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Last November, Dominican University welcomed Mexican-American poet José Olivarez for the Caesar & Patricia Tabet Poetry Reading. The reading was co-presented by the St. Catherine of Siena Center, the English Department of Dominican University's Rosary College of Arts and Sciences, and the Rebecca Crown Library.

Dominican University English professor Maggie Andersen paid memory to Pat Tabot, the namesake of the reading. Professor Andersen expressed how the annual poetry reading provided a transformative experience for students. “When we lose a faculty member, we lose a library,” Andersen said.

In introducing the evening's guest, Dominican University English major Karen Reyes said she had taken English 266: Introduction the Literature and Language Studies with low expectations. Her lack of enthusiasm for poetry was transformed largely by reading poems by Olivarez, many of which depict the push-pull of being from Mexico and living in Chicago, i.e. “What it means to be Mexican in America.”

Ode to Tortillas

One of Olivarez' most memorable poems is Ode to Tortillas, which he read first. Olivarez was inspired to write the poem one morning while deciding what he would write for the day. Recognizing that "writing about tortillas is a little bit cliche," he wondered if he could flip it and make it new somehow. In the poem, Olivarez questions many restrictions faced by Mexican-American authors. “Can you be a Mexican writer if you never migrated?” he asks.

In I Loved the World So Much I Married It, read from his book of poems Citizen Illegal, Olivarez addressed the mixed emotions and memories brought up by both his grandmother's and uncle's deaths. He uses images of the senses even when talking about death. He mentions his “most treasured possessions: a six piece/ with lemon pepper & mild sauce on,” which he will have to give up when he divorces (dies) the world he has loved so much. 

Olivarez read many poems featuring family ties, such as his last one of the night, Related : the Sky is Dope. Written by his brother in a series of texts, the poem describes the interaction between clouds and sky at day's begging and end. Written in three parts, Mexican Heaven depicts the afterlife as a bittersweet place where all do not feel welcome. “if heaven/ is real, then its gates are closed to us.” Reporting from the beyond, Olivarez' uncle declares “the party was boring…they were ditching heaven," and so they sought a spot between heaven and hell where their family could feel at home and recognize “we have always been beautiful.”

Getting Ready to Say I Love You to the Couch, It Rains

In the introduction to Promises of Gold, Olivarez explains his book of poems "is what happens when you try to write a book of love poems for the homies amid a global pandemic that has laid bare all the other pandemics that we've been living through our whole lives.” Themes of childhood longing and heartache are found in Getting Ready to Say I Love You to the Couch, It Rains. But there can be hope in desperation: while introducing the poem, Olivarez told the story of a student so thankful for a free copy of his book that he gifted the poet a bag of chips from his inventory of snacks he'd been selling.

In the Q&A following the reading, Olivarez expressed the pain of leaving his family during his days at Harvard, and the difficulties of having a background many of his classmates could not relate to. However, he expressed the joys of having a state-of-the-art library on campus which allowed him to build his own kind of curriculum. When asked about the benefits of studying poetry, Olivarez encouraged studying anything meditatively and embracing the present, in contrast to the transient nature of Twitter and the information age. 

Olivarez offered many tips for aspiring writers such as setting a disciplined routine and reading as much as possible to stay inspired. He also spoke of the benefits of paying attention to what an author is trying to accomplish with their words and methods, as well as finding motivation and accountability with a peer group of other writers. With his own use of unique paragraph breaks and prescient thematic material, Oliverez has proven himself to be a poet who will inspire poets and readers for generations to come.

References

Library of America. (January 9, 2024). José Olivarez reads “Mexican American Disambiguation” [Video]. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxI56Yn05Lc 

Olivarez, J. (2018). Getting Ready to Say I Love You to the Couch, It Rains. Citizen Illegal. Haymarket Books.

--. (2018). I Loved the World so Much I Married It. Citizen Illegal. Haymarket Books.

--. (2023). Mexican Heaven. Promises of Gold. Henry Holt and Company.

--. (2023). Ode to Tortillas. Promises of Gold. Henry Holt and Company.

Olivarez, P. (2023). In J. Olivarez, Promises of Gold. Henry Hold and Company.

This essay was written by Haven Barnes while studying abroad at Oxford during the spring 2024 semester. Haven is a senior computer science major at Dominican University, minoring in medieval history and mathematics.

Editor's note: Use Rebecca Crown Library to learn more about this topic! Check out our English & Literature databases and our English & Literature research guide.

