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TRES Review
by Jack
Anders
Richard Blanco
Someone made in Cuba
Richard Blanco
describes himself as someone who "was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain,
and imported to the United States— meaning his mother, seven months
pregnant, and the rest of the family arrived as exiles from Cienfuegos, Cuba to Madrid, where he was born.” In this
regard his life is parallel to that of Terri Carrion, whose parents
immigrated to the United States from Venezuela while her mother was
pregnant with her. Blanco is also a graduate of the MFA program in
creative writing at Florida International University, where Carrion has
held a position.
Blanco is unusual in that he couples a math-side-of-the-brain background
along with his poetry. He is trained as an engineer, and has done work
designing furniture. He works as a civil engineer in Miami.
His first book of poems was called City of a Hundred Fires and won the
University of Pittsburgh Agnes Starrett Prize in 1997. The book won
praise from the South Florida poet Campbell McGrath, among others. One
can see why McGrath would like Blanco’s poems, as both emphasize craft
and a fine weaving of details in their poems. In the poem, “Photo Shop,”
by Blanco, the lines are fairly well dripping with images:
These faces are fifteen under faux diamond tiaras
and grandmother's smuggled brillantes;
these faces are pierced with the mango smiles
that dress hopeful Teresitas and Marías—
quinceañeras with coffee bean eyes;
these pearl faces are mother's taffeta dream,
a decorated anguish in painful pink manicures.
These young faces can't remember that last day—
the innocence of their small steps into the propeller
plane drifting above palms waving elegant farewells.
These barefoot faces are those red mountains
never climbed, a Caribbean never drunk,
they are a guajiro sugar never tasted.
These faces are displaced Miritas and Susanitas.
These faces are a 50s revolution
they are the Beatles and battles,
they are Celia Cruz—AZUCAR—loud and brown;
these faces rock-n-roll and roll their r's,
they are eery botánicas and 7-Elevens.
These fiery faces are rifles and bongos,
they are maracas shaking, machetes hacking;
these faces carry too many names:
their white eyes are toppling dominoes
their glossy eyes are rum and iced tea
their African eyes are gods and Castilian saints
haloed with the finest tabaco smoke.
These faces rest an entire ocean on Taino eyebrows;
they are Kennedy, Batista, and Nixon,
they are a dragon in uniform;
these faces are singing two anthems,
nailed against walls, the walls are chipping.
These overflowing faces are swollen barrels
with rusting hoops and corset seams straining;
these faces are beans: black, red, white and blue,
with steaming rice on chipped china;
these faces are pork fat and lace gowns.
These standing faces are a sentinel—
when the Vietnamese kitchen next door stops
when the alley veils itself and closes like a fresh widow
when the flower shop draws in buckets of red carnations
when gold and diamonds are pulled from late windows
when neon flashes relieve the sun over these fading faces.
These chromatic faces are nothing important,
they are nada we need to understand,
they will transform in their photo chemistry,
these faces will collage very Americanly.
(From CITY OF A HUNDRED FIRES, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998).
The degree of imagistic detail is striking, and there is
a sense to the well-worked, or well-crafted surface, which might relate
back to his training and day job in engineering. I do wonder if this
kind of rich and closely-worked style would benefit from the use of more
white space, stanza breaks. Reading the poem is like eating a rich pie
without being able to stop for a gulp of water. On the other hand,
Elizabeth Bishop was able to pull off similar richness in big long
chunks, so maybe the problem is mine as reader. All the same, in this
poem, Blanco is switching from image to image, using a list, as opposed
to successively unrolling or articulating a single image or landscape,
say, as Bishop does in “The Fish” or “At the Fish Houses.” I think that
given the rapid succession of different images in Blanco’s text, the
compression enforced by the lack of white space might be excessive. I am
not sure. The variation of observation and acuity of vocabulary are
impressive. The basic controlling form of the poem is the litany, the
list. The entire poem is an emotive, free-flowing list rather like
Ginsberg, except with a completely different, less over-the-top,
emotional sensibility at work. There is a sense of pathos or nostalgia
in the tone that is partially traceable to the Latin American literary
tradition of fairly passionate poetic voicing in which the male poet is
allowed to foreground emotions, including vulnerable ones, without
losing machismo; there are also traces of the ruminative nostalgia one
sees in Donald Justice or his protégée Joe Bolton, who unfortunately
died young, a suicide. One wonders if there is something intrinsically
nostalgic or melancholic to the South Floridian landscape, given the
presence of these tones in these poets, all of whom spent stints of time
in that region. For instance compare this excerpt from Blanco’s poem:
a decorated anguish in painful pink manicures.
These young faces can't remember that last day—
the innocence of their small steps into the propeller
plane drifting above palms waving elegant farewells.
