[Opening strum of Spanish guitar music]
[00:00:00] Manuel: And I think poetry helps us see each other as human beings. And the same thing can happen when you go to a poetry reading, a poetry slam—whatever you want to call it—it’s the spoken word that adds that other level of vibration. It adds that other heartbeat. You get to see that living, breathing, alive, poet on the stage writing, because sometimes people look at poetry like it’s a, a dead art form.
[00:00:24] Like it’s just Shakespeare. It’s just, you know, dead poets and, and that’s what poetry is, but it’s not. It’s alive. It’s living, it’s breathing. It’s revolutionary. It’s changing minds and changing the world.
[00:00:39] Emily: ¡Bienvenidos! This is Encounter Culture from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. I’m your host, and editor of El Palacio magazine, Emily Withnall.
(intro music fades away, shifts to fading Spanish guitar music in the background)
[Poetry formatting has been modified for transcription purposes.]
[00:00:53] Manuel: Let me tell you something:
My Manic is a war in slow motion.
It’s suffocating under a blanket of smog.
It’s a mother forgetting my name.
It’s a graveyard
full of versions of me no one ever met.
It’s pacing the floor
with prayers made of sweat and panic.
It’s grief wearing my skin
like a borrowed hoodie.
Redemption is not a distant unreachable go [00:01:15] It’s desperation curled on the bathroom floor,
mouth open
no sound.
It’s being triggered by
a color,
a scent,
a song,
feeling bound
by the language you never learned
to explain what’s happening inside.
They told me,
Just talk to someone
as if my tongue hasn’t been
tied with shame.
As if depression hasn’t carved silence
into the walls of my throat.
But
This isn’t weakness.
[00:01:49] This is transformation.
This is Death and Rebirth!
I have learned the art of dying
without actually dying.
I’ve been heartbroken
by love,
by self-loathing,
by the belief
that I was unworthy,
unlovable,
Unwanted.
But I’m still here.
Healing is not a straight line.
It’s a crescendo
of setbacks and small miracles.
[00:02:18] It’s a shooting star in a thunderstorm.
It’s learning to laugh again
with scars still healing.
It’s seeing your own reflection
and saying:
I will not disappear.
I will not let my story end here.
(guitar music begins)
[00:02:40] Emily: That was an excerpt from the poem, “The Art of Dying” by Manuel González, New Mexico’s third State Poet Laureate, who says that poetry is medicine.
(music expands with funky beat behind the guitar)
[00:02:59] Manuel: My name is Manuel González. I’m from Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was born and raised there. My father is from Albuquerque, well actually he’s from a little town in northern New Mexico called Anton Chico, but he was one of the originators of what’s known as New Mexico Music now. He was the leader of a band called Manny and the Casanovas.
[00:03:19] He died when I was a baby, and so I never really got to know him. So I embodied his artistic spirit in a different way. And mine came out through poetry in that way. And so, I had my notebook with me, and I’d write things in it and, and, that’s where I would write my ideas. But it was always something I kept personal and private.
[00:03:38] It was something I wouldn’t share with people. It was something I kept to myself. But as I got older, I would write poems for my friends to try to get them dates, to try to get the girls to pay attention to them. It didn’t always work, but it was a good reason to write. I was always looking for something that spoke to my spirit in that way.
[00:03:55] And the first thing that happened was I walked into a poetry slam. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a poetry slam, but a poetry slam is a competition, and the way it works is poets get up on the stage, and they recite poems that they wrote themself. And every poem is judged on the scale from zero to ten.
[00:04:10] Zero is a poem that should never have been written, should have been left home. It leaves a dirty smell on the stage when they’re done. (Emily chuckles) Ten is a poem that changes your life. It changes your world. It makes you see colors you never knew existed before. They say at the poetry slam that a poem that deserves a ten is a poem that causes simultaneous orgasm within a ten-mile radius. (more chuckling)
[00:04:31] So it has to be a really, really, really good poem. So, I’d go to those poetry slams in awe of these poets that had the courage to get up there and share their soul in that way. And I’d get up there, and I’d try. And I’d get up there and my paper would be shaking, and I’d be really scared, and I did what I had to do to get to the end of the poem, and I’d lose.
[00:04:50] But I didn’t give up. I kept going back. I revised, rewrote, and memorized my poetry, and eventually, I started to win. And since then, I’ve been the Albuquerque Poetry Slam Champ four times, and got to represent Albuquerque on a team as we go to the National Poetry Competition and, and compete in that way.
[00:05:10] It was fun. It took me a long time to figure out that poetry slam is just a fun game for us to play with our art. It’s not necessarily a, a road to finding a career in this art form. Because it was a teacher that came into a poetry slam that saw what we did and invited me into a classroom that said, “Could you please share what you did with our students?”
[00:05:34] And I went into a classroom, and this was the first time where I got to stand in front of students and share my arte, my art, my poetry. And I got to see that light bulb above their heads. And I, I don’t teach anybody anything. I show them my authenticity and vulnerability and tell them that there’s medicine there, “and I’d like to show you how to use it.”
