Puerto Rico Poetry Out Loud

Endoso al registro y participación de escuelas en Poetry Out Loud Puerto Rico, 2021-22

José Colón — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 14:08:35 +0000

¿Qué es Poetry out Loud?

Compartimos el endoso del Departamento de Educación de Puerto Rico al programa educativo Poetry Out Loud, en su 14ta edición. Con esta carta, la principal agencia educativa del país reconoce el valor de este proyecto como una herramienta dinámica para el desarrollo integral de nuestra juventud en las artes, la comprensión y expresión de la lengua, y la comunicación.

2021EndosoPOL-firmado Download

Poetry: Tato Laviera

José Colón — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 15:31:57 +0000

Poetry: Tato Laviera

Poetry es una sección dedicada a resaltar la importante contribución literaria de las voces puertorriqueñas dentro y fuera del archipiélago, desde autores clásicos hasta escritores contemporáneos.

El poeta nuyorican Tato Laviera nació en Santurce, Puerto Rico, de padres filósofos y escritores. Su familia se mudó a Nueva York en 1960, cuando Jesús Laviera Sanches (su nombre de pila), tenía 10 años. a vivir en el Lower East Side. Estudió en la Universidad de Cornell y en el Brooklyn College. Moviéndose entre el inglés y el español, su poesía aborda temas como la inmigración, la historia y la identidad transcultural. Laviera es el autor de varias colecciones poéticas, incluyendo La Carreta Made a U-Turn (1979), AmeRícan (1985), Mainstream Ethics (Etica corriente) (1988), y Mixturao and Other Poems (2008). También escribió más de una dozena de obras de teatro, entre las que destaca King of Cans, estrenada en 2012 en el New York’s Red Carpet Theater. Laviera vivió en Nueva York hasta su muerte en 2013.

Lee más en https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tato-laviera.

Spanglish

pues estoy creando spanglish
bi-cultural systems
scientific lexicographical
inter-textual integrations
two expressions
existentially wired
two dominant languages
continentally abrazándose
en colloquial combate
en las aceras del soil
imperio spanglish emerges
control pandillaje
sobre territorio bi-lingual
las novelas mexicanas
mixing with radiorocknroll
condimented cocina lore
immigrant/migrant
nasal mispronouncements
baraja chismeteos social club
hip-hop prieto street salsa
corner soul enmixturando
spanish pop farándula
standard english classroom
with computer technicalities
spanglish is literally perfect
spanglish is ethnically snobbish
spanglish is cara-holy inteligenci
which u.s. slang do you speak?

Tato Laviera, “spanglish” from Benedición: The Complete Poetry of Tato Laviera. Copyright © 2014 by Tato Laviera. Reprinted by permission of Arte Público Press. Source: Benedición: The Complete Poetry of Tato Laviera (Arte Público Press, 2014). Poem taken from the Poetry Out Loud digital anthology, https://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/spanglish/.

ESTUDIANTE! “Spanglish” es un poema que puedes utilizar en la competencia, disponible para consulta en https://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/spanglish/.

latero story

(can pickers)

i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient
moonlighting in the sun as a latero
a job invented by national and state laws
designed to re-cycle aluminum cans
to return to consumer acid laden
gastric inflammation pituitary glands
coca diet rite low-cal godsons
of artificially flavored malignant
indigestions somewhere down the line
of a cancerous cell

i collect from garbage cans in outdoor facilities
congested with putrid residues
my hands shelving themselves
opening plastic bags never knowing
what to encounter

several times a day i touch evil rituals
slit throats of chickens
tongues of poisoned rats
salivating on my index finger
smells of month old rotten food
next to pamper’s diarrhea
dry blood infectious diseases
hypodermic needles tissued with
heroine water drops pilfered in
slimy grease blood hazardous waste materials
but i cannot use rubber gloves
they undermine my daily profit

i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient
moonlighting during the day as a latero
making it big in america
someday i might become experienced enough
to offer technical assistance
to other lateros
i am thinking of publishing
my own guide to latero collecting
and founding a latero’s union to offer
medical dental benefits

i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient
moonlighting at night as a latero
i am considered some kind of expert
at collecting cans during fifth avenue parades
i can now hire workers at twenty
five cents an hour guaranteed salary
and fifty per cent of two and one half cents
profit on each can collected
i am a twentieth-century welfare recipient
moonlighting at midnight as a latero
i am becoming an entrepreneur
an american success story
i have hired bag ladies to keep peddlers
from my territories
i have read in some guide to success
that in order to get rich
to make it big
i have to sacrifice myself
moonlighting until dawn by digging
deeper into the extra can margin of profit
i am on my way up the opportunistic
ladder of success
in ten years i will quit welfare
to become a legitimate businessman
i’ll soon become a latero executive
with corporate conglomerate intents
god bless america.

