Where We Live: Poetry of New Mexico

Introduction

October 1, 1999: Today begins a new series on New Mexico CultureNet, to be called "Where We Live: Poetry of New Mexico." Through monthly commentaries the series will explore poems and poets that focus in some way on this extraordinary state in which we live: on its landscape, its towns and cities, its history, its people, and its distinctive and complex character, and more. A sense of place is of course central to our being: where we are is part of what we are and who we are. Place is as inescapable a condition of identity as the air we breathe; and place can be an imaginative construct as well as geographical location: think, for example, of Faulkner's Mississippi, Thoreau's Walden Pond, Steinbeck's California, the worlds of Native American myth and legend. Restlessly the imagination seeks to know and to understand. As we live in a place, experience it, respond to it, absorb it, we are like the child in Whitman's poem of 1855, There Was a Child Went Forth, in whom place and identity become one. Consider the opening lines:

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity
    or love or dread, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the
    day….or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morningglories, and white and red
    clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,

And the March-born lambs, and the sow’s paint-fink litter, and the
mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf, and the noisy brood of the
barnyard or by the mire of the pondside… and the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there . . and the beautiful curious liquid
and the water-plants with their graceful flat heads… all became part of him.

As Whitman’s poem goes on to observe, a sense of place includes the people who fill its spaces. New Mexico is its inhabitants as much as its landscape, and the poetry of New Mexico must include them in all their diversity: their traditions, their beliefs, their histories. All are part of the experience of New Mexico. All contribute to it at the same time that all are shaped and sustained by it. Paradoxically, we feed on what we nourish.

But always, the land, la tierra, where we begin and where we return, the land that restores and redeems. In Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Martín & Meditations on the South Valley, for example, the poet writes of his alter ego, Martín, who endures poverty, struggle and loss through a series of violent and destructive episodes. Finally, after the drunk-driving death of a friend—Martín was in the car; it’s not clear who was at the wheel—the speaker says this:

Months after I headed West
on I-40,
in my battered Karmen Ghia.
Desperate for a new start,
sundown in my face,
I spoke with Earth—

I have been lost from you Mother Earth.
No longer
does your language of rain wear away my thoughts,
nor your language of fresh morning air
wear away my face,
nor your language of roots and blossoms
wear away my bones.

But when I return, I will become your child again,
let your green alfalfa hands take me,
let your maiz roots plunge into me
and give myself to you again,
with the crane, the elm tree and the sun.

As Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poems make clear, the human history of New Mexico is always with us. Past and present converge at every point. We stand at the farthest end of an unbroken chain of connections; we live in the present as we reach toward the future and develop from the past. What we were, in some sense we still are and forever will be. It could be no other way. Thus a Pueblo native’s sense of New Mexico is going to be unlike that of a Navajo, or of a Hispanic, or of an Anglo; and of course there will be differences within groups. The awareness of place is never fixed; and yet the history is all one, finally, as the rainbow is one. We who live here have come from many directions in order to arrive at this place we call home. The directions remain, haunting and evocative, distinct and clear. They remind us of our varied pasts; one way or another, however, they brought us here, to this community, this place that fills our days no matter who we are. The poetry of New Mexico includes us all.

R.W. French

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