I first heard L. Luis López read his poetry a year ago at the Ghost Ranch “Coffee House.” Coffee House is an open-mic event held Thursday nights to highlight the diverse talents of that week’s participants. I remember Luis standing at the front of the large hall where Coffee House is held, clearing his throat before reading. The room got quiet, even the kids. As he read his voice rolled up-and-down in the sing-songy way los Chicanos de Nuevo México talk, especially when they’re back home with family.
When I went to Ghost Ranch this past week, I arrived at the open-air studio where my Hebrew Scripture Retablo workshop was taught and there at a table in the center of the room was Luis López. It turns out he not only writes poetry — he teaches a class on mythology and the night sky at Ghost Ranch, he’s taken traditional Spanish Colonial tinware for the past five years, and he was enrolled in the same retablo painting class that I was taking.
A year ago Luis read from his book Musings of a Barrio Sack Boy, which recalls his childhood, ages 6 to 16, in Albuquerque’s South Broadway neighborhood. This past week he read two new poems from a book yet to be published. He gave me permission to publish both poems on red Ravine. What strikes me about his words is their poignancy, their all-at-once sadness and humor.
The cadence in this first poem summons a certain sense of heaviness I imagine one might carry after years of seeing a family member live day-in-day-out with schizophrenia.
Salvador Quintana
(for Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)
by L. Luis López
When on his meds, Salvador Quintana
leaves Rosy his Chevy
in the garage, walks to, sits
at McDonalds,
drinks coffee, eats apple pie, smokes
a cigarette,
drinks coffee, eats cherry pie, smokes
a cigarette,
drinks coffee, eats apple pie, smokes
a cigarette.
Salvador Quintana when on his meds.
When off his meds, Salvador Quintana
takes Rosy his Chevy
out of the garage, drives to, sits
at Joe’s Bar,
drinks wine, eats chips, smokes
a cigarette,
drinks beer, eats peanuts, smokes
a cigarette,
drinks whiskey, eats sausage, smokes
a cigarette.
Salvador Quintana when off his meds.
But this was not always Salvador Quintana.
Before he was twenty
he played center field for the Gold Sox,
drew cartoons,
made people laugh and laugh when
he mimicked
Cantinflas, Jerry Lewis, sang
like Dean Martin or Little Richard,
loved to dance,
had his Dulcinea deep in his heart, had
marriage in mind.
This before twenty was Salvador Quintana.
But his Dulcinea chose another,
Dulcinea chose another,
she chose another,
chose another.
Purity of love began to decay deep in his
heart, anger festered deep
in his brain,
voice upon voice upon voice arose,
unleashing word upon word,
talking all at once, all at once, until
something snapped, snapped
in his head. He saw giants whirling
on the horizon,
saw fearsome knights
riding out of the dark, dark woods,
saw giants whirling on the horizon,
heard from the voices
that acid licked from the back of stamps
would make the giants
friendly,
heard that sips
of red liquid from the bottle
would make fearsome knights
riding out of the dark, dark woods kindly.
I have known this Salvador Quintana
forty years,
I knew the other Salvador Quintana
before he was twenty.
I saw the change from that Salvador Quintana
to the present Salvador Quintana.
Today Salvador Quintana and I will
leave Rosy his Chevy
in the garage, we will walk to, then sit
at McDonalds,
drink coffee, eat apple pie, smoke
a cigarette,
drink coffee, eat cherry pie, smoke
a cigarette,
drink coffee, eat apple pie, smoke
a cigarette.
It’s Salvador Quintana’s birthday.
I will celebrate with my brother on his sixtieth.
Luis prefaced this second poem by saying it was about his very critical father. Later, when Luis talked about his poetry during a break in our retablo class, he said writers often write about their parents as a way to deal with issues carried from childhood. This wasn’t that poem for Luis, although he has written a lot of poetry about his father. The following poem is light-hearted and captures, I think, a sense of acceptance.
so I left him fuming
by L. Luis López
why do you come here from that South
saying y’all
and not hardly speaking no Spanish
my Dad says
you went away speaking good Engllish
and good Spanish
and
now you come here with y’all and
down the holler instead of alla
or over there
and I say Dad I just like
to talk like where I am
so now I will say ese and alla
and to get more on his nerves said como esta usted y’all
mon pere because I spent part
of my South in Louisiana
among the cajuns
and he said I mean he really
said nada and lit a Chesterfield
and that meant he said nada
even more
so I left him fuming
I asked Luis about his path to becoming a poet. He told me he started writing at age 30 because he liked to describe the people around him. His first pieces were plays. He also wrote short stories before finally landing on poetry.
