Gratitude, Martín Espada and Acentos


1. Give what you want to receive. The flow of Abundance is already all around you. To step into this flow is easy. Give to someone else the very thing you would like to receive. And give it freely without expectations of receiving, as if you already had more than enough. If you want more kindness in your life, be kind to someone, if you want more happiness in your life, make someone else happy, if you want more money in your life, share a little of what you have. Give it away easily, like you already had all that you need and there is plenty more from where that came from. 


2. Trust and know. The next step is to trust and know you have just stepped into the flow of abundance and are now aligned with what you want. Know there is more than enough to go around. 
 


3. Take Action. Participation is an important part of Abundance. While you are knowing you are now aligned with the flow of the abundance you want, it is also important to participate and help make things happen. Follow your inner knowing and your intuition and do your part to help create the abundance you would like to have. Continue to participate until you are receiving what you want.
 


4. Be Grateful. Gratitude is a vital step in the flow of abundance. It is a powerful magnet which keeps us in the flow and aligned with receiving all the wonderful things we desire. Fill yourself with gratitude all the time, even about the small and seemingly simple things in your life. There is always something to be grateful about. When you notice a little of what you want flowing to you, take a moment and be grateful for what you have received, regardless of how big or small it may be. Be grateful and say thank you. 



5. Pass it on. When you receive a little abundance take a moment and pass some of it on and assist someone else in feeling a little more abundant. When you pass on some of what you receive, do it easily as if you already have more than you need, expecting nothing in return. When you pass it on in this way you are now starting the process all over again and have once again taken the first step to "give what you want to receive." In this way the flow of abundance continues and becomes more and more each time.

Martín Espada 

From Our Friends at Acentos:

Acentos Writers Workshop welcomes Martín Espada 

Eugenio María de Hostos Community College 

Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 7pm.

Acentos Writers Workshop welcomes Martín Espada to Eugenio María de Hostos Community College on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 7pm sharp. FREE!

We are extremely excited to announce that Martín Espada will facilitate a workshop for Acentos. Called “the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published sixteen books in all as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including two collections of poems last year: Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas (Smokestack, 2008), released in England, and La Tumba de Buenaventura Roig (Terranova, 2008), a bilingual edition published in Puerto Rico.

The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Other books of poetry include Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the Premio Fronterizo, two NEA Fellowships, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

His poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation and The Best American Poetry. He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). His work has been translated into ten languages. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.

Espada will facilitate a 2 hour poetry workshop for free. Yes, I said free. We are welcoming the community at large. Yet, there will not be massive chaos. There will be a registration process. If you have not e-mailed Fish@louderarts.com to register, you will not be able to take the workshop. Notice, this workshop is on a Friday evening at 7pm. Bring your pens, bring your paper, bring your hearts. Palante papi, Siempre palante.

Eugenio María de Hostos Community College Savoy Building, 120 East 149th Street, corner of Walton Ave, Multipurpose Room, Second Floor New York 10451 • Phone 917-209-4211 7pm sharp! Directions to Hostos Community College

Hostos Community College is located at a safe and busy intersection just steps from the subway station and bus stop. By subway: take the 2,4,5 IRT trains to 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard) and the Grand Concourse.By bus: take the Bx1 or cross-town Bx19 to 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard) and the Grand Concourse. By car:From Manhattan, take the FDR Drive north to the Willis Avenue Bridge to the Major Deegan Expressway (87N). Proceed north to Exit 3. Take the right fork in the exit ramp to the Grand Concourse and proceed north to East 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard) From Queens, take the Triborough Bridge to the Major Deegan Expressway. Continue north to Exit 3. Take the right fork in the exit ramp to the Grand Concourse and proceed north to East 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard).From Westchester, take the Major Deegan Expressway south (87S) to Exit 3.

Turn left at the light. Turn left again at Grand Concourse and proceed north to East 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard) .From New Jersey, take the George Washington Bridge to the Major Deegan Expressway south to Exit 3. Turn left at the light. Turn left again at Grand Concourse and proceed north to East 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard)


Fish Vargas 917-209-4211

Lisa Alvarado

Martín Espada, A Writer's Life

Martín Espada

Dear Readers:

I was teaching an Intro to Lit class the other day and afterward one of my students approached me, wanting some one-to-one discussion time. This particular student is 6'4", about 225 lbs -- a working class guy who'd had a variety of jobs before ending up in my class. With some digging in of his heels, he'd grudgingly begun reading the assigned work for the poetry section of the class.

