Poetry Yes! Rubén Medina English-Spanish Poetry, YES!

Saturday October 12, 2:00 PM PDT

We are thrilled to have the Mexican Infrarealist poet Rubén Medina in Las Vegas for a reading Saturday. The reading will be available both in-person and via Zoom. To see Rubén read in-person, simply show up at Winchester Cultural Center, 3130 McLeod Dr., Las Vegas 89121. To access the reading via Zoom, simply click on the link below at the appointed time.

Rubén Medina English-Spanish Poetry Sat. October 12 2:00 PM PDT
To Join by Telephone: (669) 444-9171
Meeting ID: 863 2379 0651
Passcode: 751557

Rubén Medina was born in 1955 in Mexico City, and is a poet, translator, and scholar who teaches at the University of Wisconsin. He has published a book on Octavio Paz, translations of the Beat poets into Spanish, and more. He is notable as one of the founders of Infrarealism, a proletarian Spanish language movement that started in the 1970s, perhaps at La Habana Café in Mexico City. This was a group of ‘outsider artists’ who were totally mad for reading, writing, and publishing poetry. Many went on to interesting work in various genres, including the popular breakthrough novel The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. The novel tells the story of the Infrearealist poets and Rubén Medina is characterized as Rafael Barrios in that book. The Infrarealists experienced a diaspora, to Europe, Africa, and in Rubén’s case, the U.S.

From left to right: Margarita Caballero, Mario Santiago, José Rosas Ribeyro, Roberto Bolaño and José Vicente Anaya (above). Rubén Medina, Dina García, Ramón Méndez, Guadalupe Ochoa and José Peguero (below).

The fire that is Infrarealist poetry still burns, especially in the anthology edited by Rubén, Perros habitados por las voces del desierto (2014) [Dogs Inhabited by the Voices of the Desert]. Infrarealism shares a foundation with Rimbaud, Dadaism, the Surrealists, the Beats, and other international movements of upheaval that revolutionized modern culture. His own poetry strikes me as brilliant, heartfelt, and providing the outsider’s view of feeling that is what America could really benefit from understanding. This is the beginning of a long poem in a bilingual edition called That Quetzalcóatal went up north [Aquel Quetzalcóatl se fue pa'l norte].

On the road I lost my last name,
the phosphorescent outline of an impossible poem,
and several adolescent and masculine
complicities.
I lost the first dreams.
The habit of living for the next year.
The confidence in rationality
and that kind of dialectic
that progresses in a straight line.
I’m left with only this body
knowing that I’m alive,
so small and so immense all once
vulnerable as a tree
on the avenue.

On the road I lost my last name
and since then they call me That Quetzalcóatal.
I dwell on the border
between the last Utopia and the Reservation.
Here the night appears
like a secret minefield
that goes on doing and undoing
through the holes of time:
And Oscar Zeta Acosta and Parménides García Saldaña
are twin brothers
separated by whimsical accidents
of geography and money
and Oscar is a Mexican who writes in English
and Parménides is a Chicano in the Mexican metropolis
who writes in Spanish
Charles Bukowski seems to be the gringo version
of Efrain Huerta
but in fact his twin is Tom McGrath
and Tom's the one I see 
at seventy-something
dressed in denim and smoking 
as if condemned to death
outside some Minneapolis bar.
Mara Larrosa is a poem that never ends,
the novel we all wish we could write
at the age of 19
and the wonder of sensing her
just out of a shower of honey water & cinnamon
And the young Jew Sami Rosenstock leaves Romania
on a rainy night in July 1915
and when he arrives in Zurich he answers
to the name of 'Tristan Tzara.
And some poets want their words
to burst forth from their books and echo through the streets
a chaotic and phosphorescent traffic signal
that marks the way of lost dreams,
a wound in the face of life
caressed by the lascivious wind...
~

You can see how this poem links the dreams of writers and youth in a way which is international and compelling. There are sections that become even more sharp in their contrasts between the worlds of poetry success with the true, desperate feeling of being human. This excerpt has more in common with Rimbaud’s letters to Izambard summing up the game of European poetry:

...And Latin American poetry
is still a kindergarten 
a garden of prizes and complacencies
for children who have only
recently discovered
orality
and that the poem can be
a door to the abyss
and professional suicide.
And American poetry
is a high school reunion
attended every ten years
by the same old poets
And French poetry
Does French poetry even exist?...
~

I love to see poets tell the truth to one another about how empty it can feel to live and work and write in this modern world. Only good can come from telling how it feels. The poetry of Rubén Medina teaches me how, at base, our desires and perceptions are amazingly similar across cultures and circumstances, if only we can write them well enough.

Come out, dial in, a unique opportunity to hear a poet with historical weight, a brilliant mind, and allegiance to what we’ve all lost from the sentient world. A multicultural epitome of epiphany! An indelible diaspora! Be there!

Hope to see you at Poetry!

Our weekly workshop events are sponsored by Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our in-person workshops are further supported by Clark County at Winchester Dondero Cultural Center. Thank you!

Bruce Isaacson 
Poetry Promise, Inc. 
a 501 (c)(3) Corporation 
Phone: (702) 205-7100
Bruce@PoetryPromise.org