Langston Hughes

I have been reading Langston Hughes' THE WEARY BLUES (Knopf 1939). At first, on the page, the poems seem simple, and yet when read aloud the rhythmical blues can be heard, the beat like a slow swaying dance. Weariness is the opposite of energy. He was raised in Harlem with 8 siblings and a father who struggled to feed them. He lived when lynching was popular in this country. Like so many poems, Hughes' poems are meant to be heard and recited, breathed forth from a living body. They are living things. He was exiled in a sense from the South he loved. Here is the beginning of the title poem:

The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!

This collection also contains a favorite poem of mine. Possibly the poem is one of my top 10 favorites. It is called THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS. My new collection has a poem that echoes this (I can only hope), but the river I write about is the Rio Grande. Hughes' river was the vibrant culture of African-Americans, the beating swoon of the blues, the jazzy horns and glitzy renaissance of his era, the mystical and varied history of a people. Hughes had an ear for musicality of a line, and I think he offers young poets a great lesson in listening.

THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS

(To W.E.B. DuBois)

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
Went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
Bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The poem takes the first person I, but applies it to his people. Here the political is artistic, subtle, yet strangely powerful, almost surreal, as if a dream. Such bold risk; here the first person "I" defies all criticisms of self-indulgence and shows what a poem can do with the first person "I" singing. And that's all I have to say about first person I, but Robert Vasquez has some interesting commentary on the "I" in contemporary times at his blog California Poet.

Always judge a book by its cover

I’m posting again because Ms. Luna is traveling from El Paso to Boulder to settle in for the school year. She’s a professor at University of Colorado. After she gets settled she’s headed to New York City for the AWP conference and some readings. If you’re in the Big Apple at the end of January you oughta check her out: 7 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 26 at the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street New York, NY (Cross Streets: between 2nd and Bowery) where she’ll be reading with Erika T. Wurth and Gabe Gomez. I wish, wish, I could be there to go to the U.S. Latino Writers speak out: A Literary Response to the Immigration Crisis panel, Luna’s readings and the Con Tinta partay, which are always fun, oh, I mean intellectually enlightening.

There’s this book I wanted to write about but haven’t really gotten to discuss with Sheryl so here’s my disclaimer: for those who love poetry please read Sheryl Luna’s blog, I am only riffing here about a poet whose work I enjoyed recently and I don’t know diddley about the form as you’ll soon learn. What’s the famous line? “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like.”

I picked up Shin Yu Pai’s chapbook because I liked the cover with its rectangular cut outs to read the words printed on the end pages. I liked it because immediately I was forced to really examine the book itself.

And there, just like that I bought my second chapbook ever, well, not ever but I don’t count those that were required reading for class. And why are books of poetry called chapbooks anyway? Why not just book? It’s not like poets are like them 19th century peddlers selling chapbooks for a penny to the working class at alehouses. Hey, wait a minute, that’s exactly how I came across “Sightings.” I was drinking with a friend in Dallas and saw a chap selling books and I picked it up.

The first poem I read out loud to my companion was in the Unnecessary Roughness section of the book:

since the gay
old days of
this country
the American pastime
of manhandling
the opponent
taking down
to the ground
the player
holding the ball
SMEARING
THE QUEER


I can’t do it here but what is also so effective about her work is that she uses typeface to help convey meaning. In her book the word SMEARING is in some kind of Trade Gothic narrow font with an effect on it to give us a sense of the smearing. I had to touch the page to make sure my vision wasn’t blurred from too much drink.

The second piece I read aloud, again in the Unnecessary Roughness section, on a solitary page was merely this:








last one
picked

This one got us onto the topic of the author herself. We looked at her picture inside and theorized, guessed that she was “picked on” in school. I argued that she had to have been because well, she’s different. The different-ness I spoke of got us to taking guesses at Shin Yu Pai’s ethnicity.

After that curiosity was played out, we scanned the pages of her book and talked about white space (all the stuff between the words). How effectively Shin Yu Pai uses it on the pages. Whether or not you can create a sense of white space in prose. I thought of a chapter in Moby-Dick, the one where Melville describes the whiteness of the whale. Told my friend, "You know how there is so much description that you just get tired of reading it and your mind blanks out, skips graphs." She laughed and mentioned that the entire book qualifies as white space then. We stopped our Dick talk because we were distracted by another one, who asked us “Did you want to buy the book? We’re closing up.” My friend and I agreed that what I’d just read was “some good shit” so I put down my drink, shut the beautiful book that I could palm with one hand, and dug through my purse for some cash.

