*. Quote is excerpted from the rough cut to an unreleased film, titled Alabanza (after the Espada poem), about the role of poetry as a form of grieving, reconciliation, and hope after September 11, 2001, and September 11, 1973. See Alabanza in works cited and Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” pp. 3, 40n7, 514, 523.

La tumba de Buenaventura Roig

Book Review

Espada, Martín. La tumba de Buenaventura Roig: Selected Poems/Poemas selectos. Ed. César Salgado. San Juan, PR: Terranova, 2008. Print.

Martín Espada’s poetic voice stands out as unique within the diverse chorus of Puerto Rican poets’ voices in the United States. Even though he is a New Yorker by birth, he cannot be defined as a “Nuyorican” poet per se. Some aspects of his poetry, to be sure, coincide with that aesthetic, which emphasizes code switching and performance, but the thrust of Espada’s work seems to be headed in another direction entirely.

Poetry and poets, of course, cannot be categorized by rigid and exclusionary parameters, but—as a whole—Espada’s tone is more that of the prophet than of the protester: more that of open denunciation than of irony and play. It is a question of emphasis and accent, of vision and nuance, of mode and perspective.

His is a poetry of advocacy. It uses anecdotal material, giving it an epic projection. His long, incantatory verses, with their somewhat ritualistic repetitions, remind us of the cadence of psalms. Here also is a suffering people, a search for redemption, a wish for liberation. His poetry portrays the archetypical confrontation between the oppressed and the oppressor, the weak and the strong. The poet—like the psalmist—clamors for justice.

Relevant to his poetry is the fact that Martín Espada is a lawyer who champions immigrant causes. To this extent, his poetry has been part of his advocacy. And just as lawyers document in their allegations a history of wrongs to be righted, his poetry also documents a social situation that is revealed, described, and measured in surprisingly artistic terms that enrich it with unusual references, turning it into a statement that takes us into a different realm: one precisely of poetic justice.^[1]

La tumba de Buenaventura Roig: Selected Poems/Poemas selectos is his first book to be published in Puerto Rico, an anthology that includes selections from previous books, excepting his first and second volumes, respectively: The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (1982) and Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (1987). La tumba was published in a bilingual version (Spanish and English) with a splendid introduction by Professor César Salgado, who is also responsible for the translation of several poems (among the other translators are Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, Oscar Sarmiento, and Marisa Estelrich).

Each of Espada’s books is different in scope and theme. There is, nevertheless, a certain common expressiveness in them, and there are some thematic currents that underlie his work as a whole. It is fascinating to identify such continuities in this anthology. The poet’s dual vision of a personal past that has affected him directly (present since his bilingual book Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands [Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante]) is here manifested in poems like the one that gives the book its title and in “Niggerlips” (“Negro Bembón”).^[2] There is also a vision of a historic, collective experience, which has touched him as a member of a downtrodden nationality (present in poems about Puerto Rico’s political struggle) and of an ethnic group with which he feels a deep solidarity, as in “Two Mexicanos Lynched in Santa Cruz, California, May 3, 1877” (“Dos mexicanos linchados en Santa Cruz, California, 3 de mayo, 1877”) . This multiple prism—simultaneously individual, social, and historical—is the organizing principle in this anthology.

In anecdotal vignettes that seem like legal “case studies,” Espada’s poetry pronounces an indictment of the social injustices that affect immigrants. But although the situations may be concrete and individual, the immense disparity of forces between both parts of the divide universalizes those situations and projects them into the realm of myth. Thus, in “Federico’s Ghost” (“El fantasma de Federico”), the protagonist Federico, the boy who dies, poisoned by pesticides, is the embodiment of those who—like the biblical David in struggle with Goliath—fight against vastly superior forces. Just as in the poem “The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive” (“La amante de un subversivo es también subversiva”) (from City of Coughing and Dead Radiators [1993], Espada’s fourth collection of poetry), the obstinate resistance to tears that the subversive’s lover exhibits at the same time exemplifies and universalizes women’s refusal to be the object of condescension and marginalization. Luisa’s decision in “Thieves of Light” (“Los ladrones de luz”) (Imagine the Angels of Bread [1996]) to withhold the rent in face of the disastrous condition of her apartment is a stand as old as that of the poor against the rich.

