Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs w/ Paul E Nelson
What a joy to engage Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs for a Cascadian Prophets podcast interview. I hosted her at Casa del Colibrí on June 15, 2023 and discussed her book: ¿how many indians can we be? Here is my introduction:
¿cuantos indios podemos ser? is the title of the latest book by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, or in English ¿how many indians can we be? A good question. To be a Chicana and represent the United States at a poetry festival in India can be a transformative experience, allowing one to see shared traumas, shared mechanisms for coping with the realities of cultural colonization and an opportunity to use poetry to better understand just what is going on. Dr. Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs is a polylingual poet, critic, translator, cultural worker and professor in Modern Languages and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Seattle University & our guest today to talk about ¿how many indians can we be?
Poems extracted from the interview, with the interview below.
1. Tamed Tongues (Lenguas Domadas)
2. Apiary of the Unconscious
3. Bernardo Looking for Needles in a Haystack
4. The Dead (Los Muertos)
5. Hum Pedro Hum
6. The Threshold
7. Once I Was a Guitar
Podcast (prophets-podcast): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:26 — 69.3MB)
Ahhh – love listening to this woman read – as well as love her poems. I bought, at the Cascadia Poetry Festival in October – the anthology (100 years of chicanx/Latinx poetry) she edited that presents poems in two languages – I don’t speak Spanish but I minored in at school and I love reading it (when I have the luxury of ready translation) – Wonderful to hear her share her experiences at an Indian poetry festival – and of coming to Seattle. Her openness and honesty are refreshing: “I want to meet them…I think we just don’t know each other.”
How lovely to hear these poems read with an accent and the images, as in much Latin poetry, so rich and evocative of passions many other languages seem unable to express.