Inspired

In each issue, we ask a contemporary poet for a poem which draws inspiration from another poet’s work. In this issue, Francisco Aragón responds to Carmen Giménez Smith.

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of six poetry collections, including Cruel Futures, Milk and Filth and Be Recorder, shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Awards. She is also the author of the lyric memoir Bring Down the Little Birds, winner of an American Book Award. She teaches at Virginia Tech University.

Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. In 2017, he was a finalist for Split This Rock’s Freedom Plow Award for poetry and activism. Aragón is the author of two books: Puerta del Sol and Glow of Our Sweat, as well as editor of, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. His third book, After Rubén, is slated for 2020 with Red Hen Press. A native of San Francisco, CA, he is on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), where he teaches courses in Latinx poetry and creative writing. He also directs the ILS’ literary initiative, Letras Latinas. His Tongue a Swath of Sky, a limited edition, hand-stitched chapbook, was released 2019.

LB: What made you decide to write a poem inspired by the work of Carmen Giménez Smith?

FA: Last February I had the honor of introducing Carmen as the keynote speaker at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference at Arizona State University. I had wanted to do something special, something beyond the conventional introduction. This prompted me to recall an event

56 from 2014, which took place at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. It was a reading that featured, alongside Carmen, the poets Roberto Tejada and J. Michael Martínez. The poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson, who was a professor at Arizona at the time, decided to read – as the bulk of his introduction – single lines of poetry by the three featured poets, weaving them together into a kind of mosaic. In short, a cento.

Taking my cue from Wilkinson’s gesture, I decided, in preparation for my introduction, to re-read Carmen’s books and, as a first step, pluck individual lines of poetry from all her books, lines whose language engaged me. I then pruned my selection further and curated a reduced number of those lines, arranging them in a specific order. The result was into a 22-line poem broken up into 11 couplets. I kept the lines intact, verbatim if you will, and titled the piece “Carmen’s Collage: a cento.”

When you extended your invitation to submit a poem “inspired” by someone else’s work, I decided to re-visit “Carmen’s Collage” and expand it. I took this an opportunity to integrate lines of poetry from Carmen’s most recent book, Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019). At the time of my introduction in Arizona and that initial 22-line version, Be Recorder wasn’t yet available.

The piece morphed into a 50-line poem – still broken up into couplets. It’s a poem I consider, in fact, a collaboration. In other words, the piece