I’m writing to you from my desk in my apartment in an undisclosed location in an unnamed state on the east coast of the United States where I have been grinding out edits on my novel—a process that has changed me and my style—and I’m not even finished yet. But! I’m close enough that I can see the finish line. At least, I hope it’s the finish line and not a mirage.

Anyway, I hope that wherever you are, you are cultivating your own practice and sitting with your own thoughts and questions ie I hope wherever you are and whatever you are working on, you are avoiding the trap of artificial intelligence, which, for all of its improvements, remains ARTIFICIAL. Because I can feel myself going on a rant and because I really need to spend my good cognitive hours thinking about the close of this novel, I’m going to move on, BUT I will say this: I promise that your biggest artistic failure is more generative than anything a machine can write for you.

You wanna get good you gotta risk being bad. There’s no other way.

Which brings me to the point of this whole post: I will be hosting Office Hours on Tuesday, August, 25th from 8-9pm EST. What is Office Hours you might be asking. Good question!

Office Hours is a space I started because writing and publishing are both such opaque fields. For example, When you submit poems for publication, you are asked to provide a cover letter. As a new writer, I would have been freaked out by the prospect of writing cover letters for poems since my only experience is writing cover letters for jobs and that is stressful! I only learned how to write cover letters for poetry submissions because a friend of mine was studying English at a university and shared the information with me. How do I get published? Whatever your questions are, bring them to office hours and we’ll chat. Alternatively, maybe you are stuck on a poem or a small piece of writing and would like some advice about what to read or how to edit—bring that to Office Hours.

When I was a student, I sucked at taking advantage of Office Hours. I wish I spent more time asking questions to my professors about everything, academia, books, how to write better essays, everything. Unfortunately, once you leave school, the opportunities to interact with professionals in that type of environment become rarer. So, this is one small way I’m trying to fill that gap.

If you want to join Office Hours on Tuesday, August 25th at 8pm EST, please do the following:

1. Make sure you are subscribed to this substack

2. Comment below

That’s it. If you sign up, I’ll message you via substack to get your email and send you the zoom link. If you want to read together, write together, or ask questions about the business side of poetry, writing, and publishing, you are welcome to join me.

Here is a flyer I created:

You know that’s me on the poster because the stick figure has a bald head!

Back to my own projects. See you on Tuesday!

—José aka Wey Uso (YEET!)

*
it’s not a bad question, and if i could answer it however i wanted, i’d be delighted because to answer the question, i’d have to talk about Calumet City and Wentworth Junior High, and if there is a machine i’m a sucker for, then it’s probably a Time Machine, so it’s true: back in 2001, there was a huge debate about AI and Kobe Bryant. i was no longer watching basketball closely. my heart was still broken by the break up of the ‘98 Chicago Bulls, whose games i followed in the newspaper, or if they weren’t on the west coast, on television (if they were playing on WGN or NBC and i could watch without a cable subscription), so i was unfamiliar with the young hoopers taking the league by storm. and i was a baby and uninterested in basketball beyond Chicago and already the seeds of my poetry were being watered—this grand myopia, this insistence that everything i needed to write was right in front of my face, this self-imposed restraint—so when i was asked by one of my classmates, “yo, Jose, what do you think of AI?” i was unprepared.

the way i remember it (which is probably wrong, honestly), Mohammad loved AI, and that made sense since Mo was a little short and AI was a relatively small man humbling giants. i don’t remember if there were boys in my classroom that supported Kobe over AI. in my memory (which is most definitely wrong), the girls loved Kobe. because i was a shy kid and still unconfident in my command of the English language, when i got dragged into arguments at school, i picked sides based on the people arguing and not, necessarily, my opinions. Mo was one of the best basketball players in our school. he was short, but he had a good handle and was the most consistent shooter. i was always happy when we ended up on the same team. we usually won.

so i said AI was better than Kobe.

*
but, to my dismay, that isn’t the question i get asked. the question i get asked is about artificial intelligence—the other AI.

i do my best to answer (i’m a professional, after all). usually, i’ll say something like language learning machines are just a dialed up from of autocorrect, and autocorrect reacts to the names of my loved ones with red squiggles that indicate a mistake has been made, so why would i trust something like that with my thinking and writing?

*
that answer doesn’t satisfy me.

*
here’s an alternative: this past weekend, my wife and i took my brother and his wife to a jazz show at Jazzcultural to see the Donald Vega Sextet. it was awesome. if you’ve never been to a jazz show, you should make it a point to go. jazz shows are like poetry readings to me: the same notes, the same songs, the same words, performed in the same order will produce wildly different shows depending on the audience, the time, the performers, and the location of the stars. Seriously. Listening to a song by a jazz artist on your headphones at home is cool, but experiencing it live is transcendent.

while watching Carly Maldonado play his conga solo, it hit me, why i remain skeptical of artificial intelligence despite the rapid advancement of the technology; despite the mass consumption of water the technology requires; despite the vulture capitalists funneling billions into AI & thereby insisting on trying to make ‘fetch’ happen: what the dorks (respectfully (i count myself as a dork)) don’t understand about the production of art.

those arguing on behalf of AI (imagine! couldn’t be me) will say that given enough time and data, an AI bot will be able to produce rhythms with passable similarity to Carly’s congas, and i am willing to concede that they are correct. that’s the problem. they’re correct, and still wrong.

what they fail to understand is that art is not a product. perhaps, AI bots, will prove useful in the composition of emails, but that doesn’t mean it can write a poem. or a movie. or a song.

from my perspective in the second row, it looked like Carly was playing his solo with his eyes closed. if his eyes weren’t closed, then he was definitely looking away while playing, his chin pointing at the wall stage right, but his soul miles beyond in some place he couldn’t explain except through the music he was playing. i was raised catholic which means I don’t go to church anymore, but i know when i am in the presence of god. watching Carly move a little bit of heaven with his hands was a holy experience. that’s what the bots can’t replicate. they can get they can get the rhythms, but they can’t get the music. cuz what makes Carly’s work special—what makes any great artist special— is not just the product they grant us, it is their labor, their journey, their mistakes and triumphs, their performance, their style, their flair—it is inseparable from the work produced.

they can reproduce something like a product, but they can’t reproduce the work.

*

back to working on this novel. it’s a (mother effing) journey, but i’m embracing it and moving with it. paso a pasito.

peace

Hello good people, okay people, and everyone else,

I’m going to share a keynote I gave at Fordham University this week. The students seemed to appreciate it, so you might be into it too. And, one part in particular, feels incomplete, so I could use your help.

Before I get into that, I wanted to say hello and what’s up. I’m working hard at the novel. It’s my third round of editing. And I’m going for it. It might suck. It might be good, but hopefully, whatever it is, it doesn’t feel timid. I can’t wait to share more about it when it’s time. Also, I’m terrified. Which is a good place to be as a writer, I think. Between terror & possibility. I hope it means there’s heart to the project and real stakes.

Here is my lecture at Fordham (& remember I need some help!):

What is the role of the poet?

*

One of the first poems I wrote was a rhyming couplet. It went something like this:

George Bush is wack
Bring our troops home from Iraq

*

This is where I begin as a poet. I was fifteen years old and there were rumors that the military draft was going to make a comeback to help orchestrate the war against Iraq. (perhaps you saw the news that the military draft is again being considered). I attended a public high school called TF North in the south suburbs of Chicago. When I visited other high schools for Academic Decathlon (shout out to my fellow nerds), I noticed that those students were recruited primarily by universities. But at my high school, the most common recruiters were military recruiters. There is nothing, necessarily, wrong with choosing a career in the military, but something about the way my classmates and I were recruited during a moment of increased military aggression and war felt off. It felt predatory.

I did not believe in the war against Iraq. I was fifteen. I studied the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War era and saw parallels to my own time. Who were the writers speaking out against the War against Iraq? It was poets. At the time there was a show called Def Poetry Jam on HBO, and I stayed up to watch poets like Mayda Del Valle, Jessica Care Moore, Saul Williams, and Martín Espada among others.

*

What is the role of the poet?

*

Here is a poem by Jack Gilbert

The Forgotten Dialect of The Heart
by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,

and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,

God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words

get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according

to which nation. French has no word for home,

and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people

in northern India is dying out because their ancient

tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost

vocabularies that might express some of what

we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would

finally explain why the couples on their tombs

are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands

of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,

they seemed to be business records. But what if they

are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve

Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.

O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,

as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.

Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts

of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred

pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what

my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this

desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script

is not language but a map. What we feel most has

no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

*

What is your response to this poem? (ASK AUDIENCE)

*

Here is a quote from Martín Espada:

We’re living in a country where words no longer mean what they mean. We’re living in a country that has systematically drained the blood from words. The job of the poet is to put the blood back in the words.

*

The job of the poet is to put the blood back in the words.

*

Here is a story. Back when I lived in Chicago, I was riding around the city listening to WBEZ which is our local NPR station. They were interviewing someone involved in the production of the movie ZERO DARK THIRTY. Have you heard of this movie? It’s about the capture of Osama Bin Laden. The interviewer asks about depictions of ENHANCED INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES in the movie.

And I was mystified. What are enhanced interrogation techniques? To Interrogate means a formal and systematic questioning. How do you enhance that? What do you think ENHANCED INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES means? (ASK AUDIENCE)

It means torture. It means waterboarding. But those are nasty words, so the government rebranded them as ENHANCED INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES, which sounds like when a teacher sends you to the principal’s office.

