Back in 2000 studying English at McGill, the assistant of the Hard Boiled Novel teacher class told me “you Mexicans are like dwarfs, you will never get English literature as well as us, don’t even try to”.

I don’t know why he said that… I never carried my Fisher-Price lawnmower to class.

I just discover this site and this forum thanks to @ernestopriego’s twitter, thanks.

We Irish survived!

As did we all.

Now, let’s do the numbers.

This race, that. This nation, that.

Same planet. Same death!

Time to figure it out, no?

Just yesterday a friend was telling me about the slang term “peckerwood” (aka “peckawood” via Faulkner):

“2. slang (esp. in African-American usage). depreciative. A white person, esp. a white person regarded as poor, rustic, or unsophisticated;” (from the OED)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peckerwood

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=peckerwood

Does race trump class discimination or vice versa? I think they are inextricably linked. Sometimes it isn’t race but ethnicity that is the issue. Think the Irish 19th century America.

Fantastically well put!

You have hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, if humans could ‘get it’, would we even be in this predicament? I tend to agree with some evolutionary biologists who believe that overpopulation is genetically mandated. It is Nature’s mechanism of survival…no matter how many die, some will live.

As Wolf Larsen said in ‘The Sea Wolf’: “Nature is a spendthrift.”

But in the end none of this parochial squabbling matters. What trumps it all is the killing off of nature. Ain’t nobody guiltless of that. It pains me to realize how poets, in America at least, are generally insensible to the murder. Jeffers was right you know. The perfect metaphor for describing the preoccupations of the human race is incest: way too preoccupied with ourselves, especially when we define ourselves against competing groups of other human animals, to notice the killing off of nature. But this too is old news.

Terreson

There was a very interesting “desencuentro” between Mexican and Chicano poets in Hayward, California a few years ago. The kick-ass Chicano writers, including Juan Felipe Herrera and Lorna Dee Cervantes, were decidedly browner than their polished upper-middle Mexican counterparts. The Chicanos, educated here, were highly political, and very conscious that they were a generation at most from working-class roots. The Mexicans felt they had a high culture to defend.

The Chicanos were anxious for the approval of the Mexican poets — Huerta, Cross and Bracho among them — representing the “madre patria.” The Mexican poets — indoctrinated against the political poem by Paz — were condescending, and talked down about the way the Chicanos spoke Spanish.

As an Anglo poet and translator fluent in Spanish I was one of the few present not on either side of that particular fence. All kinds of class stuff was at work, and the work of Paz, Blanco, and Herrera equally inspires the sixth-grade barrio kids I teach, but with younger Chicano poets such as John Olivares Espinoza, we’re getting beyond the false dichotomy between kick-ass and polished.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say was that

1) Javier must have been very young (or very badly-read) to have discovered Octavio Paz as late as 1998, and that

2) what I find surprising of his being surprised at the “Literario Mexicano..” headline was because of the unusual combination of words, and not because “literario” is the wrong adjective in this context (it should have been “literato.” “Literario” is a quality of objects and phenomena, thus an adjective: “literato” is a man of letters, thus a noun.)

Needless to say, as a Mexican and as a writer, I don’t see anything wrong with the combination of the nationality with the profession.

“Blackface and the Poetry Foundation?” [second post down]

http://www.digitalemunction.com/

Kent

So you haven’t read him, then.