POETRY MONDAY: January 3, 2011
Martin Espada
Happy New Year to all our readers!
This feature should be of special interest, not only to poetry lovers but also to those of you who will be attending the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York City this month. If you consult the program, you will see that he is giving five different presentations, seminars and workshops as part of the educational component of the meeting.It’s a happy coincidence, because I had already planned to ask him to submit work to Poetry Monday.
I’ve known Martin Espada’s poetry for many years and have had the pleasure of introducing him twice at readings: once for the Princeton Arts Council in the 1990’s and then, years later, at Berkshire School in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Fast forward a few more years, and I heard him read in Stockbridge, MA, from his then-new book, (and my personal favorite), The Republic of Poetry. Still later, in 2007, with a group of MFA students and faculty at New England College in New Hampshire, I was privileged to hear him give a rousing, inspirational keynote address to all the poets there. As I recall – and it may just be the way I need to remember it – he exhorted us to act in and upon the world. His philosophy seems to be the very opposite of the often-heard, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” What he was saying, it seemed to me, was, “Make it happen.”
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957, Martin Espada has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His work has been translated into ten languages; collections of poems have recently been published in Spain, Puerto Rico and Chile. A collection of his essays, The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive, has just been released by the University of Michigan Press, and a new book of poems, The Trouble Ball, is forthcoming from Norton in spring 2011.
Espada has received numerous awards for his work. The Republic of Poetry (Norton, 2006), received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. An earlier book of poems, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996) won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among his other awards are the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, the USA Simon Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. That, of course, is not in the least surprising.
But it may be a surprise to learn that he is a former tenant lawyer, something he doesn’t forget and often alludes to, as you will see in the last of the three poems below.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
The Republic of Poetry
For Chile
In the republic of poetry,
a train full of poets
rolls south in the rain
as plum trees rock
and horses kick the air,
and village bands
parade down the aisle
with trumpets, with bowler hats,
followed by the president
of the republic,
shaking every hand.
In the republic of poetry,
monks print verses about the night
on boxes of monastery chocolate,
kitchens in restaurants
use odes for recipes
from eel to artichoke,
and poets eat for free.
In the republic of poetry,
poets read to the baboons
at the zoo, and all the primates,
poets and baboons alike, scream for joy.
In the republic of poetry,
poets rent a helicopter
to bombard the national palace
with poems on bookmarks,
and everyone in the courtyard
rushes to grab a poem
fluttering from the sky,
blinded by weeping.
In the republic of poetry,
the guard at the airport
will not allow you to leave the country
until you declaim a poem for her
and she says Ah! Beautiful.
from The Bloomsbury Review and The Republic of Poetry
The Soldiers in the Garden
Isla Negra, Chile, September 1973
After the coup,
the soldiers appeared
in Neruda’s garden one night,
raising lanterns to interrogate the trees,
cursing at the rocks that tripped them.
From the bedroom window
they could have been
the conquistadores of drowned galleons,
back from the sea to finish
plundering the coast.
The poet was dying;
cancer flashed through his body
and left him rolling in the bed to kill the flames.
Still, when the lieutenant stormed upstairs,
Neruda faced him and said:
There is only one danger for you here: poetry.
The lieutenant brought his helmet to his chest,
apologized to señor Neruda
and squeezed himself back down the stairs.
The lanterns dissolved one by one from the trees.
For thirty years
we have been searching
for another incantation
to make the soldiers
vanish from the garden.
from Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Sari-Wiwa and The Republic of Poetry
Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper
At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
Then the glue would sting,
hands oozing
till both palms burned
at the punchclock.
Ten years later, in law school,
I knew that every legal pad
was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,
that every open lawbook
was a pair of hands
upturned and burning.
from City of Coughing and Dead Radiators and Alabanza: New and Selected Poems