The poet and activist read selected works of hers to the Elon community during the Liberal Arts Forum lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 18
On Tuesday, Oct. 18, Elon’s Liberal Arts Forum welcomed poet Lorna Dee Cervantes to Whitley Auditorium to share selected works and answer questions from students. A successful Chicana poet, Cervantes read six of her poems from three of her books, covering themes of identity and the natural world.
“The great crisis of morals is empathy and the great crisis of empathy is imagination. If you cannot imagine, you cannot imagine the ‘other,’” Cervantes says. “[The lack of] compassion and empathy is a consequence of the lack of the art in school, in society, in everyday life.”
Her presence on the Elon campus would not have been possible were it not for a fated trip to Mexico City in her youth to participate in the Teatro Campesino. When her local San José, California theater troupe was scared they did not prepare enough material, they asked a young Cervantes to read her poetry as the sets were changed.
“It was my gift to my ‘raza,’ my people. And at that point, craft became quintessential,” she says. Cervantes then began to see herself not as a token, but as a wedge being the representation needed to improve Chicana and indigenous representation and visibility.
Writing had always been a part of Cervantes saying, “There really hasn’t been a time in my life when poetry wasn’t at the center of it. My poetry is never my own, it’s always for other people.
“Poetry is the art of language and as the art of language it is unique in that language is never our own. It’s social, it’s communal, it has a history,” she adds. “At the same time, it’s personal and it’s private.”
Saying poetry became a “career” for Cervantes is inadequate. “It’s like saying a minister has a career,” she jokes. “I am a conduit.” She uses her connection to language to empower others to connect with the world more deeply.
“Poetry to me is a spiritual practice. It’s always been. Spirit in the sense of inspiration to take a breath,” she says. “Breath is what unites us and to put poetry off the page into the air … through shared breath, I think that’s where a lot of the spiritual connection comes forth.”
Reading her poetry aloud allows her to merge the political with the personal. To attending students, Cervantes bared her experiences to share what she has learned through poetry.
“It’s that play between the personal and private on one side and the social and communal on the other side that really creates the web of humanity,” she says.
While Cervantes is a retired professor, she can never retire her love for teaching. It is this passion that compels her to continue sharing her writing with students. “I am very happy to be here and to be addressing the Liberal Arts Forum and the humanities [because] poetry makes us human,” she says.
This lecture was put on by Elon’s Liberal Arts forum. The group hosts similar events throughout the year and invites students to work together to discuss which interests are most prevalent on campus and what type of speaker may draw a wide range of students and faculty at Elon.