The Lucia Poems: Breaking Bread with the Darkness II

By Jimmy Santiago Baca and David Ray

American Book Award-winning poet Jimmy Santiago Baca endured decades in the penal system before becoming a renowned poet and a father. In these collections of strikingly expressive verse, Baca celebrates parenthood and presents, with brutal honesty, the daily complexities of adult life in the age of 9/11 and the Iraq War. This ex-convict, an essential voice in world poetry, chronicles the changes that envelop him upon the arrival of two of his children, Lucia and Esai. After “twenty-five years in the system, brutal, corrupt, hate-filled, and frenzied with violence . . . beatings, shock-therapy, abandonment, terror, death threats, stabbings,” he refuses to give in to evil and despair.

Recalling the works of other poets who passed through the horrors of extreme experience—Nazim Hikmet, Paul Celan, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Wat, Otto René Castillo, and a host of others—The Lucia Poems and The Esai Poems give poignant acknowledgement to one generation’s failings and pass on humane advice to the next. Taken together as Breaking Bread with the Darkness, these two collections offer a poetic primer for paternity, and a model for teaching the young history, politics, spirituality, and survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Oct 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989983235

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Jimmy Santiago Baca is an award-winning poet, internationally known for his lyrical, politically charged verse. Of Apache and Chicano ancestry, at the age of twenty-one he was convicted on drug charges and spent six and a half years in prison, where he found his voice as a poet through correspondence with Denise Levertov of Mother Jones. His many books include the poetry collections C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans, Healing Earthquakes, Set This Book on Fire, In the Way of the Sun, Black Mesa Poems, Poems Taken from My Yard, and What's Happening; a memoir, A Place to Stand; a collection of stories and essays, Working in the Dark; a play, Los tres hijos de Julia; a screenplay, for the film Blood In Blood Out; and the novel A Glass of Water. He has published three ebooks with Restless Books: The Face and two Breaking Bread with the Darkness poetry volumes. Baca is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, and, for his memoir A Place to Stand, the prestigious International Award. Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love, and cultural difference. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country.

Book preview

The Lucia Poems

Breaking Bread With the Darkness

Book Two

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Foreword by David Ray

Restless Books | Brooklyn, NY

Table of Contents

Foreword | Wake Us From Indifference

Prologue | On a Plane to a New Beginning

The Lucia Poems

8-3-10 Friday

8-6-10 Friday

8-6-10 Friday

8-13-10 Tuesday

8-25-10

8-31-10

9-12-10

9-14-10 Tuesday

Again and again

Every doorknob in the house is loose from Esai and Lucia

Gifts that you gave me Lucia

We bought Lucia and Esai pumpkins

It intimidates me to even try to write

Last night when I returned with Esai

I don’t understand how people

10-18-10

10-21-10

10-27-10

10-29-10

11-3-10

11-4-10

11-4-10 The Phoenix Inn Bend, Oregon

11-6-10

Redmond airport

11-6-10

11-6-10 Port of Portland airport

11-6-10 In another part of the Port of Portland airport

11-9-10 On a plane headed for Minneapolis

11-12-10 Baymont Inn & Suites Nashville, Tennessee

11-14-10 Atlanta airport

11-14-10 (In the plane headed home)

11-2010 36,000ft from Miami to Dallas, Ft. Worth

12-1-10

12-2-10

12-2-10

1-5-11

1-7-11

8-10-11

About the Author

Colophon

~To my family~

Foreword

Wake Us From Indifference

David Ray

ONE OF JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA’S GOALS is to wake us from our lethargic indifference, a statement that reminds me of Chekhov, who wrote that every gluttonous family at dinner should be awakened by a hammer reminding them of their selfishness and uncaring for others. It’s a powerful image, relevant today, and few writers use their hammers with as much power as Baca. In a day when the word poetry is not apt to conjure images of profound emotion but of cute manipulation of language, even to the point of meaninglessness, a few poets like Baca stand out as truth-tellers facing the rawest reality of human nature, using their own experience without caution.

Baca’s Lucia poems will inevitably be compared with W.D. Snodgrass’s powerful Heart’s Needle, written about his love for his daughter and their separation through divorce. Happily, the Lucia poems are not so encumbered with pain, and the structure he chose for the book represents a departure from his earlier work. I wrote each poem from a different city or hotel, he explains, reaching back into memory to explore an experience I had there in that city or hotel and tying it to the birth of my daughter, to her presence in the world,

His work is embued with gratitude and appreciation, and the voice is not that of the wild, lost man in the world, but a lost man saved by his writing and his recuperative reflection on the past. His goal, he writes, is to cast out my net and catch this contemporary moment and present day and try to squeeze from the two a third understanding, a third nit of appreciation—my experience as a wild, lost man in the world who now, years later, turns to love for his daughter as an opening for insights and gratitude.

This survivor of many hardships is no longer writing as God’s angry man, but one who uses a gentler language than in earlier work. This fresh sensibility is rich in insights and gratitude for the life he has earned through self-discipline. And though more tender, the poems are just as powerful as when he was hammering away. Probably conscious of the temptation to be too tender, he remarks that he tries to replace the too often used word beautiful with something else. But my rejoinder is that there should be no limits to such a word if it’s justified by the subject, in which case he should use it con permisso as often as he wishes.

Many great writers have come out of prisons, perhaps because, like Jimmy Baca and Etheridge Knight, they can see—with eyes wide open—that the world outside is just as crazy, corrupt, and violent as the world inside. Baca, with his hammering poetry and prose and more recent tribute to his daughter, and, his nuova vita, a gift from selfless love, will never be accused of political correctness. In this latest of his electrifying books he proves that tender, erotic,and joyous life outdoes every gain of empire and greed. His bitterness sings. His grim knowledge that politicians are thieves of happiness, bent on trading lives for oil and turf, saddens and enrages him, but he manages to scream joy as well as pain to the heavens. Prisons will never replace writing colonies, but perhaps they’ll have a better chance of now and then turning out a Cervantes, Genet, or Baca.

Prologue

On a Plane to a New Beginning

I’m on a plane at night and the sixty year old black man next to me,

despite suffering terrible coughing spasms,

sniffles, wiping fever sweat from his forehead with a blue handkerchief,

raspy fits of coughing rack him,

tells me some of his life story.

He’s from Los Angeles, divorced, used to box,

been working the same job on the docks over forty years,

proud he is that he and his daughter in DC

are attending the presidential swearing-in.

I smile, go back to my writing.

He looks at me with bulbous eyes, clears his throat,

lungs wet and wheezing, repeats he’s going