Jimmy Santiago Baca's Black Mesa Poems

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Black Mesa Poems evoke nostalgia: a nostalgia that strikes a vivid figure in time and place, Baca does not let in the grey haze that often times falls over memory. The reflection and environment illustrated are personal and informed by a distinct voice, but this does not alienate the reader, instead Baca reflects in an invitational manner.

Black Mesa Poems delves into and grazes across landscape, both internal and external, and as New Critical metaphors suggest, looking at each poem as a container, the reader finds the words as a crate that carries a large array of emotion and environment. The emotion seeps into the environment, the environment causes the emotion, reminding us we cannot separate what we feel from where we are, even when we are dreaming of escape. A dreamy tone sometimes seeps into these poems; an example of this is Main Character:

Red wine streaked
Blue sky and take-off smoke, /
Sizzled cowboys’ campfires, /
Dripped down barbwire, /
slogged the brave, daring scouts /
who galloped of to mesa buttes /
to speak peace with Apaches, /
and made the prairie /
lush with wine streams. /
When the movie /
was over, /
I squinted at the bright /
sunny street outside, /
looking for the main character. (35-36)

The blending of imagery here creates a sense of mental retreat, which works as a theme that appears and reappears throughout this collection. The leave the poet takes is often traditional as he escapes in nature, in poetry, through muses. Baca’s work has a traditional air to it; one might call him a Chicano Whitman. Baca utilizes crosshatched English, Spanish sentences to illustrate the people of his place. Similar to Whitman also in that he calls to mind the everyday lives of people joining and interconnecting. Both poets are not directly political, yet in focusing on community the message is clear: a beautiful world exists in the same place as ugly injustice. Celebration of individual comes out in all of this as well.

Baca’s El Sapo demonstrates the profound impact of losing a loved one—the reaction in this poem is to reminisce, to celebrate the life before death. The poem takes on the nostalgic tone mentioned earlier. Baca reflects on the life of a loved one in a romantic tone, yet one that tells the truth of El Sapo’s beauty and destruction.

He was robust, /
extravagant and extraordinary. /
Bred from tractor smoke and rows of tobacco, /
his laughter rustled deeply, /
corn leaves in windy afternoon, /
his exuberance for life /
flower-topped alfalfa opening to sun /
and harvesting blades. To him, good /
with bad. If you couldn’t take one, /
then don’t expect the other. /
He drank white liquor, /
left a jar on the porch a year. /
Spoke words full of fire, clean white fire from the heart, /
Made space glow with human radiance. (90)

El Sapo also serves as a good example of Baca’s confident use of familiar metaphor and devices. The poet risks the use of flowery language, yet the “heart” in his poetry always beats for the unexpected; “loneliness and love/ on the darkness” have their place as the poet combines the emotions with a “chalky pumice” of a man’s heart.

Without Black Mesa Poems, what do we know about America in the Southwest, but what we’ve experienced or imagined? Baca illustrates the dusty and raw reality of New Mexico in this collection, he takes us with him, gives us voz de la gente, gives us his preference for red chile over eggs; Baca presents poetry con duende, but never bombastically, only with manner.

Ai: Vice

Being a human is scary: the memories that swell inside, the lives (other than our own) we carry within ourselves, the pulse of want, the pulse of power, fear, the want, the want, the want. Not only the want, but what happens because of it: a new invention of self-- a self that is just like any other, a self with flaws, a self that leaks need in all of its inky mess.

Ai's Vice poems delve deep into the throat of dark desire. These poems are secrets turned confession. The confessions are not the poet's alone, but instead the persona she invents or imagines, yet each voice plays as an extension of self, somehow. This extension of self happens in channeling a plethora of voices. A good bit of the voices in Ai's poems are unusually lurid, so sinister the reader wants to ask why.

Why a murderer? Why an evil priest? Why a child beater? I asked as I read, as my stomach turned, as I wanted to peer further into the poems, as it no longer mattered who wrote the poems as the voices within the verse began to echo, agonizing echoes. In the echoes, the voices bounced off of me, and I got why. It's in us. These monsters are part of every single person. We are the news we listen to, we are the stories we've heard. This is how self becomes everything surrounding.

