It used to be I wasn’t surprised too often, but now I feel it more and more. Christopher Carmona has come up with a gem. A beat gem…roughed up by life, but still polished in the process. I thought, A Mexican-American Beat Poet from Donna Tx.? What next? I knew the beats had a connection to South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley. William Burroughs had sojourned here on his way to Mexico City. His impressions of The Valley at that time were less than stellar. It was a dusty, “beat” or should I say, “beat up” type of place. Almost a forgotten piece of America…In fact a part of it was forgotten, but that’s another story.
As Christopher Carmona says the Beat Movement struck a chord with the emerging Chicano Movement. I had never really thought about this, but now that it has been brought to attention, I agree. I see the similarities. But here we come to a chicken or the egg situation. Who influenced who first? Let’s just say the Hispanic Counter-Culture, as well as the black and jazz sub-cultures were in on the beatnik mix. The beats were famous for hanging out with what square society would see as fringe or lower clas. Even outcasts, such as homo-sexuals and drug users. During the beatnik era when Mexican and other Hispanic street culture were making moves into the edge of the mainstream, they found linkage amongst the beatniks. They had no literary tradition in the United States and the Mexican tradition was just that: The Mexican tradition. Not the American one, and not one of freedom from the norm. It was more like conformity on steroids in many ways.
So, the literary tradition continues. The beatnik saga that influenced so much of American life from the 50’s right up to the present continues. It has a regional face, the borderland. Strange places filled with community or alienation or both at once, have always been part of the beat experience. So it goes on…In the tradition of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlenghetti and Burroughs, it never stops. The Beat.
There are some wonderful lines in “beat”
From “Smile”
It was a visage I can only describe as sublime
With hair made of straw and eyes that absorbed the light
Never to let go until the end of that starry night…
“Keeping the Beat”
One took it on the road
Weaving songs of the land made by men’s hands
The second took it to a microphone
And howled from the Brooklyn Bridge
To the golden Gate…
…I found the beat
Buried deep within my wordy heart
Pounding in my voice
It was the beat I was looking for
It was the beat to keep…
Excerpt from “Alton”
Poem in remembrance of the Alton school bus accident
That killed 21 kids on September 21, 1989
La Frontera lies in wait
Permeating in the dried and cracked soil
And the tar drenched asphalt
That is the road home.
Waiting for a sacrifice
To lap up the crimson stain
Of dried motor oil and transmission fluid
Of what once was the dewy sap of ruby red tartness.
Excerpt from “A Bitter Wind”
Before we came deaf
To the songs of the star.
Before the bus stopped here.
Before Time wore itself as an accessory….
…Before the Mayans spun Algebra from a cactus…
Before the hum of pixels on plastic screams
Before it all
A wind blew bitter
Lots of good lines, some great,
Well worth both time and money
Also, a bit unusual these days, the poems read well on the page. As performance poetry there is much polishing left to be done. I have confidence that will come in time
That being said, so much “Spoken Word: or performance poetry does not stand up to the naked printed page. This collection does. Dig it!
