The Elegant Variation

GUEST REVIEW - DEATH OF A MEXICAN AND OTHER POEMS

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we are pleased to present the following guest review.  We're having intermittent internet problems, so we hope to back to add cover art and purchase links.

Death of a Mexican and Other Poems
By Manuel Paul López
Bear Star Press
96 pp. (paperback),
$16.00

GUEST REVIEW BY DANIEL OLIVAS

Founded in 1996 by Beth Spencer, Bear Star Press has committed itself to publishing the best poetry it can attract from the Mountain and Pacific time zones, as well as Alaska and Hawaii. Each year, to assist it in its mission, the press awards the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize ($1,000 and publication) to a writer from the region. This year, the winner is Manuel Paul López from the border town of El Centro, California, for his debut collection, “Death of a Mexican and Other Poems”. And no wonder: López surprises and moves the reader with poems that are filled with great humor and playful imagery. All the while, he displays a deep understanding of our never-ending quest for self-invention.

López offers a prologue with “The Poet and the Tía,” which sets the tone for the collection:

That boy of yours, Consuelo,
he sure is sensitive.
What’s wrong with him?
Every time he leaves the house
he comes back wet:
puddles on the floor,
clothes a sopping mess,
tosiendo como un burro enfermo.
We live in a desert for godsakes!
How does he get so wet?
Where does he find such sad-looking rain?

Many of the pieces that follow are prose poems, mini-stories with protagonists, no matter how silly and self-absorbed, fighting to assert themselves culturally, artistically and emotionally. In “Mi Cantito,” the teenage narrator suffers taunts from his peers because he cannot speak Spanish as well as they do. Even his family is embarrassed by this boy’s tongue-tied attempts to articulate the simplest of Spanish phrases:

“My nana used to massage my sluggish tongue with warm hands, / thumbing, pulling, wringing out the Spanish. / It was the antidote, she’d say, for Parkinson’s, cancer, and / Tío Chuy’s twelve-pack-a-day drinking problem.”

López fearlessly plays with poetic form to tell his stories. For example, “Tres Generaciónes” begins with a section entitled, “Discography of a Brown Boy” which delineates the music that made the narrator’s heart sing:

“Abbey Road / Thriller / Bach / José Alfredo Jiménez / Marvin Gaye / Stevie Wonder / José Feliciano.”

The poem’s next section, entitled “An Incomplete Chronology,” covers the period of 1975 to 2002, and is a lament for his grandmother’s ill health. Unable to relieve her suffering, he turns to the work of the late author of the classic “The Iceworker Sings and Other Poems” (Bilingual Press):

“I read Andrés Montoya’s poems as if / his words from the other side could somehow soothe her pain like the nopal she used on my / childhood knee-scrape.”

From art comes comfort and maybe even healing. López possesses an uncanny ability to create absurd characters who, nonetheless, invite us to share and even sympathize with their angst. In “Go, Nijinsky, Go,” the narrator introduces us to his Tío Rally, a temperamental choreographer whose wife has abandoned him and their daughter, Lola. Tío Rally focuses on shaping Lola into a true dancer, an artist, frantically training both her body and mind:

“’Así, así, así!’ Tío spit out, as he rehearsed with his daughter, his movements a / moving origami of limbs.”

And again, the late Andrés Montoya offers solace, a sense of hope. Tío Rally writes a letter to the poet, first singing his praises (buttering him up, one might surmise), and then offering a little postscript revealing his true purpose: “Please pass on to God that Lola needs an extra lift in the second act.” “Death of a Mexican” is filled with sly humor and comes at the reader with a lyrical intensity usually not seen in debut collections. No doubt it is a book that López’s muse, the late Andrés Montoya, would have joyously welcomed.

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books including "Devil Talk: Stories" (Bilingual Press, 2004). He is the editor of "Latinos in Lotus Land: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature," forthcoming from Bilingual Press in 2007. His Web site is www.danielolivas.com and he may be reached at [email protected]. This review first appeared in the El Paso Times.

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* According to Physorg.com, "A team of researchers that includes scholars from the University of Massachusetts Amherst is using computerized analysis of the writing of William Shakespeare to dispel lingering doubts about his authorship of many works and to trace the outlines of his total body of compositions."  This is the kind of thing Tom Stoppard has a good deal of fun with in Arcadia.

* Giving a whole new meaning to the word "shortlist" (shoot us, we couldn't resist), the Aboriginal Book Award finalists have been announced,

* The Irish Examiner brings tidings of Colm Toibin's appointment to the Arts Council.

The council was set up in 1951 to promote the knowledge, appreciation and practice of the arts in Ireland. It is a voluntary body of 12 members, and the chair, Ms Braiden, who are appointed by the Arts Minister for terms of five years.

The members include poet Theo Dorgan, actress Rosaleen Linehan and acclaimed author John McGahern, who passed away earlier this year, was also a member at the time of his death.

* Today marks the passing of John Dos Passos.

* Some old French police files have been published, providing some interesting looks at 19th and 20th century writers and poets.

Victor Hugo was a miserly money-grubber, poet Arthur Rimbaud was "a monstrosity" and Paul Verlaine was "a worthless human being" -- according to Paris police.

