Poems: Rainer Maria Rilke & Francisco Aragón

Francisco Aragón (YouTube.com)

Several days ago in my post featuring a poem by Valerie Martínez I mentioned poet Francisco Aragón, who had organized the "PINTURA: POETA, a project in Ekphrasis program" that Martínez, Carmen Giménez Smith, Blas Falconer, and a number of other leading contemporary Latinx poets had participated in back in 2013. I do plan to feature more of those poets and poems, but you J's Theater readers did not think that I would mention Francisco without sharing one of his poems, did you? In fact, a while ago I thought about posting his poem below, and then, in the swirl of...well, you know the drill. A day, a week, a month, years pass. So, how fitting that this month has provided a reminder to do so.

One of the most famous ekphrastic poems ever written is German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's (1875-1926) "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," a sonnet that initially appeared in his Neue Gedichte (New Poems) of 1907. These poems, and those in the second volume of 1908, were landmarks in European Modernist literature; while many appear in fixed forms like the sonnet, their combination of objective description, incantatory lyricism, and metaphysical heft appeared to mark a new stage in German and European poetry. At times, Rilke's poetic speaker engages in dialogue with himself--or his selves--and the poem's subject and themes, incorporating the reader in the dialogue, in a way that feels distinct from the dialogic approach one finds at times in Romanticism, or the abstractions of Symbolist poetry.

Rilke's "Archaic Torso" is fairly straightforward compared to some of the other poems in the two volumes, but it is less for the description than for its final line that its fame accrues. Many people who  perhaps have never read the German, let alone the English version of the poem know that famous dictum that concludes the sonnet: "You must change your life." As I have pointed out a number of times over the years, this translation is correct, and yet it loses one key component of the German, which is the verb "ändern," meaning to change or alter. "Ändern," and its cognates "ander/e," meaning "other," are directly related etymologically to English's "other." We lost the "n" and in the consonant shifting that occurred, and we got the "th" where German has a "d." Think "thorn" and "Dorn," or "thistle" and "Distel," or, well, "to think" and "denken." The languages, at least in their root words, are close. 

German does have other words for change too; "wechseln," meaning to "change" as in "exchange" money, sheets, etc.; "umziehen," to change one's clothes; "umtauschen," to exchange (something in a store); "verwandeln," to transform. (In the latter word, of course, "ande[r]" makes an appearance. Those "ändern" literally means "to make another" or "to make other." Or "to other." In this one word then, Rilke, as canny as they come, reminds us of the power of what not just the encounter with the work art does to the speaker, to us and any viewer, but what the artist herself must do--make oneself another, an other, other.

I have not forgotten Francisco, though. So below I am posting the German original of Rilke's poem, and Stephen Mitchell's famous translation. And then, I am posting Francisco's riff, which could be thought of also as a creative translation that manages to transform--verwandeln--the poem into something else, wittily but also with a serious little wallop. I think there are several different ways to interpret Francisco's version, but I'll leave that for J's Theater readers to pursue. I've already said quite a bit, though in case you are interested, Francisco is the author of two books of poetry, Puerta del Sol (2005) and Glow of Our Sweat (2010), and among his many activities (some of which I've mentioned on this blog before), he directs Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

ARCHAISCHER TORSO APOLLOS

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz
unter der Shultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und brächte nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

From Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995). All rights reserved.

TORSO

by Francisco Aragón

    after Rilke

Despite the absent head (whose eyes

were the green of apples)
the supple flesh hums
with the afterglow

of those eyes
which is why the curve
of chest shimmers which is why

the twist of loin turns
that look into a smile, snaring
your eyes, leading

them slowly to regions
below the waist...That block
of stone more than a figure

disfigured and short; cascade
of shoulder glints
like a sinewy beast

of prey, whose edges blink
like stars—that torso:
gazing on its own. Step closer:

go blind

Copyright © 2014 by Francisco Aragón. From Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, 2010). Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.

And, lastly, what might that headless torso of Apollo have looked like to Rilke, or how might it appear today?

Torso of Apollo, Roman copy
after a statue of the school of
Polykleitos, ca. 430–420 BC
Villa Ridolfi in Rome, acquired
in 1812 by Wagner for the
 Glyptothek, Munich
(courtesy of The Rapidian)

Poem: William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

In the American Modernist pantheon William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) looms large as one of its most important poets, and rightly so; from his earliest collections to his last writings, he cut a powerful path of experimentation, using everyday American language and rhythms, and an array of forms, not unlike a painter or sculptor, that has continued to influence English-language poets of all kinds ever since. He may be best known for his short poems that children still learn--I hope!--in grade school and junior high, including "The Red Wheelbarrow" and the often-parodied but memorable "This is just to say," among others.

