Accessible Poetry From A Cultural Center: Meet HSU Prof. Barbara Brinson Curiel

Sarah E. Isbell

Mad River Union

HUMBOLDT – Poet and professor Barbara Brinson Curiel describes herself as a “page poet, not a performance poet.”

Her writing style delivers short direct lines full of vivid imagery and deep emotional impact. Paradoxically, she is best known for her rather lengthy story poem “Mexican Jenny,” which is also the title piece of her most recent book Mexican Jenny and Other Poems.

Curiel teaches ethnic/gender studies and creative writing at Humboldt State. In 2012, she was awarded the prestigious Philip Levine Prize for Poetry.

“Philip Levine, a poet of the American working class, taught many years at Fresno State and I admired his work tremendously,” said Curiel. “I want people to see my work in a similar way. As someone who talks about working class experience, specifically from a Mexican-American woman’s point of view.”

A lot of Curiel’s work is about gender, “but it’s about challenges to conventional gender ideals,” she said. “For example, “Mexican Jenny,” the title poem, is based on a very sketchy historical story that I read about, this woman from Colorado who killed her husband in 1913, and her as a discredited women, as a prostitute, as a sex worker.

“So in the poem I try to open that up, what does that mean? Does that mean she was a victim? Does that mean she was a woman who using her agency to make her way in the world? In a lot of ways we look at people historically, a lot of those questions are unanswerable, and so in the poem, I try and accommodate all of those possibilities.”

Her accommodation of all those possibilities led her to write three different endings to the story. “We do not know her voice, we do not know her version of events, so it’s open to interpretation,” she said.

So what makes great poetry? “A clever use of language, and clever meaning that it’s crafted very deliberately,” answered Curiel. However, she added, “I think really powerful poetry evokes something in the reader. It helps the reader to put words to an experience or feeling that the reader may have had, so I think those are two things that I look for and struggle to accomplish in my own work.”

“I think a lot of [my poetry] is accessible and accessibility is important in poetry – that it’s not overly intellectual or abstract,” she explained, a good poem “works in multiple registers.”

Curiel started writing as a child. “I was lucky in that I had people who encouraged me to write. [It was] a

tremendous gift.” Today, she shares the gift, encouraging other writers to write about visceral memories or experiences with which their audiences will be familiar. “I have a lot of poems about food,” she said. In the same way that food evokes a visceral memory connection with the reader, young writers can evoke that same connection when they “write about love, write about sex, or any kind of memory which is outside of official narratives,” Curiel added.

Her advice to aspiring writers? “To write more,” said Curiel. And then she added, “Keep writing, and then create or join a community. Those are the two important things. It’s hard enough to write on your own, but to write without a community, makes it doubly hard.”

Sharing work with other people and getting their feedback is crucial. “You learn to anticipate how people read your work,” Curiel said, “that’s really important. So I recommend students create their own writing communities or become part of an existing writing community.”

Curiel has found her poetic community in CantoMundo, a national organization for Latino poets, in which she serves on the organizing committee. CantoMundo conducts a series of summer workshops for aspiring poets at the University of Texas at Austin; find out more at cantomundo.org.

Excerpt from “Mexican Jenny”

“He came at me like so many other times because the money didn’t add up”

It was Christmas Day. He was drunk. He said he would kill her but she grabbed the gun.

The sound of blows, curses, and broken furniture were nothing new in Poverty Gulch. No one came at the blast just as they hadn’t come before.

-Barbara Brinson Curiel