Poetry Centered
Poetry Centered
Vickie Vértiz: Path to a Future
Vickie Vértiz curates poems that chart a path to a collective future where we can survive crises, connect with others, and see life’s beauty. She introduces Khadijah Queen looking to words as weapons amidst grief (“bloodroot,” “Dear fear…”), Lehua M. Taitano moving through the luminous ocean of time (“Queer Check-Ins”), and Angel Dominguez breaking through the world’s isolation (“What Does the Future Sing to You in Dreams”). Vértiz closes with her poem “Disco,” a celebration of discovery and delight.
Watch Suheir Hammad’s “Gaza Suite” from the 2009 Palestine Festival of Literature.
Watch the full recordings of Queen, Taitano, and Dominguez reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Khadijah Queen (February 18, 2016)
Lehua M. Taitano (July 25, 2019)
Angel Dominguez (August 3, 2023)
You can also enjoy a recording of Vickie Vértiz reading for the Poetry Center in 2016.
Read about the Voca captioning project here. Every recording on Voca now has transcripts and captions—dive in and enjoy!
[MUSIC PLAYING](JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON) This is Poetry Centered, bringing you archival recordings of poets reading their work for the University of Arizona Poetry Center, curated for you by a contemporary poet. These recordings come to you from Voca, the Poetry Center's online audiovisual archive. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, the Center's archivist, here to welcome you. We have another great episode for you today, hosted by Vickie Vértiz. But first, an extremely exciting update. After three years and literally thousands of hours of work, every recording on Voca now has captions and transcripts, every recording. That's more than 12,000 caption files and around 6 million words. Search engines index these files, meaning you'll be able to find recordings on Voca by searching for words or phrases. We're pretty sure that we're the first of our peers to complete a comprehensive captioning project like this for a literary archive. And I can't even express how good it feels to have completed this work. Huge shout out to Sarah Kortemeier, our library director, for her amazing leadership and dedicated work on this project. She's written an informative and entertaining blog post about this work, and you can find a link in the show notes. We also want to thank the Mellon Foundation for the grant that made this enormous undertaking possible. So go check out those captions and transcripts. We hope it improves everyone's ability to access this unique archive. All right. Back to today's episode. We are delighted to welcome Vickie Vértiz, author of two books of poetry. Her most recent is Auto Body published last year. She teaches writing at UC Santa Barbara. Vickie was the Poetry Center's summer resident back in 2016, and you can watch the beautiful readings she gave on Voca. There's a link in the show notes. In this episode, Vickie looks to poetry as a path to the future, one where we can survive crises, connect with others, and see life's beauty. She shows us that path through recordings of Khadijah Queen, Lehua M. Taitano, and Angel Dominguez, who we also heard in the previous episode. Vickie, Thanks so much and welcome.[MUSIC PLAYING](VICKIE VÉRTIZ) Saludos. This is Vickie Vértiz speaking to you from a summer night in El Sereno, Tongva land, also known as Los Angeles, California. I'm beyond excited to share the work of these magnificent poets with you. The task of selecting only three poets from the archive seemed too great at first, but I followed my heart and selected people whose work was personally meaningful to me and my family and which also illuminates a path to a collective future. My selection of this work is a celebration because I believe that is what poetry is. I come from a lineage of poetry that is about valuing and elevating the beauty of everyday life, especially that of Black, Indigenous, and people of color, queer folks, working class people. And so to my select number of poets, I will add one important voice. I want to bring your attention to the incredibly necessary work of Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian American poet, author, and political activist. She is the author of Breaking Poems and Zaatar Diva and several other volumes for which she was awarded an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award. After she was his instructor at Vona, a workshop for writers of color many years ago, she sent a postcard to Kenji Lu, my partner, encouraging his writing to continue. That postcard now sits on our altar, where everyday we pray. During this time of ongoing brutality and reckoning with US complicity in the Gaza genocide and other atrocities abroad, I especially want people to listen to her performance of the five poems "Gaza Suite." The series was written during the August 2009 assault on Gaza and performed at the Palestine Festival of Literature the same year. Hammad reminds us to each day pick faith over fear, even when each day is also a mirror of fire. The Voca book of poet I selected is Khadijah Queen. In this excerpt, Queen is reading from her book Fearful Beloved. Queen is a multidisciplinary writer and visual artist, the author of six books. Her fifth, I'm So Fine, a List of Famous Men and What I Had On is one of my favorite books of hers. Radical Poetics, a book of criticism is forthcoming from her in 2025. So look out for that. In the reading, Queen contextualizes a drawing she made of herself in a performance art piece about being in grief in public as a Black woman in the world. In this sharing, we are invited to be in and with the feeling, with the resistance to the violences against Black women by the state but also patriarchy or as some of us know these spaces too well, the street, our homes, our schools. I am always moved by her ever shifting genres, ever feminist, experimental and fearless, embodying her experiences and transmuting them on the page for all of our transformation. In one of the "Dear fear" poems she recites here, we are left with the speaker as she, quote,"sharpens the leaden blade of her voice so that we may too use our words as weapons." Here is Khadijah Queen reading, "bloodroot, dear fear, dear fear, and dear fear."