A critique ofReyes Cárdenas: Chicano Poet 1970-2010
By Juan Rodríguez
The Chicano Movement, in its cultural nationalist stage (1965- 1975), gave birth to a trinity of Tejano poets whose deep faith in the people (La Raza) of Aztlan was expressed in a personal gentleness of spirit1 that countermanded the explosiveness and bravado of most Chicano poets of the time. Two of these poets, Jesús “Flaco” Maldonado2 and Cecilio García-Camarillo,3 left their native Tejas. Flaco to the Pacific Northwest, and Cecilio, in the years before his untimely death, to New Mexico. Only Reyes Cárdenas has remained close to his hometown of Seguín, “except for the year that I lost my way on the freeway and wound up in Lincoln, Nebraska.”4 And only Reyes has continually written from those hefty days (daze) of the Chicano Movement to the present, a life’s work, much of which you can now enjoy in this ground-breaking, monumental collection:5Reyes Cárdenas: Chicano Poet 1970-2010.
Organized mostly in chronological order, this book is a 40-year retrospective of Reyes Cárdenas’ life and work written from 1970- 2010. It is divided into the following 11 sections with original black and white title-page illustrations for each section by L.A. David: Selections from Chicano Territory (1970); Los Pachucos y La Flying Saucer (1975, the only novella in this anthology, originally published in Caracol magazine); Selections from Anti-Bicicleta Haiku (1976); Selections from Survivors of the Chicano Titanic (1981); Elegy for John Lennon (1982); Selections from I Was Never a Militant Chicano (1986); Homage to Robinson (2008); The Collected Poems of Artemio Sánchez (2009); Meeting Mr. Incognito (2010); Poems from chicanopoet.blogspot.com (2004-2010); and From Aztlan to the Moons of Mars: A Chicano Verse Novela (2010). Of the eleven sections, five are selections from previous publications,6and six are new, never before published collections of poetry.
In Chicano Territory (1971, Caracol), his first book, Reyes affirms the tenets of the Chicano Movement: carnalismo (brother and sisterhood) and the union of the oppressed, while situating himself and his poetry in that whirlwind of social change. In fact, it is in the union of self and social situation that Reyes finds his reason for being both a Chicano and a poet. This explains why almost all of his poetry is rooted in the historical moment, and in his quest for personal meaning within that moment. In the title poem, for example, Reyes writes his version of an ars poética in which he presents himself as the humble, modest, humorous, calm, reclusive individual that he is.
If you come by you’ll see me in the back writing about Chicano territory.
Out of my life have gone all the nagging doubts.
And with them even my vieja.
But I keep on writing as if nothing has happened.
Sounds and colors drift into the poem and go out of it.
This is what peace is all about.
And when this poem passes by no one has to move out of the way.
In “For Tigre,”7 Reyes, after listing some of the many injustices against Chicanos, ties the success of the Chicano Movement to poetry, which to him is the palpable representation of peace and justice. He writes: “But Aztlan won’t die/Not with Chicanos and Chicanas fighting side by side,/fighting day and night until there’s/nothing left but poetry.” “I have found my place in life,” he writes in the poem “PV,” “It’s not chasing carnalas, or throwing firebombs/but writing for La Causa/. . ./A carnala squats to piss/ in an alley after cerveza/It’s amazing how free she is./And I have finally found my place in life,/even when I’m not writing.” Long before A.C. Weisbecker published his stereotypical Cosmic Banditos: A Contrabandista’s Quest for the Meaning of Life (1986), and before Rosaura Sánchez’ and Beatrice Pita’s more engaging and Raza-correct Lunar Braceros: 2025-2148 (2009), Reyes Cárdenas had ventured into the realm of science fiction with his farcical Los Pachucos y La Flying Saucer (1975), the first Chicano writer to do so, to my knowledge.
In Anti-Bicicleta Haiku (1976, Caracol), Reyes makes another attempt at exploring new forms for Chicano poetry. . .while having a good laugh. Inspired by two great Chilean poets, Nicanor Parra9 and Vicente Huidobro,10 Reyes parodies, to the point of mockery, a classical form, the haiku, in a conversationalist style, while leaving us to wonder what he is against: bicycles, really? Much like Huidobro, Reyes brings together words that are not easily associated in our ordinary world. Beyond this, and here the Chicano specificity, Reyes seems to be having some good-natured fun with alurista11 and his way of writing.12 For example, in “Los Aztecas Nomás No,” Reyes mimics alurista’s Floricanto en Aztlán (1971)13 in form and content.
