Ruben Quesada Introduces Readers to the Expansive World of Latinx Poetics

Ruth Joffre interviews Ruben Quesada on his new book ‘Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry,’ the first anthology devoted to essays exploring the subject from a Latinx perspective.

Anthologies hold a special place in my heart. Like story collections, they open up windows into many different ways of thinking and being, inviting readers to learn more about a subject or an author, to dive deep into a previously unknown bibliography and absorb a whole wealth of new information. A great anthology can bring together the most respected authors in a field and lift up emerging voices, and the absence of such an anthology often means those voices have been overlooked, undervalued, not given the attention they deserve. Such was the case with thinkers writing about Latinx poetics—until now.

While anthologies of Latinx poetry or of an individual Latinx poet’s work have been available for decades, we have never before had an anthology of essays about Latinx poetics. What is it? What does it mean to be a Latinx poet? Essays on these topics have appeared in literary and academic journals over the years but have never before been collected into a book devoted to exploring the subject. Poet and editor Ruben Quesada sought to fill that gap with the anthology Latinx Poetics, out this month from University of New Mexico Press.

I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy of the book and to speak with editor Ruben Quesada about the process of publishing this anthology, what it means for poetry, and how he hopes the book will expand the reader’s understanding of Latinx poetry and all that informs it.

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Ruth Joffre: I remember hearing about this anthology on Twitter, where there was a lot of excitement about the project and what it would mean for Latinx poets. When did the idea for this anthology arise, and how did you go about making it a reality?

Ruben Quesada: The origins of this anthology project began in the late 1990s. I was an undergraduate studying poetry at Riverside, and that year we had two visiting poets. They were the first poets who looked like people in my family—uncles and aunts. Poets like Francisco Aragón and Rigoberto González; Carmen Giménez, Valerie Martínez, Norma Cantú, Natalie Diaz, Vickie Vértiz, and Allison Hedge Coke. These poets gave me the confidence to be a poet, critic, and activist. They have been a light in my world. Latinx poets, critics, editors, and activists have been models of excellence.

In the early 2000s, when I was at UC Riverside, I imagined an anthology like Dana Gioia’s Twentieth-Century American Poetics (2004), collecting writing from Latinx poets at various stages of their careers. “So Much Depends” by Julia Alvarez in Twentieth-Century American Poetics describes how she discovered William Carlos Williams’s language and rhythm by connecting to his use of syntax like her native Spanish. Alvarez reminds us that by “writing powerfully about our Latino culture, we are forging a tradition and creating a literature that will widen and enrich the existing canon. So much depends upon our feeling that we have a right and responsibility to do this.” Alvarez admits that when she was younger, she “was embarrassed by the ethnicity that rendered [her] colorful and an object of” cultural performance. Alvarez’s life experience was not in the literature. She sought stories that reflected experiences like her own.

I began to write the proposal for this anthology in 2012. I’d secured most of all twenty-four contributions by the end of 2017. I spent the next two years in contact with my editor at UNM Press, who helped me copyedit, respond to, and communicate with contributors. There’s an essay by Jen Hofer that I wish I could have published, but I couldn’t afford to pay for the royalties. It was an extraordinary manifesto.

An essay that resonates most with me is Blas Falconer’s “Puerto Rican Poetry and a State of Independence.” The piece introduces me to the relationship between Falconer and his grandmother and a poetic form called the plena, or the periodic canto. The poems in Yerba Bruja by Puerto Rican activist Juan Antonio Corretjer (1908–1985) are “a patriotic symbol.” Like Alvarez, here was a moment of discovery about a people’s history and literature.

During the SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic, from 2019 to 2021, I focused my time on completing and publishing the anthology. It will be published on November 15, 2022. Review and exam copies are available for instructors and reviewers.

RJ: Given this particular political moment and the damage done to the Latinx community by the previous administration, this is a significant time to publish a book like this. Can you speak a little to that question of “why now”?

RQ: Most presidential administrations are flawed, some more than others, in radical and ordinary ways. We all have insights into our communities on many levels. I’m interested in the individual—and others like me—with working-poor backgrounds of Latin American heritage and Costa Rican descent. A growing number of US Latinx poets consider themselves Ticos or Costa Rican. They include Steve Castro and Jacob Shores-Arguello. I feel like I’ve known them most of my life, and, anytime I see them, no time has passed.

