Jimmy Santiago Baca's Black Mesa Poems

In Black Mesa Poems, Jimmy Santiago Baca explores the relationship between cultural history as it is rooted to place (in this case, the American Southwest.) Uniformally, the poems weave distinct imagery, and as the poems unravel, Baca reveals small and large universal truths about the life on an immigrant living in the southwest. The openings of many of his poems are single lines that frame a moment and place in time, evoking a particular action or scene. Then, the poem gains momentum, pulling the reader along for the journey. The poetry unwinds; themes of place, environment, and culture become clear. The poems largely identify people with ancestryand connect to the happenings of place and fit these struggles into larger societal contexts.

In "Black Mesa," the title poem of the book, all of these underlying motifs tie together. "Black Mesa" opens with a physical description of place and leads the speaker to open up about the undulating pull guiding him the mesa. The language drips with an entangment of desire and imagery:

"I want to visit
it
before winter comes,
and balance myself
across culvert that connects
my field
to Isleta Pueblo.
Strings of water trellis
from rusty holes
and bubble scum and black moss weed
below.
Branches barrage this passage,
and draw blood at my shoulder
as I crouch past,
then climb No Trespassing fence."

We establish condensed language and the images and the power the Black Mesa has over the speaker. Tight images and language driven by verbs pushes the reader with the speaker. The allure of the mesa takes on a deeper level:

"I don't know what this year has meant to me
but I've come here to find a clue."

The speaker and the Black Mesa are connected in some way. Place and culture merge. The importance of people to place is established with regard to social justice as the poem reveals its layers:

"Rito was murdered here
by sheriffs,
brown beret Chicano activist
who taught children in the barrio
our own history,
tried to stop
them blasting Black Mesa.
And now, under my hiking boots his blood
crossbeds minerals
and forms into red crystals,
ceremonial Chac-mool plate
on which Aztec warrior Rito
sacrificed his heart to the sun."

The moment in the poem becomes an Aztec sacrifice. The Black Mesa is a voice for a people, a protection of environmental place. Rito becomes a martyr for his people against the backdrop of the desert sun.

A re-imaging occurs and the speaker merges with the mesa's history as he learns to identify with place:

"In lava cracks,
I learn to read, smell, hear
the darkness again 'til black depths
lighten slowly to twilight
and the old man who lives
in stone
offers me a different view
of life and death."

Stone becomes a recurring image through the remainder of the poem. In a dream, the speaker is appraoched by a man who speaks to him:

"Thank you for the stone in my mind.
It sings to me and I listen to it."

The speaker eventually rises, "I bend ... of my ascent from stone." The Black Mesa and stone become metaphor for ancestral history and the lucrative ties to place. The poem ends on the universe and hope for justice in the next year.

Black Mesa does well to exemplify much of what Jimmy Santiago Baca captures throughout the poems in the book. The entire work speaks to place, but not just physical landscape (although there are fresh images pertaining to physical space thoughout). Place takes on a deeper meaning the way Baca renders it; place becomes preservation of ancestry and culture. Through the language of his poems, Baca forces the reader to question what significance place carries. For the writer, he demonstrates how to control the multiple layers that make a poem truly stand out.

Vice -- Ai

The powerful draw of the poetry collected in Ai's Vice is in the pull of language. Aggressive language. Language that is not afraid to push bounds or offend. The horror ensnares the reader making even the most horrifying of subjects, of personas, alive. The first three books in her collecton, "Cruelty," "Killing Floor," and "Sin" take on personas of victims and aggressors, midwives and a man on the receiving end of an abortion.

Ai opens "Cruelty" with "Twenty-Year Marriage" in which she takes on a persona exploring the sexual side of a two decade old marriage. She opens it with, "You keep me waiting in a truck" immedeatly grounding the reader to a place and a situation, along with the progression of time. The annonymous persona urges her husband, "Hurry. I've got nothing on under my skirt tonight" and the reader learns about the inner drives, the inner emotion of the persona. In a sense, Ai opens the intamacy of the persona with the reader. The language is alluring as the poem continues, "Come on, baby, lay me down on my back" and mixes age and time with the sensuality of the persona, "and maybe we'll roll out of here, / leaving the past stacked up behind us; / old newspapers nobody's ever got to read again." Ai begins opens her collection of poems with seduction, a beckoning of the reuniting of the past and the present. And her language pulls the reader in.

