Interview with Christopher Soto (aka Loma) 2017 Freedom Plow Award Recipient

The Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, sponsored by the CrossCurrents Foundation and co-sponsored by the Arts Club of Washington and Busboys and Poets, recognizes and honors poet or poetry collective doing innovative and transformative work at the intersection of poetry and social change. The award, judged this year by Holly Bass, Dawn Lundy Martin, and 2015 award recipient Mark Nowak, is being given for the third time in 2017. Tickets now on sale! Join us on April 21 at the Arts Club of Washington for the Award Ceremony! 

About Christopher Soto (AKA Loma) 

 

Christopher Soto aka Loma (originally from Los Angeles) is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of “Sad Girl Poems” (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016) and the editor of Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018). In 2016, Poets & Writers honored Christopher Soto with the “Barnes & Nobles Writer for Writers Award.” He frequently writes book reviews for the Lambda Literary Foundation. His poems, reviews, interviews, and articles can be found at The Nation, The Guardian, The Advocate, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Poetry Review, Tin House, and more. His work has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. He has been invited to speak at universities campuses across the country. He is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript about police violence and mass incarceration. He cofounded the Undocupoets Campaign and worked with Amazon Literary Partnerships to establish grants for undocumented writers. He received his MFA in poetry from NYU.


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Split This Rock interviews Christopher Soto (AKA Loma)

By Melissa Bittner

Your poetry highlights injustices with the judicial system. Would you share why you’re committed to doing this? What is the goal of illuminating these events and what changes do you hope focusing on them will bring?

I love this question. And interviews are often boring.

For me, I think about the prison as being one of the major epicenters of racialized state violence. It is a place where the dichotomies of innocence versus criminality are so blatantly false. You can physically see people being held against their will and tormented in prison, while the state refuses to acknowledge their actions as violent and refuses to think creatively about what justice might actually look like.

How can prison possibly rehabilitate communities or help individuals heal or help individuals learn from their actions? Why is punishment the only way that we think about justice? How do we create communities which do not NEED to steal in order to eat or pay rent? I don’t think that prisons are a solution to the myriad of problems that they are supposed to be addressing. Thus, the prison becomes a place where I can examine the various social issues and how they are inappropriately addressed by the state. My relationship to writing prison literature is also personal as someone who has been hyper-policed, arrested, and seen family members incarcerated too.

My goal in these writings is to make racialized state violence legible as violence. I believe that is only the starting point in building a more equitable world. First, I want to name the harm by the state and then I want to help people imagine justice outside of the states retributive violence.

The relationship between form and meaning in your poetry is complex. Could you discuss those choices in "Home [Chaos Theory]" for example?

Dear God, two good questions in a row. I’m happy.

Yes, I love the long poem as a form to drift and meander in. The long poem allows me to make connections between ideas, which may not seem immediately relevant. For example, in my poem "Los Padrinos Juvenile Detention Center: Unit Y2" I discuss everything from human zoos, to the creation of ankle monitors, to teaching poetry to incarcerated youth, to being transgender in solitary confinement. In long poems my thoughts are allowed to drift more and I give myself more permission to jump logically, imagistically, to have looser lines and more experimentation with form across the page.

This is how I felt while writing the other long poem you mentioned too "Home [Chaos Theory]." I often feel most in my natural poetic voice during the long poem. My shorter poems play with form in different manners but that’s another conversation.

What’s your definition of “home?” Is there a place or a feeling that means home for you?

I define home as a feeling of security. My home will always be with my mother in Southern California. My home right now is with the community that I’ve built in Brooklyn, NY. I’ve had and lost many homes.

How does the current political climate fuel your activism and how has that changed, if at all, over the last few months?

The current political climate has made me take my laughter and joy more seriously. If I do not find a place to enjoy political protest then I will burn out. Thus, when marching on the streets I am singing and dancing and carrying poems and hugging my friends. I have been marching and protesting for over a decade now and I know that I can keep on fighting, as long as I’m able to find pleasure and healing while resisting too. The struggle is serious but my activism must also be sustainable.

I think the current political climate has provided a great opportunity for innovation. What new and creative and fun ways can we resist? For example, I made a GoFundMe account the other day and wrote a letter to Betsy DeVos there, asking her to pay my student debt. This page is a small way that I’ve been able to resist her online presence and also be silly.

Would you share with us an example of a time that made you keenly aware of the impact of Undocupoets?

I still don’t know / feel the impact. There are still contests that don’t allow ALL undocumented poets to apply so I feel a bit defeated there sometimes. I want to celebrate what we’ve done but every time that I hear praise, I can’t help but think about some of our shortcomings.

What inspired you to go on your Tour to End Queer Youth Homelessness* and what is one experience you’ll never forget from it?

