[April is National Poetry Month, and
to celebrate I’ll highlight a handful of poets, past and present, we should all
be reading. Including some suggestions from fellow AmericanPoetryStudiers—add
yours for a celebratory, crowd-sourced weekend poetry post, please!]
A few
complementary ways in which the Puerto Rican American poet portrays his heritage.
In this
post I highlighted Martín Espada’s amazing poem “Who Burns for the
Perfection of Paper” (1993), which engages with issues of class, labor, and
communal and individual identity as well as any brief literary text ever has. If
Espada has had one central thematic focus across his long and influential
career, it would have to be the intersections of those issues, and the
political and social perspectives that they can produce; see, to name only a
few examples, “Imagine
the Angels of Bread,” “Vivas
to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913,” and “Federico’s
Ghost.” As that last poem illustrates, certainly Hispanic American
experiences and identities come into many of Espada’s political works—but in a
way that usually, intentionally cuts across any specific national or cultural
categories or heritages. That is, whether one is from Puerto Rico or any other
Latin American community (we don’t learn Federico’s original nationality, even
though the threat to “call immigration” makes clear that he has come from
elsewhere) is in these works much less significant than the type of work one
performs and the social stratum in which one resides.
Like any great
poet, however, and especially one who has published across multiple decades and
collections, Espada is large and contains multitudes. Among them are many poems
that do engage specifically with his Puerto Rican heritage; Espada was born in
Brooklyn (in the year of West
Side Story’s release!) to
parents who had moved from Puerto Rico a few years before, and the island
continued to play a prominent role in his childhood and family. That’s
particularly clear in the dense and evocative “My
Name is Espada,” which links Espada’s surname to the many linguistic,
cultural, historical, and familial legacies it conjures for the poet; while
some are not specific to Puerto Rico, most are profoundly tied to the island’s
identity. And that poem’s intellectual and often dark portrayal of Puerto Rico
is contrasted with and complemented by the descriptive and sensory “En
la calle San Sebastián” (subtitled “Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico”), which
captures the colors and images, beats and sounds, celebrations and legacies of
a historic communal space in the Puerto Rican capital. Taken together, these
two poems illustrate just how fully and complicatedly Puerto Rico has continued
to resonate in Espada’s perspective, identity, and literary career.
Yet whatever
Puerto Rico meant and still means to Espada, he was born and raised in
Brooklyn—and in one of his funniest and perhaps most personal and revealing
poems, “Coca-Cola
and Coco Frío,” he reflects on precisely the question of what the island
could and could not signify to a child of America (and vice versa). The poem
depicts a “fat boy” making “his first visit to Puerto Rico, island of family
folklore,” and finding there the presence of both a familiar American drink
(Coca-Cola) and a shockingly unfamiliar island one (coco frío). On the one
hand, the poem posits an ironic contrast, portraying a Puerto Rico that has
adopted American products and traditions while (indeed, at the price of)
forgetting their own. Yet at the same time, by keeping the poetic perspective
entirely with this young boy, Espada undermines such easy dichotomies: yes, the
boy feels, upon tasting coco frío for the first time, “suddenly, Puerto Rico
was not Coca-Cola/or Brooklyn, and neither was he”; but of course he is still
Brooklyn (born and raised), as much as he is Puerto Rico too, raising the
question of just how separate these seemingly distinct places and worlds truly
are.
Next poet
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other poets you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment