Amanda Galvan Huynh | September 2021

In the last thirty years, Black Indigenous People of Color in America have experienced a gradual increase in the publication of multilingual poetry collections. However, this does not imply that multilingual poems surfaced thirty years ago but rather posits the fact that more publishers have begun to promote diverse writers. This newfound recognition has helped emerging writers to not feel the pressure to cater to the traditional monolingual reader because the audience demographic is shifting as well. With monolingual writers and multilingual writers convening in workshops, it becomes vital to equip them with a language to describe, discuss, and critique the multilingual poem.

  While the poetic skill set of the multilingual writer¹ overlaps with the dominant literary community, they also have an additional skill set to balance beyond the traditional knowledge of poetic sensibility. When poets decide to bring their native language or home language into a given poem, they consider imagery, flow, syllables, and sonic qualities for the audience. For example, the word “heart” has an abrupt end in its sound and only bears one syllable. The Spanish equivalent “corazón” has three syllables, and the pronunciation flows into each beat. The poet simply cannot replace every “heart” with “corazón” and be done. Purpose must exist behind these choices versus a blind reassignment of the English word.

  In the workshop, the labor of the multilingual writer can be overlooked, and Black Indigenous People of Color encounter challenges when submitting a multilingual poem to a predominantly monolingual group. Whether in a graduate school setting or writing center, multilingual writers typically receive resistance from peers who do not speak the writer’s native language and who are unwilling or incapable of giving meaningful feedback. Common arguments gravitate toward the intended reader, in this case a monolingual reader, and the possibility that they may not understand the non-English language, thus the poem’s meaning would be lost. This debate centers on whether it is the writer’s sole responsibility to translate a multilingual experience for the reader or to invite them into the poem, which requires work on the reader’s behalf; in essence, to be forced to code-switch for a monolingual audience or to resist the coercion.

  Many times, writers discuss, critique, teach, and offer the feedback: trust the reader; show and envelop the audience. Why should the decision to include a non-English language be excluded from this same poetic process? Why can writers, living a multilingual experience, not trust their readers to take the leap with them? These challenges, questions, and lack of a refined literary language to engage multilingual poems provoke a further exploration on how multilingual writers compose.

  The language used among sociolinguists, creative writers, and scholars of rhetoric and writing to discuss the presence of non-English languages in writing differs. Sociolinguists have determined spontaneity as the defining factor between code-switching and literary code-switching. Within a community, code-switching’s form derives from an oral tradition and emerges naturally in conversation, whereas the written work arises from thought and purpose.² For the act of writing, they use the term literary code-switching to define how the oral becomes written text. However, sociolinguists fail to analyze the sociopolitical proponents of code-switching and the hierarchy of powers around publication.

  Rhetoric and writing scholars, like Vershawn Ashanti Young, emphasize hierarchical powers in their definition of code-switching and prefer to use the term code-meshing for the act of composing text in more than one language and utilizing the knowledge from those languages. For multilingual poets, writing requires harnessing skills across two or more languages to produce a well-crafted poem, and the composition aligns with rhetoric and writing scholars versus sociolinguists. Whether the threaded language is Salish, Hmong, Tagalog, Bengali, Vietnamese, Japanese, Hawaiian, Spanish, or Persian, poets make similar craft decisions. The common patterns require a closer examination of the multilingual poem with a technical approach. Many papers exist with the specific discussion and justification of a poet’s reasoning behind code-meshing; however, this investigation will center around the poetic devices used in crafting the multilingual poem. Through this analysis, I hope to begin defining concise terminology to better critique multilingual poems.

  The craft of multilingual poetry consists of three core groups: emblematic devices, embodied devices, and translational devices. When a poet uses emblematic devices, they include small nuances to signify and set a poem in a specific cultural setting. These nuances either fall under titling, the incorporation of another language in a book’s title, section’s title, or a poem’s title; or naming, the inclusion of honorifics, names of places, and a variety of objects in their untranslated forms.

  A poet’s employing embodied devices consists of a more complex use of a non-English language in order to further immerse the reader into their multilingual experience and culture. This language immersion can be recognized by characteristics such as a higher frequency of naming techniques, longer continuous fragments of language, dialogue, and a combination of naming and titling. Ultimately, the non-English language lends itself as a key component to the poem’s core meaning.

  With the final category of translational devices, a poet decides whether to aid their reader with an assisted translation, the addition of footnotes or endnotes in the form of a glossary or note section; an embedded translation, the inclusion of a translation crafted into the poem; or sans translation which would include no translation of the non-English language.

