Juan Felipe Herrera neuer U.S. poet laureate

Juan Felipe Herrera, früherer poet laureate von Kalifornien, wurde am Donnerstag als erster Chicano (d.i. Mexikanischstämmiger) zum neuen Poet laureate der Vereinigten Staaten ernannt. Er begann seine Karriere mit Gedichten, die Spanisch und Englisch vermischten. Aus einem Bericht von Tomas Ovalle, Los Angeles Times:

Walking past a row of books in a library, 21-year-old aspiring poet Juan Felipe Herrera was stopped short by a title: „Snaps.“ The book was the debut collection by Victor Hernandez Cruz.

„I opened it up, started reading those poems,“ Herrera recalls 45 years later. „Puerto Rican bilingual English style and language and voices. The wordplay, improvisation, it was amazing. That catapulted me. I never forgot it.“ In 2012 he found himself sitting with Cruz as chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in New York City.

(…)

Now 66, Herrera is a master of many forms: long lines, litanies, protest poems, sonnets, plays, books for children and young adults, works that combine verse and other forms. (…) In „Blood on the Wheel,“ he writes:

Blood in the tin, in the coffee bean, in the maquila oración
Blood in the language, in the wise text of the market sausage
Blood in the border web, the penal colony shed, in the bilingual yard …

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