You don’t want me CILANTRO
in your brazos TRIPAS DE COYOTE
like cooking
for me.
Longer poems
salen del miedo
Mi corazón
round cuando your face is fighting me.
BOCA . . .
que habla TABLA
And at the end
of a ramita
a blossom
se cae
como tú.
It is not surprising that Reyes should be attracted to Vicente Huidobro’s belief in the poet’s complete freedom to create a new reality with words, an act that he called “creacionismo.” So it is fitting that Reyes makes Huidobro one of the Survivors of the Chicano Titanic (1981, Place of Herons Press), one who takes Reyes’ advice: “If you lie/still, and breathe/calmly, you’ll/ float inside yourself” and save yourself from the sinking of “progress,” and heed the “Intimidations” that “…no one seems to notice./No one is shocked/a foot away.” Like Amilcar Cabral14advises, Reyes is urging Chicanos to return to the source, the cultural source from which we have been intimidated. We must return until, as survivors, we develop “that glint in their eyes./That swaggered/ humility.”
A more “creationist” poem is “Carmen,”15whose “…freckles twirl away from your/shoulders like the universe./I mean, they spin/a cocoon for a lozenge.” A record of a day together, a day of incongruities (“vagina, laundromat, coup d’etat”), “Carmen” has the two poets find peace, “Like being stuck to the wall/of injustice,/demure of poetic license,/peace nevertheless enters.” And in the end, the two forge congruity out of incongruity: “Later, in your apartment/I see your face/ink-stained from writing so much.” Their real carnalismo is found in their lives as poets.
“Frugality on Sixth Street” and “Elegy for Joe Campos Torres” recall those who did not survive the Chicano Titanic: Max Martínez;16 Santos Rodríguez, a twelve-year-old Chicano kid murdered in cold blood on July 24, 1973, by Dallas police officer Darrell Cain; and Joe Campos Torres, murdered by six Houston police officers in May of 1977. These deaths, the last two in particular, have caused “a pain that we/try to put in the trash,” but find that “There’s really/no place for this pain,/it doesn’t even/belong here.” (“Elegy for Joe Campos Torres”).
After the presentation of the horrid violence and profound exasperation expressed in the poems referenced above, Reyes presents a beautiful meditation on death, and what remains of life after death. In “The Dragonfly,”17 the delicate wings that “...could/have beat back any enemy”. . .”failed in a critical instant.” With the dragonfly in hand, “a mass of dryness” now, the poet “...regard[s] it and wash[es] away/the present for a moment” and thinks “... of the countless zig-zags, turns, and dives,/and stare[s] at the everlasting in its face.” (Brackets, mine).
In the third section of Survivors of the Chicano Titanic, Reyes does something which he had rarely done up to that point in his writing career and has not done since, to my knowledge: he writes eight poems completely in Spanish. It’s a tribute, I believe, to the Central American guerrillas who took the brunt of the dirty proxy wars that two Ronald Reagan administrations let loose on those small republics, particularly Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Out of the eight poems, “Poema Sandino,”18included in this collection, is arguably the best.
In what is perhaps his most accomplished, cohesive work, Elegy for John Lennon, Reyes turns from Latin American poetic influences to American popular culture, poetry and music specifically, as the source of his inspiration. And again, as a poet of peace, justice, and freedom, and as a double-subject Mexican-American, it is not surprising that he should write a paean to John Lennon, the British singer who gave the American Vietnam War protests its anthem, “Give Peace a Chance.” Reyes combines references to American poets (Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, etc.) and singers (Buddy Holly, Michael Jackson, The Moonglows, etc.) as a way to situate Chicano culture in the greater cultural reality of the United States.
But as a social chronicler, as a poet who sticks close to home and to what is occurring around him in the immediate, Reyes extracts personal and social meaning from the cultural forces at work in the greater world. In “Casablanca,” he writes: “I wear my hair like a charro/knowledge crunching from news/of the world, my white shirt/spiraling like words on the page/The cliff of my hometown is poetry/to the hunter and the hunted.” In the end, however, “Stars glitter and evaporate [John Lennon, Buddy Holly, Michael Jackson]/while Atlas holds Texas over his head—/this rarefied air makes rednecks of us all.” And it does so because “Mandela is a free man after 27 years,/but of course after 27 years in prison/nobody is a free man./And after forty-two years of American freedom,/I am not free, you are not free,/we are not free.” And this is why “A few years later, while reclining/in the Oval Office,/Nixon would tell his aides, ‘Fuck/the Constitution!’ and eventually/ Ford pardoned the fornication—/but the Magical Mystery Tour/ Stops only in Paradise” (“The Magical Mystery Tour”19). The clash of fantasy with reality leaves the poet “to hallucinate an imaginary world/in which peace and justice/actually existed.” (Brackets, mine).
