Events

 

Words on Paper

 

“Words on Paper” is series of paintings that form a fractured narrative. I have written several poems that create a dialogue with the paintings. In a way, I think of each painting as a poem. I have used variations and repetitions of seven images: a human hand, a human heart, a bird falling from the sky, a man of sorrows, a light bulb, the sky, a leaf. Each image is specific, personal, intimate, private. At the same time, each image is accessible, part of the universal landscape, evokes thoughts and emotions independent of the realm of the “personal.” Each image is part of the lexicon of the everyday language of the world. Into each of the paintings, I have inserted fragments of poems. In some cases, the fragments are quotes from someone else’s writing that is known only to me. The poems themselves remain beyond the reach of the reader and yet they remain a large presence. In some instances, the poems form a sort of frame for the paintings—but in most instances, the words become yet another image.

The question remains: Is the poetry re-interpreting the images or are the images questioning the representational claims of language?

 

 

Juntos Art & Literature Festival

Saturday, March 13, 2010

El Paso Public Library, Downtown

There will be an 11:30am writers panel with Ben Saenz, Sergio Troncoso, Donna Snyder, Christine Granados, and Dagoberto Gilb. 



AWP Conference

April 7-10, 2010

Denver, Colorado

Ben Saenz will attend the conference with his new book of poetry, The Book of What Remains

http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2010awpconf.php



Dallas Kids Read!

April 16-17

Dallas, Texas

Dallas Kids Read! is a free, two-day festival designed to foster a love of literature and reading in young people.

http://www.dallaskidsread.org/



 





News 

The Book of What Remains

 

A book of poems forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, March 2010

A Perfect Season for Dreaming 

-2008 Paterson Book Prize, Best Children's Book

-2008 Austin Public Library Best Children's Book of the Year (Texas Institute of Letters)

-Kirkus Review Best Children's Books of the Year (2008)

He Forgot to Say Goodbye 

-The Tomas Rivera
  Book Award 2009
-2008 Southwest
  Book Award (Border Area Librarians Association)
-Chicago Public Library 2008,
  Best of the Best Books for Teens
-New York Public Library Stuff for the Teen, 2008 

benjaminaliresaenz.com

livefromtheborder.blogspot.com

 

 

The Book of What Remains

With his sixth collection, Sáenz bursts forth as a major American poet, one with an oracular ear to the ground for what moves people today and also an eye for the larger questions in which today’s concerns are embedded. Set in the Southwest, especially near Sáenz’s home in El Paso, the poems descend from the spiritual tradition of the desert fathers, who sought contact with divinity in arid and dangerous places. But where those ancient monks found themselves and God, Sáenz finds people braving the terrain in search of a better life, images of a postapocalyptic world, and even modernist poets in bizarre juxtaposition to cacti. Most of the poems are long and long-lined, which enhances their oral character. Reading him is like listening to a gifted storyteller, for whom every digression is a path to meaning. And like listening to truth, for his motivations are less purely literary than spiritual and moral, as his subjects are civil and environmental rights, social justice, and the gift of kindness. “As Mexicans would have it: / Cada cabeza es un mundo. / Every single mind / constitutes a world— / an ecosystem.” Sáenz seamlessly joins humanity and the natural world through compassion for both.

Starred Review, Booklist


Prologue

A man is being interviewed on the radio. He has written a book, Proust
Was a Neuroscientist
. I do not like Proust and so I am not really listening—
but then something happens and I am listening. The man begins talking
about the nature of memories and how they change. They change because
we change them. He says this is a fact. I have no reason to believe him.
Neither do I have any reason to doubt him. He has written this book so
he must be some kind of expert. According to this expert, every time we
visit a memory, we change it. If we are to believe the findings of this
erudite, disciplined, and articulate scholar, then we must conclude that
over the course of our lives, we completely change every memory we visit.
The final result is that there is no purity to remembering. Memories, he
says, are beautifully sincere. They also lie. The interviewer’s response
interests me. “That’s so sad,” she says. I do not share her sense of sadness.
The fact that our memories may be half-truths, doesn’t break my heart.
There is a litany of sadder things—much, much sadder things—that have
broken my heart. There is no need to be specific. Is there?

But now that I am on the subject of memories, I’m thinking that even if
memories lie, even if no memory is true, despite all of that, there must be
some truth that remains—even within the lie. And that truth is what I’m
hanging on to. That is all that remains.

From The Book of What Remains
Copyright © Benjamin Alire Sáenz, 2010.

Click here to order from Amazon.

 


Now out in paperback from Simon & Schuster:

From He Forgot to Say Goodbye

Him

Sometimes I think of him. And when I do, I start to draw a picture. Not a real picture. I’m not an artist, not even close. I just draw this picture in my head.

Of him.

My dad.

It’s easier for me to draw a picture of what he looks like than to imagine his voice. I mean, I don’t know what he would sound like. He would use a lot of Spanish. But his voice, I don’t know, I just don’t know what words he’d use. He’d be angry, but, that would just make him normal. A lot of fathers are like that—especially fathers who’ve gone away. I think of their anger as a wind. And that wind took them away. From me. And all the others like me.

Copyright © Benjamin Alire Sáenz, 2008.

Click here to order from Amazon.

 


        

 

 
 
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