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Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: Poems
Award-winning poet Martín Espada gives voice to the spirit of endurance in the face of loss.
In this powerful new collection of poems, Martín Espada articulates the transcendent vision of another, possible world. He invokes the words of Whitman in “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed,” a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet’s father. “El Moriviví” uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father’s return to a bay in Puerto “May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands.” Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World” urges us to “melt the bullets into bells.” Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean “actor,” finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada’s poems show us the faces of Whitman’s “numberless unknown heroes.”
In this powerful new collection of poems, Martín Espada articulates the transcendent vision of another, possible world. He invokes the words of Whitman in “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed,” a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet’s father. “El Moriviví” uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father’s return to a bay in Puerto “May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands.” Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World” urges us to “melt the bullets into bells.” Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean “actor,” finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada’s poems show us the faces of Whitman’s “numberless unknown heroes.”
- GenresPoetryLatinxNonfiction
113 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 4, 2016
6 people are currently reading
307 people want to read
About the author
Martín Espada
60 books106 followersSandra Cisneros says: “Martín Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors.” Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published thirteen books in all as a poet, essayist, editor and translator. His eighth collection of poems, The Republic of Poetry, was published by Norton in October, 2006. Of this new collection, Samuel Hazo writes: "Espada unites in these poems the fierce allegiances of Latin American poetry to freedom and glory with the democratic tradition of Whitman, and the result is a poetry of fire and passionate intelligence." His last book, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002 (Norton, 2003), received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. An earlier collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and two NEA Fellowships. He recently received a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry. He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry on CD, called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). Much of his poetry arises from his Puerto Rican heritage and his work experiences, ranging from bouncer to tenant lawyer. Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.
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June 7, 2017
The Poetry of Resistance and Grief Transformed to Flame: Martin Espada
And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!—Pablo Neruda
Vivas to those who have fail'd!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
—Walt Whitman (the epigraph to Vivas To Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913, Espada
Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river--Espada
This is a great collection of poetry for our times, by Martin Espada, called "the Pablo Neruda of North America" by Sandra Cisneros. Poetry of resistance, of history and the dark and hopeful present, political poems, narrative poems, passionate, angry, sometimes very funny, with a closing section of elegies for the poet’s father. One of the great books of poetry I have read this year! Inspirational. Powerful. Amazing.
El Moriviví
For Frank Espada (1930-2014)
The Spanish means: I died, I lived. In Puerto Rico, the leaves of el moriviví close in the dark and open at first light.
The fronds curl at a finger’s touch and then unfurl again.
My father, a mountain born of mountains, the tallest Puerto Rican in New York, who scraped doorways,
who could crack the walls with the rumble of his voice, kept a moriviví growing in his ribs. He would die, then live.
My father spoke in the tongue of el moriviví, teaching me the parable of Joe Fleming, who screwed his lit cigarette into the arms of the spics he caught, flapping like fish. My father was a bony boy, the nerves in his back crushed by the Aiello Coal and Ice Company, the load
he lifted up too many flights of stairs. Three times
they would meet to brawl for a crowd after school.
The first time, my father opened his eyes to gravel
and the shoes of his enemy. The second time, he rose
and dug his arm up to the elbow in the monster’s belly, so badly did he want to tear out the heart and eat it.
The third time, Fleming did not show up, and the boys with cigarette burns clapped their spindly champion
on the back, all the way down the street. Fleming would become a cop, fired for breaking bones in too many faces. He died smoking in bed, a sheet of flame up to his chin.
There was a moriviví sprouting in my father’s chest. He would die, then live. He spat obscenities like sunflower seeds at the driver who told him to sit at the back of the bus in Mississippi, then slipped his cap over his eyes and fell asleep. He spent a week in jail, called it the best week of his life, strode through the jailhouse door and sat behind the driver of the bus on the way out of town,
his Air Force uniform all that kept the noose from his neck.
