Tag: Mount St. Mary’s University Los Angeles

  • The Panther in the Cage

    The Panther in the Cage

    Today’s show is a recording of a poetry show I did at Mount St. Mary’s University in Los Angeles, where I teach. I took Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “The Panther,” memorized it, and performed it for the students, along with other poems that followed the theme. The all about the cages that we live in,…

  • Find Your Homeland

    Find Your Homeland

    The Spanish word terruño has captured my imagination as of late. It means “homeland,” which, in both languages, has a loving tone to it: one’s native land, the first soil, the place where we began. Of course, if your first soil was pock-marked with cruelty, abuse, neglect, drunkenness, violent parents and predatory uncles, the word…

  • El Testimonio: The Latino Memoir

    El Testimonio: The Latino Memoir

    Every once in a while, I do a Spanish podcast on The Writing Bull. This is a little cut of me recording it, in my “studio.” In this film, I talk about my own quest to regain my Salvadoran roots in my life, which I did, an obsession that began in high school and has…

  • “We Look At the World Once, In Childhood”

    “We Look At the World Once, In Childhood”

    I’m not much of a Louise Gluck lover, I find her poetry a bit distant, cold; but I sure like that one line she wrote, We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. To think of our entire life, and that, all that happened after our childhood is the memory, and…

  • Francisco Aragón: Literary Activist

    Francisco Aragón: Literary Activist

    Poet Francisco Aragón is doing is doing more for U.S. Latinx literature than any person I know. While writing his own work, he’s also always pushing and promoting the literary works of others, namely, the new Latinx writers on the block. He’s the son of Nicaraguan immigrants, born and raised in San Francisco, CA. He…