Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Reliquenda

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RELIQUENDA, Alexandra Lytton Regalado. Beacon Press, Massachusetts, 2022, 84 pages, $16.95 paper, www.beacon.org.

Reliquenda means to abandon, relinquish, or that which must be relinquished. It’s a perfect title for this heart-thumping, amazing book about family, exile, separation, death, and identity. Salvadoran-American poet Regalado knows whereof she speaks. In the words of Reginald Dwayne Betts, who chose Reliquenda for the National Poetry Series,

Reliquenda is a rarity in that, in one book, it contains a multiplicity of longings and reckonings. Alexandra Regalado is poet as historian, and poet as that family member we all have who keeps the names in whatever holy book we name, the one who has the photo albums—and more than that, who we gather around when they begin to sing our stories.

Regalado reports that she wrote the heart of this book during the 89 days of lockdown in 2020, when she was stranded in Miami with her mother and grandmother, after the death of her father, while her husband and children were in El Salvador. The poems negotiate, linger over, and meditate on all of these themes. I visited several websites, looking for responses (so much praise), and you might start by checking out the National Poetry Series website (Reliquenda was the 2021 winner), and this interview at People Chica: https://peopleenespanol.com/chica/relinquenda-alexandra-lytton-regalado/.

Here, one of the shorter poems:

The Garden of Earthly Delights

He is imminent, they have told us, a softer way of saying
he is about to die, like the words passed away, passed
to a place that is far, not here, cannot or will not
say where. Passed, as if through a threshold, to a place
we cannot follow, unknown to us. He died. It has a thud
to it, a spade of soil, the two d’s standing at either side
like bookends, died, bracing the solitary i, the self & the e,
his initial. His signature, a perfect birdswoop of wings.
And taking him by the hand, he flexes his fingers in sleep,
as if strumming guitar strings, notes that resound
in the caves of Sacromonte, geraniums in clay pots.
A puzzle on the table, half completed, all that blue & green,
grass & sky, tiny naked bodies, towers of fleshy fruits, a carousel
of dancing animals, & from somewhere comes
the music of a guitar, notes played by an unseen hand.
The adagio echoes in that whitewashed cave as we watch him pass.

—Alexandra Lytton Regalado

Many of the poems here are multi-lingual, many are choreographed across the pages, or have lines (whole poems?) by other poets woven through them. Sometimes such poems feel gimmicky to old-school me, but I was enthralled by Regalado’s choices from page one to the end. I recently—in Demystifying the Manuscript­­: Essays and Interview on Creating a Book of Poems (edited by Susan Rich and Kelli Russell Agodon)—came across the advice to choose 5 or 10 poetry books that you would want to consult while putting your own poems into some sort of order. Reliquenda is now on my list. I found it astonishing.

You’ll find more poems and commentary on Regalado at Poets.Org and Poetry Foundation, also her website: http://www.alexandralyttonregalado.com/new-page.

 

 

Claudia Castro Luna, Cipota under the Moon

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CIPOTA UNDER THE MOON, Claudia Castro Luna. Tia Chucha Press, PO Box 328, San Fernando, CA 91341, 2022, 118 pages, $19.95 paper, www.tiachucha.org.

I blogged about Claudia Castro Luna’s This City, in 2020, while she was still Washington Poet Laureate. This year I meant to read and write a post about her book, Killing Marías: A Poem for Multiple Voices. Instead I came across her 2022 book, Cipota under the Moon, and I am so astonished by it I hardly know what to say. It is a heart-breaking, multi-lingual full-immersion experience in El Salvador—war, exile, and return. In “This Is Not a Poem,” Castro Luna begins, “Guerra doesn’t go away when the bullets stop, when the grenades go silent, when helicopters’ blades no longer kick up…,” and ends: “I highly don’t recommend it.”

I highly recommend this book.

In the early minutes of her Ted Talk, Castro Luna talks about her family’s journey, and the amazing human ability to heal from trauma.

At the Tia Chucha Press website, I found this description:

In Cipota under the Moon, Claudia Castro Luna scores a series of poems as an ode to the Salvadoran immigrant experience in the United States. The poems are wrought with memories of the 1980s civil war and rich with observations from recent returns to her native country. Castro Luna draws a parallel between the ruthlessness of the war and the violence endured by communities of color in US cities; she shows how children are often the silent, unseen victims of state-sanctioned and urban violence. In lush prose poems, musical tankas, and free verse, Castro Luna affirms that the desire for light and life outweighs the darkness of poverty, violence, and war. Cipota under the Moonis a testament to the men, women, and children who bet on life at all costs and now make their home in another language, in another place, which they, by their presence, change every day.

