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Number 294 & 295
Summer/Fall 2005
Girls that Go Boom: Leticia Hernández-Linares,
Olga Angelina García Echeverría & Liliana Valenzuela
LIZ HENRY
Copyright © 2005 Poetry
Flash
UNDER WHAT BANDERA?, ten poets consider the implications
of war, Olga Angelina García Echeverría, Lupe Castillo,
Brandon Lacy Campos, Sara Rebecca Duran Garibay, Raymond R. Beltran,
Lorean E. Duarte Q., Mariajulia Arisiaga Urias, Teresa Ortiz,
Victor Payan, Emmanuel Ortiz. Calaca Press, P.O. Box 2309, National
City, CA 91951, 2004, $7.00 saddlestitched, www.calacapress.com.
RAZOR EDGES OF MY TONGUE, poems by Leticia Hernández-Linares,
Calaca Press, P.O. Box 2309, National City, CA 91951, 2002, $7.00
paper, www.calacapress.com.
RAZA SPOKEN HERE 2, CD, poetry, music, features raulrsalinas,
Antonieta Villamil, Grito Serpentino, alejandra ibarra, Leticia
Hernández-Linares, robert karimi, Los Delicados, Rod Ricardo-Livingstone,
tatiana de la tierra, alurista, and Tammy Gomez, Calaca Press,
P.O. Box 2309, National City, CA 91951, 2000, $15.00, www.calacapress.com.
THE POETRY OF RICE FIELDS and MUJER FRONTERA, MUJERA
MALINCHE, poems in Spanish and English by Liliana Valenzuela
are available from Liliana Valenzuela, 1103 Maufrais Street, Austin,
TX 78703.
Where is this woman Olga Angelina García Echeverría,
so that I can run up a hill with her, high on poetry and mushrooms
and the fumes of car exhaust, high on tears and sweat and ink?
We will tear wild animals, men and children apart with out bare
hands. We’ll sing to the highway’s transient oleanders,
poison ourselves with the chewy seeds of water hemlock. We’ll
chew up stale cigarettes found in the street with oak gall and
spit out the poisonous juices to ferment out bitter magic ink.
 watchala!
you’re
the high
heeled
sugar mama
romance
queen
wearing
skin-tight
satin
dress, singing
canciones
de amor
you
turn
the
tide red
turn
tough
illiterate
cholos
into
poets
She
knows how to sneak out of the house and find some real living.
She could eat eggs at Denny’s at four in the morning with
me, still a little tipsy, and make it Really Living. Her poetry
is cooler than either one of us will ever be. Her poetry wears
the tightest jeans of any girl in the sixth grade, and can kick
anyone’s ass.
I
am often amazed at how much a poem can say in a very short space.
With
“Metzli / you turn mars / into a burnt out / cigarette butt
/ make estrellas / look like tossed jacks” García
Echeverría unites the city, or possibly The City, with
the rest of the world and nature, extending even to the stars,
uniting languages but also code-switching between urban and natural
worlds to form a new landscape. This dual consciousness of the
derelict beauty of the city comes through strongly in her poem;
its message is that if Mars is a cigarette butt, it does not devalue
Mars, but rather opens the cigarette butt to the possibility of
gloriousness and beauty. It is not a simple reversal of language
or metaphor; it’s a messing up of the mind, a dynamic collage.
In the city, only a few stars are reachable and visible: Mars,
the moon, Venus, the streetlights and neon of the sunset. The
intimacy of the “estrellas…like tossed jacks”
hits very effectively. I can see the shining metal jacks held
in the hand of my girlhood, some silver, some pink, blue, iridescent,
and the red rubber ball, sitting on the front steps or squatting
on the blacktop; and the smell of that (for me, Detroit’s
manifestation of City) blacktop in the summer evening, shimmering.
The jacks were beautiful and precious and mine…Las estrellas
are clearly García Echeverría’s, in the same
intimate ownership.
Metzli
invoked like a goddess of night cloaks the city in splendor, “Only
you / can paint the sky / so Mexican.” To invoke the red
tide, the broken mirror, menstrual blood, a painted-on satin dress,
a yellow lowrider car, and never say the word ‘sunset’
makes for a beautiful and complex poem which does not deny the
sadness of poverty and urban ugliness, but allows a mixture of
beauty and grief.
