Latina: On the Question of Poetry and Culture
By hola | Published | 5 Comments
I have walked the same stretch of trail at Rock Creek Park for 17 years—this past year, through each of the four seasons—and am still getting to know the place and all the things that dwell there. This is humbling. I am both the walker, and the walked upon.
You can walk somewhere many times, and get to know the same place differently. First, there is the place—all that is there. Then there is you—all that you bring.
Poetry is like walking inside a magnified heart—sometimes, a magnified mind. If you’re lucky, it’s like walking inside both, in their own dance of perfect balance—tantalizing symmetry, texture… You may not see the aortic arch while you’re there. You may not see the composite memory trace across the collective unconscious. Not at first, anyway.
Poetry is a piece of the cosmos, and the cosmos itself. The minute and particular, and the expansive. It tackles it all, even the “untackable.”
When there isn’t enough room, when words themselves get in the way of arriving somewhere else, the poet can shatter language to pieces—like Ai Weiwei that 2,000-year-old Han dynasty urn in 1995—and there will be a new language in the now unoccupied space the poet can write from.
Such is poetry.
The poet is both master and apprentice—on and on, back and forth, through the gateways of time.
The reader brings his own story, which is always evolving. As he evolves, so does the poet’s work, which the poet—forgetting—thinks to have been stilled by her last period.
Poets have their allegiances. Our allegiances inform our worldview of creation. I have an allegiance to my country, an allegiance to my culture, an allegiance to language, first peoples, women, the poor, family, the working class, to the natural world in all its forms, the human spirit.
“When we walk inside culture, culture walks inside of us.”
Our allegiances seep into our work, sometimes, in spite of ourselves—our intentions. These may take the form of tropes, the evolution of our own figurative language, a token, or the ghost line between the lines. Or they may seep into our work as intentionally as a gun or music.
Our work—in part or as a whole—may not bear any semblance of the culture that informs our creative spirit. But we do not leave culture behind when we work our work, any more than we leave it behind when we visit another country. When we walk inside culture, culture walks inside of us.
Such questions about culture preoccupy a lot of minds. Is this definitively what it is? Does this or that definitively inform this person’s work? Is this or that person definitively this or that? How do they demonstrate it? Are they tripping over their intentions? What is this new objet d’art? This, as artifact? Does it represent us?
In the end, as readers, a question that concerns us is: Is this good? And “good” is a very big word, almost as big a word as “poetry”—but not quite. The answer to this question is one that, as the reader evolves, is always evolving.
As a writer, I have my own questions: Can the writing be superb but then fall away like scaffolding? And is there really such a thing? Can you “enter” what I see with me? If you can, will you change this? Work for this? Appreciate this? Protect this? Renew it? Revive it? Perfect it? Love it? Let it go? Will you go away from this and create your own thing? Will I hear about it?
Culture is alive, dynamic. It keeps the pace of evolution. Yet, it seldom leaves the past entirely. It breathes inside our poetry, not like a flag, coat of arms, cross, ready-made, or pasties, but a face and its deep lines, a hand and what it touched, a tree, a shack, an afternoon of drought, a valve, a cell, memory. Something we might hope bears a semblance of its birthing place (the particular) yet leave it behind to become more, to be outside itself.
-Naomi Ayala
NAOMI AYALA, (Puerto Rico) moved to the United States in her teens, eventually earning an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Writing in both Spanish and English, she is author of the poetry collections Wild Animals on the Moon (1997), chosen by the New York City Public Library as a 1999 Book for the Teen Age, This Side of Early (2008) and Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations 2013. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Boriquén to Diasporican: Puerto Rican Poetry from Aboriginal Times to the New Millennium (2007), Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature (2006), and First Flight: 24 Latino Poets (2006).
Naomi’s latest book, “Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations,” was published in 2013 by Bilingual Review Press.
Read her poem “Rock Creek”
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