Dear Editor,

When I was a cub book critic writing for the Boston Phoenix, I had one lesson drilled into me by older writers: never respond to a letter to the editor. “You’ve had your say,” they’d tell me; “now shut up and let the reader have a turn.” Javier Huerta’s letter on I am Joaquín raises so many substantive points, however—and raises them so patiently, despite the author’s anger—that I will take this opportunity to respond.

As I said in the essay, I come to Latino poetry “as an outsider.” By this, I don’t just mean “as an Anglo”; I mean that I had no graduate schooling or deep prior knowledge of this body of work. What I know, I learned as I wrote the piece. To reach my audience in Parnassus, whom I assumed to be equally ignorant, I took on a very deliberate persona: a clueless, overly confident man who wanted to read these poets “simply for pleasure,” but who found himself instead thrown for a loop, needing to learn new terrain. The “Cabeza de Vaca” riff at the start of the piece was meant to set up my Cowheaded identity, and by the close I hoped to seem a “conquistador / conquistado,” to borrow a phrase from a poem I praised by Francisco X. Alarcón. In the process, my implied reader (a fellow “gringo of a certain age”) would also be won over. He or she, I hoped, would leave the piece feeling confident enough to read more Latino poetry for any number of pleasures, rather than out of a sense of moral or even intellectual duty. Some of those pleasures might well be less honorable than others. (Craig Santos Perez has wondered, on his blog, about the sexual politics of my closing paragraphs.) But the reasons we enjoy what we read, inside or outside the academy, are often unprofessional, and even self-indulgent. If a tenured professor can’t address such issues, who can?

So much for the plan. What about I am Joaquín?

In his letter, Huerta contests my account of the poem’s literary quality. He points out elements of “poetic craft” that he believes I should have noticed, whatever my outsider status, and other artful moments that a little more learning on my part would have revealed. He also questions the tone of my description. In the third footnote to his letter, he offers a reverent tribute to Gonzales as both poet and man; and in the second, he says that as he read the piece he “felt as if [he] had been punched in the stomach.” Why, he asks, did I “resort to cheap shots” at the author’s and poem’s expense?

Let me respond to each of these in turn, as honestly I can.

Huerta begins by scanning the first two stanzas of I am Joaquín, hoping to show that its free verse is not “slack,” but deliberately and visibly shaped. “All the lines in the first stanza scan as iambic,” he asserts, “beginning with a dimeter in the first line, continuing with tetrameter lines, and finally concluding with the iambic pentameter of the heroic couplet.” Simply being iambic does not, of course, mean that lines are artful. It’s not that hard to write iambic lines. (I’ve written two just now, in fact.) That said, the incrementally expanding pattern Huerta spots certainly would be a sign of literary craft. Is it really there?

I scan the first lines a little differently. (For the sake of clarity, let me put the accented syllables in bold font.) But even scanned as I hear them, the pattern that Huerta describes shines through:

The first line I, too, read as iambic dimeter. The next is trimeter—dactyl, dactyl, trochee—while the third and fourth are, to the ear, a single tetrameter line, with “caught” a “headless” iamb leading into three more dactyls. (There are other ways to scan that line, I know, but clearly it has four main stresses.)

In the second half of the stanza, this steadily building shape collapses, then returns. First we have dimeter (“confused by the rules”), then an appropriately “confused” line that lies between dimeter and trimeter (“scorned by attitudes” or “scorned by attitudes”), then two lines of trimeter: “suppressed by manipulations / and destroyed by modern society.” One listens, now, for tetrameter, the metrical “goal” that was reached in the first part of the stanza, and potentially for pentameter, the normative “high culture” meter in English, and one which the poem has not yet offered. With Huerta’s help, I spot them both at the end:

We could read these lines either as a heroic couplet, visually split into four lines (this is how Huerta reads them) or as a pattern of confident monometer lines alternating with prosodically ambiguous three- or four-beat phrases: phrases which would thus recapitulate the various line-lengths that come before them.

In short, although the speaker’s diction may not be conventionally “poetic”—it is drawn from sociological or political discourse, and does repeat “society” in a way I still can’t enjoy—his use of rhythm suggests that he is also grounded in the aesthetic, the literary, the “cultural.” That is precisely the “lost and won” idea announced in the final lines: an apt and artful fit between the poem’s form and its content.

This is not the “slack free verse” that I said it was. Huerta was right, and I was wrong, about the craft in Gonzales’s verse.

He is equally persuasive to me about the central tension of the second stanza, in which a both / and speaker is forced into an either / or choice in which (to quote Huerta) “either way the ‘I’ chooses there is something won and something lost.” Although I noticed the first part of this description, the “and,” I missed the corresponding “or” in the stanza that followed. My reading tried to saunter, but in fact it was impatient, even glib. Why?

