A Poetic Conversation with Magdalena Gómez
Magdalena Gómez is Poet Laureate of Springfield, MA (2019-2022), where she co-founded Teatro V! da, an intergenerational performing arts collective; she is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow (2021-2022), the author of Shameless Woman (Red Sugarcane Press) and the co-editor, with poet, María Luisa Arroyo, of Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis (Skyhorse, 2012). She was a 2018 recipient of the New England Public Radio Arts and Humanities Award; in 2019, she received the Latinas 50 Plus Literature Award at Fordham University and the Latinx Excellence on the Hill Award from the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus of MA at the Massachusetts State House. The nationally acclaimed musical, Dancing in My Cockroach Killers, based on a dozen of her poems, has been performed in Los Angeles, DC, Massachusetts, and Off-Broadway in New York City. Her memoir noir, Mi’ja, was released in May of this year by Heliotrope Books in New York City. Her poem, Mother to a Stranger’s Child (Can I get a witness?), was selected by composer and conductor Kevin Scott to create a new work for an orchestra, two choirs (children and adults), a soprano, and a narrator. The world premiere is expected for the 2023-2024 season. She has been a features writer with AfAm Point of View news magazine (hardcopy and online) for over 12 years.
I had the pleasure and honor of asking Magdalena about the role a poet has as a storyteller, who are some of her favorite poets and playwrights, her first open mic, and so much more.
UZOMAH: How has being a playwright helped your writing process for poetry and vice versa?
MAGDALENA: Poetry arrived in my life before playwriting via the Hunts Point Library in the South Bronx, NYC. It was there I encountered the voices of ancient Chinese Women Poets, Emerson, and Robert Frost, among others. White European-descended males dominated the poetry stacks. Emerson was brilliant in many ways and an asinine idiot when it came to Indigenous Peoples and Black Peoples - I caught onto that later in life - and so I found the good first. My bridge between poetry and playwriting was the gloriously Queer and Revolutionary Federico García Lorca, and his timeless, anti-fascist, and anti-patriarchy plays, which for me were epitomized by La Casa de Bernarda Alba/The House of Bernarda Alba.
Monologue, dialogue, prose, invented words, and the use of musicality, intersect/crossover/marry throughout my poems and plays. I know the rules of craft for both; they simply don’t fulfill the needs of my most honest and nomadic voice. My new memoir noir, Mi’ja (Heliotrope Books, NYC), is a mandala of words, textures, dreams, poems, and prose for the reader to find themselves and not feel lost on the journey. Mi’ja has been described as a “new genre for the 21st Century.”
U: What advice would you give to young Latino poets and playwrights in terms of finding their voice and being authentic to the culture through writing?
M: Be intentional and active listeners of your own experiences and all sentient beings of your daily encounters. Learn to think critically of everything you hear and read in all forms of media and from the mouths of “authority figures.” I can say it best borrowing from my niece, Ayanna. When she was eight years old, I took her to an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum featuring the works of Jean Michel Basquiat. I asked her if she would like to have the headphone tour of the exhibit to guide her through the work. Her response gave me so much joy: “Thank you, Titi, but I’d rather experience the work for myself before anyone else tells me what they think it means. Then we can go a second time with headphones and maybe learn new things.” It was the “maybe” that I loved most. She didn’t assume that another’s “expert” interpretation would be superior to her knowledge or understanding of the work. She was, however, open to the possibility of learning more and making the time to do it. I offer you the wisdom of this 8-year-old, now an adult and “Educator of the Year” in her current state of residence. Critical Thinking is seldom critical - it is open and expansive, forgiving without foolishness, and nobody’s chump.
U: How do you make a story compelling?
M: First, know your audience and choose to love them. Four things unite all of humanity, regardless of who we are or where we are - we laugh, we cry, we shit, and we die. I would add love, but for the few, the ability to give it or receive it has been stripped, beaten, drugged, or erased from them. Others have surrendered love to their lust for ephemeral power and their greed. We have seen this in the running of governments and the origins of war. Within the four non-negotiable aspects of our humanity, to laugh, cry, shit, and die, is the start of the compelling story. Add love - its presence or absence and how it redeems or damages, and you have a universal story, regardless of how personal it is to the author.