Ai's use of voice creates setting; the persona in each piece illustrates not only character, but environment, and culture the same-- a good example of this is in The Hitchhiker:

We stop, and as she moves closer to me, my hands ache,/

but somehow, I get the blade in her chest./

I think a song: "Everybody needs somebody,/

everybody needs somebody to love,/

as the black numerals 35 roll out of her right eye/

inside one small tear." (14)

This poem has vivid enough language to play across a television screen. The voice of the perpetrator, the tear of the victim, the music he sings (why do I hear it crackly and on the radio?) takes us straight to the place, straight to the time; we can feel the car seat against our legs and remnants of the dry Arizona heat mixing in with the cool desert night.

Ai writes brave poetry: poetry with fear that doesn't fear, and she gets it right, but this collection isn't only about the boldness to say what hasn't been said. The collection works as a time travel machine too, a way for the poet to change history, to re-imagine history.

In Blue Suede Shoes (A Fiction) Ai tells her own Joe McCarthy story. And if ever a favorite baseball poem this one could be it for me-- because we are not at the game, but instead in the life after the game. And it hurts here: on this stoop where social class does its divide, and it hurts here where 1923 is no longer, and Joe just wants to be in the time when he was a golden boy. Damn, it stings in the yesterday, damn it stings:

Yesterday Bill comes by the hotel /

and he sits on the bed, but he can't relax. /

Uncle, he says, and points to my feet, /

All I ever wanted was this pair of blue suede shoes. (56)

And it just keeps stinging:

Remember Dorothy and the Yellow Brick Road? /

There's no pot of gold at the end, /

but we keep walking that road, /

red-white-and blue ears of corn /

steaming out of our minds: America, /

the only thing between us /

and the Red Tide. (56)

In the same way that it's scary to be a human, it's scary to be an American. Ai's poetry examines this, this anomaly of being, existing in collective memory, invented memory, media memory, memory that is instilled in us. Her poetry demonstrates that we are everything that happens in history; when we read about a murder we become a murder; when we think about being a mother we are first woman, woman that is "born with Eve's sin between her legs, / and inside her." (67) Vice is about identity, examining oneself and pulling out the parts of others, and living with those others within us.

lucille clifton: good woman

Humans be-- If I were only allowed to use two words to describe Lucille Clifton's poems those would be the two words: humans be, and maybe I would repeat them again, but not without some time and space between the first two times.

Clifton's poems make the reader simplify thought-- this isn't to say that her poetry is simple because it's not. However, the poet reveals that the world can be told with minimalistic language. Clifton's verse makes all other literature appear verbose, yet she possesses story-telling qualities as much as she does poetic, and she tells stories that can be dived into and swam around in. Her sparse verse illustrates that we can't let what appears to be shallow water fool us; we must know that we can't always see when water gets deeper-- sometimes it just drops off.

Lucille Clifton's collected works, good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980, contains unshakeable re-envisions of religious, mythological, and social texts. The poetry here is small enough in size to have been made from magnetic poetry, and if we can imagine Clifton using magnetic poetry for the entire book, the refrigerator would only have to be about 100 feet high. This is how her poems ask to be read: side by side and on one plane. The pieces interact with each other in extremely complicated ways, and flipping from one page makes less sense than would a refrigerator on the ceiling; Clifton's poems might be stared up at and and read one at at time. This Clifton poetry magnet-ing is all very logical as the poems are a cover for what stores nourishment.

Let's start with a song of mary:

somewhere it being yesterday.

i, a maiden in my mother's house.

the animals silent outside.

is morning.

princes sitting on thrones in the east

studying the incomprehensible heavens.

joseph carving a table somewhere

in another place.

i watching my mother.

i smiling an ordinary smile. (201)

Reading Clifton's persona poems happens seamlessly, no stopping to think about how the poet channelled Mary's voice, no wondering if this is Mary speaking. The broken language provides an archaic mood, and the small details a setting as vivid as a plastic manger scene (but without the mass produced feel). mary's song explores a religious figure's reflections. The speaker, Mary, remembers a yesterday before stars and light and visions from God became her life. She distances herself from the symbol of the animals, religious philosophers, and even her husband in order to travel back into her past where she is "watching her mother," and enjoying an ordinary moment. The poet explores the act of happiness or contentment as occurring in the most banal of moments.

