Response 10: Jimmy Santiago Baca

I’d just finished reading the excerpts from Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir, “A Place to Stand.” From where it left off, I was crushed, though hopeful, knowing he was experiencing revelation in prison. He was writing, dreaming, finding hope through poetry. The memoir offered snippets of his early poetry, rudimentary rhymes and dabbling in a foreign language. But his tragic childhood still haunted me. I picked up “Martín & Meditations on the South Valley,” flipped to the first page. I read the first stanza and felt triumph.

I was so moved by Baca’s poetry, as well as by his memoir, and I’m grateful that I could read excerpts of both forms at the same time, for I feel both works are informative, if not crucial to one another’s experience. Experience is what makes Baca’s writing powerful, what sets him apart from others. He had a tragic upbringing; he was abandoned by his parents, abused, mistreated. He was homeless, alienated from his past. Many go to prison, but it was there for Baca, that he actually found what he had lost, rediscovered that his “home” was much more rooted than in a house, deeper than a “family.” In his memoir, he writes, “One day, looking up from my journal to stare absentmindedly at the cell wall, I experienced a revelation. On the wall – in the sand and mortar and stones and iron and trowel sweeps – were the life experiences and sweat of my people. It contained a mural of my people’s toil, their aspirations, their pain and workmanship. I imagined my grandfather’s hand smoothing out the concrete…The iron that made the bas came from a mill in Silver City; the workers who had built the mill came from little villages on the plains. The dirt that mixed with the cement, before it was scooped up and trucked and delivered to make this wall, had been prairie soil where families camped and a woman had lain and gave birth to a child. People had slept on this dirt, tilled it for their crops and gardens, built their adobe homes with it” (239.)

Baca rekindles a tie with his people that he had lost in his upbringing. He reconnects with the land he can call his home, though he never did before. As I read through “Black Mesa Poems” and “Martín & Meditations on the South Valley,” the characters from this land came through vividly, as if he had never been separated, as if he had never felt lost. In “Too Much of a Good Thing,” Baca voices farmers and their crops. He often refers to the cycling of the seasons, the snow, the fall. In segment XII of “Martín & Meditations on the South Valley,” the narrator becomes one with the land.

I dream
myself maiz root:
swollen in pregnant earth,
rain seeping into my black bones
sifting red soil grains of my heart
into earth’s hungry mouth.

I am part of the earth.

When reading “A Place to Stand,” I was enchanted by the childlike voice which he embodies to describe these extremely vivid experiences. Of course, he is a child in many of the segments and the language is appropriate. Yet, while the language is simple, the descriptions still grasp the range of human emotions associated with the experiences. In the prologue, when Baca describes visiting his father at jail for the first time, he writes, “I wanted to tell him I was sorry. I didn’t want to keep him in jail. Only when he was drinking did he threaten to beat Mom up, wreck the car, lose his paycheck gambling, or sometimes not show up for days. He was not drinking now. We should have let him come home with us” (2.) The sentences are direct, the emotions straightforward. But they are sharp, and they bore through us because we know they are coming from a child, but resonating years later in the heart of a man.

The language of Baca’s poetry is quite opposite to that in his memoir, and it makes me think of prison and freedom. Every sentence is chocked full of descriptive words, sparing literally no space for a boring verb or noun. He hardly ever uses the verb “to be” in present or past tense. I feel the care with which Baca chose his words, as if he’s appreciating the beauty of that which he’s describing in a way a person who has always been free can’t even see. He picks the words like they’re fruit from a tree; why use any but the ripest, the sweetest, the tastiest?

I had an image of mother in the morning
dancing in front of the mirror
in pink panties,
masking her face with mascara,
squeezing into tight jeans,
Her laughter rough as brocaded cloth
and her teeth brilliant as church tiles.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Jimmy Santiago Baca’s work, and I can’t wait to meet him on Thursday. I wonder if despite his troubled childhood, there was any instant when he found himself considering language in his youth. With such talent, I wouldn’t be surprised if even as a child, he spoke to himself when no one knew. Perhaps he didn’t even know he was doing it. Does one become a poet like a phoenix rising out of the flames? Or is language a part of us? Like the land was a part of him, only needing to be discovered, relearned, really felt?