A Poet and Translator Celebrates ‘Life Cropping Up’
Lucas Martínez arrived in Provincetown with two instruments: a charango, which is a small Andean guitar, and a classical guitar, on which he practices milonga folk songs.
As a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Martínez draws on lyrical traditions that include both sonnets and folk songs, though his poetry sounds distinctly modern. Milonga is a folk genre that was started by immigrants and Indigenous people working in Argentina’s port cities along the Río de la Plata. “They would have these dance parties,” Martínez says, with two guitarists playing and singing in call-and-response. That style inspired the form of some of his poems, along with variations like the payada, “almost like rap battles — off-the-cuff coming up with rhymes,” he says.
“I wanted to be associated with these songs and culture that I was a part of but living far away from,” he says. “That I could say, ‘This is something I belong to’ in a poem — that was really exciting.”
But he wasn’t quite satisfied by that idea. What did it mean for a poet to belong to a folk music tradition, he asks. “What legs does it have today, politically, socially, romantically?”
– Tyler Jager
To read the full article in The Provincetown Independent, visit here.
