The Wilderness Between

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s experiences are truly moving in “A Place to Stand.” I found myself quite frustrated with the breaks in the sections that we read. While I am not a big non-fiction fan, I was completely captured by his narrative. I wanted to read all of it, know all of it, and be moved by all of it. His use of language is truly amazing. I kept trying to read his work like a writer, but ended up just reading. I had to stop myself multiple times to look at his craft a little closer.

While his world is completely different than my own, I could relate to everything he said. That is craft. It felt like I was there with him, watching his mother’s affair from under the floorboards of his house. I rode in the car with his drunk father, trying to sleep in the seat under a jacket. I was in prison, watching someone take over a space I had carefully created for myself (we’ve all had bad roommates). There is something so immediate about his language, so raw and vivid, that it completely passes through the analytical part of the mind and into the experiential.

I think part of this has to do with how seamlessly he enters and leaves scene. It never gets too clunky or awkward. Too, the language, while elaborate, is very natural. It isn’t overwrought or careless. It is precise and well-measured. The psychologist in me wonders how he processes and uses language since he learned to read at such a late age. It isn’t as if he just learned the language though; he’d spoken it all his life. So it’s odd because there is such a strangeness with something that had been so familiar.

His poetry itself is so vulnerable and rich. It was interesting to read it after having read “A Place to Stand” because it was like the guts of the experiences he had put in the book. I thought that the book had been so complete and well rounded, but the poetry is raw with emotions and images. The poem VI in “Martin & Meditations on the South Valley” which seemed to me to be about his mother was heart-breaking. The final lines “and your voices strained with the tragedy/ that you had lived a fairytale--/ Then he shot you and himself.” were devastating. I tried to see if this was, in fact, what had happened to his mother. If she had really been murdered because of the similarities in the stories, but I couldn’t find any confirmation.

I like how his poetry really struggles with these two worlds he had been trapped between as a child. We see glimpses of that in his story, I’m sure there is more of this in the pieces we didn’t see, but he never fully addresses it until he works on his poetry. And while he struggles with this white, “civilized” side, and this Mexican, wild side, I didn’t really see why he was considered a nature poet until I read, “Black Mesa Poems.” “Roots” was one of my favorite poems in that collection.