Eduardo Martínez-Leyva: Being a Good Ancestor

Eduardo Martínez-Leyva considers what it means to be a good ancestor, to live and work with the desire to comfort those who will follow us in their own trying times. He shares Gloria Anzaldúa modeling the mixed languages of the border (“mujer cacto”), Rigoberto González leading the gaze to strange beauty (“Walking by the Panteón San Franciscano”), and Adrienne Rich showing the way to walk away from comfort (“August”). Martínez-Leyva closes with his “Learning the Language,” a poem that springs from the ground broken open and prepared by those before him.

Listen to the full recordings of Anzaldúa, González, and Rich reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:

Gloria Anzaldúa (October 23, 1991)
Rigoberto González (September 22, 1999)
Adrienne Rich (January 31, 1974)

Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.

Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.

Transcript

0:00

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON: 0:02

This is Poetry Centered, where we invite a poet to take us by the hand for a tour of Voca, an online archive of recorded poetry from the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Voca is home to more than 1,000 recordings of poets, reading between 1963 and today. In each episode, you'll hear three poems chosen and introduced for you by guest host. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, the Poetry Center's archivist. Today, our guide will be poet Eduardo Martínez-Leyva. Aria Pahari, the other half of the Poetry Center team, is here to tell us more.

ARIA PAHARI: 0:42

One of poetry's superpowers is its ability to find meaning in details we often overlook. Eduardo Martínez-Leyva's debut poetry collection, Cowboy Park, surges with currents that radiate from slices of life. In the poem, Scenes from a Bone Orchard, the speaker alchemizes the ostensibly simple act of coring an apple by invoking its Spanish equivalent descorazonar, which translates to dishearten. Such metamorphoses re-occur across Cowboy Park. Like when a mother's studying for the US citizenship exam summons the gentle focus of combing for ticks on the head of her firstborn son. Or when a leather harness becomes the beloved recipient of an ode. For this episode, Eduardo selects vocal recordings that resound with the meaning he encounters through the poems of queer literary ancestors. Let yourself bask in the poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa, Rigoberto González, and Adrienne Rich. Chosen and introduced by Eduardo Martínez-Leyva.[MUSIC PLAYING]

EDUARDO MARTÍNEZ-LEYVA: 1:58

Hello, everyone. This is Eduardo Martínez-Leyva recording from Los Angeles, California. I hope you are well from wherever you are listening. It is the beginning of summer, and this time often yields moments of introspection. Lately, I've been asking myself what it means to be a good ancestor. We live in times that feel incredibly fragile, fraught, with so much tension and lack of compassion. In moments like these, it is so easy to shrink, to turn inward, to focus solely on surviving the day. But I keep returning to this idea of responsibility. What is our responsibility to the ones who aren't even here yet? What will we leave behind for them to inherit, to find comfort in when their own times feel dark and uncertain? I know for me, poetry is that solution, that lifeline. So today, I want to honor three queer poets, literary ancestors who cleared a path so that I could be here, writers who were brave, who stood at the intersections of multiple worlds and who refuse to apologize for a single inch of who they are. Writers who I am proud to say are part of my community. I've always viewed Gloria Anzaldúa as a sharp, unyielding light cutting through the dark. I still remember the exact moment I encountered her work. I was sitting in my introduction to creative writing class, a nervous sophomore from the US-Mexico border just trying to figure out how to put words together on a page. And then one day, our professor handed us excerpts from Borderlands La Frontera. Before reading Anzaldúa, I had been taught in subtle and not so subtle ways that my languages had to be kept separate. Growing up bilingual, there was always this pressure not to let the English and the Spanish touch. Don't muddy the waters. Don't speak Spanglish. Don't be a pocho, a word that was thrown around with so much disdain, signaling that you were too American for Mexico and too Mexican for America. You were a fragment, an in between, and incomplete. And then here comes Gloria Anzaldúa. She celebrated the word pocho, moved from English to Spanish with an ease and fearlessness that left me in awe, throwing caution to the wind and breaking every linguistic rule I had been told was sacred. For her, both languages didn't pose a threat or a barrier. In fact, they seemed to be a site of wild creative power and possibility. Her poems then are a reminder that writing from the border, from that space of in-betweenness was not a deficit. It was an asset. Her words were heavy with emotion and a profound sense of place. They taught me the value of taking risks, allowing me to see that my own voice, with all its Spanglish inflections and border nuances, was valid. I applaud her for her candor, the passion, and courage to be herself, to be sincere. Reading her reminds me of home. And I can honestly say she is a truly, truly nuestra gloria, our one and only glory. And here we get to see and listen to her courage in this following recording of"Mujer Cacto" from 1991.[MUSIC PLAYING]

