
Portrait of the Poet as Critic (& Thinker) by Francisco Aragón
“Doing what I set out to do, perform activism with ink.”
—Rigoberto González
Two friends are chatting over lunch in New York. One is a native of Texas, the other is from California. Both are Chicano authors. During dessert a cellphone rings. Texas takes the call. The brief consultation ends and Texas shifts his gaze back to California and says, “You want to review books?” This would have been 2002. And so . . . the poet Rigoberto González soon inaugurates his stint as a critic by reviewing From the Other Side of Night by Francisco X. Alarcón.
By the time it wound down ten years later, González’s Latinx book column had achieved legendary status—with 206, I repeat, 206 reviews filed. He hadn’t sought out this role. Ramón Rentería, the features editor at the El Paso Times, came calling—following up on fiction writer Sergio Troncoso’s recommendation. An opportunity presented itself and González embraced it.
In essence, he taught himself how to write the book review, taking on the novel, short story, nonfiction and poetry collection alike. I remember him once remarking that the more of these he penned and published the more he internalized the genre of the 500-word review. González had perceived a glaring gap where the critical attention of Latinx books was concerned—and was determined to do something about it. These reviews laid the foundation for what became but one side of his multi-faceted vocation—that of activist critic.
That ethos is what drives Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition: Towards a 21st Century Poetics (University of Michigan Press, 2017), which gathers, in its three sections, “Critical Essays,” “Critical Reviews” and “Critical Grace Notes.” In a way, it’s a companion to Red-Inked Retablos (University of Arizona Press, 2013), his first book of critical writing. But as much as I enjoyed that Arizona book (I’m thinking, in particular, of the essays on the late Andrés Montoya and the late Roxana Rivera, as well as “The Truman Capote Aria”), this volume’s arc feels more realized and coherent.
I
Critical Essays
The book opens with a lecture (“Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition”) delivered at the Library of Congress. González dedicates this talk to José Montoya—the late Chicano maestro and former poet laureate of Sacramento. This homage near the beginning provides a seamless transition to discuss Eduardo C. Corral’s poem, “Variation on a Theme by José Montoya.” Corral is the first of six poets González centers his remarks on. The others are J. Michael Martínez, David Tomás Martínez, Carmen Giménez Smith, Laurie Ann Guerrero, and Cynthia Cruz. This curated roster functions like a snapshot of Latinx poetry’s aesthetic range—especially with the inclusion of Michael Martinez and Giménez Smith who, arguably, serve as stand-ins for Angels of the Americlypse, an anthology from that same year (2014) that highlights the more innovative tendencies in Latinx writing. The inclusion of Cynthia Cruz is welcome recognition that Latinx poets don’t all write about identity, and that Latinx poets come from a range of ancestries as well, including German. Opening the book with a piece connected to our national library in Washington, D.C., also subtly affirms that the poems emerging from Latinx communities are essential to the literary conversations taking place across the United States.
In his Acknowledgements page at the very beginning of the book, González thanks Kazim Ali for his “persistence and patience,” suggesting Ali’s editorial vision—as the Poets on Poetry series co-editor—planted the seed that became Pivotal Voices. González ends his brief preface to part one by remarking:
[T]here is something absolutely marvelous in the knowledge that people like ourselves made the glorious decision to imagine our bodies, our bodies of color, our queer bodies of color, as empowered participants and protagonists—away from the edges of alienation and exile and closer to the truths of our unerasable realities.
Rigoberto González is insinuating, then, that one of his principal aims as a critic is to bolster the work of queer writers of color. Nearly half of the pieces in section one discuss Eduardo C. Corral, Danez Smith, Rajiv Mohabir, Ocean Vuong, and Natalie Diaz.
