Poetry & Risk—Margaret Randall & the Journey of a Creative Life
Margaret Randall is the author of more than 150 books of poetry and prose.
Her memoir released this year, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary, a memoir of time & place (Duke University Press) combines many of her artistic talents: her creative non-fiction story punctuated by a selection of her poems and photography.
A page-turner, it details her life-long social and revolutionary activism. Her “first overtly political mission”—smuggling diaphragms from Tangiers to Spain—was to aid poverty-stricken women, many of whom birthed a baby annually. She states:
Franco was in power, birth control was outlawed, and the sale or use of any device limiting procreation was punishable by death (66).
As I read her story, I follow a remarkable, exciting yet rugged trek of her personal life, social activism and abounding creativity, from New York City, to New Mexico, to Spain, back to New Mexico, back to New York City, then to Mexico, to Cuba, to Nicaragua, and back to New Mexico—and with visits to many additional countries.
I will highlight just a few of the markers of Margaret’s journey of creativity, interspersed with my related observations, as subheads, about the creative life:
Imagination and dreams spark then drive creativity.
Margaret notes the importance of imagination in her childhood, spent in New York City from her birth in 1936 until 1947. She writes:
Radio was a defining aspect of the culture…Radio is so much closer to reading than television is; it was as if we were being read to in voices. But imagination was needed to flesh out the experience (24).
By the time she was “eight or nine,” she states:
I knew I was going to be a writer. And I longed for a machine upon which to practice my craft. This was America, after all; writers had typewriters (38).
Imagination and dreams create a reality through words, sensuous description, and a writing practice.
In a childhood book, she saw drawings of New Mexico. She writes:
Images of blue sage, bright green rabbit brush, and purple mountains took up residence in my eyes. Dancers with bear and deer headdresses and small bells at their ankles moved across them as if animating a film strip. I dreamed of those colors and people, what I imagined early morning dew on cactus arms must smell like, the endless blue of those huge skies. When I finally saw that land, I felt I had come home (47).
New Mexico became her home in 1947. At her Albuquerque high school, she wrote for the student newspaper and literary magazine.
Poetry is a soul-event and a vocation, calling with its voice to a place we must discover, waiting within us.
In 1956, when Margaret was twenty, poetry called her. She relates:
…at a party in the east mountains, an event that had a lasting impact on me was listening to painter Richard Kurman read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” out loud from beginning to end. I was mesmerized. Every word found resonance in me. From that moment, I knew I wanted to be a poet (72).
Be open and attentive to serendipity, which steps through the veil of life to reveal opportunity, lessons, risk.
In what seems to be a serendipitous and fabulous event, Margaret met the renowned visual artist Elaine de Kooning, who was a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico in 1957. They became dear friends, with Margaret moving to New York City, “following” Elaine when the artist’s year-long visiting professorship ended. There, Margaret’s life is steeped in friendships with renowned artists and writers of New York’s vibrant avant-garde art scene. She relates:
My friendship with Elaine was a ticket to everything exciting going on in the arts and elsewhere in New York…From the moment we met, she showed me the value in taking personal risk (82, 83).
While in New York City from 1958 to 1961, Margaret writes:
…I witnessed many great artists bear up under years of hardship before they finally made it. Successful or not by conventional standards, quite a few of them changed my life. They did so through their vision, drive, honesty, courage, approachability, and a certain rawness I find difficult to adequately define in retrospect. Perhaps it was simply their lack of pretense (84).
Pledging our lives to include creativity promises a bit of magic.
In 1961, Margaret moved with her young son to Mexico, which, during the 60s, she describes as:
…quiet serenity laced with desperation…Mexico City was concentric circles spiraling out from discrete points of consciousness. One walked in and out of temporal dimensions; you never knew when you might find yourself inhabiting another plane. Here the pulse had a different beat: more ancient, less readymade, magical (121-122).
