For over six decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has introduced exceptionally gifted young poets to a large audience early in their careers — including John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, Mark Strand, Larry Levis, and Solmaz Sharif, to name but a few. This year, final contest judges Rick Barot, Mónica de la Torre, and Patricia Spears Jones selected four winning poets — Alexandra Zukerman, Kenzie Allen, Ina Cariño, and Mag Gabbert. Each receives a reading at 92Y, publication in The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan and $500.
We’ve been chatting with each of the four 2021 Discovery Poetry Contest winners ahead of their reading on October 22. This week, Ina Cariño tells us about the feeling of dislocation in writing poetry between the US and the Philippines, grappling with blank spots in their ancestry in their poem “Ancestors for Sale,” the power of live poetry readings, and more.
Where were you when you found out that you were a winner of the 2021 Discovery Poetry Contest? How did you initially react? How did you celebrate?
I had just gotten off my lunch break at work — I was a technical writer working remotely at the time, and I remember sitting down with fresh coffee when I got a text asking if I was free to chat about the 92Y Discovery Contest. It had been a particularly nondescript day; I don’t even remember what I was working on — probably a spreadsheet? Before the actual phone call, my initial feelings were a mixture of disbelief and denial. After the phone call, my feelings were still a mixture of disbelief and denial. I don’t have family close by, so I celebrated by ordering sushi for dinner while calling my family on FaceTime.
At what point in your life did you know that you were a poet? Was there a particular moment, an innate experience of language, a slow realization over a long period of time, or something else entirely?
I wrote my first poem when I was in high school, but I didn’t call myself a poet until right before I started my MFA program. My mom, who is a creative writing professor and is also a poet, taught me to read English when I was three — and unfortunately, I never did take to reading and speaking my native tongue Tagalog, despite living in the Philippines until I was 10. It didn’t help that English was enforced in the private Catholic school I attended.
Right before grad school, I was finishing my undergraduate studies in English lit, and even then I didn’t fully see myself as a writer. Growing up partially in the Philippines and partially in the United States, I always felt as if I lived in a third, separate country — one in which my language sensibilities were unmemorable and whitewashed. My lack of a “foreign” accent contributes to this — to this day I speak with a “standard” American accent.
So my identity as a poet didn’t crystallize until about halfway through my MFA program. It was there that I met poets of color who encouraged me to reach beyond English toward my native language, which in turn allowed me freedom to explore the different ways in which language can be disrupted and reimagined. It was the first time I asked: how can the “normal” be non-essentialized? And how can the “standard” or “traditional” be dispelled in favor of centering languages and histories of the oppressed?
You’ll be reading your poems at 92Y in the fall with this year’s other Discovery winners. What have you missed most about live poetry readings during the pandemic?
I love listening to poems. Reading something on the page gives a very different impression from when you hear it read out loud. And I can read someone’s poem out loud on my own — but it’s such a treat to hear words read by the poets who wrote them. It reminds me that poems are alive. All the inflections in a poet’s voice while they read their work — all the ways in which a shift in tone or a pause can add layers of meaning to a line of poetry — I love soaking it all in.
Tell us a bit about “Ancestors for Sale,” published in the Paris Review Daily along with poems by this year’s other Discovery winners. When and where did you write it? What inspired it? What went into its composition that might not be apparent to a reader encountering it for the very first time?
“Ancestors for Sale” was originally a pantoum. But it went through several iterations in that form until I realized it felt more like a parable — so I tried it out as a prose poem instead. The notion of one’s ancestors being sold came from my lack of knowledge regarding my own ancestry.
I have a rough idea. My ancestor, Ibaloi chieftain Mateo Cariño, owned vast tracts of land during the Spanish colonial period, in an area that would become my hometown of Baguio City in the Cordillera, in the northern part of the Philippines. Mateo had a posthumous legal victory asserting his ownership in 1909, when the US Supreme Court recognized (during the US occupation) his “native title” over ancestral lands through testimonies that the land was occupied by Indigenous populations. Which is to say, my ancestors were awarded their own land for proving to a foreign colonial entity that they had always lived on that land.
But despite knowing I have Indigenous blood, I know very little about my ancestry. I don’t speak to my biological father’s side of the family, and so I have had to piece together scraps or bits of hearsay. Sometimes I wish it were as easy as paying for an online genealogy test — but it isn’t as simple as that.
What do you think can happen in a poem that can’t in any other form of literature? What makes poetry special or vital to you?
Poems are unusual in that they can live by themselves, plucked out from a book, but they can also live in tandem with poems on either side of them in a collection. A single page of lines can impart something different to me if I read it separately, as opposed to reading it as part of a larger body of work. I find this endearing — one page can be a complete thing, but it can also be part of a larger complete thing. This nesting, and nestling — the conversations that poems have with each other — these things are really special.
Don’t miss Ina Cariño’s reading with their fellow Discovery Poetry Contest winners from 2021 and 2020 at 92Y on October 22. This contest is endowed by Joan L. and Dr. Julius H. Jacobson, II.