I found Poetry Like Bread in the used section of Elliott Bay Books. I was drawn to the title and then was further intrigued by the subtitle, "Poets of the Political Imagination." Published first in 1994, Poetry honored the 20th anniversary of the founding of Curbstone Press (now more than 30 years old and still going strong!) and is a collection of mostly Latino/a politically active people and writers, with a smattering of others from the U.S. and elsewhere. This is a wonderful anthology of powerful poets witnessing, interpreting, detailing, and narrating life through the political and social turmoil of the past forty years.
Resiliency reigns in the collection and, in this excerpt, the poet Jimmy Santiago Baca presents himself to the prison parole board with a satchel of poems hoping for time off his sentence for creative behavior:
I was ready for my first grand,
eloquent,
Booming reading of a few of my poems--
When the soft, surprised eyes
Of the chairman looked at me and said no.
from "I Applied for the Board"
Thank goodness Santiago Baca fell back on his art and didn't give up on the writing -- or on himself. Innumerable children and adults, teens trying to get or stay out of gangs, aspiring writers, and other audience members who have attended his readings and workshops all over the country since he was finally released from prison can be thankful for that.
The book's title and Curbstone's motto is from the latter half of the poem "Like You" by Roque Dalton, a Salvadoran poet murdered by a rival faction of the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP), which itself was one of the major factions fighting against the military dictatorship in El Salvador. Dalton writes:
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don't end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.
There may be no better plug for poetry's place at the world's table than that. For more on Dalton, read Ernesto Cardenal and Claribel Alegria's wonderful tributes to his life and art at Curbstone's website.
Here is a bit of awful prescience by Alfonso Quijada Arias whose entire poem "Poor Us" goes:
We'll die along with Capitalism,
we've been sentenced.
Poor us
and without ever having enjoyed it.
Such irony and humor is often a critical attribute of the resilient poet or citizen. The book dives deeper into the darkness of the wars in Central America where massacres and atrocities mounted throughout the 1970s and 80s. Ms. Alegria captures the choking pain of this terror in El Salvador in her poem, "The Rivers," where the landscape is forced into the drama:
The Sumpul is boiling with corpses
a mother said
the Goascaran
the Lempa
are all boiling with the dead.
The rivers no longer sing
they lament
they sweep their dead along
cradle them
they twinkle
under the tepid moon
under the dark
accomplice night...
Other poets focus their writing on the individuals who were part of the struggle and provided inspiration and hope. Daisy Zamora provides a poignant example in her homage to her Aunt Chofi, a musing portrait of a dynamic family and community member that captures her working at her home cake-decorating business:
Always talking, conversing,
you'd go on about this and that
as you smoked your cigarettes,
lighting one with the butt of the last
until your room was an ashtray
overflowing with twisted stubs and fragrant cups of coffee,
honey, sugar, flour, egg whites, turpentine,
linseed oil, old sheets.
Admirable Amazon in your
fantastic feats:
(you tied your drunken husband up and fell in love
with the first legitimate guru from India
to pass through Managua).
Witch doctor, you mixed medicines,
syrups and terrible potions you made us drink
against all possible diseases.
What need, what misfortune didn't you succor:
midwife, nurse,
you laid out corpses, attended drunks,
defended all lost causes
and in every family argument
your gawky figure ruled.
What a character. I opened to this poem a couple months after I'd bought my used copy of the book and found three dried pansy flowers pressed between the English and Spanish versions of the passage, as if they had blown right out of Aunt Chofi's room. Lovely bookmarks left or forgotten from the previous owner. Muchas gracias.
There is a smaller representation of U.S. poets in this collection, including Margaret Randall, who reflects on the activism of her life in a poem dedicated to an old marching comrade:
That was my first public protest, Rhoda,
strange you should retrieve it now
in a letter out of this love of ours
alive these many years....
....The world is older and I in it
am older,
burning, slower, with the same passions.
The passions are older and so I am also younger
for knowing them more deeply and moving in them
pregnant with fear
but fighting.
What pleasure to find a used book such as this while roaming the back room of the bookstore. Real Change has received a few preview volumes of current books from Curbstone, and this is one press that is worth paying attention to. Their mission involves "two interdependent goals: 1) publishing creative literature that promotes human rights and inter-cultural understanding, and 2) bringing writers and programs deep into the community to promote literacy, knowledge about many cultures, and an appreciation of literature." Curbstone puts out an incredible array of literature, heavy on the poetry but with hearty doses of non-fiction and fiction as well. Check out their titles at curbstone.org. A rough poetry-buying rule I set for myself a couple years back and try, not always perfectly, to follow, is to check out books by dead poets from the library and buy the books of living poets, especially those outside the mainstream. That is, paying full price at an independent bookstore.