[00:05:55] And I give ‘em a pencil. And so that’s where my art, from the stage transmuted into the classroom. And so I was part of a Poets in the Schools organization, and they sent me to the four corners of New Mexico, to all the little rural towns in New Mexico. And I’d go in to almost every English class in the school.
[00:06:14] And by the end of a couple of weeks, we’d changed the whole dynamics of the school. Like they would be like, you know, when we got there, the pretty kids, the jocks and the athletes were the, were the popular kids. When we left, it was the kids that were brave enough to stand up and share something authentic and sincere.
[00:06:31] And like, they saw each other’s courage and the strength that it took to stand up and be vulnerable in front of each other. And, and they didn’t make fun of or clown each other in any way. It was like, wow. And, and we got to support each other, and it was a beautiful thing.
[00:06:49] And so I got to do that over and over again, and over and over again, and it got to the point where I would be even spoiled. Like if I can’t make at least one kid cry for every class, like I feel like I didn’t do my job, (Emily chuckles) like I didn’t do it good. And so I kept doing that and I loved it, but it was a little bit unreliable. I mean, as an artist, that kind of life can be, you know, feast or famine.
[00:07:13] Sometimes I was working every week. I was at a different school in a different place, and we were doing good. And then there were months where I didn’t have any jobs and it was hard. It was a lot of sacrifice that my wife Nicole and my daughter Sarita did for me so that I could follow and pursue this idea and dream of sharing this art form with people, and trying to be, I don’t know, some, some poet. And it wasn’t until I went to where I’m at now, and where I’m at now is the Native American Community Academy.
[00:07:46] Now, I told you I had been going from school to school, and I was like Mary Poppins. I’d drop in and I’d be like the rockstar poet, and I’d hit every English class and I’d get kids to express themselves and cry. And then I’d go to a different school, and I was done. Then I went to this school, and that was the first time I was somebody’s everyday teacher for all year long.
[00:08:11] And it wasn’t two weeks, I’m a rockstar, and I’m gone. They saw my bag of tricks, and they were like, “Okay, now what?” And I had to figure out what it means to actually be a teacher.
(plucky violin music fades in with rhythmic vocals)
[00:08:26] Manuel: I use poetry and literacy as a guise to get into spaces where we can do good heart work. And that’s what I’m doing with these students. We’re writing about emotions and feelings and experiences, and just this last week we were doing Día de Los Muertos. And what I had my students working on was heart work.
[00:08:47] And so what I mean by that is, I told them, “Okay, you guys, we are talking about times where we’re honoring spirits in this way, and these spirits are here because they’re here as our ancestors to help us process trauma. And today we’re gonna build an altar. And this altar is gonna be an altar of words, and you can put anything you want on that altar. You can put a jar of your grandmother’s tears. You can put all of Albuquerque on this altar. It’s just whatever’s sacred to you, you’re gonna put it on this altar. But what you’re putting on that altar are things to represent three traumas: your personal trauma, and that’s the stuff you’ve been through, the stuff you went through that we carry on our shoulders, that makes it heavy for us to get through the day.
[00:09:28] Put it down on the altar. Then we have family trauma, and this is the stuff that we get. From our direct bloodline, from the stories that all of us have. Those stories, the shadows, the stories that we don’t tell outside the family because those are the stories that are secret that we just keep to ourselves. Find something that represents that and put that on the altar.”
[00:09:48] And the last one, and it’s heavy, not just because I work at the Native American Community Academy, ‘cause I think this is something that all of us need to do: but we talked about ancestral trauma, and to deal with processing the grief and pain that we carry from the way history went down. But we protect ourselves by not just bleeding all over the page.
[00:10:12] We find objects or metaphors or imagery to represent that trauma, and then instead of talking about, you know, the pain and depression that I go through, you can talk about a cracked mirror and just describe that cracked mirror. And that cracked mirror is your depression. You don’t have to show everybody all your vulnerabilities.
[00:10:33] It’s there in the words, it’s there in the metaphors. And this is how we heal. Because I found that there’s medicine in this artform. And this medicine comes from expressing yourself and telling the truth. The poetry comes when you get that truth, and we can shine it up, and we can polish it and make it pretty.
[00:10:51] But that’s what I wanna represent New Mexico—and as the New Mexico Poet Laureate, it is not about me or my accomplishments or my title. It’s about this being a ticket to get me into more places to do that kind of art. And heart work. There’s thirty-tree counties and twenty-three pueblos, and I wanna hit all of ‘em. I got three years to do it.
[00:11:12] And while I’m there, we’re gonna be working on heart. And because this artwork is inherently beautiful, what we create becomes the flowers that help other people heal. Because we got a lot of healing to do in New Mexico. But once we do that healing, we get to appreciate the wonder, beauty, and magic that’s the world all around us and all the time.
[00:11:34] I am so proud to be able to represent not only the voices of the people here and our cultura, our culture, and all the different cultures that we have here, but the land—this New Mexico, this place, it’s special. It’s magical. It’s, it’s something that doesn’t exist in other places. It’s sacred.