With a laser beam smile, he told me that reading Federico's Ghost altered his whole view of poetry. He said he previously thought it was irrelevant to everyday people, hard-to-understand, fussy and precious. (Which frankly, I told him, was a fairly accurate assessment of a good deal of it.)

However, Martín Espada changed what he thought and what he was going to read in the future. He went on and on about the use of images that got under his skin, images that made the labor and the suffering a visceral, unforgettable experience.

(Ah, we poets, we teachers, live for that!)

Please take a look at that life-changing work and a repeat look at my review of his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, The Republic of Poetry.

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Federico's Ghost

The story is
that whole families of fruitpickers
still crept between the furrows
of the field at dusk,
when for reasons of whiskey or whatever
the cropduster plane sprayed anyway,
floating a pesticide drizzle
over the pickers
who thrashed like dark birds
in a glistening white net,
except for Federico,
a skinny boy who stood apart
in his own green row,
and, knowing the pilot
would not understand in Spanish
that he was the son of a whore,
instead jerked his arm
and thrust an obscene finger.

The pilot understood.
He circled the plane and sprayed again,
watching a fine gauze of poison
drift over the brown bodies
that cowered and scurried on the ground,
and aiming for Federico,
leaving the skin beneath his shirt
wet and blistered,
but still pumping his finger at the sky.

After Federico died,
rumors at the labor camp
told of tomatoes picked and smashed at night,
growers muttering of vandal children
or communists in camp,
first threatening to call Immigration,
then promising every Sunday off
if only the smashing of tomatoes would stop.

Still tomatoes were picked and squashed
in the dark,
and the old women in camp
said it was Federico,
laboring after sundown
to cool the burns on his arms,
flinging tomatoes
at the cropduster
that hummed like a mosquito
lost in his ear,
and kept his soul awake.

from Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands

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¡Viva la República!

Martín Espada's The Republic of Poetry reminds me of Oscar de la Hoya's boxing. Beautiful to behold, it's unerring in its aim. Pared down to the essential--it's body blows to the chest, to the gut, head blows that annihilate the opponent and leave the viewer stunned, reeling, gasping for air. Democracy subverted in Chile and by implication, everywhere, reverberates on every page.

The Republic of Poetry is not an elegy, it's an upper cut to complacency, a left hook to amnesia. Wake up, remember what was, see what's happening right in front of you. The comparison of Espada to Neruda, to Whitman are many, but to me, what comes to mind is poet warrior, able to fight and raise an army with the power of his words.

But in case you're not convinced, here is some additional praise for this remarkable book.

“What a tender, marvelous collection. First, that broken, glorious journey into the redemptive heart of my Chile, and then, as if that had not been enough, the many gates of epiphanies and sorrows being opened again and again, over and over.” —Ariel Dorfman

“Martín Espada is a poet of annunciation and denunciation, a bridge between Whitman and Neruda, a conscientious objector in the war of silence.” —Ilan Stavans

“Martín Espada’s big-hearted poems reconfirm ‘The Republic of Poetry’ that (dares) to insist upon its dreams of justice and mercy even during the age of perpetual war.” —Sam Hamill

“Martín Espada is indeed a worthy prophet for a better world.” —Rigoberto González

This is tight, muscular writing. Espada make his point with an economy of language, concealing a dense terrain of imagery and meaning. In this universe, the dead are not ghosts, but fully fleshed--staving off the soldiers, marching in the battlefield, struggling in the streets, and inspiring new generations. Read these and you'll see what I mean.

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The Soldiers in the Garden

Isla Negra, Chile, September 1973

After the coup,
the soldiers appeared
in Neruda’s garden one night,
raising lanterns to interrogate the trees,
cursing at the rocks that tripped them.
From the bedroom window
they could have been
the conquistadores of drowned galleons,
back from the sea to finish
plundering the coast.

