Review by Eric Howard
XICANO DUENDE: A SELECT ANTHOLOGY
by Alurista
Bilingual Review Press
PO Box 875303
Tempe AZ 85287-5303
ISBN-13 978-1-931010-72-6
2011, 145 pp., $16.00
www.amazon.com
Xicano Duende offers a summary of the poetic career of bilingual Chicano poet Alurista, with selections starting with Nationchild plumaroja (1972) and continuing to his tenth book of poetry, Tunaluna (2010). Published on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of his first book, Floricanto en Aztlán, this collection is an inspirational exploration of the cultural and political issues that are essential to his personal language, which is also a people’s language.
Some of Alurista’s fluid, sinuous poems are in English, some are in Spanish, and some are a mix. In the 1970s in San Diego when Alurista was writing and teaching there, I eagerly read Floricanto en Aztlán, which has since its publication been assigned the label “experimental.” I place the word in quotation marks because in the Southwestern United States, it is natural for many to mix English and Spanish in a conversation or a sentence. The introduction by Rigoberto Gonzalez explores how Alurista’s poetry embodies the language of Aztlán and celebrates “the Chicano in all of us.” Alurista sometimes directs his polemic at highly specific targets, such as former governer of California Pete Wilson:
wilsonitis is an ingrown
epidemic
Other poems are all about the lyricism:
abotona tu vientre, maja
easels b ready
to capture flight…
cherish thigh
hug torso
b one
with duende within
discover
sun risa raza roja
Alurista also connects the personal and the political. One person’s demons are a reflection of an entire people’s struggles:
suicide is no longer a personal
choice
and in a poem about heroin addiction, he recalls:
i cook it ‘n’ i wash
my dish. i cook not for myself. i cook for us cora, zón
zón. zón. cora. zón. sleep at the wheel burping and
bumping into police cars frozen in their black and white.…
revolution
is somewhere awaiting to be awakened lovingly and
mercilessly
In “ya estufas” Alurista calls for revolution:
el cielo colorado
witnessed a dusk
of murals
painted
in the spirit
of the fallen
brown dry leaves
of autumn
las cananas en
la tarde
aparecieron and
thousands
of bullets
turned
to flowers
One of Alurista’s great strengths is his lyrical playfulness, which he enhances by switching languages as needed for sound and sense. For example in “ex-ostion” he begins by exploiting the sonorousness of Spanish:
ex-ostión, no se diga tiburón,
and the shallow waters
of shellfish para qué preguntar
si la mariposa nació con alas
then switches to English for the high rhetoric of the conclusion:
desirelessness
cannot be purchased, invoked
or dreamed, falcons do
not worry about the plunge
This mix of playfulness and seriousness also serves, in Alurista’s many political poems, to humble enemies of la raza and its anarchic freedom. In “convencido,” he concludes: “la sal sudor de nuestro pueblo acribilla cualquier bob osada.” Alurista’s poetry is embodied in and embodies his Chicano language, and Gonzalez appropriately calls Alurista’s puns intralingual rather than interlingual. Alurista’s poetry continues to inspire, and this anthology, with seventeen illustrations and a representative sample from all of his books but one, belongs in the libraries of all poets of the real and imaginary Southwest.
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Eric Howard is a magazine editor and former bilingual press editor who has published poetry in Birmingham Poetry Review, Caveat Lector, Conduit, Gulf Stream Magazine, Plainsong, and The Sun. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the Writers at Work poetry workshop.