Poem: Gary Soto

Back when I was teaching schoolchildren about poetry, one of the poets I would dip into was Gary Soto (1952-), a poet they instictively grasped and could both follow and model their own work after.  I started reading Soto intensively then, and really grew to appreciate his work. I also learned that some 20 years before, during the mid-to-late 1970s, Fresno-native Soto had become one of the best known and most popular Latino poets, in no small part because of his powerful skills as a scene-setter, his story-telling skills, his simple but never simplistic and effective use of imagery, his deft and subtle control of meter and rhythm, and the deep feeling that infuses his best work. I hadn't looked at his work in many years, but when I knew my poetry month postings would be rolling around, I made a note to post a Soto poem. So here you go, "A Red Palm," which includes all of the elements I mention above, and more. Enjoy!

A Red Palm

You're in this dream of cotton plants.
You raise a hoe, swing, and the first weeds
Fall with a sigh. You take another step,
Chop, and the sigh comes again,
Until you yourself are breathing that way
With each step, a sigh that will follow you into town.

That's hours later. The sun is a red blister
Coming up in your palm. Your back is strong,
Young, not yet the broken chair
In an abandoned school of dry spiders.
Dust settles on your forehead, dirt
Smiles under each fingernail.
You chop, step, and by the end of the first row,
You can buy one splendid fish for wife
And three sons. Another row, another fish,
Until you have enough and move on to milk,
Bread, meat. Ten hours and the cupboards creak.
You can rest in the back yard under a tree.
Your hands twitch on your lap,
Not unlike the fish on a pier or the bottom
Of a boat. You drink iced tea. The minutes jerk
Like flies.

It's dusk, now night,
And the lights in your home are on.
That costs money, yellow light
In the kitchen. That's thirty steps,
You say to your hands,
Now shaped into binoculars.
You could raise them to your eyes:
You were a fool in school, now look at you.
You're a giant among cotton plants.
Now you see your oldest boy, also running.
Papa, he says, it's time to come in.

You pull him into your lap
And ask, What's forty times nine?
He knows as well as you, and you smile.
The wind makes peace with the trees,
The stars strike themselves in the dark.
You get up and walk with the sigh of cotton plants.
You go to sleep with a red sun on your palm,
The sore light you see when you first stir in bed.

"A Red Palm," from New and Selected Poems by Gary Soto. Copyright © 1995 by Gary Soto. Used by permission of Chronicle Books.

Poem Excerpt: Bhanu Kapil

This past winter quarter, I taught excerpts from Bhanu Kapil's narrative Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006--also a former J's Theater Book of the Month pick), as part of my unit on transhumanism/posthumanism, a topic my colleague Alex Weheliye had first hipped me to some years ago, but which it took me, in my usual fashion, a while to assemble in my head. (Tisa B., the Afro-futurists, and others also pointed the way forward.) I'm not sure how much the students got from our conversation about the book, which I felt was a bit rushed given the time constraints--in my ideal class we would have many, many weeks to luxuriate in reading and discussing any text or film or performance we were exploring--but in rereading it, I was struck again by what a remarkable little intervention it is. At its heart are a series of complex and artful algorithms connecting the immigrant Other to the alien/cyborg, based on her own experiences but also reconstructed as a lattice of interlinking and interanimating images, metaphors and metonyms, and structured as a chain of linked narratives. It is an incubatory space, not just for monsters, but for thinking itself. Here're two passages that work as an excerpt and give a sense, in distilled form, of what she achieves in this book. Enjoy!

19. SOFT CRAZINESS: VISUAL MEMORIES, POST-OP

I was a monster but the surgeon said no. You have your mother's eyes. My mother, smiling euphorically, smoothed the aluminum foil over the pillow and went to sleep, dreaming of mechanical sheep flying through a sky of tungsten. Copper and tulle. This thing she pushed off. This "but in the air." This "but the air changes your body." It was me. We communicated in silence. Then I left: a descent. Soft craziness. Drifts of freeable matter. I was three months old but I did it, I rolled out of bed. I rolled out the door and I rolled through London in the deep of night until I reached the river. There, in the Thames, was a black swan with an orange nub on his beak. I think he had wings. I rolled into the water and bobbed there a few moments, like an olive or a rose or a dog, until he saw me and came over to where Iwas with great force. By my neck he took me in his beak and put me on his back. Then the ocean. How small we are, in this image, my mother, Mr. Swan, and I. There is an incredible sense of openness: a luminous intensity in which darkness has a part. When it rained, hours into our long journey to America, I saw citron-yellow flashes in the sky. I reached my little hand out as if taking the light in, through the palm, then touched the long neck of the black swan, feeling his muscles contract then relax as he moved further out into the environment. "Hungry. Want naan. Want chole. Want dudhoo. (Yeast-free bread, chickpea curry, and milk.) Are we there yet?" I have a cousin in Elizabeth, New Jersey. As children in India, we washed our feet each morning beneath a pump. At night, when the electricity went out, our grandmother poured oil into little earthenware cups then slipped in wicks of cotton and lit them and we washed like that, illuminated.