I knew I was getting something unique before I even opened it. The cover gave me all the information I needed before I turned a page. It’s innovative, clever and yeah, a little pretentious too but not to the point of being obnoxious, the way some poetry can be.

In my opinion good poetry should be so smart and tight that it has layers of meaning, one for the quick reader or scanner (non-reader), another for the middle reader (who reads Best Sellers), and still another for the thoughtful reader with millions of books swimming around his head (scholars who dissect words until they’re gray mush). This book passes my silly litmus test.

I liked that Shin Yu Pai used everything available to her as a writer, bookbinding, cover design, typeface, white space and even art to give us a glimpse into her world. “Sightings” seems to me to be a book about her. And what I’ve surmised is that she’s the type of woman who is: visual, intellectual, funny, sarcastic, sympathetic, ironic, and perhaps, a bit pretentious at times but grounded in the arts. Here’s a book you can definitely judge by its cover.

Bitter? Maybe

While we’re on the topic of Rigoberto, I must say that his review of my book in the El Paso Times turned me on to a writer from El Paso I’d never heard about—Estella Portillo Trambley. I had no idea Portillo Trambley even existed and I’m FROM El Paso. I can’t believe my high school English teachers didn’t assign her book “Rain of Scorpions” in class. I even made it through UTEP without knowing her works. I think I’d be a completely different person knowing that someone who taught in El Segundo wrote award winning books and plays. Imaginate, a third-generation Mexican American teenager reading a book written by someone who grew up in the very same city she grew up. I might have taken the fiction writer path much sooner in my life having read a book that was so important that I was assigned to read it in class right along with Shakespeare and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Okay, so I got on the Portillo Trambley bandwagon late in life. What’s new? Am I bitter, well, maybe, but I’m glad I’m aboard now. Portillo Trambley’s prose is the kind of literature I love. Stories filled with tight dialogue and sparse descriptions. It’s the Juan Rulfo kinda sparse—no pretension, clutter, or wasted words. Every word on the page advances her story.

Her tales give a complete picture of the men and women not given a voice in Texas literature, the people we live with, love, know and root for in our own families. Men like Chucho and women like his wife, Juana in “Pay the Criers.”

This, my favorite story in the collection, is a case study of a co-dependent relationship, if you’ll pardon the 12-stepese, and in it Portillo Trambley tells a beautiful story, of a family living in Juarez, Mexico that could just as easily have been El Paso, Las Cruces or Ames, Iowa for that matter, that explains why women stick it out with “shiftless” men. It’s done without being preachy, judgmental, or sentimental.

Portillo-Trambley’s stories and in particular the story of Chucho, Juana, and his mother-in-law, Refugio, reminds me of Luis Jimenez’s art work. In so much that the images or stories she constructs are true to life and not always appealing, but real, bold, revealing. It is in the truth and revealing where the beauty of the piece lies.

In the story she gives a complex portrait of Chucho, a man, who upon his mother-in-law’s death described her as someone “who had died like a warrior in the midst of the daily battle for bread. The old woman’s life had been nothing but work…. She had been a tiger, wearing a shawl, carrying a rosary in her hand, ready to pounce on him for being what she called ‘shiftless.’ ”

True to his mother-in-law’s description Chucho, coaxes the money for her funeral out of his wife’s hands and spends every centavo. But because Portillo Trambley understood what makes a fundamentally good story, well rounded characters, and gave me a glimpse into Chucho’s psyche through his internal monologues, meeting with his friend Chapo and his wife’s conversation with her friends, I grew to understand and even like the man. Like him so much that like his wife, Juana I rooted for him to do the right thing and even hoped/prayed while reading the story that he would change his fundamental nature.


Speaking of which, Portillo Trambley’s life in El Paso and some help from my father made me aware of what it is I love about El Chuco. She taught in the El Paso public schools and my father was in her history class at La Jeff. What he remembers about this award-winning author and I quote, “Yeah, she wrote books. What I can remember is that she had great legs and we were always dropping our pencils trying to look up her skirt.” This attitude is what I hate and love about El Paso. It sums up an El Chuco native’s core, how we know so much, and yet, don’t take ourselves too seriously. A way of living people either get or don’t. My father then went on to tell me how her “escorpion” story was good but that he didn’t like reading plays.

