Venus Rising

ProfileIssue: Sagittarius 06

Professor Tina Escaja Inspires Women around the World

What brought you to the U.S? What do you like the most about living here?
My intellectual and economic conditions were quite precarious in Spain. I always loved to learn, but I did not have many chances. It was a struggle to simply get through high school and the University. I had to work, hard, in the morning, and would go to school at night smelling of fish (I worked selling fish all during this period). Then, I worked selling chicken, and I would run to the University evening classes with barely a few hours of sleep (and long hours of heavy market work). The unemployment rate in Spain was 20%, the highest in Europe. I felt trapped. When I saw an ad at the University for a student-exchange program in the U.S., I applied. Perhaps it is a cliché, but this country gave me the opportunity to learn and grow.

What do you like the least?
Current politics. The rampant imperialism. The virtual numbness from many American people regarding the consequences of their government’s actions. Like families being killed in Iraq, as we speak, as a consequence of the U.S. invasion, but most people seem completely uninterested, oblivious, concerned as they are with their immediate life and a self-centered set of values attributed to the nation.

What brought you to Vermont?
I was offered a job as a Spanish professor at the University of Vermont right after I finished my dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania.

What inspires you to write poetry? What are your poems about?
My interest and motives have changed during my years of writing poetry. One of my first motivations, once in the U.S., was the interaction between person and machine, between the poet and the big black computer screen (it used to be black), and the possibilities for exchange. Using the pen name Alm@ Pérez,  I wrote this e-book called “Respiración mecánica” (Mechanic Breathing) and two interactive poems entitled “VeloCity”. A few years later, I wrote a long book of poems, “Caída Libre” (“Free Falling”) about the anxiety and celebration of an epic process, rarely expressed in poetry in its roughest sense: conception, delivery, maternity. I attached this process to another epic of celebration and anxiety that spoke of the end of the millennium in New York City. The book ends with a sense of falling of Western values, inspired by the events of 9/11. But the segment “free” of the title (Falling Free) is one of hope. This book won an important international prize, the II Premio Hispanoamericano de Poesía, Dulce María Loynaz, valued at over $12,000. The theme that interests me most right know is political commitment, and my current manuscript and art project is called “Bar Codes.”  

"Black Moon" From Bar Codes
By Tina Escaja, English Translation by Helen Wagg
 

Image by MJ Tobal                        Violent geology,
black moon in small, torn
veins.
A fallen asteroid transforms the plain
into a notable wounded summit,
silent and violet-
hued.
Dried blood harbors that moving eye
buried
in the new geography,
that celestial body in a mineral landscape
that from the heart
swells the fist,
from the word, the lance,
from the pain
the tectonic geometry of fear.
Unraveling a fabric of fictitious relief
while the moon in its wounded core
demands
sanity and worth.

There is no excuse.

Please go to www.tinaescaja.com to read more of Tina's original poetry.