[00:11:54] And, and we understand that here. And I think that’s why those of us that are here, we appreciate it. And, and, and, that’s what I want to bring to light. I wanna show everybody our shine, that we’re not, you know, Breaking Bad, or the worst statistics that we see on the news. We are these artists, these poets, these sunsets, these mountains; our medicine, our ceremony, our rituals, our culture, that are in our everyday lives. The things that we incorporate into the steps that we walk as we walk down the road.
(bendy steel guitar fades in to foreground)
[00:12:38] Manuel: I had a conversation with my daughter. She’s going to UNM. She’s taking Chicano Studies, and one of her professors years ago had a problem with the fact that Latino literature had a lot of Magic Realism in it. And I got mad because like, there’s no reason we should feel bad about our Magic Realism because it’s not ‘Magic Realism.’
[00:12:56] It’s how we live our lives. It’s who we are. It’s, it’s the way you perceive reality. That there is magic all around you. We’re not writing fairy tales into our stories. We’re telling you how we see the world, and that’s why it’s a beautiful thing. So we just had that conversation the other day about incorporating Magic Realism into our poetry, and it’s in those metaphors and there’s healing. And there’s spirit work.
[00:13:20] I’m sorry, don’t ask me to talk about poetry, ‘cause I’ll talk about poetry all day long. (Emily chuckles) And then I won’t let you get a word in edgewise, so you might have to just kind of elbow your way into me too, so you could talk.
[00:13:31] Emily: Yeah, yeah. Well, I have two questions for you based on everything you’ve just said, but because you were just talking about Magic Realism—and just before we started recording, you said you have some stones in your hat, which maybe keen listeners will be able to hear rattling around a little bit: Can you talk about what those are?
[00:13:49] Manuel: So. I’ve been studying ancient Mesoamerican culture and philosophies, and they have these ideas of the nāhualli. It’s the idea of, for a lack of a better word, spirit animal, spirit guide. But it also comes in the form of stones. I got excited about that ‘cause I’ve always been the kind of person to carry rocks in my pocket.
[00:14:10] Like I’ll have a piece of quartz, or a piece of jade or something, but. I wanted them in my hat to keep them on my mind. And, there’s like onyx and that’s where I keep my negativity and anger and all of those kind of things. There’s jade, and it’s a precious stone and it represents my culture. There’s amethyst in there. And mostly it’s there to remind me of kind of my path and the ideas that I wanna keep on my mind.
[00:14:37] And the noise reminds me of the reasons that they’re there and those reasons keep me going in the direction that I want to keep going. And so my friends and family are already used to that noise and they laugh at me that I have rocks in my head. (Emily laughs) But I, I like it. And it kind of, it’s a good little spiritual reminder for me like that.
[00:14:55] Emily: And I love that, what you said about your daughter, you know, studying Chicano Studies, because in the winter issue of El Palacio, that’s gonna be out, when listeners hear this, there’s gonna be an article about one of the photographers in the Voces Del Pueblo exhibition at NHCC, and specifically about the womens’ role during the Chicano Movement in Las Vegas where they had a farm and they taught the children the cultural ways and stuff like that. So for listeners who are interested in that tangent.
(guitar fades in to foreground)
[00:15:31] Emily: I also wanted to ask you about your dad. Um, you said he was a musician. Did he write his lyrics to songs?
[00:15:38] Manuel: Yes. He, all of his music was original. It started as a family band and then it turned into Manny and the Casanovas, and there was different band members, but he was the leader of the band.
[00:15:49] And it was in the late sixties and mid-seventies where most dance halls in Albuquerque, they would go and, and fill ‘em with, with that music. And I hear stories of them having big award ceremonies and it would be between Manny and the Casanovas, or Al Hurricane. And Manny and the Casanovas won the award. And my family would tell me these stories, but then my father got sick, and he got cancer.
[00:16:15] There’s another story they tell where my father was in the hospital and he was going through chemo and his hair fell out, and Al Hurricane famously wore a wig, and you would never see him without that wig on his head. And when he went to go see my father, as he was passing away, he took that wig off his head, and they both kinda shared each other’s bald heads in a moment of kind of, you know, like, I’m bald too, compadre.
[00:16:43] And, and it, it was a beautiful moment that they shared with each other. We have these beautiful stories and these, these things that are part of our culture and our history from music, to art, to the land itself.
[00:16:56] Emily: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:56] Manuel: We are poetry. You don’t have to look far to find those metaphors here in New Mexico like that.
[00:17:01] Emily: Did you inherit any of those lyrics that he had written down from his songs?
[00:17:06] Manuel: Um, that’s hard. My father passed away when I was about eighteen months old, of cancer. And my mother was in mourning, obviously, ‘cause she was in love, and lost her husband. So I was a baby, and every time my father’s music came on, my mother would start to cry.
[00:17:25] And I would associate that pain with his music. And so kind of, I didn’t want her to cry. So I wouldn’t put that music on. And so it was almost something we didn’t listen to much in the house, but whenever we would go visit family or we would go anywhere, they would be happy, “Oh look, let’s put on this music!”
