More of this Feature • The original Word Hoard challenge • Galway Kinnell's Word Hoard: The envelope, please • Runner-up: Sherman Alexie

Join the Discussion The original challenge: Want to see some of the other poems written in response to the word hoard challenge?

Elsewhere on the Web • Lornalinks • Lorna Dee Cervantes page at AAP (where you can listen to her reading of “Freeway 280”) • Lorna Dee Cervantes page at Voices from the Gaps • Taller Ixchel: Poetry in Paradise workshop

Lorna Dee says: “Ever since I was 19 and he touched my wild hair without permission, I've wanted to cap on his word hoard/horde(?). After my promotion to Director of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder in January, I haven't had time to write, until that morning, May 14th, and the deadline was midnight. How could I resist?”

Lorna Dee Cervantes is a known resister. She has been arrested 10 times for Civil Disobedience as Civil Defense. She is also an internationally acclaimed Chicana poet, author of two books of poetry -- Emplumada (Pitt Poetry Series, 1981) & From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Publico Press, 1991) -- winner of the American Book Award, The Paterson Prize for Poetry & the Latino Literature Award, and recipient of two fellowship grants for poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award. Her poetry has been included in over 160 anthologies including the Norton Anthology of American Poetry, and translated into five different languages. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Look for her 5-book (pentych) set entitled Drive.

Here's her winning poem:

IMAGINE

How little you know the poor.
Wrenched away in your enclave of hynopompic
cleanliness, the vagrant heart doesn't
stand a chance at the button past servitude
on a dime. Dímele the idea of a dive
of saliva, the worm of ramification issuing
out your pores at the prog of a policeman's baton. Here,
in America, in the US of AA, you, at the hoist of a hoax.

Lorna Dee Cervantes

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Buy the books • Emplumada • From the Cables of Genocide • Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology

Lorna will be at the Taos Poetry Circus in early June, reading for Global Voices night, and June 23-30 she will be at Isla Mujeres in Mexico, teaching a workshop entitled “Taller Ixchel: Write Poetry in Paradise!” with Tammy Gomez.

Next page > Sherman Alexie > page 1, 2, 3

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