The Theater of Night by Alberto Ríos

Abstract

2 1 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 7 The Theater of Night. By Alberto Rios. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005. 117 pages, $20.00. Reviewed by M aria Melendez U tah State University, Logan Before I became familiar with the world of real, live Chicano poets, I used to be afraid of reading poetry by heterosexual Chicanos. I was afraid they’d ask me to do things I didn’t want to do. Like striking a hip-hop pose, saying “Ese” or “Mano,” emoting macho oppression-resisting energy like a Taco Shop Poet. Shame on me. Obviously, this fear came more from my own “issues,” as we say in the therapy age, from my own internalization of race-based caricatures, than from the actual richness and variety of Chicano writing today. Far from being a Taco Shop Poet— (we now pause for backpedaling from the implied pejorative tone regarding the TSPs, whose work— and they don’t need me to say it— has power, importance, and validity beyond all this fuss)— nationally acclaimed Chicano poet Alberto Rios employs a practiced literary smoothness in his new collection, The Theater of Night. This collection showcases Rios’s characteristic lively imagery and accessible narrative techniques. Shapely freeverse couplets serve as the prevalent poetic structure, giving the collection’s pacing a steady calmness in which the reader is coaxed on to the next two lines, and the next. In fact, some might say Rios here turns his literary tricks too smoothly, an argument predicated on the fact that, if a poet finds his work canon-eligible, it’s a sign that it’s lacking a certain edge, a certain desirable quality of disruptive­ ness. Chicano poetry blogger Eduardo Corral flirts with this argument in his interview on Web del Sol (www.webdelsol.com), in which he claims that the Chicano poets who appear in Norton anthologies are selected for such collec­ tions primarily because “their poems can be easily consumed by Anglo readers.” Although the widely anthologized Rios is, indeed, a Nortono, I would argue that the poetry in The Theater of Night is neither so literarily standard that it’s a vapid can of Chicano Lite: Goes Down Easy, nor is it as predictably macho as caricatures of spoken-word Chicanismo would suggest. Rather, it is gentle, accessible work that retains its powers within (not despite) its linguistic and stylistic smoothness, and these powers pull the mind and heart awake in ways that only poetry can do. On a first read, I was tempted to note The Theater of Night for its feminist leanings, in that the complex experiences of a woman make up the core of the book’s central narrative about a husband-wife relationship in an early 1900s border town. The female speaking voice excercises enormous poetic strength in discern­ ing, or divining, the inner nature of her husband. Describing him as one of the “people with so much horse in them still,” in the poem, “My Husband Clemente,” she observes: “These people, they have horse dreams inside, too, // Dream pouches like organs themselves” (34). This description suggests an almost supernatural B o o k R e v ie w s 2 1 3 depth of understanding held by the speaker, Ventura, regarding her spouse. Lovely as this poetic gesture of visionary intimacy is, there is a way in which it doesn’t advance the female figure to an identity beyond “Good Wife.” No demands that the two sit and talk things over here, no flustered communica­ tion impasses so common to actual marriages. To the contrary, at the end of “My Husband Clemente,” the speaker, on waking from her dream/vision of her husband as part animal, tells us that as she gazed at him, “We said no words, how foolish that would have been. // I took Clemente’s big hand, to my mouth and to my hip. / It was this that he understood, and I knew it” (35). We hear Ventura’s verbal fluidity, a trait which seems...