1. The above citation from Espada appears in Stavans, “Poetry and Politics” 69.

The Republic of Memory

Since 1982, activist and poet Martín Espada has forged an oeuvre that is at once American, U.S. Latino, and inter-American, as it is engaged in a global poetics of dissent. As argued by Edward J. Carvalho in the introduction to this volume, “Espada’s later poetry has in fact modulated from a Puerto Rican-specific or Latino-centric vantage to one that embraces a heightened (inter)national consciousness,” evidenced most compellingly in the democratic ethos of The Republic of Poetry (2006). That work serves in part to demonstrate how Espada continues to develop what I refer to as a “republic of memory” in the face of colonial struggle.

At the time of this writing, the Espada canon has been translated into multiple languages with editions published in several countries (such as England, Germany, Chile, Ireland, Turkey, Spain).^[1] His Republic of Poetry (2006) and the bilingual collection of Espada’s previously published poems, La tumba de Buenaventura Roig: Selected Poems/Poemas selectos (2008), sustain the poetic commitment to preserve historical memory, as well as to breathe new life into political acts of solidarity. The latter compilation of Espada’s work differs from his collection Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2002 (2003) in that it excludes poems from Espada’s first two books, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (1982) and Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (1987). But even with those exclusions notwithstanding, La tumba also offers the reader a definitive statement on the poetics of dissent as cultivated by Espada.

Both Republic of Poetry and La tumba are as concerned with building monuments in the republic of memory, as critic César Salgado has aptly observed,^[2] as with tearing down false ones, imbued with the mission to heal historical trauma at personal, individual, national, hemispheric, and global levels. To this extent, they, along with the rest of his canon, link to create a matrix between Latino and broader working-class struggle in the United States, interacting with political repression in Latin America, as well as with national and international poets. As in his earlier works, “justice” is not merely a cynic’s word found only in the dictionary; human rights struggle as a theme does not risk retrograde art; and speaking for the silenced is not paralyzed by postmodernist critique. In Puerto Rican terms, while clearly “meta-leftist,” his work is not panfletismo,^[3] but the charged living legacy of independentista poets such as “national poet” Juan Antonio Corretjer, Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, and Francisco Matos Paoli, with a persistent working-class ethos going back to Bernardo Vega and Jesús Colón of the early Puerto Rican diaspora (the latter of whom is discussed in an important Latino Studies interview with José B. Gonzalez). As Espada himself characterizes in his “Poetry Like Bread” essay from Zapata’s Disciple, the work of t/his community of poets relies upon a “[p]olitical imagination [that] goes beyond protest to articulate an artistry of dissent” (100; emphasis in original).

Espada’s poetics were forged while growing up in East New York, Brooklyn, still one of the toughest and most underprivileged parts of New York, and honed by holding various blue-collar jobs—many while studying history and law and by later advocating as a tenant lawyer. That pronounced voice of the laborer with each volume has deepened poetic solidarity to struggles against social inequality everywhere, in both historic and contemporary terms. Salgado has characterized this development in Espada’s work as “fields of interlocking transnational stories,” encompassing, for example, Latin America, Ireland, the Spanish Civil War, the General Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, along with “a weightier presence of the poet’s persona acting as side character, as narrator, as singer, as prophetic seer” in the spirit of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, the latter of whose work Espada teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (Salgado, “Martín Espada”). Combined with this, he simultaneously pays homage to poets of the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, the Sanctuary Movement,^[4] and most consistently, the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. Yet, there is also plenty of room for play, as he often peppers his collections with humorous lyrics, odes to objects or food in the style of Neruda, or ironically dark, acerbically brief sketches reminiscent of Pedro Pietri’s short poems.

In interviews, his poems, and prose, Espada espouses Whitman’s and Neruda’s poetic missions, for example, egalitarianism as praxis, to have a radically transformative effect on society, decrying what he sees as the anti-Whitmanian “movement toward obscurity, toward a trivialization of poetry, where the goal is to adopt a pose of detached, hip cynicism” at some MFA programs in the United States (M. Espada qtd. in Carvalho, “Branch on the Tree of Whitman” 73).^[5] Judging from Espada’s television appearances in the PBS American Experience documentary Walt Whitman and his interviews and conversations with Bill Moyers (from 2007 to the more recent discussion in 2013),^[6] the urgency to maintain this connection as a thriving living legacy is a matter of poetics, political struggle, and practical survival. Espada also notes his indebtedness to the visual and plastic arts, such as the Mexican muralists. In an interview with Luis Alberto Urrea, the works—and political commitments—of such artists as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, far from being museum pieces, are instead invoked as an inherited living tradition. The iconographic imagery of the muralists also suggests the tone, arresting import, and currency of documentary photography, from Mexican contemporaries of Rivera, such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo, to Depression-era Farm Security Administration photography by figures such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Jack Delano (who spent much of his career in Puerto Rico), to Robert Frank, Sebastião Salgado, and of course Espada’s father, Frank Espada.^[7] The overall tone of Espada’s poetry is one pregnant with reverence for all these traditions, again, in many cases, traversing and forged by inter-American exchange; he makes the ordinary room a cathedral apse where all the petitions and offerings crowd the wall, burdened with suffering, expectant with hope, and nonetheless accompanied by a fiercely indomitable sense of endurance.

Sustaining and advancing these traditions, Republic of Poetry, a Paterson Award winner and finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize,^[8] revisits Latin American history with a startling cycle of poems dedicated to Chile’s emergence and hopeful redemption from the harrowing Pinochet dictatorship. The development of the book coincides with Espada’s 2004 visit to Chile (with poets Yusef Komunyakaa and Nathalie Handal) to commemorate the centenary of Pablo Neruda’s birth.^[9] The eponymous opening poem, with its dedication “For Chile,” acts as a whimsical invitation that belies some of the unflinching poems to immediately follow. At the very least, “The Republic of Poetry” cushions them with aural and tactile rituals of healing, suggesting the often heartbreaking style of the Latin American testimonio.^[10] This magical mood is movingly captured in the fourth stanza:

With an earlier stanza in the poem foreshadowing the collection’s forthcoming “[. . .] odes for recipes / from eel to artichoke” in restaurants where “[. . .] poets eat for free” (16–18), such a scene seems like a utopian stunt poets couldn’t possibly afford. That is, of course, unless one thinks of the political imagination in the collective sense. For the improbable is heightened with possibility here, as the poem recalls the bombardment of poems orchestrated by the Chilean art collective Casagrande,^[11] which, in March 2001, dropped one hundred thousand poems printed on bookmarks over La Moneda, the national palace in Santiago, Chile. The event conjures the earlier palace bombing of September 11, 1973, when a Chilean military and CIA-orchestrated coup of democratically elected President Salvador Allende gave rise to the infamously murderous Pinochet dictatorship that lasted until 1990.^[12]

In retrospect, Casagrande uncannily chose the same year to memorialize the tragedy of the Chilean coup, an event often referred to as “the little September 11,” following the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center (WTC). Espada has in fact written what is now widely regarded as a definitive poetic statement of the 9/11 tragedy, “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” dedicated to unionized restaurant and hotel workers who died that day in the WTC Windows on the World Restaurant. This poem, when juxtaposed with “Republic of Poetry,” serves as yet another instance of his practicing poetry as consolation.^[13] The guerrilla art of the Casagrande poetry bombardment forged a broader collective memory and healing across generations of the earlier trauma associated with La Moneda, thereby resignifying the location, as well as the very notion of what constitutes “bombardment.” Chilean actress and theater director María José Contreras has said that the bookmarks dropped from the helicopter also evoked the allied propaganda leaflets disseminated over the fields of Europe during World War II (n. pag.). Meanwhile, the visionary underground filmmaker and multifaceted artist Alejandro Jodorowsky, also known for promulgating a form of shamanistic therapy called “psycho-magic,” characterized the poetry bombardment as “social psycho-magic” (n. pag.). Casagrande has since taken the reenactment to other famous sites of collective trauma, dropping thousands of poems written by Chilean and Croatian poets over Dubrovnik in 2002, Guernica in 2004; at the time of this writing, the collective had plans in the works for similar reenactments at Dresden and Nagasaki (“Bombardeo de Poemas en Dubrovnik” n. pag.; “Bombardeo de Poemas en Guernica” n. pag.). The video clips of successfully carried out events, which are posted on the Casagrande blog (http://revistacasagrande.blogspot.com), show spectators responding with euphoria and tears . . . “blinded by weeping,” yet seeing anew (M. Espada, “Republic of Poetry” 30).

The sense of wonder in this poem acts as a balm for the next two harrowing pieces in Republic of Poetry, “Not Here” and “Something Escapes the Bonfire,” inspired by visits made by Espada and the renown Chilean poet Raúl Zurita to La Moneda, and with singer Víctor Jara’s widow Joan Jara to the Estadio Víctor Jara, as stated in the “Notes on the Poems” at the end of the volume (59). Espada’s poems memorialize these sites and pay homage to those for whom the terror is still palpable. In “Not Here,” the mourning of Allende is fresh with immediacy, recalling the familiar footage and radio broadcasts of the coup: “Today Allende is white marble outside the palace, / mute as martyr, without a hand free to wave / from the balcony, without a voice to crackle / his last words in the radio air” (34–37). But what remains unseen, and indeed the whole concept of poet as seer, is more crucial to the poem. Espada both dedicates this composition to Zurita, author of such highly acclaimed books as Purgatorio (1979) and Anteparaíso (1982), and cites from one of his poems.^[14] Zurita is also known for large-scale poetic stunts preceding those of Casagrande, skywriting his verses over New York in the 1980s, and later bulldozing a line of poetry (“Ni Pena Ni Miedo” [“Without Pain or Fear”]) in the Atacama Desert of Chile, each act consistent with his theme of nature as the only witness to many of the Pinochet era’s atrocities.

Zurita’s work voices the unspeakable, having in his early twenties been arrested, held and tortured in a ship off the coast of Valparaíso after the coup, and later surviving his own unsuccessful attempt to blind himself with ammonia. The latter bid for self-mutilation suggests that perhaps the poet was simply unable to bear what he witnessed. Undaunted, he nonetheless continues to bear witness through his poetry, as Espada does here: “What Zurita saw gnawed like a parasite at the muscles in his eyes: / Chile’s warships invaded the harbor of Valparaíso” and, “[. . .] Zurita’s heart / crashed deep in the ribs of a navy ship” (“Not Here” 3–4, 11–12):

Zurita’s longer poems employ a technique of layering, and Espada’s dedication and citation here, as well as to particular poets and events elsewhere, produces a distinct echo effect. The final stanza recalls the same time period in the United States, reminding of U.S. complicity in the coup (“[. . .] at the White House, / the plotters were pleased” [55–56]), and recalling Espada’s own time and place, “[o]n or around the night of September 11, 1973,” as a teenager “[. . .] vandalizing a golf course in the rain, / fishtailing [his] car through the mud on the ninth hole” (50, 52–53). Perhaps he unwittingly exacts class revenge, seemingly disengaged from the human rights violations being perpetuated in the name of so-called American interests: “as the radio told us what happened / on the other side of the world / and the windshield wipers said / not here, not here, not here” (61–64; emphasis in original).

The next poem, “Something Escapes the Bonfire,”^[16] dedicated to “Víctor and Joan Jara,” also cites from Víctor Jara’s song lyrics. Written in four sections, the first, “Because We Will Never Die,” is dated “June 1969,” during Víctor Jara’s popularization of the “Nueva Canción” (Chilean “New Song”) movement, inspired in part by Violeta Parra and Pablo Neruda, and which championed in its aesthetic working-class and anticolonial class struggle.^[17] The second section, “The Man with All the Guns: September 1973,” chronicles when Jara was arrested with thousands of others and taken to then-Estadio Chile, a notorious site of torture where Jara’s hands were broken, and he was ultimately executed. Parts III and IV, “If Only Víctor” and “Something Escapes the Bonfire,” respectively, both take place in “July 2004.” The former reflects on Espada’s visit to the stadium, renamed for Víctor Jara the prior year, with his widow, Joan, for whom the memory of atrocity is still visceral: “Again she finds her husband’s body in the morgue / amid the corpses piled like laundry / and lifts his dangling fractured hands in hers / as if to begin a waltz” (III.55–58). The stadium renaming seems of little consolation to her, in lines that capture the human frailty of such an iconic figure as her husband and the everyday banalities of marriage:

In legal terms as well, Víctor Jara’s murder remains unresolved, with a judge in 2008 ordering the case reopened. Jara’s body since has been exhumed, and a former army conscript was charged with the killing in June 2009.^[18] Still, Espada’s poem searches for some form of reconciliation. Taking its title from the final section, the poem ventures beyond the immediacy of a widow’s lament to contemplate the intergenerational collective memory and healing implied by the book’s opening allusion to the poetry bombardments. A young couple, far from the Estadio in time and place, “lean across a chair onstage to fill their eyes with each other’s faces” while listening to Jara’s music, as “[t]he tape rumbles, and Víctor’s voice / spirals delicate as burnt paper to the ceiling, / singing of a lover’s silence to the dancers / who uncurl the tendrils of their bodies” (IV.72–75). What endures is art, ephemeral yet defiantly, tenaciously resilient, like the final poem Víctor Jara wrote that was smuggled out of the stadium, like Zurita’s poetics of healing and of dissent.^[19]

The remaining nine poems in this longest section dedicated to Chile include less portentous selections as well, such as the amusing odes to the “eel in my heart” and “jaiva pie” (see “I Have an Eel in my Heart” and “Sonnet in Praise of Jaiva Pie” in Works Cited). There are also two that mock Pinochet and his supporters (“An Admirer of General Pinochet . . .” and “General Pinochet at the Bookstore”), knocking the ousted general’s figure down to size, that use a technique Espada has previously deployed to great effect: the long, mordant title to a short poem,^[20] evidenced here in the redundantly amusing “An Admirer of General Pinochet Writes to the Web Site of General Pinochet to Wish General Pinochet a Happy Birthday.”^[21] Four substantial poems pay tribute to Neruda in particular, with “The Soldiers in the Garden,” “Rain Without Rain,” “City of Glass,” and “Not Paint and Wood,” achieving the effect of incantation. The dazzling “Black Islands,” an encounter with a boy named Darío—named after the Nicaraguan modernist master, Rubén Darío—takes its name from Isla Negra, the village named for the black islands of rock on the coast where one of Neruda’s homes, Casa de Isla Negra, is a national landmark. Espada’s poem also resonates in theme and form with one by the late South African poet Dennis Brutus, “Isla Negra: For Neruda,” to whom a poem is dedicated in the next section.

Enacting the all-embracing reach and breadth of Neruda and Whitman, the second section displays local and global affinities, dedicating poems to Jeff Male, Robert Creeley, Julia de Burgos, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dennis Brutus, as well as two playful gibes at future poets.^[22] The first dedication poem in the series, “The Poet’s Coat,” is a paean to a less famous but no less important poet, Jeff Male, who made major contributions to the UMass Boston creative writing community (“Remembering Jeff Male” n. pag.). Those referencing the latter three poets are especially hard hitting: “The Face on the Envelope,” a profound humanization of a prisoner who sends Espada a letter with Burgos’s face strikingly rendered on the envelope (echoing “The Poet in the Box” from Alabanza); “Not Words but Hands,” condolences for the tragic murder-suicide of Pulitzer Prize–winning African American poet Komunyakaa’s partner and young son;^[23] and “Stone Hammered to Gravel,” that once again debunks the notion that poetry has little political import, not only by recalling Brutus’s imprisonment (with Nelson Mandela), but also by imaginatively recasting his poems as a tool bent on destroying South African apartheid:^[24]

Salgado’s “interlocking transnational stories,” referenced earlier in this essay, coupled with my idea of Espada’s poetics as an interacting matrix, continue in the last section of Republic of Poetry. Here Espada revisits or contemplates sites of structural violence, from East New York, to the Vietnam War and the contemporary war on terror, and renders moving personal experiences involving injury and surgery. The final composition, another poem of incantatory power, titled “The Caves of Camuy,” recalls his wife Katherine Gilbert-Espada’s hysterectomy and conjures Clemente Soto Vélez, a former Puerto Rican political prisoner and an influential mentor poet and friend to Espada, for whom the couple named their only son (echoing Espada’s previous invocations of Soto Vélez, most memorably, the elegy “Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies” [Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996)]).^[25] Honoring his wife’s power of procreation, the poem musters Soto Vélez’s creative forces as directives emanating from the Camuy caves, as if summoning the spirit of legendary Taíno Indians who took to the caves in an effort to escape and resist Spanish violence and repression: “The poet spoke a hieroglyphic tongue, yet you read / the pictures carved in air, understood the words he said” (13–14). Among the largest underground river and cave systems in the world, las cavernas de Camuy are promoted in Puerto Rico as tourism, featuring underground walking tours, but their legends as sites of resistance throughout the Caribbean, symbolically akin to maroon history, are not officially disseminated.

By closing Republic of Poetry with what may be his most personal Puerto Rico (and familial) poem, Espada, ever the historian, insinuates a connection between Operation Condor and Operation Bootstrap, in terms of the repressive attempts to silence a tradition of dissent and erase the record of this silencing.^[26] A sense of overwhelming dread pervades sites that memorialize crimes against humanity, a phrase that evokes the World War II Holocaust of Jews, gypsies, and political dissidents. But the terminology applies also to places such as Estadio Víctor Jara, proving that haunted inklings can and do emanate also from places where histories of violent political repression remain largely unacknowledged beyond their immediate locality. In Puerto Rico, I think of the hot reddish brick cells of La Princesa jail, hidden but accessible behind the façade of the Puerto Rican Tourist Board, but with no signs, no explanations—easy to overlook. When I first saw these cells decades ago, my initial visual association was the film Papillon (1973). I later learned the Nobel-nominated Puerto Rican poet Francisco Matos Paoli wrote poems while imprisoned there with Nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos. Legend has it that he levitated in his cell, adding mystique to reports that he suffered a nervous breakdown (Pedrosa). But there are no plaques or photos here; at least publicly, the names are institutionally silenced. Colonialism and neocolonialism, continuing crimes against humanity of global dimensions, rely on such erasures. Espada’s poems consistently rebuke such forgetting and impunity, asking the reader to engage in the most crucial act of dissent: to remember.

La tumba de Buenaventura Roig: Selected Poems/Poemas selectos (2008), the first book of Espada’s poems published in Puerto Rico, features selections from Espada’s six most recent books, dealing expressly with Puerto Rican themes. Like Republic of Poetry, this collection also ends with the “Caves of Camuy” (“[C]uevas de Camuy”). The title of this artfully presented bilingual edition, graced with a photo by Espada’s father, documentary photographer Frank Espada,^[27] is taken from the first poem in the book. The poem stands as a cornerstone to Espada’s own family genealogy, here irrevocably linked to Puerto Rican history. The titular poem “La tumba de Buenaventura Roig” (“La tumba de Buenaventura Roig”) recounts Espada’s personal journey of searching in vain for his great-grandfather’s unmarked grave in Utuado. Essentially, the poem itself engraves a historical marker where one is missing in imagery familiar to Caribbean literature and landscapes: “Now your bones have drifted / with the tide of steep grass, / sunken in the chaos of weeds / bent and suffering / like canecutters in the sun” (“Ahora tus huesos se han ido a la deriva / con la corriente de yerbas brujas empinadas, / hundidos en el caos de malezas / agachadas y sufrientes / como macheteros baja el sol”) (6–10). The poem was first published in Rebellion/Rebelión, a volume that takes its title from a poem about Puerto Rico’s 1937 Ponce Massacre and the only book of Espada’s poems originally published as a facing-page, bilingual edition.^[28] This raises another important dimension of Espada’s work as an editor and translator who is also in collaboration with translators. Such volumes include Poetry like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (1994, 2000),^[29] that alludes to El Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton’s “Como tú” (“Like You”), as well as a bilingual volume of Clemente Soto Vélez poems, The Blood That Keeps Singing/La sangre que sigue cantando (1991), co-translated with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, who also cotranslated with Espada Rebellion/Rebelión, and hence is among the translators in La tumba.^[30]

Indeed, one of the most interesting things about the La tumba collection is its variety of translators and distinct registers of Latin American Spanish, which produce readings of such Puerto Rican poems as the affectionately humorous “Pegao” (originally appearing in A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen [2000]) with translator Maribel Pintado-Espiet’s choice to use the word “cazuela” instead of “caldero” for “pot.” In the original English, the lines read: “We Puerto Ricans say / that the hard rice / stuck to the bottom / of the pot / is a delicacy. / We scrape / with the spoon / like kitchen archeologists” (1–8). Yet, the translations also reveal crucial Latin American dimensions, such as the poem “Sing Zapatista” (Alabanza), translated by Pérez-Bustillo, who is of Colombian descent and also practices advocacy law (as has Espada).^[31] The book also includes translations by Puerto Ricans, such as by a key literary critic of the San Juan daily El Nuevo Día, Carmen Dolores Hernández,^[32] as well as César Salgado, who has critically followed Espada’s work since his first published book. Salgado introduces this volume, usefully contextualizing Republic as a book that establishes Espada “como poeta latino, hispanoamericano, panamericano, transnacional y global; es decir, como nuestro escritor boricua de mayor universalidad,” which I translate, “as Latino, Latin American, Pan American, transnational and global, that is to say, as our most universal Boricua writer” (19). This 2008 compilation of Espada’s work, taken in tandem with Alabanza, allows readers of Republic of Poetry to contextualize the many national consciousnesses at work in his canon. The publication of La tumba, complete with local press publicity and public readings and availability via the biggest bookstores in Puerto Rico (Borders), exposes Espada’s work to broader audiences on the island beyond literary and academic circles.

As such, readers of Puerto Rican and Latin American poetry may note Espada’s genealogical affinity with aforementioned Puerto Rican poets and Latin American poets such as Nicolás Guillén, Roque Dalton, Rubén Darío, Ernesto Cardenal, and Mario Benedetti. There are, expectedly, imbrications with poets of the Puerto Rican diaspora, increasingly recognized in literary and academic circles in Puerto Rico. Though it should be said that work yet remains to critically acknowledge and disseminate poets of the diaspora who fall outside the purview of the Nuyorican tradition (Naomi Ayala, Jack Agüeros, Aurora Levins Morales, Julio Marzán, Gloria Vando, as just some examples),^[33] as well as to give visibility to the full complexity of the Nuyorican tradition itself. Salgado distinguishes Espada’s poetic language from the Nuyorican school of poetry, however, marked as a protest and performance genre, by noting that Espada’s work is not as prone to frequent code-switching or use of Spanglish (Introduction 14; “Martín Espada”).

Just the same, while Espada distinguishes his project from poets of the Nuyorican tradition, he does occasionally switch to Spanish and Spanglish with strategic effect. And Nuyorican poetry itself presents a range of code-switching and Spanglish usage tendencies—Tato Laviera being perhaps the most virtuosic proponent—and with voices who first emerged later, such as Tony Medina and Edwin Torres, engaging Nuyorican language traditions in distinct ways. Salgado also notes that Espada’s first collection Immigrant Iceboy’s, which was published with a series of Frank Espada’s poignantly gritty images, shares a similar presentation with Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, and Richard August’s groundbreaking Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (1975). And Espada in recent interviews (with Edward J. Carvalho and another with Luis Alberto Urrea) sees himself, among his multiple affiliations, as also “coming out of the so-called ‘Nuyorican’ experience” and yet transcending it (qtd. in Carvalho, “Branch on the Tree of Whitman” 75).

A corollary that often comes to mind when I think of Espada’s poetic language and global reach, if not the frontal thematics of dissent, is the work of Victor Hernández Cruz, whose early publications were also affiliated with the Nuyorican poets (Papo Got His Gun! [1966] and Snaps [1969]), but whose work and personal geographic trajectory (New York, San Francisco, Puerto Rico, Morocco) has continued expanding horizons into new stylistic and thematic terrains. The most recent, The Mountain in the Sea (2006), delves deeply into linguistic intersections of Spain, North Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas (revealing the Spanish language debt to North Africa, for example), yet also still connects the memory of New York, as in the stunning poem of arrival and diasporic rupture, “Eisenhower” (49). Recognizing such multiple affiliations, anchored in memory and witness, foregrounds such extant heterogeneities in Puerto Rico, too, not just in the obvious (e.g., the history of political repression, the perspectives and contributions from the diaspora) but in the interstices of intersections, such as between Chile and Puerto Rico.

In this vein, Republic of Poetry has produced unexpected revelatory moments in Puerto Rico. One such case centered on Espada’s May 2008 visit to Puerto Rico for a reading and talk I organized at the University of Puerto Rico (his booming voice on par with Rumi translator Coleman Barks and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott). While taking a break from a full agenda, Espada and I experienced an uncanny encounter with a local seller of Puerto Rican and Chilean documents and artifacts, herself a long-time Chilean exile.^[34] In the back of the shop, the proprietor learned of Espada’s work and the nature of his visit, as he inspected volumes of Neruda’s poems bearing Neruda’s signature with the discerning eye of an expert able to spot a falsification. In hushed tones, she revealed her ties to an important Puerto Rican historical figure, the late Blanca Canales of Jayuya, who was instrumental in the 1950 Nationalist uprising in Puerto Rico and served seventeen years as a political prisoner afterward. Having kept a sheaf of letters that Canales had written from prison, and keenly aware of their historic value in the public domain, she was nonetheless understandably hesitant to donate these historic documents to archives on the island for fear they would be neglected.

I flashed back to a visit a few years ago to the scenic Museo Casa Canales in Jayuya, also the restored home of Canales’s brother, the writer and politician Nemesio R. Canales Torresola. There, I was in the vibrant company of former political prisoner Antonio Toñito Cruz Colón, who, at the time, was granting friends a video interview about la revuelta Nacionalista. Cruz Colón served eighteen years in prison for his role in the uprising, and yet he remains defiant today. I thought of all such historical documents in private hands in this climate so pernicious for preservation, wondering if their keepers also mistrusted state institutions to protect or disseminate them, and of the dedicated archivists who would treasure such holdings, in Puerto Rico and New York. I imagined all the documents that have been lost. The convergence of these belles lettres, official/unofficial, formal/underground, recognized/silenced, loomed and hovered as a conjuring repository, as Espada began to eye the shop’s collectible coins minted during Puerto Rico’s brief autonomy from Spain before the 1898 U.S. invasion. It struck me that the moment was very much like an Espada poem, revisiting political history, rekindling fires. Perhaps he will one day write about that shop encounter in Puerto Rico in just such terms.

I have for years been inquiring about the myriad ways literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora “works” in Puerto Rico, as have others. In Poetry and Commitment (2007), Adrienne Rich also cites lines 1 to 11 from Dennis Brutus’s untitled poem (dated June 20, 1980, from the 2nd ed. of his Poems—see “An old black woman” in Works Cited) that point to Brutus’s belief in these simultaneous literary-historical purposes in and for poetry. Expanding on Brutus’s poem (while citing from line 11 in italics below), she adds:

Similarly, Espada’s verses have urgent “work” to perform in Puerto Rico, and Terranova’s locally available, bilingual La tumba edition should indeed help facilitate his message, reaching a broader audience there. Another way to expand readership on the island would be to institutionalize literature of its diaspora as part of a long-embattled public English instruction curriculum (were it not for contracts with U.S. textbook firms such as Houghton Mifflin peddling millions of dollars worth of books in the latest multicultural incarnations that, at best, mention baseball legend Roberto Clemente as the “token” Puerto Rican). A tall order, but not impossible.