  When a multilingual writer titles a poem, section, or book in a non-English language, this craft decision can be classified as a specific emblematic device called titling. This method can be traced to William Carlos Williams; a poet who grew up in a bilingual household. In his early collection, Williams brings his Puerto Rican heritage and Spanish language into the edges of his poetry. He paid Four Seas Company to publish this book in 1917, and the social context needs to be considered because publishers were inclined to print English- only books in America during his time.

  In addition to the book title, Al Que Quiere! contains three poems titled in Spanish: “El Hombre,”³ “Libertad! Igualidad! Fraternidad!,”⁴ and “Mujer.”⁵ All three poems have their titles in Spanish with the body of the poem written in English. This may seem insignificant, but the existence of these poems and the book title sets a precedent for the multilingual writer to adopt titling as a craft device.

  Since Williams’s Al Que Quiere!, the presence of a non-English language crafted into an English base language has evolved. Terms of Survival (1987) by Judith Ortiz Cofer has a full section of thirty-four poems with Spanish titles, and the poems’ forms mirror Williams’s in respect to the poem’s body set in English. While Cofer published her book in 1987, other collections stretch over decades and reveal a continuous timeline for poem titling. Maria Sandra Esteves’s Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (1990) contains four poems with titling: “Poema para la muerte,”⁶ “Rumba, Amiga, Amiga,”⁷ “Padrino,”⁸ and “Bautizo.”⁹ John Murillo’s Up Jump the Boogie (2010) has two poems: “Sin Vergüenza”¹⁰ and “Míralo.”¹¹ Bao Phi’s Thousand Star Hotel (2017) has one titled in Vietnamese: “Bàu Cua Cá Cáp.”¹² Heather Cahoon’s Horsefly Dress (2020) has eight poems in Salish like “Nunxwé,”¹³ “Méstm?/L?éw”,¹⁴14??“ še?”¹⁵ and “Sc?’lil.”¹⁶ These titles represent a small sampling as the list of published poems implementing this technique continues to proliferate. Over time, poem titling has even evolved into bilingual titles such as Cofer’s “Madrina: The Infant’s Voice”¹⁷ and “So Much for Mañana,”¹⁸ Carrie Ayagaduk Ojanen’s “Imiqmuit, from the water,”¹⁹ and “Tiimiaq, something carried,”²⁰ and Javier Zamora’s “‘Ponele Queso Bicho’ Means Put Cheese on It Kid.”²¹

  Similarly, writers have even chosen to title sections of their collections in English, non-English languages, bilingually, or multilingually. Emmy Pérez has two sections in With the River on Our Face titled in Spanish: “Cara”²² and “Boca.”²³ Kay Ulanday Barrett uses bilingual text, Tagalog and English, to title the sections in their book When the Chant Comes: “katarungan: justice,”²⁴ “mahal: love,”²⁵ “karamdaman: sickness,”²⁶ “kamatayan: death,”²⁷ and “kapwa: soul.”²⁸ Chris Santiago uses the Baybayin alphabet to section Tula, and Craig Santos Perez has multilingual section titles in from unincorporated territory [saina]: “/ hacha / uno / ichi /one /,”²⁹ “/ hugua / dos / ni / two /,”³⁰ “/ tulu / tres / san / three /,”³¹ “/ fatfat / kuatro / shi / four /,”³² “/ lima / singko / go / five /.”³³

  In relation to book titles, the use of another language to title a book spans over a century from William Carlos Williams’s Al Que Quiere! (1917) to Tino Villanueva’s Hay Otra Voz: Poems (1972), Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Empulmada (1981), Martín Espada’s Alabanza (2003), M?healani Perez-Wendt’s Uluhaimalama (2007), Chris Santiago’s Tula (2016), and Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Peluda (2017). Similar to poem titling, poets have also written bilingual book titles such as Martín Espada’s The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (1982), Luci Tapahonso’s Sáanii Dahataa?, the Women Are Singing: Poems and Stories (1993), Craig Santos Perez’s series from unincorporated territory [hacha] (2008), from unincorporated territory [saina] (2010), from unincorporated territory [guma’] (2014), and ire’ne lara silva’s Blood Sugar Canto (2015).

  Typically, sociolinguists would not consider emblematic devices as a true example of literary code-switching because “one-off loanwords (nonce borrowing) should be treated as a separate category”³⁴ from true multilingual writing; however, their reasoning does not take into consideration the process of publishing such poems. During the original composition, the writer maintains complete autonomy; the loss of autonomy happens when these poems are sent for publication. At this point, the poem can be altered or purged of its multilingual qualities. From a literary perspective, titling must be considered an aspect of code-meshing because it is a milestone in the modern multilingual poem’s evolution.