Shimmery from my sea voyage, will I be recognized to my cousin? Or will she scream, slam the door in my face, and resume her life as a citizen, a computer programmer, though she is younger than me and pregnant with her second child, or so I heard?

Copyright © Bhanu Kapil, from Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Brooklyn: Leon Works, 2006. All rights reserved.

Poem: Philip Levine

The news on the unemployment front, like a great deal of what we read and see on TV, has been growing grimmer by the day, and the social conditions behind it are certainly grimmer still. Several people I know well, friends and relatives, have lost their jobs, and others are struggling to make ends meet. Alongside the weak job market, other signs of the economy's sickness are evident everywhere: plummeting home values and rising foreclosures; the appearance of Bushvilles; the collapse of the commercial real estate market; personal bankruptcies resulting from people's inability to pay debts; and on and on. These are only a portion of of the social crisis the country faces, and conditions are as bad or worse overseas. We're officially at 8.9% unemployment, though the reality is probably far worse, which is the worst things have been since the recessionary period around 1983. That was the year I graduated from high school, and one of the reasons I'm able to look back on that period without nostalgia is because, despite my fond memories of particular aspects of being 17 and 18 years old, my perception of the national situation was clear-eyed. In case you don't recall, in 1983 the ur-right winger, Ronald Reagan, was in office; a claque of extreme conservatives were frothing in their new government positions; the Cold War still raged; the AIDS pandemic was steadily increasing, with little attention for the federal government; the crack epidemic was picking up steam, and the concomitant drug war and buildup of the penal system were underway; the US was meddling in a war in Iraq (against Iran, no less, while secretly funneling money from Iran to right-wingers in Central America); and on and on. While I, though penniless and the child of a working-class background, was heading off to college and what I hoped would be a decent future, I was quite aware that things were terrible for others. The lack of jobs, particular for the poor and working-class, for black people, for Latinos, for undereducated whites, was a pressing national concern, which the GOP exploited brilliantly. It would be 10 more years and another recession (along with a young and conservative Democratic president) before the country really turned around. I hope it does not take that long this time, though the underlying conditions do appear to be worse than they were in 1983, or 1993.

That said, I've been thinking about poems dealing with work and labor, and in particular poems I have not posted before (thus excluding "Those Winter Sundays") and one came immediately to mind: Philip Levine's "What Work Is." I first came across this poem when I heard Levine read it on public radio; I believe this was after the eponymous collection had won the National Book Award. That would have been back in 1991 or 1992. I remember tearing up when he got to the end of the poem, I was so verklempt, and I sought out his work, which I was utterly unfamiliar with, right away. About five years later, when I was in graduate school, Philip Levine was teaching a poetry workshop that I was unable to take, but he would sometimes sit in the graduate poetics class I audited (which did not, unfortunately, cover his work), something I've never seen another "famous" poet do (he knew the professor, but even still, it rarely happens), and I kept saying that I would introduce myself and praise his work, but I never did muster the courage. I got to hear him read his work live around that time, though, and when I got his autograph in my copy of What Work Is, I offered my little valentine. Here's his poem, which could have been written last week, about what occurred last week.

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

Copyright © from Philip Levine, What Work Is, New York: Knopf, 1992.

Poetry Month Begins + Poem: Gwendolyn Brooks

It's April 1, which means it's Inter/National Poetry Month! To start off the month, here's a poem by one of my favorite poets, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), that I find particularly mete for this particular national and global moment. Brooks's poem also brings to mind Langston Hughes's powerful and more bitter take, "A Dream Deferred"; her argument is wittier and more open-ended, a mirror held up to how most of us, most of the time, tend to deal with life's little and sometimes immense adversities.

kitchenette building

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.


Gwendolyn Brooks, “kitchenette building” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Source: Selected Poems (1963)