A Playlist for the March 2020 Issue

For our March 2020 playlist we asked Willie Perdomo and José Olivarez, who along with Felicia Chavez edited The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext (Haymarket Books, 2020), to curate a selection of music for us. A portfolio of work from the anthology appears in our March issue, including Perdomo’s essay “Breakbeat, Remezcla.” You can read about their respective approaches to creating the playlist below (the first seven songs were chosen by Perdomo, the rest by Olivarez). Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

I chose these songs quickly. Simply because they exemplify unity, love, and pride, and, without question, you can pretty much dance to all of them. These songs remix standards, modernize oldies—that is what drives our literary tradition, I’d argue. We soul and we mambo. We hip-hop and we serenade. We two-step and we break-dance. As Big Pun would have it, we keep it 100%. These songs seemed to be LatiNext before LatiNext became LatiNext. By that I mean that Ray Barretto understood that we couldn’t be engaged in the quest for freedom unless we tapped our multiple ancestries. I think of Naomi Ayala writing, “a Boricua is born from the roots up,” or of Nicole Sealey’s word usage, from “landless” to “wonderland,” or of Noel Quiñones’s innovative new word “shmoney,” or of Lupe Mendez giving us the unspoken rules that rebel against the dos and do nots of modern education. That is the sound many of these cuts were looking for: that which cannot be uttered, but which provokes us into creation and yelling, or whispering, from the rooftops and barrios, classrooms and poetry journals, archipelagos and metropolises, from the dirt and the pueblos. Mundo, we’re here.
—Willie Perdomo

I composed my portion of this month’s playlist by jotting down words and emotions in the margins of the March issue of Poetry. For example, I underlined and circled the word “indiscipline” in John McAuliffe’s poem “The Ax.” I put exclamation marks by the last line of Melinda Hernandez’s “Notes on Pasteles”: “leaving nothing but a smell to trace our way back home.” The songs I chose reflect my responses to the poems I read. They reflect my own indiscipline as a listener. They trace a path back home. I own a condo in the song “Agüita de Melón” and not just because Fito Olivares is probably my primo. I hope the songs grant you a moment of shimmer; a chance to shake loose whatever weight you’re bearing. We’re here, friends, in poetry and in song: alive, alive, alive. 
—José Olivarez