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.