Host introduces acclaimed writer Pablo Medina, originally from Havana, Cuba, who now lives in Williamsville, Vermont near Brattleboro. Medina will be featured as part of the October 18-20, 2024 Brattleboro Literary Festival reading mostly from his new book of poetry "Sea of Broken Mirrors". Medina reads 'Home in Vermont,' an essay he wrote specifically for the Brattleboro Words Trail. It describes how in 1960 at age 12, after leaving on the last plane out of Cuba in the midst of the Cuban Revolution, after embracing a brand new and very different city (New York), after working and teaching in various US cities, he's come to regard Vermont as home. Medina reads several short poems including "El Tiempo en Una Semilla" (in Spanish); 'Canticle of the Moon in Vermont' and 'New Pastures.' He talks about how he moves between poetry, novels, memoir, essays and translation of greats poets like Virgilio Peneira, Rafael Alcide and novelist Alejo Carpentier, and his book on Federico Garcia Lorca "A Poet in New York" co-authored with poet Mark Stanton, to publish his many books of poetry and novels. He reflects on how imagery of his early life appears in his work and his feelings about the ongoing US embargo and 62-year estrangement between the US and Cuba. He discusses his first experiences at the Brattleboro Literary Festival and how he's looking forward to reading again on Sunday, October 20 at 12:30pm at 118 Elliot in Brattleboro and how delighted he's been by the dedicated readers and writers he's found in the Brattleboro area.
This episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast featured writer Pablo Medina who reads his essay ‘Home in Vermont’ written specifically for the Brattleboro Words Trail mobile app (https://brattleboro.stqry.app/) that guides listeners through stories of people past and present who embody the theme of 'words' throughout the Brattleboro area. This episode was produced and hosted by me, Lissa Weinmann and was edited by Alec Pombriant. We thank Pablo Medina for his participation as well as his suggestion that we use short clips of his favorite Cuban composer Leo Brouwer performed by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet.
A ceramic marker in Williamsville representing Pablo will now be added to the beautiful Brattleboro Words Trail landscape murals created by local artist Cynthia Parker Houghton. You can see the murals on display at 118 Elliot in Downtown Brattleboro, but they will move to the town's new Amtrak station in 2026. You can also see a video by producer Donna Blackney about the making of the murals at: https://www.brattleborotv.org/brattleboro-words-project/brattleboro-words-trail-cynthia-parker-houghton/. General information about maps, stories and the ongoing community creation of audio stories can be found at the Brattleboro Words Project website at: https://brattleborowords.org/
PABLO MEDINA OCTOBER 2024 BRATTLEBORO WORDS TRAIL PODCAST
TRANSCRIPT
WELCOME TO THE BRAT WORDS TRAIL PODCAST
HOST: This is Lissa Weinmann. I am the host of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast, and today we're here with local poet and novelist Pablo Medina. He's originally from Cuba, but has settled into a pastoral life in Williamsville Vermont, and we're really pleased to have him with us today.
PABLO: Thank you. Thank you very much.
HOST: You're welcome very much. So Pablo will be reading a segment that we're going to be using on the Brattleboro words Trail, which some of you know, is an audio app telling stories about people and places important in both the history and current reality of words in the Brattleboro area because, as we all know, Brattleboro has a long history of printing, publishing, writing and reading. We have one of the most, I think it's the most active library in Vermont here in Brattleboro, which is amazing, but we are a community of readers and thinkers and writers and and you're part of that. So thank you for being here today.
PABLO: Thank you for having me
HOST: Yes so you could start with reading your piece, that would be great, and then we'll have a little conversation afterward and see how it goes.