[MUSIC PLAYING](KHADIJAH QUEEN)"Bloodroot. Our native bloodroot, a girl whose loose tongue wrapped in a single leaf reveals her. Glinting surface, dissolute gut, each notched blossom snugly tucked. Hiding in trees, sheltered from the remnants of winter, speaking to animals who bow their heads to listen. Dear fear, a sound made by a living animal is a voice. Sometimes pursuit is an animal. A swing toward the essential scream. A scream also is fire, an unpleasant consumption, a scintillant avoidance. Dear fear, true or false, you crawl into the made up skin, your priority potential, your actuality as potentate, your carbon irascible like traffic. We choose when you are in annoyance and when to fall in step with you, when to have somewhere to go. On the slant, you point with hard fingers, the mirror swings. My fingerprints doubled in the glass. The bodies encroach. I sharpen the leaden blade of my voice. Dear fear, some fears exist in space and not in the body. In some bodies, you are not learned. But I learned so much about you, I could never have loved you. I have careened into that knowledge like a real person. I have gathered myself into that knowledge without writing it down. But now, I write all of it down, and it will mean you still exist. Your spectrality exists. Your infinite veer."[MUSIC PLAYING](VICKIE VÉRTIZ) The second poet I selected is Lehua M. Taitano reading at the Poetry Center in 2019. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer, an interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan, also known as Guam, and the co-founder of Art 25, art in the 25th century. In 2018, I selected their work to receive the Poetry Center residency in Tucson, which is a dream for poets because you get to live just a few feet away from the Poetry Center library and archive. What a dream to contemplate and cherish time and the word. I chose her work because it was luminous and created pathways into a very near future that we need so much. Her writing continues to remind us of the ways we need to get back in order to survive all of the crises we have created in the world. This reading is especially touching because a young child comes up to select the final poem. The child identifies the school that they attend, and they are so proud to be standing before us curating our listening. Because it is a video poem, we go on a journey with the writer into a day in the life. And we emerge at the end, seemingly from a very long swim in the ocean across time and space. The speaker reminds us of the power at the end, their origin, their skills, and their way forward. The writer says, "The world spits, grapples, tries to tie me up in basements to rid themselves of my insistence. Ancestors wired me a path within. I expand. I carry within 100,000 wombs of spectacular light." This video poem was created for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and it is called "A Day in the Queer Life."[MUSIC PLAYING](LEHUA M. TAITANO) I have a very young participant here who is going to choose the last poem that I will share with you, and then I'll read it. Pick a good one. OK. Let me see what it says. OK. I'm going to look. OK. Pick another one.[LAUGHTER] She didn't pick-- she didn't pick the one she wanted. You like that one? I think the first one was good, don't you? OK. Tell us your name. Do you want to say it in the microphone? OK. Tell us your name.(BETTY REYES) My name is Betty Reyes. I go at boarding school. Dennehotso Boarding School is where I go, in Dennehotso.(LEHUA M. TAITANO) Betty, you're awesome. Do you think that I could give you a small hug around the shoulder? Thank you so much.[APPLAUSE] So believe it or not, the thing that Betty chose was a video. And the slip of paper that she read and not one that I picked for her said, tell us some things that you're working on right now. So I'm going to share with you a brief video poem that I've been working on for a project for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center called "A Day in the Queer Life." And there are 12 video poems representative of queer Asian or Pacific Islanders. The project is designed to give us visibility and to give us the opportunity to tell our own stories about how are you doing. It's a check in. What is it like to be queer and you today? All of the footage in these videos, these films that we produce are taken by us. So everything that you see is probably from my iPhone. And then there's a story that goes over. Thank you very much."Current, I consider we are made almost entirely of water and electricity. So our vernacular of emotion employs surge, wave, spark, impulse, and current. The flood of salt or rush of crackling blue pulse, of arcing rivulet. A measurement of with and without. The ecstatic penetration of sperm into egg. We have all seen the microscopic iconography. The homeless state will ordain this. The electric moment of life will brand each womb, sanctified property. My mother was conceived during a war waged on brown bodies and birthed me under a moon obscured by flags. Electric layers of ocean reveal themselves as an ancestral coding of me and her and her and her as the spear and the plunge. The cavern of handprints, the caverns of decapitation. The lightning spark cannot be created because it was already there. In the glum, human nostalgia presses to know where, when, which gods touch the first impulse of light into darkness, first enacted a separation of shadow into meaning. Yet, I fork, bead, ribbon the light into existence insistence with each sloughing of saltwater blood, each recollection of current, current, Tano I' CHamoru. Our people were shaped from stone and the pulsing sea. Sisters