The piece on Mohabir and Vuong (“Queer Immigrant World, Queer Immigrant Word”) is based on the unpublished manuscripts of what became their debut volumes of poetry, underscoring a desire to amplify newer voices of color. At the beginning of this illuminating essay, González mentions running into Vuong and Mohabir at local literary events, and being delighted to learn that their first books would be published in the same year, therefore “reach[ed] out to them for permission for an early glimpse of their works . . .” It’s also personal: “I related to their immigrant upbringing and to their journey as artists.”
And yet at the start of the aforementioned LOC lecture González comments on “the literary legacy of those who, long before many of us even knew how to read, placed expression on the page in order to inspire, motivate, and educate the audience of their time and the audience to come.” Thus, the second “Critical Essay” is “Alurista: Towards a Chicano Poetics.” What I found of particular interest here is that González reveals his own evolution of thought, where this Chicano elder is concerned: “For the longest time I, too, accepted these notions and helped circulate them whenever I was asked about Alurista.” One of the notions he’s referring to is that Alurista was an “experimental” poet. He persuasively argues why this is too tidy, perhaps too lazy a way of characterizing Alurista’s work, and instead offers astute analysis of what he prefers to call his “wordplay” and “the way he configures many of his poems on the page,” as well as his linguistic strategy of adopting “Spanish, English, Spanglish, Caló, and so on.” Also useful is how he links Alurista to his junior high classmate in San Diego, Juan Felipe Herrera. As a former U.S. Poet Laureate, Herrera may, understandably, be more well-known than Alurista in mainstream poetry circles, and so linking the two will hopefully garner Alurista new readers.
But the pieces from this first section that most engaged me were the ones that highlighted single authors—specifically, the four studies on Eduardo C. Corral, Aracelis Girmay, Danez Smith, and Natalie Diaz, respectively. González varies his strategy when approaching each of these poets. With Aracelis Girmay, for example, he opens with a brief discussion of her Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African American ancestry as a way of arguing for “a particular lens that textures the reading experience . . .” With Natalie Diaz, he contexualizes her among other high-profile native poets before diving into his examination of When My Brother Was an Aztec. But as introductions go, his opening remarks on Danez Smith felt the most timely and compelling—the way they address, on the one hand, the “alarming increase in cases across the country of racist profiling, police brutality, self-appointed vigilantism, and other prejudicial acts that have resulted in the deaths of young black men . . .” and, on the other hand, offer a brief roll call of African American poets who have, in their own way, responded to these tragic outcomes. In short, he provides a rich political and poetic context before situating Smith’s work within it. González excels at providing just the right proportion of poetic citations (not too many) and snippets of engaging analysis (a larger dose)—so much so it enticed this reader to seek out the book under discussion, [insert] boy. Here’s how González unpacks that single word (“boy”):
In its racial context it gestures to its use as an infantilizing address, from a white man to black man, that expresses both condescension and derision. In gay parlance it is a designation given to a younger man, typically a youth, but in relationship dynamics a “boy” is a willing object of desire of an older male, sometimes referred to as ‘daddy’. Therein the intriguing tension in the word . . .
In discussing a poem from the final section of the book, González skillfully weaves commentary with citation to provocative effect:
And in ‘Cue the Gangsta Rap When My Knees Bend,’ the speaker is being ironic in his own fetishizing of the ‘thug’ image, fulfilling his own sexual fantasy: ‘The only word my mouth cares for is O’
And yet, in considering this quartet of reviews, something surprising occurred. The piece on the poet whose work I was most acquainted with ended up being the piece that most spoke to me. You see, I went in with the faulty and false assumption that “The Twenty-First-Century Queer Chicano Poetics of Eduardo C. Corral” would be the essay I’d learn the least from. Instead, something resembling the opposite unfolded.
For the last several years now, ekphrastic poetry—poetry inspired by art—has been a particular interest of mine, both as a poet and as a literary curator, and so I found myself enthralled with the beginning of González’s discussion of Slow Lightning—through this particular lens:
The painting in question shows a fawn-like figure wearing a crown of flowers, eyes like a cat’s, devouring a bird. The physical act is the satiating of both bodily hunger and sexual appetite. The fluidity of this animal-human relationship gestures toward the transformation of Greek myth and to the Amerindian indigenous animal spirits or nahualismo—the animal soul manifested in dream, story, and art. Another name for this fluidity of influences and dialogues is borderlessness.
