Outside Reading #6

In his last book he published is entitled Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler. He rewrites the events of his days in chili smuggling. He carried peppers from Texas into Mexico and I guess it was illegal. This book is interesting because he repeats the dialogue in Spanish. He recreates the conversation when he tried to explain himself to his mother. He writes about his cousins and spends the entire part of the poem creating the surroundings which are very realistic. His mother told him, “I see you looking at yourself put letters on paper” (Herrera 235). This shattered him a bit. It doesn’t explain much about how she reacted to him being a smuggler or of how that conversation went but he says just enough to show her disappointment. Of course she doesn’t want him smuggling, but at the same time she can’t see him writing. He says, “All my illusions of being a poet shrank, the wings of the eagle-writer that sees all twittered into the shadow of a sparrow…” (235). I think is this a beautiful description of how he felt. It show he really did want to be a poet and thought he could do anything when writing and maybe he was just smuggling for the time being, with his cousins, to make a little money. Throughout these poems he grows and changes. By the end he is a writer and he talks to his mother again, only this time she is dead and cannot talk back. He feels good about his life and she would be proud.
The last part of this book is separated into 5 sections. One for each of the Chinese elements which I think is interesting since the entire book is focused on Latin culture. These elements are water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. What I don’t understand is how the poems correspond with the elements. Maybe it’s because I don’t know anything about Chinese elements, but the poems don’t seem to significantly fit into each section. I did like the poems though, they were more about people and how they deal and how they have dealt. He finishes his book with a poem called Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings. I think this poem is amazing because he writes a poem about what poems are about. He spells out exactly what poets are trying to do through there writing. He wrote, “…first, you must know the secret, there is no poem to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries…” (Herrera 301). I think is so true that poems do not have boundaries. Poets can go where ever they want and often it turns out beautiful. He explains what poems feel like saying, “…there you can bathe, you can play, you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is, that mist becomes the central to your existence” (301). This is an incredibly deep statement. He depicts writing as being a safe place people can go and these who are in these places is essential to your existence.
I think this relates to what we are talking about in the fact that we have studied many different types of persecution from the views of many different people. Herrera made a point in writing from the voice of a vast array of people. His poems were deep but casual. Often they were about someone’s lifestyle or about where they were from or even just based on a story someone had told them. The entire book had a central theme of exile and hardship but much of what was depicted was the beauty behind it all, or at least his poems were beautifully talking about something not too pretty.

Herrera, Jaun Felipe. All of the World in Light. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2008.