The poet was dying:
cancer flashed through his body
and left him rolling in the bed to kill the flames.
Still, when the lieutenant stormed upstairs,
Neruda faced him and said:
There is only one danger for you here: poetry.
The lieutenant brought his helmet to his chest,
apologized to señor Neruda
and squeezed himself back down the stairs.
The lanterns dissolved one by one from the trees.

For thirty years
we have been searching
for another incantation
to make the soldiers
vanish from the garden.

The soldier leaves, not because the poet is super human, but because he's supremely human. Poetry taps into a power that no bullet can halt nor cancer eat away. Armies of everyday people have been set loose with words like Neruda's. Then and now, the men in power with bloody hands know it's dangerous, know it's subversive. But in the end, it remains unstoppable.

Black Islands
for Darío

At Isla Negra,
between Neruda’s tomb
and the anchor in the garden,
a man with stonecutter’s hands
lifted up his boy of five
so the boy’s eyes could search mine.
The boy’s eyes were black olives.
Son, the father said, this is a poet,
like Pablo Neruda.
The boy’s eyes were black glass.
My son is called Darío,
for the poet of Nicaragua,
the father said.
The boy’s eyes were black stones.
The boy said nothing,
searching my face for poetry,
searching my eyes for his own eyes.
The boy’s eyes were black islands.

What possibility dwells in those black eyes? What page of history will be written for him to read, and what page will he write himself? Knowing that Espada is a father, I can only imagine how many times he's asked himself those questions in the still hours of the night, watching his own child sleep. Toward the end of The Republic of Poetry, Espada meditates on the "smaller" world of family and relationships, personal joy and private grief. Every fighter has his scars, and every poet, his pleasures.

Now, stop reading this, it won't get the job done. Go. Get the book. Read that instead.
It's time to wake up.

The Republic of Poetry W. W. Norton

• ISBN-10: 0393062562
• ISBN-13: 978-0393062564

Lisa Alvarado

April is National Poetry Month!!!!!

Photo by Tina Modotti

Better writers than I have shared their thoughts about the essential and ephemeral joy of poetry.....

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. Robert Frost

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Robert Frost

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. Paul Valery

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. E. M. Forster

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. Oscar Wilde

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. W. H. Auden

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. Wallace Stevens

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. Rene Char

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. Yevgeny Yevtushenko

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. Salman Rushdie

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. Samuel McChord Crothers

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. Jean Cocteau

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. Oscar Wilde

Always be a poet, even in prose. Charles Baudelaire

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. Charles Baudelaire

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. Jean Cocteau

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. Alfred de Musset


Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. A. E. Housman

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. Gustave Flaubert

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T. S. Eliot

God is the perfect poet. Robert Browning

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. George Sand

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. Carl Sandburg

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. Thomas Hardy

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers. Horace

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. Voltaire

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. Plutarch

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. Novalis

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. Kahlil Gibran

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. Robert Frost

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. William Hazlitt

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. Charles Simic

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. Leonard Cohen

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. Rita Dove

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. Plato

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. T. S. Eliot

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. Paul Engle

Favorite poetry books -- in no particular order

Odes to Common Things -- Neruda
Ode to Opposites -- Neruda
I Praise My Destroyer --- Ackerman
Loose Woman --- Cisneros
Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon -- Neruda
My Own True Name --- Mora
Furious Cooking --- Seaton
Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
Selected Poetry of W. B. Yeates
My Nature is Hunger --- Rodriguez
what i'm on -- Valadez

Favorite Poems (at the moment)
When You Are Old and Full of Sleep -- Yeates
Wildflowers -- Ackerman
Ulysses -- Tennyson

Lisa Alvarado

First day of 2009

In no particular order:


I wish for...

Universal health care for all
Universal literacy and the means to achieve it
Meaningful work at a true living wage for all
A planet without us wounding it by thoughtless use of resources
And end to gun barrel diplomacy

I am grateful for...

a spiritual outlook and a real relationship with Spirit
some small gift to be able to write
a larger gift to be able to appreciate the genius, hardwork,
and talent of so many others
Martin Espada
Dina Ackerman
Luis Rodriguez
Pablo Neruda
the blogueros
Ann Cardinal in particular
strength, both physical and emotional
the ability to find joy and beauty in everyday life
the ability to laugh

Lisa Alvarado