[00:17:42] And they, and then my mother would start to cry. As I’m older now as an adult, yes, I have gone into those lyrics and, and they’re old rancheras and they’re love songs and dance songs, and that’s kind of the music he played. But, I think that’s why, one of the many reasons I’m a poet, is because I’m using poetry as a means to process that type of emotion into something positive and beautiful.
[00:18:07] Even in the grief, even in the pain, that process of healing from it, there’s flowers there, and that’s, that’s what poetry does. That’s the power of the medicine in this art form. Like that.
[00:18:19] Emily: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Any listeners who have been listening in a dedicated way will maybe remember I talked to Tommy Archuleta, and I feel like there’s some parallels between the conversation I had with him in that episode on the podcast and, and what you’re talking about.
(trumpets and love song Spanish vocals fade in)
[00:18:50] Emily: One of the questions I had for you is, slam poetry is such a distinct art form, and you know it when you hear it, but I’m curious how you might describe the difference between slam poetry and poetry on the page. You know, obviously there’s overlaps, but how do you kind of define them separately?
[00:19:13] Manuel: One of the questions they asked me when I was trying to be the New Mexico State Poet Laureate was about the different communities in New Mexico, and there’s different communities in poetry.
[00:19:25] Now, there’s us slam poets. We’re very boisterous, we’re very loud, we’re very emotional. But there’s page poets that their poems exist between their pen and their paper, and they publish. And even when they recite their poems, it’s not to be loud and in your face. The emotion and the, the feeling needs to be in the words already.
[00:19:52] You don’t need to add extra emphasis to put it there But as a slam poet, we have to, on that stage, take these words and touch you in a way—like we gotta reach into your heart and squeeze your chakra in a way that makes you remember it forever. And sometimes it takes the trembling in the voice. It takes the authentic and sincere holding back of emotion, so that you can just get the words out before the floodgates open.
[00:20:20] And that’s something that touches people in ways that we’re not necessarily ready for, because there’s healing that needs to be done in society. And we’re looking at the other side, and both of us see strangers on the other side, but when we come in through emotion, through experience and feeling, it, it goes around those walls that we have up about politics and, and ideology.
[00:20:46] I started poetry as a young Chicano in Albuquerque, writing my own little poems to myself. But it wasn’t until I went to a poetry slam and I got to see other people get up and recite poetry about their experiences—and I could not only see the similarities that I have between me and maybe a queer person from a different culture up on stage that I thought I had nothing in common with, but I saw their heart. And I saw that my heart beats like their heart beats and my heart feels like their heart feels, and I don’t need to look at them as somebody other than myself.
[00:21:22] And and, and I got to see the humanity in other poets, in other people, in other experiences, instead of just living in my own bubble and not seeing past the end of my own nose. And I think poetry helps us see each other as human beings. And that’s where, you know, there’s the quiet poets, the ones that write in their paper.
[00:21:41] You can still see it if you sit there and spend time with those words and that paper, and let their prose seep into your spirit in that way. It, it, affects you. And the same thing can happen when you go to a poetry reading, a poetry slam—whatever you want to call it—it’s the spoken word that adds that other level of vibration.
[00:22:02] It adds that other heartbeat. You get to see that living, breathing, alive, poet on the stage writing, because sometimes people look at poetry like it’s a, a dead art form. Like it’s just Shakespeare. It’s just, you know, dead poets and, and that’s what poetry is, but it’s not. It’s alive. It’s living, it’s breathing.
[00:22:21] It’s revolutionary. It’s changing minds and changing the world because it comes in through emotion. It comes in through humanity. We see each other as human beings because we all have feelings and we all understand some of this trauma that we all need to heal from.
(Keyboard music play and fades into a funky beat)
(Ads begin)
[00:22:41] Emily: Do you ever wonder who coordinates public art around New Mexico or how the Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts are chosen? Or who runs the New Artist in Residence Program at the historic sites? New Mexico Arts supports these programs and provides funding for art services throughout the state, including Arts in the Military, Poetry Out Loud, the Folk Arts program, and Arts and Cultural Districts. To learn more, visit nmarts.org.
[00:23:13] Some things you can find on the internet. And others, not so much. Putting together a publication as interesting and beautiful as El Palacio Magazine is hard work, but it’s well worth the effort. The articles we cover, ranging from artist profiles you can’t find anywhere else, to impressive archeological discoveries, to histories of events in New Mexico that are underrepresented in our state’s archives, offer important and insightful writing about topics you definitely won’t find on the internet.
I may be just a little biased, but if you love New Mexico, you’ll love El Palacio. Subscribe at elpalacio.org/subscribe.
I guarantee you won’t want to miss an issue.
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(Music continues, then fades)
[00:23:57] Emily: So can you tell me a little bit about your craft and what you’re thinking about, either when you’re writing or when you’re going back to revise?
[00:24:06] Manuel: My poet mentor was Danny Solis, and when I first started writing, I would wait ’til inspiration, hit me like a lightning bolt, and then I have to get a pen or else my head would explode and I don’t know what would happen.
