Back Draft: Martín Espada
Photo by David González Martín Espada is a poet fluent in both life and death. He champions stories of living heroes while revivifying those gone too soon. Recipient of the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and author of nearly twenty books, he composes work that amplifies the voice of the righteous, rousing audiences with echoes of the epic tradition.
In “The Bard Shakes the Snow From the Trees,” Espada recalls one of his last encounters with the late poet Donald Hall. Espada has shared with us some of his final emails with Hall (see below, at the interview’s end), in which they discuss this very poem, along with baseball, among other things. Hall suggested a revision that Espada declined, though he did make one other change. Sometimes the smallest edits are the most significant.
— Ben Purkert for Guernica
Guernica: How’d you become friends with Donald Hall?
Martín Espada: We were both in the Boston-area poetry community in the late 1980s. At that time, I was working at Su Clínica Legal, a legal services program for low-income Spanish-speaking tenants. Shortly after I got out of law school in 1987, I published my second book of poems, and nobody really read it.
My third book, , came out with Curbstone in 1990, and that made something of an impression. Don and I started corresponding around that time. He would send these very simple, typed postcards. No pictures, just white postcards. If you wrote to him, he’d write you back immediately. I don’t
March 9, 2018 Dear Martín, March 9, 2018 March 13, 2018 March 13, 2018
