Warren Wilson’s MFA For Writers Alum Wins International Poetry Prize
Ada Lambert | April 11, 2024
On March 25, 2024, an alum of Warren Wilson College’s (WWC) MFA program for writers, Carlos Andrés Gómez, was selected as the 2024 Yeats International Poetry Prize winner. The Yeats International Poetry Prize is put on each year by the WB Yeats Society of New York. The organization is dedicated to sharing the legacy and life of the world-famous Irish poet; it was founded by Andrew McGowan on June 13, 1990, on WB Yeats's 125 birthday.
“They do this poetry contest every year,” Gómez said. “They solicit submissions from around the world, and this year, the judge was January O'Neil, who is another credible poet and writer. She picked a poem that I wrote for the prize. And it's a double golden shovel sonnet. The poem is called ‘Double Gold Shovel Sonnet Found on the Q Train.’”
Gómez’s poem takes a unique form, as its rules are unlike most other traditional forms of poetry. His poem is classified as a double golden shovel and an American sonnet.
“My poem is actually in conversation with a poem by Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro," which is 14 words and each line in it begins and ends with the word in the poem. [My poem is] wrestling with the destructive way I was made to think about masculinity, which a lot of my work wrestles with.”
Gómez never expected to be a writer, but his life path drastically changed after two fundamental moments watching poets read their work at the age of 17.
“I was a huge long shot to be a writer of any kind, much less an author. I didn’t learn to speak English until I was five years old,” Gómez said. “It was my third language, and I moved a lot as the son of a United Nations diplomat, so my first languages were Portuguese and Spanish. I didn't learn to read until I was nine. I was a very delayed reader and delayed speaker of English. So I think sports were at the center of my life until the end of high school when I fell in love with poetry very unexpectedly after watching the Film Slam starring Saul Williams and Martín Espada when he came to my high school.”
Soon after, Gómez moved to New York City, a place rich with opportunities for writers. This allowed him to immerse himself in his interest in poetry.
“A lot of my training, when it came to writing and poetry, was informal. I was in the New York literary scene from 1999 up until I moved to Atlanta, where I currently reside, in 2019,” Gómez said. “I would probably go to two to three poetry open mics a week for the first decade that I was in New York City, which I think had a huge impact on my growth and development as a writer.”
When Gómez initially fell in love with poetry, it was through oral storytelling rather than the written word. While he greatly appreciates both, he was drawn to the performance aspect of reading poems aloud. “It wasn't reading their work that had been published, though I did do that as well, it was in hearing them recite poems orally, and I think hearing that I was like, ‘oh my my gosh, this does something to a room and transforms a space in real-time in a way that I don't know of anything else having the capacity to do,’ and I’m interested in that,” Gómez said.
In high school, he participated in many public speaking events, so he felt fairly comfortable going to open mics and reciting his work.
“Before I could call myself a writer, I had a lot of experience and felt quite comfortable being a public speaker, and a lot of that came from protests when I was in high school of various kinds of political organizing and involvement,” Gómez said. “Perhaps this is also connected to me being a delayed reader and having different kinds of anxieties about the premise of literacy, I think I've often thought of writing as necessarily being rendered orally. Even when I revise my poems, I always say them aloud as a part of the revision process to hear the music of them and how things are working. I feel like there are things that my ear can notice that my brain can't if I'm just reading it on the page. This is something I've done from the moment I discovered my love of poetry.”
When Gómez came across WWC’s MFA for Writers program, he was intrigued but also nervous. That feeling soon subsided after being immersed in the program and the people around him.
“I took a huge leap being in the MFA program at [WWC,]” Gómez said. “The faculty I had there had a huge impact on my development. I will forever indebted to what [WWC] made possible. It is a rigorous and transformative MFA experience. I was pushed harder than I thought imaginable. I became on the other side of that program a completely different writer and a completely different artistic voice in a really powerful and good way, not the way I was afraid of when I entered an MFA.”
During his time in the program, he was challenged to produce work much faster than he thought feasible, but this experience taught him vital lessons to know as a writer.
“[The program] builds a cadence of generating work that I didn't have the kind of structure or discipline before I entered the program,” Gómez said. “I have a dear friend of mine who is a talented writer who did not go to the MFA program for writers, but I've known him for a long time. We have a practice where we meet up every Friday morning, and we exchange new work. And I think that accountability and that structure has been really important for my writing practice.”
Another skill he has learned throughout his writing career is that putting too much pressure on your writing can be detrimental to growth.
“I'm not precious at all about anything I generate,” Gómez said. “I think perfectionism kills us, and I'm a recovering perfectionist. Honestly, I like being reckless with what I generate — I don't care if it's absolute garbage. I don't care if it's awful. I don't care if I cringe because I think it's so poorly constructed later. To me, it's about how I can shape it all through revision and editing everything else. You can't revise an empty page.”
Gómez has learned a lot from his experience in WWC’s MFA program and has many people to thank, such as his mentors in the MFA program — C. Dale Young, Rodney Jones, Sandra Lim, Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Roger Reeves — and informal mentors Alan Shapiro and Matthew Olzmann.
While Gómez’s award-winning poem has not yet been released to the public, he has published many other works. If you would like to read more of his work, visit his website here.