*

Language is important. We must be careful with our language. Today, I read a report that 46 people died under ICE custody since January 2025. Do you hear how they twist the facts in that sentence? How did those 46 people die? Who killed those 46 people? Who is responsible? Our government wants us to accept this as reality. According to their language: there are no murderers; there are only victims.

(THIS IS WHERE I NEED HELP: THE PARAGRAPH ABOVE WAS WHAT I COULD THINK OF IN THE MOMENT THAT DEMONSTRATES THE SLEIGHT OF HAND BY GOVERNMENT AND RIGHT WING MEDIA TO HIDE THE VIOLENCE OF THE STATE. CAN YOU THINK OF OTHER EXAMPLES? IT WAS HARDER TO BRAINSTORM THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE—SOMETHING THAT ENCAPSULATES JUST HOW SNEAKY THIS LANGUAGE TRICK IS—WE ABSORB IT SO EASILY IT DISAPPEARS INTO OUR EVERYDAY LANGUAGE)

*

What is the role of the poet?

Here is a poem by Assata Shakur

“Love”

Love is contraband in Hell,
cause love is an acid
that eats away bars.

But you, me, and tomorrow
hold hands and make vows
that struggle will multiply.

The hacksaw has two blades.

The shotgun has two barrels.

We are pregnant with freedom.

We are a conspiracy.

*

What is your response to the poem? (ASK AUDIENCE)

*

Maybe, you are listening to me speak and you believe that I am making the argument that we should all be writing political poetry. I am not. I am not going to tell you what to write, and I am not going to tell you how to write it. I do not have all the answers.

I’m arguing for all of us to be more present. For all of us to resist the urge to give away our thinking to AI Products. For all of us to question the language of our government. For all of us to be present with each other. For all of us to conspire. For all of us to put the blood back in words.

*

I’m going to share one more poem. This one is by Nazim Hikmet. It’s called ON LIVING. An important note is that Nazim Hikmet spent many years imprisoned for promoting communism and inciting military mutiny. This is one of the poems he wrote while imprisoned.

I

Living is no laughing matter:

you must live with great seriousness

like a squirrel, for example—

I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,

I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Living is no laughing matter:

you must take it seriously,

so much so and to such a degree

that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,

your back to the wall,

or else in a laboratory

in your white coat and safety glasses,

you can die for people—

even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,

even though you know living

is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

I mean, you must take living so seriously

that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—

and not for your children, either,

but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,

because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—

which is to say we might not get up

from the white table.

Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad

about going a little too soon,

we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,

we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,

or still wait anxiously

for the latest newscast . . .

Let’s say we’re at the front—

for something worth fighting for, say.

There, in the first offensive, on that very day,

we might fall on our face, dead.

We’ll know this with a curious anger,

but we’ll still worry ourselves to death

about the outcome of the war, which could last years.

Let’s say we’re in prison

and close to fifty,

and we have eighteen more years, say,

before the iron doors will open.

We’ll still live with the outside,

with its people and animals, struggle and wind—

I mean with the outside beyond the walls.

I mean, however and wherever we are,

we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,

a star among stars

and one of the smallest,

a gilded mote on blue velvet—

I mean this, our great earth.

This earth will grow cold one day,

not like a block of ice

or a dead cloud even

but like an empty walnut it will roll along

in pitch-black space . . .

You must grieve for this right now

—you have to feel this sorrow now—

for the world must be loved this much

if you’re going to say “I lived” . . .

*

What is your response to this poem? (ASK AUDIENCE)

*

What is the role of the poet?

*

“To live as if we’ll never die.”

To conspire.

To put the blood back in language.

*

After this, I shared some of my own poems. Hope you enjoy this. Let me know what you think.

I’m writing a quick note to share a few announcements and new poems!

First, Chicago Magazine commissioned a poem from me. Here is the poem from me:

when we win

the masked agents raid our neighborhoods.

what do they cover up? (yesterday) is their promise

& their charge. on 75th and South Shore they ram down

our doors using (yesterday). they toss canisters

of (yesterday) into our children’s lullabies. why?

my people,

we carry (today) & (tomorrow) in twin holsters. we

plant (today) & (tomorrow) in our gardens. every day

there are more sprouts. let it be known: Chicago

will never cower. (yesterday) already died. (yesterday)

is dying. (yesterday) will die again. there is no future

in (yesterday). the agents in our neighborhoods hide

their faces because they are losing. because they lost.

when we win, 

there will be whistles from the gulls 

circling Lake Michigan. let them sing it:

Chicago is a city of (today) & (tomorrow). 

Chicago is the future.

I’m not gonna lie. I think I snapped with this poem. I was moved to write this poem by the ways Chicagoans and organizations like Organized Communities Against Deportation have been working to keep Chicagoans safe. I turned to the poems “Love” by Assata Shakur and the poem “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde to figure out how to tap into a collective voice.

And then, I had the honor of publishing 3 poems with Sixty Inches From Center. Two of the poems are from my “against citizenship” series of poems. The third poem is called “promo: hater’s anthem.” I’ll share it below.

promo: hater’s anthem

enough of love. the hippies had it wrong—
they stuck daisies into rifles
& the rifles ate the daisies
& grew into tanks. all that
turn the other cheek business
just got more of our cheeks slapped.
love your enemy sounds like advice
your enemy would give you.
you—

i’m talking to you now—
me & you don’t need to like each other
we definitely don’t need to love each other—
i’m saying you & i have a common enemy.
his statue is up in every town square.
his face stamped on our money.
his voice echoing from every television.
the enemy of my enemy
doesn’t have to be my friend.
we don’t need to join out of love—
love is just a slogan used
to sell chocolates & roses.
let the history books call us haters—
let the record show not everyone applauded
during the king’s coronation.
let everyone know when the king bowed for the crown,
some of us dared to dream of guillotines.

I wrote this after watching hella wrestling and thinking about what a promo might look like as a poem. I wrote this promo on the day of the 2025 presidential inauguration. shout out to all my fellow haters.

Lastly, I am teaching a course for Poets & Writers called Yo Hablo No Sabo: Multilingual Poetics. If you are interested in playing with language and embracing idioms, vernaculars, and all of our collected language to write poems that explore the heart with rhythm and tenderness, consider joining up.

That’s all my good news. It’s been a season of rejection for me. Which is cool. Which stinks. But it is what it is. It’s part of the process, and I’m already making plans for 2026. (I read this book called A MARRIAGE AT SEA by Sophie Elmhurst about a married couple that got stranded for 118 days in the Pacific Ocean on a life raft, and the couple talks a lot about how they were able to endure by continuing to make plans for their future after they got rescued. The book is excellent. I highly recommend it and also recommend this: if you too are in a season of rejection, keep making plans. Keep your spirit strong.

talk to you soon,

josé aka papi churro aka kola champagne papi aki papi two times two times

I apologize for my lengthy absence. Between travel, teaching, and writing, I haven’t been able to post here. I am sharing a brand new poem draft with you as an offering.

BUT First! I’m teaching two workshops beginning next week.

One workshop series is on Tuesday September 30th and October 7th from 7-9pm EST. The other workshop series is on Thursday October 2nd and October 9th from 6-8pm PST. Each workshop series will feature the same prompts, so please sign up either for the Tuesday series or the Thursday series. The cost is $100 total.

Here are the flyers:

To sign up, please email nolovewithoutteeth AT gmail DOT com.

Here is a brand new poem draft for you to enjoy. I wrote this yesterday.

against citizenship

my parents crossed the northern border & gave up their state.

which northern border you ask? it doesn’t matter. every border

is the same border. stateless, we. lived between bricks. between, we.

grew every green you can imagine. cilantro & jalapeños, we. offered

to the state. which state you ask? it doesn’t matter. every state is 

the same state. the state rejected our greens. wrong, we.

grew taller. grew wronger. what the state rejected, we. turned

into stew. what the state threw away, we. turned into tripas.

even my dad smiled with a mouthful of pickled pig feet. between

addresses. between social security numbers. in a shark’s mouth, we.

grew strong picking leftovers from its teeth. were you scared you ask?

terrified, we. carried rosaries. gathered & blew away every dandelion

on our block. held our hugs longer & laughed too loud. report cards &

tax receipts, we. offered to the state. dollars & dolores, we. offered

to the state. wrong & wrong & wrong & wrong, we. invented a life.

get this. not citizens & not undocumented, we. rejects of the state, 

we. chose we. tripas people, we. in between people, we. reject the state.

This is what I wrote to my friend Tess as context for the poem:

“Yeah this is a new poem. I was thinking about how pathways to citizenship are not enough and what does it mean when your tax dollars as a citizen are used to terrorize people around the world and not to provide services in your community and then I thought about how all citizenship is exclusionary and I started writing this”

Let me know what you think, and I hope to see many of you in workshop!

with hope,

José

Hello and welcome to Office Hours,

Before I begin, I have a couple of announcements:

• The next edition of Office Hours will be on Tuesday, August 5th from 7pm EST-8:30pm EST. I want to try something different this time. If you are interested in joining Office Hours, I’d love for you to sign up for a 15 minute time slot HERE. Bring a work-in-progress or questions about writing and publishing.

• I will be teaching a generative writing workshop open to writers of all levels. The class is called NO LOVE WITHOUT TEETH. In this workshop, we will study how to build stronger images, use repetition to revise the possibilities of the poem & discuss strategies for ending poems. Class will take place on August 19 & 26 from 7pm EST- 9pm EST. Class costs $100. Register by emailing nolovewithoutteeth at gmail dot com.