-with this from Joe Bolton:
I think, now, of those twenty black hats,
Black haloes your face paled under;
Jewelry, photographs, a few precious books;
Little shoes in which to make your exit.
(from “Departure”).
The melancholy and nostalgia, related to images of beauty
and memories of childhood, is similar, and similarly portrayed. I wonder
if in some strange way it could be related to the warm southern light
and languous of those Floridian environs.
I would like to talk a little more about Joe Bolton, who I discovered
somewhere in some used bookstore some years ago. Some of his poems are
here and
another good site is
here.
His story is sad. He was born in 1961 in Cadiz, Kentucky. He wrote three
collections of poetry including the one I have, The Last Nostalgia,
which was edited by Donald Justice. His school background was that he
graduated summa cum laude from Western Kentucky University, then went
and got an MA at University of Florida and an MFA at University of
Arizona. In March of 1990, he killed himself. In his poems he reveals a
mastery of inner and outer landscape, and a willingness to believe in,
reach for, gestures of sadness and earnestness, emotionally, which
placed him in an existential position of great exposure and
vulnerability:
It is a rage against geometry;
The spiked fans of the palmetto arcing
Like improvised brushstrokes in the light breeze;
Late shadowplay, somewhere a dog barking.
Against the height of new and old brick walls,
Confounding stone, transplanted pine and palm
Lift in imperfection, as heavy bells
That would force order fade into the calm
Of azure and a faint scent of musk.
(Is it eucalyptus or just the past?)
There's nothing in this warm, vegetal dusk
That is not beautiful or that will last.
(Tropical Courtyard)
Clearly he has read Hart Crane, Keats, the Romantics. The
emotional heaviness in the poem is along the lines of Housman, but
Bolton was younger than Housman was when Housman touched upon the most
difficult depths of himself in his own writing; one reason perhaps why
Bolton could not survive. There are profound difficulties involved in
uniting such a tone as we see in Bolton, which touches upon the deepest
and most elemental and noble things and which therefore we want in
poetry, with the forms of rhetoric and poetic expression readily
available in the era in which Bolton lived; therefore his poetry is
arguably flawed by a slightly archaic flavor; it is not that he is out
of control of his emotions like Edna Millay before him, but that he is
appropriating a style which, via the efforts of writers such as Snyder
and Olson and Pound and Williams – whole onslaughts of good writers –
had largely been replaced. He was trying to write in a grand style, like
Hart Crane, or Keats – but at a time when that kind of approach, with
its dangers of sloshiness and sentimentalism, had been pretty thoroughly
called into question by most of the main lines of American poetry. I
think that this situation, in a poet, can create a very dangerous
feedback loop in which the isolation at the level of style reinforces
itself existentially ever time the poet writes, until finally it
suffocates him. Nonetheless, there is much about his poetry, and what he
stands for, that I admire. But it is a dangerous place to be.
Let me give you one uncanny image of Bolton recorded by Philip G.
Schloss:
Like many others, I saw Joe on the last day of his life, riding his
bike, a slightly bemused expression in his eyes. I was sitting on the
ground leaning against a tree. It occurred to me to call out to him, but
I didn't. Then he was gone. It wasn't any big deal. He was wearing a
Hawaiian print shirt like normal.
On the last day of his life! It gives you shivers. If he had lived
longer I wonder if he would have shed some of the slightly stilted and
archaic tendencies in his writing, which hearkened back to the slightly
breathless, slightly elevated voice of prior romantic movements and
which was, I think, just a little bit disjunct from being completely
real-sounding in and for his time which was not the time of F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, or even of his mentor Donald Justice, but which
was instead the 1980s. Consider another excerpt from Bolton’s poem
“Departure”:
And if poetry is a bond between
Two hearts, it is a bond too frail:
That night words failed, I too, was lost--
To whiskey, memory, a photograph.
East of that city, the green fields
Are winding away beneath your gaze,
And here, west of that city, there is
No water deep enough to let me forget.
If I could look forward, I could see us
In Houston, in Atlanta--that South
No train will take us to, that South
We lost ourselves in so long ago.
To me, the sound of the voice here is just a little bit too lofty,
elevated, too reminiscent of prior voices of past generations of poets –
I think this disjunction or difference may have had toxic effects for
Bolton, as it would have served as an alienating device, and in America
in the 1980s, to be a young poet was already to be in a state of
alienation, regardless of what style you wrote in. Now let’s compare
that tonality, with the problems in it which I’ve noted, to the tonality
we find in the following poem by Blanco:
I am not shaving, I'm writing about it.