These poems are not exempt from irony. “Bully” (“Buscabulla”) also from Rebellion/Rebelión (and catalogued in Espada’s Alabanza as well as Cary Nelson’s important Anthology of Modern American Poetry) describes an individual situation to a large extent involving Puerto Rico’s history, but also suggests a larger geopolitical one—that is, the United States vs. Latin America—and goes beyond to record its ultimate and very contemporary corollary: the unexpected turnabout resulting from the presence of millions upon millions of Latino immigrants who fled to the United States. This multitudinous group finds itself increasingly in the position to defy and subvert from within the myth of America’s supposed “generosity.” In “Bully” (“Buscabulla”), a statue of President Teddy Roosevelt is defaced by the children of immigrants. Espada writes:

The poet’s irony, however, is not nationally one-sided; it can also turn toward Puerto Rico. In a City of Coughing poem titled “Coca-Cola and Coco Frío” (“Coca-Cola y coco frío”), for example (that resonates with a very famous Tato Laviera poem titled “nuyorican,” where he asks, “[Y]o peleo por ti, puerto rico, ¿sabes?” [“I fight for you Puerto Rico, do you know?”] [1; spacing in original]), the thrust is against a colonized mentality that prefers everything imported from the United States rather than its own indigenous resources, culture, or history, no matter how inappropriate or irrelevant to the actual circumstances of the island. This trade off for the wonders of “free trade” is evidenced in the final lines of the poem, as Espada ironically, if not mournfully, considers how “[f]or years afterward, the boy marveled at an island / where the people drank Coca-Cola / and sang jingles from World War II / in a language they did not speak, / while so many coconuts in the trees / sagged heavy with milk, swollen / and unsuckled” (22–28).

A deep-seated emotion wells up at times, more affective especially because of the poet’s effort to keep it under control. “Portrait of a Real Hijo de Puta” (“Retrato de un verdadero hijo de puta”) (Rebellion/Rebelión) describes the hidden wounds and small triumphs of a young life begun under inauspicious circumstances. In that particular way in which Espada is able to look and judge, but also to feel and participate, the poet becomes an integral part of the scene described.

Imagery is strong and surprising. On occasion, it has a cinematic quality, as in the magnificent “When Songs Become Water” (“Cuando los cantos se vuelven agua”) (City of Coughing), in which words that flow into text, into song, into singing water, are seen as opposed to the immobilizing, solid force of blind violence. In other instances, as in “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” (“Los poetas fugitivos de Fenway Park”) (Imagine), there are beautiful action images that depict the movement of the batter in a baseball game, such as “The stroke was a pendulum of long muscle and wood,” where the poet describes the almost organic athleticism and mythos of Ted Williams (17).^[3] And in the long epic poem on Clemente Soto Vélez, “Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies” (“Sin grilletes, las manos son libélulas”) (Imagine), poetry can be counted upon to be as straight and sure as a bullet. There are also many graceful similes such as those found in “Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo” (“Ahora los muertos bailarán el mambo”) (Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2002 [2003]), a poem that conflates the fallen “Mambo King” Tito Puente with the Irish resistance leader James Connolly, written while Espada completed a writing residency on Achill Island, Ireland, in 2000. Consider the opening lines to this poem: “Last night the shadow of a cloud rolled off the bare mountain / like a shawl slipping from the shoulder of a giant” (1–2).

Poetry seems to be, for Martín Espada, a way of achieving justice. And justice goes much farther than his concern for Puerto Ricans and their fortunes. His poetry reflects upon the precarious—and unjust—social and political conditions to include Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, and Chile, among other places. The voice of the poet therefore denounces wrong wherever it is found. That voice now resonates in Spanish. It was high time his poetry was translated and published in Puerto Rico.

Notes

Ed. note: Indeed, Espada sees beyond the “tired notions of poetic justice, because all justice is poetic.” These comments are excerpted from his Hampshire College Commencement speech “The Republic of Poetry” (Copy on file).

See also Carvalho, “Introduction” Note 19 in this volume.

Ed. note: The first “b” in “bembón” is lowercased in the revised version of the poem that appears in La tumba. Cf. original in Rebellion/Rebelión.

Ed. note: See also Eric B. Salo’s “Muse on First” in this volume for a close and thorough reading of Espada’s baseball poetry. See also Espada’s forthcoming book The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park: Essays on Latinos and Baseball (Bloomsbury).

Chapter 11

The Poet Is a Historian, the Poem Is a Record

Carmen Dolores Hernández

Interview with Martín Espada

It was a sunny May morning when I interviewed poet Martín Espada in San Juan. We were sitting on the terrace of his hotel in the old part of the city, overlooking the beautiful bay, which has seen so many foreign incursions over the course of centuries. Espada, who has come to the land of his ancestors from his home in Amherst, Massachusetts, is no invader, but rather a long-absent son whose presence on the island is a harbinger of a closer literary relationship between Puerto Rican writers in the United States and those of the island.