It is tempting to plead ignorance. Certainly that’s why I missed the ideational subtlety in the choice of the name “Joaquín” at the start of the poem, and that’s probably what still keeps me from appreciating the paradoxes at its close. (Huerta does his best to explain the subtleties and overtones of the closing lines, but aside from the etymological resonance of “endure,” I find it hard to hear them myself. These things happen: I’ve often kvelled over the multivalence of phrases in Ashkenazi American poems that my students and colleagues find uncomplicated, unproblematic, and not terribly interesting.)

This explanation, though, lets me off the hook too easily. I had time to do research; why did I not spend more of it on Gonzales, pressing for better guides? And I know perfectly well how to spot the patterns and rhythms deployed in those opening stanzas. Why did I not even look?

As a romance reader, I know the answer: pride and prejudice.

First, because I am Joaquín began with two abstract, conceptual stanzas that indict “gringo society,” I suspect that I quickly tuned out the poem, refused to listen closely to it. This is partly a matter of aesthetics—somewhere in the depths of my education Ezra Pound continues to shout “Go in fear of abstractions,” and this poem begins with a host of them. But it also stems from my identifying with the object of the poem’s scorn, rather than with its speaker. Feeling accused of “social neurosis” and sterility of soul, I counterpunched by pointing out how commonplace that charge was at the time (“a hash of New Left platitudes”) rather than thinking about its place in the poem, as idea or even as discourse. I still don’t love the lines, but I can see, now, the cases to be made them.

Second, by slapping the label of “working class poet” on Gonzales himself, and of “working class aesthetics” on the poem, I substituted knee-jerk categorizing for actually reading. Looking back, my comments about Paul Laurence Dunbar and Morris Rosenfeld were a bit of a smoke screen. Having assumed that the poem would be more-or-less artless, and having heard its diction as that of a speech, rather than of a poem, I never looked beyond those first impressions. Had I approached the poem more expectantly, or simply without class bias, I would have seen more, as indeed I did after Huerta’s letter. Is the same true of my response to Luis Rodríguez, whom I grouped with Dunbar & co.? I will need to reconsider him as well.

Before writing this response, I went back to my original notes for the essay-review. In them, I found this fragmentary paragraph about some topics I hoped to take up:

Think about how we read differently poets who are “ours,” somehow—not just by ethnicity, but by values, by inclination, by interest, by temperament, by sensibility. Poets we read with intimacy, and those we read estranged. Poets or poems we indulge, forgive for sins, and those we shrug off or resist. Poems that are about “issues”—overshadowed by them, to my taste, but then, are they my issues? (Emerson: “Are they my poor?”) Poets that make claims on us: political claims, claims of sympathy, claims on us to take sides in their struggles.

Of what is my indifference the sign?

On some fundamental level, I begin to wonder whether precisely the things that Huerta praises about Gonzales as a man, and about the task he sets himself as a poet, are the things that led me to respond to it with those unsuccessful jokes. By this I mean that I am Joaquín reminds me, as does Rodríguez’s work, that while other people (not just Latino poets) still ask poetry to change lives, to make things happen, I’m not sure that I do. It’s easier to keep such texts at a distance than it is to confront their claims, to face the mirror they hold up to my assumptions about what poetry is, what it can do, and why anyone might read it. This is not to say that a poem or poet dedicated to social justice is necessarily worth reading, or that one can’t be better (better written or morally better) than another. But a better essay would have addressed my hesitations and qualms head-on, and allowed me to speak directly of why other poets (Alarcón, Burgos, Aragon, Cortez) did not estrange me in the way that I am Joaquín evidently did.

At the end of “Snake,” D. H. Lawrence laments that “I missed my chance with one of the lords / Of life. / And I have something to expiate: / A pettiness.” Whether or not I ever see Gonzales as a lord of life—and I don’t mean that at all sarcastically, given the life that Huerta describes—I clearly missed my chance with this poem. I will probably never appreciate I am Joaquín as much as some of the other texts I discovered while writing my review, at least not aesthetically, but I am sorry that I tried to praise other, more recent poems at its expense. I hope my future work in this field expiates a bit of that pettiness, and that the Latino Poetry Review continues to be a place where we novices, whether insiders or outsiders, can say what we think and receive the sort of considered, detailed response that Huerta has given me.

Sincerely,

Eric Selinger

Chicago, IL

Other Letters to the Editor

Letter from Eileen Tabios
Letter from Javier Huerta