Here’s an example form the poems before immigration:

Garrison

Two girls slinked alongside barb-wired brick walls on their way to swimming lessons, doing their best to remain collected past the turrets stationed with armed soldiers. Ensconced in their look-outs, the troopers held their metralletas close to their bodies, as if they loved them, but not so much they would not use them ill. After our lesson, we headed home the same way we walked to the pool, guillotining chatter and laughter, scurrying along the garrison’s walls. Only the sound of our flip-flops striking our heels betrayed us. What if today’s soldiers were in a foul mood and pulled their triggers? What if they noticed our bulging bags, our weekly comings and goings, and tagged us as informants? What if, right leg, what if, left leg, we got through it that way—like prayers in a rosary—one bead, one foot in front of the other, one bead, one foot, one bead, one foot all the way home.

—Claudia Castro Luna

And here, a poem during and after:

Cloven Moon

The officer in charge of processing my family’s entrance to the U.S. stated that from that moment on my name was to be Claudia Castro. The passport says her name is Claudia Castro Luna, my mother objected. Here we use one last name, said the officer, and closed the matter with the gavel of his voice. Your moon got taken away from you, said my friend when I recounted the story. But when the officer eclipsed the Luna of my name the sensation was more like having a limb chopped off. For years I walked like that, cloven, until pen in hand, I began to weave into blank pages tamales de elote, scent of yerbabuena, spells of flor de muerto, the riot of a Tuesday market in Ahuachapán, the Nahuatl sageness of my abuela. I did not know then that weaving like this, warp of memory, weft of daring, had the power to sew back the name chopped off at an INS center on a January morning in 1981. All I know is that one day I walked into a Social Security office, took a number, and waited my turn to expand the canon of last names in this country. I pilgrimaged the department of motor vehicles, registrars’ offices, bank-teller windows, and once La Luna hung again in the firmament of my name, its light spilled beneath my skin and filtered back into the open mouths of a million pores.

—Claudia Castro Luna

Most of the poems are prose poem. A few are in El Salvadoran Spanish. Even the poems reaching back to the Eden of early childhood seem tainted, overshadowed by war. On every page, I was struck by the metaphors. “the sulphur reek of his step” (“Shade Grown”); “Violence spread like tincture inside a water glass” (“El Salvador 1980”); in a long poem, “Dios Madre,” these lines, “Cupped in his hands / his ten-year-old daughter / in her school uniform / passed from smiling / to hardened concrete.”

I hope you will further explore Castro Luna’s work on your own. Here is a review: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/reviews/157890/cipota-under-the-moon

And here, a link to a one-hour interview and reading from Cipota under the Moon:https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=5205831112787187.

Where You’ll Find Me

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On my to-do list for today is “write blog post.” So, here goes. What I’ve been up to, and a little of everything else.

I have finished my poetry manuscript. “Finished”? I finished it last April, too, and sent it out, then withdrew it from several contests. I couldn’t say why it didn’t feel ready, it simply didn’t.

A friend suggested that I not think globally, condemning the entire ms, but to instead focus on individual poems. What I actually did was ignore it. I took a class. I worked on my send-out practice. I (finally) returned to my mystery novel. Then, in October, I finished the rewrite of the mystery.

And the poems were still sitting there, muddy and neglected, their unwashed faces looking up at me.

I again found useful distractions. A short story re-write, notably. Then, I broke my arm and was unable to type.

I had been fantasizing about a writer’s retreat, or just a week anywhere in an Air BnB alone with my story and…maybe…my poems. With the retreat option off the table, I made a decision to resort to my practice from when my three daughters were small and writing felt like an edifice without a door, impossible.

I would sit with my poems for 15 minutes every morning.

Even in that first awful week with the immobilizing splint, when I couldn’t type, I could page through poems and reread them. I could mark them up and scribble revisions. After a day or two, I began setting my timer for 25 minutes-on / 5 minutes-off (the Pomodoro method) and I often found myself putting in an hour or two.

Every. Morning.

Even Christmas Eve. Even Christmas Day. If I didn’t break through to the hours, I at least set my timer and did the 25 minutes.

Last summer — while working on the novel — I gave up some time-wasting habits (TV on my iPhone; Spider Solitaire, which is my crack cocaine; listening to audio books). Or, I mostly gave them up. While working on the poems, and perhaps feeling sorry for my poor broken self, I slid back into all these habits. It took several weeks before I recognized I was self-medicating.