I was inspired by poverty. I had no money and no job and touring was the only way that I could survive or else I would have been on the street again. The Tour to End Queer Youth Homelessness was very literally a tour to keep the roof over my head.

As a youth, I faced displacement in the face of domestic violence. On tour, I talked about the systems that keep our most marginalized folks down. For example, if you are a trans person of color then you’re likely going to face employment and housing discrimination. If you can’t find a job then you might turn to alternative incomes such as sex work or selling drugs in order to survive. If your community is being over-policed and you don’t have access to private space and you get caught by police then you might be incarcerated for simply trying to get by.

I’ll never forget the youth I met during that tour. Youth doing sex work coming to my reading at Harvard, homeless punks and anarchists at my reading in Chicago. Every stop on that tour, I saw “my people.”

To be honest, I’ve been pretty quiet lately. I’ve stopped talking about some of my histories and I’m presenting inside the binary more now. I feel like a hunted animal that the world is trying to kill when I exist otherwise. Sometimes I miss being a freak, skateboarding down Sixth Avenue with a blue wig and a black dress. A little drunk with the lights of Manhattan all spinning around. I’ve been free (as Nina Simone says “freedom means no fear”) and that is so threatening to others that we do anything to stop you i.e. all of the murders of trans women of color).

Can you tell us what encouraged you to start Nepantla and how has it been received by Queer People of Color?

Jameson Fitzpatrick helped introduce me to William Johnson at Lambda Literary and that’s how Nepantla started. I think people like it. We always have a lot of submissions and people reading it internationally. This year, I am working with Nightboat Books to create an anthology for Nepantla so that people can find it in stores in 2018.

Your work and activism cover a broad range of social issues. What strategies do you consider as most effective or that you wish more people were using?

I don’t think any strategy is most effective. The strategy depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. For example, Undocupoets was trying to change poetry contest guidelines and create grants for undocumented writers. Nepantla was much different. I was trying to publish and distribute the work of Queer People of Color. My only wish is that people be careful when considering who/what they would like to tear down and why they think that tearing down a person or system is needed instead of rehabilitation.

In the work that you're currently doing, what issue do you feel most personally passionate about and why? And what projects are on your horizon?

I’m passionate about my full length manuscript addressing police violence and about editing the Nepantla anthology. They both feel necessary.

   

*To read more about the Tour to End Queer Youth Homelessness, visit The Advocate and Poets & Writers Magazine.  Learn more about Soto at his website.

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Melissa Bittner is an arts supporter, Split This Rock volunteer, and writer. Her passion is to help nonprofit organizations thrive, and she has coordinated community outreach efforts and nonprofit programs for years across multiple cities. She currently works in DC and lives in Stafford, Virginia with her husband and their rescue pup, Rosco.

  

Call for Poems that Speak Against Violence and for Embrace

If the back & arms you carry riddle with black

spots & marks made by birds who don’t want us here—

I will remind you: There are people who did this before us,

brown & black-spotted, yellow, with rattails,

born from what others did not want & loathed & aimed

to never let belong, & so, we are here today—

the field is wide. We make saliva from root & light.

Our spikelets grow, & do you feel the wind?

       - Joe Jiménez, Smutgrass

Orlando. Dhaka. Istanbul. Baghdad. Medina. Nice. The killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and the murder of police officers in Dallas. This summer, terrible bigotry and violence have rent our global community. The killings must end, and we in the poetry community must contribute in any way we can. As we search for answers to these horrors and for ways to combat hatred and prejudice, we are reminded of poetry’s capacity to respond to violence, to help us regenerate, like spikelets sprouting in a contested field, claiming our public spaces for everyone.

In solidarity with all those targeted at home and abroad, from the LGBT community in the United States to devastated families of Baghdad, Split This Rock is offering its blog as a Virtual Open Mic. Over the next couple of weeks, from July 14 to 28, we are requesting poems in response to and against violence toward marginalized communities:

• Poems will be accepted until July 28, 2016. 
• Send us your poems in response to this violent summer, and we will publish them on Split This Rock’s blog, Blog This Rock (blogthisrock.blogspot.com), to create a Virtual Open Mic. We welcome poems new and old, whether previously published or not. (Please include credit information for previously published work.) 
• Thematically we are wide open: resistance, mourning, rage, celebration, love. We are especially open to poems focused on how we build again, how we heal, the places of light shining through the pain. 
• Unfortunately, Split This Rock's blog is not compatible with poems with complex formatting. Should we find that your poem can not be properly we will be in touch to request a different poem.
• Send the poem(s) as email attachments (.doc or .docx only) with the subject line “A Call in Response to Violence” to info@splitthisrock.org. Include the poem name and your name in the document title.
• Please include the poem's title and your full contact information in the body of the email. 
• We invite one poem per person. 
• From the open mic collection, we may occasionally choose poems to run as Poem of the Week in the weeks ahead. We will contact you directly if we decide to use your poem for Poem of the Week. 

