Starting with Ulises Carrión’s claim that “there is no art and life, but rather only life,” Nicole Delgado’s essay wonders how to live a life of poetry, and explores several paths of artistic existence. As she moves through her life in New York, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, a variety of communities, economies, books, book fairs, publishers, makers, artists, and poets people her scenes and life. Through these travels and engagements, Delgado proposes that poetry is the basic unit of the project, the project of living a life in communities, with dignity and joy.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.