 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
April 6, 2008
Dear Editor:
In the spirit of Latino Poetry Review's mission and its “eye towards spurring inquiry and dialogue,” I would like to respond to Eric Murphy Selinger's comments1 on Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales's I am Joaquín. “As an outsider,” says Selinger, “I find its prestige baffling, for the poem seems to me a hash of New Left platitudes dished up in slack free verse” (page 5). Selinger's thrashing of Gonzales's poem personally offended me,2 and at first I wanted to write a vitriolic response3 arguing that the force behind I am Joaquín is that it remains in the particular precisely because it is written on/in “our own terms” both politically and aesthetically. But Selinger admits to his outsider status and readily acknowledges the poem's historical, social, and political importance for Chicanos. Selinger focuses his critique on what he perceives to be the poem's lack of attention to issues of craft, the subtlety of word choice, sounds, rhythm, and other formal concerns. Instead of a personal, and perhaps angry, response against Selinger, I intend to question the flatness Selinger attributes to I am Joaquín by highlighting Gonzales's poetic craft.
I will begin my analysis by refuting Selinger's claim that the first two stanzas of I am Joaquín are written in “slack free verse.” Here is the first stanza:
I am Joaquín,
lost in a world of confusion,
caught up in the whirl of a
gringo society,
confused by the rules,
scorned by attitudes,
suppressed by manipulations,
and destroyed by modern society.
My fathers
have lost the economic battle
and won
the struggle of cultural survival.
A strong iambic rhythm drives the music in this opening stanza. Actually all the lines in the first stanza scan as iambic, beginning with a dimeter in the first line, continuing with tetrameter lines, and finally concluding with the iambic pentameter of the heroic couplet. The last four lines of the first stanza can be scanned as two iambic pentameter lines that are dropped after the first foot. Here is a possible scansion4:
/ / / /
My fathers // have lost the economic battle.
W S < > W S W S W S W S < >
/ / /
And won// the struggle of cultural survival.
W S W S < > W S W S W S < >
The heroic couplet is completed with the rhyme battle/survival. Notice also the internal rhymes of struggle and cultural. This rhyming is established earlier in the stanza. In the second line, the poem's I is “lost in a world of confusion,” and in the third line the poem's I is “caught up in a whirl.” Notice the echo and the condensing of the noun phrase “world of confusion” into the single word “whirl.” Selinger is apt enough to give Gonzales credit for incorporating “an apt conjunction in the opening stanza—the fathers have lost and won, not lost but won or lost yet won.” But by dismissing the rest of the lines as “thin corn gruel,” Selinger fails to recognize the relation between this “apt conjunction” and Gonzales's “apt” use of the couplet form. Gonzales uses the couplet to work through the contradictions of Chicano identity in order to establish the paradox of being victor “and” vanquished.5
Selinger's apt observation of “and” in the first stanza should have led him to observe the emphasis on “or” in the second stanza. Here is that second stanza:
And now!
I must choose
between
the paradox of
victory of the spirit,
despite physical hunger
or
to exist in the grasp
of American social neurosis,
sterilization of the soul
and a full stomach….
In addition to emphasizing “or” by placing it on its own line, Gonzales rhymes “or” with “hunger” in order to reveal the uncertainty in hunger. The “or” is further emphasized by the “r” sounds in the following words: paradox, victory, spirit, hunger, American, neurosis, and sterilization. The focus of the first stanza is “and”; the focus of the second is “or.” The joining of and/or is at the center of the paradoxes of the poem, which Selinger is observant enough to notice:
When "I am Joaquín" turns to history, it gets a bit more interesting. [. . . ] Gonzalez makes sure that Joaquín identifies with both sides in each conflict that constitutes his Chicano identity. "I ride with revolutionists / against myself," he proclaims; "the victor, / the vanquished," he is at once Cortez and Cuauhtémoc, despot and democrat.
The paradox isn't that he is both the victor and the vanquished; the paradox is that while he's both the victor and the vanquished there's a constant choosing of being either the victor or the vanquished; either way the “I” chooses there is something won and something lost.
Let us see how the closing of the poem treats this paradox. Back to Selinger: “The closing stanza tries to turn these paradoxes into a source of strength, or at least rhetorical triumph, as the poet rallies his listeners.” (I interpret his use of the word “rhetorical” to be in opposition to “poetic.”) Here is the last stanza:
I am the masses of my people and
I refuse to be absorbed.
I am Joaquín.
The odds are great
but my spirit is strong,
my faith unbreakable,
my blood is pure.
I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ.
I SHALL ENDURE!
I WILL ENDURE!
