A poem from 1993

For paid subscribers (audio)

PH in Chicago, c. 1993

Dear paid subscribers,

This coming Thursday I will publish  a piece about a defining period in my sentimental and professional education; here is the audio of a poem that I wrote around that exact time.

The period comprised between the summer of 1992 and the summer of 1993  was one where I discovered performance art and somehow embraced the idea that my practice did not have to be limited to a particular medium (as I still considered myself a painter then).

In 1993 I was in Chicago working at the Mexican Fine Arts Museum in the Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen. I remember tearing up at a taquería on 18^th street after listening to Pedro Infante from a jukebox. My search for home, however, was frustrating because the Mexico I was longing for — namely the cultural milieu I had come from — was not relatable to practically anyone around me.

That year, there was a poetry competition organized by the city of Chicago to select a local poet who serve as “poetry ambassador” in a sister city program with Mexico City.

I wrote an ambitious poem with strong influence of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and Octavio Paz’s Piedra de Sol. The competition was held at the Décima Musa bar, a bohemian hangout in Pilsen.  The jurors were asked to assign a score to each poem immediately after the reading and lift a placard with the number to show the public, as if we were in a gymnastics competition, which felt absurd and somewhat humiliating to me. When I came up to read, I already sensed skepticism among the jurors, and in a sense I felt already disqualified: a white Chilango kid could not possibly fit the bill of a poetry ambassador to the city. I nonetheless plowed along and read my poem. I felt that the efforts I had put into the language of the piece had been completely lost on everyone.  My scores were on the mediocre 6-7 range,  and the winner was Raúl Niño, 10 years my senior and who truly was (and still is) a Chicago/Latinx poet. In retrospect, he was a much more fitting ambassador candidate than what I would have ever been.

At the end of the competition, Raúl immediately came to say hello to me and tell me that he had enjoyed my poem, which I appreciated. I did, however, go home and put the poem away. It stayed hiding in a drawer for 31 years, never published or heard again.

I decided, nonetheless, to record it and share it now, for the first time— like all the works and writings that I have shared from this period, more as a documentary portrait of an artist as a young person, wandering between cultures, full of longing, doubts and always in search of interlocutors.

Thank you so much for your support. It means a great deal to me.

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