And I conjure the most elaborate idea—
how my beard is a creation of silent labor
like ocean steam rising to form clouds,
or the bloom of spiderwebs each morning;
the discrete mystery of how whiskers grow,
like the drink roses take from the vase,
or the fall of fresh rain, becoming
a river, and then rain again, so silently.
I think of all these slow and silent forces
and how quietly my father's life passed us by.
I think of those mornings, when I am shaving,
and remember him in a masquerade of foam, then,
as if it was his beard I took the blade to,
the memory of him in tiny snips of black whiskers
swirling in the drain—dead pieces of the self
from the face that never taught me how to shave.
His legacy of whiskers that grow like black seeds
sown over my cheek and chin, my own flesh.
I am not shaving, but I will tell you about the mornings
with a full beard and the blade in my hand,
when my eyes don't recognize themselves
in a mirror echoed with a hundred faces
I have washed and shaved—it is in that split second,
when perhaps the roses drink and the clouds form,
when perhaps the spider spins and rain transforms,
that I most understand the invisibility of life
and the intensity of vanishing, like steam
at the slick edges of the mirror, without a trace.
(Shaving)
I believe that, by comparison to Bolton, Blanco’s voice
is a little more controlled in its emotional effect, or affect, by
virtue of the marshalling of detail, of observational notations, plus
the careful architecture of the poem, the way the last part folds back
up what the first part unfolded. We know from biographies of Bishop that
she was a tormented and afflicted person in many ways, not only due to
her family background, or the suicide of the lover who was for years her
stabilizing force, and not only because of her alcoholism, but simply
because to be human and a poet is emotionally difficult – yet the degree
to which she buffers and controls, or sublimates, the raw stuff of her
emotions, in her poems, is obvious. It is as if the very careful,
patient, accumulative use of sharp observation and landscape-detail in
her poems operates as a sponge to sop up the water of her affections,
which otherwise might deluge, say, like Sexton. Bishop uses her sharp
eye and craftsmanly sense to control her emotions and achieve effects of
understatement. Blanco is similar in his craft-sense. In the above poem,
I do, still worry a little about the accumulation of disparate images in
a short space: for example in the first stanza you have separate
metaphors of ocean steam, spiderwebs and roses, all jammed together – I
am wondering if he could achieve more breathing space, for the
individual image, more of a setting-off effect, around each image, were
he to add in more white space. Again, in Bishop’s poems this is never a
problem because she tends to restrain her deployment of metaphors and to
stick to careful elaborations of single landscapes or imagistic
figurations, instead of skipping from one to another to another. I do
like the meditative quality of Blanco’s writing here, and it is
obviously highly polished and sophisticated. And although he does have a
melancholic tug in his poems, which comes part-and-parcel with
meditativeness and ruminativeness, he, like Bishop or Czeslaw Milocz,
uses the image and the exterior landscape, the subject matter outside of
him, to diffuse and restrain the harsher implications of melancholy.
Wallace Stevens loved to vacation in Florida. He lived up in Hartford
Connecticut most of the time, where he worked a monotonous, though
well-paid, life as an insurance executive. Phlegmatic and somewhat
stolid by demeanor, and a born speculative philosopher, he was
relatively free from wild mood swings, and if he did have them, he hid
them well. He had a great love for the exotic and arcane, and used that
love to deal with the extreme crudity, roughness and uncultured banality
of much of the American landscape, by comparison with, say, Paris, or
Florence, or old Havana. Unlike William Carlos Williams, who
instinctively plunged as far into proletarian roughness as he could (and
as he had to, making his rounds as a small town doctor), and sought to
locate new poetics there, for Stevens, the delicate sniffing of a
peculiar imported plum, or the savoring of an imported jade vase from
China, or a French philosophy journal, or the glimpsing of a strange
tropical palm, or toucan, out of the window of his train down to the
Florida Keys, were the critical things. If god had pushed Stevens just a
little more to the right on the way down from heaven, he would have been
an insufferable exquisite, a hopeless dilettante. Instead, he improbably
and miraculously found a way to write modern poetry in English, in
America, using things like pineapples as his subject matter. Blanco
seems to have all of this in mind when he writes this poem:
The ration books voided, there was little to eat,
so Tía Olivia ruffled four hens to serve Stevens
a fresh criollo egg. The singular image lay limp,
floating in a circle of miniature roses and vines
etched around the edges of the rough dish.
The saffron, inhuman soul staring at Stevens
who asks what yolk is this, so odd a yellow?
Tell me Señora, if you know, he petitions,
what exactly is the color of this temptation:
I can see a sun, but it is not the color of suns
nor of sunflowers, nor the yellows of Van Gogh,
it is neither corn nor school pencil, as it is,
so few things are yellow, this, even more precise.
