1.
True story: the very first day in my MFA program during our initial workshop, the professor assigned us to write a sonnet. These instructions induced a kind of nausea, because I immediately realized I was going to have to already make a difficult, messy decision. Before giving myself enough time to weigh the benefits of remaining silent, I blurted out, “my apologies, but I absolutely won’t do that.” Startled by my reaction, the professor asked if I had an issue with the assignment. Thus, I found myself already having to explain myself to faculty and peers who did not yet know anything about me. I explained to them that the sonnet had nothing to do with me, and I had nothing to do with it. Mi gente of the Caribbean – and of the five boroughs – had our own poetic traditions and structures. Throughout my schooling, the sonnet was thrust upon me over and over and over again. Conversely, I was never formally taught any of the forms that came from the communities I identify with. I added that my issue was in part connected to the Shakespearean sonnet, as Shakespeare wrote an incredibly racist play about the people of the Caribbean (as well as the Moors and Jewish people), and that to set my words inside that colonial container would feel like an act of treason. I am sure I offended my professor and some of my new peers when I concluded by saying that, for me there is no poetry to be found in the sonnet. Sensing the tension in the room, I made an on the spot proposal that every time the professor wanted us to write a sonnet or another Eurocentric form, I would instead write a décima. I even offered to teach the structure and rules of the décima to the class so that they could write one too. With no model or intermediary to properly have this discussion at the time, everyone else went silent, no one took up my offer to learn how to write a décima, and my “no sonnet” stance marked an unspoken yet palpable ideological rift between myself and my artistic peers.
More than a decade later, I still find myself wishing I had been better equipped to clarify my concerns back then. I hadn’t yet equipped myself with Said, Quijano and Retamar to identify the matter as one of epistemic violence. But I had already spent a lifetime existing inside of a hegemonic power that worked tirelessly to eliminate the culture and history of Latinx and Latin American people only to replace it with Eurocentric and white American ways and forms. Folks never seemed to understand my impulse to resist having certain forms and structures imposed upon me. They couldn’t understand my vague assertion that I took it as another form of colonization, and that as a descendent of colonized people, I just cannot abide.
So you can imagine how it comforted my disquiet to read these words from Paisley Rekdal in her book Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: “If poetic forms have meaning outside of their requirements, it may be that they carry cultural and historic weight not even their proponents imagined.” She goes on to make it plain that, “ Verse forms cannot entirely be divorced from their histories and originating cultures in our contemporary reception of them.” Form is not merely shape, it’s concept. It’s not merely a concept, it is a vessel for culture that transmits the values and ways of a people. To Rekdal’s point I would add that our reception of the forms and the cultural weight they carry is informed by how we came to those forms. When our own forms are marginalized or entirely ignored while an oppressor culture forcefully imposes their own forms on us, some of us are going to act reflexively to such an action, and some of us are going to make it a mission to reclaim our own forms and create space for them to be appreciated and respected in equal proportion. This is, in part, the reason for my devotion to the décima.
2.
Pero the décima is important to me beyond my impulse to resist cultural hegemony. I am drawn toward the décima not just because it is a Latin American form created by mi gente. I am drawn toward the décima because of the way it makes music. The décima was born in part of the plena music of Puerto Rican and the Latinx Caribbean. Plena songs are structured around its rhyme and metrical pattern, which consists of ten lines with a rhyme scheme of ABBAA CCDDC. Each line is measured to be eight syllables in length. But Plena, which is one of the early musical forms that influenced the birth of Hip Hop, has a long standing tradition of improvisation from its singers. To make space for this improvisation, the décima allows for some flexibility in the syllable count so that some lines can be seven or nine syllables long. This looseness and flexibility feels very Caribbean and Latinx, serving as counterpoint to clinical rigidity of most European forms. Additionally, a décima may have as many ten line units as the poet or songwriter sees fit, and some even end with a half-décima unit of the initial ABBAA stanza.