In the poem "Child Beater" (found in the "Cruelty" collection) Ai takes on the persona of an abusive father figure. This demonstrates a stretch of poetic talent, not only humanzing a dark side of human nature, but also by her ability to step into the position of another sex and a twisted character. To an extent, it becomes too much for my personal taste. The violence and imagery is overpowering as evidenced by the first stanza:

"Outside, the rain, pinafore of gray water, dresses the town
and I stroke the leather belt,
as she sits in the rocking chair,
holding a crushed paper cup to her lips.
I yell at her, but she keeps rocking;
back, her eyes open, forward, they close.
Her body, somehow fat, though I feed her only once a day,
reminds me of my own just after she was born.
It's been seven years, but I still can't forget how I felt.
How heavy it feels to look at her."

Time and age are established. However, the persona (which could stem from this being an unreliable persona) offers little defense for his abhorrent actions. The dehumanizing descriptions of what the persona does to the little girl character are almost too overbearing. The why is never answered.

However, a fairer assessment could be that there are just too many successive persona poems for a reader to handle in one sitting in the first three books of poems collected in Vice.

Ai covers a variety of personas and topics as she explores the grimmer sides of the human condition. In "The Detective" (found in "Sin") she widens the perspective to include a mythological reference to Persephone from Greek mythology. The poem opens with the calling of a mother to her daughter; the reader knows this is the mother's tale. And like Ceres from ancient myth, this persona is mourning:

"I like on my daughter's body
to held her in the earth,
but she won't stay;
she rises, lifting me with her,
as if she were air
and not some remnant
of failed reeducation
in a Cambodian mass grave."

The contemporary horror of the time period meets the allure of myth. Themes of death and resurrection, contemporary politcs and military history merge and undulate with myth and mourning. A mother recalls her dauther, "like Persephone / climbing rom the underworld" and meditates on the devastation of Cambodia and Vietnam because "somewhere in time, it is 1968."

One of Ai's strengths is her ability to capture time and command the words to bring historic past alive, mixing it with fiction and truth as poetry forms on the page. It is something I'd like to have a stronger handle of in my own work -- especially as I develop persona poems. Her fearlessness of the subject dangles on the page, lurching the reader into unexplored terrors and hidden truths of the mind.

Good Woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1982 Lucille Clifton

One of Lucille Clifton's most powerful elements in her collection of poetry in Good Woman rests in the power of simple language. At first glance, her poetry does not appear to be overly complicated. Many of the poems and personas are given briefly. However, at a second and third and fourth reading, one pulls more and more sinew out of what appeared to be only a skeleton. For example, in "miss rosie," Clifton creates the life of two personas. The first is Miss Rosie -- who she describes through the persona's voice:

when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up

The strong fowl images of what Miss Rosie now looks like to her town and to her anonymous voyeur are easily pulled out on a first read. Phrases like "wrapped up like garbage" and images like "in your old man's shoes/with the little toe cut out" strike the page hard and create a distinct image of Miss Rosie's character. Embedded in the subtext, however, is the darker side of the poem. Not only does the reader get this image of a once beautiful Georgian woman, but the reader also gets the aftermath of her fall and a glimpse into the persona's use and dismissive view of the rags of Miss Rosie. The active use of "when i watch you" suggests the persona is aggressively calculating and observing the demise of Miss Rosie. The final three lines, "i stand up/ through your destruction/ i stand up" also shows the resolve of the persona to come to better circumstances and take the lead where Miss Rosie stopped. The persona is a young woman (probably black) speaking to an older woman, determined to have a better life. Each time I read the poem, like with so much of Clifton's poetry, more and more meat can be pulled from its bones.

Part of the collection of poems in Good Woman... is excerpted from another one of Clifton's books of poetry, "Some Jesus." In this section, a spin is placed on biblical stories with persona poems -- often incredibly short -- that poignantly characterize and humanize the characters of the Bible. Clifton begins with "adam and eve":

the names
of the things
bloom in my mouth

my body opens
into brothers

The simplicity of the poem speaks to creation (both lowercase c and capital C). Without an understanding of the story of Adam and Eve, the reader isn't left with any concrete images. Instead the abstractions of "things/ bloom in my mouth" suggest eating fruit (whatever the debated indulgence was) and something coming from it (knowledge and sin perhaps). The images strongly rely on allusion and knowledge of the story found in Genesis. "my body opens/ into brothers" also suggests birth. The duality of Clifton's craft takes shape in a mere five lines. The persona could be Adam (or a mix of Adam and Eve). We get the image of birth, not the remorse of the Fall as readers. In turn, it could also serve as an ars poetica about the craft or writing, of producing "names/ of the things" from the self. "my body opens" could suggest an outpouring of the soul onto the page. The self in the poem.