He would come to know the jailhouse again, among hundreds
of demonstrators ferried by police to Hart Island on the East River, where the city of New York stacks the coffins of anonymous
and stillborn bodies. Here, Confederate prisoners once wept
for the Stars and Bars; now, the prisoners sang Freedom Songs.
The jailers outlawed phone calls, so we were sure my father must be
a body like the bodies rolling waterlogged in the East River, till he came back from the island of the dead, black hair combed meticulously. When the riots burned in Brooklyn night after night, my father
was a peacemaker on the corner with a megaphone. A fiery
chunk of concrete fell from the sky and missed his head by inches.
My mother would tell me: Your father is out dodging bullets.
He spoke at a rally with Malcolm X, incantatory words
billowing through the bundled crowd, lifting hands and faces.
Teach, they cried. My father clicked a photograph of Malcolm
as he bent to hear a question, finger pressed against the chin.
Two months later the assassins stampeded the crowd
to shoot Malcolm, blood leaping from his chest as he fell.
My father would die too, but then he would live again,
after every riot, every rally, every arrest, every night in jail,
the change from his pockets landing hard on the dresser
at 4 AM every time I swore he was gone for good.
My father knew the secrets of el moriviví, that he would die, then live. He drifted off at the wheel, drove into a guardrail, shook his head and walked away without a web of scars
or fractures. He passed out from the heat in the subway, toppled onto the tracks, and somehow missed the third rail. He tied a white apron across his waist to open a grocery store, pulled a revolver from the counter to startle the gangsters demanding protection, then put up signs for a clearance sale as soon as they backed out the door with their hands in the air. When the family finally took a vacation in the mountains
of the Hudson Valley, a hotel with waiters in white jackets and white paint peeling in the room, the roof exploded
in flame, as if the ghost of Joe Fleming and his cigarette trailed us everywhere, and it was then that my father appeared in the smoke, like a general leading the charge
in battle, shouting commands at the volunteer fire company, steering the water from the hoses, since he was immune
to death by fire or water, as if he wore the crumbled leaves of el moriviví in an amulet slung around his neck.
My brother called to say el moriviví was gone. My father tore at the wires, the electrodes, the IV, saying that he wanted
to go home. The hospital was a jailhouse in Mississippi.
The furious pulse that fired his heart in every fight flooded
the chambers of his heart. The doctors scrutinized the film,
the grainy shadows and the light, but could never see: my father was a moriviví. I died. I lived. He died. He lived. He dies. He lives.
Matt Hanson’s great review and interview, “Resistance is Obligatory”:
http://artsfuse.org/158013/poetry-rev...
And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!—Pablo Neruda
Vivas to those who have fail'd!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
—Walt Whitman (the epigraph to Vivas To Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913, Espada
Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river--Espada
This is a great collection of poetry for our times, by Martin Espada, called "the Pablo Neruda of North America" by Sandra Cisneros. Poetry of resistance, of history and the dark and hopeful present, political poems, narrative poems, passionate, angry, sometimes very funny, with a closing section of elegies for the poet’s father. One of the great books of poetry I have read this year! Inspirational. Powerful. Amazing.
El Moriviví
For Frank Espada (1930-2014)
The Spanish means: I died, I lived. In Puerto Rico, the leaves of el moriviví close in the dark and open at first light.
The fronds curl at a finger’s touch and then unfurl again.
My father, a mountain born of mountains, the tallest Puerto Rican in New York, who scraped doorways,
who could crack the walls with the rumble of his voice, kept a moriviví growing in his ribs. He would die, then live.
My father spoke in the tongue of el moriviví, teaching me the parable of Joe Fleming, who screwed his lit cigarette into the arms of the spics he caught, flapping like fish. My father was a bony boy, the nerves in his back crushed by the Aiello Coal and Ice Company, the load
he lifted up too many flights of stairs. Three times
they would meet to brawl for a crowd after school.
The first time, my father opened his eyes to gravel
and the shoes of his enemy. The second time, he rose
and dug his arm up to the elbow in the monster’s belly, so badly did he want to tear out the heart and eat it.
