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Martín Espada is an American poet, but as the accent mark indicates, he straddles cultural traditions. A Puerto Rican steeped in the U.S. territory’s cry for independencia, a lover and reader — and teacher, at a Massachusetts university — of the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Espada nevertheless belongs to the North American tradition of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes: poet advocates whose songs sing for silent folk. Espada’s is the poetry of witness. If some poems are best whispered in a quiet room, many of his — take “Alabanza,” his eulogy for the food service workers killed on the topmost floors of the World Trade Center on 9/11 — are best growled into a bullhorn.

Bullhorns aren’t on the agenda for Espada’s visit to Seattle next week, but they easily could have been. The poet has a long history with one of the city’s most iconic activists, Abe Osheroff. Espada says Osheroff was “the best natural teacher I ever saw in my life” and “one of the last of that generation of working class radicals… truly dangerous people.” Osheroff died in 2008 at the age of 92, leaving a hole in Espada’s life that he continues to fill up, he says, with writing — poems of mourning, but also of celebration. He’s granted Real Change permission to republish one of those works written after his friend’s death, a biographical retelling of Osheroff’s political coming of age.

Espada is the author or translator of 17 books of poetry and essays. His collection “The Republic of Poetry” (2006) received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another, “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (1996), won an American Book Award. Two more books are forthcoming: this year, a collection of essays, and next, another of poetry.

Once a lawyer for poor Spanish-speaking tenants in Greater Boston – “I did eviction defense, no heat cases, extermination of vermin, crazy landlords – the whole thing” – Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing as well as the work of Pablo Neruda.

While here you’re giving a poetry workshop at the Muckleshoot tribal school. What do you bring to a typical workshop? How do you prepare yourself?

My approach is more or less the same with everybody. The idea is to give people a model, some sort of poem or poems, that you read and discuss. Then you give them a prompt and tell them they can go anywhere they want to write the poem. I might get them to write a poem about their name, or I might have people write curse poems. People write apology poems, people write prophetic poems. Any of these things can be written in a serious vein or a light vein. If they feel like laughing you let them laugh. If they feel like crying you let them cry. But the notion is to give people choices and to basically respect their intelligence. Have faith in what they’re going to produce.

What do you hope comes out of it?

The biggest dilemma that people who write poetry have is that they don’t know how to get started. They know they have something to say but they don’t know what it is. Or there’s so much pressure on them in terms of time, money, energy, that they cannot envision a way to release those creative energies quickly. I’m giving people a jumpstart method.

You can’t write a poem today and trade it tomorow for rent or groceries or doctor visits. The creative activity of poetry is shoved to the side for income generating activity, whatever that might be. So you need to be a time bandit and steal time away from those other mercantile activities. You need to be able to do it quickly, in the face of many distractions: sit down and block out what’s going on all around you and concentrate intensely for a short period of time, and that’s what this sort of exercise enables you to do.

There has been a lot of agonizing about poetry’s contemporary relevance.

In some ways poetry is held to a much higher standard than other things we do. Most of us don’t question that we vote. And you could make a good argument that when we vote it doesn’t affect things the way it should. Yet we still vote, because we believe in the principle and the alternative is unthinkable. So you vote, despite the fact that it is a flawed and incomplete way of addressing your political needs.

I had a professor at the University of Wisconsin by the name of Herbert Hill, and Hill, a history professor, a professor of Afro-American studies, used to say that ideas have consequences. It was brilliant in its simplicity. What he was referring to was that any of the ideas that you conceptualize and articulate have value. You put them into the world, into the air that we breathe. We breathe in these ideas, and who knows what happens after that?

Poetry is a way of communicating ideas and communicating ideas vividly, communicating ideas urgently, communicating ideas in such a way that you move people: that you make them think, you make them feel, and you might even make them change their lives. Because if people think and feel intensely enough, they will do what it takes to change their own lives and the lives of others.

