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WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD, SEPTEMBER 12,
2004
Poet's Choice
By Edward Hirsch
Martín Espada believes that the pursuit of social and political justice can
and must be joined to the quest for art. These ideals are for him
inseparable.
He is a Latino poet who takes a cue from Whitman -- "Vivas to those
who have failed!" -- and dreams of an inclusive democracy. He stands up for
what Whitman calls "the rights of them the others are down upon" and writes
a fiery, impure, earth-tinged, human-centered poetry.
"Alabanza," the title of Espada's new and selected poems, means
"praise" in Spanish. It has a religious sense and derives from "alabar," to
celebrate with words. Espada self-consciously uses poetry to celebrate those
who don't usually find their way into literature -- the unsung and
marginalized, the overlooked and forgotten. He finds his title in some
moving anaphoric lines from the poem "Oubao-Moin" by the Puerto Rican poet
Juan Antonio Corretjer (1908-1985), which serve as an epigraph and set the
tone for Espada's work over the past two decades.
Gloria a las manos que la mina excavaran.
Gloria a las manos que el ganado cuidaran.
Gloria a las manos que el tabaco, que la caña y el café sembraran . . .
Para ellas y para su patria, ¡alabanza! ¡alabanza!
Glory to the hands that dug the mine.
Glory to the hands that cared for the cattle.
Glory to the hands that planted the tobacco, the sugarcane and the coffee .
. .
For them and for their country, praise! Praise!
Espada's poems are haunted by voices and memories. Refugees and
immigrants call out to him. "I cannot evict them/ from my insomniac nights,"
he writes, "tenants in the city of coughing/ and dead radiators." He
fantasizes that "this is the year that squatters evict landlords" and that
"those/ who swim the border's undertow/ and shiver in boxcars/ are greeted
with trumpets and drums/ at the first railroad crossing/ on the other side."
The title poem, "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100," memorializes 43
restaurant workers who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade
Center. "Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,/ like
Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium," he declares
in a poem that becomes a virtual roll call of poor countries. "Praise the
great windows where immigrants from the kitchen/ could squint and almost see
their world, hear the chant of nations:/ Ecuador, México, Republica
Dominicana,/ Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh./ Alabanza."
Here is a villanelle that characteristically becomes a hymn to a group of
Spanish-speaking prisoners incarcerated in upstate New York:
The Prisoners of Saint Lawrence Riverview
Correctional Facility,
Ogdensburg, New York, 1993
Snow astonishing their hammered faces,
the prisoners of Saint Lawrence, island men,
remember in Spanish the island places.
The Saint Lawrence River churns white into Canada, races
past barbed walls. Immigrants from a dark sea find oceanic
snow astonishing. Their hammered faces
harden in city jails and courthouses, indigent cases
telling translators, public defenders what they
remember in Spanish. The island places,
banana leaf and nervous chickens, graces
gone in this amnesia of snow, stinging cocaine
snow, astonishing their hammered faces.
There is snow in the silence of the visiting rooms, spaces
like snow in the paper of their poems and letters, that
remember in Spanish the island places.
So the law speaks of cocaine, grams and traces,
as the prisoners of Saint Lawrence, island men,
snow astonishing their hammered faces,
remember in Spanish the island places.
Editor's Note: Martín Espada will recite his poetry as part of an
homage to Nuyorican poets at the Kennedy Center's Americartes Festival,
Friday, Sept. 17, at 7:30 p.m.
( All quotations are from Martín Espada, "Alabanza: New and Selected Poems
1982-2002." Norton. Copyright © 2003 by Martín Espada.)
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