"Let's Be Unyoked from Landscapes": Travel and Place(s) in the Poetry of Rane Arroyo

Abstract

"Let's Be Unyoked from Landscapes":Travel and Place(s) in the Poetry of Rane Arroyo Betsy A. Sandlin Award-winning poet, playwright, short story writer, and scholar Rane Arroyo (1954–2010) authored a long list of books yet has received little critical attention to date.1 Born in Chicago to Puerto Rican parents, Arroyo earned a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh and later relocated to Ohio, where he taught English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo until his untimely death. His 11 collections of poetry are especially notable for their often-humorous and colloquial engagement with popular culture in the United States, their experimentation with form, and their largely autobiographical and self-reflexive meditations on identity, influenced by his own life experiences as an openly gay, Puerto Rican man of working-class roots who navigated many predominantly Anglo and heteronormative spaces throughout his life. In a footnote, Marc Zimmerman proclaims that Arroyo "may indeed be the most prolific and most important of the Chicago Puerto Rican poets" (154). Notwithstanding a prolific literary career and prestigious prizes and recognition, Arroyo remains mainly in the footnotes, so to speak, in the shadows of both Latinx and broader U.S. literary criticism. One explanation for his absence is that Arroyo's work defies stereotypical understandings or expectations of Latinx literature and, more specifically, Puerto Rican literature written in the U.S. His poetry is not filled with code-switching or Spanglish nor does it present an urban experience like that which is easily recognized in Nuyorican texts. Furthermore, the cultural touchpoints in Arroyo's work include as many references to Broadway and Bruce Springsteen as to salsa music, as much influence from Buddhism as from Catholicism, as much Hart Crane and Emily Dickinson as Federico García Lorca or Reinaldo Arenas.2 There is very little nostalgia present in his writing, and there are as many playful and absurd meditations on the self in his poetry as there are serious ones. As Luis Urrea states in his introduction to Arroyo's collected poems, The Buried Sea, "The brother just doesn't sound like anybody else in the Latino crowd" (xii). Urrea concludes, "He is not a 'Latino' poet. He is a world poet who is Latino" (xiv). Arroyo's poetry deserves a larger posthumous audience and increased critical attention, particularly for its destabilization of the prevalent notion that a strong sense of place is a defining feature of Latinx literary production past and present, an idea that has been discussed widely by literary critics and literary historians and that stubbornly prevails in studies of Latinx cultural production in the 21st century, despite globalization and [End Page 115] challenges to theories of place-based identification. "It is a poetry … that tries to reconcile geographic specificity … with cosmopolitanism," according to Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and colleagues (144). While Arroyo certainly claimed a birthplace (Chicago), a stable residence for most of his professional life (Toledo, Ohio), and a place of familial and cultural origin (Puerto Rico), his poetic production as a whole reveals a clear preference for wandering through a multiplicity of places rather than identifying with any particular place or places. Likewise, his work refuses to identify with a strictly binary geography, which forms the backbone of many configurations of Latinx and diasporic identities, including the writing of Latinx authors who describe lives "on the hyphen" (Mexican-American, Cuban-American, etc.), as suggested by Gustavo Pérez Firmat. In other words, Arroyo's poetry is not limited to what Vanessa Pérez Rosario describes as a "double consciousness," which she argues is typical for Hispanic Caribbean literature written in the U.S. In his own introduction to The Buried Sea, Arroyo attempted a list of identifiers that would capture his complexity. He wrote: "I'm a Puerto Rican, gay, Midwestern, educated, former working class, liberal, atheistic, humanist, American, male, ex-Mormon, ex-Catholic, pseudo-Buddhist, teacher, reader, global, and popular culture-informed poet" (2). Nonetheless, Arroyo's poetry questions the stability of his chosen identifiers, particularly the place-based ones, and instead highlights movement through place(s) as fundamental to understanding his latinidad and his literary work. Arroyo's writing, both...