Duende de Burque: Alburquerque Poems and Musings

By Manuel Gonzalez

At its center, Duende de Burque is a love letter to Alburquerque and its surroundings—the Sandia Mountains, the Rio Grande Bosque, and all the people whose spirits fill these spaces. It is an exploration of one poet’s search for duende, that elusive state of spontaneous expression and authenticity. With a debut in local poetry slam, Manuel González has honed his craft on the stage and on the page for the past twenty years. He has represented Burque several times on the national slam scene, hosted countless slams for people of all ages, and worked to help adults and youths discover the power of self-expression. In this collection, González writes about his beginnings as a poet and his work as the third Albuquerque Poet Laureate. He writes about what inspires him and how he works to inspire others and to craft poems that do the same. In his core is Burque—his heart, his sangre, and the home of his ancestors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780826362681

Manuel Gonzalez

Manuel González is a performance poet and a founding member of the Angry Brown Poets. He is also the author of . . . But My Friends Call Me Burque and OM Boy.

Book preview

EVOLUTION OF A BURQUE POET

For me personally, writing began as a private and personal thing that I kept a secret. As a boy I was always afraid that someone would make fun of me for writing poetry, so I kept it to myself. As I got older I began to share my writing with my friends, who quickly asked me to write poems to the girls they liked in hopes of getting a date. It didn’t always work, but it was a reason to write. As I got older I got hip-hop. I was the beatboxer, and my friends and I would cipher all night long, but for me at the time it was like hip-hop was cotton candy. It tasted good and it was fun, but it didn’t have the vitamins I needed to survive. I didn’t find what I was looking for until I went to a poetry slam.

A poetry slam is a competition where each poet recites a poem they wrote themselves. Every poem is given a score from zero to ten. Zero is a poem that should have never been written, should have been left home. Ten is a poem that causes simultaneous orgasm in a ten-mile radius. I had never experienced someone get on a stage and allow themselves to be emotionally vulnerable and lyrically proficient at the same time.

I started going to the slam, and I started to lose. I would get on stage, and my paper would shake. I pulled my hat down low and hid behind my paper to do what I had to do to get through the poem. But I didn’t give up. I revised, rewrote, and memorized my poetry. Eventually I started to win. Winning led to me being able to compete at a national level with world-renowned poets.

I came home on fire with inspiration. Then, during a performance at a reading at a local coffee shop, a teacher approached me and asked me to come into her class and recite my poetry. When I got into the high school there were students who were like me, awkward and full of feelings. I recited poetry for them, and I realized that I was the person who got to show them an art form that I love for the first time. I was the one who got to grab them by their hearts and squeeze them until it hurt. Then I gave them a pen and paper and told them to tell the truth in the best way they knew how, and the floodgates would open. Tears and affirmations in every direction. I had found my calling.

First and foremost I use poetry and literacy as a guise to help me get into places to provide a safe place to cry. Through performance poetry I allow myself to demonstrate emotional vulnerability. This, in turn, allows the audience to open themselves up to authentically express themselves. For some people this can be a very cathartic experience. I have found that most of us carry trauma with us. Some of that trauma started before we were even born. This ancestral trauma needs to be exposed to the