Sacramento Poetry Center: Audio Clips

I haven’t listened to them yet, but you can here. Thanks to Tim Kahl of the Sacramento Poetry Center for recording our reading, and for making these audio clips available.

Yeah, despite my being almost literally a block of ice, I think I enjoyed the reading. A couple of things I’m observing about Oscar’s poetry (you can read his write-up here), as he’s sharing much newer work, that is newer than the poems in Anywhere Avenue — whereas in Anywhere Avenue he provides us with some macro-scale backdrop of Bronx urban blight and arson, leading up to and the aftermath of the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway, and during which we see the ruins of the city around his “I,” we hear in his more recent work the voice of an “I” in manners which go right at the idiosyncrasies of these various “I” personae —

He’s zeroing in on very fine details of an intersection which isn’t just a place where two streets cross, but where entire communities thrive, deal, fail, and persist, to the texture of an arsonist’s hands, to an “I,” who is the son of a deadbeat dad, and who can’t (refuses to) see his mother in any other light than one that is unfairly naive. In fact, I keep thinking, when I hear this poem, that the mother would probably smack her son across the face for portraying her as this martyr. Boy, my hardworking self has kept your delinquent ass alive, I can hear her saying, how you think I did this all by myself, just by standing here praying and staring up into the sky? Wake up, boy, and do something.

Still, in his newer poems, we also hear the “I” invoking Octavio Paz’s “I Speak of the City,” thinking large beyond the “I,” beyond the Bronx, into the concept of the modern City. I think this is where “I’m Jus Askin” comes in, where the very purpose of asking the City this pointed question, “I ask city: How does city live with city?” is precisely that the City, who is its own conscious and willful being, has failed to provide any adequate, viable answer for what it does to itself and to its citizens, just as in the original Huu Thinh poem, “Asking,” “I ask man: How does man live with man?” In which man (presumably humankind) cannot or will not answer for what he has done to his fellow man.

So there’s that. Geez, I didn’t think I’d be launching into a critical reading of my husband’s work this morning. All this to say, I hope you enjoy the audio clips, and regarding my Tagalog and Spanish language stumbling, I notice I start to get tongue-tied and cross-eyed with the multilingualism after a heavy chunk of reading time.