It’s not easy to pinpoint exactly what J. Michael Martinez means when he writes " Margin is the whiteness in our silence. I said, Difference is already spread between the body and the gaze. You said, We lament the name we give; we give word to find respite from the shallows between."
We encounter these words as a drifting dialogue, a kind of coded prose that appears untitled and on the blank page before the opening of Heredities, winner of the 2009 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.
This sense of almost knowing, of entering a frame of words without origin or apparent direction, is one of the beautiful bones that make up the body of Martinez’s first collection, a book that feels at once like wading into history and lamp-lit archives, folklore and myth, personal diary and fleeting sketch pad. The young Chicano poet exhibits fearlessness in his choice of fantastical subjects and forms. In "Articulations of Quetzacoatl’s Spine" and "The Sternum of Our Lady Guadalupe," anatomical drawings crown the long missive-like lines which consider faith and its accompanying sacrifices, whether in the guise of a jaguar or an eagle, or in how two ligaments attach themselves to the flawless "souls of infants," now "transformed into hummingbirds."
In his poems, Martinez often considers the act of becoming, of renewal as revolution, a way of claiming power by assembling not only such earthly elements as amaranth, water, oaks, and wings, for example, but also by the parsing and reconstruction of language. "Heredities: Letters of Relation" illustrates the poet’s skill with linguistic collage; the poem’s lyrical sections are written completely from Hernan Cortes’ letters from Mexico during the conquest. The slaughter is documented once more, yet his own words are now re-arranged to display the gleaming details discovered in the lives of the Tenochca (or the Aztecs as they are later known), particulars that offer the same historical prominence to a people as to the wars that enslaved them.
"We sail the laws and beliefs/ of their idols, chambers garlanded/ in feathers of little birds/ covered with pearl shells./ Their past is a valley circular,/ fertile in fruit and cotton....Owls and sparrow hawks/ echo in the oratories..."
It is particularly exciting, for me at least, to read a first book by a Latino poet who does not offer the familiar trope of nostalgia as a way of exploring identity, but, instead, mines deeply into artifact and gender, the influence of personal lore and the self-colored perceptions of language. Martinez invents his own forms to consider the idea of source and the alchemy of what makes a life.
This means that Heredities requires patience and a willingness to abandon traditional narratives, to practice a negative capability, where mystery becomes the norm and, thus, a place where one can slip into an unhurried dreamscape. While reading these poems, I thought about paintings by Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and Mexican modernist Rufino Tamayo, both who also fused atmospheric color and abstraction with the more recognizable shapes of vines and stars, human heads and horses. Martinez continues in this artistic tradition of braiding together what is seen with what is felt and not as easily explained.
J. Michael Martinez reads with Naomi Ayala and Valerie Martinez at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol Street, SE, Washington D.C. on Monday, February 28 at 7:30 p.m. The reading is part of the O. B. Hardison Poetry Series and is co-sponsored by The Poetry Society of America and Letras Latinas. For more details and ticket info, visit here.