By Alicia Stemper
Poet Emilio Taiveaho is a first generation immigrant. Born in Quito to a Finnish father and an Ecuadorian mother, he also has three younger sisters living in Finland. They cannot speak to each other in words; body language is the only language they have in common. “My life is an interesting story that’s been totally out of my control.”
When Emilio came to the United States to attend high school in Minnesota, a teacher introduced him to the work of the Beat generation, specifically Allen Ginsburg. Emilio became “enamored by Ginsburg’s syntax and the way he drew attention to the breath and the body.” Over time, “poetry became a way of practicing breathing and being aware of the air that is coming in and out and that started to blur the distinction for me between the inside and the outside and I started to realize that one really becomes the surroundings …one really is the things that one is exposed to.” As he initially struggled to adapt to a completely different culture, climate, and language in Minnesota, he “realized poetry is beyond just words on a page. It is also a means of survival and a means of creating community and a way of understanding and unraveling what it means to exist and be in the world.”
He attended college in Wisconsin and is now pursuing a PhD and teaching undergraduate composition classes at UNC. Emilio feels “…being a grad student is a supplement to my artistic practice.” He chose UNC because “some of the most rigorous scholarship on Latinx in the country is being produced right here in the triangle” and because he is “really interested in what it means to be an American and the history of American poetry. North Carolina holds such a specific place geographically…in many ways it is the south but in other ways it is also the north…”
Emilio is also interested in folds and circles and “this idea of who are we and who I am.” One of his poems appears simple yet it highlights the complex intersections between his interests and his experiences. It is one phrase repeating multiple times. “Other people are you are other people are you are…” The number of times the phrase repeats varies. Each time he performs it, he is a different person performing for a different community and the poem changes accordingly. This illustrates Emilio’s belief: “There is this tension in poetry between creating worlds and pointing you to the world that is already there.”
Emilio values Orange County’s “really wonderful transnational community.” His favorite places to eat are food trucks and “the best part of the food trucks is the cortido.” Cortido is a fermented vegetable relish, “a Central American food that’s been folded into North Carolina. Once I think of cortido, I need to have it. It is the food that most reminds me of Orange County.”