Antonina Harbus, in The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry, writes, “The [Anglo-Saxon] elegies may employ conventional imagery and characteristic Old English vocabulary, but at the same time, they construct emotionally realistic portraits of human sensibility and mental processes which constitute the psychological validity of these texts” (Harbus 154-155). The Wanderer and The Seafarer, two Anglo-Saxon elegies found in The Exeter Book, share an interest in the relationship between the body and mind within the context of another relationship, isolation and fate. The Exeter Book is dated to the late 10th century and is one of four major codices of Anglo-Saxon elegies (Treharne 48). 

While the narrator in The Wanderer only has his memories to interact with, the narrator in The Seafarer is surrounded by the ocean as he or she reflects on it, as well as their own mind. The elegiac genre these two poems fall under has been debated in terms of its most vital constituents and how to define it without projecting modern vocabulary or theory onto it. Harbus also comments, how an elegy “is thematically centred on the mental world of an individual, first-person speaker” (Harbus 127). She also mentions they tend to focus on loss or separation, as well as “deploying memory in conscious spiritual development” (Harbus 129). As such, The Wanderer and The Seafarer use isolation to explore the interaction of the self, both within the narrator’s interior world and with the outside world, and understand what it is. Despite emphasizing the importance of selfrevelation, both poets warn of the futility of such an achievement if one fails to execute their realized purpose.

Beginning with a brief introduction to each poem, The Wanderer is a complex elegiac poem thought to either have been a single monologue or a narrated monologue with narratorial commentary (Treharne 54). The narrator recounts memories with his lord and fellow men, and laments how he has lost them. Though referred to as anhaga, ‘the solitary one,’ he finds comfort in his faith in God, which Harbus expands on and emphasizes the way in which the poem demonstrates life, metaphorically, as a dream (Harbus 171). She references lines 41-44, which describes a dream the narrator has in which he is reunited with his lord, and the contrast he witnesses upon awakening signals the dream’s function as “a metaphor for the insubstantial and illusory nature of this worldly existence in contrast to the eternal life of grace.” (Harbus 164). A final theme that appears not only in this poem, but also in The Seafarer, is fate. 

Though it appears quite explicitly in line 5, “Fate is very inflexible,” it appears in more subtle ways throughout the poem, which will be revisited later. The Wanderer’s use of the narrator’s mind as a playground, then, allows the poet to explore themes such as the proximity of the past, the role of isolation in connecting with God, and how fate relates to each of these topics. The Seafarer is thought to be a companion poem to The Wanderer, and they are often studied in conjunction. Indeed, there is significant structural and thematic overlap, such as discussions of isolation, the purpose of life and the transitory nature of it, yet The Seafarer probes the mind/body distinction more deeply with its unique exploration of the self as a subject/object relationship, in which the mind is the former and the body the latter. The poem discusses the “way by which we might progress to something more, to ecan eadignesse, ‘eternal bliss,’” and the body and mind’s role in facilitating this journey to divine reunion (Treharne 60). The sylf, or self, in the context of this poem refers not to a “body containing mind,” but as “a soul containing sins,” completely setting the body aside in this illustration of a human (Matto 176). While in The Seafarer the narrator expresses distress in being confined within their mind, The Wanderer’s narrator demonstrates anxiety about being bound by their body.

To understand the “self,” and how it is described and explored in both poems, it is necessary to examine how a human being is dissected in terms of a mind, body, and soul. Within the historical context of The Wanderer and The Seafarer, there are two schools of thought on how these constituents are demarcated according to their functions: early philosophers, such as Augustine, Boethius, and Plato, and contemporary vernacular Anglo-Saxon literature. While both view the mind and soul as separate entities, early philosophy interprets the mind as the intellect, while the Anglo-Saxons, in vernacular literature, refer to it as the mod, or willpower, which must be controlled (Godden 204)(Godden 308). Moreover, vernacular Anglo-Saxon literature places the mind in the seat of the heart, and therefore encapsulates the mod’s ability to both think and feel (Godden 303). In both The Wanderer and The Seafarer, there is palpable conflict between these parts of the sylf, as the mod yet desires transient life, as it is the home of community and companionship, yet this is accompanied by a sinking awareness of its imminent death. The notable anxiety about death is intensified, too, by the absence of a clear perception of time, reflecting the uncertainty of one’s death day, as the reader is not told how long the wanderer or seafarer have been isolated. In terms of the mod, it is unclear what controls it, whether that is the soul or another component, reminiscent of Plato’s tripartite soul. This disjunction is vividly demonstrated in The Seafarer (lines 10-12):

     …where sorrows surged

     hot about the heart. 

