Poetry Centered
Poetry Centered
Diego Báez: Three Gabriels
Diego Báez introduces us to three Gabriels connected by themes of reclamation and new beginnings. He shares Gabriel Dozal approaching the US-Mexico border with humor (“You Look at Crossers, You Look Just Like Them”), Gabriel Palacios unpacking narratives of inheritance and race (“The Friar’s Daughter’s Mother”), and Jimmy Santiago Baca experiencing the birth of his son, Gabriel (“Child of the Sun—Gabriel’s Birth (Sun Prayer)”). Báez closes by reading “Neuropathy with Lamb,” which reflects on his role as a caregiver for his mother.
Find the full recordings of Dozal, Palacios, and Baca reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Gabriel Dozal (May 2, 2024)
Gabriel Palacios (May 2, 2024)
Jimmy Santiago Baca (September 14, 1988)
Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.
Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:This is Poetry Centered, where you'll hear archival recordings of poets reading and speaking about their work curated for you by another contemporary poet. The show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center and our online archive of poetry readings called Voca. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson. We're delighted to welcome Diego Báez to the show today. Diego is a poet, educator, and book critic who lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges. His first poetry collection, Yaguareté White, came out from the University of Arizona Press earlier this year. In this episode, Diego introduces us to three Gabriels, the poets Gabriel Dozal and Gabriel Palacios and a poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca about the birth of his son named Gabriel. Linking these three Gabriels are ideas of beginnings, reclamation, and good tidings. Diego, welcome. Thank you so much for being here today.[MUSIC PLAYING]
DIEGO BÁEZ:Hey, y'all. This is Diego Báez, and I'm recording this at my desk at Harry S. Truman College in the uptown neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Truman College occupies the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires-- the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi nations. It is my sincere hope that Indigenous and Native peoples in this country and around the world will reclaim their ancestral homelands. I'm recording this on Indigenous Peoples' Day, so this topic is very much on my mind, but I've been thinking a lot about reclamation lately, albeit on a much more introspective level. I've spent the last eight months promoting my debut book of poems Yaguareté White. This has been a welcome burden. It's literally the only thing I've wanted for as long as I can remember, but even so, I'm already itching to move on, to imagine new poems, to realize whatever needs to come next. And in preparing for this podcast, I was reminded of the biblical character of Gabriel, an archangel generally regarded as merciful and the bringer of hopeful announcements. I was raised Catholic but no longer practice. Even still, I'm drawn to the figure of a beneficent supernatural being who signals good tidings. It's in that spirit that I've chosen two recent recordings by poets named Gabriel, Gabriel Palacios and Gabriel Dozal, and one by Jimmy Santiago Baca that centers around a child named Gabriel. And so the first recording I'd like to share is Gabriel Dozal reading "You Look at Crossers, You Look Just Like Them" recorded on May 2, 2024. And the first thing that drew me to this poem is the title itself. My father is from Paraguay, and the experiences of immigrants to the United States from Paraguay are decidedly different from other Central American or Latin American migrants or refugees or immigrants in the sense that very few people from Paraguay make the journey on foot or by train or via water passage. Most fly over, and this was certainly the case for my father, who was 16 when he decided to come to the United States. He won a scholarship to study in Central Illinois with a family who lived on a farm in Gridley. And I think a lot about how my brothers and I-- I have two younger brothers who are very close in age-- grew up as the only brown kids on the block and stood out for those reasons even though we didn't have really much of a Spanish-speaking or Latino community to speak of. And so when I first read the title of Dozal's poem "You Look at Crossers, You Look Just Like Them," just on its surface is a reminder that indeed I do share a lot of physical or visual signifiers that perhaps group me amongst other populations in this country who have some shared experiences, some shared ancestries, or some similar ancestries. But that-- I can't get away from the fact that I always feel separated in that privilege of having descended from flight in a sense that my father flew over and also that he was able to travel with us, and so my family visited Paraguay once every two or three years. And that itself is a great privilege, a great luxury that lots of other migrants, especially Latin American migrants, do not-- just do not get. They do not get that experience. And so I was drawn to the poem specifically for that reason. It felt like something I've thought about a lot, and I'm not sure who said it. I don't know. Maybe it was a family member or a friend or I don't think I came up with it, but this idea that the world needs more metaphor, more seeking, finding, looking for similarities. And I think that is the impulse that drew me to Dozal's poem. Now one of the things you'll notice in his off-hand commentary introducing the piece, he does mention that it is included in his collection The Border Simulator, which he describes as a bilingual book translated by Natasha Tiniacos, a Venezuelan translator. And I really-- I appreciate a lot about this. I'm very interested in bilinguality. I'm interested in especially books that include both texts, so one language and another and in some cases a third or a