by Anna Macaulay

From: ArtCenter College of Design

 

This Summer, poet, girls’ rock band camp counselor and Humanities and Sciences faculty member Rocío Carlos participated in a panel, Poetry as Witness, at the Allied Media Conferencein Detroit. We caught up with Carlos shortly after her trip to find out a little more about her role at ArtCenter, her work as a poet and teacher, and her experience presenting at the conference.

What classes do you teach?

I have been teaching at ArtCenter since January 2012. I teach writing courses such as Writing Studio, Writing Studio: Intensive, and Narrative Strategies. Also Literature courses such as The Heroine and Immigrant and First Gen Voices in American Lit. The course I’m most excited about is a participatory poetry course offered this past Summer Term called You Are Here: Poetry in and of Los Angeles.

What is your research about?

My work concerns itself with the possibilities of witness and cartography, and the role of the poet as observer/participant.

Can you tell us a little about the conference and your experience presenting?

The Allied Media Conference is held every summer in Detroit—according to its website, “it brings together a vibrant and diverse community of people using media to incite change: filmmakers, radio producers, technologists, youth organizers, writers, entrepreneurs, musicians, dancers and artists.”

I presented on a panel titled “Poet as Witness.” My participation was in partnership with the independent Los Angeles press Writ Large Press, whose editors seek to give voice to authors overlooked by systemic biases. My work “Attendance,” published by poet and editor Chiwan Choi in the online magazine Cultural Weekly was a factor in being selected for the panel, but for me, my selection was also directly related to the course I taught in the Summer term, You are Here: Poetry in and of Los Angeles. In the course, students attended poetry events in the city and wrote poetry of witness and documentation as an exercise of resistance against erasure of marginalized spaces and experiences and as an exercise of cartography. In addition to being an opportunity to present my praxis as a poet, it enriched my pedagogy and directly informed my curriculum at ArtCenter.

The experience of presenting was both thrilling and humbling. I was excited to propose that poetry could be a tool of documentation even as it maintained a kind of beautiful mystery, that when we look back at movements of struggle against erasure, that the poetry as much as legal briefs or historical analysis, will tell the story of human experience. And that as much as any finely-made thing, such as a painting or a film piece, a poem acted as a capsule of context and impact.

ArtCenter funded* my flight and housing for the duration of the four-day conference. Without their support, my participation would not have been possible. I am an adjunct faculty, which means I am not promised any number of courses. Summers are particularly light in course-load, which means I must choose between expenses carefully. That ArtCenter did this for me even as a part time faculty communicated to me that they value exploration in all fields (even poetry!) and that they believe in my pedagogy and methods. This is a wonderful feeling. I admire their commitment to their faculty in this way.

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