Rage Against La Frontera Chicana and Indigenous Street-Writers Set USA "National Poetry Therapy Conference" on Fire with Real Workers' Angry Words of Resistance by Bill Nevins

"Poeta! Si! Soy! I am Street Poet!" ("Yes! I AM! I am a Poet! I am Street Poet!"), shouted New Mexico Chicana rebel writer Priscilla Baca y Candelaria, clenched fist raised before several hundred stunned literary counselors and professors gathered May 3-7 in Albuquerque, New Mexico for the Twentieth Annual Conference of the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT). A mother, teacher and farmer from the Atrisco Land Grant, Candelaria caught the well-dressed crowd's attention. She then treated her audience to her funny, angry Spanish/English poem, "Street Poet,"(from her book, LA RESOLANA), laced with political double-entendres and hot desert spice.

"Los ojos de me memoria. Minds eye dances. They can only take your soul if you let them." - Priscilla Baca y Candelaria

Candelaria's blistering working-class jeremiad jolted her audience awake like a Cinco De Mayo firecracker. Wearing T-shirt, jeans, sandals and a "curandera's" (healer's) small medicine bag, she used lilting bilingual verse to skewer the smug ignorance of academic bureaucrats who sit in the Anglophilic ivory towers of the University of New Mexico and similar neocolonial enclaves, placidly ignoring the outcry of suffering poor families and their "street poets" just a short distance south and west, across the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo bridges.

Cross those bridges and you will meet the so-called "third world," up close and personal. Tourists generally shun that very real, if too-often silenced, world, but this night its voice was heard sharp and clear in the plush surroundings of an elegant Albuquerque conference center.

Candelaria, with her sister "street poets" Maria Leyba and Yosa Alaniz, spoke from the heart,("el corazon"), of the besieged "barrios" and Native lands which lie so close and yet so far from the booming modern cities, (Tucson, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Dallas, El Paso, Juarez, Phoenix, Los Angeles, etc.),of the American southwest. They spoke in defense of their proud, poor "gente" (people), who struggle in a very real, very bloody, borderlands war to preserve ancient indigenous traditions of community, trust, peace and generosity against the multiple threats of armed cocaine-heroin gangs, rapacious real-estate racketeers, bad schools and brutish "conveyor-belt" police-prison systems.

By the end of this stormy, even visionary, "poetry reading," there was scarcely a dry eye in the room, as the relatively well-heeled counselors and very well-intentioned literary theorists of the NAPT found themselves brought face to face with the stark realities of poor peoples' lives as they are lived daily in "hidden corners" of America in the year 2000.

"They woke us up!," commented NAPT founding board member Dr. Charlie Rossiter after the May 5 reading, "Those Southwest street poets gave us a hard slap in the face. And, I'll tell you, man, we needed it! That was the liveliest poetry reading we've had in years--it gets us back to the reasons why we started the NAPT in the first place, which was to reach out to people, to touch them, and to help them when and where we can! To go where they live! I am so excited about this! It's like a new dawn for us! Like a trumpet call to get off our arses, stop dreaming and JUST DO IT!"

Rossiter's call to action, and feelings of renewed enthusiasm, were echoed by many other NAPT attendees, including Dr. Shanee Stepakoff of the NAPT Ethnic/Cultural Diversity Committee. Stepakoff quoted radical poet Marge Piercy to express her own emotions: "Thus saying what we feel, and what we want, what we fear for ourselves and each other into the dark, perhaps we could begin to begin to listen."

That eager listening, and growing excitement, continued the following day, May 6, when the NAPT Conference featured a reading and extended workshop by Jimmy Santiago Baca, preeminent poet, screenwriter and champion of America's most hard-pressed, hard-bitten, hard-working survivors. Baca is the world-famous and widely-honored Chicano/Apache prison-survivor, teacher, newspaper columnist, movie actor, poet and novelist who most recently has applied his immense energies to helping American working folks, of all ages and skin-colors, to find their public voices.

Long a mentor to barrio and ghetto writers, including Priscilla Baca y Candelaria and her Street Poet comrades, (as well as younger hip-hop voices like Jude and Mike "360" Ipiotis), Jimmy Santiago Baca is now engaged with the United Steel Workers Union in an ongoing project to support veteran workers in telling their stories of prolonged struggle, (often through four or five generations), for economic justice and a decent life. Those stories, told through poems, stories and straight-ahead, no bullshit reminiscences, will be published soon by Grove-Atlantic as STEEL WORKS.

Baca also read from his many collections, (among them IMMIGRANTS IN OUR OWN LAND and BLACK MESA POEMS), of tough, beautiful, uncompromising verse, including his latest, SET THIS BOOK ON FIRE! (Cedar Hill Press). Asked how he reconciles the inherent gentleness of poetry with the justifiable outrage and fury of the youth, prisoners, AIDS victims and embattled workers with whom he writes, Jimmy Santiago Baca replied calmly, "Writing is not so much a sublimation of rage and grief as it is a creative dance. Writing can take you out of yourself just long enough to deactivate the explosive fuse and let you stand in the moment of your creation. I tell my students and colleagues in writing to rage into the page and let it become a waterfall. It's all about keeping that flow going, keeping that light inside burning."

To divert those torrents of creative energy from racist, sexist and self-destructive violence and addictions towards the real fight for justice, freedom and some real measure of peace was the true theme of this extraordinary National Poetry Therapy Conference. It is to be hoped that the 2001 Conference, to be held in Washington, DC will witness further advances made toward that fine goal. Venceremos!

For information on the National Association for Poetry Therapy, (an international organization), contact Charlie Rossiter at posey@juno.com or visit the NAPT website

Jimmy Santiago Baca's website

Information on poems and performances by Priscilla Baca y Candelaria and other multilingual word-warriors of Southwest Street Poet!/Si Soy Poeta! may be obtained by writing to: ceilidhmoon@yahoo.com

Bill Nevins is a journalist, poet and sometimes musician in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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