The Republic of Poetry                                                                                                   For other reviews, consult BookReviews.

By Martín Espada.  New York.  2006.  63 pp.  ISBN 13: 978-0-393-06256-4.  $23.95.  WW Norton & Company. 

 

Life is easy for professors when they go, not against, but with the academic grain, never questioning or challenging the hand that feeds them.  Their reward is usually a protective cocoon of title, tenure, and lifetime salary. For a professor poet, it can also include publication opportunities, speaking engagements, prizes, and even fame, thanks to the ubiquitous academic/literary established-order machine. That "good" life, however, is surely no life for a poet. "Let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine," had declared Henry David Thoreau. For Martín Espada, however, his life has become a lubricant to help keep the machine operating.  By choosing to become the machine's sycophants (proponents), Espada and so many other fame-achievers like him, including Snyder, Hass, Collins, Angelou, Dove, Giovanni, Wright (does it matter which one?), Gluck and Pinsky, have become poet eunuchs. 

 

To achieve Espada's renown, one must avoid speaking the rude truth and “bombarding the palace” (see poem below).  One must also make a Faustian deal with the machine.  Several years ago, by the way, I protested in Acton, MA during an evening where Espada was anointing C. D. Wright with the Robert Creeley prize.  My protest flyer contained a cartoon critical of Creeley, labeling him “Beatnik Poet Academic Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.”  “If it isn’t fun, it isn’t a poem,” had written Creeley.  Espada’s wife approached me, complaining the cartoon had made Creeley’s widow weep.  Espada himself never had the courage to come out to face me.  “Creeley really helped Martín get tenure,” argued the wife, as if that fact somehow made Creeley great and that greatness rubbed off on Martín. 

In any case, the poem that is also the title of this collection is astonishingly bad.  One would have expected much more from a big publishing house like Norton.  The poem describes an ideal land of poets.  Unfortunately, Espada doesn’t seem to even be aware that he exists in that ideal land, where the poet has life-time job security and gets taxpayer-paid sabbaticals, reading invitations galore, eternal praise (backslapping), etc.  The first stanza is the following:

 

In the republic of poetry,

a train full of poets,

rolls south in the rain

as plum trees rock

and horses kick the air,

and village bands

parade down the aisle

with trumpets, with bowler hats,

followed by the president

of the republic,

shaking every hand. 

 

Espada’s wife had proclaimed her husband to be somewhat of a radical, someone who dared speak out… but about what?  Does the above verse sound like a poem written by a radical?  Hardly!  Well, I’ve rewritten the entire poem to express Espada’s reality.  But first let's look at the last stanza of the poem:

 

In the republic of poetry,

the guard at the airport

will not allow you to leave the country

until you declaim a poem for her

and she says Ah! beautiful.

 

The Ivory-Tower of Poetry
In the ivory-tower of poetry,

a line full of tenured poets,

worms south in the rain

as plum trees chuckle

and dogs lick themselves,

and student bands

parade down the aisle

with trumpets, with black caps,

followed by the president

of the university,

shaking every tenured hand. 

 

In the ivory-tower of poetry,

professors print vacuous verse

on fine-paper serviettes,

latrines in restaurants

use odes for toilet paper

from snail to seaweed,

and tenured poets eat for free. 

 

In the ivory-tower of poetry,

tenured poets read to the baboons

in classrooms, and all the primates,

poets and baboons alike, scream for joy.

 

In the ivory-tower of poetry,

tenured poets are provided with a stipend

to shower the student center

with inoffensive poems on bookmarks                                

and the sycophants in the cafeteria

rush to grab a poem

fluttering from the sky,

blinded by weeping.

 

In the ivory-tower of poetry,

the guard at the gate

won’t let you into the university

until you declaim a poem for her

                        and she says Ah! beautiful.

The back cover of Espada's book is unoriginally loaded with blurbs.  “Espada means ‘sword’ in Spanish, and in these new poems Martín Espada wields the sword of his poetry like a veritable Zorro,” writes Samuel Hazo.  But in reality Martín’s espada is as limp as it gets, and the poet wields it like a veritable sin cojones. 
 