CDH: You were born and raised in Brooklyn. Is it because of your parents that you feel so thoroughly Puerto Rican?

ME: My father, Frank Espada, was born in Utuado, a mountain town in the center of Puerto Rico, in 1930. During the sixties, he was a leader of the Puerto Rican community in New York. He also took part in the civil rights movement, which began for him when he was nineteen and stationed in San Antonio, Texas, with the U.S. Air Force. In December 1949, he was returning to New York by bus to spend Christmas with his family. He had to go through the Southern states, and when the bus stopped in Biloxi, Mississippi, he was arrested—like Rosa Parks—for refusing to sit at the back of the bus. He spent a week in jail, subjected to the laws of Jim Crow segregation. He then decided to fight that kind of injustice for the rest of his life. It was his first step toward a political conscience. I was born in 1957 and grew up in a very politically conscious family, in an atmosphere of resistance.

CDH: Is your mother also Puerto Rican?

ME: My mother is Jewish. Her last name is Levine. She [Marilyn Levine] was born and raised in New York, but her story is complicated because she became a Jehovah’s Witness.

CDH: What were your experiences growing up in New York as a Puerto Rican?

ME: I grew up in a section of Brooklyn called East New York, which had a reputation for violence. Before I was born, it had been a largely Irish and Jewish community. When I was growing up in the sixties, there was a mixed population, which included Puerto Ricans and African Americans.

CDH: Would you say that was a harbinger of what is, today, the cultural impact of the Latino presence in the United States, especially in the Northeast?

ME: “Aquí estamos y no nos vamos: Here we are and here we stay.” The debate on immigration is still red hot. There are protests all the time by immigrants and their children who clamor for legislation that will lead to citizenship. Sometimes it seems those protests hit a brick wall. Meanwhile, nobody asks Puerto Ricans for their opinion. We are still invisible; we have always been invisible. Our history has been hidden, forgotten. This has become an obsession for me. The poet has to be a historian. We have to say something against the “official” version of history. We have to remember. We not only have to remember, but we have to go on record: the poem is a record. That is the impulse of my book La tumba de Buenaventura Roig. The title poem springs from a trip my father and I made to Utuado in search of his grandfather’s grave—the grave of Buenaventura Roig. We didn’t find the grave, but we found something else: the poem.

CDH: You speak of records, of evidence, of history. How does your poetry intersect with your profession as a lawyer?

ME: I graduated from Northeastern Law School in 1985 and eventually went to work for a program called Su Clínica Legal in Chelsea, outside Boston, a poor community where I defended Latino families—many of them from Central America—against eviction. I am interested in advocacy, not only as a lawyer, but as a poet. Advocacy is part of the poetic tradition. We have Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century. In “Song of Myself,” he writes: “Through me many long dumb voices.”^[1] He speaks for those who have no voice: slaves, prisoners, prostitutes, laborers. He identifies with the downtrodden of the Earth. In Canto XII of “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” Chilean poet Pablo Neruda addresses himself to thousands of dead peasants and laborers over the centuries when he says: “I come to speak for your dead mouths.”^[2] Neruda is a disciple of Walt Whitman. He had a photograph of Whitman on his writing desk. Whitman was his literary father, and mine, too. I am part of that tradition. This is poetry that shows the human face of history and politics, an important poetic principle. It is not enough for the poem to contain abstract ideas about history and politics. We need the concrete, the human face: the eyes, the lips, the voice.

CDH: Is La tumba de Buenaventura Roig the first book you’ve published in Puerto Rico?

ME: Yes. I have published in the United States, England, Germany, Ireland, and Chile. There is a book coming out in Turkey. Smokestack Books, in Northern England, published Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas, a collection of poems about Puerto Rico. The audience in England and Ireland understands the concept of colonialism, but when I use that word in the United States, nobody understands. There is an illusion that the United States is not, and has never been, an empire.

CDH: You seem to be intent on achieving a better cultural understanding between the United States and Puerto Rico.

ME: That comes from my father’s influence. He always talked about building bridges between communities: bridges between the Puerto Rican and the African American communities in Brooklyn; between the Puerto Rican and the Chicano communities in the U.S.; between Puerto Ricans in the United States and Puerto Ricans on the island. Nothing is impossible where there are bridges.

CDH: How do you relate to Chicano literature?

