After Rubén Read online

  Advance Praise for After Rubén

  Part imagined intimate diary of the poet Rubén Darío, part lyrical exploration of the rich inner life of poet Aragón, this pulsating book is an ode to the between-world of those who live a life dedicated to observation of words. Sonically charged lines that delve into solitude, travel, separation, grief, and the complex life of the outsider allow these poems to speak both to the individual Latinx experience and the universal desire to belong, to be heard.

  —Ada Limón, author of The Carrying and Bright Dead Things

  Consider all of this / an excursus on origins,” advises Francisco Aragón as he invites the reader into the queer Latinx literary lineage in After Rubén. Comprised of equal parts familial and scholarly figures and conflicts, the depiction of Rubén Darío’s poetic legacy in this collection reveals his lasting impact on Aragón, whose verse illuminates a range of complex and passionate lives. Aragón’s translations (the originals are reproduced in an appendix) and ekphrastic re-visions of ten of Darío’s poems are daring and, indeed, “blasphemous.”

  —Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Cruel Futures and Be Recorder

  After Rubén es una maravilla. Its elegant, lapidary poems are whispered, intoned, delivered like manifestos, or sung in halting measures that transmute the ephemera of memory and witness into the flashes and trails of glimpsed truths. Francisco Aragón, an American poet of uncommon ambition, has created a bejeweled puzzle box of a book, a fragmented Mariposa memoir of a childhood in between worlds, set within an homage to the poets whose inspirations helped him find his voice, all of which is interwoven in a celebration, an elegy—an interrogation—of the legacy of his greatest literary “mentor,” the great Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. In this heady poetic idiom, bridging his home in San Francisco and scenes in Nicaragua with other places from his life in the States, Aragón’s poetry hearkens again to the possibility of a poetics of las Americas, unbounded, unabashedly literary across cultures, languages, history, and journalism, unafraid to anatomize itself, and to regard and report the ever-shifting totalities of our Latinidad.

  —John Phillip Santos, author of Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation and The Farthest Home Is in an Empire of Fire

  What is remarkable about this book is Aragón’s “here, there, how” (“Cancíon”)—the integration of history, identity, geography, homage, poetry, and prose that characterizes the collection. What contemporary Latinx poetry does best is defy division, instead affirming the complex and beautifully profound communion of beings pulsing through the poet’s veins. “I am large,” wrote Whitman, “I contain multitudes.” This book embodies these words as a powerful argument for justice, compassion and love.

  —Valerie Martínez, author of Each and Her, Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, NM (2008–2010)

  also by

  Francisco Aragón

  Poetry

  His Tongue a Swath of Sky (chapbook)

  Glow of Our Sweat

  Puerta del Sol Tertulia (chapbook)

  In Praise of Cities (chapbook)

  Light, Yogurt, Strawberry Milk (chapbook)

  Translations

  From the Other Side of Night

  Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes

  Of Dark Love

  Body in Flames

  Lorca: Selected Verse (cotranslator)

  Federico García Lorca: Collected Poems (cotranslator)

  Editions

  OCHO #15

  The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry

  Dánta: A Poetry Journal, #1 & 2

  Mark My Words: Five Emerging Poets

  Berkeley Poetry Review, #23/24

  AFTER RUBÉN

  poems + prose

  Francisco Aragón

  After Rubén

  Copyright © 2020 by Francisco Aragón

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Book design by Mark E. Cull

  Cover Art: “Momotombo on Lake Managua” by José Rodeiro,

  oil-on-linen, 24”x37,” 1995

  http://www.rodeiro-art.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Aragón, Francisco, author.

  Title: After Rubén : poems / Francisco Aragón.

  Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019027781 (print) | LCCN 2019027782 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597098571 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781597098168 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3601.R34 A6 2020 (print) | LCC PS3601.R34 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027781 | LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027782

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

  Publication of this book is made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  www.redhen.org

  para ti, papá

  QEPD /RIP

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  I

  2012

  Poem with Citations from the O.E.D.

  Postcard

  Reasons Why She Didn’t

  Far Away

  Jugglers

  Photo, 1945

  Foto, 1945

  Gloria’s

  Ernesto Cardenal in Berkeley

  Blister

  Calle Momotombo

  II

  Keough Hall

  The Inevitable

  To George W. Bush

  Tenochtitlan, 1523

  Wind & Rain

  1985

  Poem with a Phrase of Isherwood

  Bay Area Rapid Transit

  December 31, 1965

  The Man and the Wolf

  Liu Minghe Speaks

  Helen Speaks

  Academia Escolar

  The Century

  III

  Portrait with lines of Montale

  We Talk Dogs

  Voices

  Nicaragua in a Voice

  Canción

  Seashell

  After Fragments of Juan Felipe Herrera

  A Wave

  Hotel Mirror

  IV

  Walt

  Because They Lived Abroad

  To the Old World

  I Pursue a Shape

  Symphony in Gray

  1916

  Voices

  January 21, 2013

  Winter Hours

  Bay Area Rapid Transit

  Poem Beginning with a Fragment of Andrés Montoya

  Creed

  V

  My Rubén

  Appendix

  Ten poems by Rubén Darío

  Allá lejos

  Lo fatal

  A Roosevelt

  Los motivos del lobo

  Caracol

  Walt Whitman

  Yo persigo una forma . . .

