Unterberg Poetry Center Managing Director Ricardo Maldonado talks to us about 92Y’s upcoming literature and writing classes, finding inspiration in literary community during the pandemic, his debut poetry collection, and more.
You’ve been curating exceptional literature and writing classes at the Unterberg Poetry Center for over a decade, but what you’ve been doing for the last few months has been unprecedented. For the first time, 92Y classes have moved entirely online. Poetry Center offerings have been particularly popular. Students seem hungry for literature, and instructors are eager to meet them in the shared virtual space that reading and writing affords. Tell us about planning these classes since March.
My friend, the poet Camille Rankine, one of the winners of our Discovery Contest in 2010, recently told me that she was finding herself sitting “with the smallness of everyday,” during the pandemic, trying to be “attentive to its everyday beauty." In my 13 years at the Y, I’ve come to see how literature illustrates that kind of intentional mindfulness – how we move in space, say, or think about what we do. This summer, I felt it was necessary to remind others that we lived life in space once, outside, and that the written word could explain our deepest hungers in a geography. Or our despair; how hope could be now a thing “with feathers,” for example. Or how we could find in literature a kind of affirmation – something we could recognize as our own. In our curriculum of classes, I wanted to honor the gift and the possibility of reading as a form of talk, of talk as a form of discovery, and of rediscovery of the literature we once loved as a way to question everything so we can begin again one day.
To what do you attribute the burst of enthusiasm for these classes? Why do we have the impulse to read and write when we’re isolated from one another?
We have been mapping the world in the solitude of our reading – from Austen’s Highbury to Mitchell’s Greenwich Village, books have given me a kind of life in the public world – a sense of citizenship in the world outside, as I read in my mind and live through our current turbulence. I correspond with our students often – a word here, a rec letter there; something that has kept us up, what we have read in the kitchen before the dishes were done. And even though his year keeps running fast from us – how is it August already? – I have delighted in the provocations the books I have read in class have brought to my life. I see that in our digital classrooms. On Zoom, every night, I am reminded that people want to live among books because we can take refuge in them, because some time ago, early in our lives, a book gave us something like a secret, because we became legible to ourselves through them, in the quickening of the pages, with the kind of scrutiny that challenges us and changes everything.
Tell us a little about the Elena Ferrante class beginning in October. How did this course come about? Who are the instructors and guests who will be joining the students to discuss Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels?
About 100 pages into The Ferrante Letters, an experiment in collective criticism among four authors, Merve Emre writes, “Seven hours, thirty-two minutes, and fifty seconds: this is how long it took me to read The Story of the Lost Child. In that time, I did not get out of bed. I forgot to eat. I forgot to go to the bathroom. I repositioned myself once, to cry briefly, noisily, and then again to soldier on to the last page.” The intensity of Merve’s reading experience was also mine. The novels felt blasphemous to me, willing to admit the complexity of inner life-- that roughness felt indispensable. Courageous. It wreaked havoc with my schedule. Made me question everything. What better time to revisit them? We invited Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards, authors of The Ferrante Letters, to lecture on a book each and then do a collective interview of Ann Goldstein, Ferrante’s English translator at the conclusion of the seminar.
What are some of the other new classes that you’re particularly excited about being able to offer this fall for the first time? Who are some instructors you’ve worked with before who are joining our community again in a new context?
William Carlos Williams, the Poetry Center’s first reader, in 1939, once wrote that a work of art is important “as evidence, in its structure, of a new world which it has been created to affirm.” This season, I am looking forward to very specific kind of affirmation that a workshop can bring to the writer– that the work of art can be site of freedom from the past – a new kind of edifice. Every workshop that we have offered, I feel, signals to that. And will. I am particularly looking forward to year-long workshops for those working on novels, memoirs of books of poetry. These courses we’ve offered over the years invite diligent and thorough study of one’s own motivations as a writer – we’ll look at our own work unsentimentally. And who better to do this with than with our celebrated team of instructors including Sandra Newman, Kathleen Ossip, Teddy Wayne, Wendy Salinger and Anya Yurchyshyn. On the seminar side, I’m looking forward to Alex Ross’ brilliant exploration of the literary world of Wagner and revisiting classics like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, with Pulitzer finalist Michael Gorra and Milton’s Paradise Lost, with Nigel Smith – a long poem that has felt, upon rereading, more transgressive than I remember it being.
Beyond your role at the Poetry Center, you are a poet yourself, and so it’s not surprising that in your approach to your job at 92Y, you and the instructors and the students have collectively discovered some amazing creative solutions to the constraints in which the pandemic has placed us—a phenomenon that anyone who has ever tried to write a sonnet or translate poetry from another language, for example, knows well. In your work at 92Y, what to your mind is the best discovery you've made through this incredibly difficult time?
Our literary seminars have taught me the gift of patience – to welcome another student’s questions as you question yourself. I have come to trust the challenge that a smart reader will bring to the group. I also became reacquainted with they joy of a plainly stated fact, say the city observed, the city captured, as in Maeve Brennan’s writing, which Adam Gopnik shared with us. I felt, for a brief second, no longer in exile. I’ve also learned to appreciate the art of a well-organized and run Zoom session – log on 15 minutes before class starts. Wave at everybody, ask them what they are reading – this information is gold – and then mute yourself and let everybody talk.
Speaking of poetry, your first book, The Life Assignment, is coming out in September from Four Way Books. Can you tell us a bit about writing this collection? What has your work at 92Y taught you about poetry?
The Y has taught me to gather and listen, to read not as a critic – that I learned in graduate school – but as a citizen. To trust the depths of my interiority. That, I felt was my first assignment when I walked into 1395 Lex. To do the work myself and to help others along the way. My book is about that labor – what we do and got to do. It is a record of all that we’ve learned and all that we’ve got to unlearn – the violence and the tenderness of those acts. It is also a book about our collective sorrows and our collective joys – how we can find a home there.