The third time, Fleming did not show up, and the boys with cigarette burns clapped their spindly champion
on the back, all the way down the street. Fleming would become a cop, fired for breaking bones in too many faces. He died smoking in bed, a sheet of flame up to his chin.
There was a moriviví sprouting in my father’s chest. He would die, then live. He spat obscenities like sunflower seeds at the driver who told him to sit at the back of the bus in Mississippi, then slipped his cap over his eyes and fell asleep. He spent a week in jail, called it the best week of his life, strode through the jailhouse door and sat behind the driver of the bus on the way out of town,
his Air Force uniform all that kept the noose from his neck.
He would come to know the jailhouse again, among hundreds
of demonstrators ferried by police to Hart Island on the East River, where the city of New York stacks the coffins of anonymous
and stillborn bodies. Here, Confederate prisoners once wept
for the Stars and Bars; now, the prisoners sang Freedom Songs.
The jailers outlawed phone calls, so we were sure my father must be
a body like the bodies rolling waterlogged in the East River, till he came back from the island of the dead, black hair combed meticulously. When the riots burned in Brooklyn night after night, my father
was a peacemaker on the corner with a megaphone. A fiery
chunk of concrete fell from the sky and missed his head by inches.
My mother would tell me: Your father is out dodging bullets.
He spoke at a rally with Malcolm X, incantatory words
billowing through the bundled crowd, lifting hands and faces.
Teach, they cried. My father clicked a photograph of Malcolm
as he bent to hear a question, finger pressed against the chin.
Two months later the assassins stampeded the crowd
to shoot Malcolm, blood leaping from his chest as he fell.
My father would die too, but then he would live again,
after every riot, every rally, every arrest, every night in jail,
the change from his pockets landing hard on the dresser
at 4 AM every time I swore he was gone for good.
My father knew the secrets of el moriviví, that he would die, then live. He drifted off at the wheel, drove into a guardrail, shook his head and walked away without a web of scars
or fractures. He passed out from the heat in the subway, toppled onto the tracks, and somehow missed the third rail. He tied a white apron across his waist to open a grocery store, pulled a revolver from the counter to startle the gangsters demanding protection, then put up signs for a clearance sale as soon as they backed out the door with their hands in the air. When the family finally took a vacation in the mountains
of the Hudson Valley, a hotel with waiters in white jackets and white paint peeling in the room, the roof exploded
in flame, as if the ghost of Joe Fleming and his cigarette trailed us everywhere, and it was then that my father appeared in the smoke, like a general leading the charge
in battle, shouting commands at the volunteer fire company, steering the water from the hoses, since he was immune
to death by fire or water, as if he wore the crumbled leaves of el moriviví in an amulet slung around his neck.
My brother called to say el moriviví was gone. My father tore at the wires, the electrodes, the IV, saying that he wanted
to go home. The hospital was a jailhouse in Mississippi.
The furious pulse that fired his heart in every fight flooded
the chambers of his heart. The doctors scrutinized the film,
the grainy shadows and the light, but could never see: my father was a moriviví. I died. I lived. He died. He lived. He dies. He lives.
Matt Hanson’s great review and interview, “Resistance is Obligatory”:
http://artsfuse.org/158013/poetry-rev...
December 31, 2023
More Espada, and more appreciation for his work. Find myself going backward through his collections, reverse aging. His unpretentious accessible style and storytelling quality are a ripe combination.
This collection includes 5 parts, the first an ode and remembrance to the labor strike and occurrences surrounding the Paterson Silk Strike in 1913 ("Vivas to Those Who Have Failed", taking a line from Whitman) through the 3 middle sections describing memories of childhood, baseball, food, violence and activism, elegies of friends, and then the final section, the capstone, of elegies for his father (El Moriviví, In Memoriam).
