BA in Individualized Studies ProgramWriting asks us into awareness—as thinkers and readers and recorders of perception and imagination—calling us to see and listen and speak in ways that mean beyond the common currencies of language used normatively. Whether we work in the ceaselessly multiplying terrains of imagined worlds or the multiply complex territories of the world-as-it-is or somewhere in-between, writing—art-making of any kind—entails a serious commitment to a form of expression I think of as translation: the translation of perception, experience and thought into language consciously and attentively arranged. How can we use language, this excessively and sometimes mind-numbingly familiar tool, in ways that will call into question the very workings of that tool? How can we challenge the ways that language, alongside other forces, is deployed by political rhetorics to institutionalize and maintain imbalances of power, to fortify social and political contexts within which some lexicons, vernaculars and narratives are privileged while others are obliterated? Audre Lorde writes that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” How might we fashion language into a different sort of tool, so as to construct a different sort of house, or abandon the confines of the house altogether? These are the central questions of my own work as a writer and translator, and they are the central questions of my practice as an educator. I believe in teaching as a mutual process of discovery. As I see it, my job is to create conditions in which students are inspired and challenged to think in unexpected or unfamiliar ways, and at the same time to follow familiar or long-cherished ideas farther than they might have in the past. I find teaching to be an immensely humbling and immensely nourishing project. Every time I write a new syllabus or work with a student to develop a course of study, I come up against the limitations of my own knowledge, an acute and often painful awareness of how much more there is to know than I can possibly access. I teach against expertise, against a heroic narrative in which certain “great minds” will rise to the top of the hierarchy to create works of genius that will cataclysmically change the culture. Rather, I begin from the idea that each of us has certain resources—some quite different from one another’s, some with significant overlap—and that it is only through an encounter with our own individual resources, knowledges and talents, in combination with those of others, that a genuine process of learning can begin, and continue to begin. I feel infinitely, enthusiastically, purposefully, inquisitively, and permanently like a beginner. I moved from the Centro Histórico in Mexico City to Los Angeles—which I think of as el otro México—in 2002. I bought a wrecked, nearly-abandoned house and lived in an Airstream trailer in the backyard for a year and a half while simultaneously rebuilding the house and finishing a five-year project, Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women, which I edited and translated. My other translations include sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre, a translation of books two and three of the lifelong project Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes and lip wolf, a translation of Laura Solórzano’s lobo de labio. My most recent publications are one, a book-length series of research-based anti-war-manifesto poems and an epistolary prose and poetic collaboration with Patrick Durgin titled The Route. I have two book-length poetry projects coming out in the near future: Laws, which investigates the faltering workings of time and memory in poems and essays that were originally written from Mexico City as letters home; and from the valley of death, five interrelated poem and prose sequences that investigate the potentials and parameters of documentary poetics and interpretive strategies. Additionally, two new translations of Mexican Poetry will be published soon: Ivory Black, by Myriam Moscona (Mexico City) and a single-volume set containing the first four books of the Dolores Dorantes series by Dolores Dorantes (Ciudad Juárez). My public working practice includes publishing poetry and translations with autonomous small presses including Action Books, Atelos, Counterpath Press, Dusie Books, Kenning Editions, Les Figues Press, Palm Press, and Ponzipo, making handmade books at my kitchen table and sewing foraged texts into patchwork poems while on the road, collaborating with other writers and artists, writing essays, using my Argentinean grandmother’s Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter to type letters for people on the street through my Escritorio Público project, working with The Little Fakers collective on an episodic neighborhood-based marionette melodrama, and devising poetry-powered urban bicycle adventures. I have numerous part-time jobs: I teach poetics in the MFA Writing Program at California Institute of the Arts, work as a Spanish-language interpreter with the Los Angeles County Superior Courts, and work freelance as a text translator and social justice interpreter. I ride my bicycle nearly everywhere I go in Los Angeles, and am a founding member of the City of Angels Ladies’ Bicycling Association, also known as The Whirly Girls. Education Background: MFA in Poetry, University of Iowa; MFA in Literary Translation, University of Iowa; BA in Writing and Activism, Brown University.
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Jen Hofer, MFA, MFA