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POET REVIEWED: |
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Angelo Verga / A Hurricane Is Angelo Verga is what a literary America looks like. If people appreciated literature as we appreciate television, there would be more poetry like this: observant pages to better represent the unsung: regular people writing ordinary poems about everyday things. This is not an insult (as it might be taken in would-be superstar filled cities like L.A. and New York where every dog and his momma, much less poets, think the world is a stage made to suffer their endless personal monologues. Go play drama at NYU for that bullshit. The cover at the café’s open-mic is only five dollars. Pour your heart out. Angelo Verga won’t be waiting to pat your back at the other end. Where he will be is at home writing, traveling abroad somewhere, or at the Cornelia Street café, where he curates readings). Mr. Verga’s efforts serve as his way of looking at how poetry serves the wider purpose of educating readers to the human condition’s many celebratory and mournful passages. Mr. Verga’s most recent collection, A Hurricane Is (Jane Street Press, 2002) opens with a quote from Dante’s Purgatory: “Tell me poet if you come from hell / And if so which ward? Which precinct? The exact block and run.” The quote hints toward how Mr. Verga views his own role as a writer: he is a witness. He sees and absorbs, he touches and feels, and he processes reality by considering, reconsidering, and writing it. His 20-page title poem, “A Hurricane Is,” takes the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, and explodes it from stanza to stanza, revealing it as a vortex where humanity confronts inhumanity, history and present time collide, and an absolute oneness overrides earthly chaos. The poem, the length of which mandates it’s own review, serves as a model for Mr. Verga’s next project: an extended poem dedicated to Cuba. If “A Hurricane Is” helps predict Mr. Verga’s approach to writing on Cuba, then perhaps hints can be found in its style of folding time and place into corresponding lines of verse where the real and the imagined share the page. In terms of form, Mr. Verga’s lines vary from long to short, as in the poem, “My Wife’s Therapist”: “Flying into tirades can cause others to withdraw, and then we can’t / negotiate with them anymore. / She illustrates her point.” Other times, Mr. Verga favors a repetition that finds lines doubling up like mirrored couplets that grow a word at a time so that the reader is made aware of a meaning layered by degrees, such as in the poem “Ernesto Cardenal”:
In this way, images and ideas begin with a root that is extended upon by additional, distinct detail words, leading the poem in unpredictable directions from one moment to the next. Tender rather than hard, Mr. Verga tends to sympathize with each of his subjects—even those to which he seems to have no resemblance. This sympathy produces an empathy that manifests in much of the collection’s verses. While his liberal political leanings are evident in much of his work, his narrative voices are loyal to their stories though it is Mr. Verga’s pen at work on their behalf. His eye is for detail and irony flash from line to line. In the poem “Spanish Restaurant,” for example, he speaks of a “waitress who fled death squads,” and lost members of her family in a civil war. By opposing the subject’s history with her current life— she “now serves hot asopado de pollo / in Paradise”— Mr. Verga achieves a swift movement from “Guatemala’s beaten hills,” to “Paradise—that’s what they call the place I eat / across the street from Lincoln Hospital.” The geographic sweep is precise; it carries readers (like immigrants) in one fell swoop from Central to North America, prodding us to reconsider what “paradise” might be while also assisting us in once again realizing the diverse lives of people who surround us. When Mr. Verga recently asked me how much of his collection I liked, I paused to consider. About 25%, I answered. I was low-balling, being a critic, and trying not to sound too enthusiastic before writing this review. The slightly underestimated 25% that I had in mind is composed largely of work that carries a somber, meditative tone, such as the poems “In Rhinebeck,” “Border,” “Miniature,” “Ways To Fuck Up Your Dad,” and “The Pole That Holds The Subway Up,”—the latter two which I shared with my high school poetry classes. Part of NYC public school district 75, P12X is a special education high school in the Bronx. Its students, mostly male, nearly all black and Latino, have been removed from mainstream high schools due to behavioral issues associated with social and physiological conditions. As with many high schools, the challenge of teaching at P12X is engaging the students with relevant, interesting information seduces the students into learning while creating an appreciation and a drive to maintain that environment. With this goal in mind, I flipped through A Hurricane Is trying to find poems that the students would tolerate. Luckily, “Ways To Fuck Up Your Dad” and “The Pole That Holds The Subway Up” are two intense, brief poems that appear on opposing pages, making them easy to photocopy and ideal for a classroom of teenagers. I teach four classes consecutively at P12X and the halls of each floor run amok with security guards and rambunctious students. The day I used Mr. Verga’s poems, I was greeted in my first class by a roomful of empty desks. There was only a single student present in class that day— we’ll call her Monica— and she was out wandering the halls. She returned only to be distracted by other kids in the hall, phone calls, and a budding future fight. However during our 15 minutes together we read the two Verga poems before she used them as a model to write her own piece. Upon reading “Ways To Fuck Up Your Dad,” Monica laughed at the violence and interpreted each stanza accurately. In the three-stanza poem, Mr. Verga uses a factual patchwork to create the impression of complete scenes: “Another schoolgirl stabs her dad with vodka glasses / Pounding house rhythms, pool cue / Dog collar, vinyl boots, lemon onion blue hair.” Monica cut through the inferences and went straight to the meat. “That girl’s a ho'!” she said, pointing out inferences pointing to what actions this antagonist was using to “fuck up” her dad. Monica was just as sharp while interpreting the second poem. As we talked about the two poems, Monica focused mainly on the impressionism of “Ways to Fuck Up Your Dad.” As she was talking familiarly about cutting people, I asked her if she had ever stabbed anyone. Yes, she said, an old boyfriend who had cheated on her. He had also cut her, so she lifted up her pants and showed me the house key sized scar on her upper calve. A moment later, after looking to Mr. Verga’s poems for ideas. She wrote down the title, “How To Handle Boys.” We discussed possible first lines. She decided to use “First, find out the truth.” Then the bell rang and she promised to finish it later in the day, but she never did. In any case, Mr. Verga’s poem had sunk in. The bulk of the next class was taken up by a student-teacher altercation. When we did get around to Mr. Verga’s poems, one student— Jay, quickly connected to the mother/son relationship of “The Pole That Holds The Subway Up,” which reads: “She called the detectives, two / Thick-necked white men in bullet proof vests.” Jay claimed that the mother was trying to help her son by calling the police. He read and wrote silently and his resulting poem was a narrative of how his own mother had stood by his side throughout his tangles with the law. As students identified with what Mr. Verga had put to paper, it was evident that his poems document a shared reality corresponding to readers of all ages.
In short, A Hurricane Is finds Angelo
Verga bearing down on the world around him and the experiences of the
people with whom he crosses paths. Mr. Verga is a constant participant and
critic in life, ruminating on current issues that concern family, urban,
and international living, and combining them— as he has in A Hurricane
Is— into pages that serve as a vortex of both his and the reader’s own
history and future.
Marco Villalobos was born under quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent in 1973
and spent his Woodlàn, Califas, childhood learning about heart among con
men, homeboys, and barrio grandmothers full of love. He’s studied academic
and antidemic alphabets and today writes “to get plymouth rock and ivory
towers the fuck up off my back.” He moved to Crooklàndia, New Jork, in
order to escape a Tijuana deportation and has since become a National
Hispanic Scholarship Fund recipient with work at Indieplanet.com, Brooklyn
Bridge magazine, Stress magazine, and various small press publications,
none of which matter more than the now defunct Tortilla. |
Copyright © 2003 by Marco Villalobos.
Material may not be reprinted without prior written permission.