"Mary" also appears in "some jesus." "mary" offers the reader a sexualized version of the Virgin Mother:

this kiss
as soft as cotton

over my breasts
all shiny and bright

something is in this night
oh Lord have mercy on me

i feel a garden
in my mouth

between my legs
i see a tree

Again, image and biblical storytelling merge. Genesis and Adam and Eve come into play in the last four lines with a sexualized element. Since Mary is the persona, the virginal depiction melts away to an image of sexualized spirituality in which the natural world (the garden and the tree) connect with body and something hence is born. Another poem that reads on many levels.

One of Lucille Clifton's poems I particularly enjoy, but can't fully wrap my analytic mind around is found in the section "an ordinary woman" under "sisters." Since I still only have a frame of what it means (after reading it about a hundred times) I'll share it in the hope of some feedback and interpretation:

god's mood

these daughters are bone,
they break.
he wanted stone girls
and boys with branches for arms
that he could lift his life with
and be lifted by.
these sons are bone.

he is tired of years that keep turning into age
and flesh that keeps widening.
he is tired of waiting for his teeth to
bite him and walk away.

he is tired of bone,
it breaks.
he is tired of eve's fancy and
adam's whining ways.

The speaker of "god's mood" expresses a dark tone about the fragility of humankind. The final two lines, "he is tired of eve's fancy and/ adam's whining ways" seem to speak to a contemporary audience. We have lost ourselves from the original image. We are at the whim of something beyond us. We demonstrate the failings of morality (and perhaps our own mortality) with "he is tired of years that keep turning into age/ and flesh that keeps widening." Stone and bone become metaphors for the human condition. They are comparison points of what is and what we, to the speaker, could be.

Another puzzling, yet strikingly relatable poem comes under the Kali poems under the section "i agree with the leaves." In Hinduism, Kali represents the Dark Mother. She is an intimate mother figure, fulfilling a role of a mother-figure to her human children. She is an intense image: black with four arms. In one arm she has the head of a demon; in the other a sword. Her two free hands are for her worshippers. Although she is painted in skulls and blood, she is the protecting mother goddess. She has three eyes that enable her to see past, present, and future. She is the mix of birth and death and love.

In "the coming of Kali" Clifton describes not only the goddess Kali, but the state of women as an undertone. Intended or not, it also made me question why women are constantly depicted in myth as dark and evil. The end of the poem recovers to reveal the deeper depths and secrets of the self:

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 places in my bones
i never sing about but
she knows i know them well.
she knows.
she knows.

Kali stands for femininity. For the reclamation of the power of women. Her black color is also a reclaiming for what could have been race prejudice at the time Clifton was writing this poem. In many ways "the coming of Kali" is a strong poem. Repetition reinforces that a dark goddess knows about womanhood, about the inner secrets women can't even reveal to themselves: "she is persistent with her/ black terrible self, she/ knows places in my bones/ i never sing about but/ she knows i know them well."

"the coming of Kali" is also stylistically both similar and dissimilar from the shape and form of Clifton's other poems. Lucille Clifton's poetry is characterized by lowercase letters, sometimes scant punctuation. She utilizes the space and the page to let the persona own the truth of whatever it is she is saying. Largely in her poetry, the "i" of the speaker is lowercase. The other characters are also lowercase. At times, Clifton breaks this point of style and draws attention to the character or persona by allowing them to be capitalized. "the coming of Kali" exemplifies this in the title and throughout. Both God and Kali are capitalized, both God and Kali carry extra weight and cause for thought in the poem.

Likewise, the use of lowercase for the many biblical personas found in the collection of poems in "some jesus" also point the reader to look at the persona with a different scrutiny than the Bible allows. For instance, major players -- Jesus, Mary, John, Job, Solomon, Daniel, Cain, Jonah -- all relate lowercase stories and moments. This heightens their value, the punch of the words on the page. A reader expects something didactic. Instead the reader is given a moment, a piece of something relating and real.

As far as my own writing goes, capturing Lucille Clifton's grasp of making something brief speak volumes is worth working towards. And her conscientious use of every piece of syntax, letter, and word to make a statement punch. Her few words on a page all carry weight and meaning. Every time I re-read or re-discover Clifton's poetry, I learn something about myself and the truth of existence as a whole. Her craft is careful, deliberate. And the skeletons on the page also echo more and more and more.

