Francisco X. Alarcón and Juan Felipe Herrera
“Because We Come from
Everything: Poetry &Migration” is the first
public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations
dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture
and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the
lives of people of all ages and backgrounds.
During
the month of March, coalition members CantoMundo and Letras Latinas are
partnering to present guest posts by CM fellows at Letras Latinas Blog that will include essays, creative non-fiction,
micro reviews and dialogues between writers. This year’s theme borrows a line
from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” Please return
to this space and enjoy all the pieces in the series, and leave comments to
participate in the dialogue.
Barbara
Curiel, CantoMundo
Francisco
Aragón, Letras Latinas
JFH’s homage to FXA
by
Francisco Aragón
Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Walking(Tenochitlan, DF) with Francisco X. Alarcón, 1978”, braids two concepts: what
I’m calling exterior journey, and
what I’m calling interior journey. Early in his piece, we read:
We walk
on tiny quadrants of consciousness.
The “we” is Herrera and Alarcón strolling
through “downtown Mexico DF”. They’re on their way to visit Elias Nandino, “El
Doctor poeta,” whose office is in “La Torre Metropolitana,” “47 stories up above Tenochtitlan outside.” The
walk these “two spirit wanderers” are on coincides with a major archaeological
dig that started, as the title indicates, in 1978. The poem begins:
Coyolxauki
Escavations
Thus, the first image is: “archeologists”
“ben[t] down,” “swishing/brushes uncovering her stone armature”—in reference to
the female figure in Aztec mythology.
So we have Herrera and Alarcón’s
exterior journey of walking past these archaeological “quadrants.” Through the
study of these artifacts, after they’ve been unearthed, a particular human
“consciousness” will be revealed, which is to say: archeologists will soon embark
upon interior journeys—exploring and researching Aztec civilization through the
study of its physical objects.
Having said that, the poem’s principal arc
is Herrera and Alarcón experiencing a series of encounters while on their paseo:
after Nandino, they “meet up with Arturo Villafuerte” who “says he has a
column/in El Excelsior” and
encourages the young Chicano escritores to “send him some pieces.”
Next, they “run into Ernesto
Trejo/huffing it down San Juan de Letrán with his mini-series of
poetry/chapbooks.” That would be the
late poet from Fresno, Ernesto Trejo, author of Entering a Life (Arte Público Press, 1990), who died before his
time in 1991. In the poem, Trejo is 28 years old, two years younger than Herrera
and four years older than Alarcón, making the three writers contemporaries of
one another.
There’s something poignant about this:
Juan Felipe Herrera migrating back in time in order to re-create, in the space
of a poem, three young Chicanos coinciding in Mexico City, brimming with their
particular passions, this dual gesture—journeying through time, journeying through
space—unfolding before our eyes.
The next encounter is solely Herrera’s—an
interior flashback: “I saw Macario a few
blocks from here in the/early 60’s searching for a hut to be able to bite
into/an existential turkey leg…” Memory breeds memory: Herrera, as he’s
recalling that 1978 walk, is also recalling his encounter with Macario further
back in time, his mind suddenly alighting on this:
an
existential turkey leg this is the life on the street poeta a poeta
These encounters, or rather, recalling these encounters, can,
therefore, lead to insights that perhaps Herrera wasn’t cognizant of at the
time. Perhaps some lessons are not learned when they are being lived; perhaps they
are learned when memory summons them decades later.
Let’s pause for some editorial context:
“Walking (Tenochitlan, DF) with Francisco X. Alarcón, 1978” is the first poem
in, Soñadores: We Came to Dream
(CantoHondo/DeepSong Books, 2016) edited by Odilia Galván Rodríguez—a
commissioned anthology—an homage, if you will, to the late Francisco X.
Alarcón, who died on January 15, 2015 at the age of 61. We can imagine,
therefore, Herrera taking this occasion to perhaps finally commit to a poem
that walk in 1978 with his beloved poet friend.
Further
in the text, Alarcón and Herrera go on to meet with a Gustavo Saenz:
in his neat bluish coat—
Francisco
makes a deal
let’s
publish a Chicana and Chicano edition of El
Suplemento Literario
that
we’ll edit for El Excelsior—What do
you think Juan Felipe
la
hacemos I say.
we walk on we move we rap we eat
Up until now, what I’ve been calling “encounters”
have been the mentioning of particular names and their connection with some
form of literary activity as this encuentro with Gustavo Saenz bears out. The “encounter” that follows, however, breaks
this pattern.
In fact, it’s the poem’s crescendo: It’s
days after their walk and Herrera and
Alarcón find themselves at “Editorial Katún here’s a/book on the life of
Augustin Lara I think I’ll get it for Alejandro/Murguía…”
This “encounter” with the late Murguía
stands out, first of all, because it’s not a literal one like the others; it takes
place in the poet’s mind and heart. How Herrera describes him, how Herrera
perceives Murguía’s project, how Herrera concludes the “encounter” by pondering
the implications of Murguía’s project and vision—all of these things are the
elements that make up the heart of the poem:
serrucho
face his dark
melancholy
jagged wooly skin his metaphysical attempt to stitch
everything
that has been cut open back together again—that
cannot
be stitched back together again like we are Azteca
Humpty
Dumpties in the Promised Land Francisco I say
wait a
minute—stop
why
don’t you write about your life ok?
why
don’t you write about your love alone world when
you come
to Mexico by yourself that intensity that night
after
night on fire why don’t you write about your
real
stuff (Why don’t I)
Which brings us back to the poem’s first
encounter—with Elias Nandino. Herrera had designated him not only as “El Doctor
poeta,” but also as “El Doctor poeta/de canciones de amor oscuro (my emphasis). This is no accident.
Elias Nandino was a crucial role model
for the 24-year-old Alarcón. A renowned poet often associated with the poetic
group called “Los Contemporáneos,” Nandino would have been 78 years old in
1978. In him, Alarcón got to know a distinguished man of letters who lived his
life as an openly gay man in Mexico City. Alarcón had recounted to me many times
what a transformative role Nandino had played in his life—providing him with a
model on how to assume his own identity as an openly gay Chicano poet in the
early 1980s.
Juan Felipe Herrera, in effect, is adding
another layer to this particular swath of both Alarcón’s and his own literary
biography. He seems to be suggesting that one of the results of their time
together in Mexico City in 1978 was the resolve to take on, as subject matter,
their particular “truths.” It’s as if, until this moment, Herrera’s and
Alarcón’s literary aspirations lacked, perhaps, some focus. But after 1978 and
after—in Herrera’s case, it seems—his pointed reflection on the ambition of
Alejandro Murguía’s literary vocation (“his metaphysical attempt to
stitch/everything that has been cut open back together again”), Herrera has an
epiphany of sorts (“wait a minute—stop”), one he shares with Alarcón in a kind
of advice-giving way (“why don’t you write about…?”), though he also implicates
himself (“(Why don’t I)”).
Herrera, with his mention of Nandino’s
“amor oscuro” at the beginning of the poem, and his mention of Alarcón’s “love
alone world” with its “intensity” and “fire”—in short, his “real stuff”—seems
to be urging Alarcón not to mute those aspects of himself that may not have been
acceptable in the Chicano literary canon of the time. There’s a certain poetic
justice in this thought: one of the “real” and enduring subjects of Juan Felipe
Herrera’s oeuvre has been the Chicano Movement and its communities. It’s heartening, therefore, to see that in
1978 Herrera fully embraced the notion of his fellow poet friend not mincing or
parsing his words when it came to writing about being an openly gay Chicano
poet.
Part of Francisco X. Alarcón’s legacy
was having adopted Elias Nandino’s unapologetic stance, where homoeroticism was
concerned. One of the results was that Alarcón, in turn, became a mentor and
role model to the next generation of gay Chicano/Latino poets, including, for
the example, the poets he convened and introduced in the spring of 2002 in New
Orleans at the AWP reading, “Boca a Boca,” which included Rigoberto González,
the late Rane Arroyo, Eduardo C. Corral, and myself.
Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, entering its
homestretch, mentions Francisco X. Alarcón by name (“Francisco”) no less than
three times—in the last 15 lines of this 75+ line piece:
Francisco
keeps walking
*
wave to
Francisco who stays I’ll see you later when our
paths
cross again…
*
Francisco
dissolves in the multiple audiences
First: the image of our main character
perennially (“keeps”) putting one foot in front of the other forefronts the
piece’s multiple manifestations of “migration.”
Second: the piece’s use of the imperative
(“wave to Francisco”) accentuates the poem’s invitation to, literally,
participate (“wave…”) in what I’m going to call the poem’s storyscape. But it also insinuates the following: in 1978
Herrera is taking leave of Francisco and anticipates seeing him back at
Stanford University, where they met (“I got/to head back to Stanford somehow”).
And yet: Juan Felipe Herrera has written this poem after Alarcón has died. I
don’t know his views on the so-called “afterlife,” but one may read into this
passage that Herrera is aware that he, too, will one day join the realm that Elias
Nandino, Ernesto Trejo, Alejandro Murguía and, most recently, Alarcón,
currently occupies (“I’ll see you later…”). Becoming one with our muertos.
Third: given the circumstances of this
poem’s composition, this passage prompts one to ponder how Francisco X. Alarcón
lives on, not only in his work but also in the lives of those of us who loved
him—his “multiple audiences.”
In the end, “Walking (Tenochitlan, DF)
with Francisco X. Alarcón, 1978” becomes its own “quadrant of consciousness”—a
work that invites us to an archaeological dig of letters, each of us embarking
on our respective interior journeys, interior migrations.
December 2016, Torquay, U.K.
December 2016, Torquay, U.K.
Soñadores: We Came to Dream, Odilia Galván Rodríguez, ed., CantoHondo/DeepSong
Books, 2016.
Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He
is the author of, Puerta del Sol
(2005) and, Glow of Our Sweat (2010),
as well as editor of, The Wind Shifts:
New Latino Poetry (2007). He has work forthcoming in Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States
(2017). In 2003, he joined the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino
Studies(ILS), where he founded Letras Latinas—a member of The Poetry Coalition.
Since 2013, in addition to directing Letras Latinas, he teaches a course on
Latino poetry on campus in the fall, and a poetry writing workshop in
Washington, D.C. in the spring, where Letras Latinas often collaborates with
local institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the
Library of Congress. He is a native of San Francisco, CA.
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