From
“Cumbia de salvación” by Leticia Hernández-Linares:
pa
pa ra ra pa rap cu cu cumbia
yes
girl it’s the remix
I
used to think that meant the record skipped
now
it reminds me of how my shoes
pass
over the same places on the concrete
stains
on the street left
from
people tripping over how and what to acquire
The
act of walking over the stained sidewalk as a meditation; the
act of a DJ’s cumbia remix, and listening to it,
as another meditation. Juxtaposition and repetition. Cumbia,
syncopated drums and big band trumpets, Carribbean sugar, mixed
and filtered through the lens of techno and hip-hop. The blues
often talk of the disappointment of love and mix it with a social
criticism; this cumbia gives us a critique, an outside/inside
perspective, on the U.S. consumer culture both directly and through
the mix of languages and the idea that there is something
else. The blues and the cumbia, sad and philosophical, not
unmixed with joy, transcendent. Social criticism’s poetry
does not have to be didactic. Here, Hernández-Linares makes
it lyrical, bitter medicine:
para
allá, para acá, y para qué
ay,
you don’t need to buy
another
useless thing
hey
did you hear about fulanita
heard
she’s out of work
and
never goes dancing anymore
¿y
eso?
es
que,
she
danced right into the store
and
choked
on
her debt
Hernández-Linares
freewheels her way through words, taking my breath away in “Invocation”
with her energy: “On the way out the door I’ll wear
/ obsidian flint and boiling confidence / that whistles through
the house leaving steam / in the cup and on my fingertips.”
I have read in an excerpt from a review by Rubén Martínez
that Hernández-Linares is like Roque Dalton, “the
late great revo Salvadorian bard.” [Dalton, a young, passionate
revolutionary poet, was executed by a military faction of the
Ejército Revolucionario de Pueblo/ERP.] I don’t know
Dalton’s work, but I will be looking for it now. For me,
a U.S. gringa who tends to translate the work of long-dead Latin
Americans, unknown names are a good heads-up that I need to bring
my reading more into this century and the end of the one that
just past. I read Hernández-Linares and think of the beat
poets, di Prima, Kerouac, tightrope walkers sashaying across clotheslines
strung between the top floors of city buildings; of lyrical poets
with fluid grace like Mary Oliver, “look, the trees / are
turning / their own bodies / into pillars of light,” from
“In Blackwater Woods,” or Denise Levertov, “What
is green in me / darkens, muscadine,” from “Stepping
Westward.” The best poets make their feats seem effortless
to the observers on the ground below.
And
Hernández-Linares sashays and cruises and has fun—she
knows how to sneak out to party with the bad girls, and that makes
me glad. But then she shows a way to look back with wisdom on
the time of being a bad girl, or the tendency in us that persists,
and its dangerous dark sides:
feels
like she’s been dragging
more
than cruising
more
than loving
later
you find out
all
there is to like
about
the cars that go
boom
is
the memory
(from
“Cars That Go Boom”)
Gentle
and tender towards her younger wild self, full of desire: this
is how to be a poet and look back in time. Desire and awakening
are treated with real respect here, “when the familiar vibrations
/ shake the house / it’s like / a mating call,” and
the boy, the inarticulate 50 Centish hip-hop boy who lets the
bass and the car talk for him, with sadness, a little anger coming
from him and herself, again with the blues: “pointy shoed
dj wannabe / too much gel in the hair vato / wants you and he
asks hey / you like the cars that go / boom.” I feel the
strength in Hernández-Linares’s poems of the conviction
that the sadness and the dark side of this failed teenage love
and desire stem from patriarchy as well as from capitalism.
I
enjoyed hearing Hernández-Linares read on the excellent
CDs available from Calaca Press, such as Raza Spoken Here
2, and free MP3s on their Web site. Her MP3 reading of “Conversaciones”
is mesmerizing and hypnotic; she works up to a rhythmic fever
pitch, shrieks, laughs, and sings.
Last
year I came across the work of Liliana Valenzuela, a poet and
translator who lives in Austin, Texas. I was very excited to hear
her poetry and see her small books, both humble and great, like
the best of Cid Corman’s work; not hand sewn or on fancy
paper, but made as beautifully as possible from the cheapest materials.
I believe deeply in small press publishing on this scale: on getting
the work out there into the world, not waiting for someone
else to come along and offer to midwife it by some consecrated
chapbook contest or journal-review-quarterly anointing and blessing,
the MFA’s building of the resume and buying into an industry
of poetry that I see as unpleasantly hierarchical, factory-like,
guaranteed to keep many poets down. I’m not saying an MFA
is valueless or that teaching writing workshops is bad, but I
am deeply suspicious of a structure in which people with the power
have vested interest in keeping their ‘students’ as
inferiors and acceptance or rejection by established, veteran
journals as the only valid proof of literary quality.
Valenzuela
and Luz Bilingual Publishing neatly avoid all that ‘institutional
weeding out’ by putting out quite lovely books, ten or twelve
pages, like the new fronds of tiny perfect ferns… stapled
rather than perfect-bound. Sold by hand or snail mail for two
dollars each, or three for five, the humility of these books which
hold such excellent writing amazes me. They are happening.