In I Was Never a Militant Chicano20(1986), Reyes returns to the world he occupies, the Chicano reality of social oppression and of his personal dreams for peace, freedom, and justice, which are thwarted once again because “I was never/a militant Chicano/ but only because/I’ve always wanted/more than a revolution can provide.” (“I Was Never a Militant Chicano”). And yet, he recognizes that something must be done to overturn the Chicanos’ social situation, even if each solution to the problem is inadequate. He writes: “There’s only one way/to go about it/so why put it off/ any longer?” (“If We Praise the Aztecs”). Ultimately, he concludes, the revolution begins with humanizing the self and others.
But today I am thirty-eight,
I gnaw at time;
and if by chance
a little injustice
crumbles somewhere
on Earth today,
then I celebrate.
If somewhere on Earth
someone becomes more human today,
then I celebrate.
And if it’s me
who becomes more human,
then I celebrate even more.
“The Poet’s Birthday”
Homage to Robinson21 is an anti-epic of sorts, a complete tale of an anti-hero, an antagonist who brings destruction to the world. The long poem represents Reyes’ entry into the surreal world of a bourgeois, dehumanized protagonist, Robinson, who lives by his egotistical “conquistador instinct,” especially as it comes to sex.
But even here, in what should be the realm of feelings, the world of violence prevails. Mrs. Morse, Robinson’s lover, finds that “Earlier on the way to Robinson’s gray apartment/her heart beat like a cop’s nightstick/against a skull.” (“House of Robinson”). Robinson is incapable of feeling anything truly human, “When other people talked of joy or happiness/Robinson looked away/and banished such foolishness.” (“The Sound of Ice Cubes”). Robinson is “a pterodactyl” that views the world “with pterodactyl eyes.” (The Missing Links”). His serpent eyes and vision of the world are the reason Robinson avoids mirrors, “he partook of La Malinche/ because that’s what white men do/he thought as he looked into the mirror to shave,/being careful not to make eye contact,/being careful not to look into his soul by accident.” (“The Conquering Hero”).
Reyes turns the Weldon Kees character into the empty white bourgeois man who lacks a soul. In Robinson’s world of non-feeling and immediate satisfaction, only the workers, the common folk who must forge a living in an objectified world, are real, endowed with feelings in a cold world of things that only exist for the use and pleasure of the bourgeois, of Robinson. In “King Kong” Reyes writes.
The carpet gathers itself on the floor
woven by machines
sweated over by the working class,
the metal frame of the bed
put together in a dirty shop by the rough, callused hands
which don’t pick up the New York Times
or use the Tribune
only to patch a broken windowpane.
The cannery workers
who put the canned food in his pantry
would ignore poetry unless it gave them a raise.
But in the end, it’s Robinson’s naked vision that prevails. When the city is left bare and barren, naked, and turned inside out, “Robinson nods goodbye to his friends,/walks down the street/ towards the cemented sky forever.” (“The Naked City”). From the cold steel world of Robinson, Reyes moves to his hometown of Seguín, Texas and his past life there. But he returns as his alter-ego, Artemio Sánchez. The Collected Poems of Artemio Sánchez is a memoir full of playfulness and warmth delivered in typical Reyes humor. For example, Artemio is not Quetzalcoatl, the plumed-serpent, at the beach, instead he becomes “Artemio, The Toweled-Serpent” who “has lost the whole of Aztlan.” What he has found in his return to the past is his calling, “The modern day Artemio/tries to use his poetry/as his hatchet/to carry out his hatchet jobs.” (“Namesake”).
Self-deprecation is the name of the game for Reyes.
At the conference, Artemio tries to explain
how he, as a poet, got to this point
in his creative career.
He goes back to his roots,
the Olmec head of his great-grandfather,
a lowly go-fer no doubt.
And how Artemio groveled his way up
from nothing in the white man’s eyes,
to nothing in his own brown community.
“So it is this art I am obligated to …”
he curses and smiles.
“It’s our humor that brings us tears,” he promises.
