Louise Erdrich has a poem called Advice to Myself which I read each New Year’s Day as I set my intentions in motion for another trip around the sun. It’s a delicious poem and you can read it in it’s entirety here. What I love is the encouragement to step back from the culturally-driven urge to tidy things up and reflect on what will support the vocation of writing,
Here are two of my favorite bits.
“…don’t worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another…”
“…–decide first what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos…”
Louise Erdrich, Advice to Myself
So I’m reminding myself again this year to set aside the clutter of my desires for my writing and the pressure of my publishers’ desires for my books, and take a moment at the beginning of each working day to bless the blank page and light a candle for the child who will read it some day, and then forge ahead as best I can with the light of that child reader first in my thoughts.
THEY CALL ME GÜERO by David Bowles is a collection of poems which together form a loose narrative about a boy living in South Texas and occupying the physical but also social and emotional space that spans the US-Mexico border. The poems are short and ring clear with emotional and physical details that will strike a chord with any reader. There are many words in Spanish but none that would be a barrier to a reader who knows only English. The glossary in the back is more a courtesy than a necessity. Teachers will be delighted to find many poetic forms and devices used throughout which make it ideal for using in school. I also found it notable in that it doesn’t shy away from the main character’s spiritual practice. A gem from Cinco Puntos Press
My favorite verse novel in quite a while is JAZZ OWLS: A NOVEL OF THE ZOOT SUIT RIOTS by Young People’s Poet Laureate, Margarita Engle. She takes on an episode in our national history that should be far better known–a racially targeted riot between soon to deploy WWII sailors in Los Angeles and the Hispanic community there. Engle’s spare language and vivid descriptions bring to life a time when the military was still racially segregated, a time when interracial marriage was not legal in California–only 75 years ago. This would be such a great book to discuss in a classroom or book club. The references and afterward make it clear that, as vicious as the racial attacks on Mexican-American’s were, justice was done in the end. The military did integrate and freedom to marry a person of another race did become legal. Still it’s chilling to see how easily the sailors of the 1940s found it to scape goat the Mexican community and how reluctant local law enforcement was to arrest servicemen on the eve of deployment. The art by Rudy Guitierrez strikes just the right tone. This is a gem of a book which I hope will find its way into many a high school history class.