He shakes some salt, eye to eye hypothesizing:
a carnival of hues under the gossamer membrane,
a liqueur of convoluted colors, quarter-part orange,
imbued shadows, watercolors running a song
down the spine of praying stems, but what, then,
of the color of the stems, what green for the leaves,
what color the flowers; what of order for our eyes
if I can not name this elusive yellow, Señora?
Intolerant, Tía Olivia bursts open Stevens's yolk,
plunging into it with a sharp piece of Cuban toast:
It is yellow, she says, amarillo y nada más, bien?
The unleashed pigments begin to fill the plate,
overflow onto the embroidered place mats,
stream down the table and through the living room
setting all the rocking chairs in motion then
over the mill tracks cutting through cane fields,
a viscous mass downing palm trees and shacks.
In its frothy wake whole choirs of church ladies
clutch their rosary beads and sing out in Latin,
exhausted macheteros wade in the stream,
holding glinting machetes overhead with one arm;
cafeteras, '57 Chevys, uniforms and empty bottles,
mangy dogs and fattened pigs saved from slaughter,
Soviet jeeps, Bohemia magazines, park benches,
all carried in the egg lava carving the molested valley
and emptying into the sea. Yellow, Stevens relents,
Yes. But then what the color of the sea, Señora?
(Tia Olivia Serves Wallace Stevens a Cuban Egg)
This is very intelligent and witty writing, really
operating in an intermediate space between critical and lyrical, in that
a lot of the poem consists of ironic riffs off of Stevens own style, as
a sort of inherent critical commentary on Stevens. The use of careful
detail again reminds one of why Campbell McGrath is such a fan. I would
call attention to the incrementally juxtaposed discrete images, the
restrained focus on one given subject matter; and the humor. He exploits
his cross-cultural connections for all they are worth. He likes to put
many different things in his poems, almost like a magpie decorating its
nest. This collage-effect allows him to cover a wide range of
associations in one poem. John Ashbery also tends to like to load up his
poems like this, almost a painterly effect, which makes sense in
Ashbery’s case since his day job for a long time was that of being an
art critic and he cultivated close connections with New York painters
during his days as a member of loose group of poets known as the New
York School and including Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby and
Kenneth Koch. With Ashbery, however, the collage often extends to the
overall subject, in the sense that there isn’t one subject, but a
shape-shifting collage of subjects; whereas in Blanco’s poems, it seems
that there is always one overall fixed subject matter.
We also see a mixture of critical and lyrical modalities in this piece,
“Last Lines”:
I pull out your copy of Neruda's poems that remain
on my shelf. I read Tus Manos, inspiring me to write
another poem about your hands, holding a cigarette,
gesturing with our old conversations about Botticelli
or the Cosmos over goblets of red wine on the beach
with seashells and stones we'd collect and place along
the window sills as if they'd grow softer in moonlight.
I read Tu Risa wanting to trace your laughter back to
when I didn't need to write about the way we walked
together on our boardwalk, as if the sea didn't matter,
paying no attention to the senate of stars governing us.
Then I turn to a poem you book-marked with a petal,
flat as the page it kept and turning brown at the edges,
but its heart still scarlet and velvet with want, pressed
between titles: El Olvido/Oblivion and Siempre/Always.
I think that this is Blanco’s most appealing mode. It is clear from all
of his writing that reading and literary scholarship and knowledge is a
big part of his life. In this text, he allows himself to foreground that
part of his life, allowing it to sit there, right in his own text – the
references to Neruda, the art-historical reference to Botticelli – while
at the same time, he speaks more plainly and openly about a part of what
at least sounds like his own real life, not disguised behind
other-directed subject matter, but open, exposed and there: the sense of
personal loss and love issues seen here. By opening up and exposing this
more personal vein, I think he gives himself better access to the
emotional and nostalgic tonalities which are very appealing in Latin
American literature, of which he is an inheritor. Unlike the North
American stiff upper lip tradition embodied, say, in Hemingway, the
South American and Latin American male writers have always seemed to be
able to be more emotional and passionate, more suffering and vulnerable,
without in any way sacrificing charisma or machismo. Think of Neruda,
who does this in almost every poem. I think that this last piece of
Blanco’s which I have quoted represents a direction with enormous
potential for him, because it allows him to tap into these sorts of
forces. Notice how in this last text the sometimes choppy, cluttered
effect of incessant detail-image and collage loosens up, softens, and in
its place enters a very appealing sense of restrained personal
confessional impetus, along with a more relaxed approach toward the use
of literary and poetic antecedents. Working in this mixed mode, which
combines elements of the lyric, of the memoir, of the literary-critical,
of both prose and poetry, I think he charts new ground.
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