Oftentimes I meet people who tell me in all seriousness, “Poetry changed my life.” They come out of the prison system, they come out of a situation where they may have been homeless, a situation where they may have been using drugs or alcohol, they may come out of a situation of domestic violence, they may come out of the military, but in any case they’ve come out of a place where they may have felt that their lives were worse than useless. They were starved of meaning. And poetry comes along and provides that meaning.

The funny thing is, when we write a poem, let’s say you write an anti-war poem, the way to measure that poem is not to say, did it end the war? That’s ridiculous. No one poem by itself is going to end the war. What happens, though, is that that poem goes into the air and becomes part of this environment that we breathe in, and it contributes to a culture which is anti-war, a culture of peace, a culture of nonviolence. And that’s what stops the war.

At the celebration of the centennial of Pablo Neruda’s birth you read a poem of Walt Whitman’s, in Spanish, over Neruda’s grave in Chile. You’ve stated that Whitman was a great influence on your work. 

Well I’m part of a Latin American tradition in the sense that I’m a Puerto Rican poet, but I’m also part of a North American tradition in the sense that I was born and raised here and speak English as a first language.

I see there’s a lineage that I belong to that Neruda also belongs to, that goes back to Whitman in the mid-19th century. It starts with Whitman, it
really does. Because Whitman is the poet advocate: he speaks for what he calls “the rights of them the others are down upon.” He says, “Through me many long dumb voices;” he says, “Voices veiled and I remove the veil.”

There’s a motif that runs through these poems of Whitman speaking of prisoners and slaves and prostitutes and working-class people. All that is quite radical: It was radical in its time and it’s still radical today. Whitman was a radical egalitarian, for all of his contradictions and limitations that come with being a 19th-century man.

And then he was followed in the early 20th century by two poets I have great respect for, namely Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters. And you don’t have to look much further and who do you see? Langston Hughes, again a disciple of Whitman. And then it’s not too much of a leap to connect them to the beat poets. These are the people I started reading and realizing I had some common ground with. There are any number of contemporary Latino poets who also fit that definition. Probably my favorite, if I had to pick one, is Gary Soto, a Chicano poet from Fresno.

Do you ever miss your work as an attorney?

Not really, no. Every now and then I get the urge to get in a fight. (laughs) And I generally don’t have any trouble finding one. But aside from a rather pugnacious attitude towards life I don’t miss the system per se because that system was so heavily weighted against my clients and against what we were trying to accomplish. There is no better place to see the priority that this system establishes of property over people than in court.

In essays you’ve reflected on the problem of raising a Puerto Rican boy in New England, where the local news hour has a regular habit of demonizing people of your ethnicity. How do you show your son, Clemente, how to deal with people’s racial bigotry?

I think the most important thing is to try to behave in a way that he can emulate. Not that I’m a saint by any means, but I do avoid the extremes of self-destructive behavior. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t gamble, I don’t do drugs – none of the stereotypical self-destructive behaviors that people engage in when they internalize their pain. No matter what we say to our kids, it’s what we do that matters. Because if you do your job you’ve raised a child who is a critical thinker himself, and is not easily swayed or fooled – even by you.

Sometimes I think it must be disheartening to see the number of times I get into battles and basically lose those battles, but at the same time he has seen me take positions based on certain political values or principles and I try to be consistent about that.

The essay you read is about an infant; Clemente is now 18 years old. He’s 6 foot 7 – that’s what happens when you feed them. He’s going to college in the fall and he’s going to be his own person. He’s going to decide what matters, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

How do you remember Abe Osheroff?

I first met Abe on film, because I saw the film “The Good Fight,” about the Spanish Civil War, when I was still in law school. I was absolutely smitten with the power of the testimonies in that film, and far and away the most elequent of the witnesses was Abe Osheroff. If all you remember is Abe after the age of 80, then you don’t know. He was so powerful, so vibrant, so much a force of nature both physically and ethically. This guy was like a dynamo.

