This week’s guest is Rex Ybañez, who lives in Springfield, Missouri. He first discovered writing when he was eight years old. Rex writes professionally, but his favorite genre is poetry. A project that he has especially enjoyed working on since 2023 is creating spaces for local artists and finding intersections between housing justice and the arts through Springfield Tenants Unite, the local tenant union. One unique fact about Ybañez is that he has been a published poet, a grant writer, a content writer for businesses and nonprofit organizations, a featured guest in local columns, and a copy editor for K-12 science curriculum. ~ David L Harrison
Spam, Mingus, and the making of a poet
I didn’t grow up knowing I’d become a poet. I grew up toggling between worlds — white, rural Bolivar during the week and the warm, bustling Filipino diaspora in Battlefield and Springfield on weekends. My dad never taught us Bisaya, but he made sure we were immersed in the culture. Even so, I always felt caught in between. Was I White? Filipino? Both? Neither?
In high school and college, I never read Filipino American writers. However, I studied African-American, Latin American, and world literature while earning my English degree at Southwest Baptist University, becoming the first Filipino American to graduate with an arts degree there in 2013. Still, I avoided writing about my heritage. It didn’t seem like poetry material.
That changed in 2018. At Missouri State University, I took a class on literary publication. During a discussion on diverse voices, I admitted I’d never written about race or identity. My professor challenged me: “Try it. There’s an audience for that.” I took her advice to heart.
Since then, my poems have started to look more like me. In 2020, three pieces on race and heritage were displayed at Drury University’s Pool Arts Center as part of an exhibit called Race in America. A year later, I wrote a poem about something culturally relevant to me — Spam.
Yes, that Spam.
I’d cooked Spamsilog — Spam with garlic rice and eggs — for a partner while Charles Mingus played on vinyl. The moment felt small, but it carried generations. And I was tickled when I was so confident in submitting to a respected independent journal called “Doubly Mad,” who published later in July of 2021:
Spam, or Silog Party & Mingus
On my day off I
woke up in my girlfriend’s
bed & drove back to
my place grabbing
rice & eggs from
home for silog a traditional
Filipino breakfast She
had never had Spam,
telling me she was
told that it meant
“Stuff Posing As Meat”
growing up I remarked
It’s more like ground-up pork loaf
which I think sounds
better I have Charles
spinning on the record
player with his dead band at
his command raising hell in
four movements as I turn
on the oven vent &
fry up this stuff in
thin slices letting all pink
sides crunch sizzling &
popping with snare
& hi-hat the faint
scent of bacon erecting
my hominid brain as
this jazz makes me
shake my bum I can’t stop
dancing as I cook Even
as I lead my darling
to the kitchen to make
eggs she says I look
like a video game character
in a tutorial who moves
too fast Wait for me! she
says Now with
over-easy surprise over
rice I take those bites I
want Spam to mean
Silog Party & Mingus I
think it’s genius She eats
& cannot believe
it She wishes it wasn’t
meat Of course
Spam is hard to beat
◆◆◆
Now, my poetry lives where I do: in the everyday intersections of culture, memory, and morning meals.
Rex Ybañez is the University Writer/Editor at Drury University. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, 2020 Moon City Press Poetry Award finalist, and 2021 Steel Toe Books Poetry Contest longlist mention, his work is found in Half Mystic, Noctua Review, Prism Review, Doubly Mad, Interim, AAWW’s The Margins, and more. You may follow him at @theliteraryalchemist on Instagram.