Creativity thrives with solitary work and in the energy of sharing by kindred spirits.
In Mexico for nearly eight years, Margaret, with poet Sergio Mondragón, founded, edited and published the literary journal El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, an innovative, independent, bi-lingual (Spanish/English) journal that built a global artistic community of people “of diverse experiences, ideologies, generations, languages, language usage, and ways of constructing the poem” (153).
Of El Corno Emplumado, Margaret writes:
Perhaps the most important thing I can say about El Corno Emplumado now is that it fearlessly honored integrity and imagination, was an example of youthful vision and belief in the power of poetry, and a splendid map across which many creative spirits moved (164).
Poetry is more than literature: it is an agent of empowerment.
Margaret relates the mission of El Corno Emplumado:
Poetry and art were our currency, and our aim was to reach as many readers as possible…the journal did have something of an underground spirit; if by that we mean unorthodox, unreserved, unapologetic (139)
We also believed that poetry could change the world (153).
Life, loved ones, and diversity are precious.
After an amazing story of the extremely difficult separation in 1969 from her four children and from her husband so that they could all get safely to Cuba after the Mexican Student Movement of 1968 (Movimiento Estudiantil) and the forced termination of El Corno Emplumado—and then their wonderful reunion—Margaret relates her family stay in Cuba until 1980, where they experienced the continuation of the Cuban Revolution in 1970s.
There, she began her affiliation with the Casa de las Americas, “one of the preeminent arts institutions in the Spanish-speaking world” (197) and its creator and director Haydee Santamaria, who “made sure Casa functioned in a truly horizontal way: embracing diversity, making use of interdisciplinarity, and setting the highest standards in every area” (197).
Art shows recognition of the human spirit and the need for freedom.
In 1979, at the invitation of poet, priest and politician Ernesto Cardenal, Margaret went to Nicaragua to interview women who fought for freedom from the dictator Somoza; this would become her book Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle (Rutgers University Press, 1995).
She returned in 1980 to work at the Ministry of Culture. In 1981, she wrote for the department of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional or FSLN), which redefined how mass communication functions when not controlled by dictatorship.
Creativity expects self-examination, introspection, and individual expression.
Even though Margaret was always writing, by 1984 she realized she did not have the time with her 18-hour work days to do the writing that was her “own work.” She adds:
Hadn’t I discovered, way back during my years in New York City, that nothing mattered as much as doing ones’ own work?...I knew I had to begin putting writing once more at the center of my life (245).
Be inspired by the tenacity of Margaret Randall in building and re-building life in the belief of authenticity, creativity and justice.
Life would not be simple for her upon her return to the U.S. and her home in New Mexico. Her citizenship had been taken; relentless, she regained her citizenship; she started a new career in teaching; she focused on her work of writing; she found new love. While she was supported with caring people in all of her endeavors in the United States, she had many socio-political walls to scale.
And scale them she did!
Don’t hesitate to uncover these adventures and many more from between the book covers of your own copy of I Never Left Home, available from Duke University Press.
I will end with lines 21-23 from Margaret’s poem “With Gratitude to Vallejo,” from page 180 of I Never Left Home:
…I am warmed
by a love that dares speak its name,
black words on white pages…
From those lines of Margaret’s poem, I read this: as creative writers, our black words that we craft onto white pages rise up to enfold us, warming us as the wings of a phoenix.
Recent honors received by Margaret Randall include the "Poet of Two Hemispheres" prize, given by Poesía en Paralelo Cero, Quito, Ecuador, in April of 2019 and the Haydée Santamaría Medal, given by Casa de las Américas, Cuba, in May 2019. In May 2019, the University of New Mexico gave her an Honorary Doctorate in Letters. In March 2020 AWP named her the year's recipient of its George Garrett Award. And that same month she was honored with the Paulo Freire Award by Chapman University's Donna Ford Attallah College of Education.
Margaret Randall is our featured Creative at Creatives in Conversation
Wednesday, August 5,
5:30 to 6:45 pm MDT.