What do you want the readers to feel? What do you hope will endure when they are done? Will each chapter be a feast or famine to the soul? Is the writing making you feel something deeper than the transactional wish to sell your writing?
Put the audience, and not the marketplace, first. Write from a truth you have experienced or witnessed with empathy, then play with the telling - sorrow can also be hilarious. Do the unexpected. If you surprise yourself, you will surprise your reader. Life, like sex, is not limited to one position, partner, or climax - a story needn’t always adhere to a beginning, middle, and end. That’s what Country Music is for. There must be a passion that drives the story, a goal to be met, but it must be told from the heart and guts - if you feel it, your readers will too. I would say it differently if the writer’s goal were simply to entertain - nothing wrong with that - just not who I am. It would make me feel like an organ grinder’s monkey; however, it would be a fine choice if I had children to feed. It is one of the reasons I also chose to only give birth to literature and arts. All forms of art fill something in us - and our differences will find the arts we need. I speak only of the ones and the ways I know best. And for the record, I listen to all kinds of music.
U: What is the role of the poet as a storyteller?
M: Poems bring immediacy to the story and distill the story to its essence. It is the most accessible art form to most people - it doesn’t have to be written. There are many forms of poetic literacy and transference. It is like the heart of a drum; if we are alive, we have access to its music. The role of each poet depends on the intention of their poetry - there is no singular way to write it or to express it. There is not just one way to tell a story. The style of the individual is informed by culture; landscape; physical and mental abilities; economics; aesthetics; life experiences; access to the venue - it can take place in a desert or at a Presidential Inauguration; in an alley; a prison; in a field; on a mountain; by the river; in a bar. The responsibility I have taken for myself throughout the last four decades is to create training, conjure venue, access, and audience for those who might feel they “have nothing to say” or no place to share it. I intentionally use the words “conjure venue” because finding space often requires the magic of convincing others that there are stages everywhere; we only need to reimagine the use of space. For example, our city museums have a theater that was under-utilized. I was able to bring poetry and music-based intergenerational productions there and pack the 281-seat theater every time - mostly with first-time BIPOC audiences who previously didn’t realize that the museums (5 in 1) were open and available to them and their families. Attendance at the museums went up, and our youth-scripted and performed productions with professional adult musicians created a positive ripple effect throughout the city and region. Soon after, I approached a realtor about free space since this was a volunteer endeavor for me, and within fifteen minutes of the meeting, we had 10,000 square feet of free rehearsal space for five years. It turned out he also believed in the power of the arts for building new and conscious leaders. We also had performances in the building’s beautiful lobby and occasionally rehearsed on the steps of City Hall next door - which delighted walkers and visitors on beautiful days. I’ll never forget two visitors in particular from Bloomfield, CT. One of them told us, “I’ve never felt such love in people in a public place before.” Poetry is a very wide door.
U: As Poet laureate of Springfield, Massachusetts, what was your most important duty to perform for the people of the city to increase interest in poetry?
M: Among my many projects, I created new work for public celebration and grieving and performed both in connection with the Department of Health and Human Services in and outside of City Hall. This allowed for poetry to be seen not as a solitary endeavor but as one that brings people together. I also worked with our inaugural Poet Laureate and a City Councilor for a City Ordinance that would welcome a youth Poet Laureate. We now have that ordinance, but it is still in need of revision - not all of our suggestions were accepted - which included a stipend for the position. My work of bringing poetry to our city began long before I became Poet Laureate and will be ongoing for me once my tenure is done. I have found that the most effective way to share poetry in our city is through performance; cable access, which is shared globally; and intergenerational open mics, with trained youth at the helm of all facets of production. Ign!te the M!c was such a project, but we lost momentum due to COVID and the closing of the venue due to consistent underfunding of neighborhood-based arts. Cities too often will concentrate arts funding in their downtowns or riverfronts for tourism, squandering the opportunity to build neighborhood-based arts, attractions, and resident audiences.