  Sinfonía en gris mayor

  Triste, muy tristemente . . .

  De invierno

  Notes to some of
the poems and the essay

  Publications Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgments

  Biographical sketches

  Rubén’s Friends

  AFTER RUBÉN

  ¡Oh Momotombo ronco y sonoro! Te amo

  —Rubén Darío

  Canto errante

  You are dead and the dead are very patient.

  —Jack Spicer

  After Lorca

  Foreword

  by Michael Dowdy

  At the crossroads of its equis, Latinx poetry gathers worlds upon worlds—tongues, triumphs, and hardships. We’re fortunate to encounter in After Rubén an expert guide. With joy, pluck, and a warm hand, he takes us to meet his people. His mother, “head brimming with phrases” in English, amulets for escaping the sweatshop. His father, “portly, sugar / in his blood, a whiff of something // on his breath as he speaks / of the Sacramento / River.” A sister, her voice “sturdy as the metal / table and chairs / in the patio.” Cities north and south, where numina float and settle, “as if a place—León, / Granada—could speak, / whistle, inhabit / a timbre.” A Nicaraguan woman testifying about the Contra War, whose words “gather and huddle / in [his] throat.” Scoundrels, alas, like Joe Arpaio—“we’ve caught a glimpse / in the jowls of your sheriff: / bulldog who doubles as your heart.” And, in rapture, the poets who sing in his ears and in the poems in our hands.

  Francisco Aragón has collected in After Rubén several lifetimes of a life in letters. From the “short / skinny boy” with a skateboard and “books in [his] backpack,” to the man in a hotel mirror who’s come to resemble his father, the constant is poetry. A poet fierce and vulnerable, wizened and empowered by his experiences as a gay Latinx man. A generous advocate for other poets, who share our air or breathe within poems we share with others. After Rubén meditates on family, both inherited and made, through filiation, through the words of living and dead. Our guide animates his dead, for, as he writes, “the dead are very patient.”

  The Rubén of the title is, of course, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916). Rubén—innovator of Latin American modernismo, not to be confused with Anglo-American modernism. Darío—recently outed queer poet whose poems Aragón reinvents. Rubén—beating heart of the collection, a body of poems and poets in communion across space and time. Consider the line just above. Borrowed from Jack Spicer’s book After Lorca, it serves as epigraph to After Rubén and the final line of “January 21, 2013,” perhaps the book’s boldest poem.

  Aragón’s poems frequently carry dates, marking personal and historical events. The event in “January 21, 2013” unfolds in layers. An epistle in Darío’s voice, the poem is addressed to the Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez. His novel, Margarita, está linda la mar (1998), takes its title from a Darío poem. Although Rubén rates the novelist’s depictions of his life, they’re not the occasion for Rubén-Francisco’s letter. In 2012, Aragón informs us, Arizona State University acquired a privately-held collection of Darío’s papers, including nine letters addressed to Mexican poet Amado Nervo, the last of which confirms Darío’s love affair with Nervo in fin-de-siècle Paris. For reasons that seem clear enough, Ramírez published an essay denouncing the letters as counterfeit, a specious claim refuted by scholars. Speaking from beyond the grave, Rubén tells Sergio, it’s all true.

  The title references Barack Obama’s second inauguration, where the Cuban-American Richard Blanco became the first Latinx and openly gay poet to read an inaugural poem. That makes at least six poets figuratively gathered on and in “January 21, 2013”—Lorca, Spicer, Darío, Nervo, Blanco, Aragón—not counting other poets with cameos in After Rubén: Cardenal, Whitman, Herrera . . . Here, Aragón is spirit guide, conduit, time-traveling party host. As Rubén says to Sergio (here, we’re on a first-name basis; Eliot and Pound can have their surname-monuments): “Perhaps you’re surprised by this letter? / You shouldn’t be. Anything is possible / in this racket of ours.”

  Another type of racket, noise, subtly introduces After Rubén, with the poet traveling on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). A modified list poem squeezed into a loose, unpunctuated sonnet, “2012” compresses a year of culture—books, journals, playbills—in our poet’s life. Is he moving cities, apartments? No matter. This is poetry in motion, on West Coast-East Coast (San Francisco/D.C.), north-south (Indiana/Nicaragua), and transatlantic trajectories (Madrid, Paris, London). Darío, too, was a man in transit. Although he lived in Chile for two years, Nicanor Parra wrote that Darío was one of the three best Chilean poets. This is what Aragón and Latinx poetry do. They move, transgressing nations, languages, selves.

