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

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The Poetry Center presents Margaret Randall reading and in conversation. Randall speaks and reads from the anthology she edited and translated, Only the Road/Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry (Duke University Press, 2016). The reading is followed by a conversation with the audience. During March 2017, all Poetry Center programs were dedicated to the theme "Because We Come from Everything: Poetry and Migration," shared with 30+ organizations across the US engaged in the Poetry Coalition.

Originally Recorded By: DocFilm Institute
Location: The Poetry Center, SFSU
Date: 03/30/2017
Total Run Time: 00:59:03
Contributor: Steve Dickison, Estelle Snyder, Tony Ryan
Rights: ©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu
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Margaret Randal_PC_ 03_30_2017 audio..mp3 (83.02 MB – MP3 audio) Margaret Randall_PC_03_30_2017_Q&A.mp3 (41.47 MB – MP3 audio) Still 1 3_30_2017.png (3.16 MB – PNG image)

Margaret Randall (00:36:15)

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Description

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."

Conversation (00:18:06)

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Description

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.