For Espada, being a diasporic Puerto Rican suggests multiple dispossessions: by being displaced from Puerto Rico, by Puerto Rico’s dislocation from itself as a colony, and because of his status as a diasporic Puerto Rican (Miller and Feffer n. pag.). Acceptance and recognition on the island, despite the considerable accolades in many other sectors, remains a concern in his work, as it has been for other poets of the diaspora, from Miguel Piñero to Tato Laviera to María Teresa “Mariposa” Fernández.

Recently translated into Spanish for a beautiful edition published in Spain (Soldados en el jardín [Soldiers in the Garden] [2009]) and now compiled in Espada’s 2011 U.S. release The Trouble Ball (2011), the poem “The Spider and the Angel”^[35] revisits those mean streets of New York in youthful, masculinist terms, but as part of an oeuvre that has multiplied its modes. The last four of five stanzas read:

The classic tropes of linguistic prejudice and violent urban initiation here again join Espada’s perceptive grasp of institutional ennui (recalling the opening lines of “Niggerlips” [“Negro Bembón”] in Rebellion/Rebelión, for example): an attempted blinding, then seeing, an Icarus image of the impossible return, the rupture of diaspora, the irony of a bully named Angel, and the “keepers” of a hard-earned reconciliation of tensions between those born in diaspora and those from the island, both personas here kept by the insatiable longing of exile that is diaspora. So while this poem harkens back to early themes of Espada’s work, in a recognizably Nuyorican mode, this fraternally exilic moment also reproduces the ordinary people immortalized by the poets, painters, photographers, and dissidents of Espada’s enduring traditions—Puerto Rican, American, Latino, Latin American, and international—that are simultaneously local and global, in active solidarity with those exploited and persecuted. In sum, he passes the baton of struggle with an indomitable and palpable urgency, again recalling the late Dennis Brutus who wrote: “I am the exile / am the wanderer / the troubadour” (“I am the exile” 1–3; emphasis in original).

The 2009 journal publication of “Spider and the Angel” (that initially appeared in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas) exemplifies such simultaneous local/global poetics of dissent and north-south/south-south matrices, as it appears in a section titled “Two Poems” along with one in the mode that Salgado characterizes as Espada’s “poem memorials” (“Martín Espada”), dedicated to the late Alexander “Sandy” Taylor, the inveterate publisher behind Curbstone Press, titled “Visions of the Chapel Ceiling in Guadalajara”: “Yet you knew the poets of our América, / their voices bursting like a thousand grackles / from the doors and windows of your house (39–41) and “[y]ou knew the way in Guadalajara, the orphanage, / the chapel at the orphanage, Orozco’s murals at the chapel” (45–46). Echoing the Spanish language and anticolonial poetics of Martí’s “Nuestra América” (“Our America”),^[36] here, Taylor’s knowledge of and engagements with Latin American and international poets of witness resonate with other profoundly multiply located figures Espada has conjured in his poems, themselves embodying the very multilingual and transnational matrices he summons, such as the late Andrew Salkey, first-wave author in exile of Anglophone Caribbean literature with deep Hispanophone Caribbean affinities, and the since-departed Abe Osheroff, veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.^[37]

Yet, the broadened geopolitical horizons that Salgado astutely discerns with the publication of Espada’s Alabanza (“Martín Espada”) always find their way back home. This poem’s “Visions of the Chapel Ceiling,” only four lines in Spanish, glimpse Puerto Rico and its independence struggle intimately: “En Jayuya, / los lagartijos se dispersan / como una flota de canoas verdes / ante el invasor” (“In Jayuya, / the lizards scatter / like a fleet of green canoes / before the invader”) (27–30; emphasis in original).^[38] At the same time, they allude to the 1950 Nationalist uprising with the symbolic power of Jayuya, the only town that was successfully seized by Nationalists during the revolt, the town of Blanca Canales’s home, and one of the towns bombarded by the National Guard in response (Seijo Bruno 127–45), with the quiet dispersal of lizards escaping the invaders suggesting continuity of such movements, itself a poetic nod to artistic/political projects like Curbstone.^[39]

In Espada’s republic of memory and the many testimonies provided there, the voices of such myriad predecessors and successors echo eternally.

Notes

Espada’s poems have been translated into French, (Brazilian) Portuguese, Galician, Thai, Farsi, Arabic, and Hindi, with Spanish translations published in Puerto Rico, Chile, Nicaragua, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, and Spain. I thank Martín Espada for completing this information over e-mail. See M. Espada, “RE: quick Q on Rattapallax film” in Works Cited.

Ed. note: There are other critics who speak to this point. See Vincent; see also Dowdy in this volume.

Panfletismo in English could be translated as “pamphleteering,” but a more accurate translation for the usage here would be “agitprop,” as in Spanish “panfletismo” carries negative connotations when describing art as retrograde political propaganda. As in other national projects, pamphleteering was an important tradition in Puerto Rico; during the 1930s and’40s, pamphleteering was used widely by the rising Popular Democrático (Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico [PPD] or The Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico [PDP]), which spearheaded Puerto Rico’s so-called Free Associated State status, suppressed the Nationalist movement, and created an entire apparatus, called División de Educación de la Comunidad (DIVEDCO), employing important pro-independence artists and authors (such as Lorenzo Homar and René Marqués) for the task of disseminating information about governmental programs.

Throughout the 1980s, The Sanctuary Movement offered safe haven in religious congregations to Central American refugees fleeing political violence linked to U.S. foreign policy in countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala. Believing that immigration authorities were less likely to enter churches and synagogues to deport undocumented immigrants, the movement spread from the U.S. Southwest to other states and U.S. cities. The federal government indicted, and in some cases convicted, activists involved in this movement to aid refugees, including the poet Demetria Martínez, whose acquittal was the subject of Espada’s poem “Sing in the Voice of a God Even Atheists Can Hear” (Imagine [1996]). In the last decade, a New Sanctuary Movement has arisen as a coalition of interfaith religious leaders and congregations offering support, services, and safe haven to undocumented immigrants to prevent their exploitation, deportation, and forced separation from their families because of current U.S. immigration policy.

Ed. note: Earlier versions of “Branch on the Tree of Whitman” appear in Quay 1.1 (May–June 2007): 1–12 and Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 26.1 (Summer 2008): 23–34.

Ed. note: See Moyers, “Bill Moyers talks” (content from which was included in Moyers’s book Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues—see Moyers, “Martín Espada” at the end of the Moyers Works Cited entries) and Moyers, “Martín Espada Examines”; see also the PBS.org profile “Martín Espada” listed under Moyers.

Ed. note: Frank Espada’s documentary photography of the Puerto Rican diaspora would have a considerable impact on Martín’s poetic sensibility (see his The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People, as well as the book Puerto Rico Is in the Heart and the interview “Frank Espada: [Raw] Interview Transcript Feb. 16, 2010 and Feb. 20, 2010” housed at Amherst College, both under Carvalho in Works Cited). In an interview with Bruce Allen Dick featured in A Poet’s Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets, Espada addresses Dick’s question on the “black and white” (as originally articulated by Robert Creeley in his foreword to Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction) and “foregrounding and shadow” photographic features present in his work:

I think my work has probably evolved from that point, and yet essentially I think what he said is still true. Not that I see the world in black and white, as a matter of ideology, but I do think in terms of foregrounding and shadow when I create an image, especially, of course, a visual image. I’m also influenced by the great Brazilian photographer Sebastiao [sic] Salgado. So I’m really, to this day, affected by photography, and I find it influencing my work. Of course, it begins with my father’s black-and-white images that were hanging on the wall when I was a kid. (qtd. in Dick 32)

The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry that year was awarded to Natasha D. Trethewey’s Native Guard, which also deals with monuments to historical and personal memory.

Ed. note: In the Bloomsbury Review profile by John Murillo, Espada speaks about Chile’s political influence on The Republic of Poetry. He acknowledges that shortly after writing “Alabanza” he experienced the first (writer’s) block of his adult life. Thus, his trip to Chile served an important inspirational moment that helped to unblock Espada and allowed him to see past the earlier post–9/11 “period of mourning” that had otherwise silenced him (Murillo 7).

10.

Ed. note: See Urrea. After some discussion of Espada’s alignment with the poetics of advocacy, interviewer Luis Urrea asks: “And are you comfortable with being seen as a poet of witness?” to which Espada replies: “I am perfectly comfortable with the idea of being identified as a ‘poet of witness’” (n. pag.). He goes on to add, “This concept of witness, as articulated by Carolyn Forché and others, is closely linked to the Latin American testimonio. All it means is that we see and we speak. As I’ve said elsewhere, how could I know what I know and not tell what I know?” (qtd. in Urrea n. pag.; emphasis in original).

11.

According to its blog, the Casagrande collective was founded in 1996, by a group of Chilean visual artists and writers (Cristóbal Bianchi, José Joaquín Prieto, and Julio Carrasco) and oversees projects in three areas: 1) the publication of a journal that changes its format in every number, giant posters for Santiago metro stations walls, and DVD productions; 2) cinematographic projects; and 3) public performances such as Poem Bombing. For more information: www.revistacasagrande.cl (originally accessed July 1, 2009; re-accessed on July 4, 2013).

12.

During which more than 3,200 were murdered and/or “disappeared,” at least 80,000 jailed without trial, an estimated 30,000 tortured, and 200,000 exiled (more than 400,000 during the entire time of the dictatorship), some pursued by assassins, as part of a vast network involving Argentina and the Southern Cone, called Operation Condor. About a third of these people belonged to or were active in leftist political organizations, the rest were merely suspected to be associated. Not coincidentally, during the same time period, repressions involving U.S. complicity and support for dictatorships under the guise of repressing leftist movements in the context of the Cold War occurred throughout Latin America, including the notorious July 25, 1978, Cerro Maravilla murders in Puerto Rico.

13.

A subject Espada discusses in an essay “Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?” that is part of the Poetry Foundation forum conducted in the wake of September 11, 2001. Originally accessed July 6, 2009, and re-accessed on April 1, 2013: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178615.

14.

Each of these volumes are available in bilingual editions. See Works Cited entries for Zurita’s works Anteparaíso, INRI, and Purgatorio.

15.

Ed. note: Cf. the recurring motif of what is “known” in “Only the water knows” and “Zurita knows what the water knows” (lines 7 and 43) in Espada’s Zurita tribute “Not Here” (Republic of Poetry) with similar incantations from the earlier “Another Nameless Prostitute Says the Man Is Innocent” (Mayan Astronomer) written for Mumia Abu-Jamal:

The board-blinded windows knew what happened;

the pavement sleepers of Philadelphia, groaning

in their ghost-infested sleep, knew what happened;

every Black man blessed

with the gashed eyebrow of nightsticks

knew what happened;

even Walt Whitman knew what happened,

poet a century dead, keeping vigil

from the tomb on the other side of the bridge. (1–9)

16.

Ed. note: Espada reads and discusses this poem in a video interview with Progressive editor Matt Rothschild. See Rothschild, Interview in Works Cited for link.

See also the 2012 Smokestack publication of selected Víctor Jara song lyrics, His Hands Were Gentle, edited and with introduction by Martín Espada. The volume also includes a translation of Jara’s “Preguntas por Puerto Montt” (“Questions about the Massacre of Puerto Montt”) by Espada.

17.

The inter-American exchange with U.S. folk singing traditions is perhaps best illustrated, in terms of iconographic figures, by Arlo Guthrie’s song “Victor [sic] Jara” (recorded 1976), with lyrics by British antiwar poet and writer Adrian Mitchell (d. 2008).

18.

See “New probe into Victor [sic] Jara murder” and “Chilean singer Jara is exhumed,” in Works Cited, both from BBC News.

19.

Utilizing the curious but captivating headline “Raúl Zurita at the School of Nursing,” poet Rob Halpern reports that in April 2009 The Poetry Center in San Francisco, in collaboration with the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine Medical Humanities Initiative and Meridian Gallery, sponsored a series of events titled “The Poetics of Healing: Creative Investigations in Art, Medicine, and Somatic Practice” at the School of Nursing. The events, designed to explore interdisciplinary relationships between poetry and medicine, featured a reading by Raúl Zurita, and talks with a translator of his work, William Rowe, and trauma therapist Dr. Nuri Gene-Cos.

20.

Ed. note: An earlier example to consider is “The Florida Citrus Growers Association Responds to a Proposed Law Requiring Handwashing Facilities in the Fields” (“La Asociación de Productores de Cítricos de la Florida responde a un proyecto de ley requiriendo facilidades para lavarse las manos en los campos de trabajo”).

21.

Ed. note: See M. Espada, “Notes on the Poems: An Admirer of General Pinochet . . . .” 60–61. Espada indicates that this particular Republic of Poetry composition “alludes to a poem by Ernesto Cardenal entitled ‘Somoza desveliza la estatua de Somoza en el estadio Somoza’ (‘Somoza Unveils Somoza’s Statue of Somoza in the Somoza Stadium’) translated by Donald Walsh.”

22.

Ed. note: In some respects, though in a less playful capacity, Espada’s dialogue with “poets of the future” evokes Whitman’s 1867 Leaves of Grass poem “Poets to Come,” where the poet charges future generations with the mission to prove and define poetry, “expecting the main things from [them]” (9). Espada is also known for signing some volumes of poetry with the inscription, “To . . . Poet of the Future” (from editor’s personal copies on file).

23.

Ed. note: See Fahrenthold and Weichselbaum story on the deaths of Komunyakaa’s partner, poet Reetika Vazirani, age forty, who reportedly took her own life and that of her and Komunyakaa’s two-year-old son, Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa, in July 2003.

24.

Ed. note: Brutus passed on December 26, 2009, in Cape Town. See Martin for the New York Times obituary. The Foreign Policy In Focus Web site (FPIF.org) has since republished Espada’s poem in Brutus’s memory (http://www.fpif.org/articles/stone_hammered_to_gravel).

25.

Ed. note: There is another Soto Vélez poem (authored by Espada) to consider—“Clemente’s Bullets.” Cf. Espada’s other “Clemente” poems, those that chronicle the life of his son, Clemente Gilbert-Espada (more recently spelled “Klemente” with a “K,” after the poet Soto Vélez): “White Birch” (on the birth of Clemente); “Because Clemente Means Merciful”; “Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks”; and more recently, “Between the Rockets and the Songs,” “His Hands Have Learned What Cannot Be Taught,” and “The Poet’s Son Watches His Father Leave for Another Gig.”

26.

For those unfamiliar with twentieth-century Puerto Rican history, Operation Bootstrap is the common English translation for Operación Manos a la Obra, a program in which the charismatic populist Governor Luis Muñoz Marin and his Popular Democratic Party in 1952 formalized the current political status of Puerto Rico as a “Commonwealth” or “Free Associated State” of the United States (achieving referendum consensus as a negotiated semiautonomy, but for others seen as continued colonial dependence) in order to rapidly industrialize the country. Meanwhile, Nationalist and independence movements were censored and repressed, often through brute persecution, violence, and imprisonment, in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), by instituting a gag law (Law 53) called the Ley de la Mordaza. While the scale of Operation Condor’s (see Note 12 above) widespread tortures and disappearances did not occur in Puerto Rico, disappearances and politically motivated killings of independentistas, many unsolved, occurred well into the late 1970s, and political discrimination, aided by keeping files or carpetas on suspected leftists, continued into the 1990s and has been reported to continue today.

27.

The photo “Jaime Jenkins: Gravedigger in Utuado, 1985,” repeated as a motif throughout the book, is from Frank Espada’s important Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project, which culminated in the publication of The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People. See also Note 7.

Ed. note: The photograph of Jenkins, however, is not included in Frank Espada’s book Puerto Rican Diaspora.

28.

Ed. note: The poem as it appears in La tumba (the book) features a lowercase “t” in “tumba,” which is consistent with the revised version included in Alabanza. In the original version of the poem, housed in Rebellion/Rebelión, the “T” in “Tumba” is incorrectly capitalized.

29.

This volume notably achieved greater exposure across language barriers for U.S. (example Doug Anderson), Chicano (Jimmy Santiago Baca), Puerto Rican diaspora (Naomi Ayala), Puerto Rican (Julia de Burgos), Latin American (Ernesto Cardenal), and Vietnamese (Nguyen Duy) poets. Poetry like Bread pays tribute to a book said to have inspired Espada early on, Roberto Márquez’s Latin American Revolutionary Poetry/Poesia Revolucionaria Latinoamericana (1974). Other bilingual editions would later impact Espada, such as Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems [of] Julia de Burgos (obra completa poética) (1997), edited and translated by poet and fiction author Jack Agüeros.

30.

Ed. note: For more on the subject of translation in Espada’s work, see Pérez-Bustillo in this volume, in the subsection titled, “Espada as ‘Translator.’”

31.

The intersection between attorney advocacy, legal discourse, human rights, history, and poetry also recalls the experimental contributions of African–Caribbean–
Canadian poet and author Marlene Nourbese Philip.

32.

Ed. note: See the two contributions by Hernández contained in this volume.

33.

Elsewhere I have called this “post–Nuyorican,” even as this shift is not necessarily historical, geographical, political, or stylistic, though it may take into account all of those categories, or act as a provisional frame to examine these works, many of them post 1980s. See my “Towards a Post-Nuyorican Literature” in Works Cited.

34.

Of course, not all of the Chileans reported living in Puerto Rico in past U.S. Census figures are exiles of the Pinochet regime. As with the much larger Cuban exile community in Puerto Rico, a variety of political allegiances exist, including, of course, the right wing. For example, the Grupo Ferré-Rangel family’s El Nuevo Día and Primera Hora local corporate dailies have had high-ranking editors who are Chileans associated with right-wing newspapers of the Pinochet era, such as the former Executive Director of El Nuevo Día, Mauricio Gallardo, as detailed in the hard-hitting documentary Un diario amable (Zona Franca [2009]). For more information on the documentary, see the Zona Franca Web site: http://documentaleszonafranca.wordpress.com.

35.

Ed. note: The concluding action of the poem—the wrestling match atop the roof—alludes (intentionally or not) to the “Battle Royal” scene in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where young black men are made to chase gold coins while wrestling on an electrified floor. In this capacity, the poem also speaks to Camilo Pérez-Bustillo’s astute observations that prior to Espada, “Piri Thomas’s classic memoir Down These Mean Streets (1967), [. . .] had an equivalent impact as to broader awareness about the realities of Puerto Rican migration as the work of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison had achieved in the African-American context” (“Heart of Hunger” in this volume). I see Espada’s latest work resonating similarly.

Cf. the following passage from a February 18, 2010, On Wisconsin University of Wisconsin alumni feature article:

In response, he took notes, becoming in his mind a “poet spy” on the doings of people who had an internalized sense of privilege. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we talk about the ‘invisible man’ as a trope in American literature,” says Espada with a nod to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 book of that title. “When you are a laborer, when you work with your hands, you are only seen for what your hands can do . . . and that can have its benefits if it so happens that you are writing things down.” (Espada qtd. in Goldscheider n. pag.)

36.

Ed. note: The Works Cited entry to Martí’s “Nuestra América” reflects the original publication in Spanish. For a modern English translation, see “Our America” housed in the Penguin Classics title, Jose Martí: Selected Writings and listed under Martí in Works Cited.

37.

See “Compañero Poet and the Surveillance of Sheep” and “The Carpenter Swam to Spain,” respectively, both from Mayan Astronomer. Ed. note: See also Espada’s Trouble Ball poem “Like a Word that Somersaults Through the Air.” Additionally, it is worth noting that the Mayan Astronomer collection is dedicated to Osheroff.

38.

Ed. note: These are also the first four lines of the poem “Colibrí” (“Colibrí”), which suggests that Espada is returning to the poem, originally published in Rebellion/Rebelión, a Curbstone Press book, in homage to Taylor and to connect that literary history with the larger history explored in these poems—that is, the personal histories between Espada and Taylor and between these men and their ties to Latin American history. “Colibrí” (“Colibrí”) was originally published as a bilingual, English and Spanish, poem in Rebellion/Rebelión; an English-only version of the poem is also housed in Alabanza. See the general head note to this essay for Alabanza pagination.

39.

Ed. note: See “Curbstone Press, Inc.” statement at the back of Espada’s Rebellion/Rebelión, which reads in part:

Curbstone Press, Inc. is a non-profit publishing house dedicated to literature that reflects a commitment to social change, with an emphasis on contemporary writing from Latino, Latin American and Vietnamese cultures. Curbstone presents writers who give voice to the unheard in a language that goes beyond denunciation to celebrate, honor and teach. (n. pag.)

Chapter 3

Martín Espada

Pauline Uchmanowicz

Resistance-Postmodern Poet

For three decades, Martín Espada has forged an activist persona and projected a vision of social justice as author, editor, or translator of nearly twenty books, notably nine volumes of original verse. Chronicler of a particular pan-American genealogy, Espada’s cultural heritage informs both his poetic voice and subject matter.

Brooklyn-born in 1957, into an English-speaking, Puerto Rican–Jewish household, he lived for a time in city projects, worked dead-end jobs, and became a tenant lawyer. Today a long-time professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst specializing in Latino literatures and poetics, he now reigns among our most important poets. Recognized for a surrealist style reminiscent of Latin American innovators (e.g., Pablo Neruda and Carlos Drummond de Andrade) in which lyrical inventiveness combines with political rectitude, he wields ordinary yet oracular language in speaking truth to power.

Simultaneously personal witness and public advocate (and dialectically, public witness and personal advocate), the dominant speaker of Espada’s poems documents, as well as challenges, sociopolitical history lessons of the Americas in order to argue for the rights of disenfranchised and colonized populations—indigenous communities, immigrants, farm laborers, factory workers, prisoners, non-English speakers—and to champion their visibility in a global order evoked in the title of his 2006 award-winning collection, The Republic of Poetry (Paterson Award; Pulitzer Prize finalist). A pedagogical speaker as well, he aims to revise one-sided narratives, as in the invocation of “The Hidalgo’s Hat and a Hawk’s Bell of Gold” (City of Coughing and Dead Radiators [1993]) that “Columbus hallucinated gold” (1) upon first contact with the Indios “of Española, 1495” (13); or the retelling in “The Other Alamo” (City of Coughing) of “[. . .] lawyers who conquered farmland / by scratching on parchment [. . .]” (18–19) to thereafter change the fate “of Mexican peasant lives [. . .]” (21). A polemicist whose surname, as announced in his ode “My Name Is Espada”^[1] (A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen [2000]), translates to “the word for sword in Spain” (1) and thus doubles as eponym for discursive reinvention, also embodies plainspoken yet skillful rhetoric, often lyrically leaping between English, español, and street slang, thus enabling those whom he writes about to understand better the multilayered signification in his language play. While code-switching (within individual poems as well as in occasional bilingual versions) questions the mantle of “literacy” currently promoted in the United States, Espada’s poetry collections overall also seek to dissolve language and cultural barriers, in part by providing foreign-word translation glossaries that include capsule biographies of significant dramatis personae and a précis of underrepresented historical events. Straightforward and accessible overall, his poems succeed in identifying exploitative power arrangements, arguing for transformative, transnational change.

As a poet-activist, Espada’s advocacy for equitable social transformation extends from page to public persona (what Michel Foucault calls “author-function” [124–27]). He has served on editorial boards of publications such as the Progressive and as a reader-speaker at fundraisers for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged. Subverting celebrity, he has directly challenged media relations. In a particularly notorious instance, NPR’s All Things Considered commissioned him to write a poem for National Poetry Month in 1997 and then refused to broadcast the resultant composition, “Another Nameless Prostitute Says the Man Is Innocent,” which protests the incarceration of death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal by contextualizing him as more than a political prisoner but a modern-day fugitive slave. Quoted by the Boston Globe (who did print the poem, later published in Mayan Astronomer), Espada said, “‘If I didn’t speak out, then I would be governed by the same fear that governs NPR, and that would be wrong’” (qtd. in McKim D1).^[2] A year later, when Nike wanted Espada to write a poem for a commercial celebrating the commerce of the Winter Olympics, he refused, citing the corporation’s “outrageous” manipulation of youth markets and exploitation of sweatshop workers (Rothschild, “Nike’s Poets” 4).^[3] As the new millennium dawned, he penned the elegiac “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” title poem of his 2002 anthology Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2002.^[4] The poem eulogizes the forty-three members of a hotel and restaurant union, many of them immigrants, who lost their lives while working at the World Trade Center Windows on the World Restaurant on September 11, 2001.

Thematically and stylistically, Espada’s writings and public dispatches exemplify the aims of resistance-postmodern poetry, an adversarial literariness that promotes a theory or pedagogy of social change. Theoretically, resistance-postmodern poetry may be positioned in relation to ludic-postmodern poetry, that is, a status-quo literariness that reinforces a continuum of vanguardism and social exclusivity. I will explore this tug of discourses, foremost by considering Espada’s canon of poetry as a resistance tour de force.

The competing adjectival schema, resistance-postmodern versus ludic-postmodern, originates in respective critiques of theories of signification by Marxist-materialists Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, who point to the linguistic sign as an arena of social struggle, made intelligible through signifying practices, functions, and social effects. Enunciating how “[l]anguage acquires its meaning not from its formal system, as Saussure proposes, but from its place in the social struggle over meanings,” Ebert invokes “signifiers (names)” used to categorize groups, such as “Negro,” “Black,” and “African-American” (887). Her familiar example echoes in the well-trod notion that “Martín Espada” is generally regarded as the preeminent “Latino” poet of his generation” (Shorris 394), though “Caucasian” counterparts are seldom designated as such. For Zavarzadeh, “signifiers are always organized so that through them the world is produced in such a manner that its ‘reality’ supports the ‘reality’ of the interests of state power, gender, race, and the dominant classes” (45). As a state apparatus, signification exercises power within institutions through specialized language, such as found in government, law, and education, an intelligibility that Espada’s poetry effectively reveals, as will be explored below.^[5]

Establishing the resistance-ludic paradigm as emergent within discourse theory, beginning with the latter term, Ebert contends that ludic “textual practice [. . .] seeks open access to the free play of signification in order to disassemble the dominant cultural policy (totality), which tries to restrict and stabilize meaning,” hence erasing sites of struggle (887).^[6] Situating poetry itself as a textual practice along the continuum of signification that includes humanism, deconstruction, and postmodernism, Zavarzadeh demonstrates the potentially of its ludic literariness to aim for a transhistorical, transdiscursive aesthetic authority, in large part by ignoring “material processes and contradictory relations through which the discourses of culture make sense” (25). Ludic practices that adhere within poetry include “language games,” which attempt diffusion of fixed meanings or certainty in favor of incoherency and (to reformulate from Zavarzadeh) which may operate through noncoercive hegemony to result in partisan readership and/or reinforce bourgeois complacency.