As Dana Gioia wrote in the introduction to his anthology, “Who wouldn’t want to have all the possibilities of the language available, especially the powerful enchantments” of a poet’s mind and process? In the past twenty years, Latinx literature has become more expansive and inclusive, and this is a new addition to that canon.

RJ: In the introduction, you write, “Poems are a record of time,” an insight we see echoed in a number of the essays, which talk about poetry as one means of documenting a writer’s life, culture, and personal growth. Can you expand on this insight and discuss what it means to you?

RQ: Poetry and the poet’s relationship to language have always interested me. As a Spanish-heritage speaker, I’ve always had a circuitous relationship with language. How can a poet contain an experience with language? And how do we communicate the human condition across culture, language, and time?

When I was eight years old, my mother took me to the local library, and I got my first library card. The first books I wanted to read were about time travel, physics, and the elements that make up the universe and our experience within it. The first formula I memorized was E = mc2.

E = mc2 is the most famous equation, but what does it mean? Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Energy can become mass and vice versa. They are the same thing but in different forms. Poetry offers clarity on our current circumstances. A poem can explain something about the world and mesmerize us. Mai Der Vang and Anthony Cody are two Fresno poets who follow the lineage of US poets laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and Phil Levine. Their attention to language and history blurs and sustains our understanding of language. The poems are an interactive space for deep engagement by deconstructing sentences and historical information. Cody’s poems offer readers moments of a documented past excluded from American history. Addressing social and historical issues with misunderstood styles and forms to communicate the human condition is a new perspective on our ontology.

Poetry offers clarity on our current circumstances.

RJ: As a Latinx writer, I found the experience of reading this book to be one of expansion, illumination, and even validation, and I imagine many readers will have a similar reaction. I’m curious: How has the experience of editing this anthology impacted you as a writer, scholar, and thinker?

RQ: You’ve summed up the experience that I hope readers will have. Editing this anthology was a juggling act for deeply painful reasons. This book exists because of the help I received from UNM Press editor Elise McHugh, poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and many others who’ve put up with my shenanigans over the years.

It’s an honor to have the University of New Mexico Press take on this project. UNM Press introduced me to poets like Paula Gunn Allen, Gabriela Mistral, and more writers of Latin American and Indigenous heritage. Just as they’d done, I wanted to introduce poets of Latin American heritage to all types of readers.

It was important to me to include academic and artistic philosophies. I’d spent the last decade as a student and teacher and wanted to learn from poets living in the world with me. Juan Felipe Herrera, poet laureate of the United States (2015–2017), said it best in his foreword, “The Mindful Space of Joyous Creation.” He writes:

I salute these writers—
the warrior-seekers, philosophers—survivors, archeologists of the elusive and ungraspable self, that thing related to the other thing called identity, titled “Latino Poetics” or “Latinx Aesthetics” or the “Other Tribe,” as Valerie Martínez says in her essay and ire’ne lara silva [asks] “American?” Or is there “such a thing?” Raina J. León ponders. I salute them.

RJ: What other books on or of Latinx poetics would you recommend?

RQ: This book is one of a kind. Many anthologies have collected poems and prose by Latinx poets and writers, but essays on the composition of language in this manner still need to be created. A peer-reviewed collection of essays on the nature and composition of writing poetry has been absent in American literature.

In my introduction to this anthology, I offer a survey of recent poetry anthologies. Over the past two decades, a widening interest in Latinx poetry has created a need for anthologies. Some of my favorite collections are:

Contemporary Costa Rican Poetry (2012), edited by Carlos Francisco Monge and Victor S. Drescher;

Latinx Comic Book Storytelling (2016), edited by Frederick Luis Aldama;

¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets (2017), edited by Melissa Castillo-Garsow;

Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (2018), edited by Christopher Soto.

RJ: What are you working on next?

RQ: I’m working on getting the word out about this anthology to libraries, teachers, lovers of poetry. I’ve been writing more poetry, and a collection is coming together.