fourth language together. And I also appreciate that Dozal took it upon himself to essentially translate these poems for himself, if that makes sense, to include it as a bilingual collection. So I'm always looking for new translations and new translators, especially from Spanish and in this case into Spanish. José Olivarez did something similar with his book Promises of Gold, Promesas de Oro, which David Ruano González translated. And I just love that initiative. I hope to pursue that in my own writing. There's maybe not a whole lot of actual Spanish or bilinguality in the poem itself as you will hear, but I think that context is important. I think it's also worth noting the humor in the piece. I think humor is very difficult. I think it's especially difficult in poetry, but there are so many funny moments, genuinely funny moments in the poem. In his introduction, he mentions the Rossers, border crossers who cross the border specifically to shop at Ross Dress for Less, which is funny. That's a legitimately funny conceit, and it's also a commentary on the transborder cross-border commerce that for better and worse has shaped so many economic and social dynamics in the borderlands. There's also the Seinfeld-like delivery of the opening lines, which I stand by this. The way Dozal really hits the Ross in those first lines, it sounds like Jerry Seinfeld. But then it's interesting because then in the third line, there's a pretty common catchphrase in humor, am I right, that Dozal does not deliver in that way. He remixes that delivery and resists really leaning into the stand up routine of it, which I appreciate. It strikes me as a way of having your cake and eating it, too. Plus then also later in the poem, there is a very specific mention of a car make, a Daewoo, which is funny to say. It's a funny word, but it's also random. It's not Ford or Chevy or Cadillac or maybe a more recognizable brand. And I would argue that the obscurity of that-- the obscurity but also recognizability of a brand name of car marca de alto is humorous, and I appreciate that detail. It'd be a very different poem if it were a Chevy or a Buick or a Cadillac or something. And then so finally the poem as you will hear ends on this totally absurd, bizarre scene of border crossers waiting for hours, just striking up conversation, making small talk with our neighbors. And for as absurd as it seems together with the rest of the poem, it's also from what I understand a fairly accurate representation of that odd in-between space of queuing, not crossing the border but queuing to cross the border. And I just really appreciate what Dozal has been able to conjure in this poem. So here is Gabriel Dozal reading "You Look at Crossers, You Look Just Like Them."[MUSIC PLAYING]
GABRIEL DOZAL:And this is the last poem I'll read, and it's in The Border Simulator. I guess I should say also if you don't know The Border Simulator, it's a bilingual book, so it has the English on the left side and the Spanish facing. So you can play around and jump around to both English and Spanish. I worked with an amazing translator, Natasha Tiniacos, a Venezuelan translator, and her poems in Spanish-- I mean my poems in Spanish that she translated and wrote are amazing and fantastic. So please check those out. This is called "You Look at Crossers, You Look Just Like Them." Oh, yeah, and I guess I coined a word called Rossing or Rossers, and these are people who cross the border to shop at Ross--[LAUGHTER] Dress for Less. Yes. You look at crossers, you look just like them. The border simulator is constant practice at Rossing, shopping at Ross. What to say when crossing. Am I? Right? And Ross loss prevention is always side eyeing you, the merchandise. You might steal a badly seamed pair of bedazzled jeans, but Ross loss prevention cares more about you stealing yourself. Borders accept crossers as payment now. The cryptocurrency of the border is the crosser, and they are in crypt-like boxes as they cross. And soon they are released back from the crypt. If customs knows the crosser, they can't check their papers. But it's hard not to know everyone in this narrow corridor where corridos tuba from every car. It's so loud that it's quiet. You also don't get old. You just give up on the bridge, waiting next to the same Daewoo for hours, and you roll down your window and start swapping stories about other wait times. On the Mexican side, customs had enough of the line and shouted to all the cars waiting¡Bocina si no existes! Honk if you don't exist! And all the cars honked. You couldn't even hear your passenger. Thank you.[APPLAUSE][MUSIC PLAYING]
DIEGO BÁEZ:The second recording I'd like to share is Gabriel Palacios reading "The Friar's Daughter's Mother" also recorded on May 2, 2024. In introducing the piece, Palacios uses two terms that I have thought about a lot recently. He talks about the poem itself being inheritance and fakery, and he also uses the term racial fakery. These are concepts that I don't want to say plague my poetic thinking, but they really do. As someone who is descended from a Paraguayan father and a mother who is white and as a white Latino myself, I wrestle with those contradictions. I struggle to reconcile both of those being part of a dominant population and a subaltern community so to speak. And so when Palacios talks about racial fakery and the categories that we use in the United States to talk about race, to identify race, to build so much of our own personalities or personas around, it really strikes me as incredibly profound how many of us subscribe to or enact behaviors or ways of being that are either prescribed or passed down or inherited or mimicked. And the more I think about Palacios' term, the more I begin to wonder, well, isn't that the fakery, this idea that there are ways to be Latino or there are ways to be white that are accepted or not or rather condoned or endorsed by the state, by dominant culture, by media