  The second emblematic device, naming, involves the use of honorifics, untranslated names, or objects specific to the cultural inheritance. While an English translation may exist for an honorific or object, a poet chooses to adhere to the true untranslated form. Sometimes the choice to keep the untranslated form outweighs a translation because a true or direct translation for the object may not exist in English. Cathy Linh Che’s Split (2014) uses the naming technique, in the poem “Split,”³⁵ to keep b?p chu?i and áo dài in their untranslated Vietnamese:

[…]

Monsoon season drying up—
steam lifting in full-bodied waves.
She chops b?p chu?i for the hogs.

[…]

My mother’s hair
which spans the length
of her áo dài

is long, washed, and uncut.³⁶

  While a shallow analysis may argue for the poet to include the English translation for these two Vietnamese words, weight exists in the decision to keep the Vietnamese untranslated. The translation of b?p chu?i banana blossom, has a different syllable count, word length, and sonic quality. The visual and sonic quality of Vietnamese itself introduces a layer to the poem by shifting the reader’s gaze and ear. Unlike the word b?p chu?i, the translation for áo dài would be a traditional Vietnamese dress. The English equivalent takes up space with its length and therefore would be an inappropriate choice for the poem. These nuances help layer the poem and frame the multilingual experience of the poet.

  Aimee Nezhukumatathil gives another example of naming in her poem “The Ghost-Fish Postcards”³⁷ in Lucky Fish (2011) when referencing itik-itik, a dance originating from the Philippines:

[…]

   I want to dance the itik-itik for you. The tiny steps of duckling & watermoss. Each edge of bread thrown to me will be saved in my little hat & we will share it, share it soon.

[…]³⁸

  Here, she could have translated itik-itik to duck-duck or a dance originating from the Philippines but similar to Che’s poem—texture would be lost, and the music of Tagalog would disappear. This choice allows for her to be more specific than vague. The very act of choosing to stay true to the original form opens the door to expose her reader to a sliver of her culture, to a part of herself.

  The combination of emblematic devices can be analyzed in Sandra Cisneros’s “Dulzura”³⁹ and Aracelis Girmay’s “Abuelo, Mi Muerto.”⁴⁰ While poets use emblematic devices, titling and naming, independently from each other, recognition of poets using both needs to be illustrated as well. In Sandra Cisneros’s Loose Woman (1995), “Dulzura”⁴¹ has a Spanish title and Spanish interwoven into the body of the poem:

Make love to me in Spanish. Not with that other tongue.
I want you juntito a mí,
tender like the language
crooned to babies.
I want to be that
lullabied, mi bien
querido, that loved.

[…]⁴²

  Aracelis Girmay’s poem “Abuelo, Mi Muerto,”⁴³ also has a combination of emblematic devices as the poem’s title is in Spanish and the poem maintains the honorific “Abuelo” throughout:

Abuelo, I’ve walked three nights
in the last city you breathed in,
trying to read every thing:

[…]

was in El Toro. My mother clipped your toenails
off an old & naked foot, while the other one
slept in a basin on the floor—sluggish

[…]

for a shadow or a gull.

& if I start to pass you on the street,
Abuelo, shout my name, shout

[…]⁴⁴

  Girmay uses “abuelo” versus “grandfather” to communicate the cultural endearment and honorific for the speaker’s grandfather. If Girmay’s poem was translated into English, then the poem loses a cultural layer and becomes an equivalent of “Grandfather, My Dead.” Not only does the forced translation shift the tone of the poem but the music changes. The use of “El Toro” instead of “The Bull” keeps true to the community’s name. These small elements help ground the reader in the speaker’s cultural heritage.

  Embodied devices are intricate language inclusions—the identifying factor rests in the characteristic that these nuances step beyond the single one-word usage noted in emblematic devices. A poem with embodied devices can consist of a higher frequency of naming techniques, longer continuous fragments of language, dialogue, and a combination of naming and titling.

  The following three examples portray the varying degrees of language immersion. In Emmy Pérez’s poem, “[Mitochondrial Ton?ntzin,”⁴⁵ two lines are for the most part in English, with naming in Nahuatl, and the last five lines have a longer connected sentence in Spanish. Again, this steps away from the one-word uses that identify emblematic devices. In “Instructions for My Funeral,”⁴⁶ Javier Zamora writes with a combination of naming, dialogue, and a blend of longer Spanish fragments:

Don’t burn me in no steel furnace, burn me
            in Abuelita’s garden. Wrap me in blue-
white-and-blue [a la mierda patriotismo].

