Response to Jimmy Santiago Baca

Jimmy Santiago Baca moves me, as a writer, a poet, and a person. I realized this the moment I started reading his memoir, “A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet.” I know that a lot of what drives his prose is the events in his life themselves, which fuel his writing with extreme experiences and emotions, but I do think it is more than that. It feels like his language and his words are treated like presents on Christmas day, formed with the utmost amount of energy and excitement possible. He learned to read and write in his 20’s, and I think that played a huge role in the writer he is today. It’s as though every time he sits down to write a word, he magnifies each one with the delight you feel when learning your first word. He is blessed with a fresh perspective of language, a language that saved him while he was in jail, a language that “ordinary” people take for granted.

Baca’s powerful story is told through strong, crisp sentences. Each word feels painstakingly chosen in order to achieve the strongest, most efficient effect. I admire how his voice is relayed almost simultaneously through the child Baca and the adult Baca, especially when he visits his father in prison as a 5-yr.old: “I wanted to tell her not to leave Father in there. I feared he might be hurt or be swallowed up by the darkness, and we would never see him again. The green painted bars, the guards with guns and keys and surly attitudes, the caked grime on the walls and floor, the unshaven men with no teeth and swollen red eyes and scratched faces—these filled me with terror (2).” He takes the details that only an adult would recognize and conveys them through a child’s image. I believe he is very successful at this.

Baca also succeeds in writing through a genuine voice. His life was extremely difficult and instead of harping on the awful experiences themselves, he takes a deep hard look into the mind of this growing child. At times, I wanted to grab the little boy in the pages and rescue him from his life, bring him home and hold him in my arms. I felt his anguish and fear and misfortune, without his words asking for sympathy.

As I read more, delving further into Baca’s life, I was interested to see his language and metaphors becoming more complex and deep, and beautiful. It is as though he takes us on the journey of learning language, of taking it to higher and deeper realms(making his book yet another metaphor for learning language.) I was swept away to a tiny irrelevant place outside Baca’s jail cell, taken further into his brain while focusing on something as tiny as a blade of grass: “I gazed out my window at the swatch of oily grass hugging the base of a telephone pole. I wondered how the grass survived, wondered what it felt when the sun entered its pores and fed it the glowing food that made it grow…I closed my eyes and, for hours, focused strictly on the grass at the utility pole base, and I felt my soul grafting with the grass blades (238).”

Baca claims he is a poet, even though his prose is wonderful. But after reading his poetry, I see why he considers himself a poet. Reading Baca’s poems made me want to write poetry. I don’t write much poetry, mainly because I don’t feel as comfortable in that form and because I fear that I will not succeed in the way I do with prose. But, Baca encourages me to take the most important, meaningful and powerful words in a sentence and make them erupt from the page, into a poem. His verb choices are vivid and active, fueled with life and charge--in “El Sapo” he writes

Their souls cracked in attics,
in picture frames,
in family trunks. These
people afraid of his humanity,
hummed with warm-motor hearts,
blood pulsed colored blinking lights,
whose days were constant tapes and ribbons
of information
A man like Sapo,
short-circuited their heaven,
his root-charged blood darkened their ivory nails and cracked
their glass flowers (92).

His poetry is infused with metaphor and simile, comparisons that bring together the smallest details of life with the largest ideas that marinate in the mind: “Conversations in her kitchen / about my mother I overheard as a boy / made me sniff around the screen door to hear more / like a coyote smells a cave he had been born in once(15).” He fills his poems with a balance of metaphor, dialogue, detail and reflection. In this way, it is a though each poem tells a story about life, or death or some place in between where his dreams are constantly waiting, often behind cell bars.