Clifton's "Mary poems" delve deep into the psychology of the figure, illustrating the way that stars and prophecy begin to haunt her, the way that light becomes her, the way "light beyond sun and words of a name and a blessing" (198) permeate even her dreams.

Whereas in the "Kali poems," Clifton keeps a distance by moving in and out of third person, and in this way the poems are less of a meditation and more of a series of investigations. The theme of fear creates commonality between the "Kali poems" and "Mary poems." In the "Mary poems" the poet explores fear as it pierces the thoughts of Mary, whereas in the "Kali poems" the poet demonstrates fear of the goddess: a fear seeped in Kali's all-knowingness-- this is demonstrated in the coming of Kali.

it is the black God, Kali,

a woman God and terrible

with her skulls and breasts.

i am one side of your skin,

she sings, softness is the other,

you know you know me well, she sings,

you know you know me well.

running Kali off is hard.

she is persistent with her

black terrible self. she

knows laces in my bones

i never sings about but

she knows i know them well,

she knows.

she knows. (135)

A person could run amok with explication on this poem as it makes commentary on race, the body, identity-- all this in 15 lines, all this and a foreboding sense of the fate of being known by God. Being known, by a higher force, means being known as a figure in time. The poem approaches the inescapable reality that while humans are familiar with the forces of change and time, yet when we question our existence, we have a lost sense of control. We cannot control what is within, the "laces in our bones," the internal reality becomes a part of the ultimate reality that is Kali. Clifton's use of repetition in this piece haunts the page until knowledge transforms to a ghost.

The sensation of being haunted holds prevalence in good woman. The characters linger. The lingering effect stems from constant use of sensory detail. Sensory sticks on the skin in this poet's work. As in miss rosie who is "wrapped up like garbage/ sitting , surrounded by the smell/ of too old potato peels." (19) or the implied sound of a television in willie b (2) "today is mama's birthday/ and i'm gone get her that tv/ out of old steinhart's store. (41)

Voice and the channelling of voices makes good woman. Clifton teaches culture in her poetry-- she reminds us that we are not only ourselves, but we are made up of of culture, ourself is our culture. Ourself is religion or knowledge of it, ourself is the history that makes itself difficult to embrace, but we must delve into such knowledge in order to understand ourselves. Her poetry reminds us "to be," but not to forget what we are being.

Olga Broumas: Beginning With O

"O"-pression is no longer Over me, Oh
(Alix Dobkin-- Amazon ABC)

To begin with "O" we must rearrange the alphabet and change the convention of language that we are used to. To surpass "A" and all that follows means to take a different route, one that is unfamiliar, one that starts in the middle of something. This "middle of something" in Olga Broumas' first collection of poetry is a series of walking in on "O" and her lover in bed. Luckily we are readers and not a mother or sister or better an awkward stranger getting assigned to the wrong hotel room. Stapled as a "Sapphic" collection we can expect that personal matters are going on in the pages ( but really all poetry does this-- it leads us into a door that was left unlocked; we come to expect it).

Broumas' Beginning with O swells with personal affairs made universal. The poet presents a collection that starts at a central location: at the Greek sea. Readers are led into her heritage by traveling into her past from the get-go with the opening/ epilogue poem Sometimes, as a child, "when the Greek sea/ was unexceptionally calm/ the sun not so much a pinnacle." (I) The street that leads into Greek history starts here (funny enough, the word "street" comes from the Latin, "getting laid." Funny because Broumas is constantly exploring with the notion of language and its roots in this collection, and the poet certainly visits "getting laid" in these poems, but it goes further than that).

The poet chain links female fairytale characters and Greek goddesses to deconstruction. We are told to reconsider the man-made architecture of language. Broumas first pushes the idea of freedom of language as a vehicle for freedom of sexuality in Demeter. "Dependence... the male/ poet said, that touchstone/ of happiness." (21) She mocks, just a little. But the poem gets heavier when the shutters, drawers, and cupboard doors remind her of open graves. These domestic images are both gateways and ways of surrendering to death. Sexton, Plath, Woolf, and Rich are also referred to in this poem as having the "tears of a mother grieving/ a mortal child." (21) An agonizing theme that propels this collection is the call for motherhood and the inability to pro-create as a lesbian; birth and re-birth (of all things) are constant going-on in this collection.

