"Jimmy Santiago Baca" seven times and it’s done very clearly and then I pray
before my altar and I’m okay for the day. I can start to work.
KEENE: This is very inspiring to hear! I think both the people who already know your
poetry and those who are unfamiliar with your work will really be able to appreciate what
you have been saying here, because in talking about the specifics of your own life and
art, you are extending feelings and experiences that are common to us all.
BACA: Yeah. Poetry transcends all colors and cultures, and ultimately beats from the
red heart. You show me someone without a red heart, and I’ll show you someone who’s not a
human being. [Bursts into laughter]
KEENE: [Laughs]
BACA: I do believe the poet’s job in the real sense of the word is to always be there
where the emotional and psychic and spiritual earthquakes are happening, and to be strong
enough to be able to sing in those big chasms. The poet’s job is to be at the
epicenter.
KEENE: Certainly.
BACA: I don’t know if you’ve ever been at a place where there’s been an earthquake, but
let me just say it this way: I went with my two children to a place out by where there’s a
bird refuge, where thousands and millions of birds come. And we were messing around,
trying to cross this river, but they had this long fence strung across the river. It was
something very strange that day because my son, my youngest one, immediately fell to the
earth and began to play in the sand. My other son began to cross the river, clambering
sideways across it, and I followed him, the river rushing beneath, and what was
extraordinary about that time, that day was that I had another friend with me, and he
began to sing songs; but we began to comment, all four of us, that the space seemed to be,
seemed to have been cleared and sanctified in some strange way. It was that our movements
were slower, our words were more sincere, there seemed to have been the breath of great
mother earth expelled from that particular point, and two days later, the epicenter of an
earthquake was there, right there.
KEENE: What a story!
BACA: I don’t know what poets’ jobs are except that we need to get to the epicenters
before they happen, so we can participate in that power. Not be the victims of it. I want
us to participate in the power of an earthquake before the earthquake happens; I want us
to be part of the process of that power coming up, and then, when those earthquakes occur,
we understand them in a human sense. When things happen to human beings’ lives, we can
then write about them.
KEENE: Well, you know, I can’t disagree with that.
BACA: You know what the Navajos say again, right? They say that when it’s a drought,
you learn to live very dryly, you become drought. And when it’s really, really rainy, then
you become rain. So that’s how I think as a poet.
from Callaloo 17.1 (Winter 1994). Online Source: The Official Jimmy Santiago
Baca Homepage at http://www.swcp.com/~baca
News Letters on the Air
Speaker: Our guest today is poet, Jimmy Santiago Baca. Jimmy Santiago Baca is the
author of six books of poetry, most recently Black Mesa Poems. Poets often speaks
of poetry as having saved their lives, but in Santiago Baca’s case, the statement is not
mere metaphor. At the age of 18, he was an illiterate, serving time in prison for drug
possession, and in an interview with New Letters managing editor, Robert Stuart, Santiago
Baca says it was his discovery of the possibilities of language that transformed what
appeared to be a doomed life. The people who know and love poetry most, says Jimmy
Santiago Baca, are those who like himself, desperately need it.
JSB: You dive into the metaphor of language, and you hit your head on the bottom, and
you taste your own blood, and you taste your own mortality in language. You realize
suddenly that you’re here, just as the Aztecas would say, "like a flower." And,
you sort of mourn that. Writing is a form of mourning, in which you sing happy songs. One
of the really absurd assumptions that runs rampant in this country is that the people who
know about poetry, the people who truly understand poetry, the people who are the prophets
of poetry are those in the academic levels are those who write it. Well, I am the peddler
of newspaper, and I will tell you what the real news is. That the people of academia who
teach poetry know almost nothing about it. And, the people who write poetry, who are
truly, truly apprentices of poetry, in the way that Blake was, are so blinded by its
light, that they are participating in the process, that they don’t have time to stand back
and say, "Oh, well I couldn’t tell you what the centimeter beats are on this. Their
bodies are participating in it. Do you stop when you are making love to a woman and say,
"let me tell you exactly what the metabolic process is that is happening right now.
No you don’t.
Speaker: Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in New Mexico in 1952. He tells Robert Stuart
that he thinks of himself as a Chicano, although his parents were of Indian and Mexican
ancestry.
JSB: Being a baby from those people that I come from, I was born and immediately after
being born they said, "We cannot take care of you, we have no means, there is nothing
here." So they said, "Go, go to an orphanage. Go live with your grandmother. Go,
do something." So, I went to live with my grandmother, and my grandmother said, (she
was 60 or 70% blind from glaucoma and cataracts) and she said to me, "I can’t take
care of you, so you have to take care of yourself. I can give you some beans and some rice
and some corn, and that kind of thing, but I can’t do much for you." So, I grew up in
the very, very early years gaining my values from the black trains that passed the Pueblo,
from the eagle that flew and landed, from the hummingbirds that came on the fence, from
the dogs and the horses, all the trees, and looking at the seasons and the cycles. My
first sense of structure in this particular reality, in this universe, came from
everything else around me, and included in kind of realm of that value system was of
course my grandmother singing her songs, and my uncles coming in from the mountains with
wood. The people were not apart from that universe, they were part of that universe.
Speaker: This was in fairly rural New Mexico?
JSB: Yes, rural, rural New Mexico. So, yes, and then from there, the government came
and said "you cannot stay with your grandmother because you’re not going to school,
and you have to learn how to speak English." I was taken to the orphanage, and I
spent a good deal of time in the orphanage.