     Hunger inside tore the spirit of the sea-weary (Treharne). 

These three lines establish the simultaneous presence of the mod and the spirit, and the effect of the mod’s affective forces on the latter. It is peculiar here, despite the fact the mod is often associated with willpower, that the spirit instead is designated as the facilitator of will. It is also possible, as mentioned above, the “spirit” is the part of the mod which represents divine willpower that triumphs over the other, driving transient desires. Harbus quotes Godden on this predicament, who has “refined this line of argument to suggest that the poem takes its meaning from a disjunction between the mind, the faculty of thought and emotion, and the self, the controlling seat of consciousness.” (Harbus 165) There is also, in The Wanderer, a “habitual binding of sleep and sorrow,” illustrating how the narrator is overwhelmed not only by their memories, but also by the emotions generated by recalling them (Harbus 166). This also communicates tension between the body and mind, if they are viewed symbolically, wherein the body symbolizes the present and the mind the past. As memories are, in essence, recognized by contrasting the now-absent past with the present, it is this juxtaposition that evokes painful emotions. Nostalgia in both poems, then, allows the poet to experiment with portrayals of the transient life, demonstrating that eternal life after death will not cause the painful distinction between memory and his current situation the volatile temporal world offers. Although not stressed in The Seafarer to the degree it is in The Wanderer, there is yet a feeling of a mind confined to a body, and the enormous amount of willpower it requires to force it to comply with divine will (lines 74-78): 

     That he might earn before he must depart, 

     achievements on earth against the wickedness of enemies 

     opposing the devil with brave deeds 

     so that the children of men might praise him afterwards, 

     and his glory will live then among the angels (Treharne). 

These lines highlight an important counterargument to the undercurrent of disregard for the temporal world, as the body is a necessary vehicle to do good works in the world and enter heaven after death. Michael Matto, too, emphasizes this: 

Only by turning over the entire self – both the self-as-subject and the self-as-object, regardless of which part of the body/mind relationship is assigned which role – to the scrutiny of the community through selfrevelation can the speaker take on a new perspective (Matto 178). 

According to this, because both narrators in The Wanderer and The Seafarer are isolated, there is no basis of external comparison for their introspection and turmoil. However, while the poems do suggest the value of community in assuaging this predicament, they ultimately reject it as an anchor for identity stabilization, as all things must pass. There is no death without the body, and nothing for the divine will of the mod to triumph over, just as without the temptation of “evil” in the Garden, there would be no recognizable “good.” The Wanderer and The Seafarer, then, are able to tackle the complexity of the mind and body and remind their readers of the subtlety of the human experience within an early Christian framework.

 As this would typically be a highly erudite topic, the skill of the poet shines through in their ability to communicate emotion and build a bridge between the text and their reader. This bridge functions differently for its readership, as modern readers lack the cultural context Anglo-Saxon readers understood. Cognitive science has emphasized the relationship between chemical human emotion and the context it is embedded in. Harbus describes how “research into the emotions from several fields has shown us that though we might recognise apparently separate emotions, such as happiness or anger, the emotional web is tangled and interconnected with other aspects of being, sensing and interacting.” (Harbus 164). 

Therefore, as cultural context is one aspect of emotional experiences, so too is a human’s perception of themselves, their physiology, their memories that shape their comfort level with certain emotions, and other endless contributing factors. It appears, then, that the poets of The Wanderer and The Seafarer were attuned to this on an intuitive level, as it places the sylf at the center of conflicting dualities within it: the temporal and eternal life, the will of the two parts of the mod, isolation and community, and the present self, faced with consulting either the past or the future. Moreover, emotions in Anglo-Saxon literature are not described to be felt, but rather “taken.” Godden highlights how “feeling” is purely sensory in Old English, whereas someone can take “various mental states, such as anger or love, using the verb niman: ‘nim lufe to Gode,’ gif ure mod nim,’…” (Godden 299). Harbus stresses the fact Anglo-Saxon authors were cautious to not designate the person, but rather the mind alone, as the site of emotion (Godden 169). This aligns with how emotions were “taken” and not “felt,” as they are taken into the mind, the mod, to be evaluated, and thus begins the war between the divine and temporal will. 