A trained physician and native of New Jersey whose mother was from Puerto Rico and whose father was from Great Britain, Williams published poetry, fiction, and criticism, with one of his greatest works, the long, elaborate, mixed-genre volume Paterson appearing late in his career. At the end of his life he again turned to shorter forms, and his Brueghel poem, in dialogue with Auden's (which I posted several days ago), appears in his last collection during his lifetime, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), which received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. (Like many a great poetry pioneer, he deserved numerous awards but was overlooked for many of them for most of his career.) I am not, however, going to feature his Brueghel entry (and I should note, he published several poems based on Brueghel's work, including "The Dance"), but instead, a poem from earlier in his career that I taught years ago and love: "The Great Figure."

Here the symbiosis differs from the usual poet's imaginative interaction with the art work. Williams wrote his poem, a Modernist pearl, first, and the painter Charles DeMuth (1883-1935), Williams' friend and one of many gifted artists who was conversant with the leading figures in the literary and visual arts in the first decades of the 20th century, painted his Cubist and Futurist-style oil painting, "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold" after reading Williams' poem, which despite its brevity brings a rainy city street at night fully to life though its flashes of imagery and its resonant music ("gong clangs"). Williams was on his way, after a long day at the clinic, to visit another artist friend, Marsden Hartley, and this poem, which could be considered exemplary of Imagism, was the result. DeMuth was enchanted, and produced his own memorable image in tribute. It has become a signature work of his and of the era.

THE GREAT FIGURE

by William Carlos Williams



Among the rain 
and lights 
I saw the figure 5 
in gold 
on a red 
firetruck 
moving 
tense 
unheeded 
to gong clangs 
siren howls 
and wheels rumbling 
through the dark city. 

Copyright © William Carlos Williams. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

Here is DeMuth's masterpiece:

Charles Demuth, "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold," 1928, oil, graphite, ink, and gold leaf on paperboard (Upson board), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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: 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.

Remembering Piri Thomas

Piri Thomas

When I was growing up, the division of reading in my home went like this: my father read newspapers, and my mother read books. (Both read magazines.) My mother read all kinds of books, but especially novels, most of them romances after a certain point, but among her non-romance stash my favorites were novels by Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Sidney Sheldon, William Styron, and Kyle Onstott. Roots, by Alex Haley, whom my mother says is a paternal relative of mine, made its appearance around the time of the famous miniseries, but I don't recall my father picking it up, and I didn't touch it until several years later, so initially annoyed was I by (mostly white) classmates who took glee in calling me "racines" (roots, in French, one of the two foreign languages I had to study in 7th grade), which rhymed with my last name, and then was truncated to "Rasss." (Eventually I took it in stride, as I did other witty permutations on my name.) Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I did occasionally peek at based on my fascination with its eponymous subject, also sat on the living room bookshelf. There were, however, a few books other than the Bible that I knew my father periodically read at some point read, and of them, three gravitated from living room to the top of his bureau and back. Those were Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice; Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land; and Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets.

The former always stands out for me because of Eldridge Cleaver's handsome, striking face on the cover, and its poetic title. I would sometimes pick the book up and stare it, and then read the back flap and say to myself, this is one of those men's books, black men's books, a book about the 1960s and early 1970s and all the things that had gone down then, that this survivor had bravely written about.  The cover image and title together exuded a ferocity and frustration that I recognized in my father, in older male relatives and other black men near my father's age. I didn't read the book, though, because I thought of it as one of my father's books, something I shouldn't be reading--though I had no hesitation in reading Walker, or Baldwin, or Onstott--and didn't. I felt similarly about Brown's. The same was true of Thomas's book, which though also there in the house I didn't crack; its title alone was a warning: I may have originally assumed those "mean streets" were somewhere in St. Louis, or if not there, Chicago or some similar Midwestern city, until I read the book's back cover and saw that Thomas was writing about "Spanish Harlem," which I knew, because of the "Harlem," meant New York City and black people, though I had no concept of where in New York Harlem or Spanish Harlem for that matter was. But the back cover write-up suggested that the story the novel's pages contained was a harsh one, a man's story, and since this was one of my father's books and actually did appear to be read from time to time, I did no more than glance at it and try, when I had picked it up, to make sure it lay exactly where I had found it lest he notice that it had been disturbed even an inch.

