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July 24, 2020
Vincent Toro's Playlist for His Poetry Collection "Tertulia"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Vincent Toro's poetry collection Tertulia illuminates Latinx culture while highlighting the inequalities it faces. A stunning and important book.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"Toro’s poetry is exuberant and often comic, celebrating Latinx identity and culture in America even as it flags injustice and inequality at every turn."
In his own words, here is Vincent Toro's Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Tertulia:
The TERTULIA Mixtape
Listening to (and sometimes reading about or playing) music is an integral part of my writing process. As I start to build momentum working on a particular writing project, my reading and my music listening becomes increasingly voracious. The music I am digesting becomes a palpable part of the work itself. Some poems draw thematically from the music, and sometimes there is a structural or conceptual element that ends up being transferred from vinyl (or CD, or Cassette, or MP3) to the page. The work of the artists in this mix are all circulating in the vascular system of my second collection, Tertulia.
You Ain’t the Problem - Michael Kiwanuka
Back in 2012, my hermano DJ Cliff Morehead bought me Kiwanuka’s first record for my 37th birthday. Kiwanuka’s music has been traveling with me ever since. There is a cinematic quality to his song compositions that are given tenderness by his sweet and solemn voice. His balance of the cinematic or epic with the intimate and the personal is something I aspired to achieve with “Tertulia.” Kiiwanuka’s sound makes me want to write poems that will give readers the sense that we are simpatico. If only we could all be this simultaneously vulnerable and groovy.
Freedom is Free - Chicano Batman
Chicano Batman’s brand of Latinx Soul always sends me back to the Washington Heights of the 1970s where my parents grew up and where I was born. From the tenement windows on Broadway and Dyckman street you could hear harmonies of the Temptations blending with the horns of the Fania All-Stars. There was a genuine and exciting cultural exchange happening between the African American and Latinx communities living together on those upper Manhattan blocks, a bond that was made material by the music that was being played and created there. This synthesis became an entirely new flavor that spawned the Boogaloo and Latin R&B music movements, a sound that is embodied in the 21st century by Chicano Batman. It’s warm party music unafraid to get political on you when necessary.
La Leyenda del Tiempo - Camarón
While constructing this book I was reading a good deal of Federico García Lorca, whose poetry lives inside the guttural howls of Camarón de La Isla. This song from his album of the same name takes its title and some of its lyrics from one of García Lorca’s plays. Camarón’s voice IS the duende that so many poets obsess over. When Camarón is singing I literally get chills in my fingers and toes.
spider/WAVES - Le Butcherettes feat. Jello Biafra
Le Butcherettes’ latest album, bi/MENTAL, chronicles the abusive relationship between frontwoman Teri Gender Bender and her mother, and their eventual estrangement. Beyond the power of the songwriting and musicianship, what makes this record so compelling is Gender Bender’s ability to capture just how difficult it is to sever ties with family members that abuse you. Her lyrics and voice fearlessly grapple with the psychological damage such a relationship causes. “Tertulia” has a cycle of poems dealing with familial abuse. I consider bi/MENTAL to be that cycle’s soundtrack. And Gender Bender’s guitar work here is both dazzling and haunting.
Disparate Youth - Santigold
Santigold is another musician who has helped carry me through the 21st century. Though the lyrics for “Disparate Youth” are painted in broad brush strokes, the references to stormy weather ahead, the cries of resistance against forces trying to hold us back, and the collectivist spirit of the song (she sings using the “we” pronoun) seem to speak directly to our current situation of mass movements fighting both fascist institutions and impending biological/ecological crises. The guitar riff and chorus in this one convinces me that somehow we’ll get through this.
Deathless - Ibeyi featuring Kamasi Washington
This song by the Afro-French-Cuban sisters Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz (which features the illimitable Kamasi Washington) was spawned after a situation in which the two were harassed by a police officer. Lisa-Kaindé says that she wrote the song "for every minority. For everybody that feels that they are nothing, that feels small, that feels not cared about and I want them to listen to our song and for three minutes feel large, powerful, deathless. I have a huge amount of respect for people who fought for, what I think, are my rights today and if we all sing together 'We are deathless,' they will be living through us into a better world." The dedication page of Tertulia says something quite similar. My aim for the book is to also give folks that have been marginalized and oppressed at least a moment to feel like they are not alone, that they are “deathless.”