(OPENING MUSIC ‘CUBAN LANDSCAPE WITH RAIN’ BY LEGENDARY CUBAN COMPOSER LEO BROUWER)
PABLO: Home in Vermont. Since coming to the US, I've been hungry for home. I left Cuba at the age of 12, not knowing enough to be afraid, aware enough to realize that our stay in New York City would be a long one. (MUSIC)
We settled that winter into an apartment that barely accommodated us, yet the great city beat outside the door, and my curiosity was stimulated by all it offered, museums, bridges and tunnels, a subway system that seemed to take you wherever you needed to go, and those buildings that scraped the sky, the city was elegant and sordid, massive, indifferent, just the perfect place to transition from the capital of sun to the capital of shadows. (MUSIC)
Eventually, I left New York College took me south to Washington, DC. Teaching took me to New Jersey and then Miami, where I felt more foreign than anywhere else, from Miami to Philadelphia and back to New Jersey and the broken post industrial cities in between, eventually back to New York and a dream job at The New School that turned out to be a nightmare. I escaped to Las Vegas dig for roots there, and all you find is sand. I met some good friends, among them, the novelist Richard Wiley, the university president Carol Harter and the art critic Dave Hickey, who taught there, but I couldn't stay, and after three years, I moved to Boston to teach at Emerson College. (MUSIC)
Though I felt isolated and disconnected in Boston, it was there I met my wife. We were yet to marry or live together, when one very cold day in January, with the sort of cabin fever that afflicts urban apartment dwellers, Kassie said, Let's go to Vermont. We'd often gone on long drives like this one, even stayed at various inns in summer and autumn and gloried in the feel of the place with its green mountains and gentle people. But we had never gone in winter, we drove west on Route two, and as we approached the state, the snow got deeper, the cold got well, colder, the snow and our relationship to it was a mystery. We both loved warm weather. I because I was a creature of the tropics, she because she was born in northeastern Massachusetts and was tired of winter. I remember what Jean Paul Sartre said to the Cuban poet HebertoPadilla as they took a walk in Paris during a snowfall: “Cubans suffer from a prenatal nostalgia for snow.” (MUSIC)
After lunch, Kassie added, “Why don't we look at some houses?” In less than an hour, we contacted a realtor and had an appointment to see a house, then two more. It was that first house that drew our interest. After a couple of forays into real estate. The following weeks, we knew it was house number one. We wanted an old, neglected place in need of repairs, but it was by the Rock River and surrounded by woods next to a covered bridge Vermont had worked its charm. (MUSIC)
In time, after the snow melted and mud season passed, I realized what I'd found it was not at all the place I left when I was 12, not the brilliant sun and deep blue of the tropical seas or the group of houses by yet another river where I'd lived in the bosom of my extended family. It was a place where the snow is bathed in the blue milk of the moon, where nights are deep and long, where it is not unusual to see a bear in your backyard, where the people are the friendly and welcoming sort and nature and – I mean this as literally as I can – rules. There was a key to my enchantment. Vermont was not paradise, but home. MUSIC
HOST: That was beautiful.
PABLO: Thank you.
HOST: Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I don't think I mentioned that the introduction that you were born and raised until the age of 12 in Havana, Cuba, yes, and I know that you've written a memoir, and I'm just curious about how, how Cuba finds itself into your work, because it certainly does. Can you talk a little bit about how those early influences do?
PABLO: Well, it's everywhere my work, directly or indirectly, no matter how far I try to get away from it. It is a place that I was taken out of by circumstance, and so I had no consciousness of being, being being torn from my place of my comfort. But. That's what it was then. I was only in retrospect that I realized how much I lost by being taken to another place, another city, despite the fact that I gained many other things in New York. So it's both. It's a push and pull situation. I'm not I haven't quite reconciled yet. I'm not sure I ever will, but I have accepted it.
HOST: And what year did you come?
PABLO: It was November 11, 1960 1960 flight Pan Am, flight 411. The last scheduled flight out of Havana before things shut down. Wow, wow. So those, those things I remember clearly,
HOST: and did your family come straight to New York?
PABLO: We spent a couple of weeks in Miami. But my father, my father, had a job in New York that he left us behind, went to went to New York, and then brought us up there. He'd been tasked with opening an office of a Spanish company in the city of New York. And so we were lucky that way, because many Cubans who came at that time did not have jobs and had to work in the most menial circumstances possible, from picking tomatoes to shiny shoes in the city of Miami, as you probably know. But we were lucky. Despite saying that, I felt I felt lucky, there was still a sense of enclosure. New York, especially in winter, is a city where you feel sometimes very,
very hermetic, very closed in which is quite a contrast to where I came from. (Music)
HOST: And you know you talked about the idea of in the preface to the sea of broken mirrors, which is your latest book of poetry, the preface quote that you have in this book
PABLO: Oh, you mean the epigraph? “I could have been an indolent fugitive, a clever witness of world events. But instead, I became the close friends of words, of snowstorms, of rain” . It's by Sandor Petofi, who's a Hungarian poet, and this is translated from the Hungarian by Nicholas Kolumban.
HOST: So when I read that, that epigraph, I was thinking, what else could you have become?
PABLO: Well, I was in college as a biology major, hoping for hoping to become a doctor, as my family encouraged me to do, but I then decided to double major in literature and biology, because I was so interested from a very early age, I would have been interested in literature and poetry, and so that sort of shifted my the direction of My ambitions, and it was something that I don't regret doing at all. I would have been, I would have been a terrible doctor, catastrophic.