Olga Broumas : Beginning With O

Olga Broumas' poetry is full of image in Beginning With O in which she explores ancient myth and fairytale and often revisions the feminine into often a lesbian love. Not always. Her use of the natural world in language is explored and maintained in the first poem of the book, the opening that seems to be the epigraph for the rest of her work, "Sometimes, as a child." From the beginning, Broumas establishes a dive into myth,

"when the Greek sea
was exceptionally calm
the sun not so much a pinnacle
as a perspiration of light, your brow and the sky
meeting on the horizon, sometimes

you'd dive"

The Greek sea is evoked, and the image of a person meeting water on the horizon indicates some type of change, a perspective. The rest of Broumas poems in this book unfold to reveal elements of women in myth, women of today reaching out to explore those roles, sometimes even change them. The feminine is alligned with nature, often. This parallels into contemporary schools of philosophy and appraoches to literature in the ecofeminist movement of today. Broumas straddles many lands in the poems of this book, reaching into the past of myth, adding a lesbian twist to the stories, and predicting a future for poetry and literature. The poem continues, seeming to describe the birth of a woman,

"in the paused wake of your dive, enter
the suck of the parted waters, you'd emerge

clean caesarean, flinging
live rivulets from your hair, your own
breath arrested..."

Reclamation. Rebirth. Water and the feminine. Women are often bound to the sea, to water, strongly in the first section of the book in which ancient myth is explored. "Circe" moves away from the natal images of love and birth in nature. The poem opens, instead, with fire.

"The fire bites, the fire bites. Bites / to the little death. Bites / till she comes to nothing. Bites / on her own sweet tongue. She goes on. Biting."

In myth, Circe is a witch. She charms Odysseus' men and the men, in turn, become pigs. The metaphor is commonplace. However, Broumas shows Circe as a spider weaving a web, waiting in anticipation for the men to break themselves out of the spell they've cast on themselves:

"They tell me a woman waits, motionless
till she's wooed. I wait

spiderlike, effortless as they weave
even my web for me, tying the cord in knots

with their counting hands. Such power
over them. And the spell

their own. Who could release them? Who
would untie the cord

with a cloven hoof?"

Broumas leaves the ancient for the modern. A modern woman dressing for herself in the morning before leaving the house. For me the image of men around a construction site, hitting on a woman is too easy, the persona turning "men into swine" is too simple an end. However, the connection of ancient myth to modern woman is still a powerful connection. Furthermore, the fire in which Circe is personified opposesses the aqueous and lunar images of women in her other poems in the same section indicating a transformation of sorts.

The latter section of Beginning With O echoes Anne Sexton's Transformations with the reclaimation of the fairytale. In "Beauty and the Beast" I feel some of the images from the poems appearing earlier in the book are lost. Beauty and Beast are both symbollic, however, of two parts. Beast, masculine in usual perception, could be the speaker before meeting women. For instance, the description of the persona we meet is not beautiful, but more desperate and forlorn:

"For years I fantasized pain
driving, driving
me over each threshold
I though I had, till finally
the joy in my flesh would break
loose with the terrible
strain, and undulate
in great spasmic circles, centered
in cunt and heart. I clung to pain..."

The persona could be a beast in her own right. However, by the end of the poem there is a shift in tone when the speaker comes together with a woman:

"...The boy
fled from my laughter
painfully, and i
leaned and touched, leaned
and touched you, mesmerized, woman, stunned

by the tangible
pleasure that gripped my ribs, every time
like a caged beast, bewildered
by this late, this essential heart."

With "Cinderella," the connection Broumas is making to Anne Sexton's work is further strengthened when she opens the poem with an epigraph, a quote from Sexton. Unlike previous poems, Cinderella's speaker is a persona of Cinderella. A further connection to Transformations is made as Broumas leaves her form for the sake of a persona poem. (Sexton's Transformations is comprised of persona poems).

The imagery in "Cinderella" again shifts. This time, the shift is away from nature entirely and towards the domestic: "...I am a woman in a state of siege, alone / as one piece of laundry, strung on a windy clothesline..." Broumas connects fairytale and modernity:

"...I know what I know.
What sweet bread I make
for myself in this prosperous house
is dirty, what good soup I boil turns
in my mouth to mud. Give
me my ashes. A cold stove, a cinder-block pillow, wet
canvas shoes in my sisters', my sisters' hut..."

Broumas' lesbian theme is clear; Cinderella would rather be enslaved to the hearth, to sisterhood, than to marriage, to a man. The imagery of women in nature is lost to the domestic, the kettle, the piece of laundry, the stove.

