Ed note: Emma Trelles has been generously contributing here since the early days of this blog. We are thrilled to share the news that she has recently been made Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, CA. You can read all about it in the profile below. Congratulations Emma!
The position of poet laureate of Santa Barbara, initiated in 2005 and first held by the late Barry Spacks, offers an opportunity and a challenge. Granted, this city is an unlimited source of inspiration, but how do you improve on paradise? What can a poet give to the city that has everything?
When Emma Trelles became the ninth person to hold the laureateship this spring, the city found an answer. The daughter of Cuban immigrants and a native of Miami, Trelles has been a journalist in South Florida and a professor at Santa Barbara City College. Her book Tropicalia, which received the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize in 2010, overflows with the emotional intelligence and rhetorical clout of a lifelong poet.
In describing how her writing reflects her background, Trelles uses the Cuban Spanish metaphorical verb resolver, which means “to make things work despite obstacles.” In a recent email, she said that her poems “document the bright green fly at the center of a succulent or the experience of walking home at dusk with a bag of street tacos.” Writing about the world she sees and her responses to it gives her a “way of understanding it or at least giving its chaos a recognizable shape.”
“Writing poems is my way of trying to make things work, if only for a little while,” she explains. “My people are hopeful realists, and I think I am too.”
While Trelles initially developed this clear-eyed yet extravagant vision amid the lush landscapes and plural contradictions of Miami, her style suits the nuances of Santa Barbara’s ravishing Spanish-themed dreamscape equally well. Supremely attentive to the natural environment as it bumps into or brushes up against the artifice of urban life, she has found much to admire and even more to consider in the seven-plus years she and her husband have lived in Santa Barbara. From dive bars and noise bands to Tennyson and García Lorca, and from Afro-Cuban Santería to the Brazilian counterculture of Tropicália, Trelles brings an extraordinary range of contexts to bear in her work. In ways both overt and subtle, her voice is one that Santa Barbara needs to hear.
-- sdl
Comments