Margaret Randall, Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry: March 30, 2017

Steve Dickison introduces Margaret Randall. Randall speaks about the creation of Only the Road/Solo el camino and displays a slideshow with portrait photos of the poets featured in the anthology. She reads Nicolas Guillen's "Tengo/I Have," Gaston Baquero's "In Montmartre Oscar Wilde Dictates to Toulouse-Lautrec the Recipe for the Cocktail They Drank the Night before at Sarah Bernhardt's Salon," Georgina Herrara's "Ancestral Poverty," Lourdes Casal's "For Ana Veldford," Nancy Morejon's "Black Woman," Luis Rogelio "Wichy" Nogueras' "The Poet's Funeral," Soleida Rios' "A Breath Scatters the Limits of Home," Victor Rodriguez-Nunez's "[Notes--On Ho Chi Minh's Prison Diary]," Alfredo Zaldivar's "Brief Letter from Oscar Wilde to His Lover," and Laura Ruiz Montes' "Of Places and Positions."

Margaret Randall takes questions from the audience. She discusses building relationships with other Cuban poets during her decade living in Cuba during the 1970s and how those relationships eventually helped her create Only the Road. She also talks about the correlation between young Cuban writers today and the Cuban government. She comments on the usefulness of poetry to the Cuban Revolution and of revolution to poetry, and how Cuban writers today feel they are the revolution. Randall discusses her traveling back and forth between the United States and Cuba and a renewed interest in US-Cuban relations, averring that we will have to wait and see if cultural exchange between the United States and Cuba improve, or decrease, under the Trump administration.