narratives, what have you. And so I think about that a lot. And I am obsessed with the notion of passing, passing for white, passing for Latino, navigating between identities. And I speak to these identities only because they are my own. I know that many people experience that duality, that bi-cultural reality, that bi-raciality in similar ways, maybe not the same for sure but, again, in the service of seeking metaphor, maybe trying to build bridges amongst or between folks who find themselves navigating those tricky categories, those tricky columns. I am also drawn to one line in particular that really resonated with me. Now the poem itself is maybe not so overtly concerned with racial fakery in the sense that I have been speaking of it, and indeed, Palacios' poem is pretty dark. It deals with pretty upsetting, fairly disturbing subject matter. And yet there's one line that I'm really drawn to. The line goes like this-- ancestors, we treat them bad. I'd put the cable in their surnames if I could. It's a line that is pretty characteristic of Palacios or at least of this poem in the sense that the syntax is a little screwy and some of the vocabulary, the word choices make you read them twice. At first, I was imagining cable as a connecting cord or wire or something, but in fact, he's-- the speaker there is talking about putting the bills in their deceased ancestors' names, which to go back to the subject of humor, that's funny on the surface. But I really think that it in almost elliptical way gets at a dynamic that is very uncomfortable, especially for-- perhaps especially for children of immigrants in that I think we perhaps want to make our ancestors proud. We want to do well by them. And for myself, I can say that I didn't think really about questions of legacy until two important events in my life, the birth of my child and the publication of my debut book, in the sense that in both instances, in very different ways or maybe not so different but in different ways. The birth of my child extends this lineage beyond me, beyond myself, in a way that I had not been able to really imagine before that happened beforehand. And with the publication of the book, certain-- there are certain names in the book that I to my knowledge are not recorded anywhere else, and they are now at least for now published in a book that will live on in the ledger of posterity forever. By that same token, though, my abuela, my abuelo, they did not live to see the book published. They will never know that it existed, and I certainly don't begrudge them that. That's not exactly the right sentiment, but I do have some complicated emotions about it. I do feel maybe not embittered but a little resentful that the universe took them before I could share that part of myself with them. Now this is not maybe exactly what Palacios is talking about. However, there are some complicated dynamics at play in this poem, and I think the severity that underlies the subject matter of the poem really adds a complex, complicated dynamic. And so here is Gabriel Palacios reading"The Friar's Daughter's Mother."[MUSIC PLAYING]
GABRIEL PALACIOS:Some of the threads in this book are inheritance and fakery and self-implication and are who we are purported to be or are we faking it. And I feel like I'm faking it all the time. When I was really young, I was-- I took part in this Andean folk music group. I was roped into this thing where they had a revolving membership, and so sometimes some of the people couldn't come up from Obregon. And this is Andean folk music, so there's panpipes and the charango is made out of a armadillo hide, and I would come up and fill in and do my best. And we would play all of the disgusting golf resorts across the parched state. And there would be some folks. There was one gentleman, older gentleman, who was convinced that I was the same person who he'd seen last time and really taken a liking to. And I'm sure I didn't correct him, and I think that if he didn't pet me on the head, he would have. And so I feel-- I'm thinking about how people fake it, and I think that one of the fun things to think about for me is race fakery whether it's how the Selena t-shirt we wear or the mustache we have and the way that we perform these things, and this book is a lot about just asking what true identity is because it's just a mirror image of racial purity probably. And so 23andMe is the most American thing you can think of because maybe your 3% or 4% special and not what people thought you were. Or maybe the other American thing about it is that it's really a cop tool. I think that's what it has to be. So the fake and the uncanny is something I can spend a lot of time thinking about. This is called "The Friar's Daughter's Mother." Murió en el río de parto. Indigena. Event of no agreed upon name, child born bears friar's child. A spade clangs dirt. We transmit via kitchen voice of ants. The father, Alessandro Branchi, OFM, gives the infant child Carolina name, softening a torch trust over how I know him. My child's eyeball strobic in the wide-brimmed hatted death's head given placard. In museums, I am tampered with a little by a galleon's crude figurehead by who was in her maker's mind. I know the wooden woman's petty listicle of doomsday fears. The timeline to the left of my etch is an approaching fire, an exterminating thinking I feel idleness-- eyeless towards the truth. I trust computer ghosts to translate, a stratagem for getting it together to buy groceries as buying is its own sorcery against the deafening radioactivity of no stars. Ancestors, we treat them bad. I'd put the cable in their surnames if I could. I bark at my own children like the friars on these documents of death by childbirth. I pace a spinning infomercial kitchen miked in blackness before them. These dead, my young, saying what you say, when stripped at customs of whatever honorifics to your heirloom epaulets.[MUSIC PLAYING][APPLAUSE] Thank you.