U: Can you describe your first open mic and how it made you see or feel that poetry and performing were something you wanted to do in life without question?
M: I was 17 and in my senior year of high school. I had been attending the Lower East Side/Loisaida and Greenwich Village home salons of the poet Emilie Glen, among the countless widely published, unknown poets in the U.S. Emilie always saw the light and talent in me even when I couldn’t. She invited me to be the featured poet at what was then the Dramatic Personae Theater on West 14th Street. The theater housed productions featuring gay men - burlesque-like shows of sex, satire, and comedy directed by Steven Baker. On Sunday afternoons, they offered the theater to poets for open mics. My first audience was a few rows of nude men wearing their draped fuchsia fishing nets costumes in preparation for the evening show. I’ll never know if Emilie arranged this wonderful audience for me or they had arrived for an early rehearsal - all I can say is - they cheered and snapped in praise, and I left there knowing my voice had an impact. It was a wonderful lesson in the transcendent power of loving and unconditional acceptance among strangers. That audience’s encouragement carried me into a life of understanding the power of poetry and performance to create intimate connections and welcoming spaces. In case readers might wonder: the nudity didn’t bother me a bit - it was a liberating and joyful experience.
U: Where do activism and the arts intersect?
M: For me, they don’t intersect; they are inextricably linked and whole. Activism isn’t so much what we do as who we are - if it is compartmentalized as separate from our everyday actions and choices, then it can become another notch on the bedpost of ego. You either live it, or you don’t. It is like love or prayer. They needn’t be separate actions of time, place, or circumstance but wholly integrated into how we choose to live and be. As soon as COVID was announced, I felt the need to do something. I started a podcast, Jazz Ready (15 Minutes of Unexpected Pleasure; more or less). I created it for my immediate community, and it quickly attracted national and global audiences. Artists of all sonic genres stepped up and shared their uplifting best, without the veneer of “everything’s okay,” is isn’t/wasn’t, but united, we could make it a little better. We engaged in mutual aid. It gave me the joy to host and produce, the artists knew they could uplift listeners, and the audiences are still loving it. Performers range from an Academy Award-winning composer to an Alpaca, and chicken farmer in her 80’s who sings folk songs and lives in the English countryside. Every single artist arrived and gave from a place of love. Perhaps some of your readers would like to join us as listeners or performers? Have a listen to a few of over 225 episodes: https://spoti.fi/3gdXGmf or anchor.fm/magdalena-gomez
U: How do you use imagery to describe an object, person, or location in your poetry? How is it no different than when writing a play?
M: The response to this question requires a workshop. I’m available.
Gen2genlegacy@gmail.com
U: Who are some of your favorite poets and playwrights?
M: Often playwrights are poets, and poets are playwrights, so here is my list without differentiation: María Luisa Arroyo; Wang Ping; Staceyann Chin; Ionesco; Arrabal; Jeff Weiss; Sandra María Esteves; Langston Hughes; Julia de Burgos; Otto Rene Castillo; Oscar Wilde. For lyrical prose, Fadia Faqir. Many poets I love have been my students, sometimes children, and diverse hip-hop artists who live their activism, like Nejma Nefertiti. All genres inspire me; all arts and the diversity of people I have the good fortune to meet. I was once inspired to create a theater monologue based on the back of a Jello box. The Muses are everywhere if we pay attention. I encourage trips to libraries you have never visited before - the free programs, talks, displayed art, concerts, activities - the architecture. You will meet some very interesting people, especially among the “regulars.” Some libraries host affinity groups, and I believe that most have community rooms that are accessible to the public. Of course, I’m speaking about my U.S. library experiences - urban, suburban and rural. I’ll admit that when I travel outside of the U.S., I head to the waters first, if possible, next to the museums and then the cafes, which in many places are libraries. Having grown up poor, the library was my first journey to a world so much larger than my neighborhood. Wherever all people may gather and are welcomed, I feel most at home.
I invite your readers to reach out to me and visit my sites: www.mijamemoir.com and www.latinapoet.com
You can visit Magdalena at both of her websites latinapoet and mijamemoir for more information about her writing and to get in contact about doing workshops with her.