Cool. Let’s look at a poem.

The Beauty of a Busted Fruit
by Natalie Diaz
from When My Brother Was an Aztec

When we were children, we traced our knees,
shins, elbows for the slightest hint of wound,
searched them for any sad red-blue scab marking us
both victim and survivor.

All this before we knew that some wounds can’t heal,
before we knew the jagged scars of Great-Grandmother’s 
amputated legs, the way a rock can split a man’s head
open to its red syrup, like a watermelon, the way a brother
can pick at his skin for snakes and spiders only he can see.

Maybe you have grown out of yours—
maybe you no longer haul those wounds with you
onto every bus, through the streets of a new town, 
maybe you have never set them rocking in the lamplight
on a nightstand beside a stranger’s bed, carrying your hurts
like two cracked pomegranates, because you haven’t learned 
to see the beauty of a busted fruit, the bright stain it will leave
on your lips, the way it will make people want to kiss you. 

I imagine that if you are reading this newsletter you are one of three people. You are someone who loves to read poetry, someone who wants to love poetry, or someone who writes poetry. Perhaps you are a combination of the above.

And if you are someone who writes poetry, I imagine that you, like me, want to write brilliant poems that move readers. And that desire can lead us to overwrite our images or get overly sentimental. We want so hard to name our feelings and revelations that we mess up the moment for the reader.

This poem by Natalie Diaz teaches me about imagery.

The first stanza is light on imagery. There is the image of tracing “knees,/ shins, elbows” & the image of the “red-blue scab.” The poem says that these bruises mark us as “both victim and survivor.” Hold that thought.

The second stanza features more and bolder imagery:

• “jagged scars of Great-Grandmother’s/ amputated legs”

• a rock splitting “a man’s head open to its red syrup”

• watermelon

• “a brother” picking “at his skin for snakes and spiders only he can see. (notice those s sounds.)

The images in this stanza are more violent at first glance. However, it is too simple to notice the violence. Jagged scars on amputated legs also indicate survival. The ending of the first stanza holds: scars, bruises, wounds mark us as victim and survivor— even if some wounds can’t heal like the pom asserts.

In the last stanza, Diaz turns toward the reader: “Maybe you have grown out of yours—” and I am a sucker for this move in poems. I love when poets turn to me as a reader and invite me to participate. I love when they point at me even if they are scolding me. I love the opportunity to participate in a poem. The images in this stanza begin as abstractions. Diaz writes “maybe you no longer haul those wounds with you/ onto every bus” It’s true that I argue against abstraction in poems. I tell students to avoid abstraction. Here Diaz makes it work by committing to the image. The abstract image of “wounds being carried” gains physicality because it is dragged “onto every bus, through the streets of a new town,/” they are set “rocking in the lamplight/ on a nightstand beside a stranger’s bed” and though the word “baggage” is never used my mind conjures overflowing luggage. It conjures an image of someone lugging all their belongings into a town where they know no one. But the poem does not end there. The poem turns back towards physical imagery. It says “carrying your hurts/ like two cracked pomegranates” and this could be enough. Ending on an image like this might still rock us as readers, but Diaz keeps going.

Diaz writes “because you haven’t learned/ to see the beauty of a busted fruit, the bright stain it will leave/ on your lips, the way it will make people want to kiss you.”

The poem turns the image of the “wounds” being carried into this bright new thing. The poem says we do not need to hide our wounds. They don’t make us ugly or unlovable. It’s the opposite. Our wounds are marks of what we have survived and make us more lovable and attractive. What a turn. It’s beautiful. It’s a poem and ending that I’ve been thinking about for over ten years now.

But again pay attention to the imagery. the images are relatively simple. They are pomegranates. They are red syrup. Watermelon. Choose images that work for you. Don’t try to overwork the images. Trust your instincts and trust your audience to follow you.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this edition of Read Like A Poet consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps me out a ton. And if you want to take a class with me, register today for my workshop. I’ll leave the flyer below. Thank you and be good.

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Office Hours. We talk about poetry here. How to read it. How to connect it to the world. And Why it’s important. If that sounds interesting to you, I hope you’ll consider sharing this post with friends and consider a paid subscription.

Today I’m sharing the poem “Saints” by Stephen Dunn, from his 1998 collection Riffs & Reciprocities.

Saints

by Stephen Dunn

Those who earn their names know what suffering is… and elect it anyway. They love without ambivalence one shining thing, yet some—the even more saintly—are tortured by the manifold richness of the discernible world. I’ve known one secular saint. I watched him fast so an idea would swell. I didn’t want to be him, though once or twice, by design I’ve felt that strange sumptuousness born from doing without. For him it must have been an imagined feast, like a wafer on the tongue. For me: just another something for the body to have known before it dies and becomes dust. Saints, like revolutionaries, walk headlong into the cool, dry wind, are always serving a hidden flame, are terrifying because of what they do not need. The saint asks, What will you die for? The revolutionary adds, For what would you kill? Either way, sacrifice is an ugly business, as ugly as history itself. Choose between these terrible things, history often says. We are only commentators until, for us, it comes to that choice. 

Let’s talk about this poem. Saints is from Dunn’s book Riffs & Reciprocities, which is a collection 45 pairs of prose poems in conversation with each other. So 90 poems total. The description of the book mentions that the poems play off each other in the manner of jazz improvisations. All of this is useful context.

Part of what I enjoy about jazz is the break from established patterns. I remember going to a jazz show last year and seeing a pianist lay down a melody. When it was his turn to solo he played notes from the melody, but left other notes missing. It was riveting to expect a familiar melody and instead only be teased with a single note or a small slice of the melody. While the pianist played, my mind tried to fill in the blanks. Sitting in the audience, I felt like I understood something about poetry and the way silence can be more important than the actual words on a page—that maybe you could teach a reader to fill in the blanks. To finish a line themselves.

Dunn’s poem is not quite so radical. Its spirit of improvisation seems be directly related with the spirit of play. I also like that Dunn’s training as a poet shines through: The poem ends on a volta.

“Saints” reminds me of the poem “The List of Famous Hats” by James Tate. The tone is similar. Both poems are playful and both poems end on a revelation. If you’re into prose poems, you should check out Jose Hernandez Diaz, a contemporary master of prose poems.

I do not like the spirit of “Saints.” I do not like that Dunn treats saints and revolutionaries like they are extraordinary beings- like they possess a drive or a soul that is beyond ordinary human beings. To believe otherwise, lets the rest of us off the hook. There’s nothing innately different about saints and revolutionaries. They are not born with different genetics than anyone else. I believe we can and must all choose to actively participate in making the world we want to live in.

And this brings me back to the ending of “Saints:” “We are only commentators until, for us, it comes to that choice.” — This sentence feels true to me. “We are only commentators until, for us, it comes to that choice.”—that choice is coming for everybody.

*

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Reminder: tomorrow, I am hosting Office Hours from 8pm-9:30pm EST. Here is the link. Come through if you want to ask questions about a poem you are working on or publishing at large or anything else. Or come ask a question about pro wrestling. Whatever. I’ll be here.

See you soon,
José

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you are in the world and when you read this.

I want to begin by honoring Andrea Gibson who passed away this week. I never got a chance to meet Andrea, but I admired their poetry and their being in the world. If I can drop the veneer for a second, it was a gut punch to learn of Andrea’s passing. Andrea’s passing felt like learning a teammate died. We both pursued a life in letters and performance. We were fellow travelers. My condolences and love to all of their friends and family.

*

The title for today’s post is inspired by poets, Samantha Thornhill, Adam Falkner, and Jon Sands, who founded an artist collective called Poets in Unexpected Places. Their project involved planting poets in places where one does not typically encounter poetry—on a subway train, perhaps. The story I’m about to tell you involves something different. Maybe the title of this post should be Poetry in Unexpected People.

Yesterday, My wife and I visited our new accountant. It was my first time meeting him. I admit that because he is an accountant I expected them to be stern and serious. Thus, when they asked me about my writing career, I thought they did so in jest, or to belittle me. I’ve been around enough professional types to understand that writing is not always seen as a “serious” endeavor to these people.

To my surprise, the accountant told me that they took a writing workshop in college and memorized as many TS Eliot poems as their brain could hold. Then, they told me that they still write poems in their spare time. Aha! I almost laughed out of surprise and delight. Here I was revving up my defense mechanisms when I was with a literary companion. My accountant didn’t want to belittle me. He wanted to talk about writing and poetry!

After a brief exchange, he switched gears back to his professional work. I thought that was it, but after answering some of my questions, he asked if he could share a couple of poems he had written. I said, yes, of course. He read a couple poems and I offered some noticing that delighted me about his work. Just like that, him and I were chums.

This exchange made me wonder how many accountants there are waiting to run into a poet to share their poems with. How many postal workers there are waiting for someone to ask them what poets they are reading nowadays. How many airlines agents are scrawling poems at lunch? For all the talk about how no one read poetry, I can’t help but notice how often I meet people waiting to be invited back into the world of poems and imagination.

What do you think? Have you been surprised by where poetry pops up in your life? I want to know. Tell me about it in the comments.

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Today’s poem is “What He Thought” by Heather McHugh.

