By Any Other Name, Family

What a great collection of poets to read next to each other because of how “all over the map” these writers are.  Assyria?  Asian in America?  I have no idea what ethnic background Carbo comes from and his biography in the back of “Language for a New Century” reveals either Latino or Asian or possibly both as in Philippine?  I love that I don’t know and that his poem “Directions to My Imaginary Childhood” filled me with wonder, leaving an impression I can strive toward.

An oscillating fan is driving the bus?  Down streets with Spanish names especially <<Calle de Recuerdos>>  (Memory Street or Street of Memories)?  Great philosophers and writers are on his memory street playing cards.  It’s likely these authors are who he read and are the ones who formed his consciousness, helping him grow up, the way a parent would. In creating his poem as a fiction of what his childhood could ideally look like through the backward glance, he reclaims it through this reconstruction of it.

Hayan Charara has no interest in rebuilding an idealized image of Detroit.  He grew up in a place that’s “miserable” where “Everyone is suspect:…your brother, especially your brother,”.  There is no glamour in that city and yet, it pulls him back even after he’s left it and returned.  Because “when I say Detroit, I mean any place.”  That’s the resignation of someone living with the idiom of “wherever you go, there you are.”

This piece pulled at me because of its place.  The title is “Thinking American” and he circles back to it in the very last line and clarifies, “By thinking American, I mean made.”  To be made, to have it made, made in America.  It’s almost like he can’t help himself from what Detroit is and what he is because his body was “pulled from the womb into the streets.”  Made in Detroit, for what that’s worth.  These days.

Coiled Serpent is a book I’m glad we’re now into.  These poems do not hold back.  “Dancing Through a Beating” reveals the raw ride of mental street capoeira the poet has to accomplish while he’s taking a beating from the police and soaking in his own blood.  Ramiro Rodriguez has decided that a dance he has performed comes up through his ancestral blood and gives him some moves while the cop beats him.  He can’t pray his way through this trauma but he can tell himself he still has some agency in the midst of shame and humiliation as he repeats his mantra of his moves.

The beginning of this poem includes these steps, these moves and also says prayers are offered to the Creator and the ancestors.  It progresses through the abuse of the authorities but he holds to a place he knows in himself, the moves of a man commanding his own body – the way he does when he’s dancing, and praying.  He tries to hold to the beat of his heart in himself, “follow the grandfathers” and dance through it all: beatings, inner demons, his father’s abandonment.  It’s his heart’s beating that saves him and is the place he returns to as home.