More, please!
“The
Poetry of Rice Fields: A Long Poem” is indeed a long, loose,
unselfconscious but self-aware poem in many parts written with
the feel of a travel diary or a personal letter. A long poem can
be a meditation, and this one impresses me as one of the long
rambling explorations of the middle ‘break’ of the
song by the Grateful Dead, a jam session of multiple levels of
consciousness rather than multiple musicians, going off in different
directions without worrying about a goal. “Rice Fields”
is a meditation and a traveling back and forth in memory and time
as well as space, its narrator speaking of her young son left
at home, of a “purple orchid in a vase / rhizomes floating
near the breast / pungent spices / in a bathtub brew / Frida would’ve
loved” and then moving on, floating, unanchored, to two
teenage girls bathing, thoughts on breasts and nursing, womanhood
and friendship, being bathed: “coconut shell pours / flowers
and spice tea / over this body that has lived through / two births
and a revolution / now restored / by a pail of light.” Moving
away from the personal and physical again: “God exists /
in the desire to serve, / so single / mindedly to make the other
feel / what I feel / now,” thus uniting motherhood, sensuality,
sisterhood, the desire for reciprocity and a little bit of the
gulf of sadness of being the ‘rich tourist’ in Bali
served by an anonymous lady in a bathhouse. Awareness of that
sadness and the division of wealth, capitalism and the author
or narrator’s unavoidable participation in global imperialism
runs throughout the poem’s sensual, vivid enjoyments —
all with a pointed sense of humor and irony. I have to confess
I also just really like hot baths and naked women, so find it
hard to resist poetry about them.
In
Mujer Frontera, Mujer Malinche Valenzuela keeps up that
playful exploration of language, images, sensuality and politics.
The poem “Sinvergüenza” explores women
and words in Texas and Mexico: what cuss words to use? What does
it mean and how does it feel to swear or talk about fucking in
English or in Spanish, using linguistic dislocation and physical
expatriation as a distancing from the shame or guilt of speaking
the unspeakable: “además, it’s not
me who’s saying them / it’s the other me / the foreigner
/ the alocada libertina / no la niña buena
de México.” Words, “cosas que no se
mencionan / because they can activate a spell / and freeze
you in your tracks.”
I
found invocation, again, like García Echeverría’s
invocation of Meztli Chingona, in Valenzuela’s “Oración
del caminante / Prayer for Taking a Journey” (written
in Spanish and English, translated to English by David Frye, in
Mujer Frontera). The Virgin, “Virgen morena / madre
/ de los mexicanos / (aun de los güeros)” is invoked
for strength and safety on a journey.
ruega
por nosotros
virgen
mojada en el Rio Bravo
nada
a la orilla con nosotros
virgen
en blue jeans con niño a la cadera
danos
el pan
virgen
en cowboy hat
lleva
a nuestros hijos de la mano
streetwise
virgin
resguárdanos
del sol del desierto
virgen
hardininera, sirvienta, mesera, lavandera,
albanila,
abogada, médica, curandera, astronauta,
bióloga
suprema,
danos la paz.
pray
for us
wetbacked
virgin in the Rio Bravo
swim
to the far bank with us
virgin
in bluejeans with a baby on your hip
give
us our bread
virgin
in cowboy hat
take
our children by the hand
streetwise
virgin
shield
us from the desert sun
virgin
gardener, maid, waitress, laundress,
construction
worker, lawyer, doctor, healer,
astronaut,
biologist supreme,
give
us peace.
(translation
by David Frye)
All
three of the poets I’ve just presented share a freedom of
play with language, a willingness to construct imaginary goddesses
and combine them with future and past goddesses, that I admire
deeply.
As
I wrote this review I wondered a little about my impulse to associate
these three women. This impulse comes partly from their gender
and linguistic identities, and my love of mixing of the Spanish
and English languages, but also from the poems themselves and
my connection to them; the feminist energy, passion, and intensity
of their poems, and the way they wheel and dip freely in and out
of invocation, the way the poems become prayerlike; these
qualities give their work a certain unity that perhaps comes from
being a writing woman of our time living on various kinds of borderlands
between nationalities, languages, and gender roles. Reading their
work catapults me into Guillermo Gómez-Pena’s Fourth
World and constructed borderland of myth—into a place that
I think exists somewhere beyond Aztlán.
Liz Henry is a poet and translator who has published work
in Literary Mama, Cipactli, Convergence, and Lodestar
Quarterly. She writes for other magazine in San Francisco
and publishes books,chapbooks, and a translation zine through
Tollbooth Press. She lives in Redwood City, California.
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