HOST Well, we we're glad we avoided that! (Laughter) and have benefited so much from your many works, because you work in poetry primarily…
PABLO Well, I do, yes and fiction, yes, and I translate as well. I have I write essays, but I don't consider myself primarily an essayist. The essays are more ways of my kind of exploring certain things that make me just restless, you know,
HOST: What was your last essay on?
PABLO: The last essay was an essay on translation, on translating 'the kingdom of this world,' which was a novel by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. And then – a woman who was editing an anthology on on the work of Alejo Carpentier asked me to write an essay on on the process of translating that work and I did. And it was an essay that I really enjoyed writing, because I love his work so much, and I gained so much myself from the act of translating it.
HOST: There are other Cuban writers that you have translated, though, as well.
PABLO: Yes, Virgilio Pinera, who's a very important writer from the 1950s and 60s. His poetry, he's primarily a playwright, but he also wrote some poems that I thought were important to be known in the English language. So I did a ‘selected poems’ of his work. I just finished a collection by Rafael Alcides, another important Cuban poet. And of course, you know, not just Cubans, but also people like Garcia Lorca. I co-translated "A Poet in New York" with Mark Stanton, the poet Mark Stanton, and that too was very satisfying, but very difficult. (MUSIC)
HOST : One of the questions I was going to ask you is about writing in English versus writing in Spanish. What? What language do you write in?
PABLO: I write I write in English. Primarily. That's although I like to think that if I were surrounded by Spanish in a Spanish speaking country that I would be writing in Spanish. Occasionally Spanish comes through, and I like that. I like that feeling when it comes Can I read you a poem in Spanish?
HOST: I would love to have you read a poem in Spanish
PABLO: Yeah, this is a very recent poem. It's called 'El tiempo en la semilla':
EL TIEMPO EN LA SEMILLA
Luego del río
luego del largo camino
cae la tarde
como cae la nieve
sobre la montaña.
Cae la tregua sobre los días
cae--ya lo sé--
el tiempo en la semilla.
PABLO: 16:57
That's a brief little thing, but I, you know, I have, over the years, published two collections .
in Spanish.
HOST: ‘El Tiempo en la Semilla’ it is time in a seed. It looks like you have a couple other poems that you've selected there. Would you mind maybe reading a poem for us as well in English?
PABLO; Sure. And this is a Vermont poem,
HOST: Perfect.,
PABLO: Yeah. It has a couple of names in here Du Fu and Li Bai.. Both were Chinese poets of the eighth century, of the Christian era, both very, very fine, finely textured lyric poets. And there's also a reference to how Li Bai died. Li Bai liked his wine, and one day he was had a little bit too much one night, and he so looked up and saw the moon and fell in love with it and wanted to kiss it, so he got on a boat and went to the middle of the river where the moon was reflected in the water, and so he bent over to kiss it, fell in and drowned. (MUSIC)
CANTICLE OF THE MOON IN VERMONT (--o graziosa luna – Leopardi)
Before the lamp is the moon
before the moon is the map
to the palace of time
the surrendered mottled eye
of a seagull in a jar
mother of werewolves and hens
trickle down sun
caliper of clarity
moon the pox the moniker
the biscuit dipped in milk
moon withdrawn at dawn
moving like a Chinese bicycle
Du Fu Li Bo Du Fu Li Bo
who has loved you cannot forage you
give you up or turn you down
moon the enterprise
over the gas station
in the branches of a tamarack
used for love and used for fate
let me kiss you luscious wafer
on the river where you shimmer
dressed in tin and tassels
raptured in a field of glass.
HOST: Lovely.
PABLO: Thank you.
HOST: Would you mind reading another one of your poems there?
PABLO: Yes, this is called, ‘New Pastures.’ It's also a Vermont poem. I. Most of the book, this latest book, 'Sea of Broken Mirrors", was written here in Southern Vermont and Williamsville, to be exact. And many of the poems are most of the poems are Vermont poems. (Music)
NEW PASTURES
Spring snow falling
I am walking by the river
to dispense with city air
stuck to my clothes
trapped in my hair
some vague need to embrace
whatever love has left in me
spring snow falling and the field
on the far shore glows
like the blue sheets
on which you wrote
of moves to new pastures
on that field birds now
or the memory of birds black
and scattered I think
I should run back
to where I found you
an island that insists
as if insistence were the mirror
of existence that water rises
every spring as the snow melts
me closer to our days together.