DIEGO BÁEZ:The third recording I'd like to share is Jimmy Santiago Baca reading "Child of the Sun-- Gabriel's Birth-- Sun Prayer" recorded on September 14, 1988. Now this poem-- the poem itself strikes me, especially now as a father myself, as someone who witnessed the birth of my child but as I like to joke my wife and partner Sarah, she did all the work for much more than nine months, certainly nine months and more and many, many hours during delivery, and I was also there. And so in this poem, the way the speaker narrates this experience is-- I think I hope to me-- it really reflects the profundity of that whole process of being a bystander to something, to an event that you're crucially, vitally connected to and a part of and responsible for and party to but also separate from in so many important ways. And a funny thing happened earlier this year. This would have been-- in April of this year, I performed some poems at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and listed in the program in alphabetical order, my name Báez followed Jimmy Santiago Baca. And it was a rather profound moment because Baca had always been a poet who I read in anthologies or for English class or lit class. And then to see my name in print in the newspaper program directly beneath his was a very strange, disorienting, uncanny experience that I will cherish forever, maybe in similar ways that the Speaker of his poem cherishes the moment of his child's birth. But certainly it's not the same. It's different in some important ways, too. I will say, with regard to the delivery of the poem, I just could listen to Baca speak and recite poetry and perform forever. The-- his way-- his intonations and his emphasis and some of the I would say cornball but over-the-top delivery, it's maybe a little cheesy but super sincere, and I think he gets away with it for that reason or is successful for that reason. And the quality of the recording is a little grainy as well, as it's from the '80s, the late '80s, and it's just so evocative. Even that, even the quality of the recorded-- I don't know what it would have been recorded on, but it feels tangible. It feels real. It feels like a physical media. And I so appreciate that. We recently purchased a record player, not to be trendy but actually to have physical media that we can interact with and that my child can interact with in a way that forces us to slow down, in a way that forces us to handle the music that we are about to enjoy together. And in a roundabout way, that connects with my experience of hearing Baca recite this poem. I feel like I'm in the cafe with him, in the salon with him. I feel like I'm there at the event. And I can only imagine how that must feel, what that must be like. It must feel like the next best thing, the next best thing to actually being there to witness Baca. And so here he is, Jimmy Santiago Baca, reading "Child of the Sun-- Gabriel's Birth-- Sun Prayer."[MUSIC PLAYING]
JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA:We're just going to leaf through this, OK. Here goes another birth poem. Beatrice on the bed. Muscles twitch pain. No. The pain. Marsha offers warm wet towel. No, no, it's too painful. Beatrice paces bedroom, cross corn planting blanket, barefoot through rows of corn dancers caressing abdomen, deep breathing. Lips expel flurries of pain while her fingers circle belly trying to ease pain in a tub of warm water. No. Beatrice rises. Ahh, ahh, pulls my hands into hers. We stand together in bathroom window to her back, silhouettes her soft curves of hips and shoulders to a dark shadow Sunlight smolders off of. She radiates light streams. Her face grimaces intense pain and pleasure. Her head lolls forward, and long black hair falls over my face as I kneel before her on the bathroom floor. Prop your right leg up, Beatrice on the toilet seat. That's it. Now push, push. And through vines of her hair, I peer between her spread legs blinding light streams through. Our bodies connected by hair create a cave dwelling of flesh. She mutters grunted pleas, aggressive [CLEARING THROAT] throaty squeals. Grips my shoulders, her warm breath pants at my head. Sweat drips from her onto me. And then enraging strobe of sunlight between her legs from wild roses and green vines pressed against window at her back, she gives half-choked sob and upside down suspended between her legs surfacing from sunlight leaves and flowers, the 1,000-year-old face appears, Gabriel. Flying dark shape and sunlight, God descending from sky between woman's legs, arms and face glisten darkly with uterine juices, shimmery body fluids, it wriggles free of mother skin, fierce, glum godhead stone face. I stare at through vines of hair and stark eyes squinched lidded, open wide and hunting ferocity at me.