The website
Upper Rubber Boot Books URB is hosting "Couplets - a multi-author poetry blog tour" for National Poetry Month.
Today I am hosting Celia Lisset Alvarez, a wonderful poet from Miami Florida.
Her blog location is:
http://writingwithcelia.blogspot.com/
Her post for my blog is "Poetry of the Urban Pastoral" :
Poetry of the Urban Pastoral
Having lived all my life in urban Miami, I often feel at
odds with the majority of poets, who continue to find inspiration in pastoral
themes and landscapes that I can only imagine. How does one know the names of
the flowers that grow in the back yard, the names of trees and birds, the sound
of silence, if the back yard is paved in concrete and separated from a busy
street by an aluminum fence?
It might be odd to think of Miami as an unnatural landscape;
after all, isn’t it a tropical paradise? Down here, don’t we all roll out of
our hammocks and into the ocean, and spend our days sipping mojitos on the
sand? If one thinks of Miami apart from the beach at all, it’s only to imagine
pastel-colored Art Deco hotels lined up against the sand like sharps and flats
on a keyboard. In reality, however, Miami-Dade County is a vast urban and
suburban sprawl where the majority of spaces are crowded and paved. The beaches
and certain other oases, like Coral Gables or Coconut Grove, do little to
mitigate the overwhelming traffic jams of the Palmetto Expressway or the cemented
front lawns of Hialeah.
Where’s my Tintern Abbey? Such a landscape changes one’s
approach to poetry. I don’t often write poems that I feel can be described as
“contemplative,” since contemplation is a mode I seldom experience. The poems
of the city are not necessarily what one would call antipastoral, either, since
when one does find openings to the natural world it’s difficult not to
sentimentalize them.
I prefer the term “urban pastoral,” a way of finding meaning in the urban
spaces that surround us.
photo:
Sunset at Antonio Maceo Park, in the heart of Miami.
Here is a wonderful example of the urban pastoral from Miami
poet Campbell McGrath, an excerpt from “Nights on Planet Earth”:
Sometimes, not often but
repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a
familiar
neighborhood I can no longer locate,
a warren of streets lined with dark
cafés and unforgettable bars,
a place where I
can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,
a city that feels the way the skin
of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color,
laminar and fluid
and electric,
a city of shadow-draped churches,
of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or
canyonlands, but
always a city, and wonderful, and lost.
Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam,
students from the ballet school like fanciful
gazelles shooting
pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,
or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th
Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan
when the snowfall
crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop,
or Chicago, or Dublin, or some
ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can
neither remember
entirely nor completely forget,
barracuda-faced men drinking sake
like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping
champagne or
arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,
the necklaces of Christmas lights
reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of
peanuts and their
shells crushed to powder underfoot,
always real, always elusive, always
a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander
alone, searching
in vain for the irretrievable.
Here you see the city landscapes imbued with possibilities,
much as natural landscapes are in the pastoral tradition. Though he doesn’t
mention Miami in this poem, one can see here the poetry that emerges from a
life in cities—McGrath has lived in Chicago and
Washington D.C. as well as in Miami.
In my own writing, I don’t necessarily always find the
redemptive qualities of this city, nor do I idealize it the ways other do. Yes,
it is a tropical paradise, a multicultural capital. But it is also poor and
dirty, congested and contested. Nevertheless, it defines us in both positive
and negative ways. I drive through Hialeah, Miami’s sister city, often, on my
way to work in Miami Gardens or to visit my in-laws. Some days the drive is
depressing:
All day long the traffic groans
like a birthing woman,
all day long and all night, too.
This is the city that never sleeps,
that works all day.
The old men, too tired to stand or
sit,
wait on their haunches
for the liquor store to open.
In a few hours they turn into beer
bottles
girdled in brown paper bags,
scratched-off
lotto tickets, spit thick as bird
shit.
They go back to the dog track,
to Mango Hill, to their daughter’s
houses.
The women sigh like bus brakes.
There are no girls in Hialeah.
The factories stack up like
cardboard boxes.
All day long they make uniforms and
artificial hips.
Every
corner has a clinic,
a convenience store, a gas station,
a fast-food pit.
At other times, however, these very details can be seen
another way, and the city’s industry becomes a testament to its motto, “La
cuidad que progresa”—the city that progresses.
No
part of the natural world exists in isolation. Though we should try desperately
to preserve those places—like the Florida Everglades—that should remain undisturbed, those of us who live in urban
areas need not feel as if we are closed off from them. Florida has had to pay
for its reputation as The Sunshine State with overcrowded beaches and sea-grass
parking lots. Even sleepy Sarasota, home of my childhood summers, now features
an hour-
photo: Siesta
Beach, Sarasota, Florida
long wait on Midnight Pass Road to get to Siesta Beach on
weekends. We can be like the egrets, and enjoy the patch of grass, or we can
plant an umbrella near the water, and claim a patch of sand. Preferably, a
little of both.
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