The poets of The Wanderer and The Seafarer demonstrate a strong interest in an analytical approach to introspection. Both narrators refuse to perceive themselves as a whole human, but rather interpret their individual components, body and mod. The complexity of the human experience embedded in an early Christian framework is visualized in both poems as perpetual conflict between the human and divine within each person, two parts that may be harmonized in Christ yet remain in opposition for mortals. By leveraging the narrators’ experience with isolation, the reader can access an unusually raw perspective of their emotions and inner experience, devoid of the variables Harbus describes can manipulate and alter the emotional landscape. Because the poets have removed any indication of how long the wanderer or seafarer have been isolated, the urgency to execute God’s will is heightened, as neither of the narrator’s know when they will die. Both poems approach the conflict that persists between the two forces of the mod, despite the urgency generated by the fear of death, which communicates a distinct existential aspect of the human experience and challenges the fantasy of discovering one’s purpose. Revelation, therefore, means nothing if it is never realized.

Works Cited

Godden, Malcom. "Anglo-Saxons on the Mind." Old English Literature: Critical Essays. Ed. R.M. Liuzza. Yale University Press, 2002. 

Harbus, Antonina. "Cognitive Approaches to the History of Emotions and the Emotional Dynamic." Harbus, Antonina. Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry. Boydell & Brewer, 2012. 

Harbus, Antonina. "Deceptive Dreams in The Wanderer." Studies in Philology 93 (1996): 164-179. 

Harbus, Antonina. "The Mind as the Seat of Emotions: the Elegiac Strain." Harbus, Antonina. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry. Brill, 2002. 

Matto, Michael. "True Confessions: The Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf." Journal of English and German Philology 103.2 (2004): 156-179. 

Treharne, Elaine, ed. Old and Middle English c.890-1450, An Anthology. Third Edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

 Image Citations

Exeter Book 2016: The Seafarer. Accessed November 13, 2024. https://www.theexeterdaily.co.uk/whats-on/events/exeter-book-2016-seafarer.

Friedrich, Caspar David. The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Artsy.net. Accessed November 13, 2024. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/caspar-david-friedrich-wanderer-above-the-sea-of-fog.

Courbet, Gustave. The Wave. Gustave-Courbet.com. https://www.gustave-courbet.com/the-wave.jsp. Accessed November 13, 2024.

Friedrich, Caspar David. The Monk By the Sea. “Wikimedia Commons.” Caspar David Friedrich - Der Mönch am Meer - Google Art Project, n.d. Accessed December 3, 2024. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Der_Mönch_am_Meer_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Vasnetsov, Viktor. A Knight at the Crossroads. 1919 Vasnetsov Ritter an Der Kreuzung Anagoria.” Wikimedia Commons. Accessed December 3, 2024. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1919_Vasnetsov_Ritter_an_der_Kreuzung_anagoria.JPG

Renoir, Pierre-Auguste. Seascape. The Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed December 3, 2024. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/81557/seascape

The following reflection on a museum exhibit was initially written for the course LIS 717: History on Display: Museums, Exhibitions, and Public History. Our assignment was to visit a free museum of our choosing in the Chicago area and write about a singular exhibit. The instructions emphasized analyzing the aesthetic choices of the display, including the lighting, paint colors, case materials, use of glass, interactivity, chronology, relationship of the exhibit to the visitor's body, and more. These guiding concepts brought the unique attributes of this exhibit into a sharper focus.

The “Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra ‘Calidad’” exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art features Delilah Montoya's photography, presenting the multicultural lives on the Mexican borderlands and Southwest United States ("Contemporary Casta"). This project is a commentary on 18th-century Casta paintings. These works typically stood as a series of sixteen paintings that promote the colonial framework of racial hierarchy by asserting that Spanish blood was gradually degraded through mixed-race families with Indian and African ancestry (Leibsohn, Mundy). Montoya created a series of sixteen candid photos and utilized 21st-century genetic DNA tests to track the subjects' ancestry as far as 10,000 years back. Her work demonstrates that race and culture are socially constructed and not an exact science or natural order. 

The entry of the exhibit presents a series of five reproduced casta paintings ranging from a Spanish couple and their child portrayed with dignity to more disruptive portraits of mixed-race families. These paintings are placed against a bright orange wall with painted frames. The viewer is met with the symbol of sophistication that turns out to be two-dimensional. Denying these paintings the authority of a traditional frame and keeping them out of glass disrupts the absolutism the paintings imply. To the left of these paintings is black text on a beige section of the wall explaining the conceit of the exhibition and more information on the artist.