Other highlights:
"Ghazal for a Tall Boy from New Hampshire" [elegy for a former student who was murdered by ISIS]
"Flowers and Bullets" [historical connections of Puerto Rico and Cuba]
4.75*/5
This collection includes 5 parts, the first an ode and remembrance to the labor strike and occurrences surrounding the Paterson Silk Strike in 1913 ("Vivas to Those Who Have Failed", taking a line from Whitman) through the 3 middle sections describing memories of childhood, baseball, food, violence and activism, elegies of friends, and then the final section, the capstone, of elegies for his father (El Moriviví, In Memoriam).
BILLS TO PAY
The night after my father died, I climbed the stairs
to tell my mother goodnight. I saw the left side of the bed
stacked with magazine clippings, newspapers, letters folders, unpaid bills, a Bible. I slept with him for sixty-two years
she said. I had to fill up this side of the bed. I said the words
to her I should have said many times before. There were
words we still had time to say, and unpaid bills to pay.
Other highlights:
"Ghazal for a Tall Boy from New Hampshire" [elegy for a former student who was murdered by ISIS]
"Flowers and Bullets" [historical connections of Puerto Rico and Cuba]
4.75*/5
January 4, 2016
I ran across this entirely by accident. I was wandering around Barnes and Noble and noticed out of the corner of my eye the cover photo of a gruff but kindly looking man smoking a cigar. Then I noticed the title and picked the book up and quickly decided it had been sitting there waiting for me. Anyone who writes a beautiful poem honoring the defeated and forgotten textile workers strike of 1934, as Espada does in the title sonnet, is someone i love. The strikers daughter who became a poet he mentions is Maria Mazziotti Gillan, who can be found here on goodreads.
January 26, 2016
A breathtaking experience. In the brilliant tradition of Whitman, Martin Espada delivers poetry with sweeping, active humanism. His poems have the feel of chronicling - as though these poems are a record of our times - our past, present and future.
September 27, 2021
Tell me poetry isn't 'real', and I'll throw the first punch of my life. Is Rukeyser's Book of The Dead too theoretical? Are seven hundred dead bodies figurative?
Espada's poetry is as real as a fastball to the ribs, as sunlight warming the skin, as the blood of Trayvon Martin (or Michael Brown, or Breonna Taylor, or Botham Jean, or Philando Castile, or...*) seeping.
Vivas to Those Who Have Failed is history, and narrative, and beauty, and tragedy, and a clarion call, and silently weeping. It's real.
Gratitude for the author's scaffolding through a comprehensive 'notes on the poems', which keys any and all unknowing through gates of learning.
*For all the names not spoken*
Espada's poetry is as real as a fastball to the ribs, as sunlight warming the skin, as the blood of Trayvon Martin (or Michael Brown, or Breonna Taylor, or Botham Jean, or Philando Castile, or...*) seeping.
Vivas to Those Who Have Failed is history, and narrative, and beauty, and tragedy, and a clarion call, and silently weeping. It's real.
Gratitude for the author's scaffolding through a comprehensive 'notes on the poems', which keys any and all unknowing through gates of learning.
*For all the names not spoken*
June 17, 2017
This is my first time reading Espada, but I heard him speak/read at AWP 2017 and he really grabbed my attention. The book's title comes from a Walt Whitman poem, and most of this collection adopts a Whitman-esque pose and narrative voice. The lines are long, the verse is free, and the subjects are varied but tend to focus on the working-class population in the US. We read about various attempts by labor unions, in the early 20th century, to attain livable wages and decent working conditions.
Vivas is a history lesson as much as it is poetry--in the book's first section, we learn about how methods of production in the age of the robber barons left workers broken, if not maimed. We read about how attempts to challenge the status quo were met: "The cops on horseback charged into the picket line. / The weavers raised their hands across their faces, / hands that knew the loom as their fathers' hands / knew the loom, and the billy clubs broke their fingers" ("IV. The Little Agitator").
The collection's second section focuses on recent tragedies in the USA. The tone is often hopeful, but not naive. "Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World," written in memory of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, visualizes a possible future: "... and the bell born / in the foundry says: I was born of bullets, but now I sing / of a world where bullets melt into bells. / ... / I was born of cannons, / but now I sing of a world where cannons melt into bells." However, "How we Could Have Lived or Died this Way" describes the seemingly-endless stream of examples of police violence against black men: "I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn / will read or hear a century from now, words that will make them wonder / how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves / still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke / every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore."
