Alejandro Escudé: “I can’t help but feel for the guy. I know he messed up during the Hillary scandal. But I don’t believe Comey is partisan. I think he just met the wrath of an entitled child-President. And how can you not watch these larger than life characters on the news and not associate them with events in your own life? Well, I can’t.” (webpage)
Alejandro Escudé: “I moved to Los Angeles when I was six years old. Rather, I was brought here by my parents from Argentina. My first memory is Venice Beach. I was scared. As a little kid, I thought the people looked weird and frightening. And they were! But I love Los Angeles. I love it the way tourists love it, which is to say palm trees and movie stars, and I love it the way locals love it, which is to say palm trees and movie stars. And sunsets! Can’t forget about those sunsets.” (website)
Alejandro Escudé: “This is not the majority viewpoint on this story, and I feel bad for the student who was wrongly arrested, but I wanted people to understand what a harrowing job teaching high school English can be, and what it would be like to one day, in the midst of this tough job, which is so heavily criticized and demonized by American society, what it would truly feel like, what it would really be like, to suddenly, out of nowhere, hear an unimaginable, confounding beep.” (website)
Note: This poem has been published exclusively online as part of a project in which poets respond to current events. A poem written within the last week about an event that occurred within the last week will appear every Sunday at Rattle.com. Our only criterion for selection is the quality of the poem, not its editorial position; any opinions expressed are solely those of the poet and do not necessarily reflect those of Rattle’s editors. To read poems from past weeks, visit the Poets Respond page. Interact on our Facebook group. To have a poem considered for next week’s posting, submit it here before midnight Friday PST.
Alejandro Escudé: “This is a response the anniversary of the Normandy Landings in WWII. I heard an interview with a vet that just wrecked me for a while.” (website)
University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street
Madison, WI 53711-2059
ISBN: 978-0-299-28624-8
2012, 68 pp., $16.95 uwpress.wisc.edu/
John Brehm won me over while I listened to him read and speak about his book of poems Help Is On the Way on the KUSP 88.9 poetry podcast. Something about his voice (perhaps it’s always in the voice) told me this was a poet who knows poetry. I want to be very clear that I think this is extremely rare today. Often in the circles of poetry one runs into fans who don’t know a good poem from a passionately read bad one, editors won over by the ornate frame around the poem rather than the poem itself, and widely recognized poets enamored more with the verbal acrobatics in a given piece than the emotional core of the piece. But John Brehm is a true poet. And any astute reader of poetry will readily confirm this by opening Help Is On the Way and coming across the first poem, “Pompeii.”
Brehm describes the experience of noticing a poster for a movie called “Pompeii” on a train in New York City. He’s disturbed about the timing of the poster, not long after 9/11. “And now we rise creaking,” Brehm writes, “over the Manhattan Bridge, where/ one can see through the scratchy windows/the city skyline and the buildings that are/not there, where thousands tried/to breathe air on fire and failed.” This is an interesting piece because even though it is informed by the events of 9/11 it isn’t about 9/11. This is more of a poem about a grievance which clearly reveals the cruelty and insensitivity present in our society. To a poet as sensitive as Brehm, to any sensitive person for that matter, America doesn’t really feel like America anymore. Some ad exec, for the sake of making a buck, allowed that heinous poster of people outrunning a wall of flame to be posted on a New York train during an emotionally charged time for that city and for the country as a whole. But that’s the America we live in today: anything goes as long as you’re making money. The Great Recession teaches me that on a daily basis. This poem also succeeds because it avoids descending into a political rant. The poet politely makes a point of correcting the poster printer who brazenly asks of the commuters: “How can you outrun an eruption/faster than this train?” Brehm points out that the train he’s on is incredibly slow and that anyone would be able to outrun it. He sadly muses, of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, “how easily they might have done it./But that is not what they were asked to do.”
The second part of the collection called “Still Falling” consists of one long sequence entitled “Lineage,” in which Brehm playfully retraces the ancient roots of the human race. Similar in scope to Heaney’s bog poems, Brehm meditates on the place of the first artists and poets in this mythic early time. He imagines “the very first artists who painted on cave walls,” and wonders “why would you descend to darkness to make/your art?” A bit later in the sequence, Brehm wonders how many “proto-poets” were killed by predators in the dawn of civilization because they were prone to wandering alone. This is just a lot of fun to read. And in my opinion, it’s a sequence that works as an extended metaphor for the human condition in today’s difficult times. At the end of the sequence, Brehm seems to come to terms with the abrasive reality of his own contemporary society by deciding one must “start grasping things and reshaping them,/turning the world into your/idea of the world.”
There are some misses in the collection. I didn’t enjoy a few short lyrics, such as the poem “On the Subway Platform.” This piece is pure filler in my opinion and doesn’t stand with the rest of the work in this collection, which is powerful and holds a reader’s attention through Brehm’s lyrical control and hard-earned gravitas. Despite Brehm’s strong reading of “Newborn, Brovetto Farm” in the aforementioned radio program, it’s also not a particularly standout piece. There is a overly emphasized antipathy towards meat consumption orbiting the description of the newborn calf which comes off as preachy and melodramatic. But these, of course, are the exceptions.