Sadly, not one poem in this entire collection was written from personal conflict with the power structure, the one paying Espada dearly.  Not one poem involved personal risk.  Not one!  To become part of the literary-establishment order machine one has to write inoffensively.  Espada writes of the 1973 coup in Chile, but I'd much rather read a poem written by a poet who risked his skin during that coup.  So many tenured professor poets, sitting comfortably in their wainscoted offices, write poems about the Iraq war.  And, yes, Espada writes those too as in “Blues for the Soldiers Who Told You.”  But who wants to read a poem written by a professor poet living in a tenured cocoon about a war in which he hasn’t even fought.  As Charles Sykes wrote in Profscam, “Tenure corrupts, enervates, and dulls higher education.  It is, moreover, the academic culture’s ultimate control mechanism to weed out the idiosyncratic, the creative, the nonconformist.”  That is precisely what it does regarding the poet. 

The first section of this book contains poems written around Espada’s visit to Chile, especially Neruda’s Isla Negra estate, including “Rain without Rain.”  “The celebration of a century since Neruda’s birth/ brings pilgrims by the thousands to his house […],” writes Espada.  And so what?  The same goes for Elvis and one day no doubt for Paris Hilton.  Mobs do not necessarily determine literary greatness.  That poem ends rather pitifully:  “At the tomb, a woman silent all along/ steps from the circle and says:/ I want to sing.  Neruda.  Poem Twenty./ Then she climbs atop the tomb and sings:  Tonight I can write the saddest verses.”  (Does she sing that to the tune of West Side Story?)  It is time we stop glorifying the poets, especially when that glorification is self-serving. 

The second section of the book is basically more of the same, though not Chile.  “I want to write a poem about this coat,/ with buttons and pockets and green cloth,/ a poem useful as a coat to a coughing man,” writes Espada.  Good luck, for the last thing a coughing man would want is a poem.  In “You Got a Song Man,” Espada praises both himself and his buddy Creeley hovering around Thoreau’s gravesite.  “[…] Drive, you said, because poets must/ bring the news to the next town:/ You got a song, man, sing it.  You got a song, man, sing it.”   But what they are both singing is I want to be a famous poet… and not much else.  Is that really “news”?  If it is, it’s old news.  Espada would do well to contemplate not Thoreau's gravestone, but rather what Emerson wrote on Thoreau:  "No college ever offered him a diploma, or a professor’s chair; no academy made him its corresponding secretary, its discoverer or even its member.  Perhaps these learned bodies feared the satire of his presence."  Evidently, they certainly do not fear the satire of Espada's presence! 

 

In nearly every poem, the word “poet” appears.  “We have no words for you,” begins the eulogy for yet another poet, Komunyakaa. Yet Espada manages to find words and fill up the page with them.  In another poem, yet another eulogy to a poet, Dennis Brutus, who fought hard against Apartheid, spent time in jail, then ended up on the lucrative American-university circuit, where no doubt Espada bumped into him.  “Did you know, that forty years later,/ college presidents and professors of English/ would raise their wine to your name […]?”  Well, Brutus should be asking himself, if he’s not already dead, what the hell he did wrong to have such dubious people do that. 

“Advice to Young Poets,” is particularly disturbing, for Espada as tenured English professor lectures, year after year, to herds of young would-be poets in his creative writing classes.  What is his advice to the young herds?  “Never pretend/ to be a unicorn/ by sticking a plunger on your head,” he writes.  Well, that will keep President William Bulger happy.  Oh, I forgot, he left U. Mass. with a million-dollar settlement.       

Overall, these poems will be cherished by the likes of Ariel Dorfman (“What a tender, marvelous collection…”).  They will not stir up anything at all, except the excitement of established-order literati, who tend to win a lot of national prizes, and indeed Espada isn’t shy about letting us know about his “numerous awards.”  As our democracy continues on its downhill plunge, do we really need more poets like Espada manning our university classrooms?  Here is my Advice to Old Poets:  Tenured poet is an oxymoron. 

                                                                                                                                                                                         —The Editor

Dear Professor Martin Espada, English Department, University of Massachusetts :
For a critical review, as opposed to an established-order, business-as-usual hagiography, of The Republic of Poetry, consult www.theamericandissident.org/BookReviews-Espada.htm.  Wouldn’t it be a wonderful idea to distribute that review to your creative-writing students?  It would certainly present a very different perspective, one of encouraged questioning and challenging, as opposed to university-as-usual encouraged ingurgitation of dictated icons and canon.  Think about it, unless of course it’s too late for that. 

Sincerely,
G. Tod Slone, Ed.

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