mi profesor, Martín Espada and strange walk-in clinics

It's been a long time since I took Latino Poetry in 1998. Time has brought with it several jobs, several moves and several shifts, but Martín Espada is one of my favorite poets and will always be.

I got a chance to hear him read today. Here's a few of the pieces he read:

Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989

No one asks
where I am from,
I must be
from the country of janitors,
I have always mopped this floor.
Honduras, you are a squatter's camp
outside the city
of their understanding.

No one can speak
my name,
I host the fiesta
of the bathroom,
stirring the toilet
like a punchbowl.
The Spanish music of my name
is lost
when the guests complain
about toilet paper.

What they say
must be true:
I am smart,
but I have a bad attitude.

No one knows
that I quit tonight,
maybe the mop
will push on without me,
sniffing along the floor
like a crazy squid
with stringy gray tentacles.
They will call it Jorge.


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Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100

for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees
Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant,
who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
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. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.

Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.

After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.

from Alabanza: New & Selected Poems --> --> --> --> --> --> --> -->

..>

Martín Espada

A MAYAN ASTRONOMER IN HELL'S KITCHEN by Martín Espada
A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen is the title of Martín Espada's new book. The title reflects the cultural and linguistic mix in which Espada lives, shuttling from his Puerto Rican heritage to Old Guard Connecticut.
The book begins in Puerto Rico with the poet's relatives. These include a dying grandmother and a cousin whose stock of miracle cookware fails to heat the family dinner. About his father in Brooklyn, the poet writes:
Sometimes I dream
my father is a guitar,
with a hole in his chest
where the music throbs
between my fingers
("My Father as a Guitar")
Espada also writes about a magically real politician ("The Governor of Puerto Rico Reveals at His Inaugural That He Is The Reincarnation of Ponce de Leon") and the mixture of foreign birds in a luxury hotel in San Juan:
The White cockatoo from Australia
twirls tricks with a hostess
. . .
the scarlet macaw of Brazil
yammers a joke about pina coladas
. . .
the peacock of India
skitters around the koi pond
. . .
the frostbitten turkey from North Carolina
thaws in the kitchen
("Ornithology at the Caribe Hilton")




Poet, Essayist, Editor & Translator

Sandra Cisneros says: "Martín Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors." Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published thirteen books in all as a poet, essayist, editor and translator. His eighth collection of poems, The Republic of Poetry, was published by Norton in October, 2006. Of this new collection, Samuel Hazo writes: "Espada unites in these poems the fierce allegiances of Latin American poetry to freedom and glory with the democratic tradition of Whitman, and the result is a poetry of fire and passionate intelligence." His last book, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002 (Norton, 2003), received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. An earlier collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and two NEA Fellowships. He recently received a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation,The Best American Poetry. He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata's Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry on CD, called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). Much of his poetry arises from his Puerto Rican heritage and his work experiences, ranging from bouncer to tenant lawyer. Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.
So I picked up Alabanza (actually, he was giving away 3 of his books), which means "Praise" in English. He signed it for me and we chatted a bit. I told him when I taught high school English in Lawrence, that I read his work and work from his list of poets to my 5th grade-level readers and they loved it. It was those rare times that they actually quieted down and listened.

We read in both languages. It made my heart soar.

And then, because of all the stress of dealing with this slumlord, I've come down with a sinus infection. I was turned down at 3 walk-in clinics in Lawrence today because of my insurance. Not that I don't have insurance, just because my Primary Care is in Medford. Thought I would save myself the gas. I ended up having to go to Medford anyway, because they would have seen me, but I would have paid out of pocket and I had no cash on me. I'm sure the MD would have been more than happy with the cash. And, I'm not griping for my own behalf because I'm one of the lucky ones in this country with insurance and I had other options, but if you live the El Barrio and you're sick, then this is it. Maritza, the nurse who managed intake was more than welcoming albeit overwhelmed with sick patients. I thank her, even though it didn't work out. I would have paid the cash, but all I had was a check. She saw my book..."Alabanza..."! she exclaimed.



We are the richest country in the world. What have be become? This looks more like a place where one would go to buy used, plastic furniture than a health-care office.

So I say Alabanza! to you, Maritza, the nurse from the walk-in clinic on Franklin Street.

Tenga un bueno el fin de semana, Señora. Paz.
Hispanic Heritage Month 2007