HOST: When I read your work and I hear you reading your work, I'm struck by the imagery of water and snow. These are obviously natural images, but the fact that you were raised on an island surrounded by water, and that island remains somewhat of an enigma to this day,
PABLO: The cursed condition of water on all sizes. Virgilio Pinera put it.
HOST: Yes, I'm just wondering, you know how it feels like you've come almost full circle in terms of growing up in Cuba till the age of 12 and now settling here in an environment ..What do you see as the parallels?
PABLO: I think I can only respond to it by by thinking back to my childhood and remembering how much I loved the natural world such as it was, growing up in Cuba. My grandparents were farmers, and every summer I was literally farmed off to their farm.
HOST: Where was their farm ?
PABLO: In Matanzas province in the southern part of Matanzas, not far from the Zapata Swamp. And so, you know, I would go there, and I had all the freedom in the world to explore the surroundings, and I can only connect my presence here to those days when I had the whole day outside to look at things and observe things and creatures and animals and tarantulas and lizards and all these things that that that were So common there,
HOST: And so you feel at this moment in your life that you're indulging in that same kind of…
PABLO: Yes, but with a caveat, this is a very different nature. Yes, it's a very different landscape from the landscape, as you know, of Cuba. But there are connections. I think those connections, in the end, are spiritual connections, ways of bringing yourself back to those places that aren't you, those those those objects and animals and trees and so on that aren't you, and of realizing that there is, there is something there beyond your own self, and that the self itself can often put up barriers that don't really exist between you and nature.
HOST: Well, don't you feel that the the process of writing is a way to connect the two?
PABLO: Yes, but I hadn't thought of that, and I'll take that question home and ponder it.
But I think yes, there's something you know you create. You create yourself, you create your surroundings through language, yes, and the process of writing is a process of coming to terms with the way that you use language in order to understand yourself and what is not you, what is other, what is other of all potentially to see the connection between the two. And realize that there is, there is no separation, really. We go in and out.
HOST: and what you choose to fill your mind with, what you choose to pay attention to in your life. Do you, are you very careful about that?
PABLO: Sometimes and sometimes I'm not. Those are the best moments when I'm not careful, when you're not careful.
HOST: That makes me think of New York again, and then sort of your relationship to the city.
PABLO: Yeah. And as we said, because there's so many New Yorkers who come here. New Yorkers are very special people. They bring with them a certain attitude or a certain outlook that is both imaginative and at the same time creative and at the same time...insular.It's hard to crack the nut of New York, but once you do, you realize that there are wealth of people there who, in a sense, enrich your world. Yes, in ways known and unknown.
HOST: Well, you grew up in the Bronx, right?
PABLO: In the Bronx, but I was always in Manhattan. I was always, I took the, what used to be the IRT, it's the one train down and down the west side, down the west side, and just got off. Get off anywhere, really, in the village, Christopher Street and so on. So those were my haunts,
HOST: One of your books of poetry is called 'the weight of the island'.
PABLO: That's a translate. Those other translations of Vigilio Pineira. They are and so that phrases is from him, from him. 'La Isla Empesa' is the original title,
HOST: La Isla Empesa... So I wanted you to just, just get your thoughts. You said you you wrote essays sometime. But have you ever written about, sort of, the the political situation of Cuba? How do you, I guess my my question is, what are your thoughts about, you know, the estrangement between the United States and Cuba. Clearly, you've been back to the island since you left.
PABLO: Yeah, yeah. But some, well, that's, again, it's, it's a, it's, it's something that comes and goes.I think it's, I think it's a tragedy that it had had to come to this, this estrangement, this separation, and I think there's fault on both sides, on both the United States side, for the embargo and for the rigid attitude that prevails still after 60 some odd years, but there's also another kind of rigid attitude that has wanted in the past, and even to this day, to keep the island pure. But there is no purity in this world, and it's forced the island and the society and the culture, to remain in a in a straitjacket, if you will that was not necessary. So there's plenty of fault to go around on both sides. And right now, I don't know what the solution is. I hope there is a solution that is not going to blow the place up with violence and retribution and so on and so forth. But I don't see any of the leaders inside Cuba, let alone outside Cuba, who are thinking in those terms.
I'm hoping that there will be not only an opening, but rapprochement, and an understanding that it's afraid this is a discussion for another time. Cuba, not Cuba, without the United States and the United States is not the United States without Cuba. Cuba's Cuba's presence has kind of interwoven itself into the history of this country from the 18th century. Yes, there's no question about that.