The following exert of Artemis asks readers to think of giving birth to a new sense of language: as social and political voice.

I am a woman
who understands
the necessity of an impulse whose goal or origin
still lie beyond me. I keep the goat.

for more than pastoral reasons. I work
in silver the tongue-like forms
that curve round a throat

an arm-pit, the upper
thigh, whose significance stirs in me
like a curviform alphabet
that defies

decoding, appears
to consist of vowels, beginning with O, the O-
mega, horseshoe, the cave of sound. (23)

What Broumas tells me to consider: language does not have to be a patriarchal trap. Language can be converted into a portal for whatever world asks to be imagined or had. For this collection language is passion and "we must find words/ or burn." (24) Meaning that if women do not use a revision of a male-centered construction, we may as well go down with the institution.

Beginning with O is a collection that doesn't allow readers to go down with anything: Broumas' use of fluid and ethereal language and landscape keeps us floating. The danger in floating for too long, however, is losing track of the space between the ground and your feet.

Reviewer, Sue Russell, makes a good point in her critique of the collection "A Yale Younger, Now Older," she writes, "As with any artist with such a propensity for experiment, there is a risk that readers may not always appreciate the more esoteric elements, that the poems may not be as much fun for us to read as they were for the poet to create with her friends."

The poet does risk using "bedroom gossip," and the reader can feel left behind in certain ways, elements of the story can appear muffled at times. Especially in Beauty and the Beast during which I couldn't stop wondering if the reference to the fairytale was simply used as a platform for what the poet really wanted to say: a platform that read literary reference, but did not attest to the same passion of the original story. I was left with an unsettled feeling from this one, unlike the other fairy tale poems which made me feel like, "hey, this is an interesting new version that questions more than I would have ever thought to question."

Beginning with O asks readers to maneuver around streets to reach bedposts; to open doors that have moaning behind them; to think desire; to shift in time. This collection, so appropriately titled, makes readers sigh, "Oh" over and over, sometimes in reaction to passion, sometimes from repetitive imagery. Whatever the "O" it comes from the mouth (or, well... you know where).

Ed Ochester: Unreconstructed

A couple of months ago I was visiting my family in California. One morning I was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee; the television was on low, stationed at CNN. My cousin, Marc, came into the room and we both stared in a half-daze at the television. The talking heads (politicos) were saying their thing, and we were falling into the drone of their voices. Marc suddenly shouted, "AMERICA, AMERICA, AMERICA," in a strange southern drawl. We both proceeded to laugh. The moment was perfectly fitting and perfectly absurd.

I thought of my cousin's words after reading Ed Ochester's "Unreconstucted," and I laughed once more. The humor in my cousin's response to CNN was the same kind of humor in Ochester's poetry. The kind I love: unexpected and a little poke-fun (at the state of things). The poet asks his reader to consider what America is. For a cheat-sheet see Alicia Ostriker's blurb on the back of the book that reads: "Ed Ochester has his thumb on the American pulse and his ear tuned to the American voice-- in all its urban-suburban-backyard-backwoods-rust belt-ad-agency and Hollywood inspired dreaming and folly."

Ochester not only asks us to question what America(n) is, instead he tells us what he thinks it is, his poetry talks to his readers about his perception of his country; he is a poet whose verse has conversational quality, not chit-chatty-over-the-fence conversation, but rather a sit-down-on- a- couch-bar stool- bench- your choice of rear-end- rest-conversation. And his verse tells us to be ready to be seated because there's a lot to listen to, yet the whole time that we are with him in conversation we are reminded of solitude. We are really sitting alone somewhere and falling into his solitude. The first poem in the collected works tells us this is going to happen, in The Origin of Myth, we get:

One reads

and perhaps believes almost anything
when one has lived alone for a while. (3)

Ochester tells us right away: this is my solitude, these words, and I'm giving them to you, but what I say may be distorted because being alone can alter reality; and what we read essentially permeates us (for a short while). We believe what we read when we are alone because it is our only way to be with the external world. This piece sets up the reader for the entire collection, it says: look, here I am telling you about myself, and how much of myself is made up of all that surrounds.