Some poetry being written and published today that purports to contest the exclusionary, political effects of language and its intelligibilities nevertheless corresponds to ludic postmodernism: language poetry (though by no means all) representing a notorious example. A late-twentieth-century movement inaugurated in America by Charles Bernstein, language poetry ironically emerged to defamiliarize poetic discourse and strategies “as a critique of the social basis of meaning” (Davidson 676). Its first practitioners viewed language as constructed out of power relations and in service of Western-capitalist agendas (Houlihan 80). But in the ensuing forty years, such political aims have been diluted—if indeed they ever genuinely existed. As noted by Joan Houlihan, the early movement then offered readers “easy” access to presumed radicalism, in that “[s]imply by ‘reading’ a language poem, one became part of the larger political protest. So much less taxing than travelling to Washington to tie oneself to a gate” (81–82). Moreover, language poetry mainly has succeeded in branding a widespread ludic style, characterized by incoherency and imagistic non sequitur.^[7] While such poetry may seek to disrupt the artifice and constraints of verse as grounded in fixed forms, lyric subject, and personal narrative, it typically fails to transcend the mythology of spontaneity or linguistic originality as “genius,” reinforcing and sustaining the idea of literariness as a continuum of dominant Western values. Ron Offen further critiques the consequences of Bernstein’s supposed anti-conformity poetics “with its emphasis on originality” that can result in works neither “interesting nor exciting,” though often displaying “clichés” and “trite expressions” (“Meaning, Intention” 3).^[8] Pointing to the tendency of language poems to eschew meaning for “obscurity,” which produces “cachet in some circles,” he concludes that language poets “doubtless feel a sense of belonging to a select club, which makes an oxymoron of their call for nonconformity. One must follow their rules to be a member of this elitist club” (3, passim).

In opposition to ludic postmodernism, resistance postmodernism, such as we find with Espada, “insists on materialist political practice that works for equal access for all to social resources and for an end to the exploitative exercise of power” (Ebert 887). Espada’s commitment to poetic practice that echoes a resistance stance manifested simultaneously with publication of his first three collections, evidenced by selections in Alabanza from The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (1982), Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (1987), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands/Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante (1990). His central project of making visible the invisible boundaries of language and society, so that readers may challenge competing concepts of power-knowledge, expanded in mid-career volumes City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993), the American Book Award–winning Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), and A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), carrying through to his more recent Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2002 (2003), The Republic of Poetry (2006), and The Trouble Ball (2011) collections. For Espada, political content overall often appears guided by the Marxist dictum “[a]lways historicize!”^[9] fortified by carefully crafted prosody. Eschewing obtuse and elevated language, formal structure, and regular meter, Espada’s poems incline instead toward metaphorically ironic and direct statements, open-ended stanzaic architecture, and modulated rhythm.

From the older collections, consider first the fifteen-line, two-stanza “Again the Mercenaries: Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, 4th of July 1982” (Trumpets). A now signature feature among Espada titles and epigraphs, location and date herein announce a political narrative as well as encode an epitaph, dually elaborated in the lines:

Here dusk is a mulato, night the grandson

of a slave, walking the river into mines

collapsed like the caverns of an exhausted lung.

“The whites took the gold and left tuberculosis,”

says el indio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (5–9)^[10]

Material conditions that have led to erasure of people and resources are further exposed through color codes (e.g., “mulato” and “dusk”) and figurative analogies (e.g., “night” and “slave,” “exhausted lung” and “tuberculosis”), which express both impoverishment and race-based criminality. Structurally, the top-heavy first stanza condemns abusive labor relations devised in the name of conquest, summed up in the weight of its final line, which depicts title characters having arrived onshore to seize economic control, “paid with the rifles and lead of a distant monarch” (12).^[11] The poem’s three-line coda seeks redemption in contrast, describing the approach of “three unknown men swaggering machetes” (15). In the similarly titled bilingual “Two Mexicanos Lynched in Santa Cruz, California, May 3, 1877” (“Dos mexicanos linchados en Santa Cruz, California, 3 de mayo 1877”) (Rebellion/Rebelión), use of anaphora and enumeration reinforce a resistance stance in describing the stated atrocity, as inaugural lines of the first three (out of four) stanzas: “More than the moment / when forty gringo vigilantes / cheered the rope” (1–3); “more than the floating corpses, / trussed like cousins of the slaughterhouse” (6–7); and “more than the Virgen de Guadalupe / who blesses the brownskinned / and the crucified” (10–12). In the more recent “Not Here” (Republic of Poetry),^[12] which revisits the overthrow of then-democratically elected socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, the date of the U.S.-backed coup—September 11, 1973—recurs twice, ominously illustrating how historical signification too remains susceptible to imperialist usurpation.

Espada’s sustained goal of educating readers about contested views of history resonates throughout his oeuvre. As Zavarzadeh conjectures: “The view of knowledge as contestation [. . .] inevitably leads to the sites of those contestations, which are social class, gender, race, and labor relations” (35). These overlapping sites surface in Espada’s earliest poems, such as “Mrs. Baez [sic] Serves Coffee on the Third Floor” (Immigrant Iceboy’s),^[13] a plea for immigrant tenants’ rights; and “Toque de queda: Curfew in Lawrence” (Trumpets), an interrogation of violations against striking factory workers in “Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1984” (the poem’s identifying epigraph). Resistance-postmodern themes in follow-up offerings continue to pointedly indict oppression—of the tenant seeking just living conditions, the immigrant wading through Social Services, the falsely accused prisoner in his cell, the sweatshop worker on the assembly line, and, as shown in the analysis of “Sleeping on the Bus” later in this essay, the war veteran (a coded reference to his father Frank) illegally forced to the back of the bus while traveling in the 1940s deep South.

Though Espada no longer actively practices law, before his appointment to the University of Massachusetts Amherst English Department, Espada was a tenants’ rights lawyer in North Boston. It makes sense then that pursuant in defending the rights of those wrongly subjugated, an adversarial, advocacy-based lawyerly persona has evolved in Espada’s poetry, initially introduced in offerings such as “Mariano Explains Yanqui Colonialism to Judge Collings” (Trumpets). The four-line poem, a crash course in jurisprudence, reads:

Judge: Does the prisoner understand his rights?

Interpreter: ¿Entiende usted sus derechos?

Prisoner: ¡Pa’l carajo! ^[^[14]^]

Interpreter: Yes. (1–4)

The overall effect of the piece is complemented by a clever pastiche of trademark Espada gestures, including code-switching, the Spanish therein possibly a curse invoking a hanging, or perhaps equivalent in meaning (but more forceful in projection) to the more common English phrase “go to hell” (though, it should be noted, Espada indicates in the Alabanza glossary that the phrase is a “strong Spanish obscenity, of obscure origin and virtually untranslatable” [236]). Since the prisoner’s expression remains open to polysemic interpretation, a subtle critique of legal double-speak is implied, while historical struggle over signification is inferred. A more pervasive legal advocate emerges in City of Coughing, beginning in the title poem, which declares: “I cannot evict them / from my insomniac nights, / tenants in the city of coughing / and dead radiators” (1–4). The reiterated embedded title dramatically launches the speaker’s beseeching advocacy for the shared plight of the tenants, ongoing in a litany of related companion poems that feature mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants. For instance, the courtroom drama “Tires Stacked in the Hallways of Civilization” merges perspectives of attorney-translator and bench-side stenographer as a judge settles in favor of a slumlord against an El Salvadorian tenant’s complaint of rodents. The landlord’s defense is that: 1) he has given the tenant a cat to combat the infestation; and 2) in an attempt to depict the tenant as primitive, he pleads to the judge, “‘Besides, / he stacks his tires / in the hallway’” (4–6). The case is summed up in the poem’s final stanza, with the judge determining the nature of “‘[. . .] a civilized country’” (20) and Espada resting his case, aided by a wry irony: “So the defendant was ordered / to remove his tires / from the hallways of civilization, / and allowed to keep the cat” (21–24). In “The Broken Window of Rosa Ramos,” the title character, who likewise suffers mice that scurry to and fro “like runaway convicts / from a hole in the kitchen floor” (6–7), ultimately “rehears[es] with the lawyer / new words in English / for the landlord: / ‘Get out. Get out. Get out’” (26–29). Likewise, in “Borofels” (i.e., a non-English speaker’s phonetic articulation of “Board of Health”), a mail carrier eventually translates the title for a mispronouncing immigrant-tenant, “[. . .] mute in English” (10), who seeks to reverse the tribulations of no heat and infestations of roaches and mice. The reader is encouraged to compare how street-level vernacular continues to yearn for redemptive justice in imaginative ways elsewhere in the volume, as in “The Legal Aid Lawyer Has an Epiphany” and “DSS Dream.”

Unequal power relations also are signaled in Espada’s work through rhetorical reversal,^[15] such as when rendered social positions or signifying practices of oppressors and oppressed trade places. For instance, encoding resistance to the colonizing effects of the mass export of U.S. popular culture, in “Coca-Cola and Coco Frío” (City of Coughing), a Brooklyn boy visits his ancestral Puerto Rico, expecting a better understanding of “[. . .] family folklore” (2) and instead finds “[a]t every table, some great aunt / [. . .] with cool spotted hands” guiding him “to a glass of Coca-Cola” (6–8). Espada reveals that the boy (in fact, the poet in youth) prefers the machete-procured coconut drink named in the binary title to the import product incomprehensibly drunk by island people, who “[. . .] sang jingles from World War II / in a language they did not speak” (24–25). Similarly, in the lyric title proem from Imagine (printed alongside a Spanish translation by Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and the author), the opening lines incorporate rhetorical reversal, both in terms of subjectivity and spatial description, to represent as well as critique social hierarchies:

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,

gazing like admirals from the rail

of the roofdeck

or levitating hands in praise

of steam in the shower;

this is the year

that shawled refugees deport judges

who stare at the floor

and their swollen feet

as files are stamped

with their destination. (1–11)

Este es el año cuando los desamparados

echan a los terratenientes,

mirando como almirantes desde el barandal del balcón

o levantando manos en alabanza

del vapor de la regadera;

este es el año

cuando refugiados en rebozos deportan a los jueces

que miran fijamente al piso

y a sus pies hinchados

al ver sus expedientes estampados

con su destino; (1–11)

In the second stanza, the speaker continues to imagine a reordering of material conditions, so that migrant workers inherit the means of production that comprise “[. . .] the bedlam of the cannery” (“[. . .] de la enlatadora caótica”) (34), while celebrating the moment “[. . .] cockroaches / become extinct” (“[. . .] de la extinción / de las cucarachas [. . .]) (40–41), and food stamps “are auctioned like gold doubloons” (“se subastan como doblones de oro”) (46). After reminding readers of the possibility of “[. . .] the abolition of slave-manacles” (“[. . .] la abolición de los grilletes del esclavo”) (50) and “[. . .] the shutdown of extermination camps” (“[. . .] el cierre de los campamentos del exterminio”) (53), the poem arrives in the last stanza at an invocation against inhumanity: “So may every humiliated mouth, / teeth like desecrated headstones, / fill with the angels of bread” (“Y que cada boca humillada, / sus dientes como lápidas profanadas, /se llene con los ángeles de pan”) (62–64). Equally apocalyptic and epiphanic, these final lines implicate sites of social struggle as shared arrangements that may result in detrimental effects at all levels of power.

The argument for equitable labor practices in the United States that foregrounds the title poem in Imagine maintains an expansive presence throughout Espada’s body of work. Practitioners of ludic poetry, on the other hand, may confine labor relations to careerism, leading Houlihan to end her critique of language poets with the provocation: “Meanwhile, the point of [their] incoherence becomes clearer: to secure an academic position in the hierarchy of capitalist society” (85). But even poets have to eat. So while Espada himself rose to earn a place in the academy, he never forgot the less-privileged republic of his youth, using his rhetorical versatility to cross frontiers between farmhands, factory workers, minimum-wage earners, and the more economically secure workforce. As examples of this mission, many of which attest to Espada’s personal experiences with flexible labor, witness his “The Right Hand of a Mexican Farm Worker in Somerset County, Maryland” (Trumpets); “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper,” “The Toolmaker Unemployed,” “Transient Hotel Sky at the Hour of Sleep,” “The Rifle in My Hands” (City of Coughing); “Rednecks,” “The Hearse Driver,” “Do Not Put Dead Monkeys in the Freezer,” “The Bouncer’s Confession” (Imagine); and “The Janitor’s Garden” (Mayan Astronomer). Such poems also may seek to redress payroll disparity through resistance-narratives. For instance, “The Foreman’s Wallet” (Imagine) appropriates militaristic language to document a workers’ revolt at a printing plant, following an announcement of layoffs. The speaker, operator of a shrink-wrap machine, recounts: “[. . .] Towers of legal pads collapsed / fist-fired paper grenades hissed overhead. / A forklift truck without a driver bumped blindly / down the aisle, and we all saluted” (22–25). Though “[s]aboteurs were unscrewing the punchclock” (27), the speaker concedes how eventually “[. . .] even the radicals among us relented” (38). As the poem underscores, victories against worker oppression are often short-lived; the fight for fair labor practices, even in our current context, looms onward.^[16]

Critiques of social injustices as found in legal and healthcare systems, as well as the workplace, also abound in Espada’s poetic offerings in which titles tell the whole story, such as the trenchant “For the Jim Crow Mexican Restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Where My Cousin Esteban was Forbidden to Wait Tables Because He Wears Dreadlocks” (Mayan Astronomer). Propelled by speculative discourse, “Governor Wilson of California Talks in His Sleep” (Imagine) also expeditiously contests discursive politics relative to the English-only debate in the United States by hypothesizing what said politician unwittingly confesses amid the backdrop of the racist Proposition 187 debate of the 1990s: a liking for only the “aliens” (2) who appear on Star Trek “’cause / they all / speak / English” (6–9). Wry condemnation of related systemic shortcomings is frequently amplified through simplification in several long-titled poems that amount in the main to pithy epigrams, as in the fourteen-word “The Florida Citrus Growers Association Responds to a Proposed Law Requiring Handwashing Facilities in the Fields” (“La Asociación de Productores de Cítricos de la Florida responde a un proyecto de ley requiriendo facilidades para lavarse las manos en los campos de trabajo”) (Rebellion/Rebelión) and the twenty-one word “Don’t Worry, Son, You’re in the Care of Mental Health Professionals” (City of Coughing).

On the whole, Espada’s resistance-postmodern poetry corresponds to “a pedagogy of ‘practice’: praxis means forming, grasping, and changing oneself and a historical world through collective productive work that mediates between the object and subject” (Zavarzadeh 39). Poems that rely on schoolroom settings and motifs literally exemplify his pedagogical aims.^[17] For instance, using American emblems of purported freedom (e.g., the flag and president) to evaluate limits of educational opportunities in the United States, “Public School 190, Brooklyn 1963” (Imagine) reflects on the speaker’s first-year of schooling, a time when “[t]he inkwells had no ink. / The flag had 48 stars, four years / after Alaska and Hawaii [sic]” (1–3). Students attending the dilapidated institution of “[. . .] vandalized blackboards” (4) include “[. . .] retarded boys penned / in the basement” (6–7). Other pupils incomprehensively “[. . .] stared in Spanish” (8) at an inadequate instructor, while one renegade enacts a home grown version of rhetorical reversal in coloring in the faces of characters in “[. . .] Dick and Jane books / with a brown crayon” (12–14). The second and final stanza then turns to the proverbial moment of the Kennedy assassination, declaiming what the students have long known, that “something bad had happened” (19; repeated verbatim 21) before the date that becomes the poem’s final-line locational epitaph: “November 22, 1963” (23). “Public School 190” also stands as a retrospective companion poem to the earlier “The Year I Was Diagnosed with a Sacrilegious Heart” (City of Coughing), which relays a moment in 1969 when the speaker “[. . .] quit reciting / the Pledge of Allegiance,” refusing to “[. . .] salute the flag” (1–3), despite “[. . .] [drinking] the milk / with presidential portraits on the carton” (12–13). Compelling challenges to dominant-culture educational apparatuses (including English-only initiatives) also take shape in “Bully” (“Buscaballa”), “The New Bathroom Policy at English High School” (“Nueva norma para el baño en la English High School”), “Revolutionary Spanish Lesson” (“Lección revolucionaria de español”) (Rebellion/Rebelión); “My Native Costume” (Imagine), and “The Community College Revises Its Curriculum in Response to Changing Demographics” (Mayan Astronomer).^[18] As Zavarzadeh might contend in analyzing Espada’s schoolroom portraits, “the power/knowledge relation between the teacher and student and among the students in [these] classroom[s] is fully foregrounded and made visible,” cultural differences consequently recovered in the interest of educating for social understanding and change (41).

Espada’s resistance-postmodern thematic concerns and poetic strategies potently converge in “Sleeping on the Bus” (Imagine), a deeply personal yet fiercely public, free-verse narrative concerning a bus ride undertaken by a brown-skinned Army man (an allusion to the poet’s father, Frank Espada, who served in the Air Force and was arrested in 1949 on an interstate bus ride for refusing to sit in the back of the bus. See M. Espada, “Postcard”).^[19] Rendered in four stanzas unified by motifs that reassemble throughout, it critiques circumstances of cultural memory, particularly pointing to how U.S. citizens easily erase political history from our collective consciousness. Largely a lyric poem, it employs anaphora to underscore a litany of social struggles that we might forget when somnambulant in the mundane rite of traveling en masse, a metaphor for a ride through cultural memory.

The initial line, “How we drift in the twilight of bus stations” (1), sets a mood that suggests both the “twilight” of race interaction in late-twentieth-century America (time and place of the poem) as well as the idea of “drifting,” establishing concern for social consciousness in addition to questioning where we go, why, and how. The “how” matters because the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s, immortalized by Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of a public bus in 1955, allowed for changes resulting in citizens sitting side-by-side in public transportation—regardless of skin pigment. We likewise share “[. . .] soda machines” (5) and “[. . .] white-lit bathroom mirrors” (8) that no longer segregate by color-coded signage. The bus station setting itself contains an overarching metaphor that incriminates social hierarchies related to transportation, in that travel by bus, plane, train, car, rail riding, hitchhiking, and so forth, continues to mark social class to a degree, though more people have access to advanced forms of travel than ever before in our nation’s history. Additional vocabulary in the opening stanza—including “[. . .] shrink [. . .],” “[. . .] overcoats [. . .],” “[. . .] wait [. . .],” “[. . .] loudspeaker,” “[. . .] bang [. . .],” “[. . .] lost [. . .],” “[. . .] bewildered [. . .],” “[. . .] vision [. . .],” and “[. . .] faces”—speaks to the politics of forgetting as well as to covering up or “whitewashing” (implied by “[. . .] white-lit”), as it were, social grievances (2–3, 5–8). Such language suggests the losing or diminishing of political vision and action, particularly bewildering, given the volume (invoked via the loudspeaker) and force (i.e., the “bang”) of the civil rights era in U.S. history.

In the second stanza, the speaker turns from the setting of a quotidian bus station to actual Freedom Rider experiences through Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, which recall the threat of “[. . .] the beckoning mob [. . .]” (12), the violence of those times evoked in the image of “how afterwards” (12) victim’s “[. . .] faces were tender and lopsided as spoiled fruit” (13) and riddled with “[. . .] lost teeth” (14). In a moment of reversal, the stanza sounds a hopeful chord in allusions to how “[. . .] descendants / of Africa and Europe both, kept riding” (15–16), black, white, and brown alike, working from a common cause to end “[. . .] the ancient laws of segregation” (18).^[20]

First-line anaphora that connects the poem’s four stanzas continues in the third with the accusation, “How we forget Biloxi, Mississippi, a decade before” (19), creating a bridge from a collective national historical consciousness to a personal history, in which Frank Espada, the unnamed “[. . .] brown man in Army uniform” (21), is brusquely removed from a bus for ignoring the laws of who could ride where.^[21] Subsequently, the man cannot sleep in the jail cell he is hauled off to as easily as riders today doze off on buses, blissfully forgetful or unaware of history; such ignorance is projected by the fact that the soldier in the poem for many years leaves his family in the dark about his fateful night. Even the activist-speaker remains guilty of complacency, confessing in the final line of the stanza: “How he told me, and still I forget” (32).

As made audible in the culmination of “Sleeping on the Bus,” many among us have replaced the sound of our political history with a “[. . .] babble of headphones,” a sonic separatism that divorces some from “[. . .] the singing and clapping” (metonymy for the hymn “We Shall Overcome”)^[22] of a previous generation (35–36). Meanwhile, latter-day travelers who “[. . .] doze upright on buses” may have accumulated unearned advantages to travel where and how they will (33). The poem’s (ir)resolution, “how we sleep, how we sleep,” righteously condemns the shutting off of mind, body, and spirit, while simultaneously encouraging readers to recover and respect our vanishing, collective heritage (41).

As Martín Espada’s poetry conveys, circumstances for the disenfranchised of North and South America did not improve much in the final decades of the twentieth century nor in the inaugural one of the twenty-first. Yet, his resistance-postmodern writing offers hope for social change, encouraging readers to put ideas and learning gathered from its evocative literariness into immediate use. Our survival as global citizens may depend upon such recognition and action. Thus, in the final moments of Republic of Poetry does Espada project farsighted political conscience, welcoming to his cause “[. . .] poets with white hair spilling, / your sons and daughters pouring from the mouth of the world” (“Caves of Camuy” 42–43).

Notes

Cross reference to Alabanza. The following poems cited in this essay are also contained in Espada’s Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2002. Listed by order of appearance, they are (Alabanza page references included):

“The Hidalgo’s Hat and a Hawk’s Bell of Gold” 87–88; “The Other Alamo” 106–08; “My Name is Espada” 173–74; “Again the Mercenaries: Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, 4th of July 1982” 46; “Two Mexicans Lynched in Santa Cruz, California, May 3, 1877” 74; “Mrs. Báez Serves Coffee on the Third Floor” 19–22; “Toque de queda: Curfew in Lawrence” 39–40; “Mariano Explains Yanqui Colonialism to Judge Collings” 45; “City of Coughing and Dead Radiators” 94–96; “The Broken Window of Rosa Ramos” 100–01 (note that page 99 is erroneously cited in the Alabanza index for this poem); “The Legal Aid Lawyer Has an Epiphany” 102; “DSS Dream” 103; “Coca-Cola and Coco Frío” 91–92; “Imagine the Angels of Bread” 117–19; “The Right Hand of a Mexican Farm Worker in Somerset County, Maryland” 49; “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” 93; “Rednecks” 126–27; “Do Not Put Dead Monkeys in the Freezer” 128–29; “The Bouncer’s Confession” 130–31; “For the Jim Crow Mexican Restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Where My Cousin Esteban was Forbidden to Wait Tables Because He Wears Dreadlocks” 179–80; “The Florida Citrus Growers Association Responds to a Proposed Law Requiring Handwashing Facilities in the Fields” 81; “Bully” 67–68; “The New Bathroom Policy at English High School” 69; “Revolutionary Spanish Lesson” 75; “My Native Costume” 144; “The Community College Revises its Curriculum in Response to Changing Demographics” 183; and “Sleeping on the Bus” 154–55.

Ed. note: The title of this poem (i.e., “My Name Is Espada”) in the revised Alabanza version features a lowercased copula (“is”) as compared to an uppercase articulation in the original. See also Sarmiento Note 9, Pérez-Bustillo Note 44, and Dowdy Note 4, all in this volume.

Ed. note: See M. Espada, Mayan Astronomer 74–77. For more information on the NPR controversy, see also M. Espada, “All Things Censored” in Zapata’s Disciple, pp. 125–35 and 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 and as a reprint in Alabanza, pp. 187–89.

As with the Abu-Jamal/NPR controversy, Espada elaborates on the Nike scandal in his personal essay “The Poetics of Commerce: The Nike Poetry Slam” that appears in Zapata’s Disciple, pp. 115–23. As with the Abu-Jamal controversy, the Nike story was also featured in the Progressive. See Rothschild, “Nike’s Poets.”

Espada notes in the Alabanza glossary, p. 233, that “alabanza” is Spanish for “Praise; sometimes used in a religious sense. From ‘alabar,’ to celebrate with words” (emphasis added).

Ed. note: Espada addresses how such “specialized language” operates as ideological reinforcement in English-only debates. See his “The New Bathroom Policy at English High School” from Zapata’s Disciple:

If anything, the English language is being eroded from the top down, by the dialects of the powerful: Legalese, medicalese, bureaucratese. These dialects seek to obscure, rather than clarify; their intent is not to communicate, but to control. (75)

Sharing the same Latin root as ludicrous, “ludic” derives from ludus, game, and ludere, to play.

While it is not my intention to disparage particular practitioners of ludic poetry, neither do I wish to further privilege their name “brands.” Contemporary examples abound in literary-journal bellwethers; for instance, see Fence.

An adherent of resistance-postmodern practices, Ron Offen published the poetry miscellany Free Lunch from 1989–2010 (disbanding operation due to health issues), which provided subscriptions free to “all serious poets” living in the United States. Offen also returned manuscripts not accepted for publication replete with post-it notes, offering reasoned commentaries. He sums up his editorial purpose as follows: “I made a promise to myself that I would comment as best I could on all work submitted to me. As a poet myself, I knew how dispiriting it was to get a printed rejection slip with no indication as to why my work was being rejected” (“Meet the Editor”). Likewise indicative of his commitment to egalitarian practices, Free Lunch 20 (Spring 1998) contains a selection of prisoner poetry from across the United States. His editorial “From the Editor” in that same issue argues passionately for prison poetry workshops as a mechanism of “reformation and rehabilitation,” which assist in bringing prisoners “back into society as worthwhile citizens” (2–3).

Ed. note: The reference to “Always historicize!” of course, is from Fredric Jameson’s landmark The Political Unconscious, p. 9.

See also Anderson for Espada’s comment on how Marxists tend to view his work:

I do often feel like I am betwixt and between in a lot of ways. I’m not Marxist enough for the Marxists. I’m not poetic enough for the poets. By becoming a cultural hybrid, a racial hybrid, there’s some solitude. Some isolation. That you participate in some circles but you don’t belong to any particular one of them. You’re marginalized in all of them. (n. pag.)

10.

Ed. note: Some of the text in the original Trumpets publication of “Again the Mercenaries” was altered by the poet in a corrected, revised version that appears in M. Espada, Alabanza 46 (see esp. lines 8–9 in the excerpted passage below—note the incorporation of italics in line 8, and capitalization added to line 9):

Here dusk is a mulato, night the grandson

of a slave, walking the river into mines

collapsed like the caverns of an exhausted lung.

The whites took the gold and left tuberculosis,

says El Indio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (5–9, emphasis in original)

11.

Ed. note: See Note 10 above. Espada in the revised Alabanza version changed the original final word of line 12 from “monarch” to “empire.”

12.

Ed. note: For more on this poem, see the contributions by Stanchich as well as Dowdy in this volume.

13.

Ed. note: (Re: [sic] in poem title) Original version of the poem excluded the accented “á” in “Baez.” Changed to “Báez” in Alabanza version of the poem.

14.

Ed. note: Alabanza version of the poem (p. 45) italicizes the prisoner response in line 3 to read: “¡Pa’l carajo!”

15.

Rhetorical reversal as textual strategy is commonly used by writers of color to mark “whiteness” as a category of identification, often unmarked and hence made normative.

16.

