David Ray
ONE OF JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA’S GOALS is to “wake us from our lethargic indifference,” a statement that reminds me of Chekhov, who wrote that every gluttonous family at dinner should be awakened by a hammer reminding them of their selfishness and uncaring for others. It’s a powerful image, relevant today, and few writers use their hammers with as much power as Baca. In a day when the word poetry is not apt to conjure images of profound emotion but of cute manipulation of language, even to the point of meaninglessness, a few poets like Baca stand out as truth-tellers facing the rawest reality of human nature, using their own experience without caution.
Baca’s Lucia poems will inevitably be compared with W.D. Snodgrass’s powerful Heart’s Needle, written about his love for his daughter and their separation through divorce. Happily, the Lucia poems are not so encumbered with pain, and the structure he chose for the book represents a departure from his earlier work. “I wrote each poem from a different city or hotel,” he explains, “reaching back into memory to explore an experience I had there in that city or hotel and tying it to the birth of my daughter, to her presence in the world,”
His work is embued with gratitude and appreciation, and the voice is not that of the wild, lost man in the world, but a lost man saved by his writing and his recuperative reflection on the past. His goal, he writes, is “to cast out my net and catch this contemporary moment and present day and try to squeeze from the two a third understanding, a third nit of appreciation—my experience as a wild, lost man in the world who now, years later, turns to love for his daughter as an opening for insights and gratitude.”
This survivor of many hardships is no longer writing as “God’s angry man,” but one who uses a gentler language than in earlier work. This fresh sensibility is rich in insights and gratitude for the life he has earned through self-discipline. And though more tender, the poems are just as powerful as when he was hammering away. Probably conscious of the temptation to be too tender, he remarks that he tries to replace the too often used word “beautiful” with something else. But my rejoinder is that there should be no limits to such a word if it’s justified by the subject, in which case he should use it con permisso as often as he wishes.
Many great writers have come out of prisons, perhaps because, like Jimmy Baca and Etheridge Knight, they can see—with eyes wide open—that the world outside is just as crazy, corrupt, and violent as the world inside. Baca, with his hammering poetry and prose and more recent tribute to his daughter, and, his nuova vita, a gift from selfless love, will never be accused of political correctness. In this latest of his electrifying books he proves that tender, erotic,and joyous life outdoes every gain of empire and greed. His bitterness sings. His grim knowledge that politicians are thieves of happiness, bent on trading lives for oil and turf, saddens and enrages him, but he manages to scream joy as well as pain to the heavens. Prisons will never replace writing colonies, but perhaps they’ll have a better chance of now and then turning out a Cervantes, Genet, or Baca.