Across the Line/ Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California
Edited by Harry Polkinhorn and Mark Weiss
San Diego: Junction Press, 2002
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 67 (Fall 2003)
For readers in the United States, Baja California seems to be a region so close that it is almost unknown. Tucked away like a long tail, the California peninsula continues as Mexican territory for another thousand miles south (about the same distance as California north of the border). Wild country, a land of mountains and deserts, most of its population is concentrated in the north along the border. Usually the Yankee imagination stops there, in those towns born of the commerce of the border---their offer of promiscuity and escape, the chance for a cheap deal. But over the past several decades the towns grew, became big cities: Tijuana now has nearly two million inhabitants, Mexicali half that. With growth came universities, and cultural centers, and a rapidly developing literary culture, all encouraged by government policy. So that, the English-speaking reader may well be surprised to discover suddenly, in this remarkable bilingual anthology, more than fifty poets from Baja California writing with a sophistication that belies any facile notion of what it means to bear a regional identity.
Certainly, Baja claims some unique circumstances. In their constant traffic with the United States the border cities are among the most cosmopolitan in Mexico, while the peninsula itself has long remained rather independent from the distant capital. The two states of Baja California (1952) and Baja California Sur (1974) were among the last to achieve statehood. They were also the first, in the late 1980s, to elect candidates from the PAN, the party that won the presidency in 2000 with Vicente Fox. The land even possesses its own rich cultural past, in the marvelous cave paintings found in the mountains throughout the peninsula and said to be as much as 3,000 years old. The flourishing of poets in such soil, therefore, might appear quite natural, yet the selections here show it is not easy to typify Baja poetry.
In this respect, the editors made the sensible choice to arrange the many poets by chronology. The oldest, Rubén Vizcaíno Valencia (b. 1919), marks one clear tendency toward a gritty urban realism, in “Forgive Me for Not Being Blind,” as he bears witness to the plight of society’s outcasts, where “in this delirium / there’s none of the border’s inane cult of progress / nor the deluded pragmatism that conquered the moon.” Such hard-edged assessments of the border economy recur like an irregular refrain throughout the anthology, even with one of the youngest poets, Heriberto Yépez (b. 1974), in “Maniacs and Crazies” whose features are “a mockery of the face of the world outside / and of the catacomb / within.” Rendered in near-apocalyptic tones, his litanies of despair and the depths of human misery provide an ominous view of Tijuana at crisis point. Yet, for Yépez, the stinging social indictment is just one of the modes in which he works.
Of course, it is hardly unexpected that the border should figure prominently in Across the Line/ Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California. What is fascinating are the many ways that the border enters the poems---and to see the numerous poems where it does not enter at all. Well over half the poets are in their forties or fifties or older; most were born in Baja, though few of their parents were. The reader is often reminded how porous the border may be, that there is always a great degree of cultural as well as economic overlap in border zones. In “Mary Kay,” the speaker of Rosina Conde’s poem reflects on growing up in the 1960s and the ways of her hippie friend Mary Kay, who became a vegetarian and went off to India. The gringa’s display of personal freedom becomes an ironic touchstone by which to consider the difficulty of gaining a political consciousness in Tijuana at the time and the comparatively unimaginative limits then and now posed by boyfriend, father, husband.
A more stylistically complex reflection of the border may be found in Edmundo Lizardi’s masterful long poem “Baja Times.” Lizardi, from La Paz, like others from the southern end of the peninsula, reveals a keener sense of landscape than do most poets of the north (who are inevitably the large majority here). His poem ranges all over Baja, at once tracking the “horde of the border! / limited only by itself” that descends the tourist paths to sites of revelry and bliss, while charting a counter-movement in the zapatistas rising from the far south of Mexico, the figure of rebellion that “hides in every half-fucked Mexican.” But the most salient feature here is the language, with its quick-shifting tonal registers that sound like turning a radio dial, the carnivalesque play of voices, and the way each careful detail of landscape serves to celebrate a pan-Baja vision.
Other poets make evident, in the context of the anthology, that the border with the Yankee north need not take over poetic discourse; that indeed there are more immediate borders inherent in the land, in the obstacle of natural forces or the irreversible encounter with history. Raúl Antonio Cota, also from La Paz, recognizes the essential rivalry between the desert and the sea: before the vast ocean, “inventory of the world // words are oars / that the desert reclaims.” The desert is full of questions, like “the puzzling skeleton of a gray whale” in another poem, but it is also the limit-place where illusions run aground. The land thus stands, in “The Possible Myth,” as a challenge to all that has been imagined in its name: “I believe in the California that 17th century Europe / agreed to dream,” and on through history, from the lost indigenous peoples to the “empires of the stone of faith” that the Jesuits made “flower in the desert,” until there is only to conclude, “I believe in the California / of myth--- / the only one possible.” What is lost in that terrain, indigenous sources, turns out to be an occasional theme as well in the book, which begins with a brief array of traditional poems translated (via Spanish) from indigenous languages that are fast dying out. Near the end of the anthology, Heriberto Yépez offers a lovely echo in two anthropological poems based on published interviews with native informants.