The unflattering portraits of France's 19th century literary giants are just some of the juicy morsels found in long-forgotten Paris police files recently published in book form.

* The Huffington Post on Tom Stoppard's Rock n' Roll.

* Maurice Sendak profiled.  He is not, repeat not, a monster writer.

A CLASS EVEN WE'D ENJOY

This profile of Tom Lutz - the new director of UC Riverside's MFA program - namechecks our pal Laila Lalami in a glimpse of what Lutz is hoping to achieve out in the desert climes.

Started last year, the Palm Desert MFA program is targeted at working adults and has a dual focus: creative and screen writing. Students work in a primary and secondary medium and get hands-on experience, for example, shooting a scene as part of screenwriting classes.

"If you're going be a screenwriter, it's a good idea to know about poetry," Lutz said. "If you're going to write poetry, it's a good idea to know about screenwriting, the most important form of narrative today."

His plans to create a top-level program include short, intensive courses with emerging writers like Laila Lalami, author of of a well-received first novel, "Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits."

ONLINE BOOK FAIR

We'll be one of the participating bloggers in next week's Love of Reading Online Book Fair.   We'll be joined by the likes of The Literary Saloon and Ron Hogan, and we're excited about the idea of a book fair that you needn't be in Brooklyn (or Westwood) to get to.  Check in often from October 3rd through 5th to see what the future of book fairs might look like ...

DEPT. OF CURIOSITY

Poets and Writers offers a searchable database of writers and their agent contacts, as well as reading availability.

Apparently, Thomas Pynchon is available for readings.

(Thanks to Stephan Clark for the heads up.)

BIRNBAUM v. JONES (REDUX)

We're slowly getting up to speed this morning (old hungover bones being prone to creaking), so keep your feedreaders running, posts will be of the hit-and-run variety today.  But many thanks to all who commented and emailed with birthday wishes.

In the meantime, you can't do much better than to check out Robert Birnbaum's talk with one of his favorite authors, Edward P. Jones, in which the two discuss his new story collection, novels vs stories, his creative process, his story "Spanish in the Morning" Alfred Hitchcock, the perils and distractions of success, having fans, his imagination, the furnishings in his apartment, his favorite movies, Xavier Cugat, Soupie Sales, "The Known World" as a movie, Richard Wright, "The Wire," Nike and exploited foreign workers, "Patton", having children, and all manner of chit chat.

PARTYING

It's our birthday today so we're off eating, drinking and rabble rousing.  We'll be back here tomorrow, probably around lunch time.  Until then, visit the fine, sober folks to the left.

CAREFUL RON, OR YOU'LL END UP LIKE JFK

Those Shakespearean scholars can be a tetchy bunch, indeed.  Now along comes Ron Rosenbaum, tossing his own molotov cocktail into the mix in the form of The Shakespeare Wars.

Hot issue number one: Which version of Hamlet should we use? There are three different early texts of the play. Does the Folio text — the Folio being the first printed collection of Shakespeare's plays — represent Shakespeare revising his own work, or a theatre manager cutting lines so the play moves along faster on the stage?

Scholars argue the question with barely concealed ferocity. At stake is not only academic status but also jobs and income from what Rosenbaum calls the "Shakespeare studies publishing-industrial complex." Who is going to be chosen editor of the new college Shakespeare anthology? You can bet this is not a trivial question in academia.

Speaking of Shakespeare*, we're very excited about the re-release of Tom Stoppard's only novel, the exhaustingly hilarious Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, newly available courtesy of Grove Press.  This has been difficult to track down for years (well, before Bookfinders, at any rate), so we urge you Stoppard fans to pounce on it - it's certainly better than Rock n' Roll.

* You know, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, etc.  OK, a reach but we wanted to plug this title.

REVENGE OF THE NERDS

All the cool kids seem to be into John Hodgman, whose The Areas of My Expertise is now available in paperback.  He's profiled in the Boston Globe, which talks about his Daily Show gig and life as an Apple pitchman.

``Being honest as a writer to me is the most important thing, even when you're writing a book of lies," he says. Parts of his book, such as the section called ``Diversions for the Asthmatic Child Who Cannot Play in the Snow" (see inhaler whittling, page 61), are even autobiographical. Hodgman was an asthmatic child, the only son of a business executive and a nurse administrator. His mother died of lung cancer in 2000; his father still has a note on which a 6- or 7-year-old John wrote: ``Writer at work: Do not disturb."

He was focused, and a touch eccentric, from the start. ``He was a legend at his own elementary school," the Heath School, says wife Katherine Fletcher, and in eighth grade he was voted most likely to become the editor of The New Yorker. (People have always joked that Hodgman was ``born 40," she says). In high school, Hodgman carried an old-fashioned briefcase with a combination lock and had long hair that he sometimes wore in a bun. Fletcher graduated from Brookline High School a year before he did, and the two have been together since Hodgman was 17.

PSA: MISSOURI REVIEW EDITORS' PRIZE

October 1 marks the deadline for the annual Missouri Review editors' prize. The magazine awards $3,000 each for its poetry, nonfiction and fiction winners, along with publication in the magazine.

The entry fee of $20 includes a one-year subscription to the Missouri Review. Writers can submit online or through the mail. See the guidelines online.

All three winners last year were first publications. Seasoned writers are invited to submit as well.