The "Here I am" section didn't hit as hard. We get a more narrow, single-person view in a variety of situations. They don't pack the same punch as the preceding sections. Not that every poem must be political, but these just didn't really grab me, apart from the titular poem, "Here I am."
"A Million Ants Swarming Through his Body" and "El Moriviví" focus on death, and how we deal with the dead once they have left us. These, without always returning to the political, return to the verve of the earlier poems in the book. "Flowers and Bullets" speaks of national pride: "Tattoo the Puerto Rican flag on my shoulder, / so if I close my eyes forever in the cold / and the doctors cannot tell the cause of death, / you will know that I died like José Martí, / with flowers and bullets in my heart."
Finally, "The Sinking of the San Jacinto" ends with a blessing that I think any sailor would be happy to receive: "May you navigate through the night without / the compass devoured by the salt of the sea. / May you rise up in the luminescent bay, / stirring the microscopic creatures in the water / back to life so their light startles your eyes. / May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands."
Espada has written some beautiful poems. However, he has also included a number that I think could have been left out. When I began writing the review, I wavered between giving it 3 stars or 4. Looking back through puts it solidly at 4 stars, but I think it could have been leaner and meaner. I really like the Whitmanic voice that we read early on, but that tone doesn't remain constant throughout and its replacement isn't always as strong. I will certainly keep some of these poems in my heart, and I will certainly look for more work by Espada.
Vivas is a history lesson as much as it is poetry--in the book's first section, we learn about how methods of production in the age of the robber barons left workers broken, if not maimed. We read about how attempts to challenge the status quo were met: "The cops on horseback charged into the picket line. / The weavers raised their hands across their faces, / hands that knew the loom as their fathers' hands / knew the loom, and the billy clubs broke their fingers" ("IV. The Little Agitator").
The collection's second section focuses on recent tragedies in the USA. The tone is often hopeful, but not naive. "Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World," written in memory of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, visualizes a possible future: "... and the bell born / in the foundry says: I was born of bullets, but now I sing / of a world where bullets melt into bells. / ... / I was born of cannons, / but now I sing of a world where cannons melt into bells." However, "How we Could Have Lived or Died this Way" describes the seemingly-endless stream of examples of police violence against black men: "I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn / will read or hear a century from now, words that will make them wonder / how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves / still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke / every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore."
The "Here I am" section didn't hit as hard. We get a more narrow, single-person view in a variety of situations. They don't pack the same punch as the preceding sections. Not that every poem must be political, but these just didn't really grab me, apart from the titular poem, "Here I am."
"A Million Ants Swarming Through his Body" and "El Moriviví" focus on death, and how we deal with the dead once they have left us. These, without always returning to the political, return to the verve of the earlier poems in the book. "Flowers and Bullets" speaks of national pride: "Tattoo the Puerto Rican flag on my shoulder, / so if I close my eyes forever in the cold / and the doctors cannot tell the cause of death, / you will know that I died like José Martí, / with flowers and bullets in my heart."
Finally, "The Sinking of the San Jacinto" ends with a blessing that I think any sailor would be happy to receive: "May you navigate through the night without / the compass devoured by the salt of the sea. / May you rise up in the luminescent bay, / stirring the microscopic creatures in the water / back to life so their light startles your eyes. / May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands."
Espada has written some beautiful poems. However, he has also included a number that I think could have been left out. When I began writing the review, I wavered between giving it 3 stars or 4. Looking back through puts it solidly at 4 stars, but I think it could have been leaner and meaner. I really like the Whitmanic voice that we read early on, but that tone doesn't remain constant throughout and its replacement isn't always as strong. I will certainly keep some of these poems in my heart, and I will certainly look for more work by Espada.