Join us to hear and speak with Margaret Randall!
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Margaret Randall at Tent Rocks, New Mexico. Photo by Barbara Byers.
Margaret Randall
Margaret Randall (New York, 1936) is a poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer and social activist. She lived in Latin America for 23 years (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua). From 1962 to 1969 she and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón co-edited El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary quarterly that published some of the best new literature and art of the sixties.
When she came home in 1984, the government ordered her deported because it found some of her writing to be “against the good order and happiness of the United States”. With the support of many writers and others, she won her case in 1989. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, she taught at several universities, most often Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Randall’s most recent poetry titles include As If the Empty Chair / Como si la silla vacía, The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones, About Little Charlie Lindbergh, She Becomes Time, and The Morning After: Poems & Prose in a Post-Truth World (all from Wings Press). Che On My Mind (a feminist poet’s reminiscence of Che Guevara, published by Duke University Press), and More Than Things (essays, from The University of Nebraska Press) are other recent titles. Haydée Santamaría: She Led by Transgression was released by Duke in 2015. Exporting Revolution: Cuba's Global Solidarity was published by Duke in 2017. Time's Language: Selected Poems: 1959-2018 came out from Wings in the fall of 2018; it covers 60 years of her poetry. And her memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary, was released by Duke in March 2020.
Two of Randall’s photographs are in the Capitol Art Collection in Santa Fe.
She has also devoted herself to translation, producing When Rains Become Floods by Lurgio Galván Sánchez, You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot by Freddy Prestol Castillo, Voices from the Center of the World: Contemporary Poets of Ecuador and Only the Road / Solo el camino, an anthology of eight decades of Cuban poetry. Red Mountain Press in Santa Fe and The Operating System in Brooklyn have brought out her translations of individual Cuban poets. And she rediscovered the poetry of Rita Valdivia, a young combatant in Che Guevara's rebel army, and made it available to an English readership. Randall received the 2017 Medalla al Mérito Literario, awarded by Literatura en el Bravo in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
More recent honors received by Randall include the "Poet of Two Hemispheres" prize, given by Poesía en Paralelo Cero, Quito, Ecuador, in April of 2019 and the Haydée Santamaría Medal, given by Casa de las Américas, Cuba, in May 2019. In May 2019, the University of New Mexico gave her an Honorary Doctorate in Letters. In March 2020 AWP named her the year's recipient of its George Garrett Award. And that same month she was honored with the Paulo Freire Award by Chapman University's Donna Ford Attallah College of Education.
Randall's web page is www.margaretrandall.org. She lives in Albuquerque with her partner (now wife) of more than 32 years, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels extensively to read, lecture and teach.
ABOUT THE BLOG AUTHOR
Mary Dezember, PhD, is a poet and author of fiction and non-fiction. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature, specialization in Comparative Arts, from Indiana University in 2000, with PhD minors in Art History and Performance Studies. Professor of English, she teaches Comparative Arts, Art History, Creative Writing and Literature at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Her publications include several non-fiction essays and articles and two books of poetry: Earth-Marked Like You (Sunstone Press) and Still Howling (CreateSpace Independent Publishing). Her novel, Wild Conviction, is in the works to be published by Inkshares.
As with Margaret Randall, hearing Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” read aloud affected Mary Dezember profoundly. Inspired, she wrote her award-winning poem “Still Howling.” Here, Mary is shown performing at her Still Howling poetry book launch hosted by Strangers Collective in Santa Fe, 2016, the 60th anniversary of the publication of the book Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg in 1956.
And, in honor of Margaret Randall’s creative and courageous spirit and accomplishments, the blog author posed in front of her poster (from a 2006 exhibition at The National Gallery in London) that says:
COURAGE,
SUFFERING,
SACRIFICE.
CREATING
GREAT ART
HAS NEVER BEEN EASY.