![]() ![]() Could you talk a little about your path, including starting the Endangered Language Alliance? And then in 2000 you begin collaborating with Papa Susso. You write in the introduction to Aloud, the collection of the Nuyorican poets' work published in 1994, that in Chinese characters, for instance, there's no such thing as a verb without a noun. You've always been interested in how different languages are themselves media. Our interview has been edited and condensed. We discussed how his writing led him to activism, and his animating hope for poetry to transcend the language it's written in. When I visited him on a wet, dreary day last December, he was at work on a performance of a little-known poem by Simone Yoyotte, a black Parisian surrealist from Martinique. He lives above Bowery Poetry, one of the many poetry venues he's founded or been involved with over the last several decades-such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the Poetry Project at St. There are a number of colors and languages on the floor of Bob Holman's loft in New York City's Bowery. Language Matters, a feature documentary that airs this month on PBS, shows the community's efforts to preserve their language along with those of the Hawaiians and the Welsh, efforts that often involve unlikely alliances between science and art. The islands have dozens of languages, some of them with only one speaker. Ngalmindjalmag lives on one of the Goulburn Islands, a small area off the north coast of Australia populated mostly by aboriginals such as herself. Her right side is yellow, for Mawng, her own language most of her left leg is green, for Gunwingku, her mother's language and there's a small patch of pink on that shoulder for her great-grandmother's Ndjeebbana. Toward the beginning of the new documentary film, Language Matters, which poet Bob Holman created with director David Grubin, Nancy Ngalmindjalmag draws a language portrait of herself. ![]()
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