It really is crime that her revised collection of “Rain of Scorpions” is out of print, especially now, when American culture is so entangled with the Mexican. All of the United States is becoming like the El Paso I grew up in, where we don’t know where Mexican ends and American begins. Hers is too important a voice to leave lingering on a shelf. It needs to be in as many hands and minds as possible, not because she was a feminist, activist, or school teacher but because her stories touch on the healing power between the love of men and women and how the Chicano culture is the culture that is going to connect the traditional to the new. She has been quoted as saying that Chicano literature is “a bridge between the old and the new, between the primitive and technological. The Chicano can cement tradition to changing trends; a restructuring toward universality; the new American, the cosmic man.”

And in Chicano literature her book is the bridge between the pastoral musings of Antonio in Rudolfo Anaya’s “Bless Me Ultima” and the urban Chicanos that Dagoberto Gilb writes about in his books. “Rain of Scorpions” is where the two worlds meet, mix and morph into the modern day Chicano. This woman, not only defined the new Chicano, but “left a map for other” writers (be they Chicanos, halfies, mixed or steps who grew up in Mexican households, again, it’s difficult to pinpoint where Mexican begins and American ends) to follow or make new paths, “left a map” for us writers to find our “own green valleys.” “Rain of Scorpions” is a prophetic tale that everyone in El Paso should read, especially now with all the change taking place downtown and with the reopening of ASARCO.

Review

Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Other Fugitives and other Strangers (Tupelo Press 2006) is the type of poetry book some of us may be uncomfortable reading in that it challenges our comfortable distance from homoerotic love, which like all relationships, deals with issues of darkness, dominance and survival. The very things that were once hidden come to light with poems that take from the image of the body, its fragility and fleeting transitory nature and shine. It is the naked body, clavicle, skin, eye, pelvis and its animal nature that makes these poems honest and genuine in terms of the speaker’s dealing with human flaws and triumphs. In a sense, the poems themselves are a love song to the body. In “Good Boy” the speaker asks, “Wasn’t I a good boy once? Wasn’t I/ once stripped of body hair and knuckle, a laugh/so clean it stretched like a white sheet on the clothesline?/ Wasn’t my voice once/ the contagious note of a two-fingered-bell?” This first stanza for the opening poem sets up the book which is in many ways is a movement or dance through boyhood innocence to a masculine desire for dominance. Later in the same poem we hear, “Surely my anger had always been squatting its claws, eager/to tear its way out of my ten-year-old ribs…I must have ingested hatred/ through the spoons of my childhood./ I must have been the changeling matured/ of a knife slit haunted/ me, so I carved it free.// I hold your head up like/ a trophy, rub your scar. Please promise me it won’t cut/ back. I don’t like to bleed.”

It is in this manner of examining the wound, whether it is a psychological cut, physical injury, internalized or externalized, the wound is the cause or the impetus of what comes after injury and it is this recovery with which the collection moves readers. Many poems deal with the exhaustion of abuse and the urgent desire to separate out of a protective need.

In “Neurotic Double” the straight-edged honest tone continues with a series of images that exude the aftermath of struggle. “I’m not ashamed of my naked body,/ my naked body is ashamed of me,/ of how I tinge/ and stain him, then blame him for what I did./” The internal battle of our own existence with a body that in the end will betray us with age and death is ever present in these beautifully haunting poems. A poem called “Body, Anti-Body” also exudes the violence of an internal battle. “…displeased, my flesh/began to seek those strangers/generous with touch. With them/ I’m not a name, I’m body./ I’m not a ghost, I’m living skin// that craves the skirmish scars/ of passion and taking stock/ in the dark of nick and bite/ the bruise, the stench of triumph/ thickening air. These men act// on instinct, with violence/ that drives and thrusts and imposes/ pure punishment upon me.” This animalistic and desperate urgency to exist as a corporeal being in the world of living things carries with it the need to feel.

Poems like “Welts off the Bone” continue with an onslaught of reminders; we are human and we are body. There is a questioning of religious faith “We lock our limbs to crush the saints we don’t believe in./ We snap shut the pretense of altar alms, the delicacy of foreskin against cotting in the sacristan’s cassock.” The new and revised communion is with the speaker’s lover. “Everything that’s you is me. No secrets, love, pure confession./ The wafer of your ear is raw is sweet.” These poems are in the here and now and they breathe with a strange urgency, a need to live aggressively and yet there is the constant questioning of such dominance in its very presence in the collection.

