Now we are here. The Blanton Museum of Art: Expanding Abstraction, "Amada Miller: Everything in Tune" at grayDUCK Gallery, The Contemporary Austin's Jones Center Reopens. You know, we cannot turn away and live in a fantasy. You know, there's fake America. You know, right now, what's going on, as you know, in the national discourse, especially in the top tier, we have many versions of America. But I did - I could do one thing. The son of migrant farmers, Herrera moved often, living in trailers or tents along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California. A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for almost 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Anyways, that's how that's how things come together when you're writing, as you know. For that I had to push you aside. His interests in indigenous cultures inspired him to lead a formal Chicano trek to Mexican Indian villages, from the rain forest of Chiapas to the mountains of Nayarit. Support the Chronicle, The three-time Slam Champion turns to theatre to get at the roots of an empty space in her life, On coming back to an appreciation of poetry's remarkable resonance and relevance, Sherry Thomas' fifth outing in the Lady Sherlock series is as fascinating and feminist as ever, The San Antonio-based artist's new show rings lunar and true, Shaun Hamill pens an achingly aware homage to horrors past, One click gets you all the newsletters listed below, Breaking news, arts coverage, and daily events. The experience greatly changed him as an artist. The lyrical lamentations in his previous collection Notes on the Assemblage linked the martyr-making police violence that solidified into the Black Lives Matter movement with the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from a teaching college in Mexico, effectively illustrating that state-sponsored murder is a plague that needs no passport. HERRERA: Well, you know, at a young age - well, it must - high school, I bumped into Rabindranath Tagore's book called "Fireflies." With his latest collection, Every Day We Get More Illegal, Herrera offers a kind of spiritual style guide for a time when solidarity itself is stymied by social distancing. Thank you. Herrera graduated from San Diego High in 1967, and was one of the first wave of Chicanos to receive an Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) scholarship to attend UCLA. JUAN FELIPE HERRERA: (Reading) Why do you cry? First I had to learn. Herrera is the author of many collections of poetry, including Senegal Taxi (University of Arizona Press, 2013); Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008), a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award; 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971–2007 (City Lights, 2007); and Crashboomlove (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), a novel in verse, which received the Americas Award. It is a symphony, the border guard says. You have Mexico, in my family's case. Over decades - to take care of myself. It's kind of like a magical winged being. Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, California, on December 27, 1948. They're just policies that get passed that rip us apart, and they move on. Copyright 2020 NPR. I had to gain, pebble by pebble, seashell by seashell, the courage to listen to my self, my true inner self. Can't keep up with happenings around town? He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2011. There's a girl up ahead made of sparkles. I had to learn. The poems in his latest book are urgent and haunting, like this one - "Border Fever 105.7 Degrees." Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Latino ever to serve as U.S. poet laureate, wasted no time using his 2015-17 platform to address societal evils that recognized no borders. Migrants aren't separate from anyone else, and everyone else is not separate from the migrant experience or the Black experience or women's experience or LGBTQ experience. In "i am not a paid protestor," Herrera delivers deadpan Beckett-like instruction on how to deal with conspiracy-minded, Soros-obsessed detractors out to disrupt otherwise peaceful protests: The poem, which commences with curt denials of Deep State nonsense, funnels fast into a dadaesque offering of candy and amphibious tools for meditation. The poems in his latest book are urgent and haunting, like this one - "Border Fever 105.7 Degrees." Can you please read your poem "America, We Talk About It? In "Listen to Elias Canetti," Herrera takes his cues from the classic meditation on mass manipulation Crowds and Power, rhetorically interrogating his audience into considering the very nature of their teeming in a manner that recalls Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator: "Are you a crowd – are you a hunting pack – are you a domestication plasma, half machine-half skin production, are you a punishment-love hypnosis, are you a Segmenter without eyes or heart or blood, are you the remoteness that is all we know now, are you the barcode of humans at so many gates, checking-in, interrogated, zapped by desolation at every turn, are you the Symbol-maker of detachment," the poet asks, with decades of activism fueling his authorial concern. And they're short poems, and they're beautiful poems. "America, We Talk About It.". Are you listening? He began drawing cartoons while in middle school, and by high school was playing folk music by Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Juan Felipe Herrera reading from his new collection of poems called "Every Day We Get More Illegal." - because the sun goes up, and the sun goes down, and people have to travel at night and find light somehow and travel during the daytime and find more light. Where do I go to breathe no more? Over the past three decades, he has founded a number of performance ensembles, and has taught poetry, art, and performance in community art galleries and correctional facilities. HERRERA: (Laughter) Well, they're two different things (laughter). It is a symphony, the border guard says. His work, which includes video, photography, theater, poetry, prose, and performance, has made Herrera a leading voice on the Mexican American and indigenous experience. Juan Felipe Herrera - Juan Felipe Herrera Biography - Poem Hunter. JUAN FELIPE HERRERA: (Reading) Why do you cry? New recipes and food news delivered Mondays, All questions answered (satisfaction not guaranteed). He received a masters in Social Anthropology from Stanford in 1980, and went on to earn an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1990. ", For Herrera, who quotes the Dalai Lama's instruction that "We must develop a sense of oneness of 7 billion human beings," the vacuum will instead be filled with unity, which he describes as an "indescribable thing" that can take the form of the exiled expressionism found in Max Beckmann's art or exist as "just a breath of a song.". I didn't really intend for the migrant to be a firefly. The son of migrant farmers, Herrera moved often, living in trailers or tents along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California. Odd to be a half-Mexican, let me put it this way I am Mexican + … HERRERA: Well, you know, this theme of the border, of being a migrant, of being cut away in two pieces, perhaps in many more pieces - you have Latin America. And spiritually, he is deep into the quest that we all must begin before it is too late." Welcome to the program. He is the father of five children, and lives in Fresno, California, with his partner, the poet and performance artist, Margarita Robles. Is she me, or … GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's talk about the imagery in your writing. So they're strong. Aesthetically, he leaps over so many canons that he winds up on the outer limits of urban song. It is not easy. Those are not screams you hear across this cage. I mean, you have borne witness to a lot of pain over the past few years. They're brave. Tell me about the journey, the conceit of this book. So that's where I'm coming from. He has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and served as chair of the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at CSU-Fresno. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Juan Felipe Herrera, an artist, educator, activist and writer. On the custody floor, 105.7 degrees, where do I go? A lost flame, a firefly dressing for freedom, where did she go? To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. Support the free press, so we can support Austin. And they believe in making it. Juan Felipe Herrera, in addition to being a poet, is a performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher and activist. Juan Felipe Herrera is an artist and educator and activist and a former U.S. poet laureate.

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