Students and faculty share original works and perspectives to celebrate World Poetry Day

The World Languages and Cultures Department organized a two-day event where attendees wrote and discussed poems in different languages.

By: Daimler Koch and Rosemary Villalonga, Staff Writers

Students discuss poems from around the world at the second annual World Poetry Day Celebration. The event was held on March 21 by the LAVC World Languages and Cultures Department. (Fanny Rosales for The Valley Star)

On a Wednesday afternoon, about 60 people gathered in The Unity Center and sat facing a makeshift stage with a typewriter and books on a round brown table.

On the first of a two-day event celebrating World Poetry Day, audience members approached the stage — some nervous, some excited, some calm — and recited poetry in front of their peers. Works ranged from classic authors like William Shakespeare to original student and faculty creations. 

“It has been so hard for everyone. Look at how the world is going right now, you know, how many bad things are happening,” said Spanish Professor Eliécer Almaguer, who helped curate the event. “We want to bring hope. We really want that.”

World Poetry Day was adopted March 21 in 1999 by UNESCO, a United Nations agency championing peace and security through the arts. At Valley, the second annual event recognized poetry's contributions to linguistic diversity.

The first day, “Poetry Beyond Borders: Celebrate Student Voices,” was held on March 18, in the Unity Center, hosted by Brian Sonia-Wallace, the fourth West Hollywood Poet Laureate in collaboration with the Dream Resource Center and the Rainbow Pride Center.

“This was a great opportunity to embrace our students with multiple identities especially with the political climate,” Nat Guerrero, a counselor and coordinator at the Rainbow Pride Center, said. “It's good to embrace everyone. We saw this opportunity as a way to create community, embrace everyone and in all of their languages and identities.” 

As visitors took their seats, the stage was decorated with books published by Sonia-Wallace and a typewriter signifying how he started: writing poetry on the street for strangers at no charge. 

Sonia-Wallace invited audience members to present and recite literary works, both classics like Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, and originals, written beforehand or improvised on the spot. These pieces discussed the attendee’s personal experiences like heartbreak and romance, conflicting cultural identities and the immigrant experience in America.

“I love the idea that everyone’s got a different perspective and that all of those perspectives are valuable,” Sonia-Wallace said. "There's the craft element of how much you have trained with different tools to be able to tell this story, but the raw stories are the most important thing.” 

The second day of the event, “Poetry Beyond Borders,” took place on Saturday, hosted solely by the World Languages and Cultures Department. This showing was smaller and more intimate, held in room 101 in the Foreign Language building.

With a wide smile on his face, Professor Amalguer led the charge, reading poems in Spanish and English. German professor Vic Fusilero, French professors June Miyasaki and Jaklin Yermiand and World Languages and Cultures Department Chair Maria Zamudio hung out with the visitors, reciting poems in the languages they teach. 

Similarly to the Wednesday event, the professors invited the audience to the mic. Byron Cartagena, a Central American Studies major, read his original poem “El Tiempo,” which he had written in a burst of inspiration the night before.

“This is more like an intimate setting, and you can actually get to feel the words, the sounds, you know, the changes in rhythm,” Cartagena said.

The professors provided boxed lunches for the visitors with sandwiches and cookies. They also set up a fun “speed poetry” game where pairs would read and discuss a selected poem then exchange partners with a nearby group. The room rippled with small conversations as attendees rotated from poem to poem, excited by what they read.

“People, you know, are always working, trapped in time, professions, paying bills, family, this, that, you know?” Cartagena said, reflecting on the event. “Whatever it is, I mean, it’s good, but we forget about that humanity, or resonance. And I think poetry helps us regain that humanity.”