School Rules, Lupe Mendez
January 06, 2023
Lupe Mendez, the current Texas Poet Laureate, is also an educator and activist in Houston. His poem "Rules at the Juan Marcos Huelga School (Even the Unspoken Ones)," online at the Poetry Foundation, is my pick for today. An excerpt:
[Shout on paper, write boldly,
in a book, in the middle of an open
field, in the street, in the classroom,
make sure your voice shrills.]
I'm grateful to the VS podcast for introducing me to Mendez and many other poets. Just like prior hosts Franny Choi and Danez Smith, the new duo, Ajanaé Dawkins and Brittany Rogers, are super fun to listen to, and their episodes always send me straight to library and bookstore websites looking for the work that was mentioned.
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The Poetry Friday roundup is at Reading to the Core. Next week it's right here, at Chicken Spaghetti.
Photo: Roll-gate mural in the Mission District, San Francisco. Susan Thomsen, 2021.