It was June 1, 2005, and Carlos Andrés Gómez (C ‘04) had just quit his nine–month stint as a social worker in New York.
The year prior, Gómez graduated from Penn with a B.A. in History. Until his junior year, he had planned to take the LSAT and go to law school to become a public defender. After spending eight minutes thumbing through an LSAT prep book, however, he quickly decided law was far from his calling. Instead, he moved with his best friend to Brooklyn after graduation and began working as a sexual health educator and social worker in Harlem and the Bronx. On the weekends, though, Gómez was traveling across the country performing poetry at college campuses and high schools.
Spoken word poetry was the social worker’s true passion. In high school, the young Gómez cut his teeth at the emblematic Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where the modern phenomenon of slam poetry claims its early beginnings. While at Penn, in 2001, Gomez founded the Excelano Project, Penn’s Spoken Word Collective. “Of all the things I’ve done, I think helping to found Excelano remains one of the things that I am most proud and being connected to that lineage and that family of artists. So just a shout out to EP.”
This past May marked 20 years since Gómez’s graduation from Penn. “I have so many people that I deeply love and admire and lifelong friendships that I took from Penn and some mentors who are incredible, but also have complicated feelings about Penn, too, as I’m sure many of us do,” he reflects, “I feel like a lot of my friends from Penn are some of the most talented, incredible humans I’ve ever met. And most of them were terrified to even explore the possibility of ‘what if they pursued this talent they absolutely love, that they’re amazing at.’”
At a certain point, Gómez realized his side gig was both bringing him more fulfillment and cash than his full—time job. He began to ask himself, “What if you just attempted to be an artist full–time? This is something that makes you feel whole and healthy. And seems like it’s a thing that you were meant to do. What if you just attempted to pursue that?”
The day after quitting what he now proudly calls his only full–time salaried position, Gómez found himself in a wardrobe fitting for Spike Lee’s movie Inside Man, where he had been cast as one of the bank robbers. A little less than a decade later, Gómez has now published two books, headlined at poetry festivals across the globe, and even collaborated with fellow Penn alum, John Legend, on a program to counteract bullying in high schools.
“Since June 1, 2005, I’ve been a full–time artist,” says Gómez, recalling with precision the pivotal day when he leapt into his career of today.
Most recently, Gómez was awarded the 2024 Yeats International Poetry Prize, awarded by the New York W.B. Yeats Society in honor of the famed radical Irish poet. Yeats, Gómez notes, was influential to his own work in utilizing poetry as a vehicle for change. In his freshman year, Gómez took a class that explored Civil Rights Movements through poetry, paralleling the work of the Harlem Renaissance with the Irish Freedom Struggle.
“The poems that W.B. Yeats was writing were extremely radical and revolutionary, and that very much connected to ways in which I’ve always been inclined, which is wanting my personal work and artistic work, to try to dismantle destructive systems, structures, ideas, and also just speak truth to power,” says Gómez.
His prize–winning poem is titled “Double Golden Shovel Sonnet Found on the Q Train.” Gómez’s poem takes after Ezra Pound’s 14–word poem “In a Station of the Metro.” In the style of a double golden shovel, each line from Gomez’s sonnet begins and ends with a word from Pound’s piece.
The final piece has an amalgamation of poetic influences. The Golden Shovel form is borrowed from Terrance Hayes, who wrote after Gwendolyn Brooks. And, throughout his writing process, Gómez found inspiration and plenty of editing advice from his friend and writing partner, Adam Faulkner. “I think it’s like you’re in conversation with other artists. You’re in conversation with artists who’ve long been dead across centuries and continents and it’s kind of an ongoing conversation,” he says about his writing process.
“Double Golden Shovel Sonnet Found on the Q Train” explores the expectations of manhood in an encounter between two men on the subway. The destruction of toxic masculinity is a recurring theme in Gómez’s work, including as the central topic of his coming–of–age memoir Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood.
“I think of my art [as] being a way to invite me and invite other people into tenderness when I grew up in a very violent machismo culture that told me to stay as far away from tenderness as possible,” says Gómez. “A lot of my work is trying to dismantle and diffuse the destructive and one–dimensionalized ways I was taught to think about what it should mean to be a man, and [I’m ]trying to open that up to be more expansive, complex, nuanced, beautiful, tender, nurturing, and just endlessly possible, which I didn’t have very many models of, if at all, when I was a boy growing up.”
Gómez’s poetry often centers on intimate experiences that blend the personal and political. To him, the poem is a vessel, an artifact within which he can capture and dissect the small moments that make up life.
“In a poem I can keep a moment alive that only I saw or witnessed and so I think a poem is an opportunity to distill and investigate something that hopefully can help us grow as human beings.”
