Wonder Wheel of Experience
Read in Noemi Carmin Soto’s Poetry
By Robert Waddell, January 2, 2010
 Like people who live with the effects of growing up near a power plant, poet Noemi Carmin Soto lives with the effects of living most of her life in Coney Island. She’s young and majestic in her writing style. Like the Wonder Wheel: A wonderful woman wheeling wicked words of sadness and elation. Just like the great Ferris wheel, her emotions go way up high then down low flowing in the circular motion of life near the Atlantic Ocean.
Gritty New York and the nostalgia of Coney Island was Soto’s playground as a child. From her bedroom window growing up, Soto could see “The Wonder Wheel, the Astro Land tower,” she said. “I could hear the screams of people on the rides and that’s what I would fall asleep to when I was little. I could hear the music of the Himalaya from my bedroom window.”
Writing since she was 12, Soto’s parents first met working at a Coney Island knish stand. Soto is a new, original Nuyorican voice and she uses an online blog to promote her poetry and writing.
Soto describes her poetry as “honest, raw, brutal, I don’t like to sugar coat anything ever…Mostly about failed relationships, family, friendship.”
Contemporary poets have praised Soto for her originality and forceful use of language.
“Noemi has the spirit of expression and the soul of a true writer,” said Jason Hernandez, known as Majestik Originality, one of the original members of El Grito De Poetas. “She is able to take the reader on a vivid journey… She is not a common individual. She is unique….because of the truthfulness she puts out there for the world to read.”
Hernandez said that Soto’s poetry invites “without the promise of treats.” The world she creates is full of creativity, gritty reality and an evolution of this created Soto-ian world, he said.
“She is definitely a breath of fresh air amongst the stuffiness that comes with the crowded clones of artists that saturate the scene," said Hernandez. In the summer of 2009, Soto said that she fell into a deep depression. She said that she had suffered from depression in her teens and into her 20s but last year, Soto was hit hardest, she said.
“Since I’m so honest in my writing, it was that honesty that scared me,” said Soto. “I couldn’t write that deeply about my emotions.”
Because of her depression Soto almost lost her love of writing however after therapy, Soto is fine now. She said that color came back to the world and passion came back into her writing.
“He reminds me of Florida heat/sand paper skin man/always left me bleeding. No matter how hard he’d beat his chest/it was never enough to remove her from his lungs,” wrote Soto in her poem “For All He Took and All He Left Behind.”
 She ends with, “He took all the weight of his world and put it on my shoulders so that he could watch as my bones began to crack one by one throughout my body. And with the stinging smell of fear and hate on his breath, he whispered to me... ’I’ll always be with you.’”
Already and in spite of her stage fright, Soto has earned the respect of other poets and her peers.
“Noemi's work is intensely personal and moving,” said Glendaliz Camacho, one of the founders of La Menta Collective in Washington Heights. “She has much to say about what it means to be a young woman, about love, about life, about disillusionment, and she has the necessary self-awareness, creativity and honesty to accomplish it successfully through her writing and poetry.”
Poet Bonafide Rojas said that Soto’s words linked the majestic to the cynical.
“I think Noemi's work is a bridge of the beautiful and the sardonic,” said Rojas, “the struggle of being a New Yorker in a city that ever changes. She is an example that there are still beautiful things that can be found if you search a little bit.”
Soto who was married at 23, separated by the time she was 25, is now a college student at Kingsborough Community College. Her big challenge of late has been stage fright. She performed at the Nuyorican and slowly has brought herself out overcoming her fear of performing her poetry before a live audience.
While still struggling with depression, Soto said that her poetry is cathartic but not therapeutic. Her writing helps her deal with those emotions and at the same time she can communicate what she sees and has experienced in the world. She has rewoven her personal heartbreak and began to write poetry of passion, longing and pain. Like Neruda or Julia de Burgos, Soto communicates that the joy of life can come through the pains life offers someone. (Proving, as one writer once said, sadness is happiness for deep people.)
“I don’t hide anything,” said Soto. “I consider myself an open book. Whatever I went through, my depression, my relationships, it’s all out there.”
This story was developed through the Education Beat Writing Fellowship at the New York Community Alliance. |