GLORIA ANZALDÚA: 6:26

For The Desert Is No Lady filmmakers and editor, I want to read this. And it's called Mujer Cacto. Are the filmmakers here? This is for you. You probably won't understand a word.[CHUCKLES] It's part of what we were discussing over dinner about landscape. And it's the women's relationship to landscape and women's relationship to the desert and the desert plants and the desert animals. And these women are going to be making a documentary about this. Mujer Cacto. La mujer del desierto tiene espinas. Las espinas son sus ojos. Si tú te le arrimas, te araña. La mujer del desierto tiene largas y afiladas garras. La mujer del desierto mira la avispa clavar su aguijón y chingar a una tarántula. Mira que la arrastra a un agujero, pone un huevo sobre ella. El huevo se abre, el bebé sale y se come la tarántula. No es fácil vivir en esta tierra. La mujer del desierto se entierra en la arena con los lagartos. Se esconde como rata, pasa el día bajo tierra, tiene el cuero duro. No se reseca en el sol, vive sin agua. La mujer del desierto mete la cabeza adentro como la tortuga. Desentierr raíces con su hocico junto con las javalinas. Caza conejos con los coyotes. Como una flor, la mujer del desierto no dura mucho tiempo, pero cuando vive, llena el desierto con flores de nopal o de árbol paloverde. La mujer del desierto enrroscada es serpiente cascabel. Descansa durante el día. Por la noche, cuando hace fresco, bulle con la lechuza. Con las culebras alcanza un nido de pájaros y se come los huevos y los pichoncitos. Cuando se enoja la mujer del desierto, escupe sangre de los ojos como el lagarto cornudo cuando oye una seña de peligro. Salta y corre como liebre, se vuelve arena. La mujer del desierto, como el viento, sopla, hace dunas, lomas. There were about 13 poems here that I tried to translate and couldn't. Half of them I could translate and the translations are in here along with the poems. This was a poem that I tried to translate and it just did not sound right. It didn't sound like what I wanted it to sound in English. So I left it untranslated. Somebody read this and made a painting of a woman with thorns growing out of her flesh in the desert. So I'm sorry if you didn't understand.[MUSIC PLAYING]

EDUARDO MARTÍNEZ-LEYVA: 10:27

Up next is Walking by the Panteón San Franciscano by none other than El Maestro himself, Rigoberto González, a living legend. I chose this poem precisely because it doesn't shy away from the carnality and handles language with a physical, tactile intensity. I first heard Rigoberto González read in person when he visited a university campus in the neighboring town of El Paso, Texas, where I grew up. At that point in my life, I was still testing the waters of poetry. I was unsure if I had the right to call myself a poet. But looking back, I think that was the moment I stopped trying to move away from the genre and simply allowed the genre to get closer to me. I remember thinking, wow, here is a queer Latino man speaking about the body, about desire, about grief, and about the labor of our people with a dignity that was staggering. Every word he spoke resonated with me. It was alive. It wasn't pedantic or detached. It had a pulse. It was sweating. For the first time, I saw my own lived experiences reflected back at me through literature. And I've been intrigued ever since. Rigoberto forces us to look at the things we normally turn away from. He finds a strange, arresting beauty in the most unlikely of places, writing about the clinical dissection of a corpse or the bizarre, repetitive labor of inserting a plastic doll's eyes into its socket and making it feel deeply human, deeply spiritual. His work is evocative, but above all, inspiring. And like all great art, it leaves a mark. It haunts you in the best possible way.[MUSIC PLAYING]

RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ: 12:48

And I like to write a lot of Day of the Dead poems, Día de los Muertos In fact, I think it's coming up. And I'm sure here in Tucson people are very familiar with that Mexican holiday. It's very important to me and to my work. Every year I try to write at least one poem addressing the days of the dead. You probably see the influence of death in my work already. In Mexico, it's true in my town. I'm not sure if it's true throughout the republic. But in my hometown, in Michoacán, basically you pay rent to be buried. You pay rent while you're dead. It's your family does. And if you cannot pay rent, you know what happens? You get evicted. So you get thrown out to the back of the cemetery. And when I was a young boy, I remember we used to go to the back of the cemetery and look at all the coffins. By then, realized that you don't get thrown out after for a month. You were buried, no. It's just years and years and years. People forget that you were buried there. And so not even bones are left. Maybe traces of bone, but not bones anymore. But there is one way that you can really secure your home permanently, and that's perpetuity. You pay this big lump sum to be there for a very long time. Of course, not everybody can afford that. So this is poem is called Walking By the Pantheon San Francisco. And this is-- I call it my tooth poem. And there's actually a notice that I read at the cemetery. Notice-- effective 50 years after the date of your death, those of you who don't pay perpetuity will be uprooted. For more information, please walk over to the civil registry. Ask for Chela.[LAUGHTER] In this cemetery, you can buy perpetuity with vessels. For only 50, you can keep the mossy hair you'll never learn to comb, the fingernails you'll forget to stick in your mouth for comfort. Even if you remember, your fingers will slip out just after the lips slide in. You can have the shroud that will eat through your skin after you split the seams on your sleeping shirt, but you will own every button on that shirt and every bead on your rosary and every ring. And though the beads and stones won't wake anymore, you can be sure they're safe collecting at the bottom of your coffin. And your teeth, oh, yes, those teeth in the back of your mouth, the ones you never used or saw, even those will be finally yours to keep. But you will also keep a more valuable things like your cross. Yes, you can even keep your cross. That gold plated cross your godparent wrapped around your catechism or the all gold one your mother gave up when you married in the church she and your father married in. Whichever one you end up with, you'll keep. Isn't that what you, a good Catholic, would want to do? You'll crease each finger over the knuckles, both knuckles, over the chest and then the ribs will cave in over the lump of dust which used to be your heart. And you'll fold over and over again until you are layers of thin tissue, pious as the Bible. Don't be fooled if your cross seems to have grown. You have tried to shrink down to the size of your cross. You have tried to be devout and hinge yourself on it like a miniature Christ. And that will be your own little secret blasphemy to keep in a box and tuck away the way you used to store old love letters. The way you will store your own tongue. This, you will learn. And this knowledge too, you will keep. And no one will take that or anything else away from you. No one will ever search inside your pockets or disturb the way you pile up your ash or tip your skull. For only 50 pesos, you can keep all those things you took with you. The few belongings, even God won't rattle in his collection plate.[APPLAUSE] Thank you.[APPLAUSE][MUSIC PLAYING]