             […]

[wrap my pito in panties so I dream of pisar].

             […]
         
[miss work y pisen otra vez].
             […]

             dancing to the pier. Moor me
in a motorboat [de versa que sea una lancha]
              driven by a nine-year-old
son of a fisherman. Scud to the center
              of the Estero de Jaltepec. Read
“Como tú,” and toss pieces of bread.

               […]⁴⁷

  The languages coexist within one sentence or verse, and the verbs and sentence structures amalgamate into each other. Even with the inclusion of brackets, lines of Zamora’s poem interweave the languages to flow into one another. In a longer poem by Sandra Cisneros “Still Life with Potatoes, Pearls, Raw Meat, Rhinestones, Lard, and Horse Hooves,”⁴⁸ she has a small section of the poem that contains five lines of continuous Spanish and dialogue:

[…]

Doesn’t he know who we are?
Que vivan los de abajor de los de abajo,
los de rienda suelta, the witches, the women,
the dangerous, the queer.
Que vivan las perras.
“Que me sirvan otro trago…”
I know a bar where they’ll buy us drinks
[…]⁴⁹

  The leverage and ease of embodied devices heavily depends upon the poet and their experiences with code-meshing, their multilingual experiences as well as their relationship to English, poetic style, and the way they can express and weave languages together on the page.

  Whether a poet uses emblematic or embodied techniques, they also encounter the decision of including a translation for multilingual poems. Depending on the poet’s style, their poem could fall into three of the following categories: assisted translation, embedded translation, or sans translation. The choice, ultimately, lends itself to the poet’s style and voice.

  An assisted translation incorporates the use of footnotes or endnotes in the form of a glossary or notes section to aid their reader in translating the non-English language crafted into the poem. To start, we can look at Gloria Anzaldúa’s poems in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). The use of footnotes can be found in a handful of Anzaldúa’s poems and here in “Immaculate, Inviolate: Como Ella”⁵⁰:

She never lived with us
we had no bed for her
but she always came to visit.
A gift for m’ijita
two folded dollar bills secretly put in my hand.

I’d sit at her side
away from the bucket of brasas
enveloped en el olor de vieja

[…]

Platícame del rancho Jesús María,
de los Vergeles, Mamagrande,
where I was reared.

[…]

taking her two eldest
to play with other children
watching her sons y los de la otra
grow up together

___________________________________

como ella— like her
m’ijita—an endearment; my dear daughter
brasa—live coals
usted ya no puede—You can’t live here by yourself any longer.
armarios—cupboards
velices—suitcases
luto—mourning clothes platícame del rancho—Tell me about the ranch.
lo que hacen todos los hombre—what all men do
mujeres no hablan—women don’t talk about such filth
tías—aunts
y los de la otra—and those of his other woman⁵¹

  Anzaldúa merges emblematic and embodied techniques and applies a partial assisted translation. While she does not give a translation for every Spanish word in the text, the longer fragments are translated in the footnote and can be labeled under the category assisted translation. Though Anzaldúa’s text came out in 1987, contemporary poets still often use this style of an assisted translation. One poet using this technique is Chris Santiago and his poem “ultra / sound”⁵² from Tula (2017):

ki-bo1                                the heart strong & fast

ki-bo ki-bo2                        pressed by echo
                                                              into light

ki-bo ki-bo ki-bo3                he stirs when you’re
                                                               still

[…]

___________________________________

1 Ilonggo/Hiligaynon (noun): the sound the heart makes
2 Tagalog (verb): to move
3 Japanese (noun): hope⁵³

  Here, Santiago aids his readers with a footnote to define “kibo” with a brief translation in the Ilonggo/Hiligaynon, Tagalog, and Japanese languages. Santiago and Anzaldúa share this common stylistic choice even though their non-English languages differ.

  Another type of assisted translation manifests in the form of a glossary section or notes section at the end of the book. In the back pages of Martín Espada’s City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993), there are Spanish terms translated such as bodega, grito, and tortilla:

Glossary of Spanish Terms

[…]

bodega: neighborhood grocery store. 

botánica: syncretic religious shop, specializing in spiritism and spiritual healing, full of herbs, potions, statues, books, etc., drawn from Catholic and West African beliefs fused in the Caribbean. 

caciques: leaders of the indigenous people encountered by Columbus.

