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    My Nature Is Hunger: New and Selected Poems: 1989–2004
    My Nature Is Hunger: New and Selected Poems: 1989–2004
    My Nature Is Hunger: New and Selected Poems: 1989–2004
    Ebook199 pages2 hours

    My Nature Is Hunger: New and Selected Poems: 1989–2004

    By Luis J. Rodriguez

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    About this ebook

    The collected poems of one of America’s foremost balladeers of urban struggle and immigrant dreams   Over his three-decade career as a poet, novelist, and memoirist, Luis J. Rodríguez has earned acclaim for his remarkable ear for the voices of the city. My Nature Is Hunger represents the best of his lyrical work during his most prolific period as a poet, a time when he carefully documented the rarely heard voices of immigrants and the poor living on society’s margins. For Rodríguez’s subjects, the city is all-consuming, devouring lives, hopes, and the dreams of its citizens even as it flourishes with possibility. “Out of my severed body / the world has bloomed,” and out of Rodríguez’s stirring vision, so has beauty.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of Luis J. Rodríguez including rare images from the author’s personal collection.  
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJun 12, 2012
    ISBN9781453259108
    My Nature Is Hunger: New and Selected Poems: 1989–2004
    Author

    Luis J. Rodriguez

    The son of Mexican immigrants, Luis J. Rodriguez began writing in his early teens and has won national recognition as a poet, journalist, fiction writer, children's book writer, and critic. Currently working as a peacemaker among gangs on a national and international level, Rodriguez helped create Tia Chucha's Cafe & Centro Cultural, a multiarts, multimedia cultural center in the Northeast San Fernando Valley.

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      Book preview

      My Nature Is Hunger - Luis J. Rodriguez

      My Nature Is Hunger:

      New & Selected Poems 1989–2004

      by Luis J. Rodríguez

      For a single poem to be born

      we must kill things

      many, many things we love

      —Ryuichi Tamura

      CONTENTS

      Publisher’s Note

      from Poems Across the Pavement – 1989

      Running to America

      Somebody Was Breaking Windows

      Rosalie has Candles

      The Monster

      Palmas

      Piece by Piece

      The Calling

      from The Concrete River – 1991

      Watts Bleeds

      Tía Chucha

      Night Dance—Watts 1975–78

      The Concrete River

      The Rooster Who Thought It Was a Dog

      Black Mexican

      The Bull’s Eye Inn

      Waiting

      Don’t Read That Poem!

      Jarocho Blues

      Jesus Saves

      The Blast Furnace

      They Come To Dance

      Carrying My Tools

      Bethlehem No More

      Every Road

      Every Breath, a Prayer

      Lips

      from Trochemoche – 1998

      Meeting the Animal in Washington Square Park

      Victory, Victoria, My Beautiful Whisper

      Catacombs

      to the police officer who refused to sit in the same room as my son because he’s a gangbanger

      A Tale of Los Lobos

      Woman on the First Street Bridge

      The Rabbi and the Cholo

      Cinco de Mayo

      Civilization

      Fire

      Red Screams

      A Fence of Lights

      Next Generation

      At Quenchers Bar When You Said Goodbye

      The Face on the Radio

      The Object of Intent Is To Get There

      Untouched

      A Father’s Lesson

      Francisca

      Suburbia

      Believe me when I say …

      Reflection on El Train Glass

      The Quiet Woman

      Questions for Which You Are Always the Answer

      Eva sitting on the curb with pen and paper before the torturers came to get her

      ¡Seguro Que Hell Yes!

      Poem for Shakespeare & Company

      ¡Yo Voy Ami!

      Rant, Rave & Ricochet

      Cloth of Muscle and Hair

      The Old Woman of Mérida

      from Notes of a Bald Cricket

      New Poems

      My Name’s Not Rodríguez

      Coal-Seller in White Dress

      The Cockroaches I Married

      Mickey Mouse Pancakes

      My Nature Is Hunger

      Exiled in the Country of Reason

      Passersby

      Listening to Return To Forever’s Romantic Warrior with Susana in an Empty Room of my Recently Rented Echo Park Apartment

      Mother by the Lake

      Suicide Sweet

      Sometimes a Man Comes

      Time and Nature

      Loving What You Leave

      Ritchie Valens Doesn’t Sing Here Anymore

      Mexika Science

      The Gold Beneath Our Feet

      Banned

      Fat

      The Chuskas—Navajo Land 1998

      Rez Dogs

      Untitled

      ¡Si, Se Puede! Yes, We Can!

      Chuparosa (Hummingbird)

      Existence

      Nightfall: Poems to Ponder in War and Uncertainty

      The Wanton Life

      Publisher’s Note

      Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

      But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

      In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

      But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

      Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s Disclaimer as it appears in two different type sizes.

           

      Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of Disclaimer, you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading Disclaimer on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead is a complete line, while the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn is not.

      Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.

      Ultimately, there may be no way to

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