The lines in this last stanza also scan as iambic. While in the first stanza the movement was from an iambic dimeter line to an iambic pentameter line, the movement in this closing stanza is from an iambic pentameter line to a couplet of dimeter lines. The line that Selinger points out is even more intriguing because it is the only iambic tetrameter line in the stanza and interrupts the descending movement. Selinger says of the third to the last line,
Holy Huitzilopochtli! A figure that encompasses the bleeding heart of Christ and the obsidian knife that rips it, still beating, out of the chest? That is, indeed, the stuff of poetry—but of subtler, more accomplished poetry than this.
(Again, I feel that his failed attempt at humor makes his “analysis” sound like a cheap shot.) Let's take a closer look at this line. The construction of “Christian Christ” reminds me of what Borges says about certain verses in one of his Dantesque essays. In “Purgatorio I, 13” Borges studies Dante's curious line, “Sweet hue of oriental sapphire.” Borges offers the following analysis: “In the aforementioned line, Dante suggests the color of the East, the Orient, by a sapphire that includes the Orient in its name. He thus implies a reciprocal play that may well be infinite.” To say “Christian Christ” is not meant to be a “source of strength”; it is meant to question both the adjective “Christian” and the noun “Christ.” The same reciprocal play occurs in the phrase “Aztec prince.” The only princes we Mexicans know are Aztecs, and the only Aztecs we know are princes. This play, I believe, takes away from what Selinger calls the “rhetoric of triumph.”6 The “rhetoric of triumph” is further undercut by the last word of the poem, “Endure.” Gonzales chose “endure” over “triumph” and “prevail” because the victor/vanquished paradox is captured in this one word. There is both victory and defeat in “endure.” Durar for last, dura for hard. To endure is to last a hard life. The subtlety of this one word choice seems to me to be enough to argue for I am Joaquín as accomplished poetry.
1Selinger, Eric Murphy. “Gringo with a Baedeker, Cortez in Kevlar,” Latino Poetry Review. Spring 2008. Originally published in Parnassus.
Selinger attempts to provide a travel guide for those who may be interested in journeying into the land of Latino Literature. The essay is written by an outsider (his word) for outsiders. Selinger, I must admit, does a tremendous job of offering rough outlines of Latino poetry’s diverse trajectories. This is quite an accomplishment if you consider the numerous and diverse works that fall or could fall under that category. And, although discussing Chicano poetry without mentioning alurista is like discussing British Romanticism without mentioning Wordsworth, Selinger provides the best possible survey considering his limitations. I wonder, though, if Selinger could have a moment of recognition in which he realizes that this land of Latino Poetry is not as foreign as he thinks, that it is the same land as the same one in which one encounters Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Stevens, Ashberry, that it is not a new land that he is discovering but faces that have long, too long been ignored.
2I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. I don’t understand why Selinger feels he has to resort to cheap shots:
“a hash of New Left platitudes dished up in slack free verse”
“this is pretty thin corn gruel.”
“used ‘society’ twice in five flat lines”
“As a fanfare for the common Chicano, it falls flat”
These types of assaults are uncalled for and unfair.
3Punch back—that was my first instinct. I wanted to say, the reason you find it baffling is because Corky did not write the poem for Harvard/UCLA educated professors but for young Chicanos who were and are at risk, always at risk of becoming statistics, dropouts, convicts, excons, bodybags. I wanted to tell Selinger that the poem was written by a man who at age 15 stood toe-to-toe with other hungry men in the boxing ring, by a man who won Golden Gloves, by a man who tried to work for change within the Democratic Party but left disillusioned to help found the Raza Unida Party, by a man who saw firsthand that an American city can become a war zone, by a man who is the son of an immigrant from Chihuahua.
The truth is, I wanted to say, that my generation of poets will never be in Corky’s weight class, that my generation of poets wouldn’t be able to keep up with Corky even if he gave us a five-stanza headstart, that he would wink and wave at us as he left us in the dust, that everything my generation has written isn’t worth one line of Joaquín. Selinger, I wanted to say, my generation of poets wouldn’t last one round with Corky.
4I borrow the method of scansion from generative metrics.
5For a useful discussion of how the master of the couplet Alexander Pope uses the couplet to work through binaries and contradictions, see J. Paul Hunter's "Formalism and History: Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet." I believe that Gonzales's similar use of the heroic couplet shows that he is aware not only of form but also of the formal tradition.
6Perhaps Alfred Arteaga says it most insightfully:
By declaring ‘whatever I call myself,” I am Joaquin underducts its own authority over the subject by deferring responsibility. The poem, as well as the epic poet, does describe chicanismo, but that description is neither complete, finished, nor absolutely true. (Chicano Poetics; Cambridge)
Sincerely,
Javier Huerta
Oakland, CA
Other Letters to the Editor