EDUARDO MARTÍNEZ-LEYVA: 18:13

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't speak about Adrienne Rich, a writer who needs no introduction yet whose work demands we speak her name over and over. Her poetry has muscle, is mighty, and intellectually fierce. In this 1974 recording of her poem, August, she demonstrates this incredible ability to take a seemingly peaceful, idyllic scene, and with just a few words, shift the entire atmosphere. Suddenly underneath the quiet landscape, we feel the currents of danger, of mystery, of violence. And again, she does this with very few words in a subtle and seamless way. The line of village lit with blood, where all the fathers are crying, is one that sticks to my ribs. That image is a physical blow so stunning it stirs the imagination, forcing us to reckon with how the violence of the external world can breach the walls of our internal selves. So much of the poem rests on the turn leading us to this final line. I chose this poem precisely because it is a lesson on how to end with such a memorable and impactful closure. The masterful way Rich holds us in the palm of her hand before releasing us from the page, leaving us stunned with our thoughts and impressions is just superb. Although her work may often feel unassuming in its elegance, it carries a massive tectonic weight. What makes her an essential ancestor, especially during these times, is her immense bravery in walking away from comfort. Showing us that the poet's job is not just to make pretty things, but to reflect and to witness.[MUSIC PLAYING]

ADRIENNE RICH: 20:31

This is called August. Two horses in yellow light eating windfall apples under a tree. As summer tears apart, milkweed we'd stagger and grasses grow more ragged. They say there are irons in the sun neutralizing magnetic fields on Earth. Some way to explain what this week has been and the one before it. If I am flesh sunning on rock, if I am brain burning in fluorescent light, if I am dream like a wire with fire throbbing along it, if I am death to man, I have to know it. His mind is too simple. I cannot go on sharing his nightmares. My own are becoming clearer. They open into prehistory, which looks like a village lit with blood where all the fathers are crying my son is mine.[MUSIC PLAYING]

EDUARDO MARTÍNEZ-LEYVA: 21:51

Now more than ever, we need to remember the stories and voices that hold us up when the rest of the world keeps telling us we don't belong. And so I go back to my initial question. Being a good ancestor means being considerate of how our experiences might reflect or exist in conversation with others and what we choose to leave for the generations after us, just as we have received gifts from those who came before us. It is my profound honor to look back and thank these mentors and guiding spirits who paved the way. They placed the complicated questions of identity, of belonging, and of love squarely in the center of the cultural conversation. They did the hard work of breaking ground. And without them, I quite simply wouldn't exist. So thank you for doing all of this work. Here is one of the first poems I wrote, where I felt I was really starting to take a huge risk, revealing so much of myself on the page. It's called Learning The Language. Learning The Language-- to translate confection, my boy tongue nicked the hives bloated colony. No script or art to believe in. Just sugar painting the pink of me. I welcomed polygamy, the plural of sting. The strongest hurt came from the queen. Her species, awe, and expert was a light I asked to swig. I was convinced she could give me what I always wanted from a man. Muchas gracias. Thank you for listening.[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON: 24:01

You've been listening to Eduardo Martínez-Leyva. And this is Poetry Centered. Eduardo, thank you. What a good reminder to think of poetry as a gift not only to those around us, but to people we'll never meet. Listeners, I hope you're feeling encouraged by this idea too. Thank you so much for choosing to spend your time with us. More great episodes await you this season. Join us again in two weeks for an episode hosted by Richard Blanco, with more to follow. If you're enjoying the show, consider leaving us a review or rating to help others find us. And no episode would be complete without a reminder to check out Voca. You can enjoy this amazing archive of recorded poetry by visiting voca.arizona.edu. Thanks so much. And take care.

ARIA PAHARI: 24:59

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.