Winter Poems Along The Rio Grande [Paperback]

. . . . and, so begins Jimmy Santiago Baca's volume _Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande_. These lines are lyrical, that is, flowing like music--or a river--sort of Whitmanesque in that the lines are unrhymed free verse. I compared this Winter Poems with his earliest work, and I can see how he had to discipline his words into a tighter line length in order to communicate what was in him. (My apologies if this sounds a bit awkward.) Certainly, Baca has experienced pain in his life, and this work is a lyrical way of coming to terms with what all life is about: forgiving others, forgiving oneself, and moving forward on a higher, spiritual, path. Read this work to see that Baca goes deep into his experience of life; certainly, the river teaches him even in winter, the hardest season.

Several times, Baca uses the word `sadness'; he doesn't mean melancholy, but sadness is more like an intense moment in which he has paused to look back on himself and to think about human condition. His sadness is an offering to the reader. How the poet rises from the past really teaches me. "And what happened," Baca writes, "was that I learned to use the pain / to flow out into the world and create / a world through the pain, from the pain . . ." (34).

Baca has said he is not a "slam poet"--besides, he's about 58 years old. While slam poetry has its own energy appropriate for younger people, the reader can see how a more traditional notion of poetic line and form was what Baca needed in order to be heard by his intended audience (the people his age who were in his life as well as the people who incarcerated him). Baca doesn't write the formalized structure of, say, Levi Romero, or E. A. "Tony" Mares--and at times I think Baca could use their discipline--but he didn't have their lives, either.

There are so many lines in this volume that come out of a life lived spiritually, reaching for wisdom:

"Sadness and happiness
embrace me as I wake each morning
arriving, a freed prisoner
given a big bear hug by these brothers and sisters
who do not blame or pity me,
asking only from me to treat life
the same as air treats wings,
dry channels treat water,
spring treats budding leaves" (18).

In a way, Baca is saying "be the change you want to see in the world." Give him a listen!

If I still have your attention here, let me say that Baca's lines, here, are lyrical for a number of reasons. Over the years I've been reading Maulpoix on "Contemporary Lyricism in France," and though I'm making an unconventional comparison, Baca's lyrics are also what French poets have been doing: a resistance to the negativity of the world, a turn toward spirituality, an insistence on a quality of the sublime which surpasses the self (symbolized here by the Rio Grande), and a recognition of the interdependence of writing and life. Baca's work--whether he thinks about this or not--is also about the era in which we live, when young people are often channeled into crime rather than into college.

As a final note, I wish the front cover photo had been from the bosque along the Rio Grande near Albuquerque--since that is the region in which Baca lives and breathes and writes--not the Mexican-American border. Who at New Directions makes those decisions for cover photos? Perhaps a new edition will have a cover of the Rio in the Burque area, a book cover more appropriate to the poetry.

A superb account of this stage of Santiago Baca's development as a poet. I first learned of the author through Bill Moyers's PBS Series, The Language of Life. I was immediately attracted to his hard edge, his economy and agility with words, his willingness to stare life down, unblinking. I found his autobiography, A Place to Stand, inspiring. And the recent bi-lingual selection of his poems intriguing. But what has most pleased me is that he has not fixed himself in one metaphorical place and refused to move from it. He seems the embodiment of the old idea that, whatever you do, you should do with all your energy and all your focus so that you can see it to its natural end and then move on. In Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande, he has pushed through the fabled runner's wall and found himself in a deist's natural world where, with the proper focus, attention and respect, everything has a message for him about the task of being human: the river, of course, but also the mallards, egrets, and herons, and the trees, the trail itself and those he passes on it, the dawn and dusk. No longer does the poet look to the world of people to shape himself, to inform himself. He has suddenly tuned into a new, more exciting discourse in nature and gladly takes that lighter, more joyful message back to the world of his lovers and friends. Sound a little superficial? Perhaps Romatic nature worship warmed over? A little "Woo! Woo!" and New Age-y? It's not. It's pure. It's sincere. I had the genuine impression that I was in the presence of a man who discovered a way to accept the entire world, fortes and foibles, in a more peaceable vision of himself and me, as a co-inhabiter of that world.

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