[00:24:22] So I would write it, and I would write it, and then it would all come out and then, “Oh. Whew, I’m done.” And my mentor would look at me like I’m crazy. Like, “You’re not done. You just vomited on the page. You need to go and revise this. You need to go and polish this turd and turn it into something beautiful.”
[00:24:39] And by working with wise poets and other people and mentors in my life, they taught me that this craft lives much more through discipline than it does through inspiration. And if you take the time to hone your craft and go back and visit the things that you’ve done before, you see, sometimes it’s even communication from your subconscious that you didn’t know when you wrote it, why you wrote it.
[00:25:03] But now when you go back and visit it, you can see these things and focus on them and, and, and show that, that there’s beauty there too. Now poetry is ceremony. And when it’s time for me to write, which I try to make time every day, I treat it as such. It’s sacred. It’s, it’s a time where I’m gonna be trying to quiet my mind so that I can allow not only the words of my ancestors, but whatever inspiration needs to come through.
[00:25:31] I honor the fact that none of this belongs to me and it’s not mine. And, and just because even it came through my pen, doesn’t mean that this inspiration is because I’m this great person. It’s because the spirits and inspiration used me as a vessel for it to come through. And once I honor it in that way, what I create becomes more sacred.
[00:25:51] One of my favorite writers is, uh, Victor Villaseñor, and I saw speaking of his anyways, he said, “I’m not a writer.” He said, “I’m a rewriter. I write what I write, but then I gotta go back and fix it.” And that’s where it is. And that’s what I tell my kids: “You’re—whatever you do now, don’t even worry about it. Don’t worry about sounding good, you’re making bricks.
[00:26:12] Once we’re done, then you can take these bricks and build your house. But right now, let’s just make the bricks and they can be ugly. They’re made of mud. Don’t worry about it. They’re adobe. We’re gonna, we’re gonna make some ugly bricks. But then, we can make a pretty house out of them bricks.” And that’s my method.
[00:26:27] We start with deep breathing techniques and I try to show them that you’re pulling in inspiration through your breath and, and as you breathe deeply and, and, and consciously and with intention, then that inspiration will come. And make sure when you’re done writing that you thank that inspiration, that there’s gratitude in your heart, that you understand that you’re not this genius ‘cause you wrote something amazing.
(electric guitar begins to fade into background)
[00:26:52] You were just lucky enough to hear the, the channel as it came through you and you wrote it down. And, and make sure you honor that. And so that’s how my whole process has changed from being a young man trying to follow this art form, to being an elder now and, and a future ancestor in this way to to honor this, this art form and the healing and medicine that’s, that’s in it.
(electric guitar fades to foreground ponderously)
[00:27:29] Emily: Do you have any specific memories either of you watching a particular slam poetry performance, or of you doing a particular poem that really moved you or broke through something?
[00:27:45] Manuel: Okay. This might tell you too much of my story because, oh, no, no. All right, so I was a knucklehead in my twenties getting into a lot of trouble, and I got in trouble with the law.
[00:27:57] And to make a long story short, I was on house arrest for being a knucklehead, and, and one day my probation officer tracker guy calls me into the office and he’s like, “Okay, come here.” And I still had like three months left to be on house arrest. And he gets the cutters and cuts the ankle bracelet off of my ankle and he says, “Okay, you’re done.”
[00:28:20] I knew I still had time left. I said, “What do you mean I’m done? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he says, “You’re done. We’re not gonna do this no more.” I, I don’t know, I thought there would be, I don’t—I had never been on in trouble before. I don’t know how it ends. And so I thought there would be, I don’t know, a letter or something.
[00:28:35] I don’t know. So the worst thing you could possibly do on on house arrest is go to a bar. I’m not really a drinker, but I was like, I was testing him, so “If I wanted to, I could go to a bar if I wanted.” He said, “Ooh, you’re already gonna mess up already.” And I said, “No, I, I just wondered.”
[00:28:55] And so I went home and I opened up a newspaper, and at the time they had the The Weekly Alibi, it’s the newspaper you get for free that had all the cool stuff in it. And I was looking in it, and I saw a poetry reading and I had never really been to a poetry reading. And I had just spent time getting in trouble and, and I didn’t know what to do. That’s why, how much trouble can I get going to see poetry?
[00:29:11] So I just decided to go to a poetry reading and it was at a place called The Dingo Bar, and it just so happened to be Santa Fe versus Albuquerque. (Emily chuckles) And I think this was the year, 1999, 1998. And I saw the most amazing poets get up on the stage. I saw Danny Solis, I saw Matthew John Conley. I saw Sarah McKinstry-Brown, some of these greatest poets that now I know who they were, but then I didn’t know this.
[00:29:40] I, I didn’t know it could affect me. I didn’t know going to a poetry reading and seeing poets get up on the stage is like having them punch each of my chakras and making me feel in ways I wasn’t ready for and didn’t know I wasn’t expecting. So I was busted open and was like, ‘Oh wow, that’s what I’ve been looking for.’
