#296: O MY AMERICA!   In 1929, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca went to New York  City, to study English at Columbia University.  The poems that came of that visit, gathered in The Poet in New York, represents his furthest step into the mode of surrealism, summed up a few years earlier by Andre Breton as “the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca went to New Yorkomnipotence of dreams” over reason and logic, heavily influenced by Freud and the power of unconscious thought, expressed by a use of automatic writing and hypnosis.  The original methods of surrealism 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 poems, the mode retains much of its first ability to disconcert, perhaps because it seems an almost natural extension of something that was native to Lorca’s earlier voice, 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 and giggle.  I grew up when everyone was doing parodies of beatnik poetry, and I think I might not be able to get the parodies out of my mind; this part of Lorca’s work just stays a little 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’ve doubt that anyone actually living in Harlem, Coney Island, or Riverside Drive could read the poems in which Lorca invokes those places and go, “Ah, yeah, he certainly nailed that one.”  This is to give the work well less than its due, but my complaint stands.  Maybe the waking reality of New York’s daily existence is 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 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 has 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.