What He Thought

For Fabbio Doplicher

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. The Italian literati seemed
bewildered by the language of America: they asked us
what does “flat drink” mean? and the mysterious
“cheap date” (no explanation lessened
this one’s mystery). Among Italian writers we

could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic—
and least poetic— so
it seemed. Our last
few days in Rome 
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom
he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn’t
read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans

were due to leave
tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,
sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked

“What’s poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables
and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori

or the statue there?” Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn’t have to think— “The truth
is both, it’s both!” I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest
to say. What followed taught me something
about difficulty, 

for our underestimated host spoke out
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents
Giordano Bruno, brought
to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government
but rather is poured in waves, through
all things: all things
move. “If God is not the soul itself,
he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world.” Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die

they feared he might incite the crowd (the man
was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask
in which he could not speak.

That is how they burned him.
That is how he died, 
without a word,
in front of everyone. And poetry—

(we’d all put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on softly)— poetry

is what he thought, but did not say.

What I love about this poem is that the structure of the poem enacts the kind of climactic action of the poem: the poem is easy. It’s airy. It is filled with all sorts of meaningless delight up until it is not.

“But that/ was easy. That was easiest/ to say. What followed taught me something/ about difficulty,” —One of the refrains I heard a lot as a novice writer was to write "the “hard” poems. As a beginner, I misunderstood. I thought I was being asked to mine my traumas in unhealthy ways. (To be fair, I think some of those teachers WERE asking for that.) But difficulty in poetry is not about writing trauma. Maybe it is about refusing the first and obvious answer and trying to find another possibility. That’s what this poem does.

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The next office hours will be on Wednesday, July 23rd from 8pm EST-9:30pm EST. Bring poems you’re working on, questions about craft, poems you love and want to read together, and all your wrestling hot takes. Here is the link.

See you next week,

José

Hello friends,

Welcome to Office Hours. I’m your host, the professor of ethical hating, José Olivarez. Today I want to try something different.

Usually I start by telling a story and trying to connect it to a poem. This is how I approach poetry and reading. Literature is beautiful, but I don’t care about it in isolation. Poetry and all literature is relational. When I read a poem like “After You Toss Around The Ashes” by Ada Limón, it moves me. It connects me to my understanding of grief. It reminds me of my own mortality. It says something that I’m normally too busy or too stupid to say or think about: “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.”

Anyway, I don’t have a story today. None that I want to tell at the moment. What I do have is a heart full of rage. A motherufkcing full deck of hate. So that’s what I’m sharing. Feel free to skip this post if you’re looking for beauty. I won’t blame you.

Here is today’s Hater’s Report:

The Hater’s Report is a musing on an assortment of things that I don’t like beginning with number one.

1. Trümp’s bill passing and the ceding of language to losers and idiots.

   1. Look. I understand that the man calls the bill he just passed “the big beautiful bill.” Who cares? Just because he calls it that doesn’t mean we have to accept it as fact. And yet, I was listening to New York Public Radio yesterday and the host kept talking about “the big beautiful bill” and asking his guests about how it would impact New York and The United States. I hate it. We have to stop accepting the language and terms that Republicans use. Same thing with “Alligator Alcatraz.” That nickname is an insult. These motherfuckers are laughing at us when we mouth along to their stupid language.

2. Drake released a new song. I hate it.

   1. It brings me joy to see losers suffer. The song belongs on the Hater’s Report, but Drake losing is on the Joy Report next to baggy clothes being back in style.

This concludes today’s Hater’s Report. Thank you for indulging me. Here is a poem I love by June Jordan:

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies
June Jordan - 1936-2002

Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto,
President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
                                     Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or 
condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number? 
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I 
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
                   terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I 
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
                   wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

And as a bonus, here is a writing prompt to encourage your rage.

PROMPT:

What is the form your anger lives in? What type of plant would it be? What body of water is it? What is it’s favorite song? What does it look like laughing? What does it look like dancing? What happens to you if you lose your anger? What must you become?

Write a poem in which you become your anger. Give it shape. Give it transformations. Become a menace to your enemies.

See you next week.

Welcome to Office Hours. My name is José Olivarez. If you’re new here: bienvenidos. If you’ve been here: bienvenidos. Thank you either way.

This portion of the program is called Read Like A Poet. If you’re reading this, I assume it’s because you are curious about poetry, or are a writer. I hope this series offers you insights into your own reading practice.

The other portion of this program is called Office Hours. Office Hours is an invitation to come hang out via zoom and ask questions about reading, writing, or publishing. This week Office Hours will be tomorrow, Wednesday, June 18th from 7pm EST-8pm EST. Here is the link to the zoom.

Here is today’s poem: On Living by Nâzim Hikmet.

I

Living is no laughing matter:
	you must live with great seriousness
		like a squirrel, for example—
   I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
		I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
	you must take it seriously,
	so much so and to such a degree
   that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                            your back to the wall,
   or else in a laboratory
	in your white coat and safety glasses,
	you can die for people—
   even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
   even though you know living
	is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
   that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
   and not for your children, either,
   but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
   because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II

Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
			from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
			about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
		for the latest newscast. . . 
Let’s say we’re at the front—
	for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
	we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
        but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
        about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                        before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
                                I  mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.
III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
               and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
	  I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even 
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
	  in pitch-black space . . . 
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                               if you’re going to say “I lived”. . .

I didn’t want to choose this poem today, but I kept coming back to it. It kept rising to the top of my attention, past all the other poems I was looking at. Maybe you know it. Maybe you think of Aracelis Girmay’s On Kindness.

For me, I think about my friend, Jovanny. When we were in high school, Jovanny told me something to the effect of “just because you’re breathing doesn’t mean you’re alive.” I never forgot it. What does it mean to live? How do you go beyond breath? What must you do to really live?

When I go to poetry, I don’t go for answers. I go for moments of beauty, for moments when poets find language that gets close to some feeling sailing on the lake of my soul, for emotion, for play, for an opportunity to live in language and experience something real. All of those experiences might teach me. They might make me laugh. They might make me cry. The great poems all move me. I carry them with me.

How do we write great poems? I don’t know. Great poems possess a bit (or a lot) of magic. There is something to them that is beyond explanation. Hikmet’s “On Living” is a great poem. When I read it, it calls to mind these lines by Angela Jackson: “Some places you could die in,/ if you could just go on/ living there.” In both poems, death is present, and the writers turn towards life. Perhaps today’s poem also calls up last week’s poem: “Who Understands Me but Me” by Jimmy Santiago Baca. In both Baca and Hikmet’s poems there is an insistence on life.

My favorite lines in Hikmet’s poem are the first three: “Living is no laughing matter:/ you must live with great seriousness/ like a squirrel, for example.” I love the surprise that a squirrel is the first example we are given to understand what it means to live with great seriousness. I do not take squirrels seriously. I am delighted by them. Their appearance in this poem does not change my mind about them, but surprises me nonetheless.

I notice the movement from section II to section III. In section II, the writer grapples with knowing they will die and “we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told.” It is a personal death in this section. In Section III, it is a planetary death. To know that not only will we die, but everything else on this planet will one day cease, too. Hikmet offers that “You must grieve for this right now/—you have to feel this sorrow now—/ for the world must be loved this much/ if you’re going to say “I lived”…” To live is not to ignore pain, war, suffering and the like—it is to know that such pain is unavoidable. To face these truths and mourn their meaning. And to accept joy and laughter anyway. Not just to accept it, but to indulge in it. To savor it. To know that it will not last and choose life anyway.

Maybe the squirrels are right.

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow on zoom for Office Hours and next week for the next poem and micro essay.

Hello and welcome to Office Hours. My name is José Olivarez. If you’re new here, this series is Read Like A Poet. It’s an invitation to read and think together. I started this series because I believe reading is the most important part of writing. I don’t know if “You are what you eat” is true or not, but I believe that “You write what you read.”

Before I get into today’s poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca, I want to offer an apology. This newsletter is late. I’m in Tennessee at the Shakerag Workshop working with an awesome group of students alongside painter, Elsa Muñoz. The days are long with teaching and artist talks and I haven’t had the opportunity to write.

Here is today’s poem:

Who Understands Me but Me
BY JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA

They turn the water off, so I live without water,
they build walls higher, so I live without treetops,
they paint the windows black, so I live without sunshine,
they lock my cage, so I live without going anywhere,
they take each last tear I have, I live without tears,
they take my heart and rip it open, I live without heart,
they take my life and crush it, so I live without a future,
they say I am beastly and fiendish, so I have no friends,
they stop up each hope, so I have no passage out of hell,
they give me pain, so I live with pain,
they give me hate, so I live with my hate,
they have changed me, and I am not the same man,
they give me no shower, so I live with my smell,
they separate me from my brothers, so I live without brothers,
who understands me when I say this is beautiful?
who understands me when I say I have found other freedoms?

I cannot fly or make something appear in my hand,
I cannot make the heavens open or the earth tremble,
I can live with myself, and I am amazed at myself, my love,
my beauty,
I am taken by my failures, astounded by my fears,
I am stubborn and childish,
in the midst of this wreckage of life they incurred,
I practice being myself,
and I have found parts of myself never dreamed of by me,
they were goaded out from under rocks in my heart
when the walls were built higher,
when the water was turned off and the windows painted black.
I followed these signs
like an old tracker and followed the tracks deep into myself,
followed the blood-spotted path,
deeper into dangerous regions, and found so many parts of myself,
who taught me water is not everything,
and gave me new eyes to see through walls,
and when they spoke, sunlight came out of their mouths,
and I was laughing at me with them,
we laughed like children and made pacts to always be loyal,
who understands me when I say this is beautiful?