The décima structure creates the music of the clave rhythm. In contrast to the four stroke pattern of the music of the north, the clave is a five stroke pattern consisting of either a 3-2 or 2-3 measure of beats which the décima fits cozily into with its five line stanzas. The clave is the unifying structural element of Latin music. In The Repeating Island, Cuban writer and scholar Antonio Benítez-Rojo presents the theory that Caribbean people live with a notion of time as circular that is in opposition to the colonial European imposition of time as linear. The décima propels itself cyclically with variations in tempo, volume, and color each time it circles back around on itself. There is something about that sense of spinning with variation that feels innate to how I think, how I move, how I hear, how I understand the world. Though, like many poets, I engage and experiment with a wide range of poetic forms, the décima is the only traditional form that has ever made me feel like I am home. It is a form that makes sense to my ear and my heart.
3.
On form, Oscar Wilde astutely declared, “were it not for the sonnet, the set forms of verse, we should all be at the mercy of genius.” My allergy to the sonnet aside, I can’t help but agree with Wilde. Form allows us what I call liberatory constraints. Their rules and principles can be roadblocks, or they can offer the right kind of friction we need to elevate or innovate our own writing. I compose most of my writing prompts for my students by presenting them with a constraint or a poetic form, as it nudges them to go beyond just saying what they are feeling and calling it a poem. In my own process, I usually draft in free verse and then impose upon myself constraints or forms to use as part of my revision process. This allows the work of writing to be infused with a sense of experimentation or play, but it also creates space for a writer to surprise themselves. And yet… I am also conflicted by Wilde’s statement on form, because I have found that too often, in fact, writing in form produces staleness, especially with regard to forms that are decades or centuries old. As Rekdal reminds us, these forms carry a cultural and historical weight with them. They also carry with them the limitations in which they were created. Too often a student will attempt a sestina or a villanelle, and what they produce is a derivative clone. They actually might have something meaningful to convey, but they’ve been given the impression that the language of their poem in such forms should sound like it was written in the time the form was invented, so they try to emulate the language of people who lived hundreds of years ago. Though I sometimes find it amusing to hear 21st century students from Philly and the five boroughs throw some “haths” and “thous” into their verses, it doesn’t feel or sound authentic to them and ultimately undermines the power of their own work. Yet it isn’t just the poet in training who can find their work being flattened by arbitrarily utilizing traditional forms. I find it necessary to also push against the cadences and syntax inherent to a particular form in order to create work that feels fresh and genuine. Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “Sonnet for the Intro to Critical Theory Professor Who Made Her Feelings About Trans People Clear…” does this work by taking the sonnet form and infusing it with contemporary vernacular and syntax unique to her voice. If we don’t want to be “at the mercy of genius” and adopt traditional forms, it pays to find ways to also resist the form by bending its shape a little, breaking some of its rules, and infusing it with vocabulary and idioms that might counteract that form’s “cultural and historical weight.” This is the approach I took with composing my “idécimas.”
4.
My third book, Hivestruck (Penguin Random House, 2024), is an examination of how technology has altered what it means to be human. My aim with the book was to come to some understanding about the impact technology has had on my Latinx/Brown gente, especially with regard to how tech is used to enhance the ways we are colonized and erased, and how the robot has become the white fantasy’s symbol/solution for the inability to control exploited Brown labor. This involves, in part, using technology to curb Latinx people’s ability to imagine ourselves in the world and to imagine a world for ourselves. To present an antidote to the Technopoly’s policing and surveilling of Brown folx, I wanted to offer other possibilities of who we are and what we may become. Moreover, it was important to me that the book offered a glimpse of the contributions that Latinx people as well as other BIPOC people and women have made to science and to the arts of science fiction, speculative fiction, and futurism. Setting forth with this intention, I knew I had to include an ofrenda, or homage, to Rammellzee. Rammellzee was a multi- disciplinary artist considered to be among the founding parents of Hip Hop. He was an emcee, a graffiti writer, sculptor, performance artist, and creator of the theory of Goth Futurism. Beyond my fascination with the aesthetic of his work and the mythological status he has among Hip Hop heads here in New York, his art embodies critical concepts significant to the construction of this collection: his total resistance to conformity, his commitment to anonymity, and hybridity as a method of both artmaking and identity construction.
