What a pleasure and an honor to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, alongside community treasure Marta Martinez, in this issue of Motif magazine. Poetry is an integral part of any truly vibrant cultural landscape, and the writers featured here are among the best contemporary poets writing today. It is heartening and important that poems be included, since poetry has been a rich tradition in Spanish-speaking cultures
across the globe for centuries, and remains deeply connected to all forms of creative expression. It is also heartening and important that poetry appears in places where a general readership can encounter and enjoy it, as they might any other form of writing.
One of the most important insights I gleaned from my tenure as Poet Laureate of Rhode Island (2016-2024) was the extent to which all types of people and communities need and instinctively seek out poetry. There’s a reason why even those who never read or write poetry choose to share poems at important events or to commemorate milestones. Something about breath and form, the synthesis of emotion and intellect, speaks to many people on an intuitive level. Revered but often mystifying, poetry is, nonetheless, a form that in many cultures enjoys a less rarified and more accessible place than it does in the United States. This is why it’s important for poems to find their way to the people. This is why I brought the Poetry-in-Motion program, which features monthly poems on digital displays, from the New York City Transit system to our state-wide buses. It’s also why I started our state’s first Youth Poetry Ambassador program, in which high school students apply to become public poetry advocates who can reach young people as peers and serve as role models.
Here, in this issue of Motif, the act of sharing poetry feels especially crucial. Not only to give a wide readership access to these important voices, but also to assert and affirm the right to celebrate — explicitly and with expressed purpose — heritage. Of all kinds. At all times. So, please enjoy these poems by Roberto Carlos Garcia, Octavio Quintanilla, and Tomás Q. Morin. In subsequent issues will be poems by Sheila Maldonado, Sussy Santana, and LuzJennifer Martinez as part of Motif’s ongoing Hispanic Heritage series. And look out for a new weekly poetry feature I will be curating for the online journalism initiative, The Providence Eye, starting in October!
Tina Cane is the founder/director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI, and, from 2016-2024, served as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, where she lives with her husband and three children. Cane is the author of The Fifth Thought, Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz, Once More With Feeling (Veliz Books,2017), and Body of Work (Veliz Books, 2019). She was a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets and the creator/curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread, as well as editor of the forthcoming Poetry is Bread: The Anthology (Nirala, 2025. Her most recent poetry collection is Year of the Murder Hornet (Veliz Books,2022), and her debut novel-in-verse for young adults, Alma Presses Play (Penguin/Random House), was released in September 2021. Her second verse novel for young readers, Are You Nobody Too? (Penguin/ Random House), was published in August 2024.
Photo credit: Jonathan Pitts-Wiley