Sandra Garcia Betancourt – I Am the Point | S1 E02
Sandra Garcia Betancourt, 60 years old, is a writer whose work appeared most recently in Abriendo Caminos, an anthology of Puerto Rican women writers in New York.
She is currently the Director of the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in Harlem. She was the founding Director of the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NOMAA) in Washington Heights, a high-heeled union organizer, a poet and women’s rights activist.
From her first spontaneous trip from Puerto Rico to California in her 20s to her unplanned transition to arts administrator in her 50s, Sandra’s free-spirited life and story show us how staying attuned to the moment delivers a steady stream of surprises, even when you’re sitting on a couch with a broken ankle watching TV.
Here is the poem she talks about in the episode:
The Point
El Punto
I am the point
that multiplies,
triplicates, quadruplicates
eternally…
Alone I can stop sentences
Thoughts, intentions,
I can give sound to a letter
be a statement
become the center of attention,
I am the point
and alone, hardly ever,
I am nothing
so many times of me
could turn into an arrow,
a line, a plane,
I am what everything is made off,
the invisible substance of form,
and travel in all directions
until I become a number, a measurement
part of a letter, an image, a distance
a painting, a holograph
a note in a pentagram
a space, a photograph…
I am the point that in solitude
is hardly perceivable
but when seeing with the third eye
I am the birth of geometry…
I am the beginning and the end,
Like a verb, I am a verb
I am creation…
Me, a single and ethereal point,
I am geometry,
A location, the corner of a room,
A theme for conversation, a place to go…
I am geometry,
Alive in people’s imagination
so even when they close their eyes
I appear multiplied in eternal quantities
Giving texture to memory,
creating forms,
I am the point, I am substance, I am meaning,
I am sometimes invisible but assumable,
I am the beginning and the end,
The verb, creation, a simple point.
A poem to geometry: Work in progress….
Sandra A. Garcia-Betancourt
+ TRANSCRIPT
Coming soon!