October 17, 2016
*Latino Heritage Month lesson plan including the 2014 biopic Cesar Chavez:
Excerpted from Martín Espada’s 2016 poetry collection, the titular sonnet cycle takes its name from Walt Whitman’s 1855 “Song of Myself.” “Song of Myself” is amongst the most cited passages of Leaves of Grass and speaks directly to Whitman’s larger poetic vision—what Espada would later call “poetry of the political imagination.” In much of Espada’s prose and lectures, he credits Whitman as his inspiration for writing the plight of unsung Americans—workers like those in Paterson, NJ during the silk strike of 1913, or the restaurant workers who he captures in his haunting 2003 poem “Alabanza,” which is set in the ruins of the twin towers.
Himself a former factory worker—something he illustrates in his poem “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper”—Espada’s poetic vision is quite similar to Whitman’s: he too centralizes the plight of persons who are too often disregarded. In “Vivas,” Espada takes us to Paterson where silk workers toiled in unspeakable conditions: “skin and fingernails boiled away for six dollars a week in the dye house” (Part I, Lines 7-8). So too does he conjure images of striking workers that recall those in Diego Luna’s film about union leader César Chávez. Espada notes: “Twenty thousand strikers walked behind the hearse, flooding the avenue like the river that lit up the mills, surging around the tombstones” (Part II, Lines 9-11). Here we might consider the river of migrant farm workers (or campesinos) walking the 340 miles to California’s state capital in Sacramento. Here too we might consider how the perspective of the poet or the director can offer subtle glimpses into the humanity of the striking worker—glimpses that the newspapers and the “Harvard man” too often miss. As we see in the section of the poem entitled “The Little Agitator,” the judge knows only the striker, but Espada gives us Hannah.
Espada also tells us: “Strikers without shoes lose strikes” (Part V, Line 1). Here we might recall the boots donated to Chavez’s strikers; and we might consider why both artists choose to include such details. Why the boots? How does it alter our perspective of the “little agitators” to consider their feet?
The final line of Espada’s poem speaks volumes about poetry of the political imagination—be it a sonnet or a film: “Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river” (Part V, Line 14). What does the river symbolize here? And in the strikes that we now see, whether in North Dakota or on Fifth Avenue, does that river continue to gain strength?
Excerpted from Martín Espada’s 2016 poetry collection, the titular sonnet cycle takes its name from Walt Whitman’s 1855 “Song of Myself.” “Song of Myself” is amongst the most cited passages of Leaves of Grass and speaks directly to Whitman’s larger poetic vision—what Espada would later call “poetry of the political imagination.” In much of Espada’s prose and lectures, he credits Whitman as his inspiration for writing the plight of unsung Americans—workers like those in Paterson, NJ during the silk strike of 1913, or the restaurant workers who he captures in his haunting 2003 poem “Alabanza,” which is set in the ruins of the twin towers.
Himself a former factory worker—something he illustrates in his poem “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper”—Espada’s poetic vision is quite similar to Whitman’s: he too centralizes the plight of persons who are too often disregarded. In “Vivas,” Espada takes us to Paterson where silk workers toiled in unspeakable conditions: “skin and fingernails boiled away for six dollars a week in the dye house” (Part I, Lines 7-8). So too does he conjure images of striking workers that recall those in Diego Luna’s film about union leader César Chávez. Espada notes: “Twenty thousand strikers walked behind the hearse, flooding the avenue like the river that lit up the mills, surging around the tombstones” (Part II, Lines 9-11). Here we might consider the river of migrant farm workers (or campesinos) walking the 340 miles to California’s state capital in Sacramento. Here too we might consider how the perspective of the poet or the director can offer subtle glimpses into the humanity of the striking worker—glimpses that the newspapers and the “Harvard man” too often miss. As we see in the section of the poem entitled “The Little Agitator,” the judge knows only the striker, but Espada gives us Hannah.
Espada also tells us: “Strikers without shoes lose strikes” (Part V, Line 1). Here we might recall the boots donated to Chavez’s strikers; and we might consider why both artists choose to include such details. Why the boots? How does it alter our perspective of the “little agitators” to consider their feet?
