CantoMundo: Voicing the Dreams of Art and Science

"Literature and art give us the dreams that science makes a reality." I found this written on a strip of index card in my childhood desk at my mother's home, my childhood home. I don't know if I thought up this pearl or if I copied it from someone. I think it's mine but it's certainly not an original thought. Renaissance women and men across the centuries have believed and manifested similar ideas. Last weekend I was in Austin, TX for one such gathering of writers, artists, and visionaries: the CantoMundo workshop for Latin@ poets and poetry. As a Portuguese-American, my status in relation to “Latinidade” is somewhat controversial, unresolved, but they took me in, and the kindred spirits I found among the CantoMundistas made me feel like I did indeed belong.

CantoMundo is a three-day-long program of discussion, panels, workshops, readings and informal gatherings whose axis is attracting a community of and radiating outward the voices of Latin@ poetics so that they are recognized as a phenomenon in themselves and as a part of poetry in general. These voices are like nebulae, “not just the starting points of stellar evolution. Ironically, they can also be the end points.”

And these voices are not simply revisiting and re-creating identity politics through their poetics: they are going fearlessly where, well, others may have gone before, but perhaps not quite with the same sabor and sabedoria/sabiduría. One panel in particular, “Drowning in Information: Researching for Poetry” highlighted various projects that CantoMundo poets are tackling, beyond the expected comida/cultura/familia poems. As the incomparable Lorna Dee Cervantes, one of this year’s faculty, noted, “Intuition is not precise enough. Spirit comes, magic happens” —but you need to do your research.

And Canto Mundo poets are doing research and writing work, on projects ranging from astrophysics—Carl Marcum’s “Horsehead Nebula,” from his new collection A Camera Obscura—to history, feminism and forensics—Amy Sayre-Baptista’s lyrical play The Widows of Whitechapel, in which she gives voice to Jack the Ripper’s victims—to nuclear bombing for “peaceful purposes” —Eduardo Gabrieloff’s new book, an examination of Project Plowshare, an initiative launched in 1961, and never officially terminated, to use bombs to do things like create an artificial harbor in Northern Alaska.

These poets and others are not just imparting dreams that science will make real. They are taking the strands of science and weaving the dream of art.