Jimmy Santiago Baca

a powerful and timely narrative poem. I don't know much about poetry, but this was my favorite section:

“At the fence on another morning
I am startled and shriek a serrated cry
and other women rush out, thinking
the worst—I had broken a bone, been shot,
but instead, what happened, a hawk
landed on the fence bar
perched a few feet from my face
and studied me for minutes—
a moment with no beginning or end,
an infinite meeting of two travelers;
in the hawk's eyes all it had seen—
desert, forest, show more seas, fields, cliffs,
and because when I was a child I lived in the rainforest
bathed myself in mud-pits used by Huichol ancestors
plastering mud on my small body—
the hawk knew me
as it knows a tree or the air beneath its wings
and gave me in that moment all the lands it had soared over,
leaving me a feather
that had brushed against the sun.” show less

On the back of this work, there's a quote from Richard Blanco which perfectly sums up why this book is so important, and why it is so timely and painful: "Jimmy Baca's new book brilliantly reimagines the epic poem--and reshapes the epic hero as a young immigrant woman struggling to escape violence and find the child that has been taken away from her. A work that speaks strikingly and passionately of our times."

This epic poem is indeed both brilliant and brutal, and I'm not sure any reader show more can face it without feeling pain, but the author has done an admirable job of parceling out jumps in time, hard reality, and gorgeous imagery and character in a way that put life to what is hiding behind news stories and being allowed to unfold below, along, and above the border.

As there are moments of beauty, there are moments when the time and the narrative are overtaken by the reality of what is happening, and so it feels dangerous to call this a poem so much as a document in some ways. But, there is no doubt that it should be read---it should be read, and read, and shared and read again until what's in these pages can be seen as fiction vs. something we believe in so heart-breakingly easily.

Absolutely recommended. show less

Jimmy Santiago Baca has been saved by the word. And by word, I don’t mean the Bible; I mean the written word. He learned to read and write while in prison and since then has become a fierce, courageous presence on the American literary scene. He’s won honors like the Pushcart Prize and the American Book Award—honors that are well-deserved and that, thankfully, have not diluted the character of his work. He writes to call out injustice, to wrestle with ideas, to balance the horror and show more hope present in our day-to-day lives.

I’m in the process of reading two of his collections of poetry, each written for one of his children: The Esai Poems and The Lucia Poems. At the moment, I’ve just finished The Esai Poems. I’m holding off on The Lucia Poems until tomorrow morning, when I can take advantage of the Thanksgiving holiday and let myself spend several hours sinking into his words.

In her introduction to this collection Carolyn Forché tells us that “Jimmy Santiago Baca gives us the secret and present—and yes, dangerous—reality at the heart of our democracy.” What makes The Esai Poems so remarkable is the way they balance his rage and marvel: rage at the daily loss of human potential through war, imprisonment, indifference and marvel at the infinite miracles, both physical and spiritual, that mark the life of his son, Esai.

Let me start by giving you a taste of his sense of marvel. In the poem “Prolougue” that opens this collection he describes his son in phrases that are Whitmanesque: “let your beautiful feet rush through the/grass as if each/blade of grass/were a harp string/and you were falling from string to string, a/tiny little fellow/reduced to the size of a lizard,/and my goodness, play the songs of giants my son.”

Looking at his son, he celebrates “the festive possibilities of all earthly infants/from Jesus, Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Buddha, to Essai/star at the tip of the tree of life.” He shows us the divine in the ordinary, the ordinary in divine.

Despite the inherent marvel of human life, Santiago Baca sees life as a battle, with the marginalized struggling to survive while those who have cling tightly to their wealth and focus on generating more. He describes his infant son’s “tiny hands/that will have to fight for dignity;/ claw through and dig up/struggling your way to peace/bloody knuckled, scratched and cut.” In a later peom, he return to this theme of the struggle for survival that even children face: “much of what I write—/the poems, that is—are stones/I litter the dusty roads with/so kids can pick them up readily/to throw at tanks.” The written word has saved Santiago Baca. He continues to craft it in hopes of helping other survive.

Santiago Baca the father is also Santiago Baca the activist (though “activist” seems inadequate to describe all he does), who tells his son “your steps are acts of love against cruise missiles/your open arms as you rush headlong to me,/acts of love against bigots who would label protesters/terrorists.”

It’s this dual vision that makes his poems so compelling. Santiago Baca describes the incongruencies of our lives in ways that enable us to see them more sharply. Working our way through his poems, I found myself nodding, yes, and yes again, feeling deeply grateful that he could give voice to issues I’ve so often wrestled without without achieving any sort of satisfactory resolution.

Read Santiago Baca. Read him once. Read him again. Let his poems help open your eyes to both beauty and horror. At this time of year when we remind ourselves to give thanks, let him help you keep in mind the things we might someday be thankful for if we demand a fairer, more loving world. show less

We need a shoe to be a shoe,
for the poet to describe the foot
inside, the miles walked, the weariness
that seeps into toes, heels, and calf,
the tired dreams those feet lug every day
“The Truth Be Known”

Singing at the Gates: Selected Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca is a volume of poetry covering four decades of Baca's life as a poet. Baca is of Apache and Chicano descent, abandoned by his parents, and at an early age he took to the streets. He was sentenced to prison for six and a half years show more on a conviction for drug possession. It was in prison where he learned how to read and write and compose poetry. Once freed from prison he chose to live a solitary life and write.

“I was a hermit – as much as one can be living in the fringe of the city.”

Reading Singing at the Gates is experiencing Baca development as a poet. His earliest works convey the feeling of imprisonment and frustration. The feeling and emotion are there almost as if the poems were written in bold type face. Opening poem is long, twenty-five pages, and seems to have been written in a single sitting, stream of consciousness, moving with a purpose from thought to thought. The poem reads more like a letter more than a traditional poem, and he expresses his thoughts in a what appears to be a primitive form, raw, but expressing complex ideas.

By mid-book the poems take a more familiar and recognizable form. The poems still carry a message. The message is not a pastoral scene or romantic love, but a continuation of a struggle. There is racial and economic standings setting the tone in some poems and war and the environment in others. Heritage plays a role in the long poem “Rita Falling From the Sky.” Rita is a homeless woman from Mexico who spends years in a mental institution in America's midwest because she is assumed to be crazy and incoherent. It is only after a new doctor, from Chihuahua, recognized that she was not babbling but speaking her native tongue of the Raramui Indians that she is released. Her real life struggle mirrors Bacca's.

The poetry here is different from most that I have read. The form is interesting as well as the changes in the voice and form as the author's writing matures. Baca writes a fifteen page introduction to this work, which goes a very long way of explaining to the reader his life and how his writing developed. An unprepared reader may not make it through the first third of the book. This is not because it is poorly written, quite the opposite, but the background information is a sort of Rosetta Stone for his early work. Bacca's work although unconventional is still powerful and moving. Singing at the Gates is well worth the read. show less