González, in effect, is enacting what he’s about to discuss—Corral’s ekphrastic poem. He’s become, in this snippet of prose, an ekphrastic critic.
Growing up, as I did, in a bilingual household; majoring in Spanish literature in college; living in Spain for a decade; publishing a completely dual-language book of poems—that is, because of all of these things, it was inevitable that a poetics like Corral’s, one which deploys more than one tongue, would inherently interest me. And so, when it came time for González to broach this strand of Corral’s poetics, I’m happy to report that I wasn’t disappointed. On the contrary:
The use of multiple languages can be unsettling, but the purpose is not to leave the reader with a feeling of alienation after this encounter; rather, Corral invites the reader to enter the territory of the borderlands, where such linguistic auditory experiences are commonplace.
Drawing a parallel between a page of intralingual poetry and a swath of the borderlands—the space between the U.S. and Mexico—really leapt off the page for me!
While carefully re-reading the essay the text morphed into a plaza for the three of us:
queer son-of-immigrants subject (Corral)
queer son-of-immigrants critic (González)
queer son-of-immigrants reader (Aragón)
This configuration unfurled as I marveled, was moved by, González’s multi-pronged treatment of the speaker’s father. I love this passage:
In a sense, in order to claim full agency of his sexuality, the son needs to leave the father and find possibility outside of his childhood home, even if it is just next door. Unburdened by social or religious pressures, the speaker is free to dream, desire, and imagine. Perhaps the lines of the poem “Saint Anthony’s Church” say it best: ‘Instead of the nailed palms of Christ, / my father’s warm hand on my shoulder.’
Two of Corral’s poems also don the same “haunting title”: “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.” González aptly characterizes Corral’s approach to these as “more elliptical,” but doesn’t shy away from taking them on while acknowledging that they “leave much room for interpretation.” With one of the poems, he argues that it’s “futile to impose definition” on an elegant, image-rich, micro-surreal narrative. Instead, these poems are “conceptual pieces, the antithesis of death, decay, and darkness.” They are “acts of vibrancy, song, and light.” I especially appreciated these readings because they are in sync with what I often say to my students—that poems, like songs whose lyrics we may not fully comprehend, can still be enjoyed for the sounds they make—the sounds that pass through our bodies.
II
Critical Reviews
Even though section two of the book clocks in with three fewer pieces than section one, it engages the work of twenty-four poets. But one of its pieces accounts for half this number: “Twelve Essential Latino Poetry Books.” Rigoberto González has made a selection from his El Paso Times reviews and placed them under this “umbrella” title. He has often said that poetry is his first love. Therefore, I’d venture a guess that half of his 200+ EPT reviews were on books of poetry. This means that he may very well have curated these twelve poetry book reviews from, roughly, one hundred poetry book reviews. Here they are, in the order they appeared:
Francisco X. Alarcón’s From The Other Side of Night (University of Arizona Press, 2002)
Brenda Cárdenas’ Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2010)
Blas Manuel De Luna’s Bent to the Earth (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2005)
David Dominguez’s Work Done Right (University of Arizona Press, 2003)
Martin Espada’s The Republic of Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2006)
Tim Z. Hernández’s Skin Tax (Heyday Books, 2005)
Juan Felipe Herrera’s 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (City Lights Books, 2008)
Sheryl Luna’s Pity the Drowned Horses (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005)
Valerie Martínez’s Each and Her (University of Arizona Press, 2010)
Maria Meléndez’s How Long She’ll Last in This World (University of Arizona Press, 2006)
John Murillo’s Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books, 2010)
Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Dreaming the End of War (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)
Some thoughts: I wouldn’t argue with the selection of any of these books. The work of each of these poets is integral to the issues being discussed in contemporary Latinx verse. Here are some things I especially like about this roster: the overwhelming nod towards small and university presses; Up Jump the Boogie’s inclusion, not only because it was one of the best books of poetry that year (2010), but as a nod to the increasing and merited attention to Afro-Latinx poetics; that seven of the twelve titles are first books; (on a personal note) that four of the twelve poets appeared in The Wind Shifts anthology I edited.