The final line of Espada’s poem speaks volumes about poetry of the political imagination—be it a sonnet or a film: “Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river” (Part V, Line 14). What does the river symbolize here? And in the strikes that we now see, whether in North Dakota or on Fifth Avenue, does that river continue to gain strength?
February 4, 2018
I have never read Espada's work before nor had I heard of him until I came upon this book. I am so glad I picked it up. I have, for reasons I don't entirely understand, a soft spot an affection for poetry, prose, people that speak of revolutions or talk about tyranny and how to stop it or are activist. It is one of htose by default, I will probably like it.
Vivas to those who have failed is a beautiful collection of people and their lives. The change they wish to have made, what their fights were, and how they succeeded and failed. I think anyone who can write a poem about a baseball game and a socialist and make it work, is amazing in my book.
I really loved this book and I am not only glad I read it but that I savored it. I can't wait to read more of his work.
Vivas to those who have failed is a beautiful collection of people and their lives. The change they wish to have made, what their fights were, and how they succeeded and failed. I think anyone who can write a poem about a baseball game and a socialist and make it work, is amazing in my book.
I really loved this book and I am not only glad I read it but that I savored it. I can't wait to read more of his work.
February 4, 2016
I set out just read a few poems to start with; fast-forward and I finished the book in one sitting. Sad, tragic, humorous, inspiring - these poems range from social issues past and present, to amusing reflections on work and culture, to memories of love and loss. Both global and deeply personal, this collection ultimately speaks to some of the core elements of human experience - not through grand philosophizing but, as is the way of poetry, through the immediate and potent emotions of our daily lives.
April 21, 2017
My review and interview with Martin Espada:
http://artsfuse.org/158013/poetry-rev...
December 13, 2016
Now more than ever we need poets like Martín Espada to shove the mirror of truth at US.
March 31, 2016
Elegaic poems in which unsung heroes get their due.
If you've never heard of the Paterson Silk Strike, you're not alone. The strikers died mostly forgotten, even though it's thanks to them we have eight-hour workdays. Espada's new collection kicks off with a sonnet cycle that brings history to life, praising the men and women who put their lives on the line for labor rights. The title of the cycle--and of the book--is taken from Whitman, and mirrors his respect for all the little guys who left marks on history despite never been known as the ones who made the marks.
The other poems fall along the same lines, though most of the men honored are Espada's personal heroes. A great deal of the work is dedicated to his father, Frank, who died in 2014. Reading about his life and adventures will make you wish you'd known him, and envy Espada more than a little for having such a kickass dad. Reading these poems is like sitting around the kitchen table listening to the grownups tell "back in the day" stories. Bold and yet at the same time restrained, Espada's tone conveys the true nature of grief: a virus that ebbs and flows through various emotions. The overall mood is somber, but defiant.
My favorites here were "Hard-Handed Men of Athens" (wryly funny), "On the Hovering of Souls and Balloon Animals" (funny not funny), and "El Morivivi," the culmination of Espada's paternal hymns, which ends the volume on a sad, but hopeful note. Our heroes die, but not just once: they die a thousand times and are reborn, so long as we remember them. A solid collection that will resonate most strongly with anyone who has lost a parent, but also recommended for readers who like their poetry socially conscious and a bit tongue in cheek.
If you've never heard of the Paterson Silk Strike, you're not alone. The strikers died mostly forgotten, even though it's thanks to them we have eight-hour workdays. Espada's new collection kicks off with a sonnet cycle that brings history to life, praising the men and women who put their lives on the line for labor rights. The title of the cycle--and of the book--is taken from Whitman, and mirrors his respect for all the little guys who left marks on history despite never been known as the ones who made the marks.
The other poems fall along the same lines, though most of the men honored are Espada's personal heroes. A great deal of the work is dedicated to his father, Frank, who died in 2014. Reading about his life and adventures will make you wish you'd known him, and envy Espada more than a little for having such a kickass dad. Reading these poems is like sitting around the kitchen table listening to the grownups tell "back in the day" stories. Bold and yet at the same time restrained, Espada's tone conveys the true nature of grief: a virus that ebbs and flows through various emotions. The overall mood is somber, but defiant.