Tato Laviera, “latero story” from Benedición: The Complete Poetry of Tato Laviera. Copyright © 2014 by Tato Laviera. Reprinted by permission of Arte Público Press. Source: Benedición: The Complete Poetry of Tato Laviera (Arte Público Press, 2014). Poem taken from Poetry Foundation’s digital anthology, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58196/latero-story.

Soledad

people talk about loneliness

is only sexual companionship
that’s soon forgotten

beneath its seven layers
nobody can talk about solitude

people talk about solitude

and soledad

well, there is no english
translation

Tato Laviera, “soledad” from Benedición: The Complete Poetry of Tato Laviera. Copyright © 2014 by Tato Laviera. Reprinted by permission of Arte Público Press. Source: Benedición: The Complete Poetry of Tato Laviera (Arte Público Press, 2014). Poem taken from Poetry Foundation’s digital anthology, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58193/soledad.

Letter from Amy Stolls, literary arts director, NEA

José Colón — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 16:47:10 +0000

Letter from Amy Stolls, literary arts director, NEA

From the desk of Amy Stolls, literary arts director, National Endowment for the Arts

When Amanda Gorman spoke at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, people around the nation were exposed to the power of poetry, and saw how much skill and creativity it takes to bring a poem’s words to life. For more than 15 years, Poetry Out Loud has given millions of high school students a similar platform through a national poetry recitation competition.

An initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts and Poetry Foundation, Poetry Out Loud is offered in all 50 states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. The program is organized at the local level by schools or organizations, and coordinators have access to a free teacher’s guide and an online anthology of classic and contemporary poetry. With more than 1,100 poems in the anthology, students gain an understanding of the breadth of poetry, while having the freedom to discover poems with which they feel a connection. As students participate in Poetry Out Loud, not only do they develop a deeper appreciation for poetry, they also improve their analytical skills while building self-confidence and public speaking skills.

More than four million students have participated in Poetry Out Loud since 2005, many advancing from classroom competitions to school competitions to state competitions and ultimately to the national finals where students compete for the grand prize of $20,000. Non-school organizations, such as after-school clubs, libraries, or nonprofit organizations, may also host Poetry Out Loud and have students advance to state competitions. In total, Poetry Out Loud will award more than $100,000 to state- and national-level winners and their schools in 2022.

Visit PoetryOutLoud.org to learn more about this program, and to access free materials, including guidelines on how to hold competitions in-person or virtually. To participate in the official 2021-2022 program, contact the Poetry Out Loud coordinator in your state or jurisdiction.

We hope you will help us grow this national competition and bring the power of poetry to even more students in the coming year.

Amy Stolls
Director, Literary Arts
Literary Arts & Arts Education Division
National Endowment for the Arts

Photo by Carrie Holbo. Taken from arts.gov.

Amy Stolls is the Director of Literary Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts. She oversees a portfolio that includes grants to organizations for projects such as the publication of books and literary journals, book festivals, writing workshops, and reading series; fellowships to individual poets, prose writers, and translators; Poetry Out Loud, a program that engages high school students nationwide in the public recitation of poetry; and the NEA Big Read, a national initiative that supports community-wide reading programs around the country designed around a single book.

Stolls has more than 18 years of experience in the NEA’s Literary Arts program managing various grant programs and special initiatives. She has advised on and reviewed thousands of proposals from organizations and thousands more from individuals, has moderated more than 80 panels, and has been a public speaker on the topic of literature at conferences and festivals around the country and abroad, including the Moscow Book Festival, where she led a team of U.S. participants. She spearheads the NEA’s involvement in the National Book Festival, working with the Library of Congress on programming and promotion for the Poetry & Prose Pavilion. To draw attention to the NEA’s creative writing fellows, Stolls initiated in 2001 and helps manage Meet Our Fellows on the NEA website, featuring bios and excerpts from winning manuscripts.

Stolls’ publishing credits include the young adult novel Palms to the Ground (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), winner of the 2005 Parents’ Choice Gold Award, and the novel The Ninth Wife (HarperCollins, 2011), as well as numerous personal and literature-related essays. For the NEA, she co-edited the anthology The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation; wrote the introduction to NEA Literature Fellowships: 40 Years of Supporting American Writers, and co-wrote the chapter on literature in the book National Endowment for the Arts, A History: 1965-2008.

Prior to her time at the NEA, Stolls was an environmental journalist who gained international recognition for her coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. She has an MFA in creative writing from American University, where she has taught courses on contemporary literature.