And yet, I do question, in the context of Pivotal Voices, the inclusion of Francisco X. Alarcón and Juan Felipe Herrera. Here’s why: González already includes a fine twelve-page study that engages five books, titled “Juan Felipe Herrera’s Global Voice and Vision,” which concludes this second section; he also already includes a moving fifteen-page study which concludes section three and the book itself, titled “Erotic Light, Amor Oscuro: On the Queer Poetics of Francisco X. Alarcón and his Muse, Federico Garcia Lorca.” Given, therefore, that Pivotal Voices already devotes ample space, and rigorously so, to Herrera and Alarcón, respectively: why not a more gender-balanced, twelve-part piece that treats six male poets and six female poets (instead of this eight men/four women break-down)?
That said, in piece after piece—one through twelve—González’s mastery of the 500-word review is on full display: the way he skillfully conveys a succinct “plot summary” of the collection in question, his knack for seamlessly weaving poetic fragments into the argument of his narrative, and his occasional citations of whole stand-alone passages—always carefully curated to pack a punch. Here he is on Brenda Cárdenas’ Boomerang:
From this childhood appreciation of culture and an early affinity for linguistic play rises the mature voice of a strong woman who sings the praises of el mestizaje (‘if you can’t dig la mezcla, chale!’), who can chew on a poem in Old English and spit it back out in Old Chicano English (‘Language lies / across the barbed lines’), and who wistfully pronounces, ‘We work in English / make love in Spanish / and code-switch past our indecision.’
Or this passage on How Long She’ll Last in This World:
Meléndez contends that violence and healing are base pairs to this dark but glorious age. Humanity and nature are its co-habitants. And so this challenge: ‘There is a time to grip your talismans, a time to strip yourself of them.’ The speaker asks us to reconnect to ‘these places you never left’ and recognize that ‘more lives move beside us than we know.’ From these important gestures, the recovery of memory and spiritual-ecological health begins.
Before the publication of How Long She’ll Last in This World, Meléndez had published a chapbook with Sandra McPherson’s Swan Scythe Press. Its title? You guessed it: Base Pairs. Coincidence, or intentional, on González’s part (“violence and healing are base pairs”)? Doesn’t matter. The effect is the same on this reader, and others with this shared tidbit of Meléndez’s publication history: it’s an added, nuanced, layer of engagement and pleasure.
I had mentioned “Juan Felipe Herrera’s Global Voice and Vision” as the piece that closes section two of the book. It’s something of an anomaly: it’s the only piece in this section that deals with a single author. This second section is dominated by pieces that take on multiple poets, such as the twelve-poet configuration just discussed. The opening piece in section two (“Publishers on a Mission: Three Excellent Debut Poets”) adopts the added agenda of highlighting three book prizes that aim to ensure diversity in publishing. González offers substantive commentary on Laurie Ann Guerrero’s A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize; Matthew Olzmann’s Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize; and L. Lamar Wilson’s Sacrilegion (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), a product of the Carolina Wren Poetry Series, whose mission is to publish “quality writing, especially by writers ignored by mainstream publishing.” Another piece in section two highlights three first books by African American poets: Jamaal May, Kamilah Aisha Moon, and Roger Reeves. Rigoberto González also takes on the laudable task of examining the work of three more-established poets in “Midcareer: Three Poets and their Four Books.” The individuals he’s selected for this distinction are Quan Barry, Kyle Dargan, and Ada Limón. Of all the pieces in Pivotal Voices, this was the least satisfying. The strategy of discussing four distinct books by each of the three poets felt, in the end, like too ambitious an approach. I didn’t get as good a feel for each volume of poetry as I did everywhere else in Pivotal Voices. I suspect this was the case because of the necessary space restrictions given the number of books to be treated in a single piece. An alternative approach—albeit probably more ambitious but in a different sense—would have been to identify and examine a particular topic (one per poet) and discuss a poem from each of the poets’ four books—through the lens of their respective topics.
