By Bill Nevins
"Los ojos de me memoria. Minds eye dances. They can only take your soul if you let them." — Priscilla Baca y Candelaria
"Poetry is the sacred way to touch the fabric of peoples' souls in a way that lets them take the stage and dance. Tell your own story. Don't let someone else tell it for you." — Jimmy Santiago Baca
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico, USA — "Poeta! Si! Soy! I am street poet!", shouted New Mexico Chicana rebel writer Priscilla Baca y Candelaria, clenched fist raised before several hundred stunned literary counselors and professors gathered here on May 5 during the 20th annual conference of the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT).
A mother, teacher and farmer from the Atrisco Land Grant, Candelaria caught the well-dressed crowd's attention. She then treated them to her funny, angry Spanish/English poem, "Street Poet" (from her book, La Resolana), laced with political double-entendres and hot desert spice.
Candelaria's blistering working-class jeremiad jolted her audience awake like a firecracker. Wearing T-shirt, jeans, sandals and a curandera's (healer's) small medicine bag, she used lilting bilingual verse to skewer the smug ignorance of academic bureaucrats who sit in the Anglophilic ivory towers of the University of New Mexico and similar neo-colonial enclaves, placidly ignoring the outcry of suffering poor families and their "street poets" just a short distance south and west, across the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo bridges.
Cross those bridges and you will meet the so-called Third World, up close and personal. Tourists generally shun that very real, if too-often silenced, world. But this night, its voice was heard sharp and clear in the plush surroundings of an elegant Albuquerque conference centre.
Candelaria, with her sister "street poets" Maria Leyba and Yosa Alaniz, spoke from el corazon (the heart), of the besieged barrios (neighbourhoods) and Native lands that lie so close and yet so far from the booming modern cities of the US south-west. They spoke in defence of their proud, poor gente (people), who struggle in a very real, very bloody border war to preserve ancient indigenous traditions of community, trust, peace and generosity against the multiple threats of armed cocaine-heroin gangs, rapacious real-estate racketeers, bad schools and a brutish "conveyor belt" police-prison system.
By the end of this stormy, visionary "poetry reading", there was scarcely a dry eye in the room, as the well-heeled and well-intentioned literary theorists of the NAPT found themselves face to face with the stark realities of poor peoples' lives as they are lived daily in "hidden corners" of the USA, circa 2000.
"They woke us up!", commented NAPT founding board member Dr Charlie Rossiter after the May 5 reading. "Those south-west street poets gave us a hard slap in the face. And, I'll tell you, man, we needed it! That was the liveliest poetry reading we've had in years. It gets us back to the reasons why we started the NAPT in the first place, which was to reach out to people, to touch them and to help them when and where we can! To go where they live! I am so excited about this! It's like a new dawn for us! Like a trumpet call to get off our arses, stop dreaming and just do it!"
That eager listening, and growing excitement, continued May 6, when the NAPT conference featured a reading and extended workshop by Jimmy Santiago Baca — preeminent poet, screenwriter and champion of the USA's most hard-pressed, hard-bitten and hard-working survivors.
Baca is a world-famous and widely honoured Chicano/Apache prison-survivor, teacher, newspaper columnist, movie actor, poet and novelist. Most recently he has applied his immense energies to helping US working folks, of all ages and skin colours, to find their public voices.
Long a mentor to barrio and ghetto writers, including Priscilla Baca y Candelaria and her Street Poet comrades (as well as younger hip-hop voices like Jude Sena, Mike "360" Ipiotis and Los Angeles poets Carina Olivas and Efrem Lopez, who also read at the conference), Baca is now engaged with the United Steel Workers Union in a project to support veteran workers in telling their stories of prolonged struggle (often through four or five generations) for economic justice and a decent life. Those stories, told through poems, stories and straight-ahead, no bullshit reminiscences, will be published soon by Grove-Atlantic as Steel Works.
Baca read from his many collections, among them Immigrants in Our Own Land, Black Mesa Poems and his latest, Set This Book on Fire! (Cedar Hill Press). Asked how he reconciles the inherent gentleness of poetry with the justifiable outrage and fury of young people, prisoners, AIDS sufferers and embattled workers with whom he writes, Baca replied calmly, "Writing is not so much a sublimation of rage and grief as it is a creative dance. Writing can take you out of yourself just long enough to deactivate the explosive fuse and let you stand in the moment of your creation. I tell my students and colleagues in writing to rage into the page and let it become a waterfall. It's all about keeping that flow going, keeping that light inside burning."
To divert those torrents of creative energy from racist, sexist and self-destructive violence and addictions, and towards the real fight for justice, freedom and peace was the true theme of this extraordinary conference. It is to be hoped that the 2001 Conference, to be held in Washington, D.C., will witness further advances made toward that fine goal. Venceremos!
For information on the National Association for Poetry Therapy, contact Charlie Rossiter at <posey@juno.com> or visit the NAPT web site at <http://www.poetrytherapy.org>. Jimmy Santiago Baca's web site address is <http://www.swcp.com/~baca/>. Information on poems and performances by Priscilla Baca y Candelaria and other multilingual word-warriors of Southwest Street Poet!/Si Soy Poeta! may be obtained by writing to <ceilidhmoon@yahoo.com>.
[Bill Nevins is a journalist, poet and sometime musician who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]