After Rubén : A Book Launch for Francisco Aragón with Fellow Macondo Readers takes place on Tuesday, March 3, from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm at the Central Library, Latino Collection and Resource Center as part of Writer's Week at San Antonio Public Library, 600 Soledad Street, San Antonio, Texas.
The following is excerpted and adapted from the Foreword to After Rubén (Red Hen Press, 2020), by Francisco Aragón.
Alan Pelaez Lopez has argued that the “X” in “Latinx” signifies an historical wound rather than a rhetorical trend. In Pelaez Lopez’s formulation, the wound of Latinidad emerges from four sites that correspond to the four sides of the X. The violences of settler colonialism, anti-blackness, and heteropatriarchy—the inability of language to fully articulate their impacts and define how vulnerable bodies navigate daily life in the Americas. At the crossroads of this volatile equis, I’d like to propose, Latinx poetry has the unique capacity to gather the worlds of the wounded: their tongues, triumphs, and hardships, their wounds and the words for drawing near them, perhaps even the words to begin building another world from within their aches and sorrows. Readers are fortunate to encounter in Francisco Aragón’s new collection of poems and prose After Rubén a passionate, wise, and sensitive guide to these worlds.
With joy, pluck, and a welcoming hand, Aragón’s lines and sentences take us to meet the people and their places. His mother, “head brimming with phrases” in English and amulets for escaping the sweatshop. His father, “portly, sugar / in his blood, a whiff of something // on his breath as he speaks of the Sacramento / River.” A sister, her voice “sturdy as the metal / table and chairs / in the patio.” Cities north and south, where numina float and settle, “as if a place—León, / Granada—could speak, / whistle, inhabit / a timbre.” A Nicaraguan woman testifying about the Contra War, whose words “gather and huddle / in my throat.” Unitedstatesian scoundrels, alas, such as Joe Arpaio, one of the empire’s cast of grotesques—“we’ve caught a glimpse / in the jowls of your sheriff: / bulldog who doubles as your heart.” And, approaching rapture, the poets who whisper and sing in Aragón’s ears and in the poems in his book.
Aragón has collected in After Rubén several lifetimes of a life in letters. From the “short / skinny boy” with a skateboard and “books in my backpack,” to the man in a hotel mirror who’s come to resemble his father, the constant is poetry and poets. Here, Aragón is a poet fierce and compassionate, wizened and empowered by his experiences as a gay Latinx man. Here is the tireless advocate for other poets, who share our air or breathe within poems we share with others. After Rubén meditates on family, both inherited and made, through filiation, through the words of living and dead. And our guide animates his dead, for, as he writes, “the dead are very patient.”
The Rubén of the title is, of course, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916). Rubén—innovator of Latin American modernismo, not to be confused with Anglo-American modernism. Darío—recently “discovered” queer poet whose poems Aragón reinvents and reinvigorates. Rubén—beating heart of the collection, a body of poems and poets in communion across space and time. Consider the line just above. Borrowed from Jack Spicer’s book After Lorca, it serves as the evocative epigraph to After Rubén, where the dead are present, vigilant, and sensuously alive.
In this urgent book, and in our urgent times, after Rubén has many meanings: temporal (i.e., succeeding Darío); homage (praising Darío); inspiration (creating versions, riffs, and imitations inspired by Darío); trajectory (following in Darío’s footsteps); and pursuit (chasing Darío). These meanings converge in “My Rubén,” the gorgeous autobiographical essay that concludes the volume. Aragón’s beloved poet encompasses his mother’s—on demand she would recite sentimental lines to young Francisco. And his father’s—his favorite was Darío’s fable of St. Francis of Assisi, which Aragón rewrites as “The Man and the Wolf.” Of After Rubén’s many achievements, the most enduring may be Aragón’s intimate, generous, and deeply generative reintroduction of his Rubén Darío to readers in North America. Our charge is clear: to reread the mariposa modernista with the grace, care, and solidarity with which his compatriot Francisco Aragón has read him for us.
Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is the author of Puerta del Sol and Glow of Our Sweat, as well as editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. His poems have appeared in twenty anthologies, most recently The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States (Tia Chucha Press) and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightbook Books). Others include Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (W.W. Norton), Deep Travel: American Poets Abroad (Ninebark Press), and Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press). In 2017, he was a finalist for Split This Rock’s Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism. A native of San Francisco, CA, he directs Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. Aragón divides his time between Washington, D.C. and South Bend, IN.
Michael Dowdy is a poet, critic, editor, and essayist. He is the author of Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press) and the co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press). As a poet, his works include a book, Urbilly (Main Street Rag), and a chapbook, The Coriolis Effect. He is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina where he teaches poetry and Latinx literature. He's been a faculty fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities and at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Originally from Blacksburg, Virgina, he taught at Hunter College/Cuny for a decade before moving to South Carolina.
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