Paraguayan American Poet Diego Bàez Plays with Languages in 'Yaguareté White'

In Yaguareté White: Poems, educator and award-winning poet, Diego Báez, presents a remarkable collection of poetry comprised of topics such as home, history, and language, all written in a mix of different languages. In it, readers will find a variety of different types of poetry, including prose, short and long poems, lyric poems, and abstract poems. “The prose poems started from experiences that either felt closed off or separate from me or that needed some kind of very recognizable container, so just a block, a block of text… when the prose poems start to decompose, I wanted to move intentionally and then into the line, the lyric.” Additionally, what makes Báez’s collection so unique are also the various elements of poetry that he included within his poems that he found particularly fascinating. “I’ll just say I love couplets. They’re easy, they’re convenient, but I really love tercets. I love a tidy tercet… I’m attracted to asymmetries, and so I really like when… I love poets who give their poems these long, ridiculous titles and then the poem’s like two lines long… it’s funny, I think it’s effective, and so there’s some of that in here. The table of contents is really jagged, it’s really uneven, which I very much like about the book. I love a good short poem. I prefer short poems, but I wanted to try to challenge myself to write at least a couple of poems that were more than one page… I have a hard time writing a poem that’s more than one page, and so I really had to extend myself for those… ”

Known as the first Paraguayan American poet to publish in the United States, Báez’s poem’s are written in English, Spanish, and Gaurani, the indigenous language of Paraguay. As for why he decided to incorporate all three languages into his debut collection, he explained, “It took me awhile to become comfortable writing in anything other than English… I do recall quite well, a senior seminar course during undergraduate at Illinois Wesleyan, I started to experiment with mixing some Spanish words and phrases into memory poems about Paraguay, and it felt natural, it felt comfortable, but it wasn’t until I spent a lot more time just really… visually looking at Guarani. It’s an interesting language visually because there’s these compounds of consonants and all kinds of diacritics that we don’t have certainly in English and not even in Spanish, and from that place of curiosity I wanted to learn more about well, how are these words working and how do they correspond with whatever minimal language I do have at my own disposal.”