One Poem Festival: A Twentieth Anniversary Folio

The queer Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcón (1954–2016), when reminiscing about the Floricanto gatherings in the seventies, liked to invoke the term “One Poem Festival.” This was how he coined his favorite session at these multi-day affairs—one where a sizable group of poets would step to the mic, one at a time, and perform one piece, thereby gifting the audience with a rich, collective sampling of their community’s literary art. That’s what we aspire to do here in print to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies: present a festival of poems by individuals who have been in community with us, and one another, in various configurations, in the last two decades.

Letras Latinas’s mission is to amplify our community’s storytellers, with a particular emphasis on poetry. Over our twenty years, we have provided a multifaceted constellation of projects, programs, live events both on and off the Notre Dame campus, and publishing initiatives, including three national book prizes: the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, and the Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize. Partnerships and collaborations have been crucial throughout it all. These have often emerged from Letras Latinas’s membership in the Poetry Coalition, a national alliance that began in 2015. Although Letras Latinas relied mostly on the efforts of its founder, Francisco Aragón, during its first seventeen years, the initiative has become a team effort with the addition of associates Brent Ameneyro and Laura Villareal and, most recently, Poetry Coalition fellow Cloud Delfina Cardona. Our programs have often fostered conversation across artistic disciplines, with particular attention on poetry and the visual arts.

In 2014, for example, Rigoberto González delivered a memorable lecture in Washington, DC, for a Letras Latinas program in collaboration with the Library of Congress. It was titled “Latino Poetry: Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition.” And about midway through this twentieth anniversary folio, readers will encounter and experience a piece by Aleida Rodríguez, who, in 2006, was part of “POETAS Y PINTORES: Artists Conversing with Verse,” a multidisciplinary initiative in which poetry inspired the creation of new visual art. Rodríguez was one of twelve featured poets, alongside twelve featured artists. The gesture culminated with a twenty-four-piece traveling exhibit of new visual art curated alongside poems. A partnership with the Center for Women’s Intercultural Leadership (CWIL) at Saint Mary’s College, “POETAS Y PINTORES” was partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Our selection here concludes with Richard Blanco, who, before President Obama selected him as his second inaugural poet, read his poems at Notre Dame in 2007, where he also sat for an interview as part of the Letras Latinas Oral History Project. This archival undertaking produces video interviews for the community as a free online resource and currently contains over seventy recordings. Blanco returned to campus this past October 16 and was joined by Rigoberto González for the seventh in a series of nine planned events throughout 2024—both on and off campus. In fact, this was the most prevalent criteria for inclusion in these pages in Poetry: participation in one of our anniversary events.

As you may have gathered from the programming described, Letras Latinas has long been focused on putting poets in conversation with one another and creating opportunities for writers to be in community. We allowed that spirit of conversation and community to guide the selection of these poems. You’ll find poets bound together in their poetic obsessions—the moon, the body, memory, and music, to name a few. Read as a whole, you’ll hear the chorus these poets create when placed together. A main chord to listen for while reading is how the poems reckon with or respond to a question posed by Jordan Pérez. She asks: “Can you show me a body that is itself/whole?”

Bodies of all sorts are represented in these poems: lustful bodies, colonized and displaced bodies, the bodies of loved ones and our own—all of which require care. We witness art as visceral and embodied. We hold vigil for those housing the ghost of memory. As Emma Trelles writes, “the past is a haunting and the best you can hope from a ghost is a sorrow that won’t kill you.” The poets also remind us that we need each other. We are called to address what it means to live in a body under attack by hostile legislation or genocide. We must be deliberate in considering what we owe each other and how we care for and protect each other. As Yesenia Montilla fittingly calls out:

                                                          We fight for a win to fill
the ache of losing: Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Ayiti. We take

what we can, celebrate small victories until we win everything
            we thought we never could—

We must keep fighting for and celebrating each other.