Platica Y Poetics- Una plática with Jerry Robledo Season 4, Episode 10

Una plática with Jerry Robledo Season 4, Episode 10

Some conversations ask you to bring your whole self with a side of vulnerability to the table. This was one of them. Sitting across from Jerry I knew within the first few minutes that this platica would be closer to a revealing, confession. On the menu, two writers, two parents, peeling back the language we use to protect, explain, and translate ourselves. We connected speaking of our children, and about unconditional love that terrifies you with its size. We realized that we both spoke a language from the depths of el ‘alma’, the soul's dialect. Where pain, grief, fear, and unknown speak to another. Jerry's forthcoming poetry collection moves through fatherhood not as a role performed, but as an act of witnessing. He writes of his daughter's becoming, and his admission that he expressed himself to mothering, having never quite known what a father does. We spoke about how parenting was never meant to be divided by gender at all, that the real work is ushering, exposing our children to the full range of what it means to be human. He spoke with such honesty about trying to unlearn in his lineage and what he is trying to preserve. We spoke to the Mexicano and American identity and the contradiction of that space. In the end I felt like I was at a barecito in Monterrey, cigarillo in hand, cold tequila talking to a primo about life’s honest truths. In the end arriving at the last course on the menu was inheritance, what he hopes his daughter will know about the man who raised her. A present, imperfect, with a bleeding heart in hand. A translator of poesía, el camino, love, and survival. This episode was not an interview. It was two parents, two poets, speaking the language of truth.