Tonight, New York City poet LaTasha Diggs will combine multilingual mastery, contemporary culture and personal expression in a reading at the Baton Rouge Gallery.
Diggs has been writing poetry for more than two decades. In 2008, she graduated from California College of the Arts with a Masters of Fine Arts.
“It started out of boredom. I would write one poem here, one poem there,” Diggs said. “It just kept expanding, and eventually I started getting published.”
Diggs said she has been “seriously” pursuing poetry since the ’90s, but her work and her creative process has changed drastically throughout her different projects.
“My process is random. Sometime it starts with a sound, sometimes the meaning of a word,” Diggs said. “That turns on the little lightbulb above my head, and then the words just start flowing out.”
Diggs is a recording artist. Her 2003 album “Television” explores topics ranging from the loss of her mother to political issues and sexuality. Diggs’ style of poetry is influenced by a great love for music.
“I read a lot of contemporary writers like Edwin Torres, Douglas Kearney and Cathy Park Hong, but what I do is also influenced by a lot of musical artists, especially Sun Ra,” Diggs said.
Often, Diggs’ work deals with the convergence of cultural identities, a phenomenon that has become increasingly relevant worldwide.
Diggs was born and raised in Harlem, a historical neighborhood in New York City where this convergence is particularly evident. Though historically a center for African-American culture, Harlem has become a multicultural center with a large number of immigrant families speaking many different languages throughout the neighborhood, Diggs said.
“Many of the franchises you walk into every day are run by these immigrant communities where the English language is used only for the purpose of customer service,” Diggs said. “I’m interested in the fact that you can hear these languages all over if you just listen. I find that ‘English-only’ people tend to filter out all of these languages, which is sad.”
Once she realized how interested she was in exploring these languages, Diggs started collecting phrasebook after phrasebook and compiling different phrases into her poetry.
Tonight, Diggs will be reading from her 2013 poetry book, “TwERK”, as well as her previous books.
“I would describe ‘TwERK’ as multilingual, juggling topics that range from Internet culture to hair politics,” Diggs said. “I think it’s important to explore all facets of life.”
In “TwERK,” Diggs lines up phrases from languages side by side on the same page, intending to provide the intrigue and beauty of poetry in her translations.
“In my work, I want to look at language as this light that is uncomfortable to enter, but with the insight that the uncomfortability is exactly what draws us to it,” Diggs said.
Diggs was invited to perform at the Baton Rouge Gallery as part of the University’s Readers and Writers series. Local spoken word artists WordPlay will perform with Diggs. WordPlay is a teen writing project dedicated to building literary culture and community among diverse teens in Baton Rouge. The event starts at 7 p.m.