Luis told me he gets he gets up every morning at 4:30 and writes 2-3 hours. Every poem he writes by hand first then inputs it into the computer, and as he does so he begins the revision process. He said he loves revising his poems and knows when he’s done once the poem “clicks.”
Luis was born in Albuquerque in 1938. He currently lives in Grand Junction, CO, where he teaches English and Classical Languages at Mesa State College. He hosts a poetry writing and reading group that meets monthly at the downtown library. You can catch him at Ghost Ranch most summers, where you can watch the night sky with him or listen to him read his poems at Coffee House. Oh, and if you see Luis, make sure to ask him to show you his retablos. It turns out, he is a wonderful folk artist in addition to everything else.
I wish I could have heard him at the “Coffee House”. I only caught the last couple of acts after getting back late from hiking class.
Enjoying your blog!
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Hey, you guys weren’t so noisy, and besides, it was like having *my* family close by! We should coordinate next time we go, eh?
Thanks for dropping by the blog!! Glad to know you made it home safe.
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What a rich, rich contribution from LLL via you, yb. Thanks for getting permission to publish these poems. Both are very different, yet so similar how much one can hear an actual human voice. The repetition in the first poem of “smokes a cigarette” and “chose another” is very effective — hauntingly so. His rhythm and cadence reminds me alot of Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks, especially Brooks’ poem, “We Real Cool”:
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
So few words. One huge wallop.
With LLL, one image of a smoking cigarette over and over. One huge message about mental illness — without ever really naming it. That’s the gift of poetry. Interesting the cigarette image is used in both. Also interesting what he said about writers writing about parents. Nadine Gordimer, the 1991 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, recommended that we write “as though our parents are already dead.” What do you think of that advice? Is it really possible to escape their shadow while they are still alive?
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I love the Brooks poem. Do you have these floating around in your head? I’m amazed by your ability to pull these out. You are encyclopedic! And I do see the connection between the two poets and their styles.
Re: Gordimer’s advice, is writing “as though our parents are already dead” another way of saying, Tell the truth? If so, I think it’s sound advice. I’m amazed by how some authors I’ve read — Mary Carr or Alexandra Fuller, just to name two — characterize their still living parents in their memoirs. The kinds of dirty laundry that gets aired. I think it’s courageous and, from my own perspective, doing so humanizes the parents more than it denigrates them.
But what else might Gordimer have meant if it weren’t as simple as, Tell the truth? I wouldn’t want to imagine my parents dead when I write (my superstitions would kick in and I’d fear some karmic retribution for going there). I suppose it could mean, Write as though your parents will never read what you’re writing. But why not say that? Something about the being dead is significant. Like whatever it is you have to say about them will be dead, too, once you write it out?
I wish Luis were able to expand on his advice about dealing with parents and their stuff through writing. Maybe he will, although he’s teaching at Ghost Ranch this week and might not be able to connect and comment.
What do you think, sharonimo? Have you acted on Gordimer’s advice? (I know you have with one essay I’ve read.) Did writing about your parents change how you related to your parents?
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Don’t give me too much credit. I’ve been keeping a journal since 1973 and a diary since 1978 — and the journal tends to become like a scapbook. Every time I read a quote and/or poem I like, I copy it (by hand) into the journal. That being said, I did memorize the Brooks’ poem. I mean, what a line!: “We Jazz June” — I was born in that month. Also, it’s short. Like the reason why I memorized, John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”
A book that had a big impact on me with regard to parents and writing, etc. is Reading, Writing and Leaving Home: Life on the Page, by Lynn Freed. It’s out in paper back now and I highly recommend it. I copied large portions of it into my journal, but can’t seem to locate them right now. That being said, my mother’s personality is so huge and her shadow so wide, I still feel as though she is peering over my shoulder when I write about my childhood — even after decades of therapy. I do believe that her death will be liberating for my writing. I had a painful revelation last week brought on by a recent painful encounter: whenever my mother saw me writing when I was a kid, she always said, “You’re so self-indulgent.” That stuck like a barnacle. It hurt me then and now hurts me and and others through me.
