Edward J. Carvalho
If you were to ask me what I remember most from that night it was how the man’s entire being was fantastically alive with poetry. And as I listened, so, too, I watched as the poet engaged in a lyrical dance, the performance of his words tied to the movement of his body that itself seemed rooted in ancestry and connected to history. Occasionally, his foot would arch, or he would lean forward to draw out a particular phrase and accent a passage. In another moment, he would punctuate certain syllables with his hand or follow a word’s decay with the contraction of his torso, as if to conduct the harmony of praise or the dirge of lamentation. He literally had become a rhythmic embodiment of the verse he read, a performance that resulted in a kind of symbiosis between the corporeal and the ethereal, the physical and the metaphysical. His words no longer merely “live[d] on the page”[1]; they manifested orally/aurally, at once communicating with the audience as literature that was both atmospheric and oracular.
Such was my first introduction to Martín Espada in 2004, when I met the poet at a Boston Adult Literacy charity function.[2] He opened with a bilingual (Spanish and English) recitation of Whitman’s no. 24 from “Song of Myself” before reading his own work. Espada was the last to read that evening—the unstated headliner, as it was. But in truth, Espada was not reading his work at all. There was no affected lilt of institutional privilege when he spoke; neither was there what I describe as “the cold tracheotomy” at the podium, the state of nervous self-consciousness that too often signals a recitation from a junior-level poet, such as one finds at many contemporary readings. He was a master, whose voice had effectively wiped away the soporific monotone of the Ivy-League writer who first took the stage (an NPR poet, as it would happen)[3] and overshadowed the plasticized cadence of the well-known nature poet who immediately preceded him. What was made clear in Espada’s reading, however, was more than his command of vocalization and poetic presence in the shadow of these other writers—these qualities were obvious. Rather, it was the capacity for his verse to raise awareness, not only to social issues, but also in a way that would illuminate, for me especially, an entirely new way of understanding poetry. Beyond focusing on a mere celebration of artistic consequence, Espada taught me what it would mean, as a writer, to engage in an act of generosity and reciprocity with the audience, to see poetry as a political response.[4] At a time when slam poetry was redefining the landscape of American poetry, and to a great extent challenging the direction of the genre itself through its homogenization of form, he singularly “restored my faith” in the power of poetry to communicate and transform, as a medium molded from the tradition of writers like Whitman and Ginsberg.[5]
From that singular defining moment in Boston, the hook was set, and I became a voracious reader of all things Espada. Still, there was no way for me to anticipate the significance of that encounter, let alone prognosticate on how far those initial reverberations would carry, such as they have.
As it so happened, I would spend the next ten years of my life wholly committed to studying, (re)reading, and analyzing Espada’s catalog, teaching his poetry in university classrooms, producing a lengthy dissertation on his life and work, conducting interviews with him, and publishing a book on his father Frank Espada, all while simultaneously proselytizing the many things Espada I would discover, and arguing, to anyone who would listen, for why we need to be reading his canon and paying closer attention to the important social commentary it contained.[6] The inspiration for this book was largely the result of that research commitment and those collective experiences, and its publication marks the culmination of that almost decade-long journey.
Originally, this manuscript was conceived in 2008 as a collection of essays for the inaugural special issue of The Acknowledged Legislator, an academic journal I had founded that eventually came to be known as the “Espada Journal” in some quarters.[7] After careful consideration, however, it was determined that any serious effort to raise awareness of Espada’s body of work within the academy, the necessity for which is argued in this volume’s introduction, demanded the journal project be reconceived as a book, preferably one that carried with it both the institutional support and imprimatur of a respected university press, like Fairleigh Dickinson. And so, some five years later, the journal project ultimately was rethought and reconfigured into its present iteration, Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martín Espada, in order to best serve that interest.
Before leaving readers to explore on their own and pore through the contents of this volume, I want to draw their attention to some useful background information. A good portion of the Acknowledged Legislator content was assembled and preliminarily copyedited at roughly the same period I was completing my dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical,” a comprehensive 772-page single-author study that examines the historical, cultural, and economic impacts of neoliberal reforms on Espada’s life and work (2011). Thus it can be said that these two projects, the dissertation and the present edited collection before you, were not developed as entirely separate manuscripts, but as intentionally designed companion volumes that would serve as a unified and complementary, if not holistic, statement on the poet’s canon.[8] As the definitive resources on Martín Espada, these two manuscripts most certainly should be consulted in tandem and read with this critical relationship in mind.
See Al Young’s description of poetry and its links to orality/aurality in his introduction to Langston Hughes in the Poetry Speaks volume, where he writes: “[M]y classmates and I understood that poems did not live on the page; they only camped there” (152).
The phrase “first introduction” really should be clarified with “first personal introduction.” Truth be told, I had been exposed to Espada’s poetry for about a month or two prior to the event, at the encouragement of my then–MFA mentor Beatrix Gates, who recommended I begin reading Espada’s City of Coughing and Dead Radiators and A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen.
An ironic circumstance, considering that Espada himself was once an NPR poet before a major controversy erupted over his decision to write a poem about political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal that NPR ultimately censored. This controversy is examined in Espada’s “All Things Censored” from his first collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple.
The reference to artistic “consequence” is a nod to fellow poet and friend Joseph Spece. See, for example, his Twitter feed @josephspece (esp. the tweets from June 17 and September 11, 2013, respectively, as listed in Works Cited under Spece, “Politics” and “Aha”). See also my response to Spece’s observations on poetic “consequence” and other related matters in Note 40 of my introduction to the present volume.
Poetry as an “act of generosity and reciprocity” and is a phrase modified and adopted from poet-scholar and Chilean exile Marjorie Agosin. See Alabanza in Works Cited.
See reference to this in my and Espada’s interview, “A Branch on the Tree of Whitman,” pp. 74–75. See also Note 6 below.
My second encounter with Espada was a year later when I studied with him for a weeklong session of poetry workshops in Truro, Massachusetts. Fortuitously, for both of us, I think, the week coincided with the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Walt Whitman’s seminal volume, Leaves of Grass. Sensing the historical importance of this convergence, I asked Espada for an interview, to which he agreed. That interview from July 2005, “Branch on the Tree of Whitman,” has since been republished several times. My graduate work at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) over the next several years also yielded quite a few opportunities to advance the Espada cause. In April 2007, I cofacilitated Espada’s visit to IUP for a National Poetry Month reading; a year later, I coordinated my second interview with Espada, conducted in his University of Massachusetts Amherst office. The excerpted portions of this interview would be published as “‘Taking Back the Street Corner,’” first in the Works and Days special journal issue on academic freedom and then later as an edited reprint in the book version of that manuscript, my and David Downing’s coedited Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era.
Martín Espada references the project in his Acknowledgements to The Trouble Ball, p. 12: “Many thanks [. . .] to Ed Carvalho, for the Espada Journal.”
There are extensive intertextual references between these two volumes (the dissertation to the present book of criticism and vice versa). The internal dissertation references point to the original iteration of the journal volume identified as “Martín Espada: An Appreciation. Spec. issue of Acknowledged Legislator (2012) (forthcoming). Print” in Works Cited under Carvalho, Edward J., ed., which was the original working title of this manuscript. Cited pagination was not sequential for the journal essays but rather tied to individual essay galleys. For more information, see the second paragraph of general note at the end of chapter 2 in Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” pp. 117–18, that begins “Pagination for the Acknowledged Legislator (also known as the Espada Journal) . . .”