“Flying Mexicana”
He is hilarious. In “The Hunt“ he writes: “In a rush to impregnate every female,/we get trapped by the pleasure/that simmers at the hand.” In “Flea Flicker” he has a good laugh at the expense of the white, heavy-set football players at Seguin High when they discover that the brown weakling writes poems for the school paper: “A dumb, puzzled look/on their stupid faces, thinking/ stinking Mexican sure has a way with words!” Finally, “if Artemio had any sense of identity,/it lay within, and without—/sole surviving son of la pinche Malinche.” (“Identity Theft”).
I suppose that it’s every poet’s dream to live in an imaginary, literary world where contact with famous poets and writers is ordinary and everyday, where the world of poetry and its inhabitants occupy the mind and body of the characters. It’s a bourgeois world, for sure. Such is the world the poet’s persona enjoys in Meeting Mr. Incognito.22It’s a world of petty jealousies, rumors, light snobbery, frustrated sexual desires, faux intrigue where everyone “in the 28 v Juan Rodríguez know” feels superior to those they consider to be less talented.
Mr. Incognito, for example, turns out to be, according to the poet’s persona, “. . .a goddamn Soviet poet,/he talks about oppression/ as if it was something bad,/he makes Siberia seem so cold.” (“Meeting Mr. Incognito”). Because Mr. Incognito is drawing female admirers, the poet’s persona is incensed. “Mr. Incognito is a proud and boastful/son of a bitch, all them Russians are,/but you and the rest of his groupies/cannot see that he’s a pathological dictator.” (“Coffee Klatch”).
Despite the bourgeois flash, there’s little in this world of art and artists, Reyes suggests. In the end, it’s a vacuous world. In “Twenty Love Poems and a Cartoon” we read: “I see you are reading Neruda/as I climb into bed and wrest the remote/away from you. ‘Hey, hey,’ you tell me./’But you are reading that stupid book.’ I look at you in amazement.” Though the poet’s persona loses the argument, later on that night he falls asleep watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Ultimately, what the poet’s persona lives in the world of art, is as much a sham as “Mr. Incognito’s Americanized Gobbledygook.”23
After an 18-year publication gap,24Reyes enters cyberspace by posting hundreds of poems on his blog, chicanopoet.blogspot.
com. With this move he finds the perfect couplet of message and media. The immediacy of the internet matches perfectly with what Reyes has done all of his writing career: write poetry “in place and in time,” commenting on and at the moment. This allows him to display the full range of his work: situating the serious next to the humorous; the tragic next to the magic; the contemplative next to the quixotic; the autobiographical next to the ethnographic; the smirk next to the smile; and the present next to the past.
For those of us who have been on the Chiclit25train since it left the station in the 1960s, Poems from chicanopoet.blogspot.com is a special treat for its references to Chicano/a writers and poets, both living and dead. But I’ll let you, the reader, enjoy this gem on your own. I promise you won’t be the same after it’s read.
In From Aztlan to the Moons of Mars: A Chicano Verse Novela, the last section of this anthology, Reyes returns to the science fiction world he first entered in Los Pachucos y La Flying Saucer. As a result of “the racism/which was running rampant on Earth” (“The New Martians”), particularly these days in Arizona,26 Chicanos have been “edicted” to the realms of outer space: the moon, Mars, the moons of Jupiter. “Of course he missed his wife/and kids back in Texas/but with so few jobs/back on earth/for a man his color/ since the new edicts/became the law of the land/space had become his only option.” (“The Final Frontier Indeed, Piporro”).
The odd and most humorous thing about the Chicano New Martians is that, in speech and culture, they are the same barrio Chicanos we would recognize today. The only difference is that in this brave new world, Chicanos are in control. And as such, they are masters of their actions, which gives them the opportunity for revenge, (“... Moctezuma’s Revenge/No shit!”) (“Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams”), against their former rulers on Earth. All this happens when Isidra stumbles upon and opens a 100-thousand-year-old sarcophagus in which an ancient and powerful Mayan woman is found and awakened. She immediately kills some Chicanos before she returns to the sarcophagus. What to do with such a destructive power? Send it to Earth, of course! When the New Martians accomplish their revenge, wiping out all of the “whitey” Earthlings, they celebrate, and then: “The Mexicans/were again/ strangers in a strange land/alone in the universe . . ./For now.” (“Brave New Chante”).
And indeed, when Reyes wrote this last line to his final collection in this book, he surely must have felt as if he was living “alone in the universe,” for after more than forty years of writing for and about his Chicano community, his work—up to now—has known little circulation and even less critical attention.27 As he writes in the poem “I Was Never a Militant Chicano,” “I was never/Like Raul Salinas,/alurista or Ricardo Sánchez,” although he, like them, was “creating a new/world of poetry/out of a white wasteland.” 30 v Juan Rodríguez But as he notes in the same poem, “. . . followers want/justice and liberty/and fairness, too.” And while “I could never/shout like Tigre./But inside/(right here)/I guess I can/roar just as loud.” When I think of Reyes Cárdenas and his place in Chicano letters, my mind immediately places him alongside another great, but little known, Chicano artist, folk singer Sixto “Sugar Man” Rodríguez.28Despite the keen mastery of their respective art forms, both have been neglected—up to now—by the general American public and, sadly, by their own ethnic community. This may be because both are humble human beings who, unlike many of their colleagues, do not self-promote, preferring instead to let their art speak for itself. And in both cases, their art speaks in a thunderous voice that demands our attention.
My hope is that this ground-breaking book will be the means by which Reyes Cárdenas will indeed “roar” as loudly as any great poet of the past and present.
Juan Rodríguez, a Tejano, university professor and cultural critic, has written on Chicano Literature since its genesis in the late sixties. He has taught at various universities throughout the U.S. and for the last thirty years has worked at Texas Lutheran University in Seguín where he is currently an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Mexican- American Studies.
Footnotes
1. I do not want to leave the impression that their poetry was/is gentle, it was not. What I mean is that their personal mode of being was/is characterized by a generosity of spirit toward humanity.
2. Jesús has published two books: Sal y pimiento y amor (1976), and In the Still of My Heart (1993).
3. Cecilio, as a poet, fiction writer, journalist, editor, publisher, and screenwriter, published more than seventeen chapbooks and Caracol magazine for many years.
4. From a private conversation between Reyes and myself.
5. To my knowledge, this is a first in Chicano letters. At almost 400 pages, and covering a 40-year period of the poet’s life, it exhibits a representative selection of Reyes’ previously published works, and brings to print in book form for the very first time, six new collections of poetry.
6. According to the editors, they selected works for this publication from the four previous books in which Reyes was the sole author, plus, Los Pachucos y La Flying Saucer. However, Reyes was also published in a fifth book, Get Your Tortillas Together (1976, Caracol), that was co-authored by Carmen Tafolla and Cecilio García-Camarillo. Below are a couple of his poems from that fifth publication.
Coyote Mind
I am trying to
talk
maybe even
using Indian sign language.
Ages ago the
brush on fire.
But the only fuel
there was
the coyote mind
working perfectly.
Now the
moon is wiped out.
A moonbeam aslant.
The Capote road
becomes a dark purple.
And the center of a
branch pulls us together.
La Tracalada
La tracalada goes on
pero nada changes
the old things
the way tierrita
clings to piedras...
the way humo
leaves the fires...
the way that water
siempre sabe
como bajar...
the roots will always know
how deep to go
sin tener que preguntar,
without having
to think twice.
7. Raymundo “Tigre” Pérez, from a group of early Chicano Movement poets who I named the “poetas retóricos” for their often bombastic, confrontational poetry, and who Reyes greatly admired for writing in a manner, tone, and style he could not practice in good faith.
8. “I am Joaquín,” an epic poem that chronicles the history of Mexican-Americans, was the first text in Chicano history that most of us encountered in our lives.
9. Chilean poet whose Poemas y anti-poemas (1954) upset literary conventions in Latin American letters for its iconoclastic stance and for its debunking of classical literary forms.
10. Chilean poet whose epic “Altazor” is an example of his “creacionismo,” the attempt to disconnect poetry from the external world, to produce a singular world made up of words that are as real as the objects in the world.
11. The prolific Chicano cultural nationalist poet of the sixties and seventies who popularized the concept of Aztlan among Chicanos, and who was also greatly influenced by the vanguardista poets of Latin America like Huidobro and Parra.
12. Throughout much of Reyes’ poetry the reader will find cross references, usually in a humorous manner, to his contemporary Chicano poets: alurista (as the aluristo phone in From Aztlan to the Moons of Mars), Carmen Tafolla, Ricardo Sánchez, Raul Salinas, Rebecca Gonzales, etc.
13. alurista’s “Moongloom Dreams” will give the reader a sense of what I mean:
pendiente cabellera
roja luna
mujer
I pity the fool
standing
when you fly
meet the sun (in tears)
he knows not
—your children dream
moongloom
on their shoulders locks
rizos negros
ilusión, morena
luna llena
—de libertad
hair flowing—night
—to see the sun
en la pirámide
—hacia el sol,
volar
—libres (I pity the fool!)
14. Amilcar Cabral was the outstanding intellectual and revolutionary who liberated Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands from the Portuguese, and who, because of that, Portuguese agents killed in 1973. As part of the revolutionary act, the oppressed must return to their cultural source, must stop aspiring to be like the colonizer, he advocated.
15. Carmen Tafolla is a prolific poet, author, educator, and Reyes’ good friend and co-conspirator who is the City of San Antonio’s first Poet Laureate.
16. Chicano novelist, now deceased, author of The Adventures of the Chicano Kid and Other Stories (1982, Arte Público Press), and one of Reyes’ closest friends in the Chicano literary world.
17. Thanks to a Reyes’ e-mail dated January 3, 2013, I know that this poem is inspired by César Vallejo’s “The Spider” from his most famous book Los heraldos negros. As a Modernist, Vallejo sought freedom of expression in his work, free of previous forms of writing poetry. In this belief, he and Reyes concur.
Sandino Poem (English translation by Carmen Tafolla)
these things that drag us across the floor
we have to stand them up like a dried-up Christmas tree
we have to sprinkle water on them until they sprout leaves
until we can speak again
until we can move the century
the dresser that won’t let us open the door
the torn sofa we cover with sheets
this cold that has us shivering day and night
this hail that comes in through the roof
this monied sun that burns our heads
we have to leave the house
to then be able to live in it freely
2.
these people that don’t hear what’s happening in the world
and even if they hear, they don’t care, don’t feel
don’t understand that the world reaches us all
but we, we have to resist time
lift the pen, although it be with our bones
we have to offend those who close their eyes
so that even empty pages drown their sweet dreams
and they wake up coughing searching for air.
19. The name of a Beatles musical album and movie in which the characters had unspecified (mystery) magical adventures (tour).
20. In the interest of full disclosure, I will note that my and my ex-wife’s publishing company, Relámpago Press Books, published this book.
21. Thanks to Reyes’ e-mail of January 5, 2013, I learn that this homage is to the tragic American poet Weldon Kees’ neurotic alter ego, Robinson, as can be seen in the following Kees poem.
Aspects of Robinson
Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin
Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.
Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.
The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.
This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.
Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats
Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down.
Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,
Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour.
—Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.
Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.
Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times.
Robinson saying, “Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday
At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?”
Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.
Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson
In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;
Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun
Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward
The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East
Side bars.
Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,
Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down,
The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-
Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering
His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.
Weldon Kees, from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice, University of Nebraska, 2003.
22. Although the worlds presented are at opposite poles, the title recalls the alternative hip-hop song by the group A Tribe Called Quest, especially the ending of that song.
But your mind can’t contain Incognito’s on the brain
So you chill by yourself don’t really sweat nobody
Speak to all the brothers and say peace to every hottie
But lurkin in the ghetto is a germ that insists
Should you back the germ away or utilize your fists
Neither of the two, just continue with your thoughts
And rush away your pain with the power of the thought
Ain’t got no time for girls, cause girls be on some bull
Checkin for a nigga who got crazy pull
On some deep rooted sexual, highly intellectual
Not checkin for the fame although it’s perpetual
I enter the world the same way I’ll exit
If you really think the groove,
Then hey glad you checked it
Cause Incognito’s strong not urkin like a blister
Before you speak about me, make sure you call me Mister.
23. In my opinion, an apt description of A Tribe Called Quest’s lyrics.
24. Reyes notes that he did write during this period, but that the notebooks have been lost or misplaced.
25. Not to be confused with Chicklit (an English and American literature subgenre), or Chicalit, Chicklit’s Chicana equivalent. Chiclit is my word for Chicano literature in general.
26. This fact does not escape Reyes: “Yes, a large number of New Martians/are descendants of the Arizona Mexicans/who were rounded up and sent to the/penal colony that once made up Mars.” (“Down Under”). See also his poem “Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children are Strangers in a Strange Land.”
27. This is Reyes’ first book publication in 27 years.
28. For a great appreciation of this artist’s life and talent, see the 2012 documentary film Searching for Sugar Man.