from “Infinite Dream Circuits”
This past Friday Dannielle and I attended a poetry reading and collaborative performance celebrating the publication of the Mexican poet Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola’s book The Telaraña Circuit (published by Tender Buttons Press) in an event where she performed with the artist Guadalupe Maravilla, organized by the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. As we waited outside in the church’s patio for the doors to open I observed that the gathered crowd was clearly a sampling of the downtown literary intelligentsia, with many individuals appearing to be Mexican academics or writers, giving me the feeling that we were more in Coyoacán than in the East Village.
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While the selection of the Pao Yu story at Los Sures was not meant to literally refer to Dreamers (or at least I never thought of it that way until this moment: sometimes as artists we do not see the most obvious connections in the projects we develop ) in retrospect I now realize how the story of immigration is a never-ending, collective dream— perhaps, in the words of Lucía Hinojosa, a dream circuit where we seek to find the answer to these questions:
where (what) is place?
who (what) makes place?
who (why) are we
place?
Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola reads from THE TELARAÑA CIRCUIT at the Poetry Project. New York City, May 19, 2023.
