English professor publishes poetry book

By Cheyenne Scharff

Issue date: 5/6/09
At yesterday’s Cinco De Mayo celebration, Citrus College English professor, Luivette Resto, spoke to Citrus students and shared a few of her poems. Audience members heard selections from Resto’s “Unfinished Portrait,” which was recently named one of the best Latino books of 2008.


Resto’s poetry is written in the colored ink of culture and with the steady hand of experience. She tells of short interludes between lovers, with imagery that ranges from seductive sand fights on the beach to a passionate affair between two women.


She illustrates responsibilities and expectations that befall many women who identify as Hispanic Americans. In “Nightly Prayer to the Unborn Child” she asks an aborted child: “Do you forgive me–or hate me for living without you.” Resto also questions why some would deny bilingualism a place in poetry. She squeezes into this short 64-page book the story of a farmer, a streetwalker, and a son mourning the death of his mother. Resto creates an individual in her poems that, as her bilingual stanzas command, is a “quazabara”, or warrior.


Most of the collection is carried over from her master’s thesis said Resto. “I took some poems out of the manuscript and I wrote some new ones when I came to L.A.”


Those new poems, such as “City Limits,” “605 Strawberries,” “Adela’s Purse” and “Dichos y Refranos of the Sweet Complaint” are newer and fresher than the other ones, she said. One of them, “605 Strawberries”, was written when she was still new to the L.A. area. The poem is an interpretation of the strange way she felt sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 605 freeway while watching farmers pick strawberries in the nearby fields.


“I was taken a back by that kind of picturesque scene, and I started jotting things down,” she said.


Resto, who grew up in the Bronx, has lived in the United States since the summer of 1982 when, at only 4 years old, she left Puerto Rico with her mother and grandmother to come to the U.S. She recalls her first day of kindergarten in the states being especially difficult since she spoke no English.


“I remember [ . . .] not being able to communicate with anybody in the classroom, and asking another little girl in the classroom to translate for me,” Resto said.


Resto went on to finish 10th in her high school graduating class and attended Cornell University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in English literature. Four years later, she received a Master of Fine Arts in poetry and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Resto has been teaching English 30, 40, 100 and 101 at Citrus since 2005.


She stumbled upon teaching as a profession, she said. She had to find a way to pay for graduate school on her own, and she was able to do that working as a teaching associate.


“In the beginning I thought [teaching] was just going to pay my way, but I actually found out that I enjoyed it,” she said. “I enjoy being in an academic environment and listening to peoples’ ideas.”


“Educating yourself [about something] is the only way. It’s good to have a drive but you have to get yourself into a program of some sort.”


Resto said that she hopes her students learn from her that being an artist is a profession and, that, “it is an option.”


“If you’re passionate about something, then you’ll find a way to study it and do it for a living,” she said.


Resto wants her students to see past stereotypes about poetry. “I want [my students] to know that I can speak in two different languages, and that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme,” she said.


She wants to break a stereotypical image of what a woman sounds like in a love poem, or what she writes about. Resto recalls reading Dorothy Parker’s poem, “Indian summer,” that included the line, “If you do not like me, so then to hell with you.”


“I remember reading that poem, and that was when I realized, ‘Wow, Women can write about love, and it doesn’t have to be about the trees and the birds’,” Resto said.


She also remembers reading Bernadette Mayer and other poets and says, “I don’t think I would be the same type of writer if I hadn’t read these women.”


Resto is already working on her next poetry collection. She hopes that it will be finished within the next two to three years. For the present, she plans to continue teaching Citrus students. Eventually she would like to earn her Ph.D. in creative writing.


For now, we can revel in Resto’s work, relating it to ourselves, the people we know, and the people we think we know, while we anticipate what she will offer us next. “Unfinished Portrait,” is available in all major bookstores and also on Amazon.com.


Resto recently took some time to sit down with the Clarion and answer questions about her childhood and writing in general.


Cheyene Scharff can be reached at ccclarion@hotmail.com


http://www.luivetteresto.com/Press_files/Clarion%20Article.pdf