During my halcyon months on the novel, I had hit on a method of reworking a chapter, then recording it, sending it to my phone, and listening to that (instead of an audio book by anyone else) on my walks. This was genius, by the way. I don’t know if it will work for you, but it was a huge breakthrough for me.

At some point early in January it dawned on me that I could record the poems — especially the most troublesome ones — and listen to them while I walked. Again, big breakthrough. I was almost … there.

Then, sometime in the last week or so I found myself back at that edifice — the big, blank, doorless one.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but it felt as though I wasn’t at the foot of a blank wall, but stuck up high, poised to jump. It was despair. The poetry book — which is about the extremely emotional topic of my childhood on a farm, my parents’ deaths, the loss of the farm —  would never be done. I was trapped. The book would never be good enough. I would never be that person, that writer, who can do my story justice. Then, like someone waking up from a bad dream, I recognized where I was and I knew I had been there before.

In the past, whenever I felt this sort of despair over a writing project, I floundered around searching for someone to save me, maybe a whole committee — my steering committee — some august body to weigh in with all their considerable authority and tell me what to do.

I woke up one night — from a dream? into a memory? — of sitting in the hayfield beside our barn, and watching a foal die. (“A” foal? The foal, Brandy’s foal.) I experienced exactly what Bessel Van Der Kolk describes in his book, The Body Keeps the Score. I wasn’t remembering it, I was living it. My heart was pounding. I was wide awake, terrified, horrified. I could see my uncle’s face, hear his voice: “That mare has plenty of milk.” I could not just see him turning to walk away, I could feel him walking away from me. I could feel my own words stuck in my throat, choking me.

I am strongly considering not posting any of this.

In essence, in my pit of despair with the poetry manuscript, I saw that I needed what I needed when I was a kid on a farm — what I wasn’t able to do when I was that skinny, freckled girl who couldn’t or wouldn’t speak up and insist on her own voice, her own truth.

I needed to listen to my own counsel.

That foal was not the only loss I’ve experienced in my life, and I’ve often tried to deny its importance. But the truth is it was important, and early, a preface to adulthood and adult cares. It changed who I was, who I would grow up to become. I’ve written this story before — in poetry and prose — and sometimes I think I will never be finished writing it. The foal is (perhaps strangely) absent from this new book. In short: including her this time around seemed to tip the book over and unbalance it. Even so, whenever I fall back into this visceral memory, I know that I’m being asked to wake up to some reality and, well, own it. I am being asked to speak up.

Is the poetry manuscript now perfect? No, not even close. But it has reached a point where I’m pleased with it, where it feels possible to share it. It is out to four contests, and I have a spread sheet with several more to send to as they open and deadlines loom.

I had planned to say more — maybe something about how AI apps can’t write with your peculiar history, your emotional depth, or your brilliant sarcastic humor. I had meant to share a poem. But — for today — I think this is enough.

So that, my friends, is where you’ll find me.

Pierogis

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Last week one of my oldest cousins died. The oldest? Well, the oldest one still with us. Patricia was 86, the youngest child in this photograph from about 1937. My mother is the little girl in the middle, back row. My aunt Darlene is in the front row. I called Darlene this evening and we talked about my cousin — who was more like one of Darlene’s sisters. “She always called my mother, ‘Mother,’ and her mother, ‘Mama.’ She did that right up until the end.”

The conversation made me think about how the older people in our lives are repositories of history, of story, and it made me think about how much of that history dies, untapped.

Patricia had a son one year older than I, and another son, one year younger. Her mother, Violet, was like a second mother to my mother. I don’t think we saw a lot of Patricia’s family when I was young, though I have vivid memories of their collie, Shep.

I knew the “Mother/Mama” story. I didn’t know that my cousin’s favorite food was pierogis. My aunt Darlene is making a batch of them to take to the dinner after the graveside service. “She won’t get to eat any, but it’s the last time I can make them for her, so I’m doing it.” I remember my aunt Violet’s cabbage rolls (they are one of my specialities). But if I ever had pierogis, I don’t remember. So, I told my aunt I’d make them, too. She told me how she makes them — in great detail —  and then said, “You can find a recipe on-line.”

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/homemade-pierogi-recipe

I didn’t have all the ingredients on hand, but they turned out pretty yummy anyway 🙂

I thought of that poem by Grace Paley, “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative,” about making a pie instead of writing a poem.

I also thought of this short poem, though it isn’t especially appropriate to the occasion:

On the Death of Friends in Childhood

We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.

—Donald Justice (1925-2004)