In this episode of Open House, a podcast series hosted by Poets House, Francisco Aragón and Cornelius Eady begin with a discussion on literary activism. They talk about the challenges they have encountered in their work and how to find allies to help further their community-oriented goals. In response to Eady’s question about how activism began for Aragón, he replied “I began to sort of survey the landscape and see where we we’re being represented in the field—in Poetry Magazine, in Paris Review—and what I began to notice early on was that we weren’t being represented. We were invisible. The activism emerged from a state of erasure and invisibility. And in that regard, you and Cave Canem pointed the way for what that looks like in terms of fighting the good fight and starting to get results in this area.” Aragón then reads a few poems, talks about poet Rubén Darío who is the inspiration for his book After Rubén, and discusses his journey to becoming a poet.
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