  Among the possessions in “2012” are photos and cassettes of Aragón’s sister’s and father’s voices. Throughout After Rubén, dynamic interplay unfolds between sight and sound. An elegy to a sister asks what might be put to Darío: “Was recording // you a way of / releasing you?” In English and Spanish, the ekphrastic poem “Photo, 1945”/“Foto, 1945” studies the poet’s grandfather and young mother in Managua. The opening tercets foreshadow violence to come. They also stage how seeing sounds differently in each language:

  The only photo of you, black and white and torn—the frayed edge climbing your chest, just missing La única foto de ti, en blanco y negro y rota—el borde desgastado escalando tu pecho, rozando

  your left eye, cutting off your ear: only your face was spared. [ . . . ] tu ojo izquierdo, cortando tu oreja: solo tu cara se salvó. [ . . . ]

  While this poem of apostrophe subtly interweaves the personal and political, others dramatize the stakes for Latinx lives during an era of anti-immigrant nativism. In After Rubén, the poet of Puerta del Sol (2005) and Glow of Our Sweat (2010) has become more political, joining other contemporary poets of social engagement.

  Aragón follows this strand of the poetry of the Americas with a tensile rewriting of Darío’s “A Roosevelt” (1904). “To George W. Bush” hews to its spirit, diction, and mode of address, though Aragón torques, tightens, and condenses Darío’s poem into enjambed couplets. Bush is “one part wily astute / animal, three parts owner // of a ranch.” The ten Darío poems Aragón approximates in English appear in the appendix, where we notice arresting visual differences. Aragón’s propulsive version consummates Darío’s prophecy for the twentieth century: “Eres los Estados Unidos, / eres el futuro invasor / de la América [Latina].”

  Alas, disdain for Latinx and Latin American lives persists. The Trump catastrophe punctuates After Rubén in “Keough Hall” and “Helen Speaks.” As “January 21, 2013” shows, Aragón’s persona poems sparkle. Reading the title “Helen Speaks,” I expected the Helen (of Troy, whose beauty launched a thousand ships). I conjured Darío’s swan, that avatar of modernismo, Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” Zeus . . . Instead, this Helen is a working-class white woman from northern Indiana, a waitress married to a Latino deported to Mexico after seventeen years of marriage, their children distraught, helpless. This Helen, a Trump voter, stares in her mirror, “sit[ting] in the dark / peopl[ing] the wall of [her] sorrow,” aghast at the war she’s launched.

  In this urgent book, and in urgent times, after Rubén has many meanings: temporal (i.e., following Darío); homage (praising Darío); inspiration (versions, riffs, and imitations inspired by Darío); trajectory (following in Darío’s footsteps); and pursuit (chasing Darío). These meanings converge in “My Rubén,” the concluding autobiographical essay. Aragón’s beloved poet encompasses his mother’s favorite poet—on demand she would recite sentimental lines to young Francisco. And his father’s, as well—his favorite Darío poem was the fable of St. Francis of Assisi, reinvented here as “The Man and the Wolf.” For Aragón, my Rubén is foremost a mariposa poet.

  In “Because They Lived Abroad,” a Susan Howe epigraph evokes Aragón’s method for helping this mariposa poet from his chrysalis: “to write about a loved author / would be to follow the trails he follows . . .” On these trails, Aragón’s “after” poems tease the limits of “straight” transl
ation. He queers his Darío versions, or finds the queer that’s already there. He plays with the poem’s body, moving it from one language and form into others. Take “I Pursue a Shape,” where Aragón turns Darío’s Venus de Milo and Sleeping Beauty into David and “he.” How, with these changes, can the “fountain’s / spout” and “swan’s neck” in the last stanza not be read as already queer?

  After Rubén imagines durable, graceful forms of belonging, often in the face of exclusion. Many poems borrow and incorporate lines by other poets, creating collective texts across time, space, and languages. If literary property is an illusion, an idea dear to many poets of the Americas, from Borges to Latinx poets such as Urayoán Noel, my Rubén doesn’t entail ownership. Rather, my denotes a tradition to be claimed and fought for, as well as an intimate way of reading and being to be shared—a gift, meal, story, hug, a kind word, a poem.

  The penultimate poem, “Poem Beginning with a Fragment of Andrés Montoya,” exemplifies this process. The first line, “the taco vender/reciting/darío/in a moment/of passion,” comes from the late Chicano poet from Fresno. Five voices—Montoya, vender, Darío, Aragón, and Leticia Hernández-Linares, to whom the poem is dedicated—become a sensual body. In Austin, where the poem unfolds, we glimpse far-flung Latinx poets “in the open air talking / shop.” They share food and words. Such acts of communion constitute Francisco Aragón’s contribution to the mariposa tradition. Let’s welcome him to his place at the table.

  I

  2012

  24th & Mission BART station laundry

  hamper wide screen television Dupont

  Circle cassette of my sister’s voice cassette

  of my father’s Court House Metro