Pio Arango Finds His Voice
by Juliet Leary via The Provincetown Independent
A poet contends with a mentor’s absence and a war that scarred his family
Poet and ceramicist Pio Arango is a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Photo: Agata Storer
“She was really the only person I showed my poetry to,” Arango says. He was an art history major at Stanford and took Glück’s class as an elective in the spring of his senior year. After graduating in 2019, Arango continued to send his work almost exclusively to Glück. “A lot of times I felt like I was writing for her eye,” he says. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020.
When Glück died, Arango thought he might not write again and spent the next year focused on his work as a production potter in the Bay Area. Around the one-year anniversary of her death, he began thinking again about the project she helped him start.
Glück had asked Arango to mail her a packet of the poems he had written, “even the bad ones,” so they could see whether a book might be pieced together, but Arango didn’t receive feedback from her. In November 2024, Arango cold-emailed the poet Sandra Lim for guidance on what to do with the packet. She suggested he apply for a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He was selected.
When Arango arrived at FAWC this past fall, he started writing “tentatively,” for the first time in two years. He had no idea Glück had been one of FAWC’s first cohort of fellows in 1969. She had never mentioned the program, and he learned of the connection only after arriving in Provincetown.
Arango has been working on the manuscript Glück helped him begin but found that his voice has changed. “A lot of this fellowship has been writing new work and then taking out old work,” he says. “I feel like I’m trying to fill up this cup faster than it drains out.”
