Poem: Lorna Dee Cervantes

Lorna Dee Cervantes

One of the poets whose work appears in the PINTURA: PALABRA portfolio is Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954-). A major late 20th and early 21st century American poet, Cervantes has long been a leading figure in Chicano/a and Latinx literature. Her first book, Emplumada (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), which explored her upbringing and experiences as a Chicana growing up in California, and dealt with themes of self-recognition and self-expression, familial and other forms of violence, and the development of a feminist vision, received considerable praise and won the 1982 American Book Award, bringing her to wider attention. She has gone on to receive numerous other awards and publish four more volumes of poetry, found several literary journals, and teach, both inside the university system (she was a professor at the University of Colorado for nearly 20 years) and outside it. Throughout Cervantes has remained an advocate for

Her PINTURA: PALABRA poem that I reproduce here is entitled "Night Magic (Blue Jester)." It carries the epigram "After Federico García Lorca," but it was not until I started to read it that I recalled the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca's (1898-1936) poem "Romance Sonámbulo," with its opening gambit of repetition, "Verde que te quiero verde. / Verde viento. Verdes ramas," or in English, "Green, how I want you green. / Green wind. Green branches," and the subsequent dreamscape threaded through with dark and disturbing elements. If this is the García Lorca poem she had in mind, Cervantes begins by riffing on the Spanish poem's repetition and its citation of color, García Lorca's green becoming her blue, a direct response to the dominant color in the late Chicano artist Carlos Almaraz's (1941-1989) painting, from which the poem draws its title.

All these "blues" produce a kind of blues, embedding them in a dreamscape that is akin to but distinct from García Lorca's and Almazar's, yet also in conversation with both, especially the latter, an urban night scene in which the Blue Jester's magical, looming presence sparks and channels the positive and negative associations and events Cervantes details in her poem. The poem's syntax and pacing allow no stasis; the prevailing mood is one of anxiety, coupled with awe. The incantatory cadences feel especially appropriate to the dream-space that the painting and poem present, and also have echoes, particularly in the rhymes and swift shifts in imagery, of popular songs, spoken word poetry and hiphop. The effect is a poem that feels both very contemporary and out(side) of time, that is substantial and yet as evanescent as dreams or nightmares; as the poem reminds us at the end, after our journey through this world, the night, the dream, the poem itself "blew."

NIGHT MAGIC (BLUE JESTER)



By Lorna Dee Cervantes



   After Federico García Lorca



Blue that I love you
Blue that I hate you
Fat blue in the face
Disgraced blue that I erase
You lone blue
Blue of an alien race
Strong blue eternally graced
Blue that I know you
Blue that I choose you
Crust blue
Chunky blue
Moon blue glows that despise
You — idolize you
Blue and the band disappears
Blue of the single left dog
Blue of the eminent red fog
Blue that I glue you to me
You again and again blue
Blue blue of the helium
Bubble of  loveloss
Blue of  the whirlwind
The blue being again
Blue of the endless rain
Blue that I paint you
Blue that I knew you
Blue of  the blinking lights
Blue of  the landing at full tilt
Blue of  the wilt
Flower of  nightfall
Blue of  the shadow
In yellowed windows
Blue of the blown
And broken glass
Blue of the Blue Line
Underlines in blue
Blue of the ascending nude
Blue before the blackness
Of  new blue of our winsome
Bedlam Blue of the blue
Bed alone: blue of the one
Who looks on blue of what
Remains of cement fall
Blue of the vague crescent
Ship sailing blue of the rainbow
Of  wait blue that I whore
You — blue that I adore you
Blue of the bluest door
Blue my painted city
In blue (it blew.)

You can read the rest of the PINTURA : PALABRA portfolio in the March 2016 issue of Poetry. All images in this portfolio are courtesy of and with permission from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Night Magic (Blue Jester) by Carlos Almaraz, gift of Gloria Werner © 1988, Carlos Almaraz Estate. Source: Poetry (March 2016)

Night Magic (Blue Jester), 1988, by Carlos Almaraz

Juan Felipe Herrera New US Poet Laureate

Juan Felipe Herrera, the new
US Poet Laureate (A Plus Journalism)

Juan Felipe Herrera, who has served these last two years as the Poet Laureate of California, was named the new Poet Laureate of the United States (Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress) early this morning by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. He becomes the first Latino and the first Chicano to serve in this post. A retired professor, longtime advocate for bringing poetry in a wide array of spaces and, since 2011, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Herrera is the author of over two dozen books, including collections of poetry and works for children. In 2011, for National Poetry Month, and again in 2012, when he was named California Poet Laureate, I wrote short blog entries and featured poems by Herrera. In 2011, I said

One of the things I particularly like about his work is its versatility, of subject matter, voice, and form. While he draws frequently from his life, he will also set aloft a conceit like the one below, flavored by and steeped in his experiences yet resonant far beyond his own biography.