World Clique - Deeelite
If Tertulia were a film, “World Clique” would probably be its theme song. I have often said that I would love to write poems that people can dance to, and this book seeks specifically to dismantle hierarchies, injustice, and the “cliques” that are incessantly imposed upon us. Here Deeelite gets the world up on its feet while calling for global unity. It Tertulia doesn’t get you up on your feet, I’m sure this song can do the job.
Chemical Calisthenics - Blackalicious
My poetics is very much a hip-hop poetics. Much of what I love about hip-hop is the commitment to lyricism. Emcees are unafraid to show off their ability to deliver bars with sophistication and flair. I would go so far as to say that their dedication to language as world building tool makes them poetic purists. This is why I was so glad to see Kendrick Lamar win a Pulitzer Prize, because it is a statement serving as evidence that emcees are poets of the first order. The lyrical dimension of my work is driven in part by an aspiration to be as elegant and complex as the rhymes of the finest emcees. If rap (and poetry) is an act of performing verbal gymnastics, then Gift of Gab from the Bay Area hip-hop act Blackalicious is the Simone Biles of hip-hop. If you don’t believe me, listen to what he does in this song. His level of craft will paralyze you with awe.
Hallo Spaceboy - David Bowie
Including Bowie in this mix feels mandatory. Tertulia includes a cento using Bowie’s words (those he wrote, those that Nicolas Roeg wrote for him, and those that Todd Haynes wrote for Jonathan Rhys Meyes pretending to be him). My “strange fascination” with Bowie came a bit late in life, probably because when I was a child he was acting out his middling pop star persona. It was with his 1997 album “Earthling” that I actually became a Bowie head. Casual fans prefer glam Bowie or those 80’s MTV pop star years, but in the late nineties and early 2000s, Bowie’s was revivified and he found a way to synthesize the flash of his Ziggy Stardust work with the experimentalism of his Berlin trilogy while absorbing the industrial, grunge, and drum and bass music of the nineties. By then in his late forties, David Bowie was making music that was both daring and assiduous, which you can feel in this song from his 1995 album, 1. Outside. “Hallo Spaceboy” is considered the third act in an unofficial trilogy of songs starring his Major Tom character (act one being “Space Odyssey” and act two being 1980’s “Ashes to Ashes”). He called this song “the Doors playing heavy metal,” and though it was written 25 years ago, it somehow captures the collective stress and confusion we are all sharing right now.
Oscollo - Elysia Crampton
My first book, Stereo.Island.Mosaic. has a few poems that speak to my obsession with science fiction and space travel. When I began to construct Tertulia there was a real imperative to make the book a work of Latinxfuturism. Throughout the collection, I weave elements of Afrofuturism and Latin American experimental poetry with science fiction works such as Sun Ra’s “Space is the Place” and the Latinx sci-fi film “Sleep Dealer.” The aim was to present Latinx identity as the invention of a cosmic hybrid being. While Tertulia hints at a Latinxfuturist cosmos, Elysia Crampton’s music fully envisions it. The Aymaran trans producer and DJ from Bolivia sculpts sound collages that juxtapose indigenous Andean music with scores from Science Fiction films, cartoon sound effects, television static, and EDM synthesizers. My poem "<Latin/X/futurist> <Electricode/X/otica>" is an attempt to perform in verse the kind of hyper-hybridism that Crampton forges with her soundscapes.
Colors - Black Pumas
This one is a kind of cheat, because the Black Pumas record didn’t come out until after I submitted the final draft of my book. But right now I can’t stop listening to the Black Pumas. Their songs are smooth and full of charm, but also the Black Pumas - a collaboration between African American singer Eric Burton and Mexican musician Adrian Quesada - embody the Black and Brown unity that Tertulia is promoting to readers.
Mi Gente - Hector Lavoe
It’s a Puerto Rican cliche to love Hector Lavoe, so I suppose this is too obvious a choice. But I really don’t think there is a Boricua alive who isn’t touched by “La Voz.” We all grew up hearing his songs in the homes of our tias and abuelas. Nonetheless, I had to include “Mi Gente” because it is pretty much the unofficial anthem of Puerto Ricans, and paired with DeeeLite’s “World Clique,” it serves as the theme music to this collection. The chorus, which proclaims (English translation), “since I am one of you/ I invite you to sing/ with me,” really does lift the spirit in a call for unity that I hope is echoed in the pages of my book.
