The Bloomsbury Review

Volume 26, Issue 6

November/December 2006

 

THE REPUBLIC OF ESPADA

A Profile by

John Murillo

 

     “The whole scene was wild,” says poet Martín Espada.  “At the airport, a security guard wouldn’t let me leave the country until I declaimed a poem for her, on the spot.  There were menus in restaurants announcing recipes based on Neruda’s odes.  There were séances summoning back Neruda’s spirit.  I got into a taxicab and heard a radio call-in talk show—about poetry!  And all that paled beside what I saw at Isla Negra the day before the poet’s birthday.”

     In July of 2004, Martín Espada was part of a small delegation of North American poets invited to Chile to participate in the commemoration of Pablo Neruda’s Centenary.  While visiting the tomb of the famed Chilean poet, Espada was surrounded by dozens of silent demonstrators holding or wearing signs around their necks bearing photographs, names, dates, and the legend: Political execution.  “These were the families of the ‘disappeared,’ still seeking justice for their loved ones incarcerated and murdered by the Pinochet dictatorship,” explains Espada.   They’d come to Neruda’s tomb to ask that their grievances be redressed.  “To them, it made perfect sense to make their case at the grave of a poet.  To them, this is what poetry does; this is what a poet is for.  When they found out that I, too, was a poet, they appealed to me,” says Espada.  “I promised to tell their story.” 

     Called by Sandra Cisneros the “Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Martín Espada has published thirteen books as a poet, essayist, editor and translator, including Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (Norton 2003), which received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year; Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), winner of the American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990), recipient of the PEN/Revson Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize.  His other awards include the Robert Creeley Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the Charity Randall Citation, two NEA Fellowships, and a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship.  In October, Norton published Espada’s eighth poetry collection, The Republic of Poetry.

 

     After writing what many consider the definitive poem about the September 11 tragedy, Espada struggled with his work for more than two years.  He visited Neruda’s native land—a country that’s been mourning its own 9/11 tragedy for over thirty years—and returned with a recovered voice and a story to tell.   

 

      Following the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Martín Espada wrote “Alabanza,” a poem dedicated to the food service workers at the Windows on the World restaurant who were killed when the towers collapsed.  The poem became one of Espada’s most popular, but writing it came with a price.  “Something happened to me after I wrote that poem,” says Espada.  “I was blocked, for I think, the first time in my adult life.  I entered what I think of as a period of mourning.”

 

     Writing the poem psychically exhausted Espada, who many view as one of America’s premiere poets of conscience.  For two years, he was unable to produce much more than a couple of elegies and was beginning to feel distraught.  Not only was he blocked creatively, but it seemed the only time he could write was to express his despair.  “The bottom line is that I wasn’t writing,” says Espada.  “And I was feeling bad about it.

 

    “Usually when we speak of writer’s block, we’re talking about a few forces conspiring simultaneously,” says Espada.  “There could be any number of factors—physical, financial, emotional—preventing us from reaching that sustained state of concentration we call ‘inspiration.’”  For Espada, the conspiracy between world affairs and home life began early in the year when his wife, Katherine, suffered a stroke and brain hemorrhage in January 2001.   

 

     In early 2004 Espada was invited to Chile to pay tribute to Pablo Neruda and Rattapallax Films decided to make a film about his journey.  Though honored by the offer and excited about the project, Espada was hesitant at first.  “There was a certain kind of pressure,” says Espada.  “Because I knew that coming out of Chile, I was expected to come out of there with something.  I was expected to write, to produce.  If I didn’t, I would have been embarrassed.”

 

      Martín Espada’s road to Isla Negra began in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where he was born in 1957.  He discovered poetry at fifteen, when a tenth-grade English teacher in Valley Stream, Long Island, gave Espada and his gang of roughnecks a rather unconventional assignment.  “We had to produce our own issue of The New Yorker magazine.  Though we all lived in New York, none of us had ever seen The New Yorker,” says Espada.  “By the time the magazine was handed down through the hierarchy of thuggery, all that was left for me to do was to write a poem.”  Though he no longer has the poem, he does remember one line wherein he described rain as “tiny silver hammers pounding the earth.”  Says Espada, “I’d find out a week later that I had just invented my first metaphor.”