Speaker: This whole sense of basically no identity in this country shows up a lot in
your poems. You have, I know, one particularly powerful poem about your father, about
reading the death certificate after your father had died. He had been labeled as white on
the death certificate.
JSB: That one was an interesting poem because that is one of the few poems that
actually happened. That was a very interesting poem, because my father did die, he did
die, and I think one of the reasons why he did die the way he did was because he was very
bound like the earth, very red like titanium rock slab in New Mexico. And, everybody in
his life said he was white. He had this terrible, terrible grief in him when anybody would
see him. A terrible grief. It was an animal grief, that means weep and grind his teeth.
But, he’s not white, he would tell me, "I’m not white mejito, no soy blanco. Mira, mi
piel es cafecito como la tierra Madre Sagrada, ancina." And, I would look up to him
and say, "Poppe, I know you’re brown, I know who you are." And, he would say,
"Well, why when I go out there, everybody says this?" I remember when I was a
boy, and the Gillette fights would be on T.V., and he would drink like nine beers, and
then he would begin to look at me with that crazed Apache look, and say, "I’m not
like them." And, I would look at these white starched shirts and these ties, and I
think, that’s not you. I remember you Poppe, you were the boy who used to get the water
out of the well and haul it up the mountain, and you had a song, and now you’re dribbling
saliva, you’re so drunk, it’s falling on your chest, and you’re mumbling that you’re not
like them. So, here’s a poem called … this is number 26.
Jefe, todavia no saben. On the color of race on your death certificate, they have you
down as "white." You fought against that label all of your short life, Jefe.
Now, they have you down as white. They had you down when you lived. Down, because you were
too brown. Dead on arrival when you try to be white. You were brown as dungy whiskey
bottles, brown as the adobe dirt. You shattered those bottles against death now. You are
white. Under specify suicide or homicide, I scribbled out accident, and wrote in suicide,
I scribbled out white and wrote in Chicano. I erased ’caused by aspiration of meat,’ and
wrote in ‘trying to be white.’
Speaker: This is New Letters on the Air. Jimmy Santiago Baca ran away from the
orphanage when he was eleven years old, and began an odyssey of street life that
culminated in his prison sentence. The poet is fascinated with other people’s lives, and
that in his experience, gangsters tend to be great lovers of poetry.
JSB: When you see gangsters being jailed, and if they have something to say, it’s
always a quote from a poet. I mean, I happen to believe that poetry was the mother, in
oral poetry of the people. The mothers held their little babies in their arms and sang the
songs. And, when these men decided to do what they had to do, and cross that line that few
of us cross, and they decided to take someone else’s life. It was through the force of
poetry that this strange red, this strange red light that is worn on all sides evenly,
just like a cradle with a spirit, that they said, they believe in the verse and the lyrics
so much that they said, yes, you have committed an injustice, and boom, you either live or
die. But, I believe that acts that are committed, that break laws, the great acts that
assist the laws of the human spirit, whether they’re legitimized in Washington or not, are
acts that are done according to those mysterious laws of poetry.
Speaker: A kind of over-riding aesthetics that these people inherently understand.
JSB: I think it’s what we call the "infant cry" in poetry. The cry that
infants have that make a mother get out of bed in the middle of the night, you run to the
baby. I think all of us have that instinct of mothering deep in us. And, when a poem cries
out to us loud in its verse lines, there is something in us in the darkness that rises and
comes to it. I was trying to find a metaphor for the creative spirit in poets. What makes
us stay up and write, and what makes us so enormously happy in so much rumination? Why are
we so happy? And, my son and I were at the Isleta Pueblo, and I was pushing him on the
swings, and his little sneaker was scraping the dirt so that he could stop on the swing,
and he uncovered the face of a frog, a dehydrated frog. We carefully exhumed it and safely
put it into my baseball cap and took it home, and added it to my alter of things that
meant something to me. Some men bring back emmy awards, I bring back dehydrated frogs from
the Pueblo. It’s called Toward the Light.
A few inches beneath ground surface, my son heeled up a frog. It died in leap toward
light. Cooked, brittle hooked hands scoop of dirt beneath this black flat belly. Nostril
slits flared with that last heave toward the light to the faint warmth of spring. Back
legs shoved at dense dirt, pushed, pushed up, up, until exhausted, o-o-o-old frog, let its
legs and arms go limp, small toes fanned out, alas, back sigh, scoop. And, then it rested
its broad gullet down gravely, severe mouth, and died in the grimaced leap at light, just
an inch above ground. I pick it up. Sand grains tick inside its hollow shell. Eyelids,
dark scars. Blunted snub nose. Olmec King unearthed by my son’s sneaker, I enthrone in my
baseball cap, and bring home, set next to other desktop jewels. There, by the monarch
butterfly, obsidian stone, pi?ons, pine cones, pebbles, buttons, pens, eagle feathers,
withered rosebud, robin’s egg, tuft of sparrow’s nest cotton, welcome Olmec King, welcome
to my humble museum where each thing conveys an aspect of my own journey toward the light.
JSB: This is a nice one to my first son, Antonio, Since You’ve Come .
You make a thousand expressions of distaste and indifference. Like a bored Prince,
unimpressed with our performance, you scream and we stagger out of bed, grumbling at the
unmerciful rule of our emperor. We become fortune tellers guessing what you desire. We
become dwarfs at your service, jugglers of toy bears and r
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