Ed. note: See Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 3 for the fullest critical account of Espada’s labor poetry yet recorded. See also the collection of Espada’s labor poetry The Meaning of the Shovel from Smokestack Books.

As to “ongoing” labor struggles to which Uchmanowicz alludes, see Carvalho and Downing’s Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era (particularly the Churchill and Finkelstein cases, which point to the erosion of tenure). Consider also the neoliberalized attack against unionized labor—within and beyond the academy—in such legislative initiatives against collective bargaining rights, advocated by Scott Walker in Wisconsin and by legislators in other states.

17.

Ed. note: See Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 3 subsection “The Structural Violence of the Classroom,” pp. 176–88, and ch. 5 “From a Republic of Property to a Republic of Poetry—The Language of Possibility” that establishes the links between poetry, politics, and pedagogy in Espada’s writing.

18.

Ed. note: In the Alabanza edition, the “its” in the title is presented in lowercase.

19.

Ed. note: For more on the history of this event, see M. Espada, “Postcard” as well as ch. 3 “[N]ot good enough,” esp. pp. 62–66, from my study of Frank Espada’s life and work, Puerto Rico Is in the Heart.

20.

Ed. note: Cf. lines 17–22 from “Imagine the Angels of Bread”:

this is the year

that darkskinned men

lynched a century ago

return to sip coffee quietly

with the apologizing descendants

of their executioners.

21.

Ed. note: Espada changes the “brown man in Army uniform” reference on line 21 to “brown man in military uniform” in the revised Alabanza version of the poem, pp. 154–55, to not only more accurately depict his father’s enrollment in the Air Force and the historicity of the actual event he references, but to universalize the experience to include other soldiers who may well have endured similar segregationist treatment as Frank Espada.

Additionally, Espada makes clear in his Zapata’s Disciple essay “Postcard from the Empire of Queen Ixolib” (see esp. pp. 22–25) that Frank Espada’s undocumented incarceration was illegal, considering an extant Supreme Court ruling of Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia that determined the back of the bus custom could not be applied to interstate bus travelers (such as Frank Espada).

22.

Ed. note: This song has been performed by a number of artists with human rights activist commitments. One of the more popular renditions is by Pete Seeger. See Seeger in Works Cited.

Chapter 4

Undoing Macho

Oscar D. Sarmiento

Martín Espada’s Poetry against Domestic Violence^[1]

“If only history / were like your hands.”

(“Si la historia / sólo fuera como tus manos”)

—Martín Espada (“Colibrí” [“Colibrí”] 37–38)

Best known for his poems about the struggles of poor Latino immigrants in the United States, Martín Espada has also published a number of compelling texts about his family. When Espada writes on this subject, he is interested in asserting his social and ethnic background through an honest and, at times, piercing depiction of family life. For instance, in his award-winning 1996 collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), his poetry adopts the shape of a poetic autobiography—a radiography of both his family’s trials and tribulations, as well as of their courage and decisiveness when confronting discrimination. Among the poems about family life, one also finds compositions dedicated to his wife, Katherine Gilbert-Espada. The poems about Katherine must be included in the autobiographical turn of Espada’s poetry and connected to the way in which his poetry fuses—after much feminist reflection on this intersection—the personal to the political. Such is the focus of this essay.

In the poems Espada has written for and about his wife Katherine, he unties the knot that binds masculinity to violence, discloses the effects of domestic violence, and envisions a progressive Latino masculinity. “Home” in these poems, however, is no safe heaven. And this is what Tim Edwards precisely stresses in Cultures of Masculinity: “The one remaining domain here is the home, a supposedly safe haven from the violence of elsewhere and yet not well known to be a central arena for many more sexual and gendered forms of violence that often go on unregulated” (48). The success or defeat of men’s violence against women in these poems depends on the way each place themselves in relation to the roles that the androcentric script strives to ascribe to them. In this sense, then, as in other poems Espada has written, at stake here are the very choices men and women have to make every day concerning the perpetration of violence against and oppression of others who are seen as weaker—“easy prey”—for one or another reason. For Espada, a Latino man’s violence toward women (and even other males), stems from the paradoxical challenge that dislodging rage from violence presents to men.

Espada has written poems in which rage, at times, takes over his life and the lives of boys and men who suffer exploitation and discrimination. Being a Puerto Rican male adult from a working-class background and the father of a male child have been defining experiences for Espada. He reflects on the way violence and rage are embedded in the lives of many men in his essay “The Puerto Rican Dummy and the Merciful Son” (Zapata’s Disciple [1999]), in which he also highlights how these challenges impact Latino men in particular. According to Espada:

Violence is the first cousin to rage. If learning to confront rage is an important element of developing Latino manhood, then the question of violence must be addressed with equal urgency. Violence is terribly seductive; all of us, especially males, are trained to gaze upon violence until it becomes beautiful. Beautiful violence is not only the way to victory for armies and football teams; this becomes the solution to everyday problems as well. (41)

Espada thinks, therefore, that it is not only the task of Latino men to understand the impact of the masculinist script on our lives and disengage masculinity from rage and violence; that responsibility and commitment instead lies with all men. More than we care to acknowledge, we are constantly presented with the sharp images of an indestructible male warrior whose sense of self is constructed through racy actions and a cold psychological façade predicated on speedy love conquests. The iconic figure of James Bond comes to mind here. Perhaps the profound dissatisfaction some men experience, upon realizing that their social circumstances prevents them from enacting to perfection the assertive, always-in-control-over-others macho model of a man, leads them to abuse others, to assault women. In his poem “Her Toolbox” from Imagine, Espada has written a portrait of just such a man.

In this poem, Katherine, the poet’s wife (for whom the poem is dedicated, though she is unnamed in the narrative action), walks home from work, traversing a metro-Boston area that Espada describes as xenophobic and violent. In his essay “Argue not Concerning God” from Zapata’s Disciple, Espada writes a description of Katherine, a woman who is self-reliant, arts and crafts-minded, and fiercely independent, that coincides with the image of her he introduces in this poem: “My wife, born on a Connecticut dairy farm, crafts ornaments by hand and saws down her own Christmas tree in the woods” (36). According to Rita Gross, “Patriarchy depends, in the final analysis, on fixed gender roles. Without gender roles, no one will have automatic access to any gender role or power over another because of her physiological sex” (25). And here, from the start of the poem, Katherine’s image defies traditional “feminine” gender expectations, as we learn “[. . .] she was the carpenter / for the community center / on Dorchester Avenue” (9–11). Her type of work places her in a profession that today is still the domain of men, and her involvement with the community center suggests that the improvement of living conditions for this segment of the city is important to her. But Dorchester Avenue is a difficult place to navigate, let alone work in—as anyone familiar with the area will attest—because, as the poem states, with a hint at sarcasm, this is a place known for tough, gritty, and sometimes violent urban life, “where men with baseball bats / [have] chased the new immigrants / and even the liberals / rolled up their windows / at a red light” (12–16).

Once the poet has provided enough context for the anecdote to develop, the core action follows. The poem now centers on one single event that takes place while Katherine is coming back from work. She is followed that night by a man in a car, who “[. . .] talked to her / while he steered, kept taunting / when the car lurched / onto the sidewalk, / trapping her in a triangle / of brick and fender” (20–25). At this moment in the narrative, we realize that one of the poem’s central motives is to expose the risk of sexual assault. The man behind the steering wheel uses his words and his car to exert control so to overpower a woman he sees as weak and defenseless at that night hour. Could it also be that something in Katherine’s personal demeanor triggered this man’s reaction? Did Katherine’s confident attitude in the street lead this man to believe that he could show this “little woman” better?

Perhaps one of the most revealing moments of the poem takes place when we observe the man’s reaction to Katherine’s desperation. It is in this segment that we understand the reason why harassing her is so thrilling for him. It is precisely when the driver senses that Katherine has been cornered into a place of submission and fear that he starts to feel the rush of assuming power over her: “He knew her chest was throbbing; / that was the reason he throbbed too, / stepping from the car” (26–28). According to poet Maya Angelou: “The stalking becomes in the rapist’s mind, a private courtship, where the courted is unaware of her suitor, but the suitor is obsessed with the object of his desire. He follows, observes, and is the excited protagonist in his sexual drama” (46). It is now, when Katherine appears defenseless and under his grip, that the assailant has found a way to place himself at a level that is clearly superior to her. From his point of view, the power positioning of these two characters is a titillating sexual drama, essential to the reconstitution of his virility and the femininity of his quarry, Katherine, the female pedestrian in the street. Again, following his logic, now he and Katherine are both placed where they should have been from the start: at decisively clear, opposite ends of the gender power spectrum.

Espada gives us a hint as to what the resolution of this confrontation will be when, at the start of the poem, he writes that Katherine has been working as a carpenter. What takes place by the conclusion of the poem is an actual reversal of traditional gender roles, because Katherine, who was carrying her carpenter toolbox with her all along, quickly draws a hammer from it and confronts her assailant with a firm and menacing gesture. Thus, she suddenly defuses the momentum of the man’s actions, leaving him to skulk away, shaking in fear (her response reminiscent of the classic feminist image and slogan, “‘If I had a hammer . . . I’d SMASH Patriarchy’” [3; emphasis in original]).^[2] While Katherine has chosen a fight response, the poet’s description reveals to us unexpectedly the man’s decision to flee, thereby undoing his macho: “Oh, the hands like startled pigeons / flying across his face / as he backpedaled to the car / and rolled his window shut” (35–38). Also, it should be noted that Katherine’s use of the hammer to confront this man corresponds with Espada’s utilitarian definitions of poetry and what poetry should do, just as we see in the next section.

In a key passage of his essay “Zapata’s Disciple and Perfect Brie,” also contained in Zapata’s Disciple, Espada speaks of how we can understand a poem as a tool:

What do we want, finally, when we write from an awareness of class and its punishments? We want change, which, as Frederick Douglass pointed out, does not come without a demand. This is the poem as an act of political imagination, the poet not merely as prosecutor, but as visionary. For this purpose, a poem can be as useful as a hammer. (11–12)

The meaning of the hammer certainly depends on the context where one finds it mentioned. This said, such an instrument when situated in Espada’s poetry is evidently associated to working-class people’s (and to the poet as a worker who “hammers” poems) sense of self and dignity.^[3] So, when Katherine picks up the hammer and raises it in her hand to confront this man in “Her Toolbox,” she is also confronting him as a working-class individual. Intersecting her class placement, her gender performance in this context also suggests that she raises the hammer as an equal to her male working-class peers. In other words, she becomes at once a symbol of class and gender equality. No longer a victim, she proves her strength and subverts patriarchal essentialism with this quick reaction.

As it happens in Espada’s poems about the struggles of poor Latino/as, the female protagonist is presented not as a victim, but as a decisive individual who can turn an unjust situation into an opportunity for justice. Espada thus dispenses with a simplistic view of female submission to male oppression while acknowledging that some men do fall into the category of abusers. According to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, when we position women as victims we freeze them (and men) into the rigid components of a binary situation:

Although it is true that the potential of male violence against women circumscribes and elucidates their social position to a certain extent, defining women as archetypal victims freezes them into “objects-who-defend-themselves,” men into “subjects-who-perpetrate-violence,” and (every) society into powerless (read: women) and powerful (read: men) groups of people. (24)

Though she suffers abuse in the situations depicted in these poems, Espada depicts Katherine as refusing to play the role of the victim and, in so doing, cultivates a space for a different kind of civility, one grounded on the right to female self-assertion and refiguration of the masculinist script. In the same vein, not all men in Espada’s poetry fit the mold of victimizers.

An excellent example of this appears in the poem “When the Leather is a Whip,” also from Imagine. In this epigrammatic and biographical poem,^[4] Espada and his wife are assumed to be the central characters. The scene depicted seems innocuous enough, but it rapidly takes on unexpected ominous dimensions in the poetic turn when seen through the poet’s eyes. It is night and both husband and wife are retiring for the evening. Espada begins to undress while Katherine sits on the bed. The poem in its entirety reads:

At night,

with my wife

sitting on the bed,

I turn from her

to unbuckle

my belt

so she won’t see

her father

unbuckling

his belt. (1–10)

The poetic impact in “When the Leather” rests on the parallel established between the poet and Katherine’s father (Maynard Gilbert, who is unnamed in the poem)^[5]—a vital piece of biographical information necessary to appreciate fully the cycle of violence at work. It is as if the presence of a ghost invades the bedroom; what it signifies for the couple has to be carefully counteracted by the actions of the husband. So, in fact, the bedroom hosts three people, even though one is a spectral presence. Though immaterial, the ghost is tenacious and comes back time and again to haunt the couple. For this reason, repressing his presence will not make him go away. The only practical means to banish him, essentially, is to acknowledge his pervasiveness and, at the same time, find a way to counteract his actions.

In this case, the ghost of Katherine’s father clearly enacts a violent and terrifying masculinity that lingers over the couple in the bedroom. His hold is so strong that it could take over their lives if they were not to react timely and wisely. The challenge for the poet now rests on the fact that Katherine’s father’s image has started to intersect with his—invasive and threatening as this reflection seems to be—and if left unchecked, it could seize his life. At the same time, this sudden intersection searing the poet’s mind suggests that Espada, as a loving husband, has understood what Katherine allegedly endured at the hands of her father. Thus, the leather belt is an extension of the violent patriarchal legacy of his wife’s father. Branded by the father’s belt, the daughter’s flesh now attests to the cutting power divide between father and daughter.

The lines of the poem clearly suggest a number of ghost visitations. For this reason, it is important to highlight the repetitive nature of the father’s appearances. As a disciplined revenant, he comes back time and again to haunt his daughter’s memory and to take spectral possession of this bedroom. This is perhaps the major accomplishment of Espada’s epigram. The poem, then, would be true to the conflict depicted not only because the husband makes the decision to turn away from his wife and unbuckle his belt, but because it reveals with sharp precision that the husband’s choice entails a decision that may or may not be made. Subsequently, if it was Katherine’s choice to adopt the pose of the aggressor and yield the hammer in her hand to confront her abuser in “Her Toolbox,” it is now time for her husband—the poet himself—to make a decision and either defeat the patriarchal script or follow it, thereby extending the cycle of violence. Almost instinctively, Espada reacts and conceals the removal of his belt from his wife, and we certainly celebrate the poet for doing so. Equally important, we commend Espada for acknowledging that the ghost of Katherine’s father has the capability of triggering the volcano of rage in Espada himself, and in so doing, could tempt him to compromise his own sense of self and his desire for empathy. Acknowledging the presence of the ghost entails, then, that it will be the task of the husband to remind himself again of the pain inflicted on his wife’s body and in her psyche. In the end, what will allow Espada to develop a compassionate identity for himself or reinforce a violent and oppressive masculinity will be his personal decision to embrace his wife’s pain or to deny it.

Another family situation in which the struggle against the ghost of Katherine’s father plays a prominent role is the poem “White Birch” from City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993). The poet dedicates the composition to Katherine—the protagonist of the poem—and dates the work December 28, 1991. If in the previously examined poem, “When the Leather,” the repercussions of her father’s actions on Katherine’s life are intensely psychological, in this poem they are also evidently and painstakingly physical. Although the poem compels us to pay attention to her father’s brutality and to the result of one of his actions, the poem focuses not on that outcome, but instead on the juxtaposition between the excruciating pain she experiences and the sudden release from it soon after delivering her first baby. Speaking to Katherine, the poet describes in the first stanza how, after having too much “[. . .] rye whisky,” twenty years ago, her father reportedly “[. . .] stamped his shoe / in the groove between [her] hips” (1, 4–5). As a result, the poet continues, “The tail of [her] spine split, / became a scraping hook” (7–8). The link that binds the past and the present in the body of Katherine makes her own condition somewhat hyperbolic. If Katherine is giving birth to their baby, and if being in labor is agonizing, the current condition of her spine as a result of her father’s action doubly compounds the pain she feels at the hospital.

Interestingly, the poet not only highlights in the end of this stanza the disruptive effect his wife’s father’s action has had on her life, but he also introduces an organic parallel between a tree and Katherine’s body: “For twenty years a fire raced / across the boughs of your bones” (9–10). Though the “fire” here reads metaphorically for Katherine’s excruciating and seemingly interminable pain, it also signifies the post-traumatic psychological effect her father’s kick has had on her as an individual. The next stanza, which centers on the moments immediately prior to Katherine’s delivery of her and Martín’s son Clemente (aka Klemente)^[6] at the hospital, underscores the past action with the present, while simultaneously revealing the pain of labor: “The boy was snagged on that spiraling bone. / Medical fingers prodded your raw pink center / while you stared at a horizon of water / no one else could see [. . .]” (18–21). Consequently, the familial interaction in the first stanza centered on one male (Gilbert-Espada’s father) and one female (daughter); in this second stanza, we encounter two males (Martín and Clemente, father and son) and one female (Katherine as mother). From the viewpoint of the speaker, the moment of childbirth at the hospital reintroduces into his family the trauma experienced by Katherine twenty years ago. But now, as a new father, Espada is placed up to some intense degree in the position of Katherine’s father. With the decision to have a baby, that is, to be a father himself, and knowing of his wife’s physical condition, he knows he has taken a risk in assuming this role, one that could, by its very proximity, parallel him with the past actions that have defined Katherine’s life and her “father.”

This is to say, Martín finds himself at the center of the placement of the baby in Katherine’s body, complicated by the father’s violence upon her body, which could be read as a repetition of her father’s action in the present. The viciousness of her father’s kick is reenacted precisely where the baby resides inside her. The cruel irony is that Espada confronts a shocking truth-telling moment while witnessing the birth. One gets the sense that he somehow feels responsible for having exacerbated his wife’s suffering and, if he has done so, it could be argued that he has become an unwitting accomplice of Katherine’s father. The paradox is evident. He who dearly loves his wife can also become the source of raging pain, even if unintentionally so. Furthermore, Espada recognizes that his son, the next male in his and Katherine’s line, may then turn into a coparticipant in what reads as a masculinist ploy to destroy the one person they should most care for and protect.

The next stanza makes even more apparent how high the human stakes are at this delivery room for Espada and his family. At the poem’s midpoint, Espada recalls the village where Katherine was born. He concentrates on the town cemetery, where he has seen “weathered headstones naming women / drained of blood with infants coiled inside / the caging hips, hymns swaying / as if lanterns over the mounded earth” (28–31). The fear expressed here is that both his wife and his baby may die in the delivery room, thereby becoming new additions to the cemetery.^[7] If so, the crushing negative side of the past would still have the upper hand and would wreak havoc in the life of his family. Subsequently, we find in “Her Toolbox,” “When the Leather is a Whip,” and in “White Birch” a similar dramatic scene, in which the characters come face to face with patriarchal power and must brave the situation or see their lives shattered and irrevocably altered.

It stands to reason, as has been the case throughout this poetic sequence, that the challenging situation in “White Birch” provides an opportunity for liberation.^[8] When the climactic moment of the delivery of the baby boy happens, Katherine’s body releases the baby dislodging the hurtful past action from the present: “Then the white birch of your bones, / resilient and yielding, yielded again, / root snapped as the boy spilled out of you” (32–34). This means that the risk Espada and his wife took was worthwhile because a new beginning starts for them at the hospital.

As it becomes evident by the end of the poem, even though the location of the baby in Katherine’s body seemed to anchor her to her father’s action many years prior, it proves to be an unexpected blessing that produces a radical physical (and implicitly psychical) reshaping—and a renewed sense of future hope. Espada writes, “One day you stood, expected again / the branch of nerves / fanning across your back to flame, / and felt only the grace of birches” (42–45). The poem ends as an assertion of new life over death, justice over injustice, liberation and change over past stagnation in patriarchal violence, each of which allude to the most familiar themes in Espada’s corpus. In sum, Clemente, their newborn, has come vigorously to untie the knot that was binding Katherine and the Espada-Gilbert family to a past of brutality. The parallel between Katherine’s body and the tree, already announced in the first stanza, now achieves its full significance. Her body had been waiting for the right opportunity to purge itself of the persistent negativity of one past action and allow for a healing of that cruelty. Sown in her history was the seed of change, because Katherine was born in “a town of white birches” (26). Also, though seemingly unmerciful at the start, we realize in the final lines of the poem that the baby boy has come, though not recuperatively, to help release his mother from her father’s rage.

The poems Espada has written about his wife and their relationship reflect the importance that justice and solidarity play for the poet in the micrological struggle for cultural and political recognition of Latino/a communities in the United States. As a Puerto Rican, Espada sees the critical role of the poet as a work in progress that results from an upfront unveiling of both historical dishonesty and an individualistic lack of political and cultural awareness. Acknowledging, for instance, that it is through the poet’s eyes—not just as a detached observer—that we observe the events that took place in Boston’s Dorchester Avenue in “Her Toolbox” is crucial then to realizing the poet’s awareness of the intersections between power, gender, and class. Having learned important lessons from Katherine’s experiences, Espada shares them with his readers. He therefore engages in the process of reinterpreting life to rewrite the oppressive script that society has imposed on men (and women). Espada’s keen awareness of this script, as a Latino male, husband, father, and poet, is what has moved him to articulate through his poetry ways of envisioning new liberating relationships among both sexes. He chooses to redefine who he is, disengaging his masculine self from the perilous path of the stereotypical raging Latino male exerting power over women through physical and verbal abuse. While doing so, as depicted in the poem “White Birch,” he finds what he hopes will be a fellow traveler in his son. The boy—now young man—Clemente Espada, who has come to undo a family situation of stark abuse, thus earns his last name, “Espada” (Spanish for “sword”). And since he has come to symbolize such familial/genealogical healing (even though he first had to cause more pain to his mother and father in the transitional moment), he also earns his first name, “Clemente” (Spanish for “merciful”).

If last names define our civilian identity, then first names have the potential to inspire us. Interestingly, one important Latin American (Uruguayan) writer—Eduardo Galeano, who has written, among other highly praised books, Open Veins of Latin America (1997)—has lauded Espada’s poetry while celebrating the last name of the poet. The following sentence by Galeano (used as a back cover blurb for the hardcover edition of Alabanza) puns precisely on the surname Espada: “A sword (Espada) going in, deeply inside” (“Rev. of Alabanza” n. pag.). Galeano’s intention here is evidently to praise Espada’s incisive talent to uncover injustice and not let go of his readers until they acknowledge his lines as what they actually are: penetrating, committed acts of honesty and bravery. With that said, this particular appraisal of Espada’s poetry should lead us to unpack the complexity of the sword metaphor entering human flesh and touching the human soul. It will be always tempting to view Espada’s work according to an androcentric reading that figures the poet as the prototypical warrior who, in traditional fashion, uses his sword to cut open and penetrate flesh. Yet, on the other hand, since this metaphor comes so evidently loaded with violent gender resonances, Galeano may be unwittingly calling us to focus on what Espada’s existential and political (in the sense of representing men from a minority group) conundrum has been all along. For instance, in terms of his last name and given the stereotypes on Latino men, is it possible for the poet to refashion his identity? With what set of values is he to infuse his last name so that the signifier of the “sword” does not simply stand for a violent anger, resentment, and masculine brutality?

The poet addresses these concerns in “My Name Is Espada” from A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000),^[9] where he situates his last name within a unique heritage of struggle for social justice and liberation from oppressors in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean region, a major topic of his poetry. Significantly, the poet dichotomizes the sword in Espada: it is at once the tool tyrants in power use to police and terrorize the poor and disenfranchised, as well as it is the liberating instrument the dispossessed wield in revolt. The focus on the clash between these two antagonistic sides is somewhat tempered when Espada, in the fifth stanza of his poem, offers an ancestral trace of Puerto Rican relatives that include a bricklayer, teacher, shoemaker, priest, and sculptor. But the poet makes sure to end his poem by reasserting—as in “When the Leather” about the painful memories his belt invoked in the bedroom—his decision to listen, to envision, and to choose sides.

In the last lines, he reintroduces two important figures from previous segments: “So the face dreaming on a sarcophagus, / the slave of the saber riding a white horse by night / breathe my name, tell me to taste my name: Espada” (“My Name Is Espada” 41–43). The physiognomical trace on the sarcophagus is the face of a Spanish knight waiting to be awoken, and the “slave” on the “white horse” is the embodiment of the indentured Puerto Rican and Caribbean populations. His sense of self, his very identity, depends, therefore, on a decision to choose—no matter how complex his heritage—between the two clashing sides in history, as well as to embrace the historical mix of his lineage. What is most interesting here is that at given times, according to Espada, violence has either sustained oppression and victimization or produced the liberation and vindication of poor people’s humanity.

According to Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, “That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not” (54). Espada, who wants to embrace and acknowledge his heritage, pays homage to one relative that has deeply contributed to shape his strong sense of self as a Latino living in the United States, his father, Frank Espada. In a number of poems that read as evident tributes, Espada’s father appears as a decisive figure the son aspires to emulate; one of these powerful poems, included in City of Coughing, is “The Other Alamo.”^[10] Although his father’s name is not mentioned in this poem, it is evident that Espada chronicles one of his father’s experiences with segregation when he describes one of the youths that went into a bus station diner in 1949 to challenge the racist laws against serving food to people of color. Joining Frank are two of his military companions:

A soldier from Baltimore, who heard nigger sung here^[^[11]^]

more often than his name, but would not glance away;

another blond and solemn as his Tennessee

of whitewashed spires;^[^[12]^]

another from distant Puerto Rico, cap tipped at an angle

in a country where brown skin

could be boiled for the leather of a vigilante’s wallet. (30–36)

The scene that Espada depicts attests to the clear commitment these three boys have to challenge an obvious instance of racial discrimination. What is noteworthy in this case is that even though the three soldiers are forceful when expressing what they want at the diner, they do not, in the least, resort to violence while demanding to be served. They do, nonetheless, refuse to leave after being asked to do so. Upholding their dignity until the end, the men decide to vacate the premises only after the white manager orders the black cook to serve them cheeseburgers. Yet, before departing the diner, they make sure to “[. . .] [leave] a week’s pay for the cook” (50). Retelling this story is crucial for Espada because it is a poetic, truthful way of reinscribing the struggles for civil rights back into the present social justice concerns of the nation. At the same time, it also enables him to vindicate the actions of his father as a first-generation Puerto Rican struggling against racial and class tensions in the United States, a theme in Espada’s work that has also been examined by Edward J. Carvalho in “Puerto Rican Radical” and Puerto Rico Is in the Heart: Emigration, Labor, and Politics in the Life and Work of Frank Espada. Retelling this story not only dignifies Espada’s father’s courageous acts of civil disobedience, it situates Espada in a vibrant, demanding democratic historical heritage. Furthermore, this retelling allows Espada to focus on a more progressive view of Latino masculinity that he deems worthy of preservation and praise.

