This week’s guest is Rex Ybañez, who lives in Springfield, Missouri. He discovered writing for the first time at the age of eight. Rex writes professionally, but his favorite genre is poetry. A project on which he particularly likes to work since 2023 consists in creating spaces for local artists and finding intersections between housing and the arts through the tenants of Springfield Unite, the local union of tenants. A unique fact about Ybañez is that he was a published poet, a grant writer, a content editor for companies and non -profit organizations, a star guest in local columns and a copy publisher for the scientific program from kindergarten to 12th year. ~ David L Harrison
Spam, mingus and the manufacture of a poet
I did not grow up knowing that I would become a poet. I grew up by baking between the worlds – white and rural bolivar during the week and the hot and animated Philippine diaspora in Battlefield and Springfield on weekends. My father never taught us Bisaya, but he made sure that we were immersed in culture. Even so, I have always felt taken between the two. Was I white? Philippin? Both? Neither of them?
In high school and college, I have never read American American writers. However, I studied African-American, Latin American and world literature while obtaining my English diploma at the Southwest Baptist University, becoming the first American Philippin to have obtained an art diploma there in 2013. However, I avoided writing on my heritage. It didn’t seem like a poetry material.
This changed in 2018. At the Missouri State University, I took a course on literary publication. During a discussion on various voices, I admitted that I had never written on race or identity. My teacher challenged me: “Try it. There is an audience for that. ” I took advice at heart.
Since then, my poems have started to look more like me. In 2020, three pieces on the race and heritage were displayed at the Pool Arts Center at the University of Drury as part of an exhibition entitled Race In America. A year later, I wrote a poem on something culturally relevant to me – spam.
Yes, this spam.
I had cooked spamsilog – spam with garlic rice and eggs – for a partner while Charles Mingus played on vinyl. The moment was small, but he was carrying generations. And I was tickled when I was so confident to submit to an independent review respected entitled “Doubly Mad”, which later published in July 2021:
Spam, or Sliog Party & Mingus
The day of my day off
I woke up at my girlfriend
bed and return to
My place seized
Rice and eggs of
house for sillog a traditional
Philippine breakfast
I had never had a spam,
Tell me that she was
said it meant
“Tips pretending to be meat”
Growing up, I noticed
It’s no longer like a ground pork bread
What I think sounds
Better I have Charles
turn on the disc
player with his group who died at
his order raising hell
Four movements turning
on the oven fan and
fry this thing in
Fine slices leaving all the pink
Sizzling hook sides and
jump
& hi-Hat the weak
Erected bacon scent
my hominid brain like
This jazz makes me
Shake my tramp, I can’t stop
dancing like I even cook
While I head my darling
in the kitchen to do
eggs she says I look
Like a video game character
In a tutorial that moves
too fast Wait for me! She
said now with
excessive surprise
rice I take these bites I
I want spam to mean
Silog Party & Mingus I
think it’s genius that she eats
& can’t believe
She wants it to be
meat of course
Spam is difficult to beat
◆ Employment
Now my poetry lives where I do: in the daily intersections of culture, memory and morning meals.
Rex Ybañez is the screenwriter / editor -in -chief of the University of Drury. A prize nominated Pushcart twice, a finalist in the Prix de la Poésie de la Mune City Press 2020 and a mention of the poetry competition in 2021 in 2021, his work is in half mystic, night Review, Prism Review, Doubly Mad, Interim, The Margins of Aaww, and more. You can follow it at @theliteraryalchemist on Instagram.