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.