My favorites here were "Hard-Handed Men of Athens" (wryly funny), "On the Hovering of Souls and Balloon Animals" (funny not funny), and "El Morivivi," the culmination of Espada's paternal hymns, which ends the volume on a sad, but hopeful note. Our heroes die, but not just once: they die a thousand times and are reborn, so long as we remember them. A solid collection that will resonate most strongly with anyone who has lost a parent, but also recommended for readers who like their poetry socially conscious and a bit tongue in cheek.
February 3, 2018
Recently I went to the library to pick up a book that had come in from Interlibrary Loan for me on an evening when I had no pressing adult/parenting responsibilities (how rare is that?) so I browsed the stacks. None of the books I wanted were available and I thought, "I should read more poetry," so I went to go look for poetry books of tried and true authors. They were all checked out but I saw this one. The title made me chuckle so I pulled it off the shelf and checked it out. I have only ever read one Walt Whitman poem as assigned in school but I love the Whitman quotes he uses before his own very good poems - it shows me that despite going to very good schools from kindergarten to college I have huge gaps in my reading. And not just because some years I was a delinquent who didn't read the assignments. But because there are a ton of wonderful books out there. And I will read Walt Whitman soon. I don't want to say anything about this book, like I never want to say anything about any book because I think it is always best to go into a book unspoiled - not just by plot reveals and such but also it is good to read something without knowing how the people you know FEEL about a book or what they think. But if you want to read American poetry, this is a mighty satisfying choice. I give it 4.4 stars.
July 24, 2019
I like this book. It’s gritty, it’s multi-lingual, and it captures a culture and an era. Espada writes of union organizers, Puerto Rican immigrants, current events, and most of all about his late father, Frank Espada, to whom the book is dedicated. In one of my favorites, “The Goddamned Crucifix,” he tells of his father near death in a Catholic Hospital, using what might have been his final breaths to say, “Get that goddamned crucifix away from me.” Honor they father,/ the Bible says, so I lifted Jesus off the nail on the wall/and hid Him in the drawer next to the bed, stuffed/back down into the darkness before the resurrection./Only then did the miracle come to pass: my father lived.” The notes in the back really bring the poems to life by giving us the context, IDing the characters, and translating the Spanish sayings. The man is a master.
November 20, 2016
Brilliant. Gorgeous. Cuts to the heart--especially now.
It's got small moments and epic movements that intertwine in delightful ways. The collection covers protest, courage, injustice, memory, legacy, mourning, poets and their art, fathers, history, baseball, culture, identity, and time.
I loved this collection. Even the few poems that I didn't connect with are lovely things.
It's got small moments and epic movements that intertwine in delightful ways. The collection covers protest, courage, injustice, memory, legacy, mourning, poets and their art, fathers, history, baseball, culture, identity, and time.
I loved this collection. Even the few poems that I didn't connect with are lovely things.
May 24, 2018
I heard Martin Espada speak on a Puerto Rican panel at the PEN World Voices Festival and knew I needed to read his work. This collection provides eulogies to revolutionaries who found a short life to their important work, and to his father who inspired his son and community. Espada's words are grounded and yet flow with an elegance befitting the respect given to lives lost.
August 9, 2018
I always feel the need to qualify my review of poetry by saying I'm no expert, but ultimately that's not really what poetry is about, is it? It's about emotion and these poems were powerful for me. Free verse odes to the powerless, the working class, those who stand up for what they believe and for those who can't stand up for themselves. It's revolutionary humanism.
April 25, 2016
read the stories once to see what fates would befall the salty characters. reading it again to savor the master’s craft. unhurried. varied. perfected over a lifetime. like the father and the heroes of she-roes whose eulogies he sings.
May 28, 2018
This is such a beautiful tribute to those who fight. I am also impressed by how well they work both individually and as a collection.
June 30, 2019