More recently, following the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008, Espada has written a moving poem titled “Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass” that appears in his The Trouble Ball (2011). The occasion for this poem was inspired by a visit the poet paid to the tomb of the abolitionist and women’s suffragist African American leader at Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York.^[13] As is common in his other works, Espada documents his visit by including locational markers and “November 7, 2008,” in the poem header. Interestingly, the date is relevant because the poem actually interweaves the political activism of Frederick Douglass with that of Barack Obama, the first African American United States president. Much like the poems in which Espada presents the life of his father as the very ground that has nurtured his own thirst for justice and social change, similarly, in “Litany at the Tomb,” Espada roots the political and historical legacy of Barack Obama in the fertile utopian ground of Frederick Douglass’s courageous and outspoken life. The poem begins by invoking the utopian tradition of the impossible that redraws boundaries and pushes open the limits to challenge that which society and its power brokers have deemed as “normal”: “This is the longitude and latitude of the impossible; / this is the epicenter of the unthinkable; / this is the crossroads of the unimaginable: / the tomb of Frederick Douglass, three days after the election” (1–4). The link used by the poet to establish Obama’s presence in the political arena of the nation both situates Obama in relation to a rigorous critical path of unexpected transformations and suddenly places the poet, as a man of mixed heritage, in a forward-moving, democratic quest for transformative politics and reengineering of the traditional places allocated to men and women. The poet concludes his poem by appealing, on the one hand, to history’s liberation from the bonds of slavery and ignorance—much as he attempted to do in the poems about Katherine and violence toward women, as well as in his iconic “Imagine the Angels of Bread”—and, on the other, to history’s creative redefinition of the oppressed, victimized location of the masculine minority figure into a leading historical actor of tremendous positive magnitude. This is Espada’s broad attempt to undo and rewrite the future historicity of macho, so that there may be a day when both merciful sons and merciful daughters will be on equal footing. A day when we join Espada to “say a prayer” and “bury what we call / the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, now and forever. Amen” (M. Espada, “Litany” 23–24; emphasis in original).

Notes

“Colibrí” 65–66; “Her Toolbox” 145–46; “My Name is Espada” 173–74; “The Other Alamo” 106–08; “Sleeping on the Bus” 154–55; “Thanksgiving” 196–97; “When the Leather is [sic] a Whip” 147; “White Birch” 104–05.

A previous, less-developed version of this essay was read at the “After the Washington Consensus: Collaborative Scholarship for a New America” 2007 Latin American Studies Congress in Montreal, Canada.

Ed. note: Thanks to Jennifer M. Woolston for pointing out this important connection to the “If I had a hammer” image—see Carvalho, Conversation in Works Cited. “If I had a hammer” is listed by title in Works Cited. For more on the origins of the image, see Dicker, who attributes authorship as “artist unknown” in her book A History of U.S. Feminisms, p. 178 (Notes to chapter 1).

Ed. note: It is important to remember also the symbol of the “hammer” reflects a formative moment in Espada’s early poetic awakening, such as the time he realizes he has created his very first metaphor for a high-school writing assignment, when he describes the rain as “tiny silver hammers pounding the earth” (qtd. in “Martín Espada: An Interview” 31).

Ed. note: See Espada, “Puerto Rican Dummy,” in Zapata’s Disciple, esp. pp. 43–44, for more context. Espada’s essay originally appears in Ray González’s edited collection Muy Macho: Latino Men Confront Their Manhood. See González 75–89.

Katherine’s father also appears as an important character “White Birch” from Imagine (which is explored in the present essay) and in “Thanksgiving” from Mayan Astronomer. The latter poem somehow replays, in hilarious fashion, the interracial marriage situation depicted in the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. (Ed. note: For other poems citing Maynard Gilbert [Katherine’s father], see “To Skin the Hands of God” and “The Toolmaker Unemployed.”)

Ed. note: Espada’s son’s name was originally spelled with a “C”—see the dedication on p. vii in City of Coughing as well as the dedication to Imagine on p. vii. See also Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical” 630n59. Clemente Espada’s name was later changed to Klemente with a “K” after the styling of Espada’s mentor Clemente Soto Vélez. See M. Espada, Imagine 92, “Author’s Note: Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies”:

He [Soto Vélez] was recognized as a major poet with the publication of Caballo de palo (The Wooden Horse) in 1959; verses from that book are quoted, in translation, in the twelfth stanza (“You spelled your name Klemente with a K”). [. . .] My wife and I named our son after him. (emphasis in original)

Ed. note: See also the Espada poem “Because Clemente Means Merciful” where the anxiety over Clemente’s mortality comes to the fore with even greater clarity as the poet recounts the fictive dream image of his dead father that morphs into his son: “In the dream, / when I looked again, / my father had become my son” (19–21). See also Note 6 above for the spelling of Klemente with a “K.”

For more on the subject of Espada’s poetry as a form of liberation poetics, see Pérez-Bustillo in this volume and Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 5.

See also Michael Dowdy’s “‘A mountain / in my pocket’” for a detailed discussion of this poem.

The title of this poem [i.e., “My Name Is Espada”] in the revised Alabanza version features a lowercased copula (“is”) as compared to an uppercase articulation in the original. See also Uchmanowicz Note 1, Pérez-Bustillo Note 44, and Dowdy Note 4, all in this volume.

10.

There are numerous poems either dedicated to or incorporating the presence of Frank Espada. For more on how Frank’s life and activism impacted Espada’s poetry, see Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” esp. ch. 2 “Immigrant Iceboy” and the corresponding ch. 3 “A mi padre” (the latter chapter should be consulted for more detail on how Espada has in effect “inherited” the artistic and political ethos of his father Frank). See also pp. 253–54n12 of the Carvalho manuscript for a complete list of poems and prose that invoke or allude to Frank. For those poems that dialogue specifically with the theme of racism under examination in “The Other Alamo,” see M. Espada, “The Sign in My Father’s Hands” and “Sleeping on the Bus.” See also Espada’s essay, “Postcard from the Empire of Queen Ixolib.”

11.

Ed. note: Dialogue or spoken text in Espada’s poems is typically changed from standard Roman typeface (that sometimes include quote marks) to italics in Alabanza revised versions of the poems, such as the word “nigger” in line 30 and the portions of lines 25, 43, and 49—appearing as lines 42 and 48 in the Alabanza version of the poem. (For more information on the shift in line numbers between the original and that which is contained in Alabanza, see note on revised line 33 in Note 12 below).

12.

Ed. note: Line 33 in the original poem, quoted here, was incorporated into line 32 of the Alabanza revised version of the poem. The overall length of the original poem is 58 lines vs. 57 in Alabanza; because of this alteration, the cited passage in this essay is reduced to five lines in updated, edited version, represented as lines 30–35.

13.

Ed. note: For more background on this poem, see also the Bill Moyers January 2013 conversation with Espada, listed under Moyers, “Martín Espada Examines Life Through Verse.”

Chapter 5

Muse on First

Eric B. Salo
(with Edward J. Carvalho)

Baseball in the Poetry of Martín Espada

“This butchered call makes the case for instant replay like Clarence Darrow made the case for evolution at the Scopes Monkey Trial. What will Selig do? Nothing. He is an iguana who walks like a man, the pet lizard of the owners. . . . If we can’t have justice out there in wider world, can we at least have justice in the games we play?”

—Martín Espada responding to a controversial umpire’s call that cost Detroit Tigers’ pitcher Armando Galarraga a “perfect game.” (qtd. in Zirin, “Martin [sic] Espada” n. pag.; ellipsis in original)

For anyone familiar with the poetry of Martín Espada, it should be immediately obvious that the influence of his father, documentary photographer and human rights activist Frank Espada, looms large in the poet’s aesthetic and political imagination. As noted in the introduction to this volume, “To be sure, there are several poems in the Espada canon that emphasize Frank as a central character” to address a variety of familiar Espada themes, from “those directly dedicated to him [Frank] or others that speak to his immigrant working-class struggles, the racism he encountered as a dark-skinned first-generation Puerto Rican living in the United States, or his political organizing that evolved from those early civil rights encounters,” experiences that Martín would essentially “inherit” (Carvalho).^[1] Espada’s baseball poems certainly endeavor to bring all of those elements together—and importantly, that cycle of poems starts with “Tato Hates the New York Yankees” (The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero [1982]), about a young Frank Espada whose alarm clock did not work the morning he was supposed to try out for the major leagues. In keeping with this tradition, Espada’s latest collection, The Trouble Ball (2011), based on a title poem of the same name, is also tellingly “for Frank Espada.” And while the poem, set in the 1950s, works fearlessly to expose the pivotal role race politics played in Frank’s life, at the same time, Espada describes “The Trouble Ball” as “a baseball poem (and more)” (“RE: Update” n. pag.).^[2]

Given the somewhat limited cross section of baseball poetry in Espada’s canon, we typically do not equate the sport with the poet. But this in no way diminishes the ways in which Espada uses the baseball motif effectively, if not persistently, across his several books to underscore myriad political, racial, and socioeconomic tensions that manifest in his larger body of work. To that point, Espada is indeed one of a very few serious poets writing about baseball in a thoughtful way and as part of a sustained narrative (although it is worth mentioning the baseball anthology by Nicholas Dawidoff that includes Espada’s work alongside such luminaries as Yusef Komunyakaa, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams) without a false ideal that devolves into the intellectual and aesthetic equivalent of a Chevrolet commercial. And, as this essay makes clear, Espada’s baseball poems are in fact very much worth careful consideration in any critical discussion of the poet’s social concerns and political commitments.

Espada’s baseball poems appear in nearly every one of his collections, including The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (1982); Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (1987); Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996); A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000); and the recently released The Trouble Ball (2011). Each of the allusions to the sport contained therein represent a baseball that is complex and ambiguous, a cultural space that has uniquely reinforced and conquered social injustice. To this end, baseball in Espada’s poetry is both equalizing and disproportionate in the sense that it becomes the tool by which liberation can be obtained; yet, at the same time, it also can be the backdrop, or even the vehicle, for social (in)justice. In this way, he offers a fuller understanding of the game, giving it a depth and character not always seen in other poetic representations.

Like the United States, baseball has had many great triumphs juxtaposed by an equal number of failures and tragedies. A country founded on human equality was made great, bitterly and ironically, through the strong economic hand of human slavery.^[3] The U.S. Constitution claimed, on the one hand, equality for all people, but in the legal margins of that document were written the invisible classist ambitions, as well as the more overt exceptions of women, blacks, and indigenous populations. In this respect, our attempts at democratic practice failed to live up to the theory of the Constitution.^[4]

Baseball has been called the “soul of the nation.” Thus, like the stitching on the ball itself, the United States and baseball have destinies that are interwoven. Each has continually been presented as pure and untainted spirits. Still, there remain dark and sinister aspects of the game that often go ignored when left to themselves. These pile up like our filth and garbage at an empty ballpark after a game, typically swept away by brown-skinned immigrant janitors, such as those invoked in Espada’s “Watch Me Swing.” Espada acknowledges these historical tensions when speaking recently on the ongoing steroid scandal in baseball. He is quoted in the Nation as saying, “Baseball is the Main Street of sports. (Think Cooperstown.) It’s full of history and nostalgia, and paved with the bricks of hypocrisy. Now it’s the rhetoric of the ‘drug war,’ handed down from the Nixon White House forty years ago to MLB and ESPN today” (Zirin, “Pawn” n. pag.; emphasis added).

Looking more closely at the specific “bricks of hypocrisy” Espada points to above, this article analyzes five key baseball poems in Espada’s stock: “Tato Hates the New York Yankees,” “Watch Me Swing,” “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park,” “Rain Delay: Toledo Mud Hens, July 8, 1994,” and “Genuflection in Right Field.”^[5] Crucially, the analysis contained herein seeks to both situate baseball within a sociopolitical framework and to discern how Espada’s poems offer a construction of the game (and poetic interpretation) that remains mindful of the intersections of race, class, and ethnicity that the poetry explores and the historical material conditions within which the baseball players themselves operate.

“Tato Hates the New York Yankees”

Considering that Espada’s love of baseball likely begins with his father’s passion for/trials with the sport as alluded to earlier, it indeed makes sense to begin with “Tato Hates the New York Yankees,” a poem in which baseball serves as a broad representation for institutional and also unspoken segregationist policies within American society. Though the link between Frank Espada and the central character is not made overtly clear in the poem, “Tato” is an old sobriquet for Espada’s father, whose photography accompanies the poetry in Martín Espada’s first book, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (1982). Tato is offered a tryout with the New York Yankees in 1947, the year Jackie Robinson broke the modern color barrier. Like Robinson, Tato is also lauded as a very talented player. The full realization of that comparison is cut short after Tato misses his tryout with the Yankees when his “[. . .] alarm clock / didn’t work that morning” (30–31). The mistake proves life-altering for Tato when the Yankees choose not to offer any further tryouts; Espada’s wry, but factual, comment that follows in this part of the poem—“There were no brownskinned boys / in the major leagues”^[6] in “[. . .] 1947”—carries with it the (not so) subtle suggestion that the Yankees were in fact acting as Yanquis, deferring to long-standing colonial policies of racial division (33–34, 32). As a result, Tato ends up satisfying his passion for baseball by “[. . .] play[ing] semipro” for “the industrial leagues” (45–46). In his later life, he casts aside the bitter memory with a form of self- and social denial—“‘I wasn’t good enough’” (69),^[7] he says, but both the poet and the reader (and one hopes even “Tato”/Frank himself) know otherwise.

Espada’s poem reminds us that baseball has long been tied inextricably to American culture, particularly as it remains America’s pastime. Consider Jacques Barzun’s claim that “to understand America, one must first understand baseball” (159). This link reaches back even to the venerable poet Walt Whitman, as recounted by his faithful amanuensis, Horace Traubel:

I said: “Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!” He was hilarious: “That’s beautiful: the hurrah game! well—it’s our game: that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere—belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.” (Horace Traubel and Walt Whitman qtd. in Thorn 231)

Regardless of baseball’s origins (Whitman’s interpretations notwithstanding)—be they European or American, a subject yet under some debate—the sport was, at its conception, congruous with American society because of its fast-paced game play and flurry of movements. This view of rapid game play is contrary to how baseball is viewed today. It is perceived now to be a much slower sport, partially because of the invention and popularization of more violent and active (and obviously inferior!) sports such as American football and basketball. Nonetheless, baseball often has been seen as an embodiment of the American spirit and of American possibility, even forecasting those characteristics ahead of their time in many cases. For example, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s modern color barrier when Martin Luther King, Jr. was only eighteen years old: sixteen years before his “I Have a Dream” speech. And as “Rosie the Riveter” replaced industrial jobs deserted by draftees during World War II, American women, too, filled baseball’s void by forming women’s leagues. America and baseball have long since shared a common, maybe indefinable and progressive, spirit.

However, in “Tato Hates the New York Yankees,” Espada slightly alters the inextricable ties between baseball and America. Here, baseball is working as a microcosm of American society, but instead of representing all that is good and pure about the American spirit, it reveals the unpleasant, gritty underbelly of baseball: the categorical and deliberate omission of nonwhites from the sport, regardless of obvious skill or work ethic. Notice how familiar that sounds to the American experience: with the categorical and deliberate omission of nonwhites from society based solely on (what should be) the irrelevant color of skin, the willful ignoration of other pertinent traits (certainly a topical discussion, given the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on voting rights—see Liptak), and other ugly discriminatory practices that persist even up to the present historical moment. As such, the “Tato” poem comes to represent much more than baseball and reaches beyond itself to tell the story of the plight of the immigrant and/or minority worker. Tato is a qualified baseball player, good enough to be a professional ballplayer—as indicated in the poem with the words, “he [Tato] had the most natural swing / since Ted Williams” (26–27). But meritocracy and rugged individualism, so foundational to the mythos and ideological construction of the American Dream, have no place here; and so, simply being good is not good enough. Those coveted spots are reserved for the privileged.^[8]

Instead, immigrant baseball is pushed aside to semipro and industrial leagues, played in run-down stadiums littering the Jersey shore. Here Espada brings out the great racial divide in this country through the apartheid that is inherent in baseball (at least historically), a sport that has become a mimicry of the country’s racial policies.

Tato, now unable to play professional baseball, comes to work on the sanitation crew for the Holland Tunnel, as articulated in one of Espada’s most poignant and powerful images. In all its bitter irony, here is a Puerto Rican immigrant, who likely had every right and talent to be a professional ballplayer, displaced to an unsatisfying job because of his race. He finds himself “soaping his illusions / off the walls,” that is, washing the tunnel surfaces of their dirt so that they shine once again with their original, imperial whiteness (M. Espada, “Tato Hates” 67–68). One of the central “illusions,” of course, is that race would not in some way be strategically stamped out by an establishment so as to reveal the original whiteness of the land. In dialogue with Langston Hughes, this is what happens to “a dream deferred.”^[9] It is an image of race in America tantamount in its clarity to Ralph Ellison’s “invisible man,” who adds drops of black paint to capture that perfect shade of white during one of his many jobs in a dystopian, racialized 1950s America. Tato, too, attempts to “mix” himself into society by getting a tryout and seeking to pursue a career in baseball. However, his paint color, that is, his dark skin tone, is lost in the broader white canvas that dominates society. He is thereby relegated to reenact in the Holland Tunnel what has been done to him: the precise erasure of the nonwhite Dark Other from the white walls of America.

We find also in this poem the trace to folk and mythical elements in baseball, shared through oral traditions and storytelling: one example is the legendary tale of the now-reversed curse of the Boston Red Sox. Babe Ruth was traded in 1919 from the Red Sox to the New York Yankees. Though regarded as having taken a foolish deal, he went on to became the game’s greatest player with the latter team, leaving for many years the supposed “Curse of the Bambino” that supposedly jinxed the Red Sox from winning a World Series. That curse was eventually, if not infamously, reversed in 2004 when the Sox finally claimed the World Series. Much great lore surrounded this hex, such as the piano that Ruth—according to myth—threw into a large pond. The looming specter of the Babe was taken so seriously, and redemption so sought after in Boston, that sea explorers were dispatched to retrieve the piano eighty-plus years later. Myth and superstition in baseball are so important that they stop existing abstractly and manifest themselves in acts, such as the proposal to raise Ruth’s piano attests.

Another great baseball yarn is the curse of the billy goat, in which a fan in 1945 attempted to gain admission into Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs, with the animal in tow. Rightly denied at the gate, the fan, according to legend, cursed the Cubs from ever winning a World Series, a torment that still stands today. Since that time, many shocking losses have occurred, such as the 2003 playoffs when the Cubs—only two outs away from going to the World Series—committed an error, and later, a fan (the infamous Steve Bartman) reached for a foul ball, thereby thwarting the fielder from catching it for an out.

These great mythical baseball stories show up especially in baseball fiction: Bernard Malamud’s The Natural includes Roy Hobbs’s epic return to baseball, accompanied by a magical bat, after having been shot. Hollywood, in the film adaptation, would gladden an otherwise despondent ending to the book. Similarly, W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (made into the movie Field of Dreams) features an otherworldly field capable of restoring life to long-since-dead ballplayers.

While there are no such fantastical images in “Tato Hates the New York Yankees,” we nevertheless see the passing on of fabulous stories. Tato’s skills are possibly subject to poetic license, if not altogether exaggerated: his ability to “[. . .] see the seams / on the ball / from four hundred feet,” for instance (14–16). This poem draws on long-standing elements of baseball: the family and specifically father/son relationships, the folklore and handing down of stories, and fantastic hyperbole. Espada ties the poem into this history, but brings with it a poet’s perspective of also showing the harsh urban reality of Tato’s life. Even in the midst of this, though, baseball retains its redemptive value. In so doing, Espada’s complex vision of baseball surfaces; the sport is hailed, while some of its administrative practices are reviled. Thus, Espada avoids both ideality and desecration, focusing instead on the larger theme of advocacy present in so many of his works.

Among many of Espada’s baseball poems, we detect a narrator that is firmly entrenched in the story: not omnipotent or twice removed, but embedded—a kind of “poet sportscaster,” in a sense. This draws on another of Espada’s tendencies in his work, to be directly involved in the poem. In many of his works, the narrator is a character in the action, affected by and impacting the story in meaningful ways. He is not a detached poet with a distant, ambivalent God’s-eye viewpoint. This stylistic choice says something about his individual commitments as an activist and how he understands the role of a poet: he remains very much among the people to speak on behalf of the people, only removing himself from the narrative to present and allow for a different viewpoint.

“Watch Me Swing”

If “Tato Hates the New York Yankees” is concerned primarily with race politics and their impact on upward mobility, then “Watch Me Swing” (Trumpets), with its classist tensions and ability to serve as manifesto for the poor, is a natural complementary reading. Espada particularly focuses on powerlessness and an associated loss of identity here. Set during a period of high unemployment in the 1980s, the poem involves five men hired through the city welfare cleaning crew to sweep the accumulated trash at a ballpark after the Opening Day game. They fill their monotonous work by imagining that baseball is being played on the empty field. When the work is done, the satisfied businessman who hired the five-man flexible labor crew realizes in true neoliberal spirit that the job instead could be handled by four workers, so the narrator (read: the poet himself, who is the fifth man hired) is fired. Now without work, the narrator fills his loss with fictitious retribution against the business manager by imagining himself at the plate, “aiming a smacked baseball / for the back of [the boss’s] head” as he strides back toward his office (37–38).

The behind-the-scenes labor of baseball reflects the general conditions of the immigrant labor force in the United States. The poor are a disenfranchised group in that they are brushed aside by society to a place where they do not have to be cared for or confronted. Often by political design and/or government sanction, cities typically end up structured in such ways that the rich and the poor never cohabitate in the same spaces, resulting in the twin phenomena of what we would otherwise describe as “ghettoization” and gentrification.

As with many disenfranchised persons (think here, again, of Ellison’s play on “invisible”), the narrator in “Watch Me Swing” does not have an identity (note that each of the sweepers are unidentified and indistinguishable, while the “boss,” as will be shown momentarily, is a veritable category unto himself). The narrator is labeled only as the “[. . .] fifth man hired” (1)—like a prisoner, he is a number, not a human being. The remaining sweepers also go unnamed. The business manager who assesses the work is unique because he emerges from his office (later returning to it) and stands in an authoritative role. Reasserting that dominion, the business manager is compared even to a military commander in front of a line of cadets armed with broomsticks in hand.

From our perspective, the boss is driven entirely by a Taylorism that, due to the time management and efficiency of the crew, renders unnecessary the employment of the fifth man. The narrator’s job loss is not for want of work ethic, per se, but rather based on his poor luck of being the last man hired, and thus, the first man to go. The businessman is only distantly uninvolved. He is already incongruous to the situation by the occasional emergence from his office. We do not receive any description that he is dressed up, but we might fairly picture him in white-collar clothing: slacks, shiny shoes, button-down shirt, tie. Regardless, we immediately view him as an oppressor, the decision maker who cares not for the people affected by the arbitrariness of those decisions, but rather the neoliberalized race to the bottom. He reinforces this with a passive interest in his workers, only casually inspecting the work and nonchalantly firing the fifth man. Afterward, he simply, but promptly, returns to his office.

The scene says much about baseball as it does Espada’s understanding and articulation of the working conditions of the sport. Fittingly, the means by which this laborer receives retribution is also a result of baseball. When the firing takes place, the rejected worker places himself into a fantasy world as a baseball player; and he attempts to bring justice to his situation by waiting on a pitch at home plate. Here again, but more poignantly than in “Tato Hates the New York Yankees,” we have the imagination and lore of baseball: the mythical daydreaming of being a ballplayer, bringing with it a kind of wish fulfillment for youthful aspirations. Baseball is not just a way to escape reality, but to alter the material conditions that produce it in this case.

The impoverished worker is using baseball as a means to solve his problems. It is no coincidence that his perceived vengeance comes through baseball, stepping up to the plate in his mind with his broom in hand and hitting fictitious balls toward the business manager’s head. Baseball becomes a political space for resistance and a forum for restitution. The worker would finally get his sought-after revenge against the boss, if only through baseball.

The workers clean up the postgame trash and, importantly, the crowd never sees the refuse, except only in their exiting the stadium as they contribute to the detritus by littering their “wrappers, spilled cups, scorecards” “[. . .] chewed and spit hot dogs,”^[10] and even “[. . .] condom[s] dried on newspaper” (M. Espada, “Watch Me Swing” 8–10). Just as the rich rarely “see” the poor in our modern cityscapes, so, too, in this image, the trash (or its removal, more specifically) is never seen by the fans, though it certainly is by the reified workers who are tied to the labor of its cleanup and disposal.

The mess left behind is delegated to minimum-wage city cleanup crews—a flex-labor equivalent of a chain-gang assigned to spruce up a roadway. They are literally making their living off the trash of others. This is the same concept that we find later in “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park,” in which the unpleasant aspects of the contents of a hot dog are obscured by a blissful slathering of spicy mustard. We are reminded again of baseball’s doubleness for its ability to emancipate and enslave.

This reflects society’s persistent (mis)understanding of the poor and the labor they perform. It is also significant that these “shadow army” workers are doing an “invisible” job;^[11] fans return to a clean ballpark the next day, and yet have little awareness or concern for how that came to be. Similarly, the poor are not something we encounter in our day-to-day lives. In fact, we have government-architected programs that help us sort through the human casualties, relegating them to parts of town that we do not have to visit. And all the while, these programs rarely, if ever, solve the “poor problem,” but instead only corral the less fortunate into a part of town that becomes a media-constructed wasteland of failure and self-producing destitution: a cycle that reinforces yet more dehumanization, despair, and deterioration.

In this way, the poor are often powerless, and the powerlessness of the “[. . .] fifth man hired”/fired (1) in “Watch Me Swing” is manifested in his only option: the fictitious retribution of baseball. Power is at the center of all race relations and interrelations between the rich and the poor. But it is less about power and more about the perception of power. As we move toward a U.S. culture that attempts more and more to allot power to the powerless, we have to recognize further that perceived power—in the form of political and economic agency—is equally as important.

As the myth goes, a poor person has all the same rights as a rich person. But the stark reality is that the racial and the economic divide in the United States yields an unequal and unjust balance of power. The sweeper does not come from an assumption of power, and he is at the mercy of the business manager. He defeats his powerlessness in his own imagination because in no other world does he have that agency. Baseball has become the sport through which redemption and justice (and the restoration of power) are offered.

Separately, “Watch Me Swing” brings out Espada’s engagement with a long-standing tradition of baseball seen by some as a religious experience: “When the sweeping was done, / and the grandstand benches / clean as Sunday morning pews” (21–23). It is an, unassuming almost fleeting, reference, but it is, just the same, noteworthy, because baseball has been almost perennially tied to the metaphysical and the spiritual. We refer to our stadiums as “green cathedrals”; the crowd gathers and seats itself among their “pews.” Long-time Detroit Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell once said, “‘Baseball. It’s just a game—as simple as a ball and a bat, yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It’s a sport, a business, and sometimes even religion’” (qtd. in Redmount 292). If this is America’s sport and the nation’s soul, then it is also in many ways America’s religion.

There is a spirit to baseball that rises above anything sensory happening on the field, a transcendence of the game that has become much more than simply the sum of its tangible parts. Espada’s brief reference to “pews” does in fact dialogue with another religious metaphor in his poem “Genuflection in Right Field” (discussed shortly), as well as the religious overtones in the poem that immediately follows, “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” (e.g., Ted Williams as “blasphemer” and “heretic”; the fact that Neruda “praises” Williams—in Spanish the word would be “alabanza,” a term derived from a religious context), thereby proving that religiosity resonates deep within the subtle words of all his baseball poetry. In fact, a case could be made that Neruda’s poetic outburst in “Fugitive Poets,” such as we will see, is even a moment of epiphany.

