By Jessica Helen Lopez,
(Check out her class’s poetry project published here!)

When I was in high school I hated poetry. I loved to read, but I hated poetry. I read anything and everything but poetry. I was what you would call a “regular” at my local library. I used to check out dozens of books on a monthly basis. As a young, brown and generationally poor girl from the “hood,” I exalted the act of reading as a form of magical escapism. I was able to travel all over the world, no matter the era, and for free. Reading afforded me the luxury of experiencing the lives, stories, trials, tribulations and triumphs of all walks of life. I read short stories. I read novels. I read comic books, the back of cereal boxes, sometimes Westerns and even Harlequin romances. I read outdated magazines, old newspaper articles, those weird Highlights in the dentist’s office, billboards, and ingredients listed on the boxes of Mac & Cheese and tubes of toothpaste. 

But the library, oh, the library was a jeweled, fantastical place for me. As a library card holder, I could access and traverse the globe, and it was years before I entered high school that I found out the library was a transportational and transformational access point that I was allowed to experience. No one punished me because I spent too much time at the library. No one bothered the little, skinny brown girl reading a book. Family members, teachers and even friends left me alone when they saw that I held a book in my hand. Everyone and everything disappeared. The world that existed outside of my book simply ceased to occur. It helped that I loved words, but I must admit I don’t believe that it was my schooling that initiated me into the land and love of storytelling. That most definitely originated with my family and their knack for what anthropologists call, “oral tradition.” I used to call it gossip, or in my abuela’s words, chisme. Nonetheless, I ultimately gravitated to the written word. I fell in love with books.  With text. With ink and pulp. With dusty used bookstores and the quiet, sacred hush of a library stuffed with aisles brimming with titles upon titles upon titles of books. 

And then, as a result of so much reading and my obsession with obtaining other people’s stories, at a young age I eventually started dabbling with creative writing. I kept journals and wrote rap lyrics and short stories. I penned memoir and children’s books of my own accord. I scratched out graphic novels and, when I was in junior high, published my own neighborhood newspaper. I was both the editor and the lone reporter. There was exactly one copy created and my distribution consisted of my mother.  I joined spelling bees for the heck of it. As an older student, I grew to enjoy authoring articles for my high school newspaper. I reveled in writing AP essays about Hawthorne and Salinger and all the classics that my teacher listed as, “must-reads.”  Shit, I even liked reading aloud Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar in my English class during my Sophomore year. Hamlet was cool too. But, I absolutely and what I truly believed at the time, irrevocably did not appreciate poetry. Sonnets. Pantoums. Haiku. I did NOT like it. I neither, “got it,” nor, “enjoyed it.”  For every poetry unit I ever endured during my stint as a student of high school “English Lit” classes, was a resulting and confounding migraine headache induced. 

Raul Salinas, the late, great Xicanindio poet and founder of the Austin-based, POC book store, “La Resistencia,” used to say, “Poesia esta en la calle!” I did not know that he said such things, or that such things could be said of poetry until I was much, much older. Poetry can be found in the streets? Poets were brown? Spoke Spanish? Were not only dead canonized white men?  Poets were dudes who had been in prison and then later became activists fighting against prejudices, racism and oppressions with their words? Why hadn’t the poetry I read in school sounded and tasted and echoed and danced like Salinas’s words? Why the fuck had teachers been holding out on us all of this time? If someone, anyone would have shared Salinas with me at a young age, maybe I would have, “got” poetry. 

Sandra Cisneros, Mexican-American writer wrote:

I’m an aim-well,

shoot-sharp,

sharp-tongued,

sharp-thinking,

fast-speaking,

foot-loose,

loose-tongued,

let-loose,

woman-on-the-loose

loose woman.

Beware, honey.

I am sure my soul died and was then resurrected when I first read these words from her poem, Loose Woman of her titular book back when I was a freshman in college. It took me years to find poets who wrote poems that sounded like the way I talked, walked, strutted, stumbled, was hard-pressed upon, angered, saddened, enraged, colonized, raped, murdered, survived, and lived. Where were those poets during my formative educational journey, who absolutely understood, wrote down, were published and celebrated through their words the contradictions of my messy world?  This was not because they had not existed all those long years I was in school. It was because NO TEACHER, DISTRICT,  ADMINISTRATION, college-entry standardized-based for-profit entity created test, had ever thought to include brown, black, modern/contemporary (alive) POC poets within any curriculum that I had ever been exposed to. This goes the same for all genres. 

Okay, like the time I ran across La Reina Ultima, Queer, Black writer Audre Lorde’s, A Woman Speaks:

I have been woman

for a long time

beware my smile

I am treacherous with old magic   

and the noon’s new fury

with all your wide futures   

promised

I am

woman

and not white.

Again, where was this type of poetry during my schooling? Were the powers-that-be afraid of sharing these realities with us? Why did I only ever have to read, year after year, Poe’s, The Raven and White’s, Why I Am Not a Painter? Here I was only exposed to Frost, Blake and Whitman, all this time. Once in a while we did read female writers like Woolf and Dickinson, and though I understood their poetry I did not feel enlivened by it. Who in the very hell made the decisions, that only a certain echelon of writers were to be included in the pounds and pounds of printed text that became the poetry anthologies disclosed to our young minds?  

So, yes, I read these poems yet I felt not a thing. I glossed over the poetry sections and somewhat appreciated certain alliteration devices and end-rhyme schemas the way I did when I was privy to nursery rhymes at a very young age. I found some of it interesting because it utilized the types of sounds, lyricism, consonance, assonance and so forth, that I found in hip-hop. But, I found no real passion in the poetry I was reading, what I was forced to imbibe and then explicate and spit out on standardized tests that “proved” I understood, maybe even mastered, the knowledge and mechanics of poetic literature. What did that even mean and/or prove? 

