"Home Is Where the Music Is" --
A Review of Victor Hernandez Cruz' Panoramas

Dateline: 1/20/98

Hola, and Oye! Two beautiful books, brimful of tropicalism’s music, American as pasteles, cause for joy and bailar! Here’s the latest fresh roasted off Coffee House Press, perhaps the best “small” press in the country, stepping to the heartbeat of la poesia nueva: Victor Hernandez Cruz, the maestro of Puerto Rican poetics, bringing a new view to the Spanish-English dialogue in Panoramas*, and an inspired (and inspiring) first book by a young Cuban-American poet, Adrian Castro, who fuels a new Miami spice in Cantos to Blood and Honey*. And for the next two weeks, let’s taste the sun and eat the poems of these two fierce poetas.

This week, let’s get lost in the palabra palaver of Sr Victor, who’s recently moved back to his native land.

Cruz’s own first book was Snaps (Random House, 1969), published when he was 20. (A mythical first book, Papo Got His Gun, actually preceded Snaps -- let me know if you find it.) Snaps’s an Ur-text Nuyorican poetics, a sly and slamming streetwise symphony of the colloquial. Uncapitalized, raw, and totally hilarious, Snaps begat five other books of poetry, each of them flowing surreal landscapes and zen-like commentary into a fragrant stew, marking Cruz as his own aesthetic. In Panoramas, he seems finally to have made it back home, and home is most definitely Aguas Buenas, P.R.

Panoramas begins with a spectacular, sweet memoir of Cruz’s childhood in rural PR. The book is dedicated to a rock, and a tree, and in “Home Is Where the Music Is,” Cruz animates these and other aspects of the island landscape. On a sacred tree we find “Lizards fleeting like electrical charges or suspended motionless for hours awaiting the trajectory of a predestined singular fly.” No doubt, Dear Reader, in regarding Victor’s Panoramas, 'tis you, the fly. We meet the family, his legendary grandfather, singer and tabaquero, and visit the chin-chale (cigar workshops) with him. It was here, observing the rolling laboring of cigar making, amidst the anarchist and socialist philosophers, that Cruz was first exposed to the declaiming of poetry. Since then he’s been the Heavyweight Poetry Champion of the World, defeating Andrei Codrescu in Taos in 1987, and losing the crown to Anne Waldman in 1989, been featured on Bill Moyer’s Language of Life, and won a Guggenheim. All the while, a poet’s poet, and a primo purveyor of the salsero poetic lineage.

“Home Is Where the Music Is” is written in English, as are most of the works in Panoramas, and that English really changes when Cruz’s family emigrates to the mainland, to Loisaida. “Had someone poured cement on the mountains, I wondered.”

“English was just a scattering of noise coming out of people’s mouths -- who would arrange that strange new furniture, where would one sit?” And in Cruz’s mouth, in his pages, that language never does sit still like a Louis Quatorze backbreaker. “Words have lives of their own -- they were here before us and they are what we fit into.” Later on, in a poem to his daughter called “To Kairi,” Cruz gives her the poet’s view of bilinguality’s utility:

I think of the two languages
I write in both
In one I find something
That I can’t find in the other

(Cruz pulls a new furniture move in line one -- he thinks “of” the two languages, as if he were in a third -- a hybrid of both? He writes “in” both, although here it is only English! Reading is thus imagining, or creating, and can even be in its own language, i.e., the Reader’s.)

To me Spanish seems round
and vegetable --
English is vertical and goes
Straight up into the air
Like cylindrical pipes --
In English it is like being inside
walls --
Spanish is outdoors and circles.

Later, in the essay “Water from the Fountain of Youth,” he finds a copy of William Carlos Williams in his pocket, a book which opens up into history itself, becomes the impulse from Williams’s mother, who was Puerto Rican. This fact gives Cruz an understanding of how “Williams stayed Americano, his friend Eliot swam to Europe, Pound went to Italy.” (See also The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams* by Julio Marzan, University of Texas Press, 1994). How, in this essay, Cruz wishes “there were more curves in the Teutonic base of English,” moaning that “Trying to find rhymes in English, it’s like trying to find banana leaves for pasteles in Ann Arbor, Michigan.”

“Forget about history textbooks; poems are the best way to study and teach history,” he writes in another essay, “Writing Migrations,” where he espouses an activist approach to history via literature, referring to Ruben Dario, the great poet and cultural father of Nicaragua, in Dario’s “Ode to Walt Whitman.” “It could have been the age of Big Stick policy in Washington but poets wanted to communicate across borders and languages. What if we could bring this alive to a class of recent arrivals from Cambodia, Santo Domingo, El Salvador, etc.?. . . A duality opens up in front of you. . . part brick, part mango.”

Panoramas is framed by two poems to the Lower East Side, the first in English (“The Lower East Side of Manhattan”), the last in Spanish (“Loisaida”). “The Lower East” begins with a verse that hilariously echoes “Hiawatha”:

By the East River
Of Manhattan Island
Where once the Iroquois
canoed in style --

and then plows into a joyous riot of Manhattan babble:

Eldridge Street lelolai
A Spanish never before seen
Inside gypsies.
Once Cordova the cabala
Haberdasheries of Orchard Street
Hecklers riddling bargains
Like in gone bazaars of
Some Warsaw ghetto

eventually calling out to his lost friends of youth, Where are they?

The pavements sucked them up
The pavements had mouths that
ate them
Urban vanishment
Illusion
I too
Henry Roth
“Call It Sleep.”

brilliantly flipping the whole mishegoss into literature, the Mean Streets of Piri Thomas, the tenement skyline and rounded corner of the paperback edition of Roth’s seminal work.

A long title poem is the centerpiece of the book, and in it Cruz lets us in on the bilingual pun that informs his title (Don’t forget his book By Lingual Wholes, and that in a poem in another book, Red Beans, he actually answered the age old quandary, Which came first, the Chicken or the Egg? Answer: The Rooster always comes first.):

A jumping toad on her feet
A word to think of is: Pana-Rana

where Pana is both corduroy and breakdown (as in car problems) and Rana is indeed a frog.

In “If You See Me in LA It’s Because I’m Looking for the Airport,” he goes after the nonculture blah-blah of Lalaland:

The relationship of people to
Their TV is a perversion
In the pocket of some
Beverly Hills psychiatrist --
Lap cats forced to sit with
Owners dizzied from remote control.

This book is a major step for Cruz, bridging languages, bridging poetry and prose. It’s a mature work, big vistas, acute and incisive, rolling in poetry play but serious serious. I’ve always been a fan -- in Panoramas, Victor Hernandez Cruz steps up and rocks like rocks rock. He also wrote the intro for first-timer Adrian Castro’s book which I’ll discuss next week, acknowledging that the torch is being passed on, but it is still in use, climbing the high Jibaro mountains of central PR, illuminating the world from Olympus.

Cruz is an original progenitor following in that Jibaro tradition. He and Adrian will be reading at Steve Cannon’s Gathering of the Tribes Gallery, 285 East 3rd Street, 2nd floor, in New York on Sunday, February 12, 7 - 10 p.m.

--Bob Holman

Ears are fingers
The night transmitting
The mountain pueblo
Gathering speed
Forming into as rock
Inventing the commercial jumps
The economic leaps
A cod fritter for two cents
Frozen in recollection.

. . . . . . .

Celebrate
‘Cause those two ears come together
To make the shape of a heart
Listening
Above the rain forest.

*As a result of a commercial relationship between About.com, its Guides and Amazon.com online booksellers, these titles can be purchased directly from Amazon.com by following the links above. (Note: Amazon.com is solely responsible for fulfillment of book orders placed through these links.)

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