Reflecting on the ‘human experience’

Poets of the Rio Grande Valley: Third in a Series

Sol Garcia | THE RIDER

During an early morning last year, as the pandemic had just begun, Emmy Pérez, a creative writing professor at UTRGV and current Texas Poet Laureate, was awakened by her young son. 

All of a sudden, she heard the cry of a pauraque, a bird native to the Rio Grande Valley but a rare sight in her neighborhood. To Pérez, the bird sounded like a baby crying. From somewhere else outside, she heard a cat growling, and she soon formed a poem in her mind. 

“I had to imagine in my head that there was this scene where the cat was killing this beautiful bird that’s rare, and so I was connecting that to motherhood, because I could hear the adult pauraque further away, calling out to the child,” she said. “I connected hearing all of that to the experience of parenting and how difficult that can be sometimes when you have to leave your child for a minute.”

Pérez, a published author of two poetry collections, “Solstice” (Swan Scythe Press, 2019) and “With the River on Our Face,” (University of Arizona, 2016) was first exposed to poetry for class assignments. In middle school, she started to write poems for self-expression. 

“I always liked to write,” she said. “I would often write to express my feelings in a private sort of way.” 

Born in Santa Ana, California, Pérez would go on to receive an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Southern California. She then attended Columbia University in New York for a graduate degree in creative writing. Eventually, she relocated to El Paso, where her mother was from. 

In 2006, Pérez moved to the Valley, where she began instructing at legacy institution University of Texas-Pan American. She also serves as the associate director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at UTRGV.

“Solstice,” released in 2003, details living in those different states. 

“The first collection, ‘Solstice,’ is a lot about different times that are inspired by my life in California and New York, in El Paso, where my mom is from, when I moved there,” she said. 

In 2016, “With the River on Our Face” was published, which was about her experiences in El Paso and the Valley. 

“A lot of that work is about the natural world in both places, but also the social issues at the time that I wrote it,” the author said. “It’s about a lot of things. There’s love poems, and there’s everything.” 

Since then, Pérez has been working on her third poetry collection, which will be released next year. It will include some of her older and newer poems. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pérez has continued to write poetry but through a different writing process than she used for “With the River on Our Face.”  

“A lot of that work, I wrote by being outside and taking walks through wildlife refuges and going to visit different places along the [Rio Grande], including all the way through New Mexico and up to Colorado, but for this [new] book I can’t do that.” 

Instead of looking for external inspiration, Pérez has had to rely on inspirations from herself and her home. 

“It’s amazing how you can start to develop different kinds of sensory motivation,” she said. “Before … I would see things and those images would appear in my writing, and now I’m mostly listening from the inside of my house.”

Through lyric poetry, Pérez finds her voice. 

“It’s a little song, and so it doesn’t necessarily have to have a beginning, middle and the end, although it has movement,” she said. “I enjoy creating new ways of saying things that we may have heard before because we’re all trying to describe our human experience. … The lyric poetry lends itself to that kind of writing.”  

Some of the other experiences she writes about is her family history and life as a woman of color. 

Pérez is the granddaughter of “three Mexican immigrants and a Tejano from El Paso.” Her parents both grew up in borderland areas, and Pérez draws on her family’s experiences as inspiration. 

“I just deeply honor and respect their experiences,” she said. “We never really learned about our histories, in the official textbooks, in public schools, and even in my college experience. Those histories … [were] not really widely available, and so I think that I’m motivated to write about my own experiences as a Chicana in this world.”  

Last year, Pérez became the Texas Poet Laureate, winning a fellowship with the Academy of American Poets. She imagined she would travel often to meet other poet laureates from other states but due to the pandemic, that experience was mostly virtual. 

However, she remains grateful for the fellowship, especially because she is using the funds to create a digital archive of Texas borderland poets, as well as other poets. 

“They will be a collection of videos, and the poets will be performing their work,” Pérez said. “They will have Spanish translations, literary translations of their poetry in subtitles below and if they read in Spanish, or in both languages or other languages, those translations will be provided as well.” 

The archive should be completed this summer. 

For Pérez, poetry is an outlet for reflecting upon the natural world, her family’s history and what is occurring in the world, like family separation on the border and the border wall. 

“As a writer, I’m not going to remain silent about issues that affect me and that affect my communities and that also affect other communities that I care about,” the McAllen resident said. “I care very deeply about what happens in the world beyond me.”  

When discussing creating poetry about similar issues, Pérez informs her students that courage is necessary. 

“I tell my students: When we do that, it requires courage because not everybody’s going to agree, but we’re poets. Poets throughout time have always tried to tell the truth as they see it,” she said. 

To learn more about Pérez’s work, visit her website.