Current U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera is coming to the Palladium next Monday

I’ve got a guest blogger today. Daniel Lawless, an SPC English Professor and editor of the literary journal, Plume, wrote this one in advance of a visit to the Palladium by the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe-Herrera. That reading is Monday, March 21 at 7:30. I’ll turn it over to Daniel now:

 

 
It’s such a pleasure to bring Juan to Saint Petersburg. I met him a couple of years ago via our Plume correspondence regarding the appearance of a poem in that journal, one that concludes this brief guest post. A correspondence, by the way, that immediately evinced every good quality I had attached to his character from reading his work: kind, courteous, hyper-intelligent, generous beyond measure. And I should add to that list: gentleman, self-effacing. See for yourself in these clips. The first is his reading of “Five Directions to My House.” The second is a biographical segment from PBS entitled “Juan Felipe Herrera’s Winding Path to Poetry” Finally, there is an NPR interview with the poet in which he speaks of, among other things, his background (son of migrant workers, graduate of Stanford and Iowa), his inaugural poem “So I Will Speak Of It,” inspiration, the business of advice-giving, and Charleston.

 

 

 

Of his work – whose praises I could sing for far too long — let me say only the obvious, or what after nearly half a century of writing has become so: Mr. Herrera is above all a meticulous craftsman –a fact that the nature of his work, given as it is often to addressing social and political themes, sometimes obscures. But read carefully. Believe me, it’s there. Not usually a strictly a narrative poet, Juan is rather a muralist, a collagist, not altogether unlike Allen Ginsberg, E.E. Cummings, with a soupçon of Sylvia Plath for good measure, in his production of scarifying images. Snatching a reference from here, an allusion there, an astonishing line of description, he welds the component parts into a steely, sometimes dizzying panorama of human voices and experience.

 

And what work: protean in its shape-and-theme-shifting range, somber and exuberant at once, meditative and provocative: Mr. Herrera is the master of the beautiful call to arms. Should it surprise that the guises under which he delivers his art are equally multi-form? I didn’t think so. If not the original, Juan is at least among the best of the hyphenated-artists of our time: poet, performance artist, social activist, poetry-operatist, novelists-in-verse-ifier. Or, as esteemed critic Stephen Burt has it in his New York Times article: one of the first poets to successfully create “a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too.”

 

We may be not sure what all this means, these pinned-on labels, exactly; are perhaps only glimpsing it now. But we know that it, his poetry, moves us in ways we have not considered before, ways that blend road with sky, tears with profound joy, terror and freedom. One day, when he is need of them, the following words from one of his poems might serve as a suitable epitaph:

 

I want to write of love
in the face of disaster.

 

And, somehow, the aspirational tone doesn’t seem out of line here, for Mr. Herrera, even in this imagined farewell, is a figure of such prodigious gifts, of such transcendent humanity, it seems certain his work will live in his readers’ minds and spill from their tongues for many generations to come.
Oh – and that promised poem, from Plume – an amuse-bouche, of a sort, in its brevity, whetting the appetite for the feast to come – Monday evening, at the Palladium.

 

Even the Gun Does Not Want to be a Gun

It denies the polish
Its seablood sculpted elegance the weight in blue machine
It ignores its howl if only it could truly sing
If only it knew more than one long word
Of one long dismembered song
Come, then, eat with every sense what will be laid down for you. I promise you’ll go home sated, wanting more.

 

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume

 

As the featured reader in The Plume Poetry Series, sponsored by Saint Petersburg College, Mr. Herrera will be reading at the Palladium on March 21st, 7:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. Mr. Herrera will read for approximately 45 minutes, then do a Q and A with audience members. He will sign books after the reading. $ 10 admission. Free for SPC faculty, staff, and students. Mr. Herrera will be introduced by another towering figure in US Poetry: Peter Meinke, the current Poet Laureate of the State of Florida. For tickets and more information follow this link.

Books available for purchase (or bring your own copies):
Notes on the Assemblage
Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems
Portraits of Hispanic American Heroes
Plume Anthology of Poetry V 4