ME: Chicano literature has certainly influenced me. Moreover, the Chicano literary community has many resources that it sometimes shares with me. I recently received an award from a cultural organization in the town of Mesilla, New Mexico, where every year there is a literary festival. I was the first Puerto Rican writer to receive it. I have not only been an advocate for Puerto Ricans, but for Latinos in general: for Chicanos, for Central Americans.

CDH: In view of the places where you have published your books and of your experience with Chicanos, it may be said that you are a sort of an “ambassador” for Puerto Rican poetry.

ME: A Puerto Rican poet has to be a historian, a journalist, a teacher, an organizer, and many other things. The English-speaking public in the United States has virtually no context for the Puerto Rican experience: almost all they know is West Side Story, and I’m not María.

CDH: As César Salgado, the critic and scholar, says in the introduction to La tumba, you don’t make frequent use of “code-switching.” Rather, you tend to write either in Spanish or English.

ME: Sometimes I use “code-switching,” as in the poem “Alabanza,” where that word is key. Every word has to justify its presence in my poetry, including the Spanish. Sometimes I use Spanish words in the body of an English-language poem. The Spanish word is like the key that opens the closed box of the poem. But I also use words that live between the two languages, as in the poem “Borofels,” which is the way two Puerto Rican characters in the poem pronounce the phrase “Board of Health.”

CDH: How do you relate to the Puerto Rican literary establishment?

ME: Well, I’m here now. That is a first step. I am fifty years old, and here I am. I feel very close to writers from the island, like Julia de Burgos, and writers from New York, like Jack Agüeros. I met Jack when I was ten years old. In La tumba there is a long poem in honor of Clemente Soto Vélez.^[3] He was a prophet. His voice was like thunder. He was my mentor, my teacher. He talked to me about how important it was to write in Spanish, but he accepted my writing in English. There was a deep personal and professional connection between us. My son’s name is Klemente (with a K).

CDH: Can you speak about the performance aspect of your poetry?

ME: Ideally, every poem lives in two worlds: on the page and on the air. Every performance ends with the body of the poet, but you want the poem to go beyond that. You want to leave something permanent, a monument, a tombstone for those who have no monument or tombstone. You want to leave something visible. In the United States many believe Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans have no written culture: that we are and should be invisible. The poet’s mission is to change that to make the invisible visible.

Notes

Portions of this interview originally appeared in Spanish in the Sunday Magazine of Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Día, May 18, 2008: 11–12.

Ed. note: Here Espada quotes from Section 24 of the poem, line 508.

Ed. note: The quoted phrase here is from line 28.

Clemente Soto Vélez (1905–1993) was a Puerto Rican poet and journalist who was politically affiliated with the Nationalist Party in Puerto Rico, whose leader was Pedro Albizu Campos. He was incarcerated in federal prison on the mainland, together with Albizu and poet Juan Antonio Corretjer, on charges of seditious conspiracy. When he was released in the early 1940s, he stayed on in New York, where there is now a Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center that honors his legacy.

Chapter 12

A Visit to the Bakery

Peter Nelson

The Martín Espada Papers at Amherst College

When I showed Martín Espada where his personal papers would be stored once they arrived to the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College, I sensed his wry satisfaction. This was in 2003, and I was giving him a tour of our library’s large underground off-site storage facility. For the library staff and anyone else at the College who knows about this facility, it is commonly known as “The Bunker.” That’s because from 1957 to 1971, that’s precisely what this extensive mountainside installation was: an exceedingly well-protected military communications center run by the Strategic Air Command during the height of the Cold War. With its underground location, extremely thick concrete walls, high ceilings, and a hulking entrance door of solid lead, the bunker was intended to serve as one of the chief command and control centers for the U.S. Air Force in the event of nuclear war; it is said to have been designed to survive anything short of a direct hit by a nuclear missile. Now, nearly all traces of its former military purpose are gone, although here and there (as in the two-story high “War Room” with a sign painted on the door reading “Senior Battle Staff Members Only”), a vibe of Dr. Strangelove does persist. After its military decommissioning, the Bunker served for several years as a records storage facility for the Federal Reserve Bank until Amherst College purchased it in 1989. It then was renovated thoroughly. Today, it provides additional collections storage space, not only for the Robert Frost Library, but also for two Amherst College museums. It is also the home of the Five College Library Depository (the latter being home, incidentally, to a large archive of the master film stock of the former East German movie production company, Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft, or DEFA).