[…]

Grito: literally, a cry or shout; the word has connotations of political uprising, i.e., the Grito de Lares, the Puerto Rican rebellion against Spain in 1868.

[…]

tortilla: a thin pancake of corn or flour meal, customarily made by hand, which is a staple food of México and Central America.

[…]⁵⁴

  These words can be found in one or more poems in the entire poetry collection. With the increased knowledge of Spanish in America, it would be difficult to imagine a poet needing to translate the term tortilla; but again, time and social context of the collection need to be kept in mind. Espada published this book in 1993; however, contemporary poets are still using assisted translations in the glossary or notes section format. Recent collections with glossaries and notes include Sarah A. Chavez’s Hands that Break and Scar (2017) and Mai Der Vang’s Afterland (2017). Chavez’s book closely follows the glossary layout seen in Espada’s book:

Glossary of Spanish Words and Phrases 

Está tan caliente – it’s so hot
baile folklorico – folk dancing
zapateadas – dance shoes, specifically for the traditional folk dances of Mexico and Spain
Esto es usted – this is you
y usted debería estar orgulloso – and you should be proud
hermanas – sisters
mota – slang term for marijuana
Telemundo – Spanish-language televisión cannel
chile verde – green chile
Imperio De Cristal – Crystal Empire (a soap opera)
Beso, abrazo, amor and familia – kiss, hug, love, and family
Quinceañera – a celebration; a rite of passage from girlhood to womanhood; a coming-of age ritual marking when a girl has her fifteenth birthday, similar to a European debutante ball

[…]⁵⁵

  The time between Espada’s and Chavez’s books spans twenty-four years, and it shows a linear heritage of craft; a variation of the glossary can take the shape of a notes section. In Mai Der Vang’s collection, she combines her translations alongside other notes for her book. An excerpt from the poem “Light from a Burning Citadel”⁵⁶ and Vang’s use of the White Hmong dialect (Hmoob Dawb):

[…]

I am locked in the ash oven of a forest.

Peb yog and we will be.

[…]

money into a thousand tiny boats.

            Peb yog
            hmoob and we will be.

[…]

the heart of a wild gaur.

             Hmoob and we
             will be.

[…]

as hourglass dripping honey.

              Peb yeej ib txwm yog
              hmoob.

[…]⁵⁷

In the back of Afterland, the notes section gives the reader a chance to access the assisted translation written by Vang: 

Notes

In “Light from a Burning Citadel” the Hmong text translates as follows:

              “Peb yog” means “We are”
              “Peb yog hmoob” means “We are Hmong”
              “Peb yeej ib txwm yog hmoob” means “We
                                have always been Hmong”

[…]

In “Final Dispatch from Laos” the Hmong word “txiv” means both “father” and “fruit” in the Hmong language. 

The translation for the Hmong words in “Mother of People without Script” are provided in the poem directly underneath. The phrase “Niam Ntawv” literally means “Mother of Paper” and can also mean “Mother of Writing.”⁵⁸

  For Vang’s book, it is important to note that the language is not well known and thus the poet’s inclusion of an assisted translation becomes vital to the reader. Anzaldúa and Espada wrote during a time when Spanish was not as widely integrated into the American social context. Santiago’s and Vang’s addition of an assisted translation echoes similar concerns in the present day as their languages are not well known in America; however, the insecurities of being understood and taken seriously can be felt in Chavez’s decision to include a glossary for her Spanish text.

  While the assisted translation can be viewed as a supplemental text to the body of the poem, the embedded translation requires a poetic translation built into the poem itself. This type of translation takes up space within the poem, and therefore the poet must take this into account and consider how to balance line breaks, stanza breaks, cadence, and flow of the included translation. Poets do not want to break the dream or feeling of the poem. In “Do You Speak Persian?”⁵⁹ by Kaveh Akbar, the reader receives a direct translation to the phonetic spelling of the Persian:

[…]

I don’t remember how to say home
in my first language, or lonely, or light.

I remember only
delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you,

and shab bekheir, goodnight.

How is school going, Kaveh-joon?
Delam barat tang shodeh.

Are you still drinking?
Shab bekheir.

[…]

Right now our moon looks like a pale cabbage rose.
Delam barat tang shodeh.