“The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park”

In the fictional poem “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” (Imagine), Pablo Neruda is hiding from the Chilean secret police in Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox. The year is 1948. In actual life, Neruda, a socialist, found himself running from his home country after a government-sponsored banishment on communism. He escaped to Argentina and went into exile.^[12] Fenway Park (and the United States in general) is Espada’s clever, embellished juxtaposition of the location of Neruda’s hiding. The ethereal presence of Neruda seems to hover above much of Espada’s work, but here it becomes much more explicit.

Teresa Longo, in her article “Neruda in Centerfield,” notes that in this conceit/poem, Neruda the communist is hiding in the last place a communist would actually be: the McCarthy-era United States, and even more specifically, attending a game that has so long represented our nation (as mentioned above, it is “our nation’s soul”): baseball. By placing Neruda in this context, Espada’s poem thus establishes contradictory elements and mutually exclusive presences.

It’s not the first time Neruda has been affiliated imaginatively with baseball. Vince Passaro’s amusing conceit “Neruda and the Mets” appears in the May 1985 edition of Harper’s. In this example, Passaro pairs ludicrous and dichotomous concepts when the sixty-one-year-old Neruda attempts an under-the-radar venture as third baseman with the New York Mets. That is, until he miffs forty-five of seventy grounders to third base and is demoted to the minor leagues, which prompts his retirement. Of the minors, years later, the fictitious Neruda says, “There is little meal money and the bus rides are very, very long. Some of los lavados [older players] are mean, bitter, drunken men whose mothers should never have given birth to them” (34; emphasis in original).

Ironically, Chile itself is a relatively quiet country when it comes to baseball. At the time of this writing, it has produced no major leaguers.^[13] So even though Neruda may have heard of foreign students playing baseball in Santiago at some point in his later life, the whole thing would have been foreign to him. It is entirely possible Neruda may have passively picked up on baseball through his admiration of Walt Whitman, an admirer of the sport himself (Rondon).^[14]

In “Fugitive Poet,” Espada uses the same technique as Passaro, essentially, relying on a ludicrous disparity of circumstances, placing Neruda in Fenway Park enjoying a hot dog while hometown hero Ted Williams comes to the plate.

As the poem is narrated by Espada, we might assume, just as Longo does, that Espada and Neruda are the plural “fugitive poets” referenced in the title (emphasis added). But we should not discount that the “Splendid Splinter” (Williams’s alliterative nickname) is another poet and not just a background or typecast hero. Indeed, in Espada’s own liner notes to his audio recording Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo, he explains in his description of the poem: “Namely, Pablo Neruda and Ted Williams,” suggesting that the fugitive poets are Neruda and Williams, not Neruda and Espada (as poet-narrator) (Liner notes n. pag.).

To understand how Ted Williams is a poet, we must first look at Espada’s own understanding and definition of the term. Perhaps Longo says it best: “In his justice-oriented writing, Espada takes in the Nerudian concept of ‘poetry like bread,’ the simple poetic vision of communion and community, hope and wonder. He then complicates it, and hands it back to us with a touch of harsh reality and irony” (141–42).^[15]

This perfectly captures the spirit of Espada’s poetry. We glean from Espada’s work that he is averse to turning or obscuring that “harsh reality” of life into something to be mythologized or obtrusively represented. Instead, Espada directly confronts the real world in real terms. His poetry is a mirror, not merely a distortion of what is reflected from a sometimes beautiful and sometimes rather ugly habitus.

But poetry and poets have to go one step further. They must allow the community of which and to which poetry speaks to distinguish between what is resplendent and what is gruesome. Which is to say, poetry should not be without a partisan stance (something Neruda realized as he became more politically involved in his career), and Espada is no different. Espada’s poetry feeds but does not spoon-feed the people. Referring back to Longo’s explanation, the bread is handed back to the reader complicated, just like the world that it reflects; but it is highly digestible. Therefore, knowledge in Espada’s poetry must be realized, not simply received. This is to say, that in his poetry, there is no disconnect between reality and poetry; the poetry is simply another form of reality.

Returning to “Fugitive Poets,” Ted Williams is portrayed as defiantly individualistic, true to his real-life persona. He did not participate in the shallowness of the newspaper reporters, who will praise their supporters but crucify their detractors. In fact, Williams in his career had a long history of butting heads with journalists. And it is well known that Williams and the Boston media certainly did not get along. Much as Espada makes clear in the poem, Williams “[. . .] this blasphemer of newsprint, the heretic,” as Espada calls him, would not offer up a cheerful veteran’s smile outside his news sportswriter-surrounded locker, neither would he “[. . .] tip his cap as he toed home plate” (21–22).

And it wasn’t just the news media with whom Williams had contentious relations. He even had a love/hate relationship with Boston fans, exacerbated, of course, by the negative image of Williams propagated by the media to the Boston fans. In one doubleheader at Fenway, as recounted in Leigh Montville’s excellent book Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero, Williams made several fielding errors to the vehement boos of the fans, matched by his equally obscene hand gestures back to the onlooking throng. And this was the home crowd no less. The reciprocal tensions come through in the following passage: “‘I don’t mind the errors,’ Williams told reporters after the game, ‘but those—— fans; they can———and you can quote me in all the papers. They’re——’” (qtd. in Montville 147; omissions in original).

There was also a public image problem with Ted Williams, mostly because he simply did not care about the opinions of others and certainly not those in the media. One such instance captures quintessentially his struggle with media perception: the birth of his daughter, which he missed because the baby came two weeks early and he was on a fishing trip. Now, by going on this fishing trip, he also disregarded a Boston Baseball Writer’s Dinner, at which he was to be honored as MVP of the Red Sox for that season. The Boston media, still feeling the sting of Williams’s dinner refusal—one of a long line of similar transgressions, incidentally—used this moment to emphasize his insensitivity in the papers. “‘The heck with public opinion,’ [Williams] said as flashbulbs popped. ‘It’s my baby,’ he said. ‘It’s my life’” (qtd. in Montville 138).

In the poem, the fickle crowd that hisses and boos at errors now erupts in cheers for Williams’s home run. You can see, on the other hand, how Williams is not so forgiving or prevaricating. Perhaps this is why he also obstinately refused to “[. . .] tip his cap [. . .]” for a homerun in the course of his career (M. Espada, “Fugitive Poets” 22).

The comparison between Neruda and Williams is strong in that both are fugitives within their own park, so to say. Williams is cheered by the crowds when the home runs come, but when something happens that they care not to see (i.e., fielding errors, and so forth), then comes the jeering. In a related sense, Neruda, a wildly popular poet in Chile, is exiled because of a political endorsement.

It is the role of the poet, therefore, to be simultaneously rejected (or ignored) and embraced, just like Williams and Neruda and, perhaps more notoriously, Walt Whitman.^[16] Espada says the following in an interview with Edward J. Carvalho, appearing in Espada’s Lover of a Subversive collection:

All too often Whitman was, and I think to some extent still is, quietly censored and sanitized in this country. It’s ironic because, at the same time, he has gained a reputation as one of our great poets, and certainly the founder of so much of what we call “poetry” today. Yet, in a tangible way, we’re not ready for Whitman as a society. We’re still not ready for his message of radical egalitarianism; we’re not ready for his expressions of compassion for everyone. Many of us are not ready for his sexuality. (67)

We should notice from this quote immediately the similarity with Neruda and also with Williams as he is presented in “Fugitive Poets.”

It could be argued further that the fickleness comes from the fans, the certainty and steadiness from the poets. The poets are unchanging. This is how Williams is appropriately placed on equal ground with Neruda, a culmination shown by the fleeting presence of Neruda’s black cap as it drifts into the outfield, the same outfield upon which Ted Williams practiced his art.

We see amid the wry humor in this poem that something awry and sinister is going on beneath the surface of baseball. Very specifically, baseball is like Neruda’s description of the hot dog (as imagined by Espada): the inside is filled with all manner of repugnant things (e.g., “[. . .] pink meat, / pork snouts, sawdust, mouse feces, / human hair [. . .]”^[17]—an outstanding example also of the Whitmanian catalog, thus reinforcing the Neruda/Whitman conflation) that we would ignore and put out of our minds. Neruda makes this point as he stands triumphantly on his seat and declaims the hot dog as a unholy concoction whose true state is disguised only by its “[. . .] bapti[sm] [. . .]” of a spicy condiment (M. Espada, “Fugitive Poets” 35–38).^[18] In Espada’s description above, a hot dog is comprised of little more than what is swept up from the floor at the slaughterhouse. Similarly, behind what may be happening on the field, there is a fugitive poet chased wildly by the Chilean secret police. Baseball, so purely American (at least in this author’s view), is now the secret sanctum of a communist refugee.

But baseball maintains its luster amid this unsightliness that we would choose to ignore. It remains a game to be lauded and praised. Though Neruda’s speech contains conceit and “frankfurtic” play exhibited above, it also bestows genuine celebration of the sport: “Praise the Wall rising / like a great green wave / from the green sea of the outfield!” (M. Espada, “Fugitive Poets” 32–34).^[19]

In the essay “The Good Liar Meets His Executioners” (Zapata’s Disciple),^[20] Espada explains the evolution of a poem of the same name in which he details collaborating with the subject of that poem—a man named Nelson Azócar, also to whom the poem is dedicated—on the cultivation of Neruda’s sea image (given similar treatment in the later poem “Fugitive Poets”). Here, Espada points to the significance of the “[. . .] green wave” of the sea:

The poem [“Good Liar”] needed that sense of the miraculous, the fantastic, reminiscent of certain Neruda poems.

The sea, Neruda’s muse at Isla Negra, provided the metaphor for liberation. The sea also lends itself to images of the miraculous [. . .]. Finally, characterizing his escape, in the last stanza [lines 83–84], I added that Nelson “smuggled himself away from Chile / the green waves lifting him.” (109)

This is linguistically evocative of Neruda smuggling himself out of Chile, traversing the green waves (i.e., the Green Monster, a distinct structural feature of Fenway Park) that also seem to rise from the outfield in Boston. It is no coincidence then that Neruda leaves a vestige behind at Fenway: his black cap. The reader can vividly picture that cap, resting in the green outfield, as if it were floating on a green sea. It is noteworthy that Williams played left field, directly underneath the looming green wave of the Green Monster, and so baseball was his liberation, and maybe even his “muse on first.”

Espada himself is an important presence in this poem. He reveals in the last stanza his quiet “attendance.” From these two poets, Williams, and Neruda, essentially and figuratively, a third poet, Espada, is born. Espada thus “sees” the actions of Williams and Neruda vis-à-vis poetic license or creative fantasy. By the conclusion of the poem, Espada acknowledges that he was not even alive when the supposed events occurred (Espada’s date of birth is August 7, 1957). Of course, this testimony, combined with the additional historical fact that the Red Sox are on a road trip in Chicago “on August 7, 1948,” allow us also to recognize the poem as the artifice of Espada’s imagination (M. Espada, “Fugitive Poets” 53).

“Genuflection in Right Field”

“Genuflection in Right Field” from Mayan Astronomer is a poem about a group of children playing baseball in what we take to be an untended, dilapidated part of a city, finding a place to play, even in a triangle of grass by a highway ramp, instead of a typical suburban sandlot. The children one day encounter on the field a dead dog killed by its owner, and in the final stanza, they continue to play baseball with the dog’s body still there, a presence that must be revered and yet sidestepped as an urbanized symbol of the sacred and profane.

For a poem about the usually idyllic scene of children joyfully playing baseball in the suburbs, there are in this poem all too frequent images of urban crisis, violence, and discord. The cars pass by angrily in the background as the ball often interferes with their path, showing that it is indeed quite a dangerous place for children. Further peril enters the scene when a renegade neighborhood boy approaches the group one day whirling a chain overhead, only to leave sobbing after hitting himself with that same chain.

Later, the narrator conflates the dead dog with a human corpse when he recounts a story of the boys finding a dead body in the neighborhood, the “police tape holding us back / like the red velvet rope of a museum” (M. Espada, “Genuflection” 22–23). The comparison of the police tape to museum rope indicates that this is where the boys are learning about life, receiving their education in this harsh reality. In effect, it is urban life that has left their innocence museumized.

A short list of some descriptive words and phrases from this poem: “We played hardball” (instead of baseball), “[. . .] dangerous,” “[. . .] furious [. . .],” “bursting,” “[. . .] sobbing [. . .],” “[. . .] dead [. . .],” “bleeding [. . .],” “[. . .] pounding of fist [. . .],” “[. . .] putrefied snout,” “a fumbling genuflection, the wobbly throw,” and “the hooting of obscenities [. . .]” (1, 3, 6–7, 11, 14, 18, 25, 29–31; emphases added). When asked to conjure up images of children playing baseball, these might not be our first impressions or linguistic guesses.

Recognizable is the disunity between the usually pure form of children playing baseball and the instead destitute conditions we actually encounter in the poem. It is an important motif that, through careful examination in this essay, we have seen time and again in Espada’s baseball poetry. The difficult realities of the world have been commingled masterfully, if not complexly, with images of righteous and innocent baseball in the poetry.

We see in this poem a direct confrontation between the violence of the real world and the utopian realm of baseball. Whereas before the children were exposed to peripheral violence—that is, witnessing a dead body from behind police tape—the dead dog is now directly in their immediate sphere, the place where they congregate. More accurately, the narrator notes that the dead dog has been sadistically killed by its owner (and perhaps even defiled after death), burned and mutilated with a stake through its eye socket; certainly, of all things to find in a summer baseball poem, this is something we least expect. The horror has encroached upon the safe haven of the youths’ baseball “field.” Up to this point, baseball could ignore many things and was used by these children in the same way: the boy with the chain, the dead man on the hill. “But the dog was here [. . .]” (24). There is no escaping the dog or the Blakean metaphor of “experience” embodied in it, inscribed on its corpse as well as the reader’s consciousness.

This poem, as hinted earlier, also evokes religious language, referencing a “genuflection.” The genuflection, though also practiced in secular environments as an Althusserian form of interpolation—such as to a political superior, for example—is nonetheless understood in Western society as a religious act in which the congregant bows on one knee to the bishop or to the Blessed Sacrament in the Catholic Church. We can assume, based on the above analysis, that it has more of a religious meaning here, considering also the distinctive and deliberate appearance of other religious symbols that recur in Espada’s baseball poems.

The dog is rendered a holy thing by process of the children’s genuflection. The basest of crimes has therefore transmogrified into something religious. The animal is burned (purified by fire?) and martyred in a certain sense by the cruelty of the outside world, a result of all the peripheral influences like the traffic and the presence of the dead human body. But the dog somehow becomes a symbol of respect, largely because it brings the outside world into the baseball arena. Whereas it was formerly an escape from a tough life, baseball is now accumulated into the real world. The boys discover that like the dog, they also have been martyred by society in a sense; there is both empathy and a profound sense of loss in their transformation, leaving them to therefore genuflect to the dog with each encounter, not just out of respect but also recognition.

“Rain Delay: Toledo Mud Hens, July 8, 1994”

The final Espada baseball poem examined in this essay is “Rain Delay: Toledo Mud Hens, July 8, 1994” (Imagine), which looks at the simple scene unfolding at a baseball game in small-town Ohio on a night with threatening weather. Espada worked as a groundskeeper at Ned Skeldon Stadium in Maumee, Ohio, the home of the Toledo Mud Hens. The Mud Hens are the Triple-A affiliate team of the Detroit Tigers. They relocated to a new stadium in 2001. Ned Skeldon Stadium also is known for its frequent references in the television show M*A*S*H: in fact, Corporal Max Klinger’s favorite team is the Toledo club.

The small-town atmosphere of the park gives it a county fair quality. In the stands are homespun images of hand-sewn quilts, the carnival, and the simple life we would expect in such venues. The poem emphasizes these qualities and focuses more on the atmospheric setting rather than the game play itself. In fact, only one of the four stanzas is devoted to the action on the field. In this way, baseball becomes just one piece of a larger scene.

In many ways, though (and as we have witnessed throughout), baseball is at odds with the larger scene at work in the poem. The ballplayers work with systematic adroitness. Their resolute motions (“[. . .] waiting for the pitch,” “[. . .] coiled beneath the umpire’s alert leaning,” “[. . .] stalking with poised hands,” the “shouts [of] advice in Spanish to the pitcher,” the nod of the pitcher, etc. [12–14, 18]) contrast the nonchalance of the gathered fans who passively absorb the game. The game play, with its industrial efficiency, is in contradiction to the fans and the natural surroundings of the county fair atmosphere, representing the Wordsworthian tension of a “world [that] is too much with us” (1). The handcrafted quilts oppose the almost synthetic clockwork of the ground out. The expectancy of the game play is also set against the unpredictable nature of the weather as it lingers overhead.

As part of just one larger scene, baseball again points to something more than just itself. The gathering of fans at a baseball game transcends its externally discernible parts. Baseball in this poem takes on a spirit of nationalism through the patriotic reciting of the U.S. national anthem. There is camaraderie among the people as they jeer collectively at the electric bug mascot about their high utility bills and then later praise the coming of the rain, all-important to farmers.

Advertising plays a significant role in this scene, too, demonstrating the culture industry aspects of the game. The gimmicky lightning bug mascot promotes the electric company. Billboards are plastered all across the outfield wall, selling myriad products. Interestingly, as with many franchise relationships, the team’s corporate-sponsored Fifth Third Bank relocation to a new stadium in 2001 resulted in the corporatized renaming of the venue as Fifth Third Ballpark. The entire stadium has become an advertisement for privatization, like so many other ballparks (and other public goods, spaces, and enterprises) around the country.

The poem ends with a fusion of natural and industrial imagery: the threatening weather is an “[. . .] iron-clouded storm” (28). Moreover, the ballpark stands out in the landscape as a bright light in the middle of a graying sky (note the bleak industrialized “[. . .] grey air” [30]). The lights (powered ironically by the same provocateurs of “a lightning bug called Louie” [23]) become “[. . .] a hundred moons [. . .]” (30). The sound of the train breaks through the night, as does the enemy rain, “[w]hen the water strikes down,” forcing retreat from the uniformed workers (32). That same rain, though, is a jubilee for the farm hands. Constantly in this poem there is an interrelation between the gathered parts that are sometimes in conjunction with—and other times in contrast to—one another. The word “strike,” particularly during this period in baseball’s labor history, is also a term that causes complex, often oppositional, emotions in fans. One has to wonder, considering Espada’s reputation as a fan of the game, if this language choice was a deliberate attempt to provoke those push-pull reactions from the reader. As this poem comes from Espada’s earlier groundskeeper experience (cf. “Watch Me Swing”), we are reminded of the motif in all his baseball poems of a direct personal experience as labor rights agitator and advocate. Baseball, like work and a living wage, is as political as it is personal.

Conclusion: Espada’s Muse on First

This essay has attempted to both help us come to appreciate Espada’s poetic treatment of baseball and to demonstrate also that his subseries of baseball poems indeed resonate with important themes presented elsewhere in his canon. Espada’s “muse on first,” it can be said, is a human presence, for all of Espada’s baseball poems either involve a personal narrator or emerge from a personal experience. And like any good baseball announcer, Espada as a poet is masterful at simply relaying what is going on in the field, without injecting superfluous intangibles. Effective poetry also alternates between wide and telephoto lenses, and well-trained poets know how to employ each for specific effects. Espada in this sense offers both perspectives to present a fuller understanding of baseball, one that confronts the sport’s internal contradictions, as well as its laudable and shameful historical realities, while providing us at the same time with individualized close-up shots—vignettes, really—of the personal employment circumstances, awakenings, and discriminate tragedies sometimes associated with the game. As such, Espada’s baseball poetry acts as a metaphysical foul line complicating, in the best sense of that term, the way we think about the sport, while emphasizing that the game and its players cannot truly be understood by separating them from their social or political contexts or by conceptualizing them in traditionally dehistoricized or conventional terms.

Notes

Thanks to editor Edward J. Carvalho for his substantial revisions to this essay and his many useful authorial and editorial emendations incorporated throughout.

Cross reference to Alabanza. The following poems cited in this essay are also contained in Espada’s Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2002. Listed by order of appearance, they are (Alabanza page references included):

“Tato Hates the New York Yankees” 26–29; “Watch Me Swing” 52–53; “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” 156–58; “Genuflection in Right Field” 185–86.

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. See also Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 2–3.

Ed. note: Of all the baseball poems in his catalog “The Trouble Ball” is especially noteworthy for the way in which it establishes how Frank Espada’s connection to the sport so obviously influenced his son Martín. The poem presents myriad formative memories associated with the sport, suggesting that baseball and race politics were in many ways crystallized in the poet’s consciousness at a very early age. For more on this poem, see Carvalho, Puerto Rico Is in the Heart 54–58.

For more on Espada’s interest in the sport, see his forthcoming edited collection of baseball essays The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park: Essays on Latinos and Baseball from Bloomsbury. See also his latest uncataloged baseball poem, “The Socialist in the Crowd.”

Ed. note: See Carvalho, “‘Taking Back the Street Corner,’” where Espada notes:

I don’t think you can separate, in this country, racial and economic issues. I think racism and economics are linked in this country and always have been. You always have an underclass to do the hardest and dirtiest and most dangerous work. We can simply take a look at agriculture and see how this plays itself out. Because for centuries, this country—not only the South, clearly, but the country as a whole—benefitted to an incalculable degree from slavery. Slavery built this country. “Free labor” that was used for agricultural purposes was, in turn, used to buttress the economy of this country. Where would the Industrial Revolution in the North be without slavery in the South? (259; emphasis in original)

Ed. note: See Chomsky, Profit esp. ch. 2 “Consent without Consent: Regimenting the Public Mind” 43–62. To Salo’s phrase we could add, “its conspicuous legalese on the 3/5 humanity of blacks, notwithstanding.” See also the introduction to Stanley Tookie Williams’s memoir, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, p. xvii.

Ed. note: There are additional allusions to baseball made by Espada in the poem, “Pitching the Potatoes.” The first lines of this poem read:

My father was a semipro pitcher in the city,

with a curveball that swooped

like a seagull feeding at the dump. (1–3)

Ed. note: Alabanza version reads “in the American League” on line 34.

Ed. note: The quoted text on line 69 is reproduced in italics for the revised Alabanza version of the poem. For more on Espada’s textual revisions for dialogue and spoken passages, see Sarmiento’s essay in this volume, Note 11.

Ed. note: Especially when structural violence of race and class is factored into the equation. See Carvalho, ch. 3 “[N]ot good enough” Puerto Rico Is in the Heart.

Ed. note: An allusion to Hughes’s “Harlem [2]” (i.e., “What happens to a dream deferred?”).

10.

Ed. note: Line 9 is changed to “spat hot dogs,” past tense, in the Alabanza revised version of the poem.

11.

Ed. note: See Suarez. Espada, when speaking of the immigrant laborers who died in the fallen World Trade Center (WTC) (“Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100”), refers to these workers as a “shadow army” that “passes through every office building in Manhattan, making those buildings run and providing what we need” (qtd. in Suarez n. pag.).

12.

Ed. note: For more on Neruda’s political background, see M. Espada, “The Unacknowledged Legislator.”

13.

Ed. note: This claim was once more confirmed and fact-checked by Salo before going to press. See Salo, “Re: Salo—URGENT—Espada Edited Collection” in Works Cited.

14.

Here the author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Chilean baseball expert Alberto Rondon. See Rondon.

Ed. note: See also Carvalho’s interview with Espada “Branch on the Tree of Whitman” reprinted in Espada’s second collection of essays, The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive, pp. 67–78, as well as Pérez-Bustillo (in this volume) for references to Whitman’s influence in North and South America.

15.

Ed. note: Interestingly, Longo seems here to conflate Neruda with Roque Dalton and his phrase “poetry, like bread, is for everyone” from the poem “Como tú” (“Like You”) (9). As readers may recall, Espada’s edited collection from Curbstone, Poetry like Bread, borrows from Dalton’s words for its title. Thus it could be argued that the conflation of bread and poetry is more Daltonian than Nerudian.

16.

Ed. note: The references to the poet’s ability “to be simultaneously rejected (or ignored) and embraced” is an example, to an extent, of applied negative capability. So, too, there are overtones of a Hegelian dialectic in play here, a favored technique of Whitman. See also Note 17 below.

17.

Ed. note: The hot dog imagery in the cited passage could be seen as a modified version of a Hegelian dialectic for its description of an organic life cycle rooted in birth, death, and new life (pig, slaughter, and hot dog [as sustenance]), a technique frequently employed by Whitman. There are copious examples of this technique woven into the poetry of Leaves of Grass. Thus, the cited passage here is tied to Whitman in two ways: as an example of the Whitmanian catalog and as a modified sample of the Hegelian dialectic.

18.

Ed. note: As with other Espada quoted speech passages, Neruda’s soliloquy in “Fugitive Poets” is entirely italicized. See Alabanza, lines 28–41. See also Note 7 above.

19.

Ed. note: See above Note 18 on application of italics to dialogue content in Alabanza version of poem.

20.

Ed. note: Interestingly, “Good Liar” follows “Fugitive Poets” in Imagine and carries with it the specter of Neruda that effectively merges the two poems. Not only do these two works share overlapping themes (to an extent) of Chilean political persecution, but there is a parallel use of the “green waves” image (of Neruda’s Chilean sea) that appears in each poem and creates a critical dialogue between them. See line 84 in “Good Liar” that reads, “[T]he green waves lifting him” and compare against the articulation of this image in “Fugitive Poets” lines 33–34: “like a great green wave / from the green sea of the outfield!”

Chapter 6

A Poetry like Ammunition

Natasha Azank

Martín Espada’s Poetics of Resistance and Subversion

Last year, I took my eleven-year-old niece, herself a young writer, to a reading Martín Espada was giving at Amherst Cinema as part of a celebration of the town’s 250th anniversary. After the reading, she decided to buy Espada’s 2002 collection Alabanza with her own money and shyly asked him to sign it for her. On the way home, I asked her what she thought of the reading, and she replied, “He is amazing. I love the way he read the poem ‘Alabanza’; it was dramatic.” Although a simple statement from a young girl, her response to this particular poem (that addresses the tragic events of September 11, 2001) and continuing interest in Espada’s poetry remains with me, as it reflects the accessibility, and yet complexity, embedded in his verse. Part of this accessibility relates to Espada’s gift in bringing large-scale, and often global, events to the local and deeply personal level. While my niece understood the content of the poem (she has grown up surrounded by a continuing discourse of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the mainstream media), she was also able to connect with it because of how Espada fills the poem “‘with exact, human details’” (Espada qtd. in Stavans, “Poetry and Politics” 69), such as “[. . .] the cook with a shaven head” (M. Espada, “Alabanza” 1) and the “dishwasher” who “could not stop coughing [. . .]” (28–29).

