A while ago now, The Los Angeles Review (with support from Letras Latinas), commissioned me a piece focusing on the concepts of Joy and Resistance for their Latinex Digital Poetics folio. Camilo Loaiza Bonilla, the issue’s editor, puts it this way:
“(i)n 2025, the Latinx community in the U.S. is experiencing fear and uncertainty that threatens to tear down what our communities have built together. (Un)expectedly, I have found that many have grown stronger in these times—not because of that fear and uncertainty, but despite it. Poetry encourages this growth; it unravels, heals, and puts together again. It swallows fear and uncertainty and spits out something new, different, and so resilient it cannot be taken away: joy. Joy resists.
Electronic Literature (E-Lit) finds itself in a unique position. To create E-Lit is to experiment; to experiment is to play; thus, to play—inherently—is to foster joy. Digital poetry specifically has an ability to engage readers in a distinctive dimension that opens the reader/viewer/player to new perspectives and possibilities—in craft and of futurity—that help deepen the positive impact we can have on our communities now.”
So? how to resist and how to joy and how to joyfully resist and resistantly joy? joy as noun and verb, resist as both too. La resistencia; my daughter’s middle name is Joy.
“Resistance to” is the poem I ended up writing; an interactive, multi-platform poem that needs to be downloaded and played locally in your own computer. The poem travels, as do we; the poem resists, as you do, and somewhere in between you may find joy, I hope.
This week we’ll be talking about this poem and other pieces in the folio with Camilo Loaiza, Brent Ameneyro and Joshua Escobar at the AWP conference. enJoy.