Poetry Friday: Juan Felipe Herrera, Our New Poet Laureate

Our new Poet Laureate

Juan Felipe Herrera has just been named the new Poet Laureate of the United States, and I bet more than a few people are scrambling to catch up & read more of his work, myself included. For Poetry Friday, I'm providing some links that might help, plus I'm including here one of his poems for adults. Herrera also writes for children, and I'm going to run up to the public library this afternoon to pick up the four picture books they have available. He also writes for young adults, so his range is large. Click on a few of the links and read about his childhood (not speaking English, traveling around with migrant parents from field to field in California) and about his introduction to poetry (God bless good teachers!) I love how spare the poem below is, how accessible, no game-playing. yet not completely direct. As readers we're left wondering about what has happened, and I always like that in a poem. Poetry, after all, isn't information, it's impression (plus a few other things :-)

I can't wait to see how Juan Felipe Herrera uses this wonderful opportunity to speak to (and for) Americans about the power of poetry.When asked about not being able to speak English with other children in school, he says, "My tongue was a rock." I know that's still happening to children, and I hope they can look up to Herrera as a role model.  Here's his poem "longtime hermano Bob":

longtime hermano Bob          tells me

one of the monks in brown directs us to the deep sink

made of two sinks the hose & the silver table where all

the spoons & metal tongs are clean

wait at the entrance for directions the monk gave me

but he is in there & points me to another sink

made of two sinks & a silver table where all

the spoons & metal tongs are clean

scrub off the rice burned at the bottom

there it is clinging to the sides of the steel

outside working the hole in the earth

three monks in brown stir the blackish pots boiling

four months of mud cakes for the new lunar year

the dragon the people the monastery the mountains

one monk stands staring into the nothing

no thoughts around him

the other monk descends through the scaly fog two

children angle an exploded tree limb back & forth

so the sparks play with them      to the left

the meditation hall is curved & faces Escondido

down below where my father drove his army truck

& pulled our trailer to a stop on Lincoln Road in ‘54

I watered spidered corn & noticed the deportations

little friends gone the land left to ice alone

lunch is served we go to the line the spoons

and the speckled tongs await by the brown rice

white rice eggplant kim chee & a grey shade pot

pour the seaweed soup we go with our tray & sit

the mud cakes are ribboned in red & gold & green

there is a way to do this

it requires listening & seeing &

silence           silence the bell rings

longtime hermano Bob & I      at the parking lot

we leave brown cloth                           brown cloth

naked spoons      naked pots

steam         rises from the sink &      the view

the view with no one           in front or     in back

Click here for a link to a Parent's Choice interview of Herrera which focuses on his work for children. 

Click here for a link to the first part of a three-part interview by David Lau for the Poetry Foundation, in which Herrera talks about working with kids in the schools, political activism, Chicano culture, his own poetic processes, what it's like being a poet in the public sphere (he was previously the Poet Laureate of California) and many other topics. 

Click here for links to a few of his poems for adults available at the Poetry Foundation site. 

Click here for a biography at the Academy of American Poets site (includes links to a few videos of Herrera reading his work.)  

Congratulations, also, to Jacqueline Woodson, our new Children's Poet Laureate! 

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The wonderful Jama Rattigan is hosting Poetry Friday today at Alphabet Soup. Head over there to see what other people have posted (and to read a delicious blueberry poem by Mary Szybist.) And I've got another post over at Books Around the Table, questioning how porous "a room of one's own" needs to be - you can read it here.