 

     After high school, Espada would go on to study history, then law at Northeastern University.  After a string of odd jobs—gas station attendant, bouncer, assistant in a primate laboratory—he served as a tenant lawyer for Su Clínica Legal in Chelsea, Massachusetts.  It was in this capacity that he began to marry his art with his activism.  “As a lawyer, I was engaged in the business of speaking on behalf of those without an opportunity to be heard—the Latino community, immigrants, the poor, and so on,” says Espada.  “I believe this is also one of my missions as a poet, to make the invisible visible.”

 

     Espada’s commitment to social justice has earned him a loyal readership of both traditional and non-traditional audiences.  “A lot of people dig his stuff,” says Rich Villar, poet and curator of the Bronx-based Acentos reading series.  “He’s popular among spoken word artists, folks who ‘know poetry,’ Black people, white people, Latinos, a lot of folks.”  Villar credits Espada’s wide appeal to his everyman stance and attitude toward the downtrodden and working class struggle.  “Martin is very much one of us,” says Villar.  “His work reflects our everyday experiences.  It’s very true to the people who built this country, the workers.”

 

     Poet and activist Sam Hamill agrees.  “Martín Espada writes in the tradition of socially engaged poets that stretches from Sappho and the ancient Greeks to the modern giants like Yeats and Lorca and Neruda.  I think, speaking of Neruda, that Martín has drawn on most of Neruda’s vast strengths while avoiding his many, many pitfalls, most notably Neruda’s almost insatiable ego.  In an age when many, if not most, U.S. poets seem to be sliding into syllogism and the celebration of self, Espada continually engages the other.  It is not the Self that draws Espada to write poetry, but rather the transcendence of self.  He serves something larger, something uniquely noble in poetry.”

 

     “I work in a tradition,” says Espada.   “I have a history.  And that tradition for me—and for Neruda, for that matter—goes back to Walt Whitman who, in his preface to Leaves of Grass, wrote that the duty of the poet is to ‘cheer up slaves and to horrify despots.’”

    

     Not surprisingly, Espada’s willingness to “horrify despots” has earned him some enmity as well as admiration.  A few years ago, a Tucson, Arizona, bookstore that was to host his reading received a bomb threat.  While police evacuated the building and searched the grounds, Espada positioned himself under a lamppost and gave his reading in the parking lot.  “I don’t think about my physical or political safety,” says Espada.  “If I start fixating on consequences, then I’m finished.  Fortunately, the consequences usually don’t cross my mind until much later.”

 

      Questions abound among poets and critics alike whether poetry can be of any true political or social consequence.  Such discourse annoys Espada.  “The debate is a self-serving one for those poets who would like to remain apolitical intellectuals their whole lives,” he says.  “And, as we know, people can be furious in their defense of complacency.  They can be absolutely passionate in defense of their indifference. 

 

     “At the same time, there’s a very strong undercurrent that dates back to Whitman of poets who believe in justice and use their language on behalf of their belief in the difference between right and wrong.”

 

     Perhaps the greatest single influence on Espada’s work is neither Neruda nor Whitman, but his father, Frank Espada.  The elder Espada was a respected civil rights activist and organizer in New York City during the sixties and seventies.  A dark-skinned Puerto Rican, Frank Espada was arrested in 1949 for refusing to sit at the back of a bus in Biloxi, Mississippi.  During the week he spent in jail, he decided that he would spend the rest of his days fighting injustice wherever it confronted him.  Years later, when Martín was seven, Frank was “disappeared” again, when police arrested him for protesting discriminatory hiring practices at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.  Seeing Martín so shaken by his father’s disappearance, Frank decided it was time to start the boy’s political education, bringing young Espada along with him to political rallies and meetings.

 

 

     Frank would later provide Martín with his earliest model of the intersection of politics and art.  “He had always been a photographer,” writes Espada, in an essay from his collection, Zapata’s Disciple.  “And in the late 70’s a grant enabled him to create the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project, a photodocumentary and oral history of the Puerto Rican migration across the United States.”   Chances are, there may be a third generation of Espada artist-activists on the rise.  Martín’s teenaged son, Klemente, is a burgeoning playwright and actor who’s already had his work staged near their home in Amherst, Massachusetts.