News media, music, film, literature, political history, the people we know and love = what it means to be an American. In Ochester's selection of New Poems, this is particularly true. The poet does not skim these topics, but rather peruses, and rides with the big belly reality that we are what we eat. And do I love the lines in Rewinding the Cassette of Fear City that read, "Times Square as/ electric Eden festooned with neon jellybeans,/anything is possible." (6) Ochester takes the neon and makes it candy, revealing that we are always trying to sweeten things, which is how he prepares us that "we're ready to begin again/ the essential American story."(6)

Poem by poem the poet reveals that the essential American story is also the essential everything story: reflections on war, religion, language, and how all of these components shape our present-day reality. Ochester's poetry too illustrates that Americans are not only made up of what we read and what we see, but also what beats within: somehow escaping a societal dream, and creating our own dream/ vision.

Unreconstructed made me want to try an experiment. Because I read it through a literary lens I was accepting of the writer's allusions, and mostly amused by the name drops (ie: Dylan Thomas, David Lehman, O'Hara) however, I would like to see how a casual reader (not so used to modernist tendencies) would read Ochester's work. I wonder if the weight of these allusions is taken away by the reference to pop-culture and the everyday experience of driving passed a Burger King. I would like to have a conversation on this book with an un-booky person, mostly because I was in love with Ochester's bold and humorous exploration of writer's identity, and I wonder if I was distracted by that love.

One piece in particular that had my heart going was On A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing:

Christ, while we thought each thud of our typewriters
was tough enough to puncture hearts
you heard America snapping its gum (34).

Here the poet says: this is what it's like to have someone try to make you disillusioned, don't believe it. We are what we are: what we listen to just as much as what we don't hear or digest. Yet, the poetry is not always so big, it also gives small ideas to think on, why do we give into the convenience of going to Roy Rogers and taking a few extra tomato slices in a napkin as in Packing Lunch. This is my favorite piece of the collection as it moves from the fantasy of eating fancy foods to the French and Indian wars, to Proust, to the poet making his father sick by riding on a roller coaster too many times. This poem truly reveals what identity is: a collection of memory, knowledge, family, and making all of the above mean something in a larger context.

Unreconstructed uncovers a lot; this collection of poetry pulls back the sheets that cover the horror of America. Yet the poet makes sure that the reader finds funny little things (like "two pillows in pants") in the place of dark images, which is Ochester's way of playing funny. His poetry reveals that when we are faced with terror, the best thing to do is laugh.

Anne Sexton: Transformations

Anne's Sexton's Transformations gave me the idea that every poem is a little toy: a plaything for its readers. I wanted to be a bad reader and put the toys in my mouth, careful not to swallow the words, but to let them roll on my tongue and against my cheeks; I wanted Sexton's language to bump around my teeth the way that small plastic bits of a Lego castle would if I shoved them between my lips.

It's no wonder I felt this way as the mouth is the most important of all body parts in fairy tales, and Sexton proves this in her revisionary poems as she retells the kiss, the themes of consumption, the imagery of food as both pleasureful and painful, the poisons that put the lovelies of these stories to sleep.

This collection is both disturbing and delicious; the poetry didn't leave me with one specific type of hunger, but it did have me thinking about ingestion, not only because of the food imagery that often appears in the tales that the poet re-tells, but also because in a lot of ways Anne Sexton must have taken each original story in: bite by bite in order to digest and then creatively regurgitate them.

The fairy tales that Sexton turns into poems in Transformations mostly stay true to the Grimm version, but what the poet brings in the re-telling of the tales are similes and metaphors that any writer would want to steal, IE: "They are tender as bog moss" from Rapunzel or the stanza from Iron Hans that I wish I could put in my pocket and claim as my own:

***

Take a boy on a bridge.

One hundred feet up. About to jump,

thinking: This is my last ball game.

This time it's a home run.

Wanting the good crack of the bat.

Wanting to throw his body away

like a corn cob.

And you'll move off.

***

Sexton reminds us that fairy tales are dark business, and that play-things are sometimes demented ways of re-creating life. The fear in these fairy tales comes from events that lead up to looming deaths, murder, loneliness, or great big want. The poet fools around with these themes in a way that almost becomes something like poking fun. This poking fun is most vividly demonstrated in Sexton's version of Cinderella, when she uses the repetitive end line of "that story." Every story is the same, isn't it? Sexton asks, but what tone does she use? Is it a sarcastic tone? Or does she ask a sincere question? I'd say a little of both.