And how does one criticize a collection of poems that needed to be written? In the third part of the book, “Side by Side,” Brehm chronicles the experience of traveling to Japan in order to donate a part of his liver to save his dying nephew, George Masahiro Brehm, to whom the collection is also dedicated. It is striking. There’s not one false note in the entire narrative sequence and it hits you right in the gut. It’s a sacred piece both for the poet and inevitably for the reader who is fortunate enough to come across it. This section of Help Is On the Way is reason enough to purchase the book.
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Alejandro Escudé is the author of two chapbooks, “Where Else But Here” and “Unknown Physics,” both published by March Street Press. Among other journals, his poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Rattle, and Phoebe. Alejandro is originally from Argentina and he works as a high school English teacher. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two kids. He can be contacted at: ajescude@hotmail.com. His websites are: www.alejandroescude.com and www.alejandroescude.blogspot.com.
Sarabande Books
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
ISBN 13 978-1-932511-96-3
2011, 75 pp., $14.95 www.sarabandebooks.org
I first came across the work of David Hernandez when I read “Mosul” in The Kenyon Review. I got that weird pang of jealousy mixed with awe every poet gets whenever they come across an amazing poem they wished they’d written. This is a poet who’s actually capable of writing memorable signature poems. And I say that knowing full well there’s a lot of poetry published today that contains absolutely nothing “signature.”
Poems like “On Aggression” and “Everything I’m About to Tell You Actually Happened” are instant classics in my book. The description in “On Aggression” of the speaker fighting to retrieve a bird from a cat’s mouth is both comical and disturbing, rendered with a light touch reminiscent of William Carlos Williams. In the final lines, after the speaker successfully retrieves the dying bird from the cat, Hernandez writes, “The world slowed then, the blood cooled./Far off, wind jostled wind chimes—/the sound of a broom/endlessly sweeping broken glass.” That last metaphor is masterful. I love the sound of wind chimes, and I particularly admire how the poet manages to work the chimes into a metaphor that is at once appropriate to the subject (the mundane quality of death), and at the same time conveys, at least for me, an international or worldly poetic spirit, perhaps because the sound of a sweeping broom is more ubiquitous in other parts of the globe than it is here in Southern California.
In “Everything I’m About to Tell You Actually Happened,” Hernandez again employs that light touch but toward describing a family during Christmas. How many poets have wanted to capture the smorgasbord of emotions, images, exchanges, and issues that arise during this time of year? Hernandez actually accomplishes that task, utilizing snappy, clipped lines, humor, and precision: “Doorbell rings. It’s Jesus. Drops of blood/fall from his body like a torn rag of rubies./Together we take him apart and seal him/inside a box labeled MR. KILL JOY.” All at once, Hernandez hits us with subtle religious commentary, a humorous depiction of this particular family’s manner of celebrating the holiday, and expert use of figurative language. Describing the blood as “a torn rag of rubies” is both reverent and over the top, echoing most tawdry religious depictions. But labeling Jesus “MR. KILL JOY” is what really elevates this poem to a work of art. Who thinks of Jesus in this way? Is it the family, the speaker, the world? Perhaps, all of the above. Christmas is reduced to an event that can be boxed and labeled. It’s just fast food.
At the end of “Everything I’m About to Tell You Actually Happened,” Hernandez reveals his opinion on the matter in a subtle, yet convincing way, which is another thing I enjoy about this poet. Hernandez is not afraid to state opinions, but he does so while remaining aware of the strict requirements of the artful poem. He writes, “Picture a cardboard box at the bottom/of the well. Guess who’s inside it.” I like how the last line is missing a question mark. It’s a statement. The poet muses on the death of meaning. He’s not proud of the way the holiday is spent. He tells us so. The speaker in the poem is, in my opinion, a bit hard on the family. He comes across as slightly pompous, especially when he points out the brother’s error describing the taste of arsenic, which the speaker informs is tasteless. But there’s real emotion here, and one should admire a poet that doesn’t let all of their work drift into the miasma of Keats’ negative capability.
Some of Hernandez’ poems, however, approach the theme of death in a manner that is too simplistic. Poems like “Hornet’s Nest” and “The Body You’re Suited-up In” further illustrate the point of death being mundane, unavoidable and scary, but they aren’t as successful in my view as the same theme covered in “Mosul,” albeit with a political edge, or “Housefly,” which contains a wonderful concluding metaphor. These flaws, if you can call them that, are minor and point to a fearlessness in the work of Hernandez which I admire. “Hoodwinked” also includes the occasional gaudy metaphor–“the sun lays/its golden head on the horizon’s guillotine” in “Head Case,” for example, but that doesn’t deter from the strength of the collection in the least. You may come across a few of these and then suddenly be hit with the stunning description of God as “a silence/that was there from the beginning.” Hernandez takes on Bukowski-like subjects, especially in “Married And,” and “Hangover,” and at times reads like Rilke, Williams, Dickinson, and even Stevens. It’s all in there—-but in the final analysis, he’s a poet with a gutsy voice all his own.
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Alejandro Escudé is a husband, father, and teacher. He lives in Los Angeles and has a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis, where he won the 2003 UC Poet Laureate Award. Among other journals, his work has appeared in California Quarterly, The Lilliput Review, Main Street Rag, Phoebe, and Rattle. A chapbook entitled Where Else But Here was published by March Street Press, December 2005. Another chapbook, Unknown Physics, was published in 2007, also by March Street Press. He is originally from Argentina. He can be contacted at: ajescude@hotmail.com