#296: O MY AMERICA!   In 1929, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca left his native Granada to go to New York City, to study English at Columbia University.  Lorca is by any standards one of the great Spanish poets; the poems that came of that visit, gathered in The Poet in New York, represent his furthest step into surrealism.  The original methods of surrealism—what André Breton called “the omnipotence of dreams” over reason and logic, and the power of unconscious thought—eventually got dispersed, varied and watered down, to the point that the term is now used to mean just about anything weird, dreamlike or shocking.   In Lorca’s hands the mode retains much of its ability to disconcert, perhaps because it seems both an extension and intensification of something that was native to his earlier voice—the beautiful early work in cante jondo, the terse, often mysterious suites and songs—and the collection is considered by some to be his greatest work.  For me, well, I feel dim and plebeian whenever I say this, but I’ve always found most surrealist work overwrought, tiresome and, worst, smokable (as Keats said of his poem “Isabella”)—too easy to send up, too much given to making me snort, giggle, and roll my eyes.  I grew up when everyone was doing parodies of beatnik poetry, and I find, even when reading Lorca, I’m not able to get the parodies out of my mind; this part of his work just stays a bit out of my range of hearing.  My other complaint of Poet in New York is that you get a good deal of the Poet but very little that is specifically or recognizably New York.  I doubt that anyone actually living in Harlem, Coney Island, or Riverside Drive could read the poems in which Lorca invokes those places and say, “Ah, yeah, he certainly nailed that one.”  This is to give the work well less than its due—maybe surrealism cannot accommodate that kind of photographic realism--but my complaint stands.  Perhaps the waking reality of New York’s daily existence is simply more fabulous, more incredible (in those words’ original meanings) than most people’s dreams.

       Just shy of a hundred years later, another poet from Granada, Fernando Valverde, came to the United States, to “La Tierra Prometida” whose promise lingers like a despoiled shadow existence, haunting people’s hopes like the chancery suit in Bleak House.  Charles Simic said of the resulting book, America, “In a country like ours, that learns nothing because it remembers nothing, these poems are a reminder of what we have lived through and what kind of poetry we have been missing from our lives.”  I think this is accurate.   In a central sequence Valverde visits the sites of our recent mass shootings—Columbine, Sandy Hook, Pulse—which, being a subject that could be tackled for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways, is one measure of his gifts and the book’s depth of thought and feeling.  This is a poetry of social concern whose methods are genuinely poetic rather than any kind of disguised sociology—a visitor, at a time when Spanish has become a naturalized second voice of American verse, of someone who sees us perhaps better than we see ourselves.  I know of hardly any other poetry that has expressed the America that appalls us despite our love, frightens us despite our daily comforts, that tears at us like the sight of a wounded parent.  He invokes the humans who have been most broken and haunted by America—Poe, Kerouac, King, Kurt Cobain—and it’s another measure of Valverde’s gifts that he speaks of these subjects without any air of grandstanding or appropriation.  He deals with his subjects vividly, with great power of evocation—the subjects are never smothered in his perceptions, as I complained of with Lorca’s New York. What might have been a mere moment of respite, a visit to Eagle Pond—a sequence of poems for Donald Hall, then very near the end of his life—retains the gravity and kindness of his poems on more fearsome topics.  America, splendidly translated by Carolyn Forche, has left me a bit winded, deeply moved, and opened up for me again the vision and questions of my country.  I grew up up at the edges of the counterculture in the sixties and seventies, when poets and other writers were burning with those questions—America was the subject, the obsession of the day. I believe Valverde’s poems, this visitor’s visions of our old and new violences,  may stand with those as equals.

       A nearly-personal postscript to the subject of one of Valverde’s poems: when the shooting at the gay bar in Pulse, Florida, was reported, the original number of deaths was given as 48 people (a forty-ninth was later added).  At the time the Book Barn employed 24 people, and it struck the Barn owner, Randi White, that it was as if the whole staff had been killed—twice.  Since then the Barn has flown the rainbow flag every day, despite occasional complaint, one theft, and occasional comic misunderstanding.  One older man simply assumed it meant that everyone who worked at the Barn must be gay.  O my America!

       And, whatever distance I might feel from surrealism, I do remember one day in school, probably the late sixties, that seemed a perfect vindication of its methods.  I was sitting in on a course in film history, and the teacher was showing a print of “Un Chien Andalou,” the first of two film collaborations by Lorca’s countrymen, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.   Here is Wikipedia’s summary of its first scene:  “A man sharpens a razor and tests it on his thumb. He gazes at the moon, which is about to be bisected by a thin cloud. A young woman stares straight ahead as he brings the razor near her eye. A cut occurs to the cloud passing in front of the moon, and then to a close-up of the razor slicing open her eye.” (The eye was actually from a dead calf.)  At the slice of the knife a collective roar of disgust went up from the entire auditorium, followed—split-second beat—by a short, wild, helpless burst of laughter.  The stated aim of surrealism—trailing down from and transcending the old French habit of writing “pour épater les bourgeois” (to shock the bougies), was to use violent imagery to release the observer’s energy, to escape the enervation of middle class life.  That wild, relieving burst of laughter in the theatre that day always made me wonder if maybe the Surrealists weren’t on to something.

--America, by Fernando Valverde.  Translated with an introduction by Carolyn Forche.  Copper Canyon Press, 2021.

--For Federico García Lorce, the Collected Poems, in the revised edition by Christian Maurer (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2002) is the be-all and end-all.  With its choice of the best translations from a dozen poets, it could not have been done better.

--Both “Un Chien Andalou” and the later Buñuel-Dalí collaboration, “L’Age d’Or,” can be seen on Youtube.