The poem opens with “They turn the water off, so I live without water,/ they build walls higher, so I live without without treetops,” The imagery is brutal. Immediately, I want to respond and offer that no one should live under these circumstances. Maybe you agree with me. It doesn’t matter because the poem does not need our agreement. Underneath the harshness of living without water and with higher walls is an insistence: “so I live” is right there. This poem is not a beached fish flopping asking for help. It rises up. It insists. It lives.

*

“I cannot make the heavens open or the earth tremble,/ I can live with myself, and I am amazed at myself, my love, my beauty,” –I love this moment because of the switch from “I cannot” to “I can.” The poet has already been insisting on life while documenting the brutality he is facing. Here, the move becomes bolder. The rhetorical change feels like a spiritual shift. A refusal to turn towards what is denied to us and a deliberate choosing of our own innate beauty and life. The poem continues: “I am taken by my failures, astounded by my fears,/ I am stubborn and childish,”—this is not about being perfect. There are no perfect people here. The speaker admits to being human: imperfect: faulty—and still deserving of beauty, life, protection.

*

I love this poem. Structurally, I love the second halves of the lines: the responses to the lines that begin with: they turn, they paint, they lock, they take, they take, they take… The response always begins with “I live, I live, I live.” And here we meet, Substack reader. You and I. If you believe that in this poem, you are a neutral observer, it is too late. If you believe that your positionality in this poem is as an internally guilty bystander, it is too late. Let me break the news to you. You already have less rights today than you did three months ago. Saul Williams and Suheir Hammad said that during their concert together at the end of May, and they are right. You and I both and everyone we know has more in common with the speaker of this poem than anyone else. They will shut off our water. They will shut off our internet. They will lock us up. Some of us—perhaps a great many of us—will die. Some have already died. We are living in this poem. And we must figure out how we are going to protect each other. How we are going to insist on living for and with one another.

*

Donate to the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund here.

See you next week.

What is the point of poetry?

The first time I remember being asked this question was during a class visit with students at the University of Illinois-Chicago during the quarantine days of March or April 2020. I don’t remember the question verbatim, but it was something like, “What is the role of poetry during a time like this?”

Why write or read poetry at a time like this? Poetry can’t stop a bullet. A poem won’t feed a hungry child. What is the point of poetry?

Last week, I attended a performance by Saul Williams and Suheir Hammad accompanied by a jazz band consisting of Laraaji, Carlos Niño, Malick Koly, and Surya Botofasina. I went because Saul Williams is the reason I started writing poetry in the first place. And it had been years since I was able to attend a live performance by Saul.

The performance was incredible. It was mostly improv with the band backing a poetic conversation and meditation between Williams and Hammad. Williams began with a repetition of “600 days”—the number of days since Israel’s latest assault on Gaza. After about 10 minutes, when it became clear that this was the show—an interrogation of our own complicity and a reminder about the atrocities occurring every second of every day—a small number of audience members began to leave. Saul Williams saw this happening and replied, “You may leave, but there is no escape.”

“You may leave, but there is no escape.” That’s the truth.

In one movement of the performance, Saul Williams brings up the question that opens this post. He notes that he’s been asked What can art do?And he answers that by 1877 The Ku Klux Klan was finished as an organization. There were no more active chapters in the United States. Then, in 1915, the movie “Birth of a Nation” is released and not only does the movie mythologize the KKK, but it gives them their costume of white hoods and white robes. Before the movie, the KKK did not wear white robes and white hoods. That was an invention of the movie. Nor did they burn crosses. That was another invention of the movie. So the modern KKK was spurred in huge part by art. That was Williams’s answer. And unsaid, but present, I believe, is that if art can play a role in creating the KKK, if it can spur people to violence, then it can play a role in ending violence. It can spur peace. Art can move people.

At another point, Suheir Hammad quoted W.E.B. Du Bois as saying something akin to “I am not interested in art that is not propaganda. The other side makes nothing but propaganda.”

So, what is the point of poetry? Let me say it plainly here: I hope that poetry offers us an opportunity to wake up. To stop blindly complying. To use the weight of our language against empty consumption. Against imperialism. Against genocide. To insist that we matter to each other.

Thank you to Saul Williams and Suheir Hammad and the incredible musicians that backed their dialogue. Here is this week’s poem by Tim Seibles:

Ladder by Tim Seibles

But look! The churches keep opening
their mouths	  like trout left to dry in the grass.

And the corporations don’t fall down – see 
how they run:

the blue suits, the black robes, and their President
whose brain is a bug rolling dung. 

Of course, there’s blood on the money.

The vampires have always 
walked among us.

But so have the trees!

The great stalker called commerce
and the Earth’s primordial solo
continue to be the windows

through which we arrive — one by one – naked, 
splashing like birdless birds into the air, 
almost blind, begging to be fed.

Why? To become this?
These workaday trolls scared of our newspapers,
revved up to buy bigger alarms?

Look how the world rolls around the sun’s gold belly,
how the ocean is so much stranger than its word.

Isn’t everybody still 3/5ths water?
How lonely 	does a truth have to be

before we bring its blues to our lips?

What we do not sing, what we drown in
not saying — 

is already music. And still, we keep
turning from the sound

like two-legged animals all buttoned and zipped
unwilling to recognize this tall ladder of bones 
to which we cling briefly with our small teeth.

And because we do not see well into the future
because we are busy taking as much as we can get because
money has infected these days with its prolific germ,

what surrounds us looks like forever
but its not — 

just as today’s wind 
with its grim whistle and bruise
is only the weather for a little while,

on past the dying edge	of the usual
what they said	could never be

begins.  

I love this poem. I begin with the end.

“just as today’s wind/ with its grim whistle and bruise/ is only the weather for a little while,// on past the dying edge of the usual/ what they said could never be// begins.”

I love the music that begins this section. I love the assonance of “wind/ with its grim whistle.” It’s beautiful music for an ugly image. The end of the poem is a call to imagination. Beyond the every day. Beyond our routines. Everything they said is not possible is, in fact, possible. I love it. Reading the end of this poem feels like drinking a pre-workout. Have you ever had one of those? They make my heart vibrate. I don’t like them. This ending is like that, but in a good way. This poem renews my faith in people and in myself. It challenges me to do and say something and gives me the juice necessary to get into action.

“their President/ whose brain is a bug rolling dung.” LOL those lines were written about George W Bush, but they continue to apply. I love how biting and funny the image is. And more assonance, to boot. Read this poem out loud. See if you can do it without smiling. You can’t.

“What we do not sing, what we drown in/ not saying —// is already music. And still, we keep/ turning from the sound// like two-legged animals all buttoned and zipped”

The image of “two-legged animals all buttoned and zipped” is a classic Tim Seibles image. It is a descriptor for people, but he makes the language strange. The effect it has on me is it forces me to snap out of whatever reading zone I’m in and focus. It reminds me, that even when reading, we can fall asleep. The brain predicts what language is next. If we’re not careful, we can find we’re just looking at the words instead of really reading them.

What is it that we do not sing? What do we drown in not saying? I don’t know, but I know. I feel it. Even if I can’t put language to it. I understand the gesture. The feeling of wanting to express something beyond language and definitely beyond the language of commerce and surviving capitalism is why I sit down to write in the first place. I believe that is some of what is being alluded to here.

That’s all I have for you today. Thank you for spending some time with me. We hit 800 subscribers this weekend. That’s pretty cool. Please consider sharing this substack if you enjoyed it. Or if you hated it.

Share Office Hours with José Olivarez

Next week, I’ll be in Tennessee teaching for Shakerag, but I’ll try to get a post done. Office hours will have to wait until June 18th since I don’t know how strong my internet will be while teaching.

Hello and welcome to Office Hours. I’m your host, José Olivarez

This series is called Read Like a Poet. In this series, I hope to give some tools and insights to people who are poetry curious, but are afraid they don’t know how to read poetry. I’m excited to share poems I love with you, and I hope this series encourages you to deepen your reading of poetry.

If you are a writer reading this series, I’m sure you have your own reading practices. Perhaps, sharing my practices will offer you opportunities to expand your own. Selfishly, I hope that writing all this down helps me sharpen my reading.

Today’s poem is called Some Toxin, and it by Natalie Shapero.

Some Toxin
by Natalie Shapero

This is what we get. This is the penance
for extending and extending the human lifespan—
now some people live a hundred and twenty years,
but those years are increasingly spent being bombarded
with adorable profiles of the oldest people,
interviews about what keeps them ticking.
The secret is always some toxin, like bacon or vodka,
and the joke that ensues is always the same:
THE CHEMICALS PRESERVE HIM. That’s all fine,

but just once I would like to uncrumple the Metro section
and find that the key to long life is rage and trauma, 
that bitterness girds the organs in equal measure.
If I could choose to be born in any era,
I would opt to predate these longer lives.
There’s so much violence, always. Better to have it
visited on you back when your attackers
would end up dead much sooner. When you would die
sooner, too. All I want is for someone

to understand me, but it seems my keenest friends
and I—we’re scattered. We’ve struggled for peace,
for permanence, and somehow in that struggle,
we’ve ventured far from each other. This is what
we get. This is the penance. Back when even the powerful
died younger, they would lose one another and dutifully
wait to be reunited in Heaven. We wait for that 
still, but now in the absence of Heaven. We say someday
we’ll find each other, year after year on Earth.