Hurricane - Grace Jones
This one is included because… well… because it’s Grace effin’ Jones! Grace Jones’s creative power appears to be boundless and unstoppable, a feeling suffused in her performance of this song which she recorded at the age of 60! Jones lives the Caribbean poetics of expanse and fusion as articulated by Édouard Glissant in his “Poetics of Relation.” She has modeled, acted, made music and visual art, knows several languages, and moves seemingly effortlessly into and out of different worlds and identity, completely owning them all. In this song she dons the persona of a calamitous environmental condition: the hurricane. The word hurricane derives from the Taíno “huracán,” which was their name for the god of wind and storms. Hurricanes, like Maria in 2017, have brought devastation to the islands of the Caribbean for centuries. But where the people of the islands are at the mercy of the hurricane, here Jones declares herself the hurricane itself (in the chorus: “I am the hurricane.”). It’s such a badass (and Caribeño) thing to do, and the way she performs it one can’t help but be convinced that she is, in fact, the hurricane. If my poem (in this book) “Anthropomorphic Study of the Antilles” were a film, Grace Jones could very well be cast in the lead, and she’d slay in the role!
Golden Age - TV on the Radio
Whereas my life in the 20th century was lit by my fervor for The Doors, my life in the 21st century has been enhanced by an implacable zeal for TV on the Radio. This Brooklyn band has distilled through sound the early part of this millennium’s condition of relentless flux, and all the anxieties and gifts that it has wrought. In their music I hear the artist’s attempt to make sense (and a little magic) of the rapid technological change, the brutality of systemic injustice, the evolution of human identity, the weight of ecological collapse, the dissolution of infrastructures and institutions, and the search for connection in a world that seems to be growing increasingly splintered. What I love about their work is that they grapple with all this (in their lyrics and in their instrumental arrangements) with an undying sense of wonder and hope, a hope that is in abundance on this track from their 2008 record, Dear Science. The album was composed and released on the cusp of Barack Obama’s Presidential election, “Golden Age” envelopes the listener in a dreamy kind of optimism that we could all use a little of right now.
Pa’Lante - Hurray for the Riff Raff
You know this just has to conclude with a queer Boricua from the Boogie Down Bronx. After the 2016 election, I existed in a state of perpetual despair for a good eight or nine months. Just as I was starting to find a way out of my malaise, I discovered Hurray for the Riff Raff’s album The Navigator. It felt like this record was crooning directly into my “Alternatino”* marrow. The song structures are “Americano,” grounded in folk, rock, and blues. But they are flavored with Latin percussion, and the narratives in Alynda Segarra’s lyrics are about the urban Latinx experience. To make the Nuyorican heart of Segarra’s music clear, “Pa’Lante” even samples “Puerto Rican Obituary,” a seminal Nuyorican poem by Reverendo Pedro Pietri (the first Puerto Rican poet I ever read). Its title, which is short for “para adelante,” meaning “go for it,” is a phrase that became ubiquitous among Puerto Ricans during the social movements of the sixties and seventies. The activist group The Young Lords even named their community newspaper “Pa’Lante!” By sampling Pietri and naming the song as such, Segarra is staking her position and her intention. “The Navigator” is a both document of injustice against Latinx (and all poor and marginalized) people and a mellifluous call to action. Also, in the tradition of rock opuses like Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, The Navigator tells the story of Segarra’s alter-ego Navita Milagros Negrón, stranded in a post-apocalyptic New York that has been completely destroyed by environmental havoc, militarization, and (even more) extreme segregation. So it can also be said that Hurray for the Riff Raff is also Latinxfuturist. This, the album’s penultimate track, is a musical act of resistance, a call to action to people of color to confront oppression and claim our own space, to “go for it.”
“Pa’Lante” has become somewhat of a personal anthem. It’s made me weep on more than one occasion, and when I am just feeling like I absolutely can’t go on, I put this one on my turntable. It reboots me every time, without fail, which I think makes it the perfect end track for the “Tertulia” mix.
*“Alternatino” is a term coined by Arturo Castro on his show of the same name, meaning an “alternative” Latino.
Vincent Toro's debut poetry collection, STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC., was awarded the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. He is also a Poet's House Emerging Poets Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry, and winner of The Caribbean Writer's Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize and Repertorio Español's Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award. Vincent is a professor at Bronx Community College, is poet in the schools for Dreamyard and the Dodge Poetry Foundation, is writing liaison for The Cooper Union's Saturday Program, and is a contributing editor at Kweli Literary Journal.
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