When I was talking to my poet-friend about the book he posed a question along the same lines as the one posed above. He asked if Sexton is following the fairy tales so closely to their original context, how do the poems re-invent the fairy tales? "They don't," I told him, "At least I don't think they do." But what they do is to reiterate that storytelling is an ageless tradition; in this tradition we find that the elements are all based in similar foundations and emulsified by similar components: hopes, dreams, love, revenge, power. Each component represents some kind of rubber another a kind of glue. I told my friend that what I think Sexton does is to prove that language is the larger component that brings everything together: that the same old story is a different story when given a different body and a different voice.

Sexton uses the body of a poem for these tales in order to reveal that an attention to language makes a fresh version. Transformations is an experimentation with narrative in this way. The same old stories are embedded in every writer's creative process, but what makes each writers' version new or different is attention to voice and tone.

Sexton's voice tells her readers of "long, long ago" tales in a way that blends time together while also calling to mind that the poems were published in the 70's. Her Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs begins: "No matter what life you lead/ the virgin is always a lovely number." She uses such little premeditations to the verse to add flavor and give something of her own perspective to the old story. This method makes the poems all the more like playthings. My favorite of Sexton's premeditation belongs to Rumpelstiltskin which begins, "Inside many of us/ is a small old man/ who wants to get out." In both poems the poet plays with the topic of sexuality, which lassoed me in at the first lines.

Sexton does the opposite of what Disney did: she paid no mind to the idea of G-rating for her version of the fairy tales, but that's not to say that she is always straight forwardly lewd, no instead, she mostly slips the perversity in the way that one might add more sugar to tea that is not sweet enough: somewhat subtly dropping in the cubes, one by one. A good example of this is in Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs when she writes, "The dwarfs, those little hot dogs, walked three times around Snow White, the sleeping virgin." In some cases Sexton does tell a down-right "steamy" version, as in The Little Peasant: "Touch me, my pancake, and make me young." Or in The Maiden Without Hands, "He wanted to lap her up like strawberry preserve."

Transformations is a collection that embraces the dark side that breaths inside the same old story; it embraces the dark side and laughs with it, deep heavy laughs-- laughs that stem from what? The absurdity of a make-believe life. Yes, these poems are little toys that keep us both entertained, and just a little scared of what past lives we might find in them.

If I could talk to Medusa: a reaction to the discussion from Tuesday's poetry class

I'd tell her that I know that she didn't look this this. That caricatures are always off. Then I'd get a little serious: I'd say that I'm sorry that they drained her body of one side of its blood. It's embarrassing that anyone would demonize anyone else for sexiness. I'd tell her that it's okay to cause a boner-- no shame in that. I'd stop myself and ask her: is that what they meant about you turning men to stone? I'd hope that we'd laugh together.

I wouldn't ask her if she was wearing a short skirt when she was raped or if she knew that the sickest of people would say that she might have deserved it. But I'd want to know the answer, and to stop myself from asking, I'd put a book in my mouth. And I'd keep it there until she told me to take it out.

I'd ask her if she knows what Freud said about her representing all that is taboo. I'd say, "Are you really the mature female genitals?" and "Were those snakes your missing female penis?" I'd hope that we'd laughed together over this too.

I would thank her for serving as a symbol of creative and artistic vision. I'd ask her if the story was true: that when she looked at the grass in the sea, did she turn to coral? Does she believe that we can kill things into art? I'd ask her if she thought that art is a small death--la petite mort? I'd say do you think that art is like an orgasm-- a place where the world stops?

I'd tell her that people say her story is the story of what happened to women's voices for so many years: her story is a symbol for silence, stillness. I'd tell her, I'm sure she knows this. I'd ask her if she knew how many poems she was the cause of. Then I'd read her my favorite parts of Sylvia Plath's "Medusa."

***

In any case, you are always there,

Tremulous breath at the end of my line,

Curve of water upleaping,

To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,

Touching and sucking.

***

I'd ask her what it's like to be part of so many women, but not without being nervous about looking her in the eye.