Given its history and its amenities, then, it was rather easy for me to reassure Martín that the Bunker would do nicely to store his papers for posterity under secure and climate-controlled conditions (and, too, to dish out a healthy portion of historical irony for one and all, an irony so palpable on our little tour together as to not even merit much comment). For a writer who imagines a Republic of Poetry where “poets rent a helicopter / to bombard the national palace / with poems on bookmarks” (“Republic of Poetry” 24–26)—a writer, indeed, whose poetic work often resounds like a modern-day continuation of the Beatitudes—this irony, I suspect, was received tacitly and gleefully.

The Martín Espada Papers at Amherst College comprise more than thirteen linear feet of material, and additions are expected in coming years. Organized into fourteen series or groups,^[1] the collection contains the correspondence, poetry manuscripts and galley proofs, news clippings, contracts, posters, publicity materials, notebooks, photographs, video and audio recordings, and other materials documenting his personal life and his career as a poet, teacher, tenant lawyer, and political activist from 1957 to 2006. Acquisition of the papers by Amherst College in 2003 was largely facilitated by Martín Espada’s colleague at Amherst, Professor Ilan Stavans.

Although Martín Espada has never had a formal affiliation with Amherst College, the placement of his papers at Amherst is appropriate for a host of reasons.

First, it keeps his legacy in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, where he has lived and worked for the past sixteen years. The community is justly proud of its intertwined heritage of poetry, education, and activism (“Amherst—Where Only the H is Silent”). In this sense, Espada and his work are emblematic.

What is more, Espada joins the company of other notable American poets whose papers are preserved at the Amherst College Library, in cluding Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost (for whom the library is named), Louise Bogan, and alumni Rolfe Humphries ’15, Richard Wilbur ’42, and James Merrill ’47, to name but a few.^[2]

Additionally, the Espada Papers act as a significant anchor for the Library’s primary sources, not only in poetry, but also in a relatively new and growing collecting area: Latino/a studies. Books and personal papers generated by or relating to notable Latino/a (or Latino/a-allied) writers (Alicia Borinsky, Sandra Cisneros), scholars (Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Ivor Miller), activists (Jerry Cohen), and diplomats (Jeffrey Davidow, Dwight Morrow) embrace the culture and politics of the United States, Afro-Cuba, and Central and South America. This collecting focus of the Library relates closely to developing interests of Amherst’s faculty in their undergraduate teaching and research and makes, in addition, a significant contribution to similar scholarly resources in the Five College consortium to which Amherst belongs.^[3]

Espada’s writings and activism also have strong affinities with another major area of primary source documentation at Amherst: grassroots organizing and the alternative press. The Bloom Alternative Press Collection at Amherst College, a massive archive of more than 3,500 titles, brings together rare and often ephemeral “underground” publications from the 1960s and 1970s from the United States and many other countries. It is one of the best such collections in the country to document what was said and written at the grassroots level about issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, labor, war, poverty, and power. Moreover, other collections such as the recently acquired papers of alumnus Jerry Cohen ’63 (General Counsel for the United Farm Workers in the 1960s and 1970s and personal attorney of César Chávez) complement Espada’s own dissenting voice with regard to the rights of farm workers.

Browsing randomly among the boxes and folders of the Espada Papers reveals common themes but also regular surprises. Poetry suffuses all: draft poems (scrawled in numerous spiral notebooks), poems in galley proofs ready for publication, and poems in various states in between. Discussions of poems and poets who influenced Espada’s work appear in letters, articles, and transcripts of interviews. It should be no surprise that the names of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda crop up repeatedly. But perhaps the touchstone of all touchstones, as shown in Espada’s papers, is the name of Clemente Soto Vélez, the widely influential Puerto Rican nationalist, poet, journalist, and community organizer who, after release from imprisonment for seditious conspiracy in the 1940s, settled in New York City and organized for the rights of Puerto Ricans: indeed, for all Latino workers there. To understand the vision and ethos of Martín Espada’s life and writings, one would do well to study carefully the many references to Soto Vélez in the Espada Papers. (As is referenced elsewhere in the present volume, Espada’s son, Klemente, bears his name.)^[4]

As in most collections of personal papers, the best source for gathering an unfiltered sense of the subject is by reading his mail. In Series 6, “Correspondence, 1983–2003” are letters, postcards, and e-mail messages to and from fellow poets, readers, publishers, and friends. Enemies, too: Espada’s hate mail is preserved alongside the rest. Espada often filed photocopies (or duplicate printouts) of the letters he wrote, particularly later in this period when he wrote on a computer. One favorite of mine is a letter to the late Howard Zinn dated July 1, 2002,^[5] in which he sends along two new poems (now celebrated): “Ghazal for Open Hands” and “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100.”^[6] He briefly explains the origins of each, which are elegies for (respectively) the late poet Agha Shahid Ali and the forty-three members of HERE Local 100 (Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees) who died in the World Trade Center towers on
9/11.

