POETRY & SOUND

(Introducción instrumental)

Lydia Platón (LP):  Itinerarios Sonoros, el Caribe de cerca y de lejos es un viaje por el mundo de los sonidos, su nacimiento y sus prácticas. Te invitamos a que nos acompañes a escuchar sobre proyectos artísticos, música, poesia, vida cotidiana y los debates de la escucha aquí y ahora en Puerto Rico, en el Caribe y más allá de nuestra geografía. 

Hey, Nalini Natarajan, how are you doing?

Nalini Natarajan: Fine, thank you. I'm happy to be here.

LP:  And I'm so happy that you did such a good job putting this together for us. Could you tell the audience a little bit about who you are and why are you even here, from India and Puerto Rico.

Nalini Natarajan: I'm here because I teach here and I've been teaching here for quite some time. My name is Nalini Natarjan. I think of Puerto Rico as a second home. In some ways it's a surrogate from my native land India. So much is familiar:  the climate, the friendliness of the people, the landscape and I really feel very much at home here.

For this particular edition I was working on sound and poetry. The landscape here is very inspiring, more so for poets. There is a variety in the poet's who have been featured here today. Some were born here but live elsewhere. Some are resident here but come from somewhere else. Others are born here of foreign parents. So, I was interested in looking how these poets use sound because we tend to think of poetry as, you know, linked to the written word, you know, connecting with print, but if you think about it the origins of poetry through history it's always been lyrical, musical pros arranged, you know, according to the intake and exhale of breath or to the rhythm of movement. And so, poetry is very oral and therefore we wanted to emphasize that. 

The other thing is in the current colonial crisis that we are in in Puerto Rico, which is another point of contact for me a somebody from India because every day I'm reminded of situations here that are not so different from what India also went through and continues to go through in the near colonial order. So, in this crisis how do we become sensitized to the role of sound in awakening or consolidating people's political, social and environmental consciousness. 

So this was the question that I was thinking about because in colonial times and even today, you know, there's always been this opposition between nature and culture, and so we want to see how a sound can reflect nature. So, as a part of doing this I sent a few questions to the poets and here are some of them. Mainly we wanted to hear their work but we wanted them to reflect on certain things. 

So my first question was, could they read some examples of how they used sound, and so  hopefully we'll be listening to different kinds of different poems from different poets. Then I wanted to know if they use sounds of nature, sounds of human beings or sounds of the cosmos. How sound... being aware of sound forges a space for a new consciousness, whether it's about colonialism, whether it's about gender whether it's about environment, and whether when they do this is conscious or unconscious, and how it's linked to their creative process. 

And finally, I was interested in the question of identity because they all have varied relationships to the island of... to the island. For example, some are totally rooted here, some a long time residents here but with origins elsewhere, like myself. There's a diasporic, you know, born here but living outside, and others are born in Puerto Rico with international background. So, my question was, in what way the sound help you connect to the island. To the medium of sound how do you feel that you connect, and how important is sound to their memory of or if they are diaspores or how they see it or they empathy with the island, and their ability to connect to the island and with other places in their life, other places they came from. 

So, with these broad questions that were sent out the poets will be responding and reading from their poems.

(Music)

Here are some samples of the use of sound in the poetry of Loretta Collins, Danabang Kuwabong, Urayoan Noel and Ana Portnoy Brimmer. We begin with Loretta on music, butterflies and the sound of horses. 

Loretta Collins (LC): My name is Loretta Collins Klobah. I am a poet and a professor of Caribbean Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Puerto Rico. I'm going to be talking about poems that were published in my new collection, which is called Ricantations. It came out in June, 2018 from Peepal Tree Press in Britain, and many of the poems in the collection do combine the use of music, such as reggaeton, salsa, boleros, the music of trio singers, calypso, soca and reggae, along with images from the natural world to talk about anti-colonial politics here in Puerto Rico. 

The first example that I can give of that combination of sound, nature and resistance is a poem that was written as a tribute to Joe Medina who was in charge of Aula Verde, a butterfly farm here in San Juan. Joe Medina was part of a prisoner release program. He was an ex convict, and like any ex convicts he was given a transitional job in the butterfly farm. When the government changed when the election came about the new political party didn't continue to fund that program so there was no money to pay the prisoners to work in the butterfly farm. But Joe Medina had so fallen in love with the butterflies that he stayed on as a volunteer, also going beyond the bounds by driving on the weekends to look for leaves to feed the caterpillars because the butterfly farm couldn't produce enough leaves. 

The story touched me a lot because this book also pays tribute to several men who follow their passions and their dreams ostensibly without causing harm. So his way of practicing masculinity by dealing with the world of butterflies really touched me. So the poem is for him, and in the poem we see him playing music for the butterflies during their mating practices and he plays Paquitín Soto and his trio singers over loud speakers for the butterflies. So, I'm just going to read a very short excerpt from the poem. 