[00:29:58] They had cut off my ankle bracelet that day, so that was the first day my whole life changed direction. I stopped making stupid mistakes, getting into trouble. That’s when I started moving in the direction of my art and taking it seriously in that way, and writing and, and wanting to go back to that poetry reading.
[00:30:17] And then I was going to every open mic, every slam. I wanted to feel that feeling. It was like, you know, I got addicted to that catharsis, to that feeling of being busted open. And, and, and then it’s something that I can’t explain. As a poet, I can’t explain it. I, I, I try to explain to my students, there’s a time when we snap our fingers at a poetry slam.
[00:30:39] One of ‘em is if a poet gets up on the stage and the paper starts to shake, and in the middle of their poem, they forget what they’re saying. And then there’s moments of awkward silence. We snap our fingers to show support, to tell ‘em to take a breath. We’re okay. We’re with you. But there’s another reason why we would snap our fingers in a poetry reading.
[00:30:59] It would be when someone gets up on the stage and is like they brought exactly what you needed to hear at exactly the moment you needed to hear it. It’s like that metaphor spoke to your heart and healed you in ways that only your ancestors could feel. And you can snap your fingers in the middle of their poem without messing them up, but they can hear your snap and they can hear that respect and hear that appreciation, because we need that response as the audience for the poet as we’re on that stage, and that’s that moment.
[00:31:33] And I’ve been there, I’ve been in the audience, and it’s like time stops. It’s like they’re talking just to me. It’s like, it’s like their words hang in the air, and we just get to have that moment of beauty and metaphor and power as their words are healing my spirit. And, and, and, and I can feel it. That’s why I got addicted to that:
[00:31:53] Going from school to school to school. ‘cause high school kids come into the room, like, ‘I don’t want to do poetry. This, oh man, we gotta do, I don’t,’ and by the end, ‘Sir! Sir, look, I just wrote this. Sir, sir, I just wrote this and I, I, I wanna know if you think it’s any good, sir. Sir. Lemme—’ and I knew I got ‘em. I got ‘em.
[00:32:12] Yes. And Yes, I know it’s good. Whatever it is. ‘I know it’s good ‘cause you wrote it,’ and I get to tell ‘em and, and I love that. The first couple of years when I was, somebody’s everyday—working at NACA and their everyday, all the time teacher, I was doing emotional poetry assignment after emotional and like they got to hate me.
(Emily chuckles)
[00:32:30] It got bad. Like, like they didn’t wanna go cry in my class every day, you know, after a, a few months of that, like they didn’t wanna come to my classroom anymore. And I, I had to figure, okay, it’s okay to write about pizza every once in a while and we gotta put those in there too. I had to figure out when it was okay to push ‘em and when it was just, “Okay, we need to go outside and talk about the beauty we see in the sky.”
[00:32:55] I had to find those happy poems. Not every poem needs to twist your soul and break your heart.
[00:33:01] Emily: So what grades do you teach?
[00:33:02] Manuel: I’ve taught all grades. Oh, oh, the little ones. Those are scary. The, the, the, the kinders up to even the middle schoolers, they’re a whole other ball of emotions, but the the little ones, they really wanna please and they really wanna write, but then it’s like herding cats and they’re in every direction.
[00:33:21] And I, “Okay. Let’s write about a color. What’s your favorite color? ‘My color’s blue.’ Okay. Okay. Now tell me three things that are blue.’ ‘Uh, uh, the sky?’ Yes. Okay. ‘Uh, uh, blue Jolly Ranchers.’ You like them when they’re, when they make your whole mouth blue? ‘Yes.’ Write that down.” And, and it, it, it’s easy once we get there, but it’s hard to get them to focus.
[00:33:38] And I, it, it takes way more of my energy than to just like, I read a poem to them, give them the pencil and then kind of sit there for fifteen minutes while they cry to themselves on their page. The little ones are hard. The middle schoolers, Ooh. (Emily chuckles) Their emotions and—they’re just barely starting to feel those emotions and they don’t really know what to do with them.
[00:34:01] And sometimes they get dark, sometimes they get scary. And sometimes I’m there to help them untie the knots that they carry in their stomach, and they’re connected to those traumas that we talked about a while ago.
[00:34:13] And, and we gotta figure out how to talk about these traumas without retraumatizing ourselves and without exposing so much of ourselves that kind of, you know, it shows everybody your vulnerabilities. There’s ways to protect yourselves in these metaphors, and that’s why we do it that way. Now, the high school kids are already walking in the room with their walls up and they’re protected, and I have to show them my vulnerability.
[00:34:37] I have to break my heart, open it up for them and bleed in front of them for them to be like, “Okay, I think I might be able to try this.” And, and, and, and they’re very skeptical and, and they don’t even really, until they see another one of their fellow students do it. And then once I can get one kid to do it, then they all, oh, it’s, it’s, it’s beautiful.
[00:34:58] My experience working with this Native American community was the opposite of that. I can get them to write, I could get them to fill pages. But they didn’t wanna speak, they didn’t wanna share, they didn’t wanna get their voices heard. And, and no matter how loud I got or how high I jumped, or how much energy I tried to bring to the classroom, sometimes even the louder I got would make them cringe even more.