I finally read Down These Mean Streets when I was in college, not as part of the curriculum of any course but because I was trying to read all kinds of things I felt I should be reading or have read (like Roots, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X), as opposed to things I'd been assigned to read in junior high and high school (Macbeth, Lord of the Flies, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lysistrata, Le noeud de vipères) or out of my own unclassifiable interests (Teach Yourself Sanskrit, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ulysses, Annie Allen) or as part of my college syllabi (Harmonium, Tender Buttons, The Conquest of New Spain, Ariel). As I proceeded through Thomas's account of his early life and youth as a Puerto Rican-Cuban (born Juan Pedro Tomás, in 1928) in Depression era and post-war America, I glimpsed what my father might have seen in the book, the common points despite their different heritages, backgrounds and experiences. My father was not from El Barrio; my father, as far as I knew, could not speak more than a few words of Spanish; my father never went to jail on drug charges. But Thomas's story of struggling to find his place in a city, a society and a world that had little interest in or place for him; his journey, as a latino man of African descent (among other ancestries), from the ghetto, to finding and asserting his presence and voice, against and through multiple invisibilities; his narrative of becoming a man, which was also at its core a narrative of becoming and being, I could see spoke directly to my father, as Haley/Malcolm X's, Brown's and Eldridge Cleaver's books did, and it spoke immediately to me. Thomas's love of books, of libraries, of the power of being able to travel to other places through literary texts, spoke even more directly to my mind and soul.

Thomas at University
of Chicago, delivering
a flow, 1969

Down These Mean Streets, originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1967, is now a classic. Raw, poetic, sometimes infuriating, sometimes shocking, but always enthralling, Thomas's autobiographical novel tackled, among its many themes, the racial and ethnic diversity and attendant tensions both within and outside latino communities, a focus that many subsequent writers and scholars have picked up, but which the contemporary mainstream US media still cannot fully grasp or comprehend.  Its portrait of Spanish Harlem was also different from some of the idealized depictions that had preceded it (cf. West Side Story), and inspired many subsequent writers, latino and non-latino, to write their own stories. Thomas became quite famous for this book, to which he published a sequel, 7 Long Times (Arte Público, 1994). He also released other works, such as Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (Doubleday, 1972) and Stories From El Barrio (Freedom Voices, 2005)  He was also a poet, and recorded and issued CDs of his poetry, performed in a style he called flow, akin to rap's precursors such as the spoken-word poetry and songs of Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Felipe Luciano, Lou Rawls, and Oscar Brown, Jr.  His CDs were Sounds of the Streets and No Mo' Barrio Blues. He wrote and talked with young people all over the country about his own experiences, about being a Puerto Rican and latino in this country, about the history of Puerto Rico/Borinquen, about being a convict and an ex-con and the role that race and ethnicity play in the US penal system, about challenging the social logic and law of racism, whose effects he and many millions of others have suffered since this country's earliest days, and above all, about the necessity of "unity," a word he used when he spoke to young people, which is to say about finding commonalities and connections amid, across and despite differences.

Piri Thomas's vital voice left us yesterday, October 17, 2011, but it is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon. We still have his words, in text and CD form, online and on libraries shelves, and, as I remember growing up, on bookshelves and bureaus. His vision and wisdom, captured in his novel, lives on and endures--vivirán y durarán--in heads, in hearts, in souls.

Poem: Juan Felipe Herrera

Okay, now how many of you have heard of or read the work of this incredibly talented poet, Juan Felipe Herrera? Show of hands. Of course I can't see them, and I know some are waving. But I do wonder, because despite how outstanding and prolific a poet he is, I rarely see his name mentioned in the same breath as many others of his generation. Born in 1948 in California, Herrera has published about 25 books, which include works for children, a novel in verse, and bilingual texts. 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. Herrera attended UCLA, Stanford, and Iowa, and has taught at California State University, Fresno and University of California, Riverside, where he directs the Art and Barbara Culver Center for the Arts. He has also taught poetry in California prisons, and works with local schools and community colleges in and around Riverside.

EL ÁNGEL DE LA GUARDA


(The Guardian Angel)


I should have visited more often.
I should have taken the sour pudding they offered.
I should have danced that lousy beggar shuffle.
I should have painted their rooms in a brighter color.
I should have put a window in there, for the daughters.
I should have provided a decent mountain for a view.
I should have nudged them a little closer to the sky.
I should have guessed they would never come out to wave.
I should have cleaned up that mole, the abyss, in the back.
I should have touched them, that's it, it comes to me now.
I should have touched them.

(From Woodland Pattern Bookstore's site) From Lotería Cards and Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives, by Juan Felipe Herrera, Linocuts by Artemil Rodrígues Copyright © City Lights, 1999. All rights reserved.