This will be the last of my blog posts on “____ with Jimmy Santiago Baca.”
Yesterday evening, Oscar was fortunate to read with Jimmy at the Cesar Chavez Library in Salinas. The house was packed standing room only, with entire families, high school and probably college students as well. So that, along with the audience’s diversity, was great to see.
Jimmy read from his latest poetry collection, Rita and Julia (San Diego City Works Press), which, much to my delight, is a collection of long poems, which to me, hearken back my favorite JSB book, Martín & Meditations on the South Valley. This is where Jimmy, to me, is at his best as a poet, with the long poem slowly unfolding the narrative through very natural and simultaneously poetic diction, and held together tight by his control of the line. Jimmy makes this look hella easy.
But what I wanted to talk about here was Jimmy’s talkstory, which he spent more time doing than the actual reading of poetry. Yesterday evening was one of those times that I could have sat and listened to his story all night, and actually now that I think of it, it reminds me of hearing Piri Thomas at City Lights Books a couple of years ago now, just talking story about back in the day, all the bad shit he used to do, which is another way of saying that was what life was like, the shit of being incarcerated, and how writing and poetry changed all that by allowing him to reconsider himself, reconsider where he wanted to direct himself next. Here, I am talking about both Piri Thomas and Jimmy Santiago Baca, and the importance of working towards/gaining literacy, and becoming and being literary.
Jimmy portrays himself as someone who really does believe in the power of poetry; for him it was transformative for his world view, and it moved people in his life to act in a way that his previous actions as a young criminal could never move people. And this makes me happy, to know a poet who really does believe in poetry, who really cares about it, as what it seems we find ourselves surrounded by in these places dense with artists is this distanced air of disaffectedness and aloofness, neither of which is cute.
I think Jimmy’s emphasis on talkstory tells me that he’s interested in connecting with his audience, which also made me think of Manong Al Robles, for whom personal and collective memory, hence the telling of the story, is everything. I’d wondered if this is an “elder” thing, but another thing to consider is how well the poets know the worlds they are addressing/representing in the work. This is what they are trying to convey to us in their story, so then as we are drawn into the circle, we learn where the work is coming from.
Perhaps this is not so much different from authors who can articulate well the conditions under which their work arose, who can very naturally provide substantial backstory, political and historical context and then smoothly transition into the actual reading of the printed work. When this is the case, the talk and talkstory itself is as much of a treat as the reading of the printed word. Maybe this has something to do with coming from communities for whom oral tradition is not only alive but central, crucial to/for the community’s survival and ability to thrive. So glad we made the trip down to Salinas. Oscar’s blog post and YouTubes are here.