But the desert may also be a topography of desire, as in Elizabeth Algrávez’s luscious “Sandbook.” Here the desert is all sentience: “You barely touch it and the desert opens, / surrenders itself slippery crescent of sand imprisoned between your hands: / it overflows runs over slips away.” The sole creature in the longish poem is a reptile, whose movements give the desert life. “Only the dry sound of skin against sand, / the reptile’s trail a subtle zigzag / the reptile’s arid purr sweeping the skin of the desert.” The reptile’s caress is able to undo “the geography / of the desert with a breath and [remake] it with its hands.” So that, “without its lover the desert burns / with expectation . . . / its murmuring speaks of fish, of damp geographies now gone.” No longer obstacle, the desert becomes an act of pure sensuousness in the poem. But Algrávez is hardly alone in this kind of wordplay. Several of the women poets here address erotic desire, a theme they handle quite freely, starting with the amorous verbal ecstacies of Estela Alicia López Lomas’s poems from Alice in Wonderjail.
To judge by this anthology with its generous selections, Baja writers tend to be quite well read. They could not be accused of provincialism. The one coherent group to emerge historically, as noted in the introduction, shows an interest in Verlaine and Mallarmé, the Surrealists, even the American Objectivists; the work of these poets, however much they differ from one another, tends toward more abstract uses of language. Overall, many of the Baja poets are familiar with North American poets and some have translated them (William Carlos Williams, Charles Bukowski, Jerome Rothenberg, to name a few). And of course there are plentiful traces of Mexican and Latin American traditions, with several poets clearly aligning themselves with a neo-Baroque practice.
One might well ask, was it really necessary to include as many as 53 poets and make the anthology some 400 pages long? Surely a shorter book would have sufficed. But the impact would not have been the same. Most anthologies are quite dispensable, yet every now and then a few prove valuable. This is one of the good ones. The translators have done wonders: the poems in English sing, bringing into our own language a vibrant culture that is still quite new, as though sprung fully formed from the rib of some Adam, and that somehow we hadn’t noticed standing before us.
Edited by Harry Polkinhorn and Mark Weiss
San Diego: Junction Press, 2002
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 67 (Fall 2003)
For readers in the United States, Baja California seems to be a region so close that it is almost unknown. Tucked away like a long tail, the California peninsula continues as Mexican territory for another thousand miles south (about the same distance as California north of the border). Wild country, a land of mountains and deserts, most of its population is concentrated in the north along the border. Usually the Yankee imagination stops there, in those towns born of the commerce of the border---their offer of promiscuity and escape, the chance for a cheap deal. But over the past several decades the towns grew, became big cities: Tijuana now has nearly two million inhabitants, Mexicali half that. With growth came universities, and cultural centers, and a rapidly developing literary culture, all encouraged by government policy. So that, the English-speaking reader may well be surprised to discover suddenly, in this remarkable bilingual anthology, more than fifty poets from Baja California writing with a sophistication that belies any facile notion of what it means to bear a regional identity.
Certainly, Baja claims some unique circumstances. In their constant traffic with the United States the border cities are among the most cosmopolitan in Mexico, while the peninsula itself has long remained rather independent from the distant capital. The two states of Baja California (1952) and Baja California Sur (1974) were among the last to achieve statehood. They were also the first, in the late 1980s, to elect candidates from the PAN, the party that won the presidency in 2000 with Vicente Fox. The land even possesses its own rich cultural past, in the marvelous cave paintings found in the mountains throughout the peninsula and said to be as much as 3,000 years old. The flourishing of poets in such soil, therefore, might appear quite natural, yet the selections here show it is not easy to typify Baja poetry.
In this respect, the editors made the sensible choice to arrange the many poets by chronology. The oldest, Rubén Vizcaíno Valencia (b. 1919), marks one clear tendency toward a gritty urban realism, in “Forgive Me for Not Being Blind,” as he bears witness to the plight of society’s outcasts, where “in this delirium / there’s none of the border’s inane cult of progress / nor the deluded pragmatism that conquered the moon.” Such hard-edged assessments of the border economy recur like an irregular refrain throughout the anthology, even with one of the youngest poets, Heriberto Yépez (b. 1974), in “Maniacs and Crazies” whose features are “a mockery of the face of the world outside / and of the catacomb / within.” Rendered in near-apocalyptic tones, his litanies of despair and the depths of human misery provide an ominous view of Tijuana at crisis point. Yet, for Yépez, the stinging social indictment is just one of the modes in which he works.