What is the difference between a “good” poem and a “bad” poem? For me, part of the magic of poetry is that there are no set answers to that question. If you tell me that a “good” poem should show, not tell, then I’d tell you that you are correct. If you tell me that a “good” poem should feature striking images and avoid cliché, I’d say yes. And yet, there are poems that I love that break these rules. And there are poems that obey these rules that do nothing for me.

I use quotation marks because the language of “good” and “bad” poetry feels too economic. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a cop out, but I don’t know that it’s useful to think of poems as being good or bad. I read many poems that do not connect with me, but some of those missed connections are due to my own biases and imperfections as a reader. That doesn’t make those poems bad. It just means it's a bad fit. The other missed connections, I’d chalk up to polish. These poems are most often offered to me by students. The poems aren’t bad, there is a seed in the poem that is visible to both the poet and I, but the poet is still figuring out how to construct a poem with that seed.

One piece of advice I give to students often is to try a different angle. I’d like to dig a little deeper into that idea, and for that I return to today’s poem, Some Toxin.

The poem begins, “This is what we get. This is the penance”—penance is a punishment. Breaking the line here makes me wonder what are we being punished for? What of humanity’s violences are we being held accountable for? The next line reveals “for extending and extending the human lifespan—”I love this because it is so contrarian. I don’t ever hear the extension of the human lifespan approached as something that we must make penance for. Immediately, because of the reader that I am and my own contrarian instincts, I’m intrigued.

You don’t need to be a contrarian or pessimistic to write poems that connect with me, but you do need to find a way to intrigue me. If you tell me that love is good, I will agree, but so what? One of the challenges of writing is that we risk repeating something that is already apparent to the reader. Find a way to show me something new about love. Or connect new images and language to love. Find a way to make horses romantic. I don’t know. There are infinite ways to do it, but you have to find your way to your own approaches, language, and images.

Back to the poem: my favorite moment is, of course, the opening to the second stanza. Shapero writes, “but just once I would like to uncrumple the Metro section,/ and find that the key to long life is rage and trauma.” Here I’d like to offer my snaps, my enthusiastic nods, my own rage on rage. I don’t feel the need to decode anything here, but I do want to offer that it feels good to read those words. I want more poems to praise and ask for our rage because there is so much to be angry about.

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Thank you for reading alongside me. You can find Natalie Shapero’s website here.

As a reminder, I will be hosting Office Hours on Thursday, May 29th from 8pm EST-9:30pm EST. The date has been changed, so adjust your calendars accordingly. The meeting link is here. During Office Hours, you can bring a work in progress for feedback, ask questions about craft, wrestling, or anything else.

What do you think? Do you believe there are bad poems? How can you tell if a poem if is good or bad? Tell me in the comments.

Today, I am starting a new series. Inspired by conversations with my friend, Traci Thomas, and conversations with students all over the country, I will be sharing poems I enjoy alongside a few meditations about how I read those poems.

I understand that the idea of reading poetry can make people anxious. When I made the leap from only encountering poems at performances (poetry slams and open mics) to grabbing random books of poetry at my library, I was terrified. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the poems in the books. I didn’t get them, with rare exceptions.

I still encounter poems that I’m not sure I get, but those poems no longer frighten me. I now view those poems as opportunities for learning and discovery. Frankly, I rarely care about what a poem means. Poems are not math problems, I tell students when they share their anxieties about poetry. They don’t have right or wrong answers. That doesn’t make my students any less anxious. It would be easier if there were right answers to discover. Nevertheless, I try to guide them back to the uncertainty a poem can present us and the gift of that uncertainty. What images excite you? Is there a piece of language that startles you—that doesn’t make sense— that is counterintuitive? There, I ask them to dig in. Why does it surprise you? What does it make you feel?

Poetry is not math. I think about poetry as being akin to sculptures. There are sculptures that immediately make sense to me. I understand a sculpture like the sculpture of David.

But there are sculptures like The Chicago Picasso that are a little bit more inscrutable. What do I make of this:

Perhaps there is a face? Perhaps there are wings? Perhaps there is hair? A ribcage? A body? Is it human? Is it an animal?

I don’t know, but I can appreciate the craft. I can spend time with the sculpture and appreciate its design. I do not need to abandon my looking just because I don’t fully understand it. In fact, I can enjoy the feeling of wonder. Like looking at a cloud and seeing different objects depending on my mood.

If you are someone that is scared of poetry: Welcome. I hope this series will encourage you to read more poems and to appreciate them even when you don’t always understand them.

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Today’s poem is The Forgotten Dialect of The Heart by Jack Gilbert.

The Forgotten Dialect of The Heart
by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,

and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,

God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words

get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according

to which nation. French has no word for home,

and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people

in northern India is dying out because their ancient

tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost

vocabularies that might express some of what

we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would

finally explain why the couples on their tombs

are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands

of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,

they seemed to be business records. But what if they

are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve

Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.

O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,

as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.

Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts

of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred

pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what

my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this

desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script

is not language but a map. What we feel most has

no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

When I read this poem, I begin with the first sentence spread over a line and a half. “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean/ and frightening that it does not quite.”

This is it. The crux of the problem with communication. We can only ever make gestures at what we really mean, but no matter how precise our language is the person on the other end of our communication may interpret it differently than we intended.

Gilbert continues: “Love, we say,/ God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words/ get it all wrong.”

Perhaps the reference to “Rome and Michiko” frightens you because you don’t understand it. You can look it up. Or you can ignore it for now: Love, we say, God, we say, and the words/ get it all wrong.” Language is the best we have. We try so hard to name our feelings. And yet, the words get it all wrong. Think about the word “love.” It is the best word we have for that overwhelming feeling of devotion and care and romantic desire towards another person. But how can the word “love” be enough when we use the same word for all our different loves and the same word for a good pop song or a good sandwich? Clearly, the word “love” is not nearly precise enough to mean what we intend for it to mean.

My favorite part of the poem is when Gilbert starts making metaphors for emotional language: “My joy is the same as twelve/ Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.”

Not thirteen Ethiopian goats. Not eleven Ethiopian goats. Twelve. My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. I love those lines. In giving shape to my joy, I would not come up with goats. And yet, when I read this poem, I am nodding alongside the author. Yes, joy is twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. This also makes a great warm up exercise: What is your joy today? My joy is two masked luchadors waiting for the bell to ring. My joy is a wolf napping in the sunlight. My joy is a library full of books. My joy is a basketball court at dawn. My joy is a ripe avocado. My joy is twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.

How do you know when an image is precise enough? How do you know if you overwrote an image? If I say my joy is an unopened pack of Pokemon cards at recess, is that enough? Is it a better image than: My joy is an unopened pack of Pokemon cards? Ultimately, one of the joys of writing poems is seeing what you can get away with. Seeing how far readers will follow you.

My favorite image in the poem is “Giraffes are this/ desire in the dark.” What?! What does it mean? I don’t know, but I love it. It feels right. It transforms my understanding of giraffes. It makes them feel more sensual. Giraffes are this/ desire in the dark. It’s sexy. It lowkey makes me blush.

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I hope you love Jack Gilbert’s The Forgotten Dialect of The Heart as much as I do. You can buy Jack Gilbert’s book, The Great Fires, here. Thank you for reading alongside me. If you enjoyed this, I hope you’ll share it with a friend and consider subscribing. Remember, I am hosting office hours next Wednesday, May 28th from 8pm-9:30pm EST. Bring a poem you want feedback on. Bring a poem you don’t get and want to read together. Bring questions about writing and poetry.

If you come up with any good metaphors for your joy, leave them in the comments. See you next week!

You can register here!

• Bring a poem you are working on

• Bring your questions about revision

• Bring your questions about publishing

• Bring your questions about pro wrestling

• Bring yourself!

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It is a scary thing to try to do something new. Thank you for giving me space to do just that. I’ll see you tonight!

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Poetry Alive! is a program hosted by George Mason University. It is an arts program for students at the Fairfax County Juvenile Detention Center. For the last handful of years, I’ve had the pleasure and honor of visiting with the students of Poetry Alive! I asked to write the forward to their class anthology, and with the permission of their instructors (shout out to Martheaus Perkins, Katey Funderburgh, Nicholas Ritter, and McKinley Johnson) I’m sharing the forward here. Thank you to the Poetry Alive! students for their beautiful poems.

Forward:

In the opening poem to Lucille Clifton’s Blessing The Boats, “the times,” Clifton writes, “the grains of dust would gather themselves/ along the streets and spell out: // these too are your children this too is your child.” I carry these words with me because we live in a moment that encourages us to forget Clifton’s revelation. We live in a moment that encourages us to only worry about ourselves. Never mind what’s happening in other countries or in other cities or in other houses. We are encouraged by our phones to believe we only need a screen to make true connections. We are encouraged by politicians that find new ways to split us. I write these words from New Jersey. If I turn my back on you, wherever you may be, I am lost.

I begin with Clifton because when I read the words of the young writers featured in this collection, I sense the same clarity and the same longing for connection. Here, the poets remind us that the guys, loves, friends, family, and ourselves are intertwined. When I read the opening line of JL’s poem: “Even though our loved ones aren’t here they’re here,” I want to yell it at every stranger I come across. Even though our loved ones aren’t here they’re here. It’s true and undeniable.