Montoya's photos are placed on the room's beige walls, allowing the viewer to walk through in a circle to view all the pieces. They are framed in modern, simplistic wood box frames with a wood panel underneath. This section holds a black-and-white map with a test tube of sand on either side. Each tube is labeled with a familial designation, as the sand symbolizes the individual’s ancestry. The map establishes the regions the family is from and the casta to which the family would be assigned. 

In the above photo (click here for the photo, map, and accompanying audio), the left sand represents the mother's brother while the right represents the father. In the middle of the exhibit, a glass box stood with a book on casta paintings and the labeled colors of sand. In this example, the mother’s brother is represented in orange sand indicating Native American ancestry, and the father is represented in white sand, indicating northern European ancestry. The other options for sand were Mediterranean, southwest Asian, southwest Asian, northeast Asian, south African, and Sub-Saharan. 

        The photos are not in order of caste, which disrupts the idea of progressive ‘dilution’ of Spanish blood. As the participants were from the same regions of Texas and New Mexico, this created a sense of neighborhood and integrated community in a way the original Casta paintings rejected. While this exhibit utilizes test tubes, maps, and Casta classifications to demonstrate scientific analysis of its subjects, the placing of the photos works to reinforce that the artist intends to present each family with equal respect and humanity. 

This project's source material is based on treating non-Spanish people as lesser objects rather than embodied subjects. While approaching the same form through different intentions, Montoya and the exhibit curators had to create an intentional presentation that combated the original point of view. The artists creating Casta paintings had immense power and control, both politically and in the act of creation since they were painters rather than photographers. Montoya’s choice to photograph candid scenes and the supplemental text box that explains that these scenes were part of one-hour sessions are both powerful objections to the impersonal colonial perspective. 

As visitors walk around the room, they can scan QR codes on the photos that link to “family monologues” where the subjects discuss their family history and the photo’s context, as well as another image of the map that illustrates migration. The audio component of this project adds significant context to the images and sand representations. Participants told personal anecdotes, family stories, tragedies, and their journeys to understanding where their families came from. The photos feel intimate and current, while the maps and test tubes feel more distant and historical. Hearing directly from these sources is a necessary bridge that shows the personal narratives the families have regarding their geographic origins. (Click here for the photo, map, and audio of the above image).

       Test tubes denote a sterile, scientific process while sand and wood connect the project to the earth. The colors used for each region somewhat correlate with the skin tones of the ethnic groups represented. The genealogical assessment combined with unposed scenes of domestic lives brings subjectivity to the genre of casta imagery. Montoya and her interviewees show how each unique family has a long history impacted by political forces that changed over time.

Another orange wall section in the center of the room, where the casta paintings were displayed, shows scientific art of reptiles and flowers next to text explaining that the Spanish systematized ethnographic hierarchy in the context of similar ideas about race rampant in the Enlightenment Era. Another text box explains DNA tracing and the intention behind pursuing it for the project. These text portions are kept brief and include both English and Spanish translations, as was consistent throughout the museum. This informational center of the space didn’t distract from the circular experience of walking from photo to photo but still made context a priority. 

The wall with the exit door is blank other than a short profile on the artist, which features a photo of her next to black text on a grey rectangle, and a large quote from her placed above in bold black text. The quote states that the exhibit is an “investigation of culture and biological forms of ‘hybridity’” intended to show viewers the “resonance of colonialism as a substructure of our contemporary society that was constructed by an imposition of sovereignty.” This quote is also placed in Spanish above a section of the portraits in the same font and size. Looking up to see these quotes high on the walls created a sense that the artist was overlooking the exhibit.

           This room is one of the first doors a visitor could walk through when entering the museum. It is next to the large gift store, which led me to visit it right before leaving. Its light and neutral walls differ from the rest of the museum, which uses the orange featured on one wall of this exhibit heavily throughout other rooms, as well as blue, pink, and yellow. The wall color and bright white lighting complement the unadorned photography in creating a sense of authenticity. The space is smaller than other rooms and not connected to any other exhibit. This allowed the work to excel in its self-contained 16-part scale. 

Works Cited:

“Contemporary Casta Portraiture:  Nuestra ‘Calidad.’” National Museum of Mexican Art, Pilsen, Chicago. Accessed 2024. https://nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org/events/contemporary-casta-portraiture.

Leibsohn, Dana, and Barbara E. Mundy. “Casta Painting.” VistasGallery, 2015. https://vistasgallery.ace.fordham.edu/items/show/1659.

Montoya, Delilah. “Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra Calidad.” Contemporary Casta portraiture: Nuestra calidad. Accessed 2024. http://www.delilahmontoya.com/ContempCasta/.