Of course, it is hardly unexpected that the border should figure prominently in Across the Line/ Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California. What is fascinating are the many ways that the border enters the poems---and to see the numerous poems where it does not enter at all. Well over half the poets are in their forties or fifties or older; most were born in Baja, though few of their parents were. The reader is often reminded how porous the border may be, that there is always a great degree of cultural as well as economic overlap in border zones. In “Mary Kay,” the speaker of Rosina Conde’s poem reflects on growing up in the 1960s and the ways of her hippie friend Mary Kay, who became a vegetarian and went off to India. The gringa’s display of personal freedom becomes an ironic touchstone by which to consider the difficulty of gaining a political consciousness in Tijuana at the time and the comparatively unimaginative limits then and now posed by boyfriend, father, husband.
A more stylistically complex reflection of the border may be found in Edmundo Lizardi’s masterful long poem “Baja Times.” Lizardi, from La Paz, like others from the southern end of the peninsula, reveals a keener sense of landscape than do most poets of the north (who are inevitably the large majority here). His poem ranges all over Baja, at once tracking the “horde of the border! / limited only by itself” that descends the tourist paths to sites of revelry and bliss, while charting a counter-movement in the zapatistas rising from the far south of Mexico, the figure of rebellion that “hides in every half-fucked Mexican.” But the most salient feature here is the language, with its quick-shifting tonal registers that sound like turning a radio dial, the carnivalesque play of voices, and the way each careful detail of landscape serves to celebrate a pan-Baja vision.
Other poets make evident, in the context of the anthology, that the border with the Yankee north need not take over poetic discourse; that indeed there are more immediate borders inherent in the land, in the obstacle of natural forces or the irreversible encounter with history. Raúl Antonio Cota, also from La Paz, recognizes the essential rivalry between the desert and the sea: before the vast ocean, “inventory of the world // words are oars / that the desert reclaims.” The desert is full of questions, like “the puzzling skeleton of a gray whale” in another poem, but it is also the limit-place where illusions run aground. The land thus stands, in “The Possible Myth,” as a challenge to all that has been imagined in its name: “I believe in the California that 17th century Europe / agreed to dream,” and on through history, from the lost indigenous peoples to the “empires of the stone of faith” that the Jesuits made “flower in the desert,” until there is only to conclude, “I believe in the California / of myth--- / the only one possible.” What is lost in that terrain, indigenous sources, turns out to be an occasional theme as well in the book, which begins with a brief array of traditional poems translated (via Spanish) from indigenous languages that are fast dying out. Near the end of the anthology, Heriberto Yépez offers a lovely echo in two anthropological poems based on published interviews with native informants.
But the desert may also be a topography of desire, as in Elizabeth Algrávez’s luscious “Sandbook.” Here the desert is all sentience: “You barely touch it and the desert opens, / surrenders itself slippery crescent of sand imprisoned between your hands: / it overflows runs over slips away.” The sole creature in the longish poem is a reptile, whose movements give the desert life. “Only the dry sound of skin against sand, / the reptile’s trail a subtle zigzag / the reptile’s arid purr sweeping the skin of the desert.” The reptile’s caress is able to undo “the geography / of the desert with a breath and [remake] it with its hands.” So that, “without its lover the desert burns / with expectation . . . / its murmuring speaks of fish, of damp geographies now gone.” No longer obstacle, the desert becomes an act of pure sensuousness in the poem. But Algrávez is hardly alone in this kind of wordplay. Several of the women poets here address erotic desire, a theme they handle quite freely, starting with the amorous verbal ecstacies of Estela Alicia López Lomas’s poems from Alice in Wonderjail.
To judge by this anthology with its generous selections, Baja writers tend to be quite well read. They could not be accused of provincialism. The one coherent group to emerge historically, as noted in the introduction, shows an interest in Verlaine and Mallarmé, the Surrealists, even the American Objectivists; the work of these poets, however much they differ from one another, tends toward more abstract uses of language. Overall, many of the Baja poets are familiar with North American poets and some have translated them (William Carlos Williams, Charles Bukowski, Jerome Rothenberg, to name a few). And of course there are plentiful traces of Mexican and Latin American traditions, with several poets clearly aligning themselves with a neo-Baroque practice.
One might well ask, was it really necessary to include as many as 53 poets and make the anthology some 400 pages long? Surely a shorter book would have sufficed. But the impact would not have been the same. Most anthologies are quite dispensable, yet every now and then a few prove valuable. This is one of the good ones. The translators have done wonders: the poems in English sing, bringing into our own language a vibrant culture that is still quite new, as though sprung fully formed from the rib of some Adam, and that somehow we hadn’t noticed standing before us.