Over and over again, you will come across moments of genius in these writers’ poems. IH writes: “Speak away the darkness in the name of the sun.” Okay. I feel that. FC writes: “I was loyal to my ex except when I was with my other ex.” Heartbreaking. Humorous. Cold. Honest. Real. CEB writes “But I could be dead or alive/ Which one is worse.” Brutal. I feel it in my soul. It makes me want to cry. AAC writes: “Moving through the streets/ Where they suck/ You bone dry I stood.” Those lines breaks are layered and advanced. They break mid thought and carry suspense. These are writers that understand drama. They understand emotion.

I encourage you to read these poems because they are our children like Clifton reminds us. And because, conversely, we belong to them. And if you read these poems, you might feel something in your soul and in your heart calling out for connection. You might remember what it really means to be human and alive and on this planet with each other. I know I felt that reading these excellent poems. It is my honor to present them to you now.

--José Olivarez

Author of Promises of Gold

Here is an interview with Poetry Alive! Fellows, Katey Funderburgh and Nicholas Ritter on the Poetry Alive! program.

As a reminder, tomorrow, I’ll be hosting office hours from 8-9:30pm EST. I’ll post the zoom link tomorrow morning, and if you’d like to participate, you can join. I’ll open up break out rooms, so we can have private conversations about a poem you’re working on or anything else.

Thank you for reading.

My name is José Olivarez. I started this substack years ago under a different banner. My idea was to write three times a week. I failed. Oh well. It won’t be the last time I fail. And this won’t be the last time I dust myself off and try again.

So, what is this new iteration? I am calling this newsletter Office Hours because when I looked at the literary landscape, I figured that while I could offer writing workshops and prompts, there are already many awesome places doing that. If you are looking for a generative writing community, you could, for example, try to get into Jon Sands’s awesome Emotional Historians workshop. If there are other excellent ongoing writing workshops, please feel free to shout them out in the comments.

Instead of offering a generative writing workshop, I decided to offer Office Hours. I was inspired by sitting at the University of Wisconsin with a friend of mine who is a professor there and remembering how cool it is that university professors will just open their doors to their students and offer them a chance to stop by and discuss literary texts, questions, future career prospects, and writing projects. When I was an undergrad at Harvard University, I felt so intimidated and lost that I never took full advantage of office hours. I wish I had spent more time asking Professor Glenda Carpio about her favorite books and how to use humor effectively in writing.

This substack is my offering to the writing community that has given me so much. Every other week, I will open up a zoom for subscribers to stop by and ask questions. We can look at a particular piece of writing you’ve been struggling with. You can ask questions about publishing. You can ask for reading recommendations. We can read a poem together and talk through what it means to read a poem as a writer. Whatever is helpful to you.

So what about the weeks in between when there are no zoom office hours? Well, every week I will publish an essay about creativity or writing or reading. I’ll post a lot about reading because I am trying to improve my reading practice and because I believe reading is an important part of writing.

For now, everything will be free, although you may choose to pay and subscribe. It would be greatly appreciated.

The first office hours will be Wednesday, May 14th from 8pm EST-9:30pm EST. The first essay starts right about now:

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On Being A Mark.

In the last few years, I’ve gotten into professional wrestling again. I hadn’t watched since I was a kid rooting for Stone Cold and The Rock, but now I’m fully invested again. In wrestling parlance, a mark is a fan that behaves as though wrestling is real. Perhaps they know that the matches are scripted and who wins and who loses isn’t decided by the wrestlers but instead by writers and a creative team backstage. However, they don’t care. They go along with the show and root passionately. Allow me to introduce myself again. I’m a mark. I don’t care that wrestling is scripted. I love rooting for my favorite wrestlers.

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Last night, my wife and I were discussing Sinners (don’t worry, there will be no spoilers.) and she mentioned that a friend of hers liked the movie but didn’t think it was a masterpiece. I think that’s a fine opinion. I asked my wife what her friend’s critiques were of the film. One of her friend’s critiques was a scene that they felt was illogical. the scene broke the rules of the film’s universe and therefore it took them out of the movie.

There was a truth to the critique. However, I didn’t care. The inconsistency was so small, it didn’t matter to me. Sinners is such an incredible film—especially early on—that I became a mark for the film. I lost myself in the universe of the film. I didn’t watch to find inconsistencies. I watched because I cared about the characters and I wanted to see how their stories intertwined and what happened to them.

I’d like to offer that maybe one way to experience more joy in the world is to allow yourself to be a mark when experiencing art and beauty. Give in to the illusion. Understand that everything is temporary and give in anyway. Be a mark. If the only way you experience art is to look for every flaw, you might want to reconsider.

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Look, as a card-carrying member of HATERS UNITED, the United States’ first union for professional haters, I must be clear. I am not against negative reviews. I am not against critical reviews. I love a good critical review.

However, I am telling you out of my own experience that I have allowed my desire to be perceived as an ‘intellectual’ to override my enjoyment of something. I have walked into a movie theater looking for reasons to hate a movie. I did this when Marvel movies first got hot. I thought they were silly. They are silly. Some of those movies are also excellent. If you go into an experience looking for flaws, you will find flaws. You find what you look for. Perhaps it is worthwhile to go into an artistic experience willing to surrender to the artist’s ambitions, and if you leave that experience feeling underwhelmed, not-at-all-electrified, dull, or bored, then go ahead and figure out why. But I would suggest that you allow yourself to be a mark first. You might be surprised by what you enjoy when you allow yourself to enjoy it.

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What do you think? How do you approach artistic experiences?

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Welcome to El Mango Entero. If you’re new here, bienvenidos. I hope you’ll consider subscribing and staying here. This newsletter is a space to reflect. Often, I’ll share a poem or other artwork that’s been on my mind. Hopefully, you’ll join me in that process of reflection and clarification.

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This past Saturday I participated on a panel for Latinx Heritage Month called “A Lilting Line of Lyrical Alliteration” hosted by the Latinx Heritage Month Book Fest. Also on the panel were Aida Salazar, Lysz Flo, Jasminne Mendez, and Yesika Salgado. The panel was moderated by Adriana M. Martínez Figueroa.

The second question that Adriana asked the panel was how does your identity help shape the things that you write about. I wanted to take a second to answer the question here since I’m not satisfied with the answer I gave during the panel.

We have to be clear about what we mean when we say Latinidad. Because it’s Latinx Heritage Month corporate brands of all sizes are adding a little horchata to whatever they are offering. They love Latinidad as long as it’s a product they can package and sell. They love conchas and reggaeton, but don’t want to reckon with the people who make the culture. We know that coronavirus has had a devastating impact on Latinx people in the United States. Why? Because Latinx people are often essential workers, which in our paradoxical country also means least paid and most disposable. We know that our siblings in Latin American countries live with the threat of American intervention hanging over them, which is another way of saying they live with the threat of American political, military, and/or financial attack.

We might get a Latinx president one day, but it won’t mean anything if their policies are not towards liberation. We are aiding in our own destruction if we allow Latinidad to be a capitalist identity.

When I say Latinidad, I’m not talking about guacamole. I mean my mom can’t vote even though she’s lived in this country for 30 years. I mean my undocumented people can’t vote even though they live here. I mean my cousins in México don’t have a say in American policies even though they have to live with the consequences. I mean my people in Puerto Rico can’t vote even though they’re citizens. I mean my parents got laid off. I mean my brother works in a factory. I mean that’s not a coincidence. I mean all the señoras that make every Mexican corner store feel like home. I mean fuck guacamole. And fuck piñatas. And fuck all the ways our culture is sold while denying our people’s peoplehood.

Latinidad is bullshit if it’s just the cultural artifacts and not pro-black, pro-queer, pro-migrant. Why? Because Latinidad is bullshit if it’s just a 20% discount at Macy’s or a special pupusa burger at Burger King. Let Latinidad be about the safety and liberation of all of our people and not just about the beer you drink.

Quick Hitters

Note: This section is going to look a little bit different from now on because I’m tired of posting the same books every week. It’s true. I read and move so slow these days. I don’t feel bad about it, but I don’t need more reasons to shame myself. Instead, I’m going to be posting 5 things.

1. If Any of the above conversation resonated with you and you are interested in thinking about Latinidad as a way to fight for political liberation, I suggest getting involved with Mijente.

2. Julissa Arce is interviewing Laura E Gomez about her new book “Inventing Latinos” and I am so excited for the conversation. More HERE.

3. Jimmy Butler is 4 wins away from an NBA Championship. HEAT IN SIX.

4. Here’s a little feel good throwback for your Monday.

5. “GWENDOLYN BROOKS: "Well, in the 'Chicago Picasso,' first of all, I was asked to write a poem by the mayor of Chicago about that statue, and I hadn't seen it. I had only seen pictures of it, and the pictures looked very foolish, with those two little eyes and the long nose. And I don't know a great deal about art myself; I haven't studied it. So I really didn't feel qualified to discuss what Picasso was doing or had intended to do. So I decided to handle the situation from the standpoint of how most of us who are not art fanciers or well educated in things artistic respond to just the word art, that it's not a huggable thing, as I said here: 'Does man love Art? Man visits Art.' ...  And we visit it, we pay special, nice, precise little calls on it. But those of us who have not grown up with or to it perhaps squirm a little in its presence. We feel that something is required of us that perhaps we aren't altogether able to give. And it's just a way of saying, 'Art hurts.' Art is not an old shoe; it's something that you have to work in the presence of.”