“Alabanza,” then, became her point of entry into Espada’s compelling world of political poetry, through which he shows his readers the lives of those who are marginalized in society, but in a way that captures the intricacies of their lived experiences and does justice to their resilience in the face of ongoing adversity. This is the “poetry of advocacy,” which is one way that Espada has characterized his own work over the years (qtd. in Dick and Fisher 23). He aligns himself with a tradition of poets who write “[p]oetry of the political imagination”—“speaking on behalf of those without an opportunity to be heard”—and in so doing, demands social change (M. Espada, Zapata’s Disciple 100, 8).^[1] Through his poetry of resistance, Espada denounces the injustices of colonialism, challenges dominant historical narratives, and protests the marginalization of Latino/as, immigrants, and the working class by positioning them in the center of his poetic discourse.

Espada traces his advocacy heritage to Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda,^[2] two poets with whom he has been repeatedly compared and cites as central literary influences. The comparisons to Neruda and Whitman point to an essential and persistent aspect of Espada’s poetry—a spirit of resistance that derives from his Puerto Rican heritage but reaches beyond national or cultural borders to denounce injustice in various corners of the world. Puerto Rican poets, both on the island and the mainland, have and continue to write poetry of protest, which Espada identifies as “the most striking characteristic of Puerto Rican poetry in the United States” (“Documentaries” 262). For many, this conjures up poetry associated with the Nuyorican movement, in which New York Puerto Rican (i.e., “Nuyorican”) poets began expressing “the incongruities between the myth of the American Dream and the harsh realities encountered by their families upon migrating” (Hernández, Puerto Rican Voices 5).^[3] While Espada acknowledges the Nuyorican aesthetic as influential on his early work (qtd. in Stavans, “Poetry and Politics” 71–72, 76–77), his poetic sensibility clearly and deliberately departs from this style. The predecessors of this movement, which include Clemente Soto Vélez and Julia de Burgos, express a specifically political Puerto Rican consciousness in their poetry that protests the island’s ongoing colonial status and condemns the oppression of Third World peoples. Situating Espada’s verse alongside these two poets, and within the framework of resistance literature as defined by Barbara Harlow and Edward Said, demonstrates a tradition of resistance among a different set of Puerto Rican poets; it also illustrates how this resistance moves beyond the national context, becoming transnational in nature.

In Resistance Literature, Barbara Harlow draws on various writers and scholars to establish “the integral relationship between armed resistance and resistance literature” (10). While armed struggles represent obvious forms of resistance to oppressive power structures, Harlow emphasizes the significance of cultural forms of resistance, which she believes are “no less valuable than armed resistance itself” (11). In defining resistance literature, Harlow states:

Resistance literature calls attention to itself, and to literature in general, as a political and politicized activity. The literature of resistance sees itself furthermore as immediately and directly involved in a struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural production. (28–29)

She explains this genre of literature cannot be separated from its historical reality and emphasizes that this analytical approach positions politics at the center rather than the periphery.

Moreover, Harlow asserts “the role of poetry in the liberation struggle itself has [. . .] been a crucial one, both as a force for mobilizing a collective response to occupation and domination and as a repository for popular memory and consciousness” (34). Edward Said reinforces Harlow’s ideas with his discussion of the role of art in cultural decolonization in his widely influential book Culture and Imperialism. He maintains literature of decolonization “form[s] a counterpoint to the Western powers’ monumental histories, official discourses, and panoptic quasi-scientific viewpoint” and argues “that resistance, far from being merely a reaction to imperialism, is an alternative way of conceiving human history. [. . .] Certainly [. . .] writing back to the metropolitan cultures, disrupting the European narratives [. . .] [and] replacing them with either a more playful or more powerful new narrative style is a major component in the process” (215–16; emphasis in original). Soto Vélez, Burgos, and Espada—who believes “one of the duties a poet must assume [. . .] is to challenge the ‘official’ history” (qtd. in Ratiner 173)—each offer counternarratives in their poetry that not only contribute to the work of restoring the nation’s culture to itself (Said 215), but also advocate for equality and social justice on a global level.

Clemente Soto Vélez and Julia de Burgos

In addition to the influences of Whitman and Neruda on his poetry, Espada acknowledges himself as a descendant of “Latin American poets writing in historical terms” (qtd. in Ratiner 170); this includes several of Puerto Rico’s nationalist poets, such as Clemente Soto Vélez, Juan Antonio Corretjer, and Julia de Burgos. In an interview with Ilan Stavans in 2005, Espada explains that his “deepest influence came from Soto Vélez, who became a close friend and mentor in the last decade of his life [. . .]. Soto [sic] provided a political and ethical example for me to follow. His poems were powerfully surreal, yet totally engaged with the fate of humankind” (qtd. in Stavans, “Poetry and Politics” 71). Espada commemorates Soto Vélez in his poem, “Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies,”^[4] and along with long-time Espada comrade, Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, translated several of Soto Vélez’s poems into a bilingual collection, The Blood That Keeps Singing/La sangre que sigue cantando (1991). As one of the founders of the literary movement La Atalaya de los Dioses (The Watchtower of the Gods), which contained a “strong political sensibility” (M. Espada and Pérez-Bustillo 7) and corresponded with the rise of the Nationalist Party, Soto Vélez’s life and poetry are intimately tied to the Puerto Rican independence movement and thus embody acts of resistance. He became part of the governing body of the Nationalist Party and the editor of its weekly newspaper, Armas (Weapons). Like his fellow comrades, he actively engaged in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence in the 1930s, participating in the 1932 takeover of the capitol building in San Juan and the sugar strike in Guayama in 1934, for which he was imprisoned. Soto Vélez and Albizu Campos (in addition to seven other Nationalists) were convicted of seditious conspiracy in 1936 and housed together in the United States at the Atlanta, Georgia, federal penitentiary from 1936 to 1942, an experience that profoundly influenced Soto Vélez’s writing. His first book of poems, Escalio (Fallow Land), was published while he was still incarcerated (M. Espada and Pérez-Bustillo 7–9); upon his release, he settled in New York City and took up various causes associated with the Puerto Rican people, both on the island and in the diaspora. The 1950s were his most prolific period as a poet: he published Abrazo interno (Internal Embrace) in 1954, Arboles (Trees) in 1955, and Caballo de palo (The Wooden Horse) in 1959, the latter of which established his literary reputation (Espada and Pérez-Bustillo 9).

In the introduction to Blood/Sangre, Espada and Pérez-Bustillo characterize Soto Vélez as a bridge figure, who “provides a link with more than a century of Puerto Rican resistance to first Spanish and then U.S. colonial rule, a resistance he came to personify” (7). This manifests itself in his poetry, which is revolutionary in both form and content and driven by a “radical, egalitarian vision” (Espada and Pérez-Bustillo 9–10). Themes in his poetry range from calls for revolution, liberation, and equality to the importance of memory and resilience of humanity; he highlights these by employing repetition of key ideas and phrases, a poetic device that Burgos and Espada also utilize to great effect. In poem “#17” from Wooden Horse, for example, Soto Vélez uses repetition to implore his fellow Puerto Ricans to love liberty and advocate on behalf of such principles. He begins by admonishing those who doubt the potential for liberation, which ultimately refers to those who do not believe in or fight for Puerto Rico’s independence. While he delineates the differences between the adversaries and advocates of liberation, he powerfully conveys the fact that without liberation, everyone “suffers” (“sufren”) (a word repeated eight times throughout the poem in the even-numbered lines from 6 to 20).^[5] Like most of his poems, “#17” is multilayered and replete with juxtapositions and reversals that highlight the complicated nature of Puerto Rico’s colonial status (compare the language in lines 11, 13 and 19, 21, for example, which contrast the disparate attitudes toward individual struggle and collective resistance within the larger framework of colonialism).

Lines 10–11 of the poem reference the solitary confinement political prisoners often confront as a result of their struggle (undoubtably based on his first-hand experiences with incarceration); whereas in lines 12–13, Soto Vélez turns away from the individual “suffer[ing]” (“que sufre”) to focus back on the “multitudes” (“multitudes”) (13), or the general population, whose lives are affected detrimentally by colonialism. Within these four lines, he moves from the individual to the communal effects of oppression and colonialism, thereby highlighting their interconnectedness.

Soto Vélez’s collection La tierra prometida (The Promised Land) (1979) articulates the many ways in which the oppressed can and must fight against injustice. He implores his readers to rebel against not only the oppression of imperialism, but also the imprisonment of ignorance, and he encourages his reader to seek freedom on multiple levels—socially, politically, and intellectually. In Soto Vélez’s utopian promised land, poetry (and thereby knowledge) possesses the same power as weapons; words (and the ideas behind them) are endowed with strength and hold subversive power to fight against oppression and injustices of all kind. In a radical form consisting of mostly one-word lines, poem “#29” provides a vivid depiction of the poet and his role in society. By comparing the poet to “blood” (“sangre”), which continues “singing” (“cantando”) despite clotting, he identifies the poet as one who continuously fights for freedom even after death because his work will continue to promote rebellion (Tierra prometida [Promised Land] 17, 20). He endows the poet with a spirit of resistance, whose art becomes immortal and provides knowledge for his community. Significantly, Soto Vélez describes the movement of the poet with musical terminology. The act of singing carries a history of resistance dating back to slavery, when it was used both as a mechanism for survival and also as a coded critique of oppressive social structures. Thus, through both his form and content, Soto Vélez characterizes the poet as rebellious and positions him within a history of resistance.

Julia de Burgos (whom Espada honors with his elegy “The Face on the Envelope” from The Republic of Poetry [2006]) worked alongside Soto Vélez in writing for Pueblos Hispanos in New York City and was also deeply invested in the cause of Puerto Rican independence.^[6] Despite coming of age as a poor woman in the colonial and patriarchal culture of early twentieth-century Puerto Rico, she rose to political prominence by the young age of twenty-two, acquired a strong literary reputation before publishing even one book of poetry, and in a prominent Puerto Rican magazine was compared to “Chile’s Gabriela Mistral, Argentina’s Alfonsina Storni, [and] Uruguay’s Juana de Ibarbourou” (Agüeros xvii), all of whom possessed international reputations. Burgos was a fiercely independent woman who, at times, served as her own publisher and distributor. Fellow Puerto Rican writer Jack Agüeros identifies her as a “revolutionary woman” (xxi) who defied traditional boundaries imposed upon women in the early twentieth century; Font Saldaña describes her as a “‘free spirit [. . .] who clamored for justice’” (qtd. in Agüeros xxi), attributes that are exemplified in both her life and her writing. Her poetry has been variously described as political, romantic, feminist, and subversive, as it clearly speaks out against all forms of oppression and the legacy of colonialism.

Burgos wrote several overtly political and militant poems throughout her life, some of which include #160 “Una canción a Albizu Campos” (#160 “A Song to Albizu Campos”), #168 “Es nuestra la hora” (#168 “Ours Is the Hour”), #172 “Hora Santa” (#172 “Holy Hour”), and #174 “Ibero-América resurge ante Bolívar” (#174 “Ibero-America Resurges before Bolívar”). In all of these poems, she employs a rhetoric of resistance in order to raise the consciousness of her fellow Puerto Ricans and to advocate for social justice and freedom for all oppressed peoples. In addition to exemplifying militant characteristics, her 1868 poem #167 “23 de septiembre” (#167 “23rd of September”) commemorating El Grito de Lares (commonly referred to as the Lares Uprising), the Puerto Rican revolt against Spanish colonial rule, demonstrates how resistance poetry participates in the reappropriation of national history. Harlow clarifies how First-World imperialism disrupts the literary traditions of the Third World and thus interferes with historiography, leaving “the poets, like the guerilla leaders of the resistance movements, [to] consider it necessary to wrest that expropriated historicity back, reappropriate it for themselves in order to reconstruct a new world-historical order” (33). Burgos accomplishes this by chronicling the details of September 23, 1868, and by insisting on this event’s ongoing significance. Her poem not only (re)historicizes this uprising and the nationalists who sacrificed their lives, but also propagates the ideologies of justice and independence that fueled the revolt, evidenced by her repetition of the September 23rd phrase, which begins all but one of the stanzas in the poem (1, 12, 30). In the first stanza, Burgos establishes that the spirit of this resistance to colonialism is present everywhere she looks, including among the heavens.

Like Soto Vélez, Burgos often employs nature imagery in her verse, which enables her to move between universal concepts and specific details throughout this poem. This first stanza does not give the reader any indications of a particular geographical place or nation, so those unfamiliar with Puerto Rican history would not immediately recognize the significance this day holds for its people. In these lines, Burgos’s language positions the historical date of September 23, in the realm of the universal, as the fight for “freedom of bread and justice of ideas” (“libertades de pan y justicia de ideas”) could apply to any colonized nation (11). However, the poem then moves from the general to the specific.

Burgos makes the connection to the Lares Uprising explicit in the second stanza as she shows how this incident lives on in the memory and lives of the Puerto Rican people. She begins by noting how this event now spans two hundred years and can still be heard “drip[ing] through the lips of the crazy palm trees” (“[chorreante] en los labios de las locas palmeras”) (#167 “23 de septiembre” [#167 “23rd of September”] 15). By personifying the palm trees, Burgos posits that even the natural world of this nation echoes its call for freedom, thereby demonstrating the pervasiveness of this spirit of resistance on the island of Puerto Rico. Moreover, her use of nature imagery in connection with the liberation struggle implies that freedom is (or should be) a fundamental right, which aligns her ideologically with Soto Vélez, a tradition extended later by Espada. At the end of the stanza, she honors those who have died fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence by asserting that their struggle continues to live on in each new protest.

Burgos demonstrates the continuation of El Grito’s rebellious spirit as she chronicles the turbulent events and uprisings of the 1930s in the following stanzas. By memorializing specific individuals who became martyrs and eventually heroes of Puerto Rican independence, Burgos’s poem “‘sustains, within the popular memory, national continuity’” (Khouri qtd. in Harlow 34). The poetess also alludes to the massacre at Rio Piedras (1934) and the Ponce Massacre (1937), which left “[. . .] a homeland bloodied but never undone” (“[. . .] patria ensangrentada, pero jamas deshecha”) (Burgos, #167 “23 de septiembre” [#167 “23rd of September”] 27). As in the previous stanzas, she reiterates how the Puerto Rican spirit of resistance and quest for freedom cannot be hampered even by these despicable acts of violence.

In the last stanza, she maintains that El Grito de Lares, the “23rd of September [. . .]” (“23 de septiembre [. . .]” [42]), which marked the declaration of an independent Puerto Rico, remains alive for all of those who, like her, continue to yearn for freedom in their homeland. She believes its legacy lives among those imprisoned, especially with Albizu Campos “who walks from himself to the world that awaits him” (“que desde sí camina al mundo que lo espera”) [41]). As she does in several other poems, she honors Campos here, Puerto Rico’s most prominent political figure of the twentieth century, who sacrificed his life for his country’s freedom and whom many consider a national hero. Although in the last stanza she homes in on what this date signifies specifically in Puerto Rican history, she also widens the lens again and situates Puerto Rico on a global scale, which indicates an emerging transnational consciousness in Puerto Rican poetry that flourishes with several poets of the next generation, such as Espada. By asserting that freedom fighters around the world echo the spirit of the 23rd of September, she proclaims freedom as a universal right and connects Puerto Rico’s fight for independence to anticolonial struggles throughout the globe.

“[S]peaking for the voices struck silent”:^[7]
Martín Espada’s Political Poetry

I cannot evict them

from my insomniac nights,

tenants in the city of coughing

and dead radiators.

—Martín Espada, “City of Coughing and Dead Radiators” (1–4)

In his Zapata’s Disciple essay “Zapata’s Disciple and Perfect Brie,” Espada explains he was raised with “an ethos of resistance all around” him, which continues to manifest itself in his work (5). Born in 1957, he grew up in the working-class housing projects of East New York, and his life, as well as his writing, has been strongly influenced by his father’s (Frank Espada’s) political activism and direct confrontation with racial discrimination. He worked a series of menial and low-income jobs, including janitor, gas station attendant, salesman, bouncer, and desk clerk at a hotel, among many others, before obtaining a law degree from Northeastern University in 1985. He practiced bilingual education law and worked as a tenant lawyer for low-income Spanish-speaking people in Chelsea, Massachusetts (Zapata’s Disciple 6–7), before committing himself fully to poetry and teaching. His Puerto Rican heritage and work experiences—both inevitably political (as he discusses in his interview with Bruce Allen Dick)—have necessarily influenced his poetry, through which he continues his father’s and his own commitment to fighting social injustice.^[8] As a poet, essayist, editor, and translator, he has won several awards, including an American Book Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, the Patterson Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, to name only a few, and has produced an impressive range of publications, including nine collections of poetry (with multiple other volumes of reprinted works in translation),^[9] two collections of essays, three edited anthologies, and the translated edition of Soto Vélez’s poetry previously mentioned.

While Espada’s work has gained increasing visibility over the years, he has been praised since his first publication for the “precision of his poetic snapshots” (Frost 130) for his “deft humor [. . .]” (Freeman n. pag.), and for the “distinctively expansive and humanistic” tone “of his uncompromising political poetry” (Harlan 24). In a Booklist review of Espada’s Alabanza, Ray Olson declares the poet has “forged a passionate, compelling, eminently readable poetry that makes him arguably the most important ‘minority’ U.S. poet since Langston Hughes” (1366). The critical scholarship on Espada’s work also remarks on the intersection of the personal and the political, as well as the significance of history, evident in his poetry. In his essay, “Inside the Worlds of the Latino Traveling Cultures: Martín Espada’s Poetry of Rebellion,” Santa Arias frames her discussion of Espada’s work within a “context of movement and exchange” and examines how Espada “constitutes his subjects, his autobiographical migrant history, and other Latino traveling cultures” (2). Arias analyzes “metaphors of travel” in the author’s poetry to show how “these images [. . .] represent empowerment and a form of resistance to dominant culture” (2). In “Visibility and History in the Poetry of Martín Espada,” Thomas Fink argues that Espada’s poems (concerning Puerto Rico and other Latin American countries) “constitute narrative and lyric representations of imperial, colonial, or otherwise oppressive power relations and make visible the struggle of common people to establish national autonomy and democratic conditions” (219).^[10] Fink analyzes a range of Espada’s poems (mainly from his second, third, and fourth collections) that address “Puerto Rican in/visibility on the mainland,” the “distortion of [Puerto Rican] history” in mainstream U.S. discourse, and in some analyses, he touches on aspects of resistance at work in the poems (205, 210; emphasis in original). Through his discussion of the author’s poems concerning the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the Sandinista forces in Nicaragua, Fink highlights the pan-Latino perspective that weaves throughout Espada’s work.^[11]

César Salgado, in “About Martín Espada: A Profile” that appears in Espada’s guest-edited issue of Ploughshares (2005) (a consolidated version of his Latino and Latina Writers encyclopedia profile that is reprinted in the present volume), provides a concise overview of the poet’s work, which begins with Espada’s depictions of “institutional neglect suffered by Latinos in rundown inner cities” in his first book and has broadened to include “a new array of ethnoscapes” in Alabanza that “celebrate the overlapping of immigrant, revolutionary, and anti-colonial experience across American and non-American nations” (204, 208). For over thirty years, then, Espada has played the role of advocate with both admonition to those who would abuse power and empathy for the victims, from denouncing immigrants’ poor living conditions in “Mrs. Baez [sic] Serves Coffee on the Third Floor” in his first collection The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (1982) to honoring the political activism and poetry of Dennis Brutus in “Stone Hammered to Gravel” from Republic of Poetry (2006). Espada’s world of poetry, replete with metaphor, sensory details, and musical imagery, illuminates the struggles of the dispossessed and demonstrates both the necessity and power of resistance.

In Espada’s earliest collections, “Latino realities and identities” (Arias 3) are often the focus, and in his poem, “Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction” (from his 1987 collection of the same name), he speaks out against the discrimination and injustices Puerto Rican and Latino “immigrants” in the United States experience (2). The poem moves between two different locales—the island and a “[. . .] barrio” in the United States—where both “[t]he music [. . .]” from Puerto Rico and “[. . .] predatory squad cars” swarm in, indicating the hostility and violence the immigrants regularly experience (5, 7). Throughout the poem, “[. . .] their eviction” holds double meaning (4, 9, 39), referring to both Puerto Ricans’ exile from their homeland and also their exclusion from various aspects of social life in the United States. For example, Espada describes how “Mrs. Alfaro [. . .]” and her “[. . .] five children” (10, 32–33) are evicted from their apartment; a boy known as “[. . .] Daniel [. . .]” (14) is dismissed from his classroom for lacking adequate English skills; and his father Frank Espada (as he is alluded to in the poem) is thrown off a bus and imprisoned in Biloxi, Mississippi, because of his “brown skin” (19). Here, Espada, just as he describes poetry of the political imagination, “document[s] daily existence” (Foreword 12) and provides names and faces to the countless Latinos who are continually marginalized from mainstream American culture. In the next stanza, he juxtaposes this naming by underscoring the lack of subjectivity Puerto Ricans often experience when “[they] are the ones identified by case number,”^[12] rather than by name (“Trumpets” 29).

Despite this repeated discrimination, the poem does not end with defeat. This time, the immigrants “hear trumpets / from the islands of their eviction” (38–39) and endow them with the strength to produce “[a] sound [that] scares away devils” (40), which perhaps refers to those (the landlord, the third-grade teacher, the grocery store clerk) who participate in the evictions outlined earlier in the poem. Repeating the first four lines in the last stanza provides a cyclical nature to the poem, echoing the cyclical migration patterns of Puerto Ricans. While Espada shows the “double dislocation”^[13] Puerto Ricans experience as a result of migration, he also underscores music’s ability to challenge oppression and reestablish one’s sense of identity.

For Puerto Ricans, identity remains tied to their colonial history (M. Espada, “Documentaries” n. pag.), a theme that figures prominently in several of Espada’s poems, including the bilingual poems “La Tumba de Buenaventura Roig” (“La tumba de Buenaventura Roig”) and “Colibrí” (“Colibrí”) (Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands/Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante [1990]); “Coca-Cola and Coco Frío” and “The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive” (City of Coughing and Dead Radiators [1993]); and “Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks” (Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2002 [2003]). In the title poem from his third collection, “Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Pellín and Nina)” (“Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante [Pellín y Nina]”), Espada challenges the master colonial narrative of the Ponce Massacre (March 22, 1937)^[14] and offers an alternative perspective of this significant event in Puerto Rican national history, two fundamental elements of resistance poetry. Like Burgos’s “23 de septiembre” (“23rd of September”), this poem demonstrates Espada’s participation in the rewriting of his people’s history from the perspective of those who have been silenced and also illustrates his belief that poets “must work to give history a human face, eyes, nose, mouth” (Espada qtd. in Stavans, “Poetry and Politics” 69) through their craft.^[15] Espada accomplishes this in “Rebellion” (“Rebelión”) by homing in on Pellín, who despite having been shot, still “[. . .] scratched defiance / in jagged wet letters on the sidewalk” (“y dibujó su desafío / en letras tortuosas y mojadas sobre la acera”) with “[. . .] the bloody soup of his own body” (“la sopa sangrienta de su propio cuerpo”) (10–11, 9). By providing visceral details here, Espada highlights the materiality of this tragedy and also honors the brave resilience of those who, like Pellín, died while still fighting.

In the second half of the stanza, Espada continues to delineate the chronology of this event, so as to provide readers with a perspective of the incident that differs from the colonial narrative:

Around him stormed

the frenzied clattering drumbeat

of machineguns,^[^[16]^]

the stampede of terrified limbs

and the panicked wail

that rushed babbling

past his dim senses. (12–18)

A su alrededor

el tamborileo enloquecido

de las ametralladoras,

el estampido de brazos y piernas aterrados

y el gemido atormentado

que barría, balbuceando más allá

de sus sentidos que se apagaban. (12–18)

While some readers may not be familiar with the details of this bloody event, Espada’s vivid language and use of enjambment in these lines powerfully convey how quickly this peaceful protest transformed into a scene of chaos and violence. The words “[. . .] stormed,” “[. . .] frenzied [. . .],” “[. . .] clattering [. . .],” “[. . .] stampede [. . .],” and “[. . .] rushed [. . .]” relay the turbulent atmosphere that transpired, while “[. . .] terrified [. . .],” “[. . .] panicked [. . .],” and “[. . .] wail [. . .]” capture the frightened nature of those caught in the crossfire “of machineguns.”^[17] Here, Espada’s poem works to “counteract the historical amnesia” that occurs as a result of colonization, during which “the history of [a] people will be conveniently forgotten at best, and suppressed at worst” (Espada qtd. in Ratiner 170).^[18]

In contrast to the lively descriptions in the first stanza, the second exhibits a journalistic character and matter-of-fact tone that focuses in on two individuals affected deeply by this massacre. Espada achieves this with the headline-like first line, “Palm Sunday, 1937” (“Domingo de Ramos, 1937”), which he follows with seven short lines of between three and four words (19). Through these quick phrases, the reader discovers that Pellín and Nina were engaged and that the news “halted the circular motion / of his lover’s hands” (“detuvo el movimiento circular”) just “as she [Nina] embroidered / [her] wedding dress” (“que bordaba / su traje de bodas”) (21–24). By providing a space for stories like Pellín and Nina’s, which are almost always left out of historical narratives, Espada’s poem participates in the “struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural production” (Harlow 28–29). In this condensed amount of space, Espada not only provides an alternative (or supplementary) rendering of this incident but also presents the central image of the poem: the circle. In this stanza, the circular motion conveys the act of embroidery, which consists of a stitching together of various threads into one design or pattern. This act of connecting distinct parts clearly symbolizes marriage, but also serves as a metaphor for the march by the Nationalist Party, whose various members united for a single cause.

Espada highlights the lingering effects of colonialism in the third stanza, where we witness the repetition of violence against Puerto Ricans, but this time in the diaspora of “[. . .] Nueva York” (“[. . .] Nueva York”) (29). The narrative of violence relayed here harkens back to the account of the Ponce Massacre in the first stanza; this time, however, it is Nina’s son who is caught up in “[. . .] the whip of nightsticks” (“[. . .] el latigazo de macanas”) for speaking out against injustice “in a bullhorn shout” (“a gritos por un altoparlante”), which demonstrates the inherited legacy of colonial repression and brutality (35, 32). Despite this discrimination, Espada emphasizes the Puerto Rican people’s resilience and resistance to subjugation with his final words of defiance:

But rebellion

is the circle of a lover’s hands,

that must keep moving,

always weaving. (38–41)

Pero rebelión

es el giro de manos del amante,

incesantemente moviéndose,

siempre tejiendo. (38–41)

By beginning the last stanza with the word “[b]ut” (“[p]ero”), a conjunction used to indicate disagreement, Espada objects to the “[. . .] fresh blood” (“[. . .] sangre fresca”) on the “[. . .] scalp[s]” (“[. . .] cabell[eras]”) of his fellow Puerto Ricans in the previous stanza (36–37). Furthermore, the image of the circle reappears and becomes a metaphor for rebellion, as Espada compares the act of resistance to the circular movement of embroidery. Like a circle, Espada believes that the struggle against injustice has no beginning or end and even possesses an agency of its own since it “[. . .] must keep moving” (“incesantemente moviéndose”) (40). Espada’s circle imagery here evokes Soto Vélez’s metaphor of the poet’s blood that continues to “circulate” (“circular”) and promote “[. . .] insurrection” (“[. . .] insurrección”) in poem #29 from Tierra prometida (Promised Land) (25–26).