[LAUGHTER] And instantly I am tossed, flung from my body into a Ferris wheel of lights, disembodied in sheer blaze of dazzling waves of light, instantaneously hurled into timeless space, out of my body like a spark from a chimney flue at winter dawn floating up an updraft. Then I'm holding a wrinkled brown baby. Filling me with juice, thick rivulets of blood run down our hands, arms, wrists. Gabriel slips from her trembling loins into my hands, cries angrily at me. And I rise in the glowing sunlight blue-misted bathroom brushed through vines of hair, offer Gabriel, child of the sun, to Beatrice and then look at the window and bow.[APPLAUSE][MUSIC PLAYING]
DIEGO BÁEZ:And so finally, I'd like to share a poem of my own. I've chosen a poem that I wrote only two weeks ago, so it's pretty new. I've had the opportunity to share it a couple times but not much. It deals with some experiences recently as part of the sandwich generation, which is a term I learned recently. You know how there are terms that apply so accurately to dynamics or phenomena where it just fits. Maybe the situation ahead of time and then you learn the term for it, you're like, ahh, yes, that's the word I needed for this. And so the sandwich generation refers to those of us who are both raising children and caring for aging parents. It's the kind of thing I'd heard about, you know about, you learn about, But then to actually be part of it, to participate in it, to be responsible for it is another level that I had not been prepared for. And oddly, within the span of just a couple of weeks, some fairly serious medical and health-related concerns played out around me. A dear friend had been hospitalized for two weeks. My father-in-law underwent open heart surgery. I was in New York recently, and a friend who I was to meet up with ended up in the ICU. And right around the same time, which actually precipitated all of those aforementioned events, was a procedure that I attended with my mother, and she was getting a bone marrow sample taken. And I was in the room. She requested that I be in the room, and I was positioned awkwardly. I couldn't actually look at her or hold her hand. I was at the other end of the table. And if you're not familiar with the procedure, it is not the most invasive or the most serious. You walk in walk out, they anesthetize the area and all that, but it's still pretty intense. It's the retrieval of bone matter from a body. And I knew in the moment watching it and being part of it but, again, also being distant from it that this was something I was going to need to think about, talk about, process, write about for sure. And the poem is called"Neuropathy with Lamb." And I shared the poem with some friends who questioned where the lamb was in the poem. And it occurred to me that I'm not sure exactly who this poem is for, if it's for me or if it's for my mom. And I think that probably the answer is both. So this is "Neuropathy with Lamb." Squidge of marrow, spongy the tech says. Shiny vials of red, wileful and vile, these tests. Lab techs and extraction specialists pinch their way through the room. Mom prone, feet to me, early autumn always swore by apple cider vinegar and silver colloidal, prayer beads and penance, whispers and visions, visitors, shivers. Hot cry of sciatica. Quickly now. Whimpers of assurance. Sandbag for pressure. Vitals, a sign. The hematologist tells her Jesus heals souls. Let us do the rest. Yes. Has it always been so twitchy, this long band of time? The moment mother becomes a patient and impatient, I untwist the coils of this razor wire life. There you are now. Go ahead. You're all right. Thank you for listening. My name is Diego Báez, signing off from Chicago.[MUSIC PLAYING] JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON: Diego, thank you so much for this episode. Those words are a great way to end the year. Listeners, thank you. We are so grateful to spend time with you, and I hope good tidings are finding you wherever you are. Due to the holidays, we'll take a slightly longer break of three weeks, and we'll be back then on January 1st with an episode hosted by Abigail Chabitnoy. We'll see you then, and we're wishing you a great end to 2024.
ARIA PAHARI:Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari-- that's me-- and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audio visual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.