Series 7 of the Espada Papers, “Controversies, 1995–2003,” is a riveting, often entertaining, sometimes maddening, and inspiring collection of Espada files on the many good fights from which he hasn’t backed down. Some of the controversies involve Espada only on the periphery, or as one united with many, such as in Poets Against the War,^[7] an organization of poets that was instigated by Sam Hamill in the wake of the 2003 White House poetry symposium organized by First Lady Laura Bush; the gathering was abruptly canceled when the Bush administration suspected that the event might actually turn into something more than a polite discussion of metaphor, rhyme, and meter.

Other controversies, however, have laid on Espada a fame reaching far beyond “mere” poetry circles. For example, pore through his file on the case that he eventually addressed in an article called “All Things Censored: The Poem NPR Doesn’t Want You To Hear.” The incident goes back to National Poetry Month 1997, when National Public Radio (NPR) representatives asked Espada to write (and read on the air) a poem in a journalistic style based on a story he encountered during his travels that month. When he presented the poem “Another Nameless Prostitute Says the Man is Innocent,”^[8] about the ongoing Mumia Abu-Jamal case, NPR got the shakes and refused to air the poem. Espada’s ire about this disheartening display of liberal cowardice was duly vented in the aforementioned essay. Thus, in one acid-free folder are documents touching on enormous and age-old questions of poetry, commentary, and censorship.^[9]

A similarly instructive (and delicious) example of controversy involving the media, the “Nike Poetry Slam” of 1997, is well documented in the papers.^[10] As a case study, however, it is not so much about poetry and censorship but rather poetry and commerce, as well as the ugly side of hip consumerism. The story of Espada’s response to Nike’s invitation to submit a poem befitting its celebration of female athletes in a series of TV commercials to be aired during the 1998 Olympic Games barely needs telling, as his letter has been widely published (including in essay form in Zapata’s Disciple—see “Poetics of Commerce”). Espada’s file contains not only the letter he wrote to Nike’s advertising agency and copies of the various publications in which it later appeared (with his approval), but also personal correspondence from friends and colleagues commenting on it.

Last, but certainly not least, the material grouped under the somewhat mysterious series title “Personal Affairs, 1957–2003,” bears mention. It includes juvenilia (childhood drawings, writings, and numerous family photographs); early academic work; unpublished poetry and prose; a copy of Espada’s high school’s literary magazine, the Inquiry, where his writing was first published; papers relating to his teaching at Suffolk University Law School and the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and the catalog of his father, documentary photographer Frank Espada, whose portraits of the Puerto Rican Diaspora are an aesthetic and political counterpoint to his son’s poetry that is both moving and instructive.^[11] (Many of Frank Espada’s pictures were also featured in his son’s The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero and as book cover images for that volume as well as Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction, Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands/Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante, Zapata’s Disciple, and La tumba de Buenaventura Roig: Selected Poems/Poemas selectos.)

Very often, individuals whose personal papers are turned over to a library do very little themselves to organize them beforehand. While this is unfortunate, it isn’t all that surprising, often since those individuals are dead or dying at the time their papers are collected, and their family or executors typically lack the ability, interest, or resources to handle the generally demanding task of reviewing, identifying, and arranging a large body of letters and files. Yet, even living figures who agree to offer their papers frequently assume a rather passive “take it as it is” attitude. In turn, this many times forces archivists to make ill-informed decisions when processing such materials after deposit.

Happily, with Martín Espada this was not at all the case. Throughout many months of preparing for the transfer of his papers to the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College, he worked diligently, identifying anything that was likely to seem puzzling to future visitors to the collection and organizing the unruly mass into meaningful subgroups. (I suspect that he also appreciated the opportunity to gain some perspective on his body of work through 2003 and to assess it comprehensively before it left his custody.) Demonstrating a true archival spirit, he was even willing to transfer everything into archival-quality folders and boxes. As his liaison archivist at Amherst, I recall that I only needed to provide him with the appropriate supplies and a few tips and guidelines, and he worked independently from there.