crouched body wave kneaded, salt lapped until we tumbled from her, of her, of them, all strong, strong and hold together. Birds regarded our sea foam anklets, our slippery ropes of hair, our cheeks full of pebbles and scattered from the shore singing. We opened our new mouths to our own chorus, crooning sister, brother. We are sun, moon, sky, water, Earth. All siblings. Current, I believe in reincarnation in so much as I know an ancestor passed to me the memory of making oneself into a universe. One self, current, connected to. No. Concurrent with every iteration of subatomic movement. How then, am I queer? Queer. Queer. I am also only queer because there is a world outside of mine. If the world were only me, I would seem just so. A microcosmos of animal, mineral, plant, light, electric. I. Current. Yet the world, here is what I can say. I am I. Warrior I. Glacier I. Photon I. Vine I. Rivulet I. Integer I. Summoner I. Wave I. Exhalation I. Mother I. Lava I. Hilum I. Hypha I. I. I. I. Current. Prism I and culture bending through me. The world spits, grapples, tries to tie me up in basements to rid themselves of my insistence. Ancestor wired me a path within inside the brick spaces throughout and becoming the walls and clouds. I swallow bolts, I expand, I empty. I carry within 100,000 wombs of spectacular light."[MUSIC PLAYING](VICKIE VÉRTIZ) The final poet I selected is Angel Dominguez, a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Maya descent. Born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys by their immigrant family. They're the author of Desgraciado, The Collected Letters, Rose Sun Water and Black Lavender Milk. I first met Angel at Cal State Monterey Bay for a Latinx poetry symposium that ended with an epic road trip to the Bay Area in a van with Farid Matuk, Roque Raquel Salinas, Erick Sáenz, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, and myself. Angel had invited all of us there to that windy coast, that foggy piece of land. And just like the threaded bonds that Angel performs with, we took our connection, our string of love from Monterey to Berkeley to watch Angel read their work and recreate their ancestral homeland through their poetry. We watched enraptured in a tiny room in the Berkeley Art Museum as Angel connected us with strangers, other writers, children, people we would never see again. And for me, this is what poetry can do, connect us when we can see no other way to be connected in a world that wants us to be increasingly isolated and away from one another. Here is Angel reading "What Does the Future Sing to You in Dreams."[MUSIC PLAYING](ANGEL DOMINGUEZ) I had the great honor of holding a poetry workshop here, and I am so grateful for that time and space. And I wanted to share a poem I came out of it. It's called "What Does the Future Sing to You in Dreams?""The future sings still here. The future sings all the demons are dead. The future sings cloud net full of trees. The future sings I remember you, dearest one. The future sings there is still poetry. The future sings we never gave up. The future sings you never gave up. The future sings and sings and sings and sings long into the night of eternity." That's it.[APPLAUSE][MUSIC PLAYING](VICKIE VÉRTIZ) From my own work, I will be reading from my recent book, Auto Body from Notre Dame Press. Thank you for listening. I hope that these works will inspire you to live more fully, enjoy, and to see the many paths that poetry creates to our future."Disco." One Saturday night, Mario takes me to circus disco. Our path is a smoke trail of bacon wrapped hot dogs. We are really not on a date. His muscle tank top is ribbed tight. All eyes are on him. Como copo de algodón, ay la verdolaga. He spins me into the riot. Men opening fast. Cumbia hinges. Bodies perfumed in high cinnamon and cool water eye scream. Some women wear button-ups and newsboys. Others, tacones and red enamel. The lights go out and Rocio Dúrcal walks into the spotlight. She drifts in an emerald dress. Her neck is rhinestone vibrato. This is my first drag show and I don't know the rules. Rocio sings, Me gustas mucho. Me gustas mucho tu. Middle aged men and señoras who look like my mom hold up dollar bills. Look at us, all regular degular. We swoon and snap when Rocio takes our bills. A kiss and another on the cheek. Her lips quiver. The room alight with splendor. Sequins and khakis, tight black skirts, and hungry paychecks. Then my brain makes the record skip. A bald dude in a Dodgers jersey walks up to her. Who's this fool? I say. Girl, Mario says, don't you know everyone has a dollar? The homey gently tucks the bill in the gemstone bosom. Shit, I think. If he can be gay, he who probably drives a Caprice Classic or maybe a Honda Civic with a loud, loud tailpipe. If his bald head can be gay, then so can I. I can be a cumbia riot. I'm not a player like some fools, but I can be hot pants and Rocio's lipstick. I'm saying, I want to be an emerald bosom. Go, Dodgers! Play ball. Play me love is the message, and I'll learn how to hustle, how to push my hips so far I'll knock fools down. I am not afraid. In this sparkle, in the middle of all of us, I am not afraid to burn down this and every song. Did I find my light? Is there one for me? Is this the moon? Or am I just born?"[MUSIC PLAYING](JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON) Vickie, I love that final line."Is this the moon or am I just born?" Thank you so much for this episode. Listeners, thank you. We wouldn't be doing this if you weren't out there to hear it. And we're so grateful for your time. We'll be taking a break after this, but you can look forward to new episodes this fall. Until then, go enjoy those captions and transcripts on Voca at voca.arizona.edu. We'll see you next time.(ARIA PAHARI) Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world-class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audio visual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.