Mi constelación está en mis manos

Writer Natalia Treviño reads a student poem at the Battered Women and Children’s Shelter (BWCS) in San Antonio on October 21, 2009. Treviño facilitated a poetry workshop at BWCS in Spring ‘09 as part of Gemini Ink’s Writers in Communities program.

Mujeres Writing Group at OLLU

Ricardo Sánchez’s: the word writ/the writ word

I met Ricardo Sánchez about twenty years ago downtown when I was working the graveyard shift at the Denny’s on Commerce. He was with painter Victor Tello, and their conversation about art, writing and poetry (that they so kindly included me in on) was so enticing that my interest in poetry grew just from this meeting. I was seventeen or eighteen at the time, and in the habit of taking notes about the evening, about people and things they said, and Sánchez noticed this about me. It is very possible that he was the first person to ever call me a poet. The following essay, “the word writ/the writ word,” is the foreward to his book Amerikan Journeys : : Jornadas Americanas. I am grateful to have come to this essay somehow on this chilly Sunday morning.

AMERICAN JOURNEYS :: JORNADAS AMERICANAS

fall 1993

the word writ/the writ word

There is at the moment a chill in the air, it cuts deftly to the marrow-bone. I feel wintry promises of blanched visions to come. A frozen land, the Palouse. Pristine, stark. It is a sheet of paper inviting my pen to dance into the very word, the verb.

Adjectives and adverbs stand at the ready. Their countenances seem to peer to the next page, seeking a means to link unto a wayword verb or reposing noun. A pinche predicate nominative sneers as it gravitates toward its proper placement, next to a Prufrockish indirect object-you know the kind!-the ones which would rather be edited out than act like a dangling participle. All those weirdy/beasty thingles are a bit much, but the poet within demands that I, at the very least, accord those lingualizing elements the benefit of the grammar. What else can a poet do?

It’s part of the journey, that’s all the damn thing can be-a moment regardless of its span. Even when some element dares to straddle my frontal lobes and demand that the poet come out to play, and the poet is too darn busy being a maudit kind of fellow at that precise moment that some pinche interrogative expletive desires utilization. Its jaws salivate as it imagines launching a grand metaphor, perhaps even a righteous mothuh-for someone. The thing feels frisky and wants to romp around, do something . . . any kind of thing that a thing can do.