed of recognizable phonemes,
& chest-shaking screams, composed of uncountable stress,

is that an expletive can be targeted. It’s pretty easy to map 
each Blanco / fuck \ to a warmonger’s fuck yeah take that!
Perhaps a scream is the most eloquent expression of can’t,

just an apostrophe down & an addended letter away from a canto
whereas an expletive is the most eloquence expression of can,
an insistence that there’ll be a difference further along the path,

where Blanco’s fuck finally & powerfully forgives,
where the poet & the reader just love & let live,
& community grows & understanding isn’t a sieve.

EPILOGUE: CONCLUDING TIDBITS 

I must admit I struggled across months, in cities & in mountains, to write this.
I did my own a spin on that problematic ergo imperative term, Latinx Poetix.
I think nation & ethnicity, devoid of community or heritage, are impositions.

I embrace Whitman’s atoms, off-the-cuff if sincere, tempestuous but honest.
I wish I had the space for “Transgender opera for perpetual metamorphosis.”
I’ll say it contains one of my favorite phrases in the festival, cosmic faggots.

I was regularly ungentle, too damned individual, & frequently didn’t soften.
I felt friendship flow from every poet’s fingers & both curators—a success!
I know, with no muse other than its own music, this festival makes history.