HOST: And I think that the question I wanted to ask you also was this ability that you seem to have to move between the novels and the poetry. So I just wanted you to comment a little ….
PABLO: The word facility is tricky. Yeah, it's not, it's not easy. But let's, let's just say that that I was writing a novel, my second novel.
HOST: How many have you written?
PABLO: I think five.
HOST: You think?
PABLO: I lose no, well, I've written more than five, but published five, so let's put it that way.
HOST: I was just asking you to comment on the the different attitudes, different processes that are involved in terms of your poetry versus your fiction.
PABLO: Yeah, if, if I have a goal before I die, and I may not reach it, but that's okay, as long as one has a goal, one keeps going. Is to reconcile the two and to write a book which is both lyrical and narrative, and people don't realize where the narrative ends and the lyric begins.
HOST: That's a challenge.
PABLO: It is a challenge. That's why I say I probably will never achieve it. It's not easy, but I do it simply because when I was working on my second novel, 'The Return of Felix Nogara' I was I just had one day, one of those days where I thought I would never write another poem. I was very, very deeply involved in the narrative, and I put aside the narrative, and I started writing poems. There were all these short, six-line poems that eventually were published under a book titled "Points of Balance.' But, you know, I was just afraid, so I started writing these poems, and then I would go back to the fiction, refreshed in a way, so that that came, that going back and forth was actually very helpful in finishing the book. And since then, it's always been sort of well, if I don't, I can't forget about poetry and and I go from sometimes in mid, in mid novel. I go from from fiction to poetry.
HOST Mixes things up, yeah,
PABLO: Yeah…it keeps things bubbling.
HOST: And finally, I'd love you to talk a little bit about your appearance at this year at the Brattleboro Literary Festival. I know that you'll be reading your poetry.
PABLO: Yes, Sunday, I believe at 1230 Sunday, the forget the exact date, the 20 that's Sunday of the festival. Right? Midday, I'll be reading the poetry.
HOST: And is it mostly work from 'Sea of Broken Mirrors'? mostly
PABLO: Work yeah, from, the book, as it was just published this year, and I'm promoting it. Yeah.
HOST And you've participated in other Brattleboro LIt Fests…
PABLO: I participated. Must have been before the pandemic, with, with 'The Cuban Comedy', which was my last novel. Again, it was very, very good. I really enjoyed a packed audience.
HOST: Were you surprised the first time you came to the Brattleboro Lit Fest?
PABLO: I was surprised, because you go to these fairs, and there might be five or 10 people in the audience, but no, this was packed. And it showed me that I think there is an audience here of readers, attentive readers, active readers who like to go to these conferences and get a lot out of them. So it was, it was, it was very exciting, and I'm looking forward again to participating,
HOST: Yeah, well, we're looking forward to seeing you there, too. And we're very proud of the Brattleboro literary festival because it for that third weekend, I believe, in October. It really brings so many interesting people into town, and all the events are free, free, which is pretty amazing, actually, yeah, and it dates back. It has a history. Days back, as you said to Saul Bellow, when he lived here. Yes, another, another fabulous writer who chose this area to to live out his days. No, he to live out his days. He's actually buried in the cemetery here downtown, which few people know, but some people do, and they make pilgrimages there. I think that's, is there anything else that you'd like to add
PABLO: No, you’ve been a very good interviewer, and I thank you for hosting me. It's been terrific. Thank you.
HOST: Well. Thank you also for bringing yourself to our area and enriching it even more.
So Pablo Medina! Be sure to catch him at the Brattleboro Literary Festival. The dates can be found on their website, but I believe it's the third weekend in October, and Pablo will be reading on Sunday,
PABLO: Sunday midday, I think it's 1230 – check the calendar, just to make sure,
HOST: We'll put all that information in the notes for the podcast too. So thank you very much for listening, and thank you again Pablo and to BCTV for hosting us today.
PABLO: Thank you
HOST: This episode of the BWT Podcast featured writer Pablo Medina who wrote his essay ‘Home in Vermont’ specifically for the Brattleboro Words Trail. A ceramic marker for Pablo will now be added to the beautiful Brattleboro Words Trail murals pegged to his home in Williamsville, Vermont, just outside Brattleboro. You can see the murals on display at 118 Elliot in Downtown Brattleboro, but they will move to the new Amtrak station in town in 2026. This episode was produced and hosted by me, Lissa Weinmann and was edited by Alec Pombriant. We thank Pablo Medina for his participation as well as his suggestion that we use short clips of his favorite Cuban composer Leo Brouwer. Thanks for listening and we look forward to seeing you next month on…the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
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