What this means is that future researchers in Espada’s papers are fortunate. The materials reflect their creator’s sense of its organic structure. Folder titles are Espada’s folder titles, and identifications of people in photographs and correspondence are likely to be highly accurate.^[12]

Martín Espada is fond of Roque Dalton’s observation that “[. . .] poetry, like bread, is for everyone” (9).^[13] His ethos is one that espouses the democratic, indeed radical, inclusion of poetry and art in everyday life. This is why his poems so often read like still-hot, highly relevant commentaries on the day’s news. If poetry is like bread, intended to be shared as common, unpretentious, fortifying food, then consider the Martín Espada Papers as a visit to the bakery. The bakery, too, is open to all who wish to study Espada’s process of creation over the years and to appreciate the relentless effort of his commitment to feed the masses.

Notes

Cross reference to Alabanza. The following poem cited in this essay is also contained in Espada’s Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2002 (Alabanza page reference included): “Prisoner AM-8335 and His Library of Lions” 187–89.

The organization of the papers is as follows:

Series 1. Books, 1982–2006; Series 2. Awards and Honors, 1983–2003; Series 3. Events, 1985–2003; Series 4. Translations, 1989–2003; Series 5. International, 1998–2003; Series 6. Correspondence, 1983–2003; Series 7. Controversies, 1995–2003; Series 8. Readings, Lectures, and Workshops, 1982–2003; Series 9. Miscellaneous Works by and about Espada, 1984–2003; Series 10. Notebooks, 1986–2003; Series 11. Personal Affairs, 1957–2003; Series 12. Video Recordings, 1984–2003; Series 13. Graphic Material, 1983–2003; Series 14. Audio Recordings, 1982–2003.

Amherst holds a large collection of Merrill family papers and a small amount of the poet’s correspondence. Most of Merrill’s papers are held at Washington University.

The Five College consortium is comprised of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Ed. note: See Sarmiento Note 6 in this volume for more on Clemente [Klemente] Espada.

See Box 5, folder 56D.

Ed. note: See also Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical” 440–41; 450, 500–01n18; and 617n19.

Ed. note: See M. Espada, Alabanza 230–32. The poem is examined at some length in Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 4 “‘Armed with a terrorist’s sonnet’—The Language of War: Espada’s Historical Trace of Neoliberalism” in the subsection titled, “September 11, 2001—The American 9/11 Attacks and Beyond the Post-9/11 Period: Neoliberal History and Anti-Imperial Overtones in ‘Alabanza,’ U.S.–Middle East Relations,” pp. 435–52.

And later an anthology of the same name. See Hamill.

Ed. note: For more on Espada’s connections to Poets Against the War, see also Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 5 “From a Republic of Property to a Republic of Poetry—The Language of Possibility: Espada’s Poetry as Politics and Pedagogy” in subsection II “The ‘Poet as Public Citizen’: Poetry as Protest, Poetry as Public Pedagogy,” pp. 530–63.

Ed. note: This poem is housed in Espada’s Mayan Astronomer, pp. 74–77. For more information on the NPR controversy, see also M. Espada, Zapata’s Disciple 125–35, and M. Espada, “All Things Censored” in the Progressive, where the story originally appeared. For another poem on Mumia Abu-Jamal by Espada, see also “Prisoner AM-8335 and His Library of Lions” in Mayan Astronomer, pp. 78–79. This poem is also reproduced in Alabanza, pp. 187–89.

Box 5, folder 57.

10.

Box 5, folder 68.

11.

Significant portions of Frank Espada’s project have recently appeared in print. See his Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People.

Ed. note: For more on Frank Espada, see Carvalho, Puerto Rico Is in the Heart: Emigration, Labor, and Politics in the Life and Work of Frank Espada.

12.

Ed. note: Espada’s gravitation toward the archival process is a somewhat natural extension of one of his passions: historical research. Recall that Espada holds a bachelor’s in Latin American history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. See also Carmen Dolores Hernández’s interview with Espada, “The Poet Is a Historian,” included in this volume.

13.

Ed. note: This citation from Dalton’s “Como tú” (“Like You”) serves as titular inspiration for Espada’s edited collection on poets of the political imagination, Poetry like Bread.

Chapter 13

The Great Bell in Martín Espada’s Chest

Andy Croft

It was after the Liverpool reading^[1]

As we walked back towards the hotel,

Though he tried not to show it, the visiting poet

Was suddenly feeling unwell.

