IN THE CLASSROOM
"The Extreme Contemporary of Latino Aesthetics"
How can Latino cultural production in the academy reach the very constituencies it seeks to represent? "The Extreme Contemporary of Latino Aesthetics" is a pedagogical practice we've developed in class that allows us to counter Latino-bashing creatively by informing both cultural consumers and subaltern agents of issues that are affecting Latinos directly. In the link above, Nikki López "reads" Samuel P. Huntington's Who Are We The Challenge to America's National Identity and responds by conjuring his image with a passionate and personalized reinterpretation of the American Dream as a nightmare to scores of nationals and cultural citizens excluded from the national patriotic embrace.
PUBLIC TALKS
"Losing Earth: Tomás Rivera and the Anti-Aesthetic Turn" (Part I)
"Losing Earth: Tomás Rivera and the Anti-Aesthetic Turn" (Part II)
FEATURED POETS
Recently, a class lecture on voice, declamation, and modernist appropriations of ethnically marked aesthetic expression led me to these two very different uses of voice and poetic personae. Notice O'Hara's superior command of prosody but near failure of declamation in comparison to Plath's highly stylized self-presentation in the absence of any vocal spontaneity.
Frank O'Hara reads, "The Inca Mystery," "Lana Turner Has Collapsed," "Song"
Sylvia Plath reads, "Daddy," "The Applicant"
And then there's Lezama Lima's "Pensamiento en La Habana," rarely commented at length; its a long poem, willingly cryptic, brilliant. Here, he seems to want to tell a story about yearning in the vocal staccato of a longing symbolized by "fango," "pájaros," "la urna cineraria" ("my soul is not an ashtray," after all), the inevitable "hombre desnudo," and always, La Habana, as the canvass that contains and registers that yearning. If you listen to it at length, you wonder how the "siempre goloso Lezama," as Arenas called him, could contain so many breaths in this reading without a vocal shudder.
José Lezama Lima, "Pensaminetos en La Habana"