Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
On Friday I came across a simple tweet from someone I follow: “Enjoy the long weekend. Don’t die.” One might see this as good advice for all of us, but also dark humor during a week when two beloved celebrities, David Bowie and Alan Rickman, had died at the age of 69. Those of us in the poetry world mourned the death of C.D. Wright in the same week, and a review of Friday’s Los Angeles Times reveals a host of other recognizable people – musicians, actors, and the prosecutor of Patty Hearst – passing from this world.
And then the startling news came Friday afternoon of the passing of Francisco X. Alarcon, the most prominent poet living in Davis.
Friends of Francisco – and he had so many – knew that he had been diagnosed with stomach cancer only a couple months ago, but his passing still felt untimely. I was due to host a celebration (now postponed) of Francisco’s life and poetry this coming Saturday. He has “featured” at my poetry series perhaps half a dozen times, and has shown up to support other poets perhaps another dozen times.
I first saw Francisco read more than 20 years ago, when I was a graduate student in my early 20s. From the 1990s up to the three times I saw him read in 2015, Francisco was always so full of exuberance and joy, despite taking on some heavy subjects, such as the effects of widespread discrimination and racism against people like himself who were Latino, Mestizo, Native American, or Aztec.
Francisco’s poetry and prose challenge of the basic premises of a “border,” of what it means to be American, about what it means to walk without papers on the streets of Arizona. Reflecting on Francisco’s activist work, I am reminded of Martin Luther King Jr.’s reflections on what it means to be “disinherited” because of one’s skin color, spoken during a Montgomery bus boycott speech at the Holt Street Baptist Church in December, 1955. King said, “We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.”
That “daybreak” that King speaks of informs all of Francisco’s poetry, and his demeanor. He was a font of encouragement for other poets, founding Los Escritores del Nuevo Sol, a mentorship and creative productivity group that has been meeting regularly for more than a decade. The inspiration and support that he provided other poets came in the classroom, in the meetings of Los Escritores, and at myriad readings of his students, former students, and the great varieties of people he inspired.
Francisco has read in the halls of our state capitol, beginning a meeting of the state senate with an exclamation to the four directions. He has read before huge rallies in Arizona, supported by a group he founded called Poets Responding to SB 1070, which encouraged law enforcement officers to detain and question people whom they think “look illegal.” I got to see Francisco read in churches, in community centers, in countless bookstores, in classrooms, and at many outdoor political events. I have seen him perform his work as a featured reader more often than any other poet.
When my daughter’s 5th grade class at Montgomery Elementary School read and performed poetry, Francisco came to support them. When students from my freshman seminar helped to organize an open mic at the John Natsoulas Gallery, Francisco came to support them. When the Davis City Council held a ceremony naming me Poet Laureate of Davis, Francisco came to support me.
As you can read about if you look him up online, Francisco X. Alarcón was important as a scholar of Latino history, of the Spanish language and Spanish linguistics, of Aztec culture, and of poetry of protest and poetry of cultural celebration. He is widely known as a gay Latino icon, as an author of more than 20 books (including many bilingual illustrated poetry books for children), as a tireless advocate for poetry and other arts, and as a mentor and faculty member at UC Davis. But to me, he was mostly a friend.
I miss him, thank him, and celebrate him. I hope that tonight you will join me in toasting Francisco X. Alarcón.
Happy Martin Luther King Day. Tonight’s pub quiz will features questions on Dr. King, on Francisco Alarcón (note the spelling), and on the rest of the topics that you have come to expect from the Pub Quiz. This week those will include logistics, the ancestors of my bulldog, numbers divisible by 5 (math!), frequency in time and space, Oscar nominees, the common era, Mexico travelogues, Australian crops, names that end with Y, theatrical pastimes, Mike Wallace, presidential politics, best-sellers, tails, the Olympics, the pronunciation of “Caribbean,” centuries of difference in South Dakota, literary antagonists, neighbors below and especially above, favorite consonants, noncaloric fracases, central stones, sports cities, completed quotations, decorated spaces, forgotten films, people that cannot be removed, legal drama, Francisco X. Alarcón, and Shakespeare.
I hope you can join us this evening for the Pub Quiz.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. What snack food uses the slogan “Dangerously Cheesy”?
- Internet Culture. What company owns the first, third, and eighth most-popular smartphone apps used in 2015?
- Current Events – Names in the News. What was the birth name of the musician, artist and actor known as David Bowie?
P.S. This coming Thursday is Poetry Night in the city of Davis, this time featuring Phillip Barron and Karen Terrey. Barron’s new book of poetry, What Comes from a Thing, won the 2015 Michael Rubin Book Award, and was published by Fourteen Hills Press of San Francisco. He also authored the non-fiction book The Outspokin’ Cyclist (Avenida Books, 2010), a collection of his newspaper columns on bicycling. Karen Terrey teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College and Sierra College. Her book Bite and Blood was published by Finishing Line Press. I hope you will join us at the John Natsoulas Gallery on January 21st at 8 PM.