We are forever folding into the night.
Shab bekheir.⁶⁰

  In this particular poem, there are two phrases introduced and translated once even though the phrases appear four more times within the text. The placement of the Persian lines enhances the reader’s experience with the poem as the repetition of these phrases allows for a revelation and tension to build depth and duality. His Persian creates room for reflection and rediscovery of the words as they are reintroduced throughout the poem. Akbar’s stylistic choice varies from another poet whose embedded translation technique differs and carries a poetic resonance. Tarfia Faizullah threads a translation of Bengali and Urdu in her poem “Interview with a Birangona”⁶¹:

[…]

trees. Grandfather calls to me:
mishti maya. Girl of sweetness.

Aashi, I call back. I finish braiding
my hair, tie it tight. I twine a red string

around my thigh. That evening,
a blade sliced through string, through

skin, red on red on red. Kutta, the man
in khaki says. It is only later I realize

it is me he is calling dog. Dog. Dog.⁶²

  Akbar uses commas to control the speed of his embedded translations—Faizullah ties in full stops with periods. While Akbar’s lines “delam barat tang shodeh” and “shab bekheir” build depth, Faizullah creates emphasis through a different aesthetic. Even in the last line, her poetic choices permeate in the poem as she could have translated “kutta” to a singular “dog” but instead repeats this English translation for intensity and sound.

  The final category, within the translational devices, includes sans translation or no accompanying translation. These poems stand in their multilingual forms without any type of translation to assist to the reader. The poems can take different shapes and forms, but none give their reader any type of translation. Here are two examples, the first poem “Las Lenguas”⁶³ by Laurie Ann Guerrero:

[…]

Who knows what the priest
told my mother when, with a quivering
chin, she pleaded, Por favor, padre,
necesito ir al banño, squeezing
her tiny, six-year-old thighs
together in the best English
she could muster.⁶⁴

  In this poem, neither an assisted nor embedded translation exists as Guerrero keeps the Spanish dialogue untranslated. Ocean Vuong’s “My Father Writes From Prison”⁶⁵ does not include a translation for the Vietnamese in the first line and throughout:

Lan oi,
      Em kh?e khong? Gi? em ?ang ? ?âu? Anh nh? em va con qua. H?n n?a & there are things / I can say only in the dark / how one spring / I crushed a monarch midflight / just to know how it felt / to have something change / […] again dear Lan or / Lan oi what does it matter / […]66⁶⁶

  Sans translation must be identified and included as its own category because in both of these poems the poet made a choice to purposefully leave out a translation. Absence is a craft decision. The poet could have decided to translate their multilingual experience or to be true to multilingual readers. For this reason, sans translation exists alongside assisted translation and embedded translation devices.

  With this new terminology, writing instructors have the ability to facilitate discussion on the multilingual poem. In addition to images, tone, and stanza breaks, instructors can engage these poems with meaningful questions: approaching the incorporation of non-English language as we do with other elemental styles—line breaks, form, flow, content—how does the non-English language aid in the poem’s fullness? How does it add to the poem? Does the naming aid in setting the poem’s tone or voice? Is the language immersion distracting or illuminating? Are the assisted translations working? Can the poem rest sans translation? Are the words working for their place on the page? These questions are similar critiques to the traditional poem but with a mind open to the inclusivity of the non-English language versus dismissing the poem due to the presence of a non-English language.

  Contemporary multilingual poets continue the written but undefined traditions of the multilingual poem. Their published work solidifies the connection and patterns of multilingual poets’ craft decisions. Emblematic and embodied techniques are key components to contemporary multilingual poems, and the use of embedded translations, assisted translations, or texts sans translations are present in correlation.

  Just within the last ten years, these changes are influencing the poetry world and redefining what poetry in a multilingual tongue can look like because multilingual experiences are a part of the American diaspora. While the concept of establishing a novel literary language committed to the implementation of a non-English language in poetics feels unfamiliar, this is largely due to its absence from the traditional modes of teaching poetry. New terminology needs to be taught alongside other techniques because our contemporary poets will one day be part of the canon—they will be part of our classics.

  By no means is this analysis static nor concrete as language itself continues to transform from day to day. These ideas are meant to start a discussion around the language we use to critique multilingual poems within the workshop and to help all writers in discussing these craft elements with more precision and clarity. Hopefully, within the next decade, we will have more texts to reference and to teach to future generations of writers.

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Amanda Galvan Huynh is a Mexican American writer and educator from Texas. She is the author of Songs of Brujería and she is coeditor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics. Her writing has been supported by fellowships and scholarships from MacDowell, Storyknife Writers Retreat, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Currently, she is a doctoral student at the University of Hawai’i at Mñnoa.

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Notes