Perhaps he was suffering from jet lag,

Perhaps he just needed a rest,

But down Penny Lane, he began to complain

Of a sharp ringing pain in his chest.^[2]

At the hospital none of the doctors

Could explain what the problem might be,

So he said where it hurt and they took off his shirt

And they tapped him three times on each knee.

Then they measured and prodded and weighed him

From his beard to the soles of his feet,

But his arteries still pumped, and his heart-beat still thumped

(On the left side, where all hearts should beat).

Since he seemed in such good working order

The doctors could hardly explain

Why this model of fitness (as God was their witness),

Should be in such terrible pain.

But before they could safely discharge him,

They decided to do one more test

But all they could see from a quick ECG

Was what looked like a bell in his chest.

Within minutes a team of consultants

Were stood at the foot of his bed,

“It’s impossible surely—no wonder he’s poorly,

By rights this man ought to be dead.”

Well they needed more time to establish

Where the bell in his rib-cage was from,

So they called in the Law so they could be quite sure

That the bell wasn’t really a bomb.

It was all in the next morning’s papers,

Who had somehow got wind of the test:

“Is he clapped out or cracked? Is he freakish or fact?

Human found with a bell in his chest!”

So the government launched an inquiry

To allay any public unrest;

The inquiry was clear there was nothing to fear

From a man with a bell in his chest:

“This is not the long-lost bell of Bosham,

Or the bell that’s beneath Comber Mere,

Or the bell which the rats thought to put on the cat,

Or the one from the Santa Maria;

“It possesses no military value,

And investors aren’t likely to pay

Just to sponsor a chime that cannot tell the time

And does not call the faithful to pray;

“We conclude that this bell is quite useless,

Its commercial potential is small,

And it’s only perhaps if we melt it for scrap

It will have any value at all;

“We propose, in the interests of science,

To cut out the great bell with a knife,

Though there is a slight risk (the report here was brisk)

That it might cost the patient his life.”

Although previously patient, the patient

Now opened his mouth to protest,

And the sound which came out was an eloquent shout

And it rang like a bell in his chest;

It was loud as a shirt from Hawai‘i,

It was deep as a bell lost at sea,

And it rolled its long tongue ’round a carillon song

That was ringing to set the world free;

And it rose like a wave in the ocean,

And it echoed the hopes of the years

Like an ancient dry well or a green broken bell,

And it swelled like a chorus of tears;

And it rang for the weak and the hungry,

And it sang for the poor and oppressed,

And all those who bear violence with patience and silence,

Forgetting the bell in their chest.

Though the world may be heavy and hollow,

It can ring out as poetry does,

But don’t ask why it rolls or for whom the bell tolls—

It’s still singing for each one of us.

Notes

Ed. note: Andy Croft was kind enough to supply some background on this poem, as well as to point out some important literary allusions contained therein, in an e-mail to me dated November 6, 2009. See Croft, “[A]s promised” (cited with permission):

[The poem] is based on a health scare Martín had when he was reading in the UK last year. It is supposed to be a light-hearted and nonsensical poem, although there are some rather more serious literary echoes in the background: Adrian Mitchell’s “The Great Bell in Paul Robeson’s Chest,” Martín’s “You Got a Song, Man,” [Nazim] Hikmet’s “Angina Pectoris,” [Pablo] Neruda’s “Esta campana rota,” and [Aleksandr] Blok’s “Devushka pela v tsirkovnom hore.” (n. pag.)

Similarly, Espada commented on this same poem in a later correspondence, adding important contextual details. See M. Espada “RE: Academic Freedom” (cited with permission). He writes:

The title, at least, is based on an Adrian Mitchell poem called, “The [Great] Bell in Paul Robeson’s Chest.”

Adrian was a great friend to both of us. When he died, I translated that poem into Spanish and read it in tribute to Adrian in London. (n. pag.)

See also Sergei Esenin’s “The moon is the tongue . . .”; lines 7–8 from Robert Creeley’s “Old Story”; and Espada’s poem “You Got a Song, Man” (that borrows for its refrain the “song” and “bell” lines from Creeley’s poem) that served as supplemental literary inspiration for Croft’s poem. Additional information on the Espada and Creeley poems is documented in M. Espada, “Notes on the Poems: ‘You Got a Song, Man’” in Republic of Poetry.

Ed. note: See Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical” 115, 232, 246, and 304–05n135.

“The poets must speak”: Postscripts and Epilogue

La tumba de Buenaventura Roig

Book Review

Notes

The Poet Is a Historian, the Poem Is a Record

Notes

A Visit to the Bakery

Notes

The Great Bell in Martín Espada’s Chest

Notes