6. BONUS: GO WHITE SOX

Thank you for reading this. Thank you for sharing this if you shared it. As always, you can drop me a line via email or in the comments and I’ll get back to you. Let’s keep fighting.

Hello good people, 

Welcome to El Mango Entero. If you’re new here, bienvenidos. I hope you’ll consider subscribing and staying here. This newsletter is a space to reflect. Often, I’ll share a poem or other artwork that’s been on my mind. Hopefully, you’ll join me in that process of reflection and clarification.

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Friends,

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on Friday, September 18th at the age of 87. As the news spread my social media was overflowing with tributes and despair. I know my first response was “Oh shit, this is bad.” I’m not here to give you sweet nothings about how everything is going to be okay. I don’t know if everything is going to be okay.

What I do know is that we’ve lost a lot of giants these last few years. In the last few months we’ve lost both Rep. John Lewis and RBG. Perhaps you are wondering who is going to save us now.

Beloveds, no one is going to save us.

That’s okay because we don’t need anyone to save us, and truth be told, no individual person could have saved us anyway. Feel what you feel. Despair if you must. Grieve how you grieve. Curse your ass off. Then, after you eat a whole heavenly apple handpie, like I did yesterday, you have to get ready. Because we have to fight with everything we have.

How do we fight? I don’t have all the answers. However, I believe in local work. Here is a directory of mutual aid efforts across the country. If you are able, get involved. My favorite story of last week was about Femdot, a Chicago rapper who started delivering groceries to families in need after Chicago Public Schools announced that they were stopping their free lunch program. Here is a story about a few other mutual aid efforts in Chicago. Start learning about the progressive candidates running for election wherever you are at.

After learning of RBG’s death, I immediately turned to the poem, “Como Tú” by Roque Dalton. Roque writes, “ Y que mis venas no terminan en mí/ sino en la sangre unánime/ de los que luchan por la vida,/ el amor,/ las cosas,/ el paisaje y el pan,/ la poesía de todos.” Y que mis venas no terminan en mí. That’s the type of energy I’m trying to hold onto.

Poet, Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad, writes in with a question: “I'm really curious about the relationship between José the son of Mexican immigrants and José the poet. It seems your poems often grapple with these two personas but ultimately harmonize the identities. Do you ever find the identities in conflict? If so, do you try to reconcile that in your writing? To clarify, when I say persona, I mean the different but authentic version of oneself (not a fabricated identity for the public).”

I love this question. I think that often my identities are in tension. For example, I wrote the poem “I Tried To Be A Good Mexican Son” because I wanted to explore some of the misunderstandings between my parents and myself.

I grew up hearing about el sacrificio my parents made so my brothers and I could go to school. Sacrifice is a heavy word, and I spent a lot of time dwelling on everything my parents missed by migrating. So how could I square the heaviness I was assuming about my parents’ interior lives with the pictures my mom sends me of the cilantro in her garden? With the way she asks for a kiss on the cheek whenever I see her. With my dad’s belly laughs when someone tells a good joke at a party? What I’ve learned is that there are sadnesses and loss and hurt, but that doesn’t mean my parents would give back any of this joy we’ve managed to scrape together out of life in the United States.

My parents are surprised by my decision to become a poet, and I don’t think they fully understand how I earn money, but over time, they’ve supported me more and more. That’s partly because I’ve been published in a few places, so my parents can hand people copies of my book or other things I’ve been published to show them what I do.

Mostly, I realize there are parts of my parents’ lives that will never be knowable to me. I’ll never know if my parents are secretly a little embarrassed by my poems or a little disappointed that I didn’t become a lawyer. I trust that even if that’s the case, my parents are capable of holding those small hurts alongside their big love for me.

I also have to put aside my assumptions and all the academic texts I read and hold my parents’ hurts and joys and disappointments and grief and love and pride when it comes to the way their lives have unfolded thus far. I have to be able to decenter myself when thinking about them because my parents are more than just my parents. They have lives outside of me.

This has been my experience trying to make my parents proud and also make myself happy. This is gendered too. When I first started driving to open mics on the north side of the city as a teenager, my parents didn’t actively support me, but they didn’t stop me either. My siblings are all boys, but I bet if we had a sister, my parents would have been more strict with her activities.

Mehrnoosh, thank you for your question. I hope I answered it. Reminder to everyone, if you have a question about writing or anything else, you can submit your question in the comments or email it to me.

Quick Hitters

What I’m Reading: I’m back to reading Manifest Destinies by Dr. Laura E. Gomez. I read so slowly these days.

What I’m Watching: Erika and I are watching The Boys. The show is really good. It’s a hyper-capitalist vision of what the world might look like if there were people with superpowers. Plus, Langston Kerman is on the show, and I try to support Oak Park River Forest High School alums whenever I can.

What I’m Listening To: The 14th anniversary fo Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor just passed, so this past weekend I listened to it from start to finish. It’s still such an excellent record.

Mexican Heaven:

I love Yvette Mayorga’s art-work. What artists are you digging?

That’s it for today. If you read this, then thank you. I hope you take good care of yourself. 

See you soon,

José

Hello mi gente, 

Welcome back to El Mango Entero. If you’re new here, bienvenidos. I hope you’ll consider subscribing and staying. This newsletter is a space to reflect. Often, I’ll share a poem or other artwork that’s been on my mind. Hopefully, you’ll join me in that process of reflection and clarification.

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Naomi Osaka won her third Grand Slam singles title and second US Open Championship this weekend after defeating Victoria Azarenka in three sets on Saturday, September 12th. Osaka made headlines with her outstanding play and because she wore a black mask bearing the name of a different Black person killed by policemen for each of her seven matches.

After Osaka won the championship match, ESPN Reporter, Tom Rinaldi, asked her, “You said from the beginning you had seven matches, seven masks, [and] seven names. What was the message you wanted to send, Naomi?”

Naomi Osaka stands at center court. Behind her everyone stands at a distance listening to the new champion. Osaka answers the question with a question, “Well, what was the message that you got?”

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One of my favorite moments in poems is when the writer breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader. Such moments feel charged with possibility because they break one of the earliest rules for quote unquote good writing we are taught: show, don’t tell.

These turns are delicious because they can surprise the reader. I imagine a reader as something like an eavesdropped. I’m saying maybe I got into reading because I’m a natural chismoso, and I always want to know what the secret is in a poem or a story. When the writer addresses the reader, it can feel a little bit like writer is saying, “yes, I know you’re listening.”

Today, I was reading Natalie Diaz’s POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM when I came to Diaz’s poem “Like Church.” This poem is a banger. When I studied abroad in Brazil, some cars would drive around blasting scripture in the morning. This is a poem I would drive around blasting through a sleepy neighborhood. It’s the type of poem that makes me excited about poems and their possibilities.

The poem begins with desire before the world intrudes. The speaker says, “What if/ we stopped saying whiteness so it meant anything.” While this statement doesn’t necessarily seem directed at the reader, it isn’t long before the speaker faces us directly: “They think/ brown people fuck better when we are sad./ Like horses. Or coyotes. All hoof or howl. All/ mouth clamped down in the hair, on the neck,/ slicked with latherin. You ask, Who is they?/ even though you know. You want me to name/ names. Shoot, we are named after them.”

Like Naomi Osaka, Natalie Diaz fields a question, “Who is they?” and like Osaka, Diaz refuses to answer. Diaz writes “You ask… even though you know.” I love this moment of refusal because it reminds me that some questions do not belong to us. Osaka’s answer to Rinaldi’s question with the same question was a moment of similar clarity. Who should have to answer the question of what Osaka’s protest meant? I’m sure Osaka knows what the names on her masks mean. Perhaps that question doesn’t belong to her, but belongs to non-Black people. “Well, what was the message that you got?”

Quick Hitters

What I’m Reading: I’m in the middle of two writing projects right now. One is a short story that I can’t talk about yet. The second writing project is a collaboration with the photographer, Tony Salazar. I need to finish the short story before I can get back to work on poems, but I am so hungry to get back to poems. I’m reading Natalie Diaz’s aforementioned POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM, and I am also studying Anthony Cody’s BORDERLAND APOCRYPHA. Both books are excellent, and I highly recommend them.

What I’m Watching: The NBA Playoffs are entering the conference finals this week. If you know me, then you know I’m a Jimmy Butler believer, so I am rooting for my hometown Miami Heat. Shout out to Hialeah, FL and my homie, Jennine Capo Crucet.

What I’m Listening To: I just finished listening to Joel Anderson’s Slate Podcast Slow Burn on the murders of Biggie and 2Pac. It was so good! It did such a good job of framing that moment in time. I look at hip hop now as pop culture, but in 1996 rappers and hip hop were still viewed as a fringe subculture even if rappers were selling millions of records.

Mexican Heaven:

This one goes out to Nikola Jokic. Who is Nikola Jokic? Jokic is the Center for the Denver Nuggets basketball team. More importantly, Jokic looks like this:

This is the type of representation I want in the NBA. I know I am no where near as skilled or even as athletic as Jokic, but that’s not gonna stop me from yelling “JOKIC” the next time I do a slow-motion behind the back dribble followed by a jumpless jump-shot. Where’s Glen Big Baby Davis at? Tell him it’s our time.

That’s it for today. If you read this, then thank you. Thank you for sticking with me. I hope you take good care of yourself. 

See you soon,

José