Like May Swenson, he can do a lot of different things well, and has been known to move words in very interesting ways around the page. Herrera finally received some major props in 2008 when he won the National Book Critics Circle Award, becoming the first Latino poet to receive it.

In the latter post, I wrote

his work covers a broad range of styles and forms, sometimes melding Spanish and English, though it is often colloquial in tone, frequently tinged with humor, and always attentive to the resonances of everyday life and people, sometimes effortlessly bringing profound cultural and spiritual dimensions to the fore. It is in this regard quintessentially American, and nourishes a rich tradition of such poetry going back centuries.

I'm excited to see the breadth and richness of American poetries reflected in this new choice and look forward to seeing him serve as Poet Laureate. I envision him attracting a wide array of people to the worlds of poetry, and hope that this post brings far more readers to his playful, profound work.

Congratulations to Juan Felipe Herrera!

>>>

Here is another poem by Juan Felipe Herrera, shared from the Academy of American Poets' website, from Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems. It's brief, and manages to be both comical and serious, with touches of surrealism and the metaphysical, resonating like that sixth guitar string.

Five Directions to My House

1. Go back to the grain yellow hills where the broken speak of elegance
2. Walk up to the canvas door, the short bed stretched against the clouds
3. Beneath the earth, an ant writes with the grace of a governor
4. Blow, blow Red Tail Hawk, your hidden sleeve—your desert secrets
5. You are there, almost, without a name, without a body, go now
6. I said five, said five like a guitar says six.

From Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008.

Poem: Lorna Dee Cervantes

I was trying to figure out how to introduce the following poem, by Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954-), which I thought of when I read the hedging admission by the House Majority Whip, Eric Cantor (R-VA) that anti-Semitism and racism were (still) a problem in his (the Republican House) caucus.  Well, duh. (Yet does he realize how he's been part of the problem?) I read this poem many years ago and recall it every so often because of how it captures so much of what was surging through me back then, and what I still sometimes feel, beginning with her opening line, "In my land there are no distinctions." Yet she must qualify her utopian statement rather quickly by noting that despite this view, despite the fact that "there are no boundaries," there is a system that is trying to destroy her, there are people whose words and actions are killing her, people who do not want her be alive, that there "is a real enemy / who hates me," and that even some of the best and best-meaning people seem unwilling to do or say anything to stop this.

I also know that she wrote it when she was very young and yet it shows such nuance, such sophistication, then ends with a bang that I feel we shouldn't forget.  We are a country at war, sadly, without our selves, "our various selves," as Amiri Baraka once put it. At any rate, I was thinking of introductions when I came across this 2007 blog post by none other than Cervantes herself, from her blog Lorna Dice, in which she explains to a student named Emily her motivations, the writing of the poem, and what she thinks it means. (Can I just say, I love that with I can read Lorna Dee Cervantes' musings after a few seconds' search via DuckDuckGo. She actually has two other blogs: Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Mission Poetry Center--La Misión Poética)  Cervantes, for those who may not be familiar with her, is a Chicana/Native American (Chumash) poet long active in feminist, progressive, antiracist causes, and has been writing and fighting since the 1970s.

Her first, perhaps best known book, is the award-winning volume Emplumada (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).  Ten years later she published her second book, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1991), and has gone on to publish two more volumes, while also serving as editor or co-editor of journals and anthologies, teaching (for many year at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now at University of California, Berkeley), and keeping the dream of a better world alive through her work in many communities.  Her blog is an extension of this; on it you see she not infrequently responds to young people who contact her about her work, theirs, life in general, the issues they're going through, and it represents yet another aspect of her longtime efforts to improve literacy among young people, especially young Latinos.