After the Virtual Open Mic closes, we hope to print out and mail all of the poems to Congress and the National Rifle Association.

Split This Rock is also accepting poems for its 10th Annual Poetry Contest until November 1, 2016. For submissions guidelines, visit Split This Rock's website or Submittable.

Review of Collective Brightness

Review by Katherine Anderson Howell

If prophesy is speaking an idea whose time has come, then Collective Brightness must be prophetic. In a time when the right for all persons to participate in religious freedoms, such as marriage or ordination, is shifting and changing, and when religious groups of all kinds demonstrate their turmoil over sexual identity, the 100 plus poets represented in the anthology write boldly of faith, lack thereof, religion, exclusion therefrom, and spirituality that cannot be taken from them.

The book opens with Franklin Abbott’s “Koan.” Koans are Zen Buddhist stories or sayings that must be understood intuitively – they do not make sense to our rational minds. Abbott’s “Koan” explores history, both global and familial: “my face/ before my birth/ was half/ my father’s face/ looking/ back into/ eternity.” This koan sets the tone for the book – intimate and urgent, these poems speak to a world that see persons who are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, or Queer as less than whole people. These poems insist on speaking the experience of poets whose souls are demeaned and damned by people who claim to determine who religion is and isn’t for.

The book doesn’t have a religion agenda; it isn’t an evangelical anthology. Ellen Bass’s poem “Ode to The God of Atheists” insists on a world in which “[t]he plums that bloom extravagantly,/ the dolphins that stitch sky to sea,/ each pebble and fear, pond and fish/ are yours whether or not you believe.” Beauty, spiritual and physical, fills this world, as Robin Becker writes about “peach and azure birds” flying from the mouth of a monk brushing his teeth. God godsself is drawn by this beauty. In the poem “Beetle Orgy,” from which the anthology’s title is drawn, Benjamin Grossberg writes of God looking down on a group of HIV positive men having sex and being “[m]oved to add/ His touch.” God gains from this experience, “comes to some knowledge/ as if for the first time, is distracted and pleased/ by the collective brightness of human skin…”

The anthology does not ignore the other, painful side of faith, religion, and spirituality. Kazim Ali’s “Home” claims that “God’s true language is only silence and breath,” and Jericho Brown, in “Romans 12:1” (the verse in which Paul orders Christians to offer their bodies as “living sacrifices”) observes that people, “[o]n the whole/ Hurt by me, they will not call me/ Brother. …they hate a woman/They smell in me.” Doubt, loneliness, hatred, and rejection are aspects of the spiritual experience of LGBTIQ people that are also explored in the anthology.

As is violence. Late in the book, Joseph Ross’s poem “The Upstairs Lounge, New Orleans, June 24, 1973” brings the murder of the patrons of the Upstairs Lounge, a bar and church where gay men could worship, vividly to life. Ross writes of the patrons singing “like they deserved to.// They prayed like they meant it.” The bar is set on fire, and many of the patrons die, including George, who escapes, then returns for Louis. The two “were found, a spiral/ of bones holding each other…” Ross does not stop with the fire; he continues to the aftermath – the jokes on the radio, the laughter of priests, and the refusal of churches to bury the dead: “Save one: a priest from// St. George’s Episcopal Church, who received hate mail…”

This is the hate and indifference to violence that leads to despair, which is achingly described in Regie Cabico’s “Soul Bargaining”: “By soul,// I mean God make me a wind instrument so I can toss myself/ into the East River. The street lamps are howling for the first// slivers of light. By light, I mean falling off a bridge// wrapped in the arms of a God who knows your name.”

Collective Brightness includes a poem by Azwan Ismail, a Malaysian writer who received death threats for participating in the It Gets Better Project and producing a Malay language LGBT anthology, Orang Macam Kita. Seung-Ja Choe is also included, the first time a Korean poet has been featured in an LGBTIQ anthology in any language. And Japanese poet Atsusuke Tanaka appears translated by Jeffry Angles for the first time.

The anthology is a global effort, and one that again and again gives evidence of what editor Kevin Simmonds claims in the introduction: “Abiding with this faith [which religion scholar Karen Armstrong refers to as the “opposite of certainty”], however, is one very personal certainty: No matter what, as a gay man, I belong.”

This Sunday, October 16, Kevin Simmonds and other poets from the anthology, Collective Brightness, will read at Sunday Kind of Love at Busboys and Poets, 14th and V Sts, Washington DC. The reading will begin at 5:00 p.m.

Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, & Spirituality

Edited by Kevin Simmonds

Publisher – Sibling Rivalry Press

$24.95

A free review copy of the book was provided to Split This Rock by the publisher.