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| Volume 11, No. 49 |
September 1-7, 2010 |
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| | ‘Insides She Swallowed’: Utep professor publishes book of poetry | | By Dan Lambert | |  “It’s about culture, food, and body, how as women and as immigrants, we have to consume in order to not be consumed ourselves.”
That’s what Sasha Pimentel Chacon – UTEP visiting assistant professor in the creative writing department and author of “Insides She Swallowed,” a newly published collection of poetry – says of her new book.
The book is printed by West End Press, a publisher out of Albuquerque.
“I was lucky just to get a book, considering how flooded the business of publishing is now with new authors like me,” Pimentel Chacon says. “I remember one of the rejections of this book: ‘We’d like to publish this but we just can’t make poetry work financially.’”
Reading poetry may not be on a Top Ten list of current American leisure activities. “The only people who read poetry are other poets,” says Bobby Byrd, poet and co-owner of El Paso’s Cinco Puntos Press.
But a good introduction to poetry for the interested but uninitiated would be “Insides She Swallowed.” There’s a lot about growing up in the Philippines – universal stuff, really, distilled through Pimentel Chacon’s eyes and pen.
For the rookie trying to absorb the short pieces presented in the book, some background music might help – no lyrics, instrumental music to get you focusing on the words, ideas, and craft. Pimentel Chacon touched on her craft and the music connection.
“In many ways, I’ve been writing poetry all my life,” she says. “I’ve been playing with language since I was a kid, which is why I write poetry; it’s about sound, music, play.”
Pimentel Chacon says that English was not her first language and remembers, while learning it, repeating words over and over again until she found meanings or lost meanings in the sound.
She expands on the music theme: “It’s about reveling in the strings of different combinations of words, and I never had the talent for singing or playing an instrument, so I had to become a poet.”
The author coaches other aspiring writers along. That’s her day job. She teaches at the graduate level, in the bilingual MFA in creative writing program and at the undergrad level, working with creative writing majors.
“I try to show my students really good poetry, and to let that literature speak first,” she says. “You can’t help but to be deeply touched by poetry, real poetry.
“Then we explore the levels of complexity in the poems to understand the work behind the play, and students write their own poems. We have conversations about their poems, about how to revise their work so that their poems can go where they need to go.”
Interestingly, Pimentel Chacon explains that suggested directions can often be risky, politically or emotionally. It’s about where the poem, not necessarily the author, wants to go, to let the poem speak first.
Sasha Pimentel Chacon will be reading on Thursday, March 11, at UTEP’s Blumberg Auditorium at 7 p.m., and is leading a workshop at EPCC on April 13 as part of their Spring Arts Festival.
She is working on a second collection of poems, about the El Paso desert and the absence of water, juxtaposed with the Philippines’ abundance of water.
“Insides She Swallowed”
is available at the West End Press website, westendpress.org, and also on Amazon. Look for it in the UTEP bookstore soon.
Comments or questions about this story? E-mail Secret@whatsuppub.com
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