July/August 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Praise for Alabanza

Alabanza, Martín Espada, W.W. Norton, 2003

Kevin Gallagher is a poet and editor living in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He works as an economist on environmental issues in Mexico at the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University.

The US-led war with Iraq has sparked a new round of debate regarding the role of the poet in our society. Perhaps the most widely discussed treatment of the subject has been essayist Eliot Weinberger’s statement at the February 2003 “Poetry as News” conference at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York City. In his speech Weinberger said that poets often follow one of three models during times (like these) of injustice and political crisis. Weinberger said poets either write poems that directly engage the crisis at hand, stop writing and become organizers for the cause, or write poems that don’t directly address current crises other than as creative acts in un-creative times. Martín Espada’s Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982 to 2002, reveals that he is one of the only poets writing in the United States whose work falls in all three categories.

Martín Espada was born of Puerto Rican descent in Brooklyn, 1957. Espada’s first books were published by Curbstone Press, one of the country’s foremost publishers of political poetry. Alabanza, which selects poems from a publishing career that has now spanned twenty years, is his fourth book with W.W. Norton Company.

Espada’s signature work over the past twenty years has been a political poetry that is very different than that of many of his contemporaries.

Martín Espada

The bulk of political poetry written in the United States has been a poetry of direct expressive statement for or against particular causes. Espada’s work however, can be characterized as poetry of solidarity, or better yet praise. Indeed, “alabanza” translates to “praise” in English. With extreme empathy he tells the stories of others but through their eyes. Indeed, some of his subjects are no longer with us to say anything, as in his homage to the pro-independence marchers killed in the 1937 Ponce Massacre in Puerto Rico:

fifty years of family history
says it was Pellin
who dipped a finger
into the bloody soup of his own body
and scratched defiance
in jagged wet letters on the sidewalk.

Espada has directly or indirectly come in contact with the struggles of individuals both inside and outside of the United States. Though darkness sets most of the work, hope is often laced throughout, as in the poem “After the Flood in Chinandega.”

Nicaragua
is a young brown girl
standing in the mud
of a refugee camp
grinning at the way
her green bird
balances himself
on her head

To Weinberger, the second kind of poet was epitomized by George Oppen, who in the 1930s stopped writing to become a union leader. What is unique about Espada is that he has not only written lucid and memorable political poetry, but has been (and remains) an activist as well. For years he served as a tenant lawyer working to protect the rights of inner city families. Indeed, the poems of his fourth book, City of Coughing and Dead Radiators are testimonials of his days as a tenant lawyer in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Alabanza features the playful but all too revealing poem, “DSS Dream,” in which a Department of Social Services agent informs a tenant that the tenant’s baby has to be taken away because the tenant is illegally housing a baby, a goat, and a pig in the tenant’s tiny apartment. The last two lines of the poem are:

“The pig’s OK?” I asked.
“The pig’s OK,” they said.

Espada’s personal political activism continues to this day. He is one of 13,000 poets active in “Poets Against the War” and will be featured in the forthcoming anthology with the same title.

The great American poet Kenneth Rexroth was noted for saying that there is no defense against the creative act. In times of war and injustice, love and creativity can be gone and forgotten. Thus, the very making of art can be seen or expressed as a political act because such beauty is frowned upon by the more powerful elements of society. Espada may not see himself writing in this vein, but much of his work inspires many poetry readers who want to get away from headlines and hatred and find beauty. His “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” imagines Pablo Neruda hiding from the Chilean secret police in Fenway Park! What better than poetry and baseball to take us away:

Praise the hot dog, pig meat,
pork snouts, sawdust, mouse feces,
human hair, plugging our intestines,
yet baptized joyfully with mustard!

Espada’s critics have claimed that his work lacks a sharp aesthetic and that he can be overly sanctimonious. I think such critics are simply overwhelmed by the content of his work and thus overlook his art. Robert Lowell became one of America’s most cherished poets for writing autobiographical confessions of his tormented modern mind and soul. Espada has extended that aesthetic into a broader realm: many of his poems are expressions of empathetic confessions of witness. He is “confessing” the lives and struggles of others. In so doing, the logical poetic form for a poet of praise and solidarity is to write as the common person speaks. For those reasons his poems are widely read by a large share of the general public, especially among advocates for peace and justice—a feat few poets can count as their own. For those reasons many critics find his work too “easy.”

Espada’s best poems seem so easy because they are so successful at achieving his poetic goals of communication, homage, love, and inspiration. The selection of poems in Alabanza will serve as a great introduction for those who have not yet had the chance to experience Martín Espada’s work, and as a “greatest hits” for those who have been reading him for twenty years.

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