The piece from this section, on the other hand, that captivated me was “On Karankawa and The Animal Too Big to Kill.” We learn, in the publications acknowledgements, that the treatment of these two books were each published separately in The Rumpus. But something about intentionally placing them side by side in one piece was, curatorially speaking, genius. They are both books that deal, on some level, with challenging family relationships and legacies, and that may be the secret sauce I was tasting by reading these reviews back to back, as González intended. And, as circumstances would have it, both Iliana Rocha (Karankawa) and Shane McCrae (The Animal Too Big to Kill) are poets I knew by name, but not overly familiar with their work. González’s twin reviews will result in my actively seeking out these two books. His brilliantly proportioned alchemy of citation, analysis, and plot summary have, once again, done the trick of making a reader want to track the titles down.
III
Critical Grace Notes
In his brief preface to the third and final section of Pivotal Voices, Rigoberto González writes: “I believe it was Gloria Anzaldúa who encouraged queer and feminist critics to write the self in the work . . .” This statement is related to why, after reading this section, I felt prompted to think: Pivotal Voices should be required reading for anyone enrolled in a graduate creative writing program. The texts, in particular, that spur me to articulate this are a keynote address (“The Activist Role of the Writer”), a commencement address (“The Writer’s Journey: A Motivation”), and an acceptance speech (“Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement Speech”). The first is a moving, at times heartbreaking testimonial of González’s journey of coming into his queer identity within a challenging family dynamic. At one point, in discussing the less-than-accepting environment he was raised in, he resorts to the third person:
It seemed that even his facial features gave him away. All the other boy faces in his family were pure muscle and bone, while his was so awkwardly doughy and rosy, a ripe plum in a bowl of potatoes. And if that wasn’t enough, when he walked into the room he brought along a pronounced lisp like a pink balloon. What other recourse for self-preservation but staying still and quiet, what other way to survive but by becoming a near absence in the house, an errant puddle near the wall that each day receded more?
That image of the receding puddle is a metaphor: the boy is slowly dying on the inside. The piece is also about how discovering queer and Latinx literature, and writing, saved him:
This journey is my life, and it’s personal, and it’s the reason I became a writer: to add to those bookshelves that not only shape lives, they save them. What more noble cause than that, than to save the lives of our youth? And perhaps I’m saving myself each time I complete a book and toss it out to the sea of readers like a life preserver. Someone will grab it—grab hold of me.
I could cite more passages from the commencement and acceptance speech to similar effect, but I think these suffice to convey why these testimonials gave the book what I’ll call its “handbook feel.” I would have loved holding a volume like this in my hands twenty years ago while pursuing my creative writing MA and MFA. Pivotal Voices could, today, with the right frame of mind, be a guidebook on cultivating one’s aspiration to be a poet-critic (sections I & II), and/or a poet-thinker (section III) . . . if one is open to the challenge—to the measure and degree that suits one. González seems to express some rigidity on this score. At the end of his brief preface to section two he writes:
My only disappointment after I left the El Paso Times was that no other Latino writer took the opportunity to replace me. A few attempts were made but none of the would-be columnists achieved my level of production or discipline. This many years later, I’m still waiting for someone else to make such a commitment in service to the Latino writing community.
