Biography
Anndell
was born in Panama City,
Panama and grew up in Miami, Florida. In 2007, she
relocated to the city of Chicago -- each of these cities serves as the
vibrant, pulsing, backdrop of her work.
Anndell on the concept of New Cartography, a personal philosophy that informs her poetry and prose:
Anndell on the concept of New Cartography, a personal philosophy that informs her poetry and prose:
The
Writer/Poet as New Cartographer
My work is the product of a leap into an alternative space. This space takes the form of a reimagined Panama. It has quite a bit in common with the "real" Panama and yet one would never find it on a map or in a history book. Isabel Allende, a Chilean author, describes this same tendency in her work 'My Invented Country,'
"I have constructed an idea of my country the way you fit together a jigsaw puzzle, by selecting pieces that fit in my design and ignoring the others . . . I have also created a version of myself that has no nationality, or, more accurately, many nationalities. I do not belong to one land, but to several, or perhaps only to the ambit of the fiction I write."
The need to create this reimagined place emerged from a strange blurring that seemed to occur when I set down to tell the story straight. The poems I wanted to write, the stories I hoped to tell, all existed in the halfway house of reality. Suddenly, a certain sense of accountability emerged from within the self and to the reader. To say that my art occupied the realm of an imagined, alternative world was one way to solve this problem.
In his Nobel lecture, 'The Solitude of Latin America,' Gabriel Garcia Marquez does a brilliant job of explaining the predicament faced by the Latin American writer. Perhaps our mistake is to feel that our experience can be conveyed aptly through convention.
"Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of the imagination, for our crucial problem has been lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends is the crux of our solitude. . . The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."
I like to think Marquez was speaking directly to me when he made that statement.
My work is the product of a leap into an alternative space. This space takes the form of a reimagined Panama. It has quite a bit in common with the "real" Panama and yet one would never find it on a map or in a history book. Isabel Allende, a Chilean author, describes this same tendency in her work 'My Invented Country,'
"I have constructed an idea of my country the way you fit together a jigsaw puzzle, by selecting pieces that fit in my design and ignoring the others . . . I have also created a version of myself that has no nationality, or, more accurately, many nationalities. I do not belong to one land, but to several, or perhaps only to the ambit of the fiction I write."
The need to create this reimagined place emerged from a strange blurring that seemed to occur when I set down to tell the story straight. The poems I wanted to write, the stories I hoped to tell, all existed in the halfway house of reality. Suddenly, a certain sense of accountability emerged from within the self and to the reader. To say that my art occupied the realm of an imagined, alternative world was one way to solve this problem.
In his Nobel lecture, 'The Solitude of Latin America,' Gabriel Garcia Marquez does a brilliant job of explaining the predicament faced by the Latin American writer. Perhaps our mistake is to feel that our experience can be conveyed aptly through convention.
"Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of the imagination, for our crucial problem has been lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends is the crux of our solitude. . . The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."
I like to think Marquez was speaking directly to me when he made that statement.
This
poem is for you. Savor
it like you might a café con leche on a winter afternoon,
let it
nourish you like a bowl of sancocho, estilo Panameño of
course.
--
¡Dance!
We think nostalgically about the present,
"it was the summer of a boy.
new songs,
the same old meaning,
silver gloved passion"
We stand here in the impermanence
of thought,
building my fortress
of lingua franca.
no se puede
si se puede
The streets of calle ocho
are riddled with broken salsa,
faded bachata,
roadkill merengue,
dance
bitch
dance.
CONTACT ANNDELL:
ANNDELLQUINTERO@GMAIL.COM
786.999.5191
FOLLOW HER ON TWITTER, AS SHE LIVES HER LIFE 140 CHARACTERS AT A TIME:
@ANNDELLY
Copyright © 2009 by Anndell Quintero
Web Design & Photographs by Anndell Quintero
¡Dance!
We think nostalgically about the present,
"it was the summer of a boy.
new songs,
the same old meaning,
silver gloved passion"
We stand here in the impermanence
of thought,
building my fortress
of lingua franca.
no se puede
si se puede
The streets of calle ocho
are riddled with broken salsa,
faded bachata,
roadkill merengue,
dance
bitch
dance.
CONTACT ANNDELL:
ANNDELLQUINTERO@GMAIL.COM
786.999.5191
FOLLOW HER ON TWITTER, AS SHE LIVES HER LIFE 140 CHARACTERS AT A TIME:
@ANNDELLY
Copyright © 2009 by Anndell Quintero
Web Design & Photographs by Anndell Quintero