[00:35:23] It wasn’t part of who they were. And the hardest part was, in order for them to stand up and share what they had, I had to get it to where they felt safe and comfortable with me. And sometimes they were barely getting comfortable with me and, and then the class ends. But I was used to being a, a slam poet, being a, a boisterous spoken word artist.
[00:35:44] Their page poets over there, and I had to work with them. It forced me to find different techniques and ways to work with them and that it’s okay to allow them to be quiet and write in their paper. And then I read and we can discuss it, but it’s not standing up and yelling and crying and showing everybody my heart and my soul and my experience.
[00:36:04] But when they stand up and read what they wrote, it’s their—like I told you, the emotion, feeling, and power. It’s written in the metaphors. It, it doesn’t need to be yelled at the top of your lungs. I found that their intensity comes from this beauty that comes from a connection to the land, a connection to their ancestors, and a connection to this trauma that they understand in ways that I, I thought, I thought I was turning them onto something when their ancestors were already talking to them and they were already writing that down. And so I’m just, I’m just there to hand pencils and give space.
(bright keyboard music and rhythm fades in to foreground)
[00:36:43] Emily: This excerpt is from “Clearly Spoken,” dedicated to the students at NACA.
[Poetry formatting has been modified for transcription purposes.]
[00:36:49] Manuel: They walk into my classroom
Carrying the constellations of their ancestors in their ribcages,
ancestral codes written in their bones
Whispered in the spiraling scrolls of DNA
cosmic syllables humming low in their throats.
Spoken in the stars that illuminate their dreams
They are stardust and cornmeal,
[00:37:15] river
breath
and red clay.
They come from pueblos older than this nation,
from Diné chants and Apache winds,
from Keres prayers whispered
into canyon echoes and grandmother’s stew.
They come not to be loud,
but to speak from silence,
from ceremony,
from generations unbroken by boarding school ash.
They sit with quiet fire
Not silence
But fire
Because their resilience isn’t loud
[00:37:50] Their fire is not for spectacle.
Their rage is not theatrical.
But it is clearly spoken.
I have seen it,
in the poems they write with the ink of resilience,
on paper that becomes
a battlefield,
a sweat lodge,
a sacred site.
They weave their words like prayer rugs their grandmother taught them to weave on looms of
ancestral cords
[00:38:16] She told them stories of the nightmares she survived
They called it education in those old Indian schools with children buried beneath the soil
And this new generation of indigenous children are here to heal from the traumas of their
grandmothers grandmothers grandmothers
Writing their medicine in each and every line
[00:38:42] They reclaimed religion and rewrote it as movement
As decolonization
As freedom
As the right to feel joy without asking permission
And
They don’t do this for applause.
They do it for return.
Return of land.
Return of language.
Return of love untouched by colonization.
(electric keyboard music fades in briefly)
[00:39:07] Manuel: And every day it’s a learning process. But I really love to see how this art form heals people. I’ve gone to the, the halfway houses, people getting outta prison. I’ve gone to the treatment centers where people are dealing with addiction. I used to go to YDDC, to the youth detention centers where those kids—man, if we were all judged by the mistakes that we made when we were young for the rest of our lives, like—those kids are just kids.
[00:39:35] And, and, and sometimes, I mean, I’m sorry to say it, but when I go in there, they treat those children, like they’re adult criminals. And so I try to find the children in them sometimes. And, and that’s where I, I’m working with the 18-, 19-year-olds, but we write about the color blue and I, I gotta worry about that ‘cause we gotta worry about gang connotations with colors and things.
[00:39:55] So I go, ‘Okay, what would your grandmother say? Her most beautiful thing is when she thinks of the color blue.’ We gotta break it down to, ‘Oooh, don’t talk about my grandma.’ And so I’m going, ‘Like I told you, we go in through emotions, we go in through feelings.’ I come into their heart, makes them put down those walls.
[00:40:15] You you’re gonna talk about your grandma. It’s hard to talk about gang colors and glorifying violence or misogyny or any of these other things that sometimes they’re ready to write about and they wanna start brimming and write raps that they hear. ‘Tell me what your grandmother’s eyes look like.’
[00:40:28] Grandma is a good one to go to. We all have a soft spot in our heart for our grandma, and so I go there, and then some of these kids have stories there. They don’t have family, they don’t have any of this stuff, so I gotta find other ways where we can come into heart. That’s what I’m looking for. I wanna reach into heart.
[00:40:45] That’s what this poetry is. That’s what this art form is. It’s about heart work. Oh, and the, the metaphors and the simile and the, and the figurative language, and all the stuff that those English teachers in that other room are teaching over there at my school. I’m here to get them to express themselves authentically and sincerely.
[00:41:04] And so as the New Mexico Poet Laureate, I, I’m gonna set up writing workshops before we do open mic performances, at different libraries and schools and detention centers and, and, and treatment centers. And then after we’ve done the crying and we’ve done the writing and we get to the sharing, I’m going to showcase their work on a website.