"Joe harvests eggs in the copulario where monarchs and orange fritaleries achieve butterfly positions without the kamasutra. He plays sad boleros and waltzes of Paquitín Soto and his trio singers. He watches butterfly lovers bumble romance clumsily facing away from each other." 

The third example I can give from my collection that combines sound, natural elements and resistance is called Campeonato de Trujillo Alto. I first began to write this poem because I'd gone to a competition of our classic paso fino horse. Puerto Rico is a horseman's culture and has been, traditionally is today. But one thing I began to think about after seeing this very athletic, incredible paso fino was the kind of historical breeding and training it took to develop that horse and all the times in which I've seen paso finos in the culture: in the 'campo', in the mountainside people riding barefoot on the weekends, in the tourist area of San Juan where they would have a 'blanquita' in a white bomba dress dancing with a white horse for the tourist and Loiza on the day of the festival of Santiago people riding on horseback during the carnival. 

And this poem took a turn I didn't expect at the end where I came to understand that this Spanish tradition of breeding this horse and training it for specific purposes of repression was very much like the colonialism that we have in Puerto Rico, and at the end of the poem I ask the horse if it's able to break that training and rise up against its writer. So, I mean it's a call for fighting off colonialism within Puerto Rico by calling out to the horse if they can break that training. 

So I'm going to read a section from that. First I should explain that during a paso fino competition there's a sounding board that's set up in front of the judges and as the horse goes over the sounding board you can hear how the foot beats fall, so the best paso fino is not going to raise across the board. The speed of movement is across space. It's not the important thing. The speed of the footfalls as they tap the sounding board is the important thing. And I wrote this poem in a tetrameter form which is the fine isochronist gate that the paso fino has. It's the only horse with this footfall pattern and my poem is written in that cadence. 

So I'm reading the ending of the poem. 

"Paso fino still in my dreams, bred of Spanish Barb and genet, the Andalusian brought here to Borinquen by Columbus and Governor Juan Ponce de León. The Conquistadors had the time for volley, retreat and trampling people to death on plantations and in narrow blue cobbled streets of Old San Juan five hundred years. White ash pony of my daydreams, how hard you are strained and struggled. I want to ask if you can give up this training, break away from this arena in your sport, rear up, straight quick at this late date, unseat your jinete, topple the trainers, clinch bit in your teeth, win if not now. Would you do it?

ERROR: Not only are these pieces marvelous and evocative to hear, they depict sound as  a way of human natural world solidarity which connects us, struggles with and against gender gnomes, colonial and new colonial oppression. Let us now hear Ana. 

Ana Portnoy Brimmer (APB): Saludos. Mi nombre es Ana Portnoy  Brimmer. Les estoy hablando desde Newark, New Jersey. Yo me crié en Puerto Rico y estuve basada ahí toda la vida hasta recientemente pues que me mudé aquí a Newark para hacer un MFA en redacción creativa en poesía. 

I'll share three poems with you. The first one is entitled If a Tree Falls in an Island, the Metaphysics of Colonialism, and it has an epigraph that reads: 

"Ah, what an age it is when to speak of trees is almost a crime for it is a kind of silence about injustice” after Bertolt Brecht. But even the trees spoke, snapping like dry bones under the weighty foot of weather, sparking and slung over power lines, last attempt at sustained flight, sputtering sap and blood, branches a thousand arms reaching, routed, rotting, bark, marbled fungus and termites. Consider the plight of a Flamboyán, birds upturned, robbed of red, roots ripped from the Earth's scalp. Consider the cry of a carambola, struck down, stripped bare, starfruit putrid sweet of the ground, lost aspiring body of the cosmos. Consider the plight of the plantain. Self suffocated, wrapped in its own leaf. hijos dying inside, sprouting back like jagged teeth, twisting arthritic fingers both growing and graves, to not speak of trees now when even the trees have spoken. It's the deadliest of silences, for when a tree falls in an island and the world is around to hear it, the island drowns, for a tree is no longer a tree and semantics like leaves pay. 

It is memory burnt into body, seven months piled up on a sidewalk blocking the street at your doorstep, lighted wood and abandonment. It is death at its slowest, an unblinking mirror steadfast rustle of gutting truth that of people fall in an island and the world is around to hear it we make a sound, but only the ocean responds with a swallow."

(Sounds are played)

NN: Hurricane Maria uprooted trees, traumatized wild life and people. More than ever those sounds linked us. 

APB: This third poem I'll be sharing is entitled A Hurricane has Come and Gone. What do we tell our children now, and the title of this poem was borrowed from the following article: Coping with post hurricane psychologically. A parent’s perspective. By Cailla George, published in Virgin Island Life & Style Magazine. 