Of course, I may die before she does, so I should just write, write, write. Any concrete suggestions on how to write through fear? Natalie Goldberg’s workshops help in ways that are inexplicable to me. It something about the silence and the way it teaches you to accept yourself.
In looking through my journal for some Freed quotes, I did come across this one from William Zinsser’s, Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past:
“Whatever we call the form — autobiography, memoir, personal habits, family history — writing about one’s life is a powerful human need. Who doesn’t want to leave behind some record of his or her accomplishment and thoughts and emotions? If it’s a family history it will have the further value of telling your children and your grandchildren who they are and what heritage they came from. Writers are the custodians of memory, and memories have a way of dying with their owner. One of the saddest sentences I know is, ‘I wish I had asked my mother about that.'”
We are the custodians of memory, says Zinsser. Okay, what if what you are remembering is pile after pile of sh!t, pardon my laziness. I feel like I spend so much time making the piles smaller and smaller in order to get to the part that is just me — and not my mother and me. I don’t want to die having SURVIVED MY MOTHER. I want to have lived BEING ME. That’s the key, no? Let me tell you — it’s very, very hard and demands 24/7 mindfulness.
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I enjoyed the poems very much. Writing about family can be such a monumental task built of ephemeral stuff.
I’m grappling with my own old issues of late, and debating whether it’s worth pouring the notes into the pc, and then paring away everything that doesn’t work or ring true.
Thanks for the post.
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One place I feel safe in writing as truthfully as I can to now to is in my small writing group. (I have two writing groups — a new, online one, and then one here in town where we get together. It’s this second one where I let it all out.) I’ve written about things I’m not sure I’d publish, but at least I’m writing it out.
Powerful lines, sharonimo: I don’t want to die having SURVIVED MY MOTHER. I want to have lived BEING ME. I don’t know a whole lot about your childhood but I know enough that I want to know more. Writing about oneself and by extension one’s family can help others in a myriad of ways. I got an email from a friend who told me he wasn’t big on poetry but he really liked Luis Lopez’s poems. (Leave a comment!, I told him.) So there was someone who was moved by a medium that doesn’t normally speak to him. (BTW, I could relate to Luis’ father. These older Chicano men were very critical. They came from penitente stock, those self-flagellating men who learned that to criticize was to improve.)
sharonimo, re: that piece about what your mother said about writing being self-indulgent – writing about oneself is often self-indulgent, don’t you think? Blogs are self-indulgent. That’s part of the point. This notion that anyone who wants to can tell a story, impart some knowledge, fawn over himself or herself, rant. The democratization of art and writing. Literally, free to write the worst sh*t in America. (Which we try hard NOT to do on this blog, but just read The Cult of the Amateur to get an earful on that whole perspective.)
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ombudsben: i think you should take a stab. let us know if there’s anything you’d be interested in publishing on red Ravine. Of course, you have your own blog and lots of readers there, but this can be another option.
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I just “googled” The Cult of the Amateur (I wonder how the author, Keen, would feel about that) because I had vaguely heard of it, but didn’t know a whole lot. I read the NY Times review. Seems like Keen comes down pretty hard on Web 2.0 which makes me want to both read it and avoid it, given my own misgivings (more like discomfort) about technology. [Have you read this book, by the way, and do you recommend ?] What is the fine line between “democratization of art and writing” and “the worst sh!t in America”?
Back to my mother — could it be that she grew up in a time when spending time alone, reading and/or writing, seemed like a luxury? Or self-indulgent? I don’t think she ever had a moment to herself except when she was sleeping. And the more I ponder all of this, I wonder why she doesn’t call pundits like Rush Limbaugh (whom she listens to every day) and Bill O’Reilly (whom she watches every evening) self-indulgent. There’s a heck of a lot of ranting going on during their shows.
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No, I haven’t read the book. What I know of it I gleaned from an NPR interview with the author as well as reactions from the blogosphere.
The way I see it, an outgrowth of democratization is that people will publish what they publish. Buyer beware, although cream does rise to the top.
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Hey I am in New Mexico! Yeeha!
I liked these poems when I read them the other day. Most of the time, I don’t enjoy poetry, but I could understand these. Fun to read.
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So glad you made it safely to o’ fair new mexico!!
Yes, these poems are grounded, both in terms of language and content. Very much like the man who wrote them.
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