One thing I want to note about Cervantes' poetry, especially since I have called attention to her emphasis on social activism, is how much it summons vivid, sensuous details of the natural world, particularly flowers, details of the urban terrain, material aspects of the everyday world, to etch sharp pictures in the mind. In my mind, when I think of her poems, I often see them beginning with the naming of a plant whose blooms, colors, scent, grounds me immediately. She writes many other kinds of poems, but her work also makes clear that one doesn't have to surrender social concerns no matter what or how one is writing a poem.

Now, this famous poem, which seems especially fitting given the rhetoric that regular fills the airwaves and the numerous tragedies, arising out of sexism and misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, religious intolerance, and general disrespect for the humanity of others, for difference and pluralism, that have scarred the news of late. Do read her blog if you get a moment; she doesn't disappoint there or in her poems.

POEM FOR THE YOUNG WHITE MAN
WHO ASKED ME HOW I, AN INTELLIGENT,
WELL-READ PERSON, COULD BELIEVE IN
THE WAR BETWEEN THE RACES

In my land there are no distinctions.
The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields.

In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.
There are no boundaries.
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed.

I am not a revolutionary.
I don't even like political poems.
Do you think I can believe in a war between the races?
I can deny it. I can forget about it
when I'm safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there.

I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools...
(I know you don't believe this,
You think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at you.)
I'm marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
"excuse me" tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.

These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
I cannot reason these scars away.

Outside my door
there is a real enemy
who hates me.

I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face.
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land

and this is my land.

I do not believe in the war between the races.

but in this country
there is war.

Copyright © Lorna Dee Cervantes, "Poem For The Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-read Person, Could Believe In The War Between The Races," from Emplumada, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

Poem: Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea (saveethnicstudies.org)

I have always been drawn bothto poetry that is very complex in its forms and meanings but also, conversely, to poetry that appears to be simple but turns out to be complex. Such marks some of the work of Luís Alberto Urrea (1955-), a writer I have unaccountably never featured on this blog, though I greatly enjoy his work. Urrea was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and grew up in the United States. A prolific writer, he (like Kwame Dawes) belies the genre-specificity so dominant in contemporary American literature culture, representing an older model of the person of letters, who just writes, and writes well.

Of course not everyone can do this, but some writers foreclose the possibility without even trying. It is even endemic in undergraduate and in some cases high school literary education, when all writers should be encouraged to try all genres and forms, and Urrea offers a model of how one might do this. He has published three books of poetry, one book of short stories, four novels, two memoirs, and three works of nonfiction, and teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Despite our being in the same city for nearly a decade, I have never seen him read or even come across an announcement for his reading, though perhaps that will occur at some point in the future. His work has garnered many awards, among them: the Christopher Award for Across the Wire, his first book, a nonfictional work; the Colorado Book Award and the Western States Book Award for The Fever of Being; the American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody's Son: Notes from An American Life; and the Lannan Literary Award and a finalist selection for the Pulitzer Prize for The Devil's Highway.

The poem below is one of those seemingly simple but actually complex works. It's a litany, consisting of the anaphoric refrain "All the vatos," whom he ironically notes will never be in a poem, though, as we see, they are.  And he presents them in their diversity, the poem taking on many different notes and tones as it unfolds, full of humor, social critique, absurdity, linguistic registers and languages, realness as documentary as a snapshop, yet so lyrical that it's almost song--it could be sung--the first half issuing the same call, appeal, even perhaps an apostrophe (to those homeboys), the second half of each line, after the caesura, mostly but not always in trochaic trimeter (the entire line is trochaic pentameter), as in "down por vida homeboys" or "arms around their sisters"-- '~ '~ '~ --which endows each response with a feel that is not that of the usual English iambic (penta)meter, but something closer to Spanish (vato, gato, hombre, libre), yet also strikes the ear as perfectly appropriate. We know from the rhythm what's coming even though we don't know what's coming, so we experience a twinned sense of anticipation and surprise.

There are microclimates in this poem. One of my favorites is when the poem becomes self-reflexive towards the end, and another is at the very end, when with artful simplicity it combines history, politics, culture, resistance, into just a few lines, invoking the discourse that many young and old Xicanos and Xicanas have had remind themselves in the face of societies that would erase or efface or reduce their humanity: "All the vatos  beautiful young Aztecs / All the vatos  sons of Guadalupe / All the vatos   bad as la chingada / All the vatos  call themselves Chicanos...."  I'd say the vatos couldn't have asked for a better tribute, and without a doubt, Luis Alberto Urrea is the ish!