"Tell them about the waters, the ones they waited, taste on their lips. Tell them not to fear the waves that birth and baptized them, Drowning as if no concern, as long as the island stays afloat. That heat grows like a fetus and come June, another swell will miscarry into the wind. Tell them of Guabancex, a goddess whose fury destroys everything: Huracán, the storm she spuns, the word ''hurricane", a bastardized translation. Drifts from one mouth to another. Tell them hurricane lies arid and unmoving on the tongue in bite sized headlines, quick conscientious exchanges on the way to work.

Hurricane sounds like hurry, cane and sugar boils in the vile and rises like blood in the throats. Tell them not to speak this word, say 'huracán''. Let it lash your mouth open. Shriek it like a prayer. Sing it like a song. Our bodies are the pothole roads of chaos, sweat, tendrils down our spine. It is the way we dance, the wine in our walk, the way our bellies spiral into huger, how we coil and curl thrust forward in lovemaking, how we breathe of storms, how we are alive, amen. We are alive, amen. We are alive, amen. We are alive, amen. A hurricane has come and gone. Time has passed, my children, and we are alive. 

(Sounds are played)

Danabang Kuwabong (DK) This is Danabang Kuwabong. I've been asked to read a poem or two about using sound system that might reflect my relationship to my environment. I have so many different types of poems and I think I will read one on Maria, hurricane Maria, because for me that experience made me relate to Puerto Rico much more than I would have so far. So here goes the poem: 

"Meditations on Hurricane Maria and Irma. You awaken on the day of Maria's rage. Meet your nightmares strolling on this is last […] contest. This ravaged pardiosos where los turistos seek escape, dreams of abandoned ecstasies. But today you cringe, startled, locked inside your hotel toilet afraid of the roars of competing winds, of the wrath of boiling seas. No one to transfer your fear of hurricanes. 

Silence leaves and broken branches, unveiled roots, shattered strungs, strong mangled, twisted, tangled, gaga in heaps like garbage and paradise sprawls dry-eyed, licks her lacerated confused body and new gulleys sword by disorderly waters chasing unruly mud, armies that slide drunk on steady boulders down these ancient valleys. Amuse your Maria of nightmares. You bite your quivering lips. Your fingers blooded on rosary beads. You chant litanies of saints, you recall him you long despised after the confirmation tap by the Bishop. On that feast day of Maria's assumption A still, small voice squeals in supplication, 

"Hail, Queen of Heaven. the Ocean Star, Guide of the wanderer here below, Thrown on life's surge, we claim thy care, Save us from peril and from woe. Mother of Christ, Star of the sea Pray for the wanderer, pray for me". 

Holy Maria answers you are a sucker for airwave promises. You await the count of losses for words, for feelings, for faith confirmed in your surrounding and you belong no more. You recall only how that night, how Maria's [panyaring] raids on this Islas del Encantus, began a new way of calling time. You recall the hooping of shoe, the pounding of juracan’s anger, to now revision your surge ". 

(Music)

NN: Thank you, Danabang, which brings us to the next set of readings on sound and its effect on diasporic consciousness.

(Music)

Urayoán Noel (UN): Hola, mi nombre es Urayoán Noel. Soy poeta, profesor, performer, traductor, radicado en Nueva York, profesor en New York University y actualmente estoy en Melbourne, Florida visitando a mi mamá, asi que haciendo puentes entre la isla, Florida y Nueva York. 

Well, thank you so much for the invitation, Nalini, I will start us off with a piece from my book Los días porosos, 2012 originally published by Catafixia editorial in Guatemala, reissued in 2014 by our own Atarraya Cartonera, San Juan. Los días porosos plays with the idea of the diasporic and what I call the "diaporous", right, as someone who was born and raised on the island but has lived on the mainland, specifically in and around New York for the past twenty years. 

I'm never quite sure how to account for my experience so I came up with this idea of Los días porosos, right, like diaspórico, right, but not quite Puerto Rican so to speak, right, so the Puerto Rican and the diasporoso, but also with the días porosos, right, the pores of our skin, right, and the thought of tropical veins and what it feels to experience that  from a diasporoso distance. So here's a section from that piece. I should say also that it's built around improvisations of walking, right, in that sense sound in my work is very much tied to embodiment. There's often an attempt in the context of U.S. academia and I say this also as a profesor of poetry to compartmentalize poetry, right. There's performance poetry, there's sound poetry, which has its own genealogy and its own institutional xylos. 

But for me the experience of sound and poetry is inseparable from questions of embodiment. So in this case I was walking around initially Vacía Talega, right, the beach, and then in this section I'm walking around Rio Piedras where I grew up, Plaza del Mercado. 

"En los días porosos todo se filtra. Se infiltra. In these porous days we no longer say poor us, pour us a sip of something we can swallow. En los días porosos, in the porous days, we are all poros. Puerto Ricans, poro de poros, de paros sin amparo. In the porous days we remember the poorest resolution, the porosity of self."

But then I'm thinking also about a text like Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, right, which has a famous and a phasic, right, invocation of vowels towards this avant-garde poetic meaning that acquires a political dimension, right, in the context of what I'm doing in the text, like dissolution of all these social and political contradictions into this kind of random noise. So a lot of that for me has to do with the noise of the city and in that sense I'll finish with something from the book from 2010 called High Density Politics published by Blaze VOX books in Buffalo, New York. It's a very experimental book. Actually, with cover art by the great Puerto Rican artist Ivelisse Jiménez who I collaborated with on numerous occasions and I'm happy to talk about how her visual work, like very much, serves the kind of sound score particularly her use of reclaimed materials, leaves you thinking about space. I think it's very interesting. 

So density here is about the density of urban space , people living together but also thinking about the density of language, right, the density of meaning, one meaning as opposed to another, and then also as a kind of complication of identity politics, but also in defense of a certain kind of identity politics. So, that's in the kind of weak multicultural sense and more on the sense of a kind of working through the embodied self in the city, has an old poetic tradition back to Baudelaire and everyone it refers back to, but I think it's very much the future of diasporas, of immigrants, reclaiming urban space, imagining it and that part is largely inspired by the nuyorican poetic traditions which I've written about in a book. 

(Music)

 APB "Home, have I forgotten it? wild conch shell dialect, cave of captive consonance beneath my tongue. How are words bloom from the same backbone, "respirar and espiral", our breath of cyclical measures, the breed here is an arrow, exhales flat like fog. I practice sighing in spirals, fear not breathing of storms or is that not breathing at all. Return is too jagged a shard to walk on. My (soles) have pinkened and grown cays scarred in islands. I swallow sea glass, hope the waters will tumble and roll me a shore lined in grape and Indian almond. Lips plump with guinep and guava. I've sucked on their pulp and patience, savored loading halos of seaweed and sorrow, bits and fistfuls of sand and sung the slow born sadness of island and exile and here I stand still at the edge of this mouth, this piercing pant of a country in perpetual weak and rage and plight. 

For what is betrayal if not happiness in a place not whole. Forgive this grieving body reminded of laughter, roaring, "libre" like waves, flushing lilt of churned salt and sea foam of the sea that again and again I pray does not forget my name."

NN: Is there a sonic dimension to the experience of colonialism? We will end by hearing some thoughts on colonialism. 

AP: Well, given Puerto Rico's forced and violent subjugation to the United States  and the four hundred years of subjugation to Spain before that I would like to quickly point out that I believe we do not inhabit a post colonial reality on the island, but rather a colonial one and a highly exacerbated one at that during the last three to four years. But to continue, I consider myself as having emerged from having been a student and forever being a student of poetic traditions and schools that understand the critical ancestral and socio political role of sound, performance, rhythm and music in poetic creations and work, but just the nuyorican school of poetry, the chicano movement and a variety of Caribbean poetics and school of thought. 

So I believe the role of sound in my work is profound, such as the power of sound in song and turning poetry from an individual or even individualist endeavor; perhaps even in some cases the capitalist and neoliberal endeavor, but that's another conversation to be had, to a community oriented inclusive and participative and collective endeavor as a consolidator of community and as a community builder as a small part of and contribution to a broad and largely historical conversation about the island as healer and organizer of collective energy, power and resistance, specially in colonial spaces such as the one that we inhabit, and as a galvanizing force in times of great persona and collective struggle. 

DK: … so for me Maria connected West Africa, not just to Puerto Rico but to the Caribbean. Also, I wouldn't say that this particular poem forged post colonial or gender inequality issues, because this is nature. Nature does not discriminate between gender or colonial or non colonial. The only thing I knew is that it connects the two continents and therefore the histories of the continents is the history of... the ecological histories and so and so. If one wants to call it post colonial or colonial agenda it doesn't really matter very much because both environments were colonized by the West, but the hurricane winds predated that colonization.

(Music)

NN : You've just been listening to Danabang Kuwabong, professor from Ghana who teaches at the University of Puerto Rico. Thank you, Danabang, Urayoán, Ana and Loretta for sharing with us the sonority of your poems and conversely the poetry in sound.

Itinerarios Sonoros es una producción de la Calle Loiza, Inc. y Radio San Juan con el auspicio de la Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades. Producido y dirigido por Lydia Platón Lázaro y Mariana Reyes con la colaboración de Priya Parrotta, Nalini Natarajan.y Juan Otero Garabís. La dirección técnica estuvo a cargo de Ezequiel Rodriguez Andino, Ambar Suarez Cubillé y Julio Albino.