The poems themselves are dangerous and they themselves “risk and love for things exotic.” We are indeed fugitives with debts and life is a series of losses and resolutions. Despite the serious mood of many of the poems there is a sense of comic relief. In “The Untimely Return of My Dead” the speaker opens, “With three loud knocks my dead lover/ makes himself known. His first complaints, I suspect:/ Why did you change the locks? Why, goddamit,/ did you bury me in blue? Makes me look fat, for crissake!”

Gonzalez’s Other Fugitives and Other Strangers is about our own sense of otherness or separateness in a world of pain and joy, how we partake in living, and how we survive. This is a poignant yet edgy collection of poems that cuts through to what it means to be human like a razor.

Sun, sand and stories

Technically we're not from El Paso anymore but we were born and raised in the Sun City, where dust storms are as commonplace as Wal-Mart. It's that El Paso has a way of staying with you, like a visit to the beach, weeks later I'll put my hands inside the pocket of a jacket and feel the grit I unknowingly brought home with me. Depending on my mood I'm either annoyed or content with my memories of home.



It's our love of sun, sand, and stories that got Sheryl and I to thinking, "Hey, why don't we write about literature, the stuff we like, the stuff we're reading and like to read?" Sheryl walked me through the steps of creating blog, or rather, welcomed me to the 21 st century. I'm a blog virgin and so happy that Sheryl decided to join in popping my blog cherry. I think we're going to have lots of fun.



With that said I'd like to get down to the business blogging. I'm blessed to come across many books, manuscripts, clever etchings on bathroom stall walls and for some reason I feel compelled to comment about what I'm reading. With this blog, I envisioned an online book club of sorts, because the BookMates club I belong to here in Central Texas isn't enough for me. We only meet once a month and already have the year 2008 filled with books to read.



One author who didn't make our list but whose book I want to read is Doris Lessing. I recently discovered Lessing, the 2007 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I know, I know, she's been around for, like, ever, and I stumbled across her by chance on the NY Times website when she won the big prize back in October. Actually, it was her photo that caught my eye first. She resembles my long since dead Nina in El Paso, gray hair pulled loosely into a bun, full moon face, gray eyes, features that radiate warmth. My Nina was all the incentive I needed. I hightailed it to my community library and I was thrilled that they actually had her books, five of them anyway. I live in a town, population 5,700, and man, our library rivals many inner city community libraries. I couldn't believe my luck. Of the five, I chose the title I could relate to, "The Fifth Child." I didn't know yet about "The Golden Notebook."



I was hooked from the very first sentence. "Harriet and David met each other at an office party neither had particularly wanted to go to, and both knew at once that this was what they had been waiting for." What an ordinary beginning to an extraordinary life they were both headed toward. I won't give away anything else in the book but I will say that Lessing's gift for turning (what some critics consider) the ordinary and mundane into social statements reminds me of Tillie Olsen, Flannery O'Conner, Kate Chopin, all the women I love to read. Books like this one are the reason I read fiction. Her gift for capturing how social pressures can undo even the best of people, or was it that the worst people can make social pressure undue influence, keep me hitting the bookstores and libraries.



I didn't realize what a leader she was in the feminist movement, until I read all the articles about her. She wasn't necessarily a part of the demonstrations but the women of the movement did adopt her literature as their own because she wrote about women, mothers, who were angry, aggressive, and unfulfilled when not many people were. Back in the 60s, she was attacked as being unfeminine. And her response to her attackers as quoted in the International Herald Tribune: "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise."



"The Golden Notebook" is resting on my "to read" shelf and I'm just two books away from it. What's at the top of the pile is "Love in the Time of Cholera." It wasn't my pick. It's on my book club's list for January. Majority ruled on this one, I was the only objector. I first read "Love" when I was in my twenties and I didn't understand what all the fuss was about. I remember the experience felt like a 50 years before I got to the end of Dr. Urbino's love story. I may have been too young when I first picked it up. It may not have been the right time for me to read the book. Now that I'm older and wiser I'm going to have another go at Marquez and I'm curious to see how much the book has changed, er, I mean I've changed.