As a poem that commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Ponce Massacre, Espada’s verse, similar to Burgos’s poem #172 “Hora Santa” (#172 “Holy Hour”) in which she memorializes two independentistas killed in the aftermath of the Rio Piedras massacre, serves as “a repository for popular memory and consciousness” (Harlow 34) and promotes the Puerto Rican people’s “rebellion” (Burgos, #172 “Hora Santa” [#172 “Holy Hour”] [38])^[19] against the various injustices they continue to experience. Espada demonstrates the recurring violence Puerto Ricans suffer at the hands of government officials, both on the island and mainland, and their answer of resistance to this unjust treatment. In the Dick interview cited earlier, Espada maintains one of the reasons he writes is to honor “all of those nameless and faceless, anonymous people who sacrificed and suffered and went to jail and sometimes died to change the world” (qtd. in Dick 31). He accomplishes this by paying tribute to Pellín and the other nationalists, whose sacrifices he elevates to the heroic and whose stories he writes into history.

History features as an important subject in the poetry of both Soto Vélez and Burgos and serves as a main theme in “The River Will Not Testify” (from A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen [2002]), in which Espada offers a critical commentary of how U.S. historical monuments sustain ideologies of American imperialism.^[20] Through personification, repetition, and allusion, Espada’s poem denounces the inaccuracy, and even injustice, of “official” history that vilifies the “[. . .] 300 Indians [who died] at this place”^[21] (Turners Falls) (45; emphasis in original) and commemorates “Captain Turner’s men, [the] Puritans [. . .]” (18) who killed them, as well as it ossifies their versions of such events (and countless other encounters between the colonists and Native Americans in early America) that are recorded in “[. . .] the granite monument” (44) and the history books and therefore passed on as the definitive historical accounts of what occurred. The voices and stories of native peoples have continually been excluded from the national narrative, which is why “[t]he river cannot testify [. . .]” (7, 16, 25, 34, 40) to the atrocities that occurred at Turners Falls in 1676. Because “the river,” a metaphor for the Native American people in the poem (and perhaps even its cultural practice of oral history), cannot attest to the injustices committed against them, the poet speaks on their behalf. Through his poem, Espada resists the repeated silencing of Native Americans and provides a version of this event that acknowledges the Native American tribes involved, criticizes the actions of the colonists, and thus more honestly captures the contentious history of this site.

Espada establishes a violent and frightening mood in the first stanza through personification and dark imagery. The first line, the “shards of bone gnawed by water” swirling in “[t]he river’s belly [. . .]” conveys a visceral and haunting image of the river that disrupts the pastoral and idyllic representation of rivers that readers often encounter in poetry (1). Espada builds on this subversive depiction in the next few lines, where “[t]he river thrashes [. . .],” “[t]he river strangles [. . .],” “[. . .] hissing at the stone eagles” (3–4). The violence in these lines becomes even more powerful as the reader completes the poem and learns that hundreds of Indians met their death in these waters, which now carries the brutality they experienced in its current. Even though the river (like the Native Americans) resists its strangulation by “thrash[ing]” and “hissing,” it is ultimately silenced, as “[c]oncrete stops the river’s tongue at Turners Falls” (6). Just as Burgos posits freedom as a natural right through personification in #167 “23 de septiembre” (#167 “23rd of September”), here Espada’s image of the damned river serves as a critique of the unnaturalness of the Indian homicides, and by extension of U.S. colonialism.

Espada’s skillful use of repetition captures both the tragedy of this event and its inaccurate rendering in history. Stanzas two through six all begin, “The river cannot testify [. . .]” (7, 16, 25, 34, 40), which emphasizes the repeated historical silencing of Native Americans and also the ignorance among the general U.S. population of their distinct tribal customs and histories. For example, in stanza two, Espada writes:

The river cannot testify to all the names:

Peskeomskut, gathering place at the falls;

Sokoki, Nipmuck, Pocumtuck, many nations, many hands

that speared the flapping salmon from the rocks,

stitched the strips of white birch into wigwams. (7–11)

Here, the “300 Indians” who were “destroyed [. . .] at this place” are grouped together on “[. . .] the granite monument” and become active and distinct subjects rather than objects (45, 44; emphasis in original). All the more poignant when we learn how they utilized their natural surroundings as sources of food and shelter.

Although “[t]he river cannot testify of May 19, 1676,” the speaker informs us that “Captain Turner’s men [. . .] / [with] flintlock muzzles, slipped between the wigwams” and opened fire on the “[. . .] old men, women and children [. . .]” (16, 18–19, 14; emphasis in original). Despite the fact that the “[. . .] Reverend Mr. Russell [. . .]” acknowledges premeditation of the attack when he claims, “[. . .] The Lord calls us / to make some trial which may be done against them,” the colonists then misreport their unprovoked massacre when “[. . .] Reverend Mr. [Cotton] Mather wrote: / The river swept them away, that ancient river, oh my soul” (12, 14–15, 32–33; emphasis in original). In addition to a gross misrepresentation of what occurred, the colonists avoid responsibility for the Indians’ deaths by attributing their disappearance to the river. Although history memorializes Captain Turner since “[h]is name christened the falls, the town, [. . .],” none of the Indians’ names are recorded in the history books; in fact, their individuality is deemed so unimportant that “the river cannot testify to say what warrior’s musket / shot Captain Turner [. . .]” (44, 40–41). Espada’s poem, then, counters the absence of the “Indians” from the historical record and defies the colonists’ portrayal of them as “[. . .] the green demons that whipped their eyes” (38). Instead, Espada offers us a depiction of the Puritans as “[. . .] conquerors [. . .] ” who use “their furious God [. . .]” as justification for their slaughter, certainly an unflattering representation of the early Americans (37, 22).

The passage of time is compressed in the last two stanzas with the poet offering his readers a quick overview of the events that have transpired “[. . .] at this place” since the massacre of 1676 (63). In the last stanza, Espada paints a bleak picture for the future of the town:

when the monuments of war have cracked

into hieroglyphics no one can read,

when the rain sizzles with a nameless poison,

when the current drunk on its own dark liquor

storms through the crumbling of the dam,

the river will not testify of Turners Falls,

for the river has swept them away, oh my soul. (68–74)

In Espada’s rendition of history, Captain Turner will not be remembered and glorified, but will meet the same end as the Native Americans he mercilessly murdered—he will be washed away and erased from the historical narrative. By appropriating the words of Reverend Mather in the last line, Espada turns the language of the colonists against them and effectively alters the narrative of this event. In this way, Espada’s poem refutes “the cultural oppression of imperialism” (Harlow 37) embedded in our historiography and participates in the process of cultural decolonization, which, according to Edward Said, entails not only armed conflict, but also “ideological resistance” (209); according to Jahan Ramazani,^[22] empire not only “expropriate[s] the land, displacing native names, myths and attachments, [but also] marginalize[s] and disfigure[s] indigenous narratives of the past, subordinating them to ‘the Western powers’ monumental histories” (155). “The River Will Not Testify” speaks precisely and exactly to this eventuality, such as we find in the displacing of “all the names” (7) of the native tribes at Turners Falls and the subordination of their narrative to the words engraved on the granite monument. To counter this, Espada’s poem “recreat[es] and reclaim[s] a communal history” for this town by providing details that have been left out of the “official” narrative (Ramazani 155).

In Espada’s next collection, Alabanza (2003), we see an even further broadening of his poetic scope as he travels from Mexico in “Sing Zapatista” to Ireland in “Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo,” which also addresses resistance to colonial rule. This poem perhaps best exemplifies the transnational poetics of resistance in Espada’s work, as it expresses an “inter/transcultural dialogue” across cultures, languages, histories, and geographies (Seyhan 4). While the poem begins in Ireland, Espada takes the reader across the Atlantic to “[. . .] Brooklyn [New York]” (12) and then “[. . .] Ponce, Puerto” (21) to highlight the connections he sees between Ireland and Puerto Rico as a result of their shared experiences with colonialism. As in the earlier “Trumpets,” music functions in this poem as a vehicle of resistance that transcends geographical, cultural, and even temporal boundaries and ultimately leads to transformation.^[23]

With images such as “Last night the shadow of a cloud / rolled off the bare mountain,” the clothing on the line that “[. . .] sagged in rain,” and Irish music sung from “[. . .] tongues sod-hard with lament” in the first stanza, Espada establishes a somber mood that almost prepares the reader for the “[. . .] the BBC news [. . .]” announcement: “[. . .] Tito Puente, The Mambo King, dead in New York” (1–3, 6–8; emphasis in original). This last line, while serving as a transition from one stanza to the next, demonstrates how globalization enables the unprecedented movement of people, commodities, and cultures from one region to another (Clifford); it also illustrates the transnational character of Espada’s poem, which like other transnational texts, moves beyond the scope of the national, both acknowledging and depending upon “external points of reference” to construct a transcultural narrative (Giles 6).

Throughout the poem, Espada blurs the boundaries between the national and cultural borders of Ireland and Puerto Rico (and to some extent the United States), first, through a direct comparison of their musical instruments in stanza two, and then by drawing parallels between their countries’ “Easter dead” (25, 32)—those who died fighting for their nation’s independence—in stanza three. After reflecting on a performance by Tito Puente he attended in Boston, where “[. . .] Tito’s drumstick, / splintered from repeating, always repeating the beat of slaves” (16–17), he writes:

Here, on this island, I rehearse the Irish word for drum:

bodhrán, gripped by hand like the pandereta,

circle of skin and wood for the grandchildren of slaves

to thump as they sang the news in Ponce, Puerto Rico. (18–21; emphasis in original)

In addition to placing the Irish and Puerto Rican drum—the “bodhrán [. . .]” and pandereta—side by side in the same line, Espada informs the reader that musicians hold these drums in the same manner, which enables the reader to draw connections between these two cultures.^[24] The poem as a whole, but these lines in particular, demonstrate(s) how “transnational and intercultural poetry imaginatively reconfigures the relations among [. . .] ingredients drawn from disparate cultural worlds and fused within its verbal and formal space” (Ramazani 18). Finally, in these lines Espada alludes to the pandereta’s origins during slavery in Puerto Rico and its continued use by its descendants; this emphasizes not only the legacy of subjugation on the island, but also the Puerto Rican people’s use of music to resist that oppression, which Puente’s “repeating” beat perpetuates. Here, “The Mambo King’s” ongoing musical beat recalls the continuous singing, also an act of resistance, of Soto Vélez’s poet in #29. Although Puente (like thousands of other Puerto Ricans) was born and raised in Spanish Harlem (“Tito Puente” n. pag.), Espada highlights how he carries his nation’s history with him through his musical performances, underscoring how art, whether poetry or music, “sustains national continuity” within popular consciousness and participates in cultural decolonization (Harlow 34).

Stanza three focuses on the armed struggle for liberation in both Ireland and Puerto Rico, where the speaker and bartender in an Irish pub exchange details about their countries’ nationalist uprisings and national heroes. The pub displays “the posters of their Easter dead [. . .]” (25), and the bartender recounts James Connolly’s noble resistance to the British army, even though he was “strapped to a chair in the stonebreakers’ yard / gangrene feasting on his wound so he could not stand” (30–31).^[25] The speaker then tells the bartender Puerto Rico also “has its Easter dead” (32) and relates details about the Ponce Massacre of 1937, where “[. . .] Cadets of the Republic / paint[ed] slogans on the street in their belly-blood” (34–35). These lines echo those from “Rebellion” (“Rebelión”), which, as previously discussed, address the brutality and injustice of the Ponce Massacre in greater detail. This stanza, similar to Burgos’s stanza three in #167 “23 de septiembre” (#167 “23rd of September”), documents and honors these patriots’ acts of resistance in the face of violent oppression, and also demonstrates the global scope of the struggle against empire in the twentieth century.

There is a shift in both mood and theme in the last stanza that creates a space of redemption within the poem. In contrast to the solemn rain that sets the scene in the preceding stanza, the upbeat tempo of “[. . .] Tito’s Oye Como Va” plays on the jukebox in the fourth as the speaker and his friends “[. . .] shoot a game of pool in his memory” and “the table becomes a dance floor at the Palladium / cue ball spinning through a crowd of red and green” (M. Espada, “Now the Dead” 40, 43–45). The music the patrons hear in the bar, not only Tito Puente’s, but also “the Dubliner’s,” endows them with a sense of empowerment as they nod their heads and chant “yes-yes, yes-yes” (40, 42; emphasis in original). This affirmation, channeled through the music, illustrates a shift from struggle (in the third stanza) to empowerment, which also extends to “James Connolly,” who now “could dance the mambo, / gangrene forever banished from his leg” (46–47). Once again, Espada fuses “ingredients” from distinct “cultural worlds” (Ramazani 18). Within this newly created space, here and through Puente’s music (and by extension Espada’s poem), Connolly undergoes a transformation. Literally, he moves from a restrained seated position to one of uninhibited dancing; figuratively, he now occupies a space of liberation that he fought for, but was otherwise denied, in “1916” (M. Espada, “Now the Dead” 27).

By engaging multiple geopolitical landscapes and intertwining their histories, Espada’s poem expresses a transnational poetics of resistance. While the Irish and Puerto Rican people speak different languages and follow distinct customs, Espada highlights their interconnectedness by drawing attention to their people’s shared history of resistance and the vital role music plays in that struggle. Through a continual crossing of borders, Espada emphasizes the fluidity of culture as well as the interconnectedness of the human struggle for justice. By highlighting two significant uprisings in these countries’ colonial histories, Espada challenges master narratives of empire and presents to the reader new ways of considering how art enacts both resistance and transformation.

In the title poem of his 2002 collection, “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” which some have referred to as “the definitive poem about the September 11 tragedy” (Murillo 7), Espada positions those who often occupy the margins of society—the “immigrants from the kitchen” (“Alabanza” 16)—at the center of his poetic praise. He addresses global issues, such as war, terrorism, and religious conflict, through local details, and through the motif of music, his poem works to resist boundaries—national, cultural, and religious—that have become reinscribed after the terror attacks of September 11. Espada highlights the resilience of the hotel and restaurant employees of the Windows on the World Restaurant, to whom he dedicates his poem, by focusing on specific aspects of their difficult working-class lives. He emphasizes sensory details, particularly those of sight and sound, so as to place the reader into the kitchen with the Puerto Rican cook in the first stanza, the “[. . .] busboy’s music [. . .]” in the second, and the “waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen / and sang to herself about a man gone [. . .]” in the third (25, 32–33). In stanza three, he praises “[. . .] the dishwasher / who worked that morning because another dishwasher / could not stop coughing [. . .]” and because he needed the extra money to send to his family “floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs” (28–29, 31). This shows both the compassion and work ethic of the dishwasher, who sacrifices his time (and ultimately his life) for his fellow worker and family. This portrayal also challenges political and media-constructed characterizations of immigrants, who Espada says “make an enormous contribution to this economy,” despite the fact that many within American society do not acknowledge this reality (qtd. in Dick and Fisher 27). While this is a glimpse of only one dishwasher’s life, this “[. . .] dish-dog [. . .]” (M. Espada, “Alabanza” 27) symbolizes the countless immigrants and working-class people whose sacrifices and lives remain invisible to mainstream society.

Through the image of windows, Espada not only allows the reader to look in, so to speak, into the lives of immigrants (thus making them visible), but he also highlights the transnational character of New York City:

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. (16–19; emphasis in original)

By placing side by side select nations that are geographically far apart, such as Haiti and Yemen, Espada emphasizes the constant mingling of cultures and languages that occurs in New York. Moreover, italicizing the names of these countries links them with the word “Alabanza”—the Spanish word for “praise” that recurs throughout the poem^[26]—one of the few sections in the poem formatted as such; by doing this, Espada deconstructs boundaries between people based on nationality and also “pay[s] homage” (M. Espada, Zapata’s Disciple 7)^[27] to the various immigrant communities that contribute positively to our society.

Despite their hardships, the subjects of Espada’s poem persevere through the help of music, a motif that recurs in each stanza of the poem. In the first stanza, Espada “[p]raise[s] the kitchen radio [. . .]” (“Alabanza” 11)^[28] that is turned on “even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish / rose before bread [. . .]” (12–13). Bread often symbolizes a basic necessity for survival, and here Espada draws on that association to demonstrate the vital and nourishing role that music (specifically in Spanish) plays in these workers’ lives. Connecting to music, particularly in their native language, provides the immigrants with strength and even functions as healing agent in stanza three for the waitress who sings to herself as a way of coping with her lost love. In the last stanza, Espada alludes to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan and provides the reader with a surreal image of “two constellations of smoke [. . .]” (evocative of some of the star imagery Soto Vélez employs in “Five-Pointed Stars”) that coalesce with one another “[. . .] in icy air” (45–46):

. . . . . 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. (46–49; emphasis in original)

By providing us with a perhaps unexpected image here—an Afghan and a Spanish soldier befriending rather than battling one another^[29]—Espada’s poem resists the binary distinctions between East and West that flourished in much mainstream media after 9/11. His use of italics in these two lines also stresses the significance of music for the Spanish soldier, who claims it as his only means of survival and even a marker of existence. Finally, even though the soldiers speak in different “tongue[s]” or languages, they connect with one another through music, thereby symbolizing its unifying capabilities. By the end of the poem, Espada has taken us from Manhattan to Puerto Rico, Africa, the Middle East, Central America, and Afghanistan and showed us the shared humanity of working-class immigrants. This repeated movement across borders underscores the transnational character of Espada’s poem, since transnational texts demonstrate “translocation, verbally enabling and enacting—between specific times and places—cross-cultural, transhistorical exchange” (Ramazani 96). Because music exists outside of any one national language or culture, it facilitates this exchange within the poem and also signifies transcendence for the forty-three employees of Local 100 to whom Espada pays tribute in his verse.

In his poetry of resistance, which now spans more than three decades, Espada not only captures the nuances of the Puerto Rican experience with colonialism and migration, but also foregrounds issues of social class, racism, and economic exploitation across geographic, national, and cultural borders. The transnational element of his poetry, which fosters “inter/transcultural dialogue (Seyhan 4), demonstrates an expansion of a poetic tradition of resistance he inherits from Clemente Soto Vélez and Julia de Burgos, who used their art as a vehicle of political expression and action. Through his vivid depictions, Espada challenges negative perceptions of Latino/as, immigrants, and the working class, humanizes these often-marginalized groups of people, and honors the “dignity of [their] defiance” (M. Espada, Zapata’s Disciple 3).^[30] He defies the conventional narratives of both U.S. and Puerto Rican history, and his (re)visionary accounts of significant historical events, like Burgos’s, contribute to cultural decolonization. He believes one of the most remarkable characteristics of poetry of the political imagination “is the quality of hopefulness, testimony to the extraordinary resilience of that human quality. The prophetic voice resonates throughout the poetry; the poets sing of the possibility, the certainty of eventual justice” (M. Espada, Foreword 13; emphasis in original). Just as Soto Vélez believes the poet continues to sing even after death, Espada continues to advocate for justice in his poetry, which becomes a realm of redemption and liberation.

Notes

“Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies” 159–70; “City of Coughing and Dead Radiators” 94–96; “Mrs. Báez Serves Coffee on the Third Floor” 19–22; “Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction” 37–38; “La tumba de Buenaventura Roig” 59–61; “Colibrí” 65–66; “Coca-Cola and Coco Frío” 91–92; “The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive” 89–90; “Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Pellín and Nina)” 62–63; and “The River Will Not Testify” 198–200.

Ed. note: Citations correspond with the essays “Poetry Like Bread” (100) and “Zapata’s Disciple” (8) from Zapata’s Disciple.

Sandra Cisneros has called Martín Espada “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors” (qtd. in Murillo 7), and in an interview with Edward J. Carvalho from 2006, “Branch on the Tree of Whitman,” Espada discusses the influence of Whitman on his work.

Ed. note: The Cisneros quote also appears as a back cover blurb to the hardcover edition of Alabanza.

Ed. note: See also in this volume Hernández’s El Nueva Diá 2008 interview with Espada and a review of his first book of poetry printed in Puerto Rico, the bilingual collection La tumba, both of which are reproduced in the present volume for the first time in English translation.

Ed. note: See also Espada’s “Clemente’s Bullets.” See also contributions from Stanchich Note 25 and Pérez-Bustillo Note 52 in this volume.

Ed. note: Similarly, the word “her,” representative of Puerto Rico, first appears on line 7 and recurs on lines 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29–30.

Pueblos Hispanos was a progressive weekly newspaper in circulation in New York City from 1943 to 1944 that “promoted socialist causes around the globe, ran weekly columns on politics and culture [. . .] and covered Puerto Rican politics on the island and in New York in detail” (Kanellos and Martell 109).

Ed. note: The quote used in this subsection is excerpted from Espada’s “Poetry Like Bread” essay (Zapata’s Disciple), p. 103.

Ed. note: These points are argued in depth in Edward J. Carvalho’s dissertation, “Puerto Rican Radical.” See esp. chapters 1 and 2 on the political radicalization of Frank Espada and Martín Espada.

Ed. note: The nine volumes included in this list are those that comprise Espada’s core poetic canon, which include Immigrant Iceboy’s, Trumpets, Rebellion/Rebelión, City of Coughing, Imagine, Mayan Astronomer, Alabanza, Republic of Poetry, and Trouble Ball.

10.

Ed. note: This article originally appeared in the Americas Review and was later incorporated into a chapter of Fink’s book “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry; see esp. pp. 123–38.

11.

Ed. note: Fink’s analysis is, of course, limited only by its publication date. Which is to say, the author could have no way of anticipating just how pan- Latin American and global Espada’s poetics would become by the time the poet’s Alabanza, Republic of Poetry, and Trouble Ball volumes would go to print. For more on Espada’s Chilean sequence and Espada’s global poetics, see his Republic of Poetry and the essays from Stanchich, Pérez-Bustillo, and Dowdy in this volume.

12.

Ed. note: The Alabanza version of this poem contains a typo on line 29 that reads “one” instead of the plural “ones.”

13.

Ed. note: The author borrows here from Espada’s term and theoretical concept outlined in an interview with E. Ethelbert Miller. See Miller and Feffer.

14.

A New York Times article on the day of the massacre (March 22, 1937) reported: “According to the police version there was disorder, during which someone in the Nationalist crowd fired and some policemen were wounded. The police then returned the fire” (“7 Die in Puerto Rico Riot” 1+). A subsequent article on March 31, 1937, reported that according to then-Attorney General Fernandez Garcia, a government investigation of the Ponce Massacre found “conclusive evidence the first shot had been fired from the corner in front of the Nationalist Club” (“Reports on Ponce Riot” 3). However, according to César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, the “Cadetes de la Republica,” were unarmed (116). In addition, historian Stan Steiner clarifies that an investigation of the events by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) blamed Governor [Blanton] Winship (appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and the police for the massacre (Islands 228).

15.

Ed. note: See also Sarah Browning’s early interview with Espada, wherein he advocates for a poetry that “give[s] history a human face”; this concept and terminology is echoed in another interview with Steven Ratiner.

16.

Ed. note: The Alabanza version of the poem features an alteration to line 14, changing the original “machineguns” to “machine guns.”

17.

Ed. note: Because several of the English verbs cited in this passage do not translate word for word with the corresponding lines from the Spanish translation of the poem, and for the sake of readability and clarity, given the heavy citational interaction/saturation in this section, an editorial decision was made to exclude the Spanish translation for the cited words here.

18.

Ed. note: See also Dowdy’s essay in this issue that also addresses how Espada’s poetry constructs alternative historical monuments to thwart neoliberal orthodoxy.

19.

Ed. note: Re: the use of “rebellion”: The actual word on line 14 of the Burgos poem is “[. . .] REVOLUCION” (emphasis in original), which is translated by Jack Agüeros to English as “[. . .] REVOLUTION” (emphasis in original); here the author employs scare quotes around “rebellion” in her essay to note the similar overtones with Espada’s “Rebellion/Rebelión” poem.

20.

Ed. note: See Note 18 above.

21.

Ed. note: Text on line 45 of the Alabanza version of the poem was edited by the poet to read “three hundred” instead of “300” (emphasis in original).

22.

In this quote, Ramazani is summarizing Edward Said’s notions of cultural decolonization, outlined in his (Said’s) book Culture and Imperialism.

23.

In his profile on Espada in Latino and Latina Writers, César Salgado details the expansion of Espada’s vision in this collection; he also discusses the role of music in this particular poem and concludes “the poem celebrates the Irish and Puerto Rican reliance on indigenous musical traditions to resist or confront the colonial forces that have tried to subject and assimilate them” (“Martín Espada” 869). Many thanks to Acknowledged Legislator editor Edward J. Carvalho for directing me to this source. See “Re: Azank Review Comments” under Carvalho (copy on file).

24.

Ed. note: See Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical” 627n54 for an explanation detailing the overlap between Azank’s analysis of this poem with Carvalho’s research in his dissertation chapter 5. Both authors are, however, equally indebted to Salgado’s earlier criticism of “Now the Dead” contained in his Latino and Latina Writers profile of Espada that is reprinted in this volume.

25.

James Connolly was commandant of the Irish Citizen Army in 1914, and as commandant general of the Dublin Division of the Army of the Republic, he was actively involved in the Easter Rising in Ireland on April, 24, 1916 (that sought to end British rule and establish an independent Republic of Ireland), for which he was executed by the British army (“James Connolly” n. pag.).

26.

Ed. note: The word “Alabanza” is repeated eleven times (potentially symbolic of 9/11, or the WTC towers in numeric form?), alternating as anaphora and epistrophe in lines 1, 7, 11, 13, 20, 25, 27, 32–33, and 43–44 (emphasis in original). See also Pérez-Bustillo Note 60 (in this volume).

27.

Ed. note: Citation is from the title essay to this volume, “Zapata’s Disciple and Perfect Brie.”

28.

Ed. note: Cf. line 32, where the radio and music adopt a more solemn tone, becoming a source of lament, and forebode, in a sense, the calamity that follows immediately thereafter.

29.

Ed. note: Alternatively, it is possible to read the “soldiers” as “civilians,” which would actually be more in line with Espada’s antiwar ethos here and elsewhere. It is useful to consider, also, that the entire poem “praises” the lives of civilian immigrant workers and bemoans their casualty as the result of war. See Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 4 subsection “September 11, 2001—The American 9/11 Attacks and Beyond,” pp. 435–51.

30.

Ed. note: Citation is from the title essay to this volume, “Zapata’s Disciple and Perfect Brie.”

“[T]o give history a human face”:1 Historical Memory and Political Resistance

The Republic of Memory

Notes

Martín Espada

Notes

Undoing Macho

Notes

Muse on First

“Tato Hates the New York Yankees”

“Watch Me Swing”

“The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park”

“Genuflection in Right Field”

“Rain Delay: Toledo Mud Hens, July 8, 1994”

Conclusion: Espada’s Muse on First

Notes

A Poetry like Ammunition

Clemente Soto Vélez and Julia de Burgos

“[S]peaking for the voices struck silent”:[7] Martín Espada’s Political Poetry

Notes

“[T]o give history a human face”:¹ Historical Memory
and Political Resistance

“[S]peaking for the voices struck silent”:^[7]
Martín Espada’s Political Poetry