Mechanics. It was all about mechanics. Schooling taught me to explicate the poem as you would a stiff, cold machine. Take it apart. Talk of it. Bubble in your answers onto the test. Then forget about it. This was not the stuff that revolutions were born of. And then I read Joy Harjo:

We had no choice. They took our children. Some ran away and froze to death. If they were found/ they were dragged back to the school and punished. They cut their hair, took away their language,/ until they became strangers to themselves even as they became strangers to us.

Years later, I finally read Santiago-Baca’s, So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs From Americans: 

The children are dead already. We are killing them,

that is what America should be saying;

on TV, in the streets, in offices, should be saying,

“We aren’t giving the children a chance to live.”

Mexicans are taking our jobs, they say instead.

What they really say is, let them die,

and the children too.

Fast forward. I became a professional poet. Me. I write poetry for a living. This, the same young girl who despised poetry in school. How? Because I eventually read black, brown, Asian, poor, Queer, Trans, intersectional feminist, modern, contemporary poets and not just the stale, recycled sonnets of yesteryear’s idea of public education. 

I became a teacher of poetry. Me. I teach poetry for a living. How? I became an active participant in slam poetry, writing words to be spoken on stage at local live readings. It swept the nation in the 90’s, just like every tradition that comes and goes, dies and becomes new and novel again. However, much like rap, slam poetry is still kicking ass. It is not a movement that will go quietly into that dark night, you dig?  Slam poetry is the close cousin of rap/hip hop, which is related to the generation of the Beat, which is really scat and is born of jazz and blues. But it is also the Dozens. Call and response. Secreted plantation songs. Escape routes and underground railroads. It is corridos sung beneath a moon. Before that it was the ancestral utterations of origin and creation stories, borne of Indigenous tribal peoples across Turtle Island, First Nations, Mexica, Quechua, and Aymara peoples. My people. Through the act of ephemeral writing and performance of my spoken word, I became accustomed to talking about the act of storytelling to groups of community members. Along the way I became a teacher. Slam poetry was not only a craft, but also a multi-generational, communal and democratized interactive act of subversiveness, creation, ingenuity and all-around, good times. 

My students are reflections of that movimiento. I’ve taught poetry at the Native American Community Academy (NACA) for close to a decade. NACA, an Indigenous-based school set within the urban landscape of Albuquerque, New Mexico boasts a student body diverse with many cultural and ethnic backgrounds, including students from more than 60 different tribes. 

The NACA poets highlighted by Abantu are currently students in the dual-enrollment writing class in which, upon completion and supported by the Institute of Indian Arts (IAIA) of Santa Fe, receive collegiate credit. They are absolutely, without doubt, talented and courageous individuals. It takes a lot of ganas to speak truth to power through poetic verse. It takes a lot of bravery, to not only creatively take chances, but also to write authentically from a place of true, personal experience. My students celebrate their Indigenous, POC and intersectional identities. They write in their cultural languages. They write of their ancestral lands. They write of their kin, relatives, ceremony, tradition and modernity of what it means to be a young Indigenous/Brown/Black/Queer person in today’s world. They write of mental health issues and the medicine they seek through the act of their art, academics and community endeavors. They put on display their generational traumas, personal strife, resiliency and  also their victories. These young people are damned brilliant and I am honored to be their teacher. In fact, conversely, they are my teachers and I am an eager student, not just this semester, past semesters, but also future semesters to come. Every year I am enthralled to meet, greet and establish a friendship with young writers. I watch them become enthralled with the written AND spoken word. I watch them celebrate who they are. 

Yes, I make a concerted effort to include diverse writers in my curriculum. Within my classroom, I work to decolonize, Indigenize and cultivate safe spaces for discussion of black poets, brown poets, Indigenous poets, Asian/Pacific-Islander poets, Undocumented poets, Middle Eastern poets, Queer and Trans poets, Intersectional feminist poets, and on and on and on. But it isn’t my reading list that is to be celebrated here. Yes, I learned from what I did not learn as a young student of poetry, to ensure that I am an inclusive educator of past and current literature and varied modalities of storytelling. However, it is the students who are recreating the literary canon in the image of themselves. They are not only the reflection, they are the mirrors of the powerful portrait of their ancestors, elders, and Seventh Generation rising. This is the real work, you see. This is the important work in rejecting the erasure and homogenization of our shared histories and peoples. These are the real songs of truth, and they do it every day. They ink their journals and type in their laptops the stories of them. They write, read aloud, support each other and share in public forums their necessary words. For without them, we are enacting a backwards approach to education that lacks equity, inclusivity and spirit. 

I am heartened by the explosion of Slam poetry, aka spoken word poetry, born of dark pubs, coffee shops, libraries and emboldened by classroom settings, poetry anthologies, small presses, and MFA, ethnic studies, anthropological and collegiate pursuits, dissertations and degrees. It has enlivened the accessibility of poetry as a true form of powerful expression, an agent for change and social justice for young Indigenous, POC and “marginalized” youth everywhere. It continues to thrive, especially in the words of our NACA poetry aficionados. 

Enjoy readers. You certainly will. Enjoy and learn. Our young poets will not let you forget. They keep alive that which innately thrives; their histories and their futures. They are the joyous, purposeful and welcoming gatekeepers of this generation and many more to come. They are the truth tellers, soothsayers and bards for today’s knowledge-seeking students; far-reaching across classrooms that span the globe. They are the poetry found in the streets, neighborhoods, pueblos, bustling cities and bus stops, Kinaaldás, Sun Dances, mantanzas, basketball courts, islands, detention camps, border towns, and yes, the sacred and revolutionized classrooms.  

They are the poets who make us fall in love with poetry.

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