Reviewed by: Vivas to Those Who Have Failed by Martín Espada Bhisham Bherwani Martín Espada. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed. W. W. Norton, 2016. A reader unfamiliar with Martín Espada's poetry opening Vivas to Those Who Have Failed to a random poem might carelessly conclude the work is a satirist's, or an elegist's, or a political poet's—though some poems, such as "The Man in the Duck Suit," might befuddle him or her: satire or elegy? In it, the late ad-man Todd Godwin is affectionately remembered by the poet as "the star of my crime thriller, In Cold Duck," wearing a duck outfit and wielding a shotgun for a Super 8 film: … After the last take,he wandered out onto my porch in full duck regalia,waving the shotgun at passing cars on Johnson Street.Thirty years later, the hunters of Wisconsin still shiver in the reedsas they recall the Monster Duck who hunted humans…. Espada is a satirist, an elegist, and a political poet or, as he has noted elsewhere of other writers, a poet of "the political imagination." Here, in its entirety, is "Chalk-board on the Wall of a Diner in Providence, Rhode Island the Morning after George Zimmerman Was Acquitted in the Shooting Death of Trayvon Martin, an Unarmed Black Teenager": [End Page 31] Daily Special: vegetarian chili. The poet elegizes the victim in the poem's title, recalling the event at a location geographically (and demographically) removed from the place of the incident. The poem draws attention to our collective indifference, at its worst our obliviousness to (or silent complicity in) matters of social import, a condition in which our precious vegan palates define our day-to-day priorities. Given the spate of related violence that has preceded and followed the episode referenced in "Chalkboard," and the absence of any willful, meaningful change that might have prevented it, the poem is also a critique of our ineffectiveness in some quarters as a state. The title suggests, if not parodies, an opportune (and opportunistic) attention-grabbing headline, any following report or oped impotent. "Poetry of the political imagination goes beyond protest to articulate an artistry of dissent," Espada noted in "Poetry Like Bread." "The question is not whether poetry and politics can mix.… The question is how best to combine poetry and politics, craft and commitment, how to find the artistic imagination equal to the intensity of the experience and the quality of the ideas." "Chalkboard," with brevity and irony, circumvents the pitfalls of rage, which, rightful or not, risks reducing a political-occasion poem to illogical, egotistical rant, dissociated from the unyielding complexities of cultural and historical realities. Espada's persona is that of someone compassionate and rational when confronting sociopolitical injustice. In the opening title poem (subtitled "The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913," after the massive protest that led to a seminal change in US labor laws), he approaches his subject not only with the emotional detachment of "Chalkboard," but also with the tone of tenderness of his elegies. In Part II of "Vivas," he recounts the death of a bystander, shot by a silk dyeing company's agent: Two white-veiled horses pulled the carriage to the cemetery. Twenty thousand strikers walked behind the hearse, flooding the avenue like the river that lit up the mills, surging around the tombstones. Blood for blood, cried Tresca: at his signal, thousands of hands dropped red carnations and ribbons into the grave, till the coffin evaporated in a red sea. Newspaper accounts, partially the sources for his "artistry of dissent," underlie the five parts of "Vivas," fueling "the quality of the ideas" in the poem. A narrative impulse and a dramatic flourish, seasoned with vivid imagery ("Blood for blood, cried Tresca," an activist; "at his signal, / thousands of hands dropped red carnations and ribbons"; and so on) define Espada's "craft" and "artistic imagination," the path from atrocity to art. In "The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate," which recounts a massacre, the conquistador's "spirit scratched / and howled like a dog trapped within the bronze body" of his statue and "Spanish hands tossed feet into...
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Feb 27, 2018
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