Central to my research for the book was the tech criticism of Jaron Lanier. Lanier is a computer scientist, futurist, and author of the book You are Not a Gadget. In You are Not a Gadget, Lanier expresses concern that the way he and his colleagues approached open sourcing in their construction of the web would inevitably lead to a troubling mass conformity that would stunt creativity, autonomy, and learning in general, writing “we shouldn’t seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence.” Rammellzee was an art provocateur who consistently worked to go against the grain of trends that his peers in Hip Hop and the art world (including one Jean-Michel Basquiat) were producing. This may have functioned to minimize his visibility and commercial success, but it also ensured that his art would stand out as wholly unique artifacts with no equivalent. To use vernacular of that place and time, Rammellzee was no biter and it was impossible to bite off of him.
It is fascinating that he was able to do this, considering he was also dedicated to keeping himself relatively anonymous. There are few photos or videos of him where he is clearly visible. He often conducted interviews dressed in one of his self made Goth Futurist costumes (my first time witnessing him was in a cut segment he did for the famous graffiti documentary, Style Wars, where he did the whole interview dressed in a suit of armor made of legos). Throughout Hivestruck I write about my concerns with the surveillance state that Silicon Valley built and steered us all into, how internet fame was marketed to us as a way of getting us to consent to be perennially recorded and data mined. In this context, anonymity becomes an act of rebellion, and Rammellzee offers a blueprint for how to be a force in the world as an artist while also maintaining levels of privacy.
Lastly, Rammellzee’s approach to artmaking epitomizes the theory of hybridity articulated by Latinx scholars such as Silviano Santiago and Sandy Florian. The concept for HIVESTRUCK was born out of my own fascination with Latinx people being hybrid beings. The colonization that created us infused us with the often contradictory genetic and cultural material of the Indigenous people of the Americas, African peoples, and the European colonizers. Latinxfuturism was born out of the cyborg poetics of our own hybrid identities. Like in Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Latinx people have had to rebuild ourselves again and again from the broken remnants left behind by the violent machinations of colonization. This is why Latinx people are so adept at adapting. We collect and stitch ourselves into a new and unified whole from the disparate fabrics of a complex universe. Rammellzee did this in multivalent ways. He was a mixed race kid from the most diverse place in the U.S. (Queens) who invented the mythology of Goth Futurism by fusing together bits and pieces of science, poetry, and pop culture iconography. He also drew no distinction between art mediums; he wrote, made graffiti art and sculpture, performed and played music, with all these disciplines bleeding into one another to form a single art. Rammellzee also erased the imposed class lines that worked to categorize “high” and “low” art. The side of a subway car was no less valuable an art space than a Soho art gallery. As a writer and theater artist who has collaborated with visual artists and dabbled with music, I aimed to make HIVESTRUCK an art object that also dissolved the boundaries of artistic disciplines, envisioning the book as literature, visual art, and sound art in one object. Moreover, it envisions a future where humans rebuild themselves into something entirely new out of the synthetic parts that the technopoly creates and then tosses away (a process that contributes greatly to our present ecological crisis).
5.
As cyborg spiritual guide for this collection, it felt all but absolutely necessary to compose a poem honoring Rammellzee’s (after)life. Any ofrenda or elegy worthy of their subject is constructed as song. While using the craft elements of Hip Hop might seem like the logical approach, that would have also been too conventional for Rammellzee’s blood. Rammellzee was a plurality who danced with the infinite, blending the possible with the impossible. There is a thrill and a joy to his art, and I wanted to convey that. I didn’t want to write a somber ofrenda or elegy, which is in part why I chose to make the poem a décima. The décima rhythm, like much of Latin music, conveys a spirited joy. Pero the décima is itself a centuries old poetic form, its structure presents the problem I posed earlier: how to make a venerable poetic tradition feel modern, futuristic even. The décima also brings with it another challenge, which is that it is a model that was designed with the intention of composing poetry in Spanish. In keeping with the aesthetics of both Rammellzee and Latinxfuturism, my conceptual approach was to juxtapose the archaic structure of the décima with the spaced out barrio tech lingo of Rammellzee’s treatise of Goth Futurism, synthesizing the two into a poem that would honor the artist’s legacy while also provoking new possibilities. The final product, “Ramm:Ell:Zee’s Reboot (Non Elegy / iDécima),” reaches simultaneously into the past and the future, stirring the two into a cosmic sancocho where Rammellzee does not die, but instead is in an infinite process of being rebooted, updated, and metamorphosed via the décima that is both ofrenda and song of (re)birth, the distinction between old and new forever abolished.