 

      When the Neruda Foundation in Santiago, Chile asked Rattapallax editor, Ram Devineni, to organize an American delegation of poets to commemorate the centenary of Chile’s greatest poet, Martín Espada was the first to come to mind.  A longtime fan of Espada’s work, Devineni got the idea to do a film about the poet when he saw Espada reading “Alabanza” during a television interview.  Alabanza, a word that means “praise” in Spanish, is also the name of the documentary that follows Espada on this journey.  “I think Espada is the modern reincarnation of Neruda,” says Devineni.  “Like Neruda, his poetry is critical for many people involved in social causes so, for me, it was logical to bring him to Chile.  There were so many parallel things working all at once, it was almost like an omen.”

     Perhaps the most noteworthy parallel is that for both Chile and the United States, September 11 marks a national day of mourning.  On Tuesday, September 11, 1973, Chile’s presidential palace was bombed by a swarm of Hawker Hunter fighter jets.  The military coup, orchestrated by General Augusto Pinochet, signaled the overthrow of democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende.  Rather than surrender, President Allende committed suicide after giving his final radio address.   Dissidents were summarily gathered and killed by the thousands, ushering in a violent dictatorship that lasted seventeen years.  Pablo Neruda died within days of hearing of the coup.

     “Most people in this country have forgotten, or never knew, about the other September 11^th,” says Espada.  “This coup was backed by the Nixon administration, so the United States bears some degree of culpability for what happened there.  Chile suffered repression for seventeen years.  The deprivation of civil liberties, the use of torture, and the prevalence of arbitrary imprisonment were all justified in the name of national security.  Sound familiar?  Before the coup, many Chileans, accustomed to their own democratic tradition, said, ‘It can’t happen here.’  Anything can happen, anywhere.” 

     More than thirty years after the coup, thousands of the “disappeared” are still unaccounted for.  Families are still petitioning the government for answers.  Yet Espada was able to see a fortitude in the Chilean people that keeps them moving forward even in the wake of all that they’ve endured.  In his latest collection, Espada celebrates the resilience of the Chilean people, as well as the role played by the arts in the process of rebuilding. “Redemption is taking place,” says Espada.  “And this redemption involves creative forces like poetry and music.  We see this in the example of the poetry of Raul Zurita.  We see it in the revival of the work of Pablo Neruda, and the wonderful celebration of his life’s work.  This is all part of that redemption of that spirit.”

     Though only partially comprised of poems about Chile, The Republic of Poetry, is all about redemption.  Whether writing elegies for fellow poets like Robert Creeley and Jeff Male or about returning to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, Espada’s latest collection may be summed up in one word: heal.  As the United States observes the fifth anniversary of its 9/11, the Chile poems can be especially instructive.   “Poetry can be part of building a new world,” says Espada.  “If you look at the example of Chile during the Allende years, poetry was a part of that great flowering, and it can help the world heal in the wake of what has happened in the last few years.  In the wake of the destruction that the United States has suffered and now inflicts on others, the poets must speak.”

     As a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Martín Espada teaches the works of Pablo Neruda.  He’s been a student of Neruda’s life and work for as long as he’s been writing.  Espada returned from Neruda’s homeland rejuvenated, annealed and with a renewed sense of mission.  “If you’re a poet and you live and you work in the U.S., you often question your reality,” says Espada.  “You often wonder, ‘why am I doing this?’ You know?  ‘Nobody cares about poetry.’  And then you come to a place like this where poetry is such a passion, and you realize that the thing to which you’ve dedicated your life is actually a good thing and that it’s embraced by millions of people around the world.  And it’s important to remember that.  Being in Chile—the ‘Republic of Poetry’—made me believe in poetry again, made me believe that poetry could make a difference.  It gave me a renewed sense of faith, of hope.”  As citizens in Martín Espada’s new republic, we’re all the better for it.

 

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