hymn to vatos who will never be in a poem

All the vatos  sleeping on hillsides
All the vatos  say goodnight forever
All the vatos  loving their menudo
All the vatos  faith in la tortilla
All the vatos  fearing the alarm clock
All the vatos  Wino Jefe Peewee
All the vatos  even the cabrones
All the vatos  down por vida homeboys
All the vatos  using words like ranfla
All the vatos  who woke up abandoned
All the vatos  not afraid of their daughters
All the vatos  arms around their sisters
All the vatos  talking to their women
All the vatos  granting their foregiveness
All the vatos  plotting wicked paybacks
All the vatos  sleeping under mota
All the vatos  with tequilla visions
All the vatos  they call maricones
All the vatos  bleeding in the alley
All the vatos  chased by helicopters
All the vatos  dissed by pinches white boys
All the vatos  bent to pick tomatoes
All the vatos  smoked by Agent Orange
All the vatos  brave in deadly classrooms
All the vatos  pacing in the prisons
All the vatos  pierced by needle lightning
All the vatos  who were once our fathers
All the vatos  even veteranos
All the vatos  and their abuelitos
All the vatos  proud of tatuajes
All the vatos  carrying a lunch pail
All the vatos  graduating law school
All the vatos  grown up to be curas
All the vatos  Jimmy Spider Tito
All the vatos  lost their tongues in Spanish
All the vatos  can't say shit in English
All the vatos  looking at her photo
All the vatos  making love till morning
All the vatos  stroking their own hunger
All the vatos  faded clear as windows
All the vatos  needing something better
All the vatos  bold in strange horizons
All the vatos  waiting for tomorrow
All the vatos  sure that no one loves them
All the vatos  sure that no one hears them
All the vatos  never in a poem
All the vatos  told they don't belong here
All the vatos  beautiful young Aztecs
All the vatos  warrior Apaches
All the vatos  sons of Guadalupe
All the vatos  bad as a la chingada
All the vatos  call themselves Chicanos
All the vatos  praying for their children
All the vatos  even all you feos
All the vatos  filled with life eternal
All the vatos  sacred as the Sun God
All the vatos  Flaco Pepe Gordo
All the vatos  rising from their mothers

Copyright © Luis Alberto Urrea, "hymn to vatos who will never be in a poem," from Vatos, El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2000. All rights reserved.

California's New Poet Laureate + Poem: Juan Felipe Herrera

Congratulations to California's new Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera (1948-). This week Democratic Governor Jerry Brown appointed the long-time social and arts activist and professor at the University of California, Riverside, where he holds the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing. Herrera has published 28 books of poetry, fiction, and children's literature, and received the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for his collection Half the World in Light, just one of the many honors he has earned over the years. Herrera is the first  Latino poet ever to hold this post, and he described it this way to the undergraduate newspaper UCR Today: "This award is for all the young writers who want to put kindness inside every word throughout the state, because kindness is the heart of creativity."

Rivera is the son of campesinos who worked San Joaquín and Salinas Valleys in California, and this upbringing provided the material for much of his early poetry, which he began publishing after attending UCLA, Stanford, and the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop. As I noted when I wrote about and featured a poem of his during National Poetry Month last year, his work covers a broad range of styles and forms, sometimes melding Spanish and English, though it is often colloquial in tone, frequently tinged with humor, and always attentive to the resonances of everyday life and people, sometimes effortlessly bringing profound cultural and spiritual dimensions to the fore. It is in this regard quintessentially American, and nourishes a rich tradition of such poetry going back centuries.

The poem I chose last year, which fascinates me, "El ángel de la guarda" (The Guardian Angel), uses one of the oldest rhetorical devices, anaphora, or repetition of initial words or phrases, to build towards a powerful conclusion. In honor of his new post, I think it's about time to feature another poem by him, which I have borrowed directly from the blog of the very fine poet Barbara Jane Reyes. (Do read her take on Herrera too.) This poem is about poems and poetry themselves, though it is, like all his work, about life.

Congratulations to Juan Felipe Herrera, and enjoy!

LET ME TELL YOU WHAT A POEM BRINGS

for Charles Fishman

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,
instead of going day by day against the razors, well,
the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket
sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from
the outside you think you are being entertained,
when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise,
your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold
standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,
is always open for business too, except, as you can see,
it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into
the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,
you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is,
the mist becomes central to your existence.

Copyright © 2008 Juan Felipe Herrera, from Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008. All rights reserved.