“Dark Matter”: Video Poems, la Poesía de Ruben Quesada y más

Por Xánath Caraza

 

Ruben Quesada (Photo by Sam Logan)

 

 

Poetry matters!  Today on La Bloga, we celebrate la poesía del lunes with Ruben Quesada.  His work includes video poems as well as conventionally written poetry.  His themes are multifaceted, postmodern and artistic, involving life-issues such as death and race. Themes of the Midwest and LGBT empowerment have been importantly part of his work.  Continuing with the theme of celebrating poetry, for today’s La Bloga article, in addition, I’ll share some upcoming presentaciones en el mes de octubre para Sílabas de viento/Syllables of Wind.

 

Ruben Quesada, Con Tinta Advisor

 

Ruben Quesada is the author of Next Extinct Mammal and Luis Cernuda: Exiled from the Throne of Night. His writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, The Rumpus, Superstition Review, Guernica, Ostrich Review, The California Journal of Poetics, Miramar, Boat, Third Coast, Rattle, Palabra Magazine, Packing House Review, Pilgrimage, THEthepoetry, Poetryseen, Quiddity, and Solo Nova. Quesada, Con Tinta Advisor, writes about postmodern poetry that, "within each poetic tradition there comes a time when the reliability of the speaker comes into question and someone new arrives to present their authority on the matter of the human experience." His work is here to do just that. Through his poems he explores art, death, love, race, and sexuality in a way that elevates the everyday to the mythic. However, the work never loses sight of the here and now and how the way we interact with the world, with each other shapes our lives. It is important to him that poetry, the composition and the evolution of diction, syntax, and content be arranged with purpose in order for each component of craft (line, sentence, stanza, text) to be worthy of recognition. Chaos is not a sign of beauty and chaos, which lacks organization is not beautiful. For him, a poem's content must reflect the human experience to produce feelings of exaltation that affect the mind and the senses.

 

Ruben Quesada in Palabra Pura, Chicago, IL

 

As a writer and reader, Quesada has struggled to find visionary ideas, values, and models that reflect who he is as a gay Latino in the Midwest. He wonders who is urging readers to resist or question social conventions? He discovered after speaking to numerous gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered writers and editors that their experience is not much different. Whether an LGBTQ person was in a metropolis or a college town, their experience in public never felt welcomed. As he points out, many social and political revolutions have been born through art because it has the power to make us question right and wrong. He does this in his poems and in the poetry he chooses to publish as an editor. He is Poetry Editor for Luna Luna Magazine, Cobalt Review, Codex Journal and The Cossack Review.  Through these magazines he is helping to bring the voices of a new generation of poets to readers. He wants to be sure to give space to voices that might be otherwise underrepresented. Too often the voices of people of color or queer voices who are not able to be heard. Quesada is working to give them their space, so their experiences can be shared, discussed, and understood. He achieves this by also being the co-founder and creative consultant for the reading series, Stories and Queer, which creates performance space in local communities for queer and POC with simultaneous live broadcast and digital archive. Too often, underrepresented individuals in small communities are expected to move to the “big city” to feel safe or to find community, but this may not be a feasible option, especially in an economically depressed society. The social, political, and economic marginality of people of queer people and people of color and what sustains them is essential in understanding and redefining what it means to be a queer person or a person of color in America.

 

Storytelling is a central component to all of Quesada’s literary and academic pursuits. He is extending the opportunities for storytelling beyond the page and live performance through the creation of video poems. This can be seen in his video poems for “Dark Matter” and “Mechanics of Men.” “Dark Matter” is a video translation of his own poem, while “Mechanics of Men” is a translation of a David Tomas Martinez poem. These video poems show the dynamic nature of poetry that it can extend beyond the page into a filmic medium. These translations allow the poet to shape the poem with image and sound to highlight aspects of the work that might be the main focus of the poem on the page. This challenges both the poet and the reader to engage with the poem in new and unexpected ways.

 

Challenging expected lines of thought is something he also brings to his teaching at Eastern Illinois University where he teaches English and creative writing for the performing arts at Eastern Illinois University, including courses on composition, queer theory, graduate and undergraduate poetry, dramatic writing, including playwriting and screenwriting with a focus on horror, as well as a graduate course on digital storytelling.

 

In his teaching, he stresses the importance of knowing where a poet or thinker sits in the larger tradition of their field. Quesada mentions how Wallace Stevens described the poet’s role as on which to attempts to reconcile the “pressure of reality,” in other words, the sense of being in the world; the purpose is to understand one’s own place in relation to history. Postmodern poetry as a tradition requires an examination of what came before it in order to evolve. If a poet or student does not do this, the work will not be able to push in new directions because they will be unaware of what is innovative and what is not. Being innovative is key. It is through innovation that change can occur. Quesada asks his students to think in terms of the bigger picture and beyond their own community to have a greater understanding of the world around them. This is true of his poetry students as well as students in the other genres he teaches. In all his classes he is equipping them to not only craft their writing well in terms of technique, but to tell their story as well as examine their relation to the world around them. The poet/student must turn toward Eliot’s “impersonality of poetry” and present the world through a personal, direct, and often fragmented experience resounding of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He wants his students to be active members of their community.

