[For my annual Fall semester reflections series, I wanted to share some of the new texts and ideas I encountered this semester. I’d love to hear things you discovered or rediscovered this Fall in comments!]
As was the
case with the subject of yesterday’s post, I first discovered the poems of Martín
Espada through assigning them for a class, in this case my redesigned
Ethnic American Literature course. Over the years since he’s become one of
my favorite American poets, for all the reasons I traced
in this post among others. But that doesn’t mean there still aren’t new
works of his to discover (and I don’t just mean newly published ones, although
he does continue to produce
new work), and this semester in Ethnic Lit one such poem of Espada’s jumped
out at me anew: “Heart of Hunger” (it doesn’t seem to be online in full any
more, but is well worth seeking out!). As we talked about during those class
discussions (and I hope this goes without saying, but every discovery I’m
highlighting in this week’s series was due much more to our collective work
than my own individual ideas), what makes “Heart” particularly striking is the way
Espada moves back and forth between elaborate extended metaphors and painfully
concrete imagery to create a truly multilayered poetic portrayal of the
immigrant experience in America, past, present, and future. I’ve been thinking and
writing about that experience for decades, and this powerful poem was still
able to open up new lenses on it for me, and I believe for everyone in our
class.
Next Fall
find tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other Fall finds you’d share?
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