How he deploys “my level” and “such a” in the above passage seems to turn a momentary blind eye on the notion that Latinx writers—not a homogenous group to begin with—bring different proclivities and abilities to their respective “service” to the Latinx writing community, or whatever other community they serve—as well as different life trajectories, which can translate into different motivations and priorities. In contrast, González is firmly on the mark in “The Writer’s Journey: A Motivation,” the commencement speech in section three, when he writes: “[S]ometimes that means the writing will take place slowly—and that’s all right, writing’s not a race.” The cliché, with a twist, is useful here: one size does not fit all.
Rigoberto González and I share something: we were both formally mentored by the late Francisco X. Alarcón—he sat on each of our respective MA thesis committees at UC Davis. In the days after Alarcón died in January of 2016, we reached out to one another to share stories of our time with him at Davis. Although I’d known Alarcón since the mid 1980s, mainly in my capacity as his translator, it was from a distance. The relationship unfurled fully during my two years in Davis (1998–2000), as it did for González during his stint there (1992–1994). Shortly after his death, I wrote my tribute to Francisco at Letras Latinas Blog (“Francisco X. Alarcón: tocayo”) and González wrote his at NBC Latino (“Voices: Remembering Friend, Mentor and Poet Francisco X. Alarcón”), which serves as the first section of “Erotic Light, Amor Oscuro: On the Queer Poetics of Francisco X. Alarcón and His Muse, Federico García Lorca”—the final essay in Pivotal Voices. I provided some of the background for it—as it pertains to Alarcón’s homoerotic sonnet collection, De Amor Oscuro/Of Dark Love, which I translated into English. And I also appear in the piece itself, as the person who made Alarcón aware of Lorca’s homoerotic sonnet sequence, “Sonetos del amor oscuro.”
What I can say is this: considering the fact that one of Rigoberto González’s touchstone principals as a thinker is his insistence on fully embodying and articulating his twin identities as Chicano and gay, and therefore a gay Chicano artist, it’s not at all surprising that he would reserve the final slot in Pivotal Voices for the mentor who most instilled in him this principal. So while it might make more logical sense for the essay on Alarcón to reside in section one of this book, “Critical Essays,” having it in section three, “Critical Grace Notes,” makes perfect sense, and is more in line with the notion of writing the self into the work—that is, a more personal gesture with more at stake. It also allows the book’s “farewell” to the reader to also serve as González’s final “farewell” to Alarcón. González even opts for the personal in his farewell to the reader to end the essay and the book:
And so I end with this appeal: when I die, talk about my work, talk about my activism, talk about how much I cared about my communities, but don’t silence the part of my identity that walked every single step along with me to the rally, the classroom, the desk, the podium, that part of my identity that makes me susceptible to hatred and fear and ignorance and hurt. That part of me I also appreciate and love, and so should you.
He’s alluding to being gay, and this closing passage of the essay harkens back to an earlier passage of the piece:
When Francisco agreed to sit on my thesis committee, I began to consider seriously the term Chicano—something I had resisted because I had always called myself Mexican. I didn’t know I could inhabit all of these identities at once until I met Francisco, who embodied many of them. Like him, I had been born in the United States and spent my childhood in Mexico. Like him, I was bilingual, bicultural, and gay.
In the end, Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition: Towards a 21st Century Poetics stands in for Rigoberto González’s cumulative achievement(s) as a critic and thinker. It also stands firmly beside his achievement(s) as a multi-genre artist of his own literary work—twin monuments.
January 2018
Torquay, England
Works Cited
González, Rigoberto. Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition: Towards a 21st Century Poetics. Ann Arbor, Michigan.
……University of Michigan Press, 2017.
González, Rigoberto. Red-Inked Retablos. Tucson, Arizona. University of Arizona Press, 2013.
Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is the author of Glow of Our Sweat and Puerta del Sol, as well as the editor of, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. His third book, After Rubén, is slated for 2020 with Red Hen Press. His Tongue A Swath of Sky, a chapbook, was released in 2019. A native of San Francisco, he is a faculty member at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame, where he directs their literary initiative, Letras Latinas. For more information, visit: http://franciscoaragon.net
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