Olga Broumas explores the lives and aspects of women throughout her poetry in Beginning With O. Her poetry often associates the feminine with nature, coming to love (or birth) through water. Her heroines reject heterosexual love for true connection with other female characters in myth and fairytale. Her language is luring, beautiful. Stanley Kunitz, who selected her as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets (197?) describes her lingual power best, "Among the most impressive features of Broumas's supple art is her command of syntax, rhythm, and tone. Her hedonism extends to the use of language itsef; she rollicks in 'the cave of sound'" (xiii).

Unreconstructed -- Ed Ochester

The hook into Ed Ochester's poetry is universality. Each poem -- even one's packed with metaphor such as "On a Friend Whose Work Has come to Nothing" -- reads on many levels. The plot, the why, behind each poem resonates with me. Ochester's poetry isn't didactic or about lofty ideals. Instead it is the truth -- both the beautiful and the ugly -- hidden in the moments of the everyday. The subjects and personas aren't archetypes. No. They are the everyperson, the nextdoor neighbor, the friend lost in passing. His poetry's greatest strength is in the connection it makes with its reader.

For instance, in "On a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing" Ochester explores the relationship of friendship, writing work, snippets of an individual life, and reflection -- inner-reflection -- after a long lost friend/collegue's death. Lines like, "and every one of us was the true illegitimate/son of Hemmingway who/by the way/was your very close friend" indicate emotions behidn a persona's words, represent the descent into grief, remembrance, and self-discovery. Although the example is literary, the moment after a friend's death, the feelings of closeness and a look of one's life work, is universal, even if it stays sealed on a person's inside.

His poetry resonates on history and a connection with the middle class. Almost anyone can pick up and pull something out of the words he puts on a page. Fresh language and the momentum push a reader through to the end. Ed Ochester is a universal voice for the people.

Transforming the Fairy Tale

Anne Sexton's Transformations lured me into her poems not only because I'm a sucker for a morbid Grimm brothers fairytale, but also because of the quality and ability Sexton takes to slip between stories older than centuries and apply their truths to the unfoldings of a modern and personal world. The words aren't a mere retelling of distorted fairytales. They are a reclaiming. A reckoning. Images of food and disease mix on a page to reveal inner truths about the human condition beyond a witch and an oven or a frog and Princess's plate. Kisses aren't always a savior. The "happily ever afters" exist in consequence. A clear, uncomfortable, unflinching sarcasm colors the words. The appeal of the depraved, innocent, and insane drips from the page onto the fangs of a wolf full of stones to the bloody spindle prick of an insomniac too frightened by reality to sleep. Sexton reenvisions the fairytales as the Grimm's first imagined, and we are present in each and every story.

Medusa, Medusa...

...with snakes in her hair. And eyes that can turn you to stone.

If only in myth. So the truth behind myth, I think, exists in the perceptions of the time period. For instance, let's take Medusa for example. In oversimplified summary, you have a broken Gorgon, ravaged by a horny god (Zeus) turned into an angry, man-hating monster. To perpetuate the masculine hypersensitivity, a demigod (Perseus) enters the scene, hellbent on destroying a woman-turned-monster over which his involvement is unnecessary. The removal of her head (acquired by the help of a beautiful god) releases a white horse, Pegasus from the blood of the silenced woman's throat. In essence, the infamous story, reformatted and rewritten for contemporary audiences from the ancient skew, is drenched in shame, wrath, and the oppression of women.

Contemporary versions of this very myth may reveal different truths about the reality behind the fiction. The modern differs from the ancient. One could argue today that Medusa is not the ugly Gorgon she once was portrayed to be, but an individual attacked and trying to vindicate herself against the world (and person) who betrayed her trust and harmed her. Pregnancy is a pop culture theme. Perhaps a modern spin on Medusa let's her consider an abortion.
Instead of dehumanizing the woman (Medusa) in a modern revisioning of the story; the myth would likely empower her to not become frozen by overwhelming anger, and instead, let her find her voice and discover an outlet for the wicked acts committed against her outside of herself. Perhaps through the acceptance and support of others -- which would be lost on an ancient audience -- Medusa would be able to forgive herself of that which she could not control and unbind herself from the guilt, that enrages her to snakes and stones.

The contemporary women should be empathetic to our modern Medusas. For we are many. And we are not to be maddened into exile, anger, and lonely silence. This is for the everyday Medusas, a beautiful sisterhood of Medusas, releasing thick tongues stuck to the back of throats, and outpouring our stories.

So...Why Words & Why Winos?

Because ... what's better than three friends and a bottle of cabernet over a few scribbles of poetry that aren't your own (and sometimes words that exclusively belong to you)?

Nothing.

Stay tuned.