Sal Salasin, sweet gregarious international treasure, tasty poet, angry muffo, and now under the volcano with a Spanish vocabulary list and Mexico as lover: I love the Blogosphere when he’s in it. His writing, from some crazed professor adrift in a time-space noncontinuum, harkens back to the language drill poems of Ed Friedman -- it’s a travelogue by someone who treats humans the way Steve Irwin dealt with reptiles. Here are two recent postings that drew me up short -- reading them, I was suddenly living poetry as Sal was writing it.
~Bob Holman
CONGITO & CANARICITA, TWO LETTERS FROM MEXICO
- Correo Electronico Viente y Dos
(Electronic Letter #22)
- Correo Electronico Viente y Cinco
(Electronic Letter #25)
[Editor’s Note: These are two sequential letters -- there is no #23 and no #24. We are posting both because they are complementary; several threads begin in #22 and are concluded in #25.]
In 2003, progressive American writer and poet Sal Salasin organized a 250-member labor union in his shop in Seattle (International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees, Local 17, AF of L) and served as chair of the Policy Committee of that local for two years. “It was such an interesting experience, I decided to go into labor organization full time, which in the US requires you to be either a lawyer, a woman, or a speaker of Spanish. Since I didn’t speak a word of Spanish, I decided to learn. Easier than becoming a lawyer or a woman.”
Crossing the border in January, 2006 in his 2002 Saturn, Sal drove through Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador to get to Santa Ana, Costa Rica, and six months later moved to Guadalajara, Mexico. Between the story of “meeting Joseph Mengele in Guatemala,” getting an undocumented car out of Costa Rica, and an uprising in Oaxaca, it’s been an interesting and introspective journey, documented in weekly or semiweekly correos electronicos (emails) to a mailing list of union members, poets and friends. He currently lives, studies and writes in a working class neighborhood in Guadalajara, Mexico and can be reached at salasin@scn.org.
Sal is the author of Stepping Out of the Plane Under the Protection of the Army (Another Chicago Press, 1988) and Optima Suavidad (Greenbean Press, NY, 2000) as well as the online (free) collection 12 Cautionary Tales. Sal is the founder, publisher, and absent editor of RealPoetik, the oldest and most active Internet literary magazine in the world (posting works to the 1200 strong mailing list once or twice a week since 1992).
TO BUY SAL’S BOOKS:
- Optima Suavidad
- Stepping Out of the Plane Under the Protection of the Army