[00:41:28] And on that website we’ll have the State of New Mexico where you can click on the different counties and click on the different Pueblos. And when you click on it, then you will have the opportunity to either see video or text, and I’ll be collecting these over the next three years, I’m gonna hit all these different places. And then start this whole living digital anthology that I wanna make it so that people can upload their own poetry to, so that even when I’m not Poet Laureate anymore, this is something that can live ongoing, because this art form is a movement.
[00:42:04] It’s not just, you know, pretty poems and books on the shelf. It’s political, it’s artistic, it’s revolutionary, and what we do moves people’s hearts. We can talk about politics and ideas, but to hear the sound of a baby crying ‘cause they’re hungry is something that none of us can really argue with or have any kind of political stance against.
[00:42:28] That’s what poetry does. I try to get everybody to talk about the truth, regardless of what your political stance is or who you follow or who you voted for. I wanna know about what makes you cry, and how is that connected to the humanity that you carry inside your heart? That we all carry inside our hearts—that we are human beings and, and that’s what I feel can heal.
[00:42:53] And is something that, that this art form can do in New Mexico. And that’s what I wanna spread. I wanna show, I wanna showcase our, our beauty, our, our poetry, our healing, this medicine, this medicine that lives in each of our hearts that we have to share with one another in that way. ‘Cause you never know if it’s your voice, that’s the one that’s gonna be, that that person needed to hear at that moment.
[00:43:18] That healed them in ways that, that only their ancestors understood. That’s the way I got into with my kids to get them to stand up and share, is to tell them that ‘You remember that time when a poet touched you and it, and it, and it hurt, but it felt better and it made you heal? Your voice is that voice for somebody else, and if you don’t get up and share what you wrote, you’re dishonoring that inspiration that came through those words and the inspiration that needs to live on when somebody else hears what you did.’ And that’s what I wanna do. That’s what I want to go around New Mexico and having everybody share their inspiration with one another until we’re all inspired, and we all start figuring out how to change the world with one another in a beautiful way, so that we can see the humanity in one another. In this way.
(music begins)
[Poetry formatting has been modified for transcription purposes.]
[00:44:13] Manuel: This is “Ritual. Vessel. Volcano. Vision.”
Albuquerque,
this is healing,
reclamation.
We sanctify the soil,
We are more than crime statistics.
We are San Jose sunrises,
Barelas barrio alchemy,
Central Avenue gospel
painting hope in bold strokes of dawn.
The blue light of the magic hour.
From Tramway to Old Town’s soul,
To the west mesa
[00:44:47] We carry medicine in our stride.
Our mouths,
our breath.
Our hearts are war drums.
Rebellion embodied.
Forged in fire
by volcano breath,
blessed by
the Rio’s sacred flow
Burque, you are holy ground.
Not forgotten,
nor forsaken.
You are the drum circle,
the car show,
the lowrider moonrise over
El Chante: a temple.
[00:45:23] West Mesa: the horizon
beckoning you to rise again
Like the sun over the Sandias
and ignite every barrio that dimmed its glow.
We are building a city that heals,
That honors,
that shouts joy into the future.
[music increases in volume briefly before fading away]
[00:45:51] Emily: Find out about upcoming events and work from Manuel González on his website, linked in the show notes. Be sure to also look for links to our past episodes with poets Lauren Camp and Tommy Archuleta. And keep your eye out for the spring issue of El Palacio magazine, which will be filled with poetry. The issue will feature a profile of the new U.S. Poet Laureate from Santa Fe, Arthur Sze, and Lauren Camp’s community poem project, featuring poems she created in small towns around the state during her tenure as New Mexico Poet Laureate.
[00:46:25] The issue will also feature a profile of Manuel written by yet another former Albuquerque Poet Laureate, Hakim Bellamy. Manny shared three of his poems for today’s episode, “Clearly Spoken,” “Ritual. Vessel. Volcano. Vision,” and “The Art of Dying.” To see him read the full poems, visit our YouTube channel @newmexicoculture.
[music fades into theme music and closing credits]
[00:47:02] Emily: Encounter Culture is a production of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
Our producer is Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios.
This season is produced and edited by Andrea Klunder and Alex Riegler with additional editing by Monica Braine.
Our recording engineers are Collin Ungerleider and Kabby at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe.
[00:47:25] Technical direction and post-production audio by Edwin R. Ruiz.
Our executive producer is Daniel Zillmann.
Thank you to New Mexico artist “El Brujo” D’Santi Nava for our theme music.
For a full transcript and show notes, visit podcast.nmculture.org or click the link in the episode description in your listening app.
[00:47:48] I’m your host, Emily Withnall.
The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs is your guide to the state’s entire family of museums, historic sites, and cultural institutions. From Native treasures to space exploration, world-class folk art to ancient dinosaurs, our favorite way to fully explore is with the New Mexico CulturePass. To see everywhere CulturePass is accepted and reserve yours today, visit nmculture.org/visit/culturepass.
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[theme music fades out]