He came to this area in about 1998 to be on a panel at Mount Holyoke College with a touring exhibit of Spanish Civil War posters. I established a bond with him right away. Not just politically, but also because both of us were raised in those sort of hardscrabble working-class communities in the same section of Brooklyn, and he identified with that immediately. And in a sense, perhaps, he gave me a lot of credibility that other people had to earn.

But you were separated in age by about 30 years?

He was born in 1915 and I was born in 1957. So it was more than that: 42 years! And yet there were things he said about Brooklyn that I instantly recognized as being part of my own experience.

Abe was one of the last of that generation of working-class radicals from the 1930s. Truly dangerous people. They could really change everything. So they had to be dealt with.

There was another poem I wrote that was about Abe’s epiphany: His discovery of the political activist’s life which came about when he was around 15 years old, the way that he would tell the story. In the early 1930s, when he was about 15, Abe got involved with the Young Communists League and particularly their efforts against eviction: The anti-eviction movement in Brooklyn, which was very strong during the Depression.

The simple, powerful act that these neighborhood guys organized and engaged in was to take the furniture off the street and put it back in the building where it came from. In open defiance of the cops.

Abe was one of these kids picking up the furniture and carrying it back into the house, and at that point he was still reacting from a basic sense of right and wrong rather than any political conciousness. Well, all that changed because he became part of that movement, and because a cop came along and stopped them one day.

This cop pulled a gun. And Abe took the gun out of his hand and threw it on the ground, and the gun bounced away. And of course that was it! That was it, right there: the moment of his epiphany. When he takes the gun out of the cop’s hand and throws it across the sidewalk, he knows he’s in trouble but he also knows that it’s worth the trouble. That day he was arrested and beaten up pretty badly and spent several months in jail before he was finally released. And that did it; that radicalized him.

Abe, when he died was 92 years old, so it came as a shock to absolutely no one. Abe talked about it. He was well aware of it. Even so, with all that it left this huge hole in my life. It’s a pattern actually, there have been a number of older people in my life who were teachers or mentors that have died in the last two or three years. The last one was Howard Zinn, who was a very good friend of mine. I’ve lost a lot of fathers, and Abe was one of them.

Where do you find comfort in the course of those loses?

I have to write them out.

I’m very interested, these days, as a poet, in discovery. Not discovery in the sense of the conquistadores, in this sense of Columbus or Cortez, but discovery in the sense of Abe Osheroff, who figures out what he wants to do with the rest of his life when a cop tries to stop him from putting the furniture back in the building. Or the epiphany Howard Zinn experienced after he dropped bombs towards the end of the Second World War, and then he took all of his ribbons and medals and put them in a folder and wrote across the folder “Never Again,” and became one of the most eloquent peace activists of the 20th century.

These are the discoverers, not Colombus or Cortez. We should be looking at their discoveries and trying to emulate them. 

Like a Word That
Somersaults Through the Air
for Abe Osheroff, 1915-2008

His life begins with the rain, and the soggy cushions
of a couch left by the landlord to die on a Brooklyn sidewalk
in the year 1930. His life begins at age fifteen, Abe
the high school wrestler straining the cords in his neck

to lift the couch with the other boys back through the doorway
of a tenement in Brownsville. His life begins with a woman
who could not pay the rent, staring dumbstruck on the corner
at the miracle of eviction evicted, the landlord a lord no more,

her sons and daughters trailing in a procession after the sofa.
His life begins with the cop who arrives on the corner
waving a revolver, the gun Abe snatches away to toss
across the pavement, squinting into the face of his first arrest.

His life begins with a cop’s revolver bouncing off the asphalt,
like a word that somersaults through the air and cannot be unsaid.

[Originally published in The Progressive.]

Espada reads his poetry Tuesday, May 11 on the University of Washington campus, Mary Gates Hall, Room 389, and Wednesday, May 12, at El Centro De La Raza, 2524 16th Avenue South, with a reception starting at 6 p.m. Admission to both is free of charge and Elliott Bay Book Company will be on hand to assist with book signings.

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