 

He incorporates technology components into each of his classes, so that students are best prepared for an increasingly digital world. This is accomplished by making assignments and text available online and through incorporating the creation of digital stories whenever possible. Digital stories, similar to the video poems he creates, allow students a new way of approaching and constructing a persuasive argument, a poem or even an informative project. He asks them to consider how to convey their points only through image and sound. A digital story, a video, may also broaden the reach of a poem or an argument for those you may have access to YouTube, but not necessarily to books or written material.

 

Through his queer theory classes, he is able to educate students about LGBTQ history and have them consider how LGBTQ people are represented in the media and entertainment. By increasing this awareness it allows students to see the historical and current societal factors that leads to prejudice and oppression of LGBTQ people. Film is an important and accessible storytelling medium, which is why he has taught screenwriting classes. It has also led him to pioneer the study of Queer Horror, which examines films that may not be traditionally thought of as horror films. It looks at films that construct a primarily heteronormative filmic world can create a horrific world for a queer character, a character that is seen as unnatural in the presented world. Examining these films in a different way, students can examine the world in a different way, which expands their critical skills and tasks the student to be daring and unexpected.

 

 

La Poesía de Ruben Quesada

 

 

Ruben Quesada

 

 

(from Next Extinct Mammal)

STORE

                        City of Bell

 

Every morning, I discovered the artichoke colored walls

that had been painted and repainted, again and again,

to conceal the names of Tortilla Flats or Grape Street

gangs. Inside, a toothsome smell—dust and incense—

as if ashes of locos and homies had been put to rest

on countertops and floors. As if nobody dared pass

through the glass double doors, not for a gallon of milk,

nor a suitcase of Coors. All year round above the register

hung a Kung Hei Fat Choy sign and at the end of every aisle

sat a golden Buddha, an altar with incense haunting us

through the night. And for twenty years or more

it stood like a waning Godzilla with a sign on the door

in creamy vanilla that read: Yes, we cash checks!

 

 

 

(Previously appeared at THEthepoetry)

HEAR THE REVOLUTION

            After Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii

 

And there once was a time on earth when giants and gods prevailed. But here

decisions about life are made by men who die for the sake of valor.

O, mortals, you women who hold back your gleaming hearts from cliffs’ imminent with grief  

curb your cries and instead boldly speak; take the oath and follow into war!

Guard your men against death’s wretched spell; unravel a shadow of black silk—

your body, a shadow fixed to sky, against him forged to die, arms outstretched

like curtains of thick lead to protect against blades. Atomic love, embrace

and conquer death’s sharp edge with your voice; lay your curved silken skin onto his.  

Beloved, filled with light and twisted with torment, your spinning body cries

like a god out of time: Be brief, love! Jagged fiend, cut yourself out of me!

 

(Previously appeared at The Rumpus)

 

AUBADE

 

Antelucent, we lie—your body moons against mine. Earlier,

I stoked sweat on your neck in the humming of this light.

In the dark I listen, now resigned you mumble

about the arms of a pinyon pine, say it points to a falling star

against the bruised pool of sky. We hear the grackles crackle

above a church lot. Then headlights shine on your face

splitting your face, listless lips, half-open eyes—staring out

you wait for the occult wreckage of night to vanish from this world

holding out until its final moment, until you fall asleep

and get lost. Your body light like tulle carried off

by a strong current—taken from me—as I helix in the light.

 

 

 

(Previously appeared at Cimarron Review)

 

DARK MATTER

 

In this blood that haunts my skin,

in the folds of my brain are burrowed

the harrowed words to describe you.

And when the universe was young,

smooth and featureless, it possessed

the means to give you breath, to deliver

your body to me: an exchange of quantum

particles whose covalent bonds

were broken one cloudy afternoon

in your darkened room where the laughter

of the neighbor’s dog forced you awake,

back to life from the ghost of heroin.

What more could the periodic table offer?

Already you were Nitrogen, Sulfur, even Gold.

 

 

(Previously appear in Pilgrimage Magazine)

RENAISSANCE

 

Lord, you who

have never left me

like the fading shadows

that ascend at days

end. You settle

like a silent stone

in the sweet arteries

of my hand: golden

crocus forming

your forgotten body.

How it must feel

to let go of the light,

to submit to the fright

of being set free.

In praise of you

let me sing this once,

a glimmer

of your dying light,

a crown of fire

in the night.

 

 

In Other News

 

 

 

 

Here is my reading schedule for the month of October in addition to a book review by Héctor Luis Álamo of Sílabas de viento/Syllables of Wind  (Mammoth Publications, 2014).  Viva la poesía!

 

Poem on amate paper, "Luz de octubre/October Light" by Xanath Caraza

 

 

University of North Georgia: “Exploring Linguistic Diversity among Latinas”, October 7 – 8

 

Festival del Libro y la Palabra, Acapulco en su Tinta, October 9 – 11

 

Emporia State University, Keynote Speaker for Hispanic Heritage Month Celebration Banquet 2014, October 15

 

NACCS Midwest FOCO: Latinas & Latinos in the Midwest: Past, Present, & Future, October 23 – 25

 

Homegrown Reads at South Branch Library, Local Author Fair, Kansas City, Kansas, October 25