Corral’s candid, code-switching poetry
By hola | Published | 2 Comments
At the Split This Rock poetry festival Saturday, Eduardo C. Corral captivated the packed audience with award-winning poetry and a frank discussion about how his work stemmed from the bleak imagery of gay men as “skeletal figures kissed by death and public scorn” that he encountered growing up in the ’80s and ’90s.
He read poems about AIDS, a topic he grappled with while coming of age in Casa Grande, an Arizona town where literature about the LGBT community was as sparse as the desert terrain. There were no books in the public library about gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people—“beautiful people.” While the hurt he experienced back then motivated his writing and provided a catharsis, he confided that the pain has not gone away.
Corral doesn’t shy away from controversy, whether in the topics he writes about or the way he casually interweaves Spanish and English, treating both languages as equals. On Saturday, he read poems about immigration, sexuality, his relationship with his father, and the pain of being a gay man in an often homophobic world.
“His artistic excellence is on display in brilliant ways,” said Teri Cross Davis, a poet and member of the Split This Rock’s advisory board, who introduced Corral by reading a lengthy list of his awards and achievements. A fellow with the Latino poetry organization, CantoMundo, he was the first Latino to win the Yale Young Poets prize for “Slow Lightning,” the 2011 collection of poetry he read from on Saturday.
“His work is intoxicating and dangerous,” said Cross about Corral’s seamless blending of the English and Spanish languages. “It was as if I had followed a mysterious stranger down a darkened hallway,” she said about reading “Slow Lightning,” which left her feeling “a bit concussed,” a response, she said, she hoped the audience would also have to his work.
Corral was one of this year’s featured speakers at the biannual festival, which brings together poets from around the country for a long weekend of readings, workshops, panels, and other activities. He shared the stage at the National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium Saturday with three seasoned poets—Gayle Danley, Myra Sklarew and Claudia Rankine—and 17-year-old slam poet, Lauren May.
After Corral made his way to the podium, where he found himself caught in a spotlight, he admitted to the packed audience, “I am not nervous; I am very nervous.” But they were quickly engrossed in his clever and staccato poems that mixed Spanish and English, most notably in work about his family, where culture and tradition combined into lines such as, “he strung the guitarra,” and “the silver letters on his black belt spell Sangrón.”
Such “code switching” has long been a topic of debate and controversy among bilingual writers. For some, toggling between Spanish and English diminishes both languages and leaves too many monolingual readers behind. But Corral said that attitude underestimates the audience.
Instead of worrying that readers won’t understand or follow the juxtaposition of his two languages, he told the audience that he “refuse[s] to privilege one way of viewing over the other,” he said. “Language is one lens we see the world through,” he added.
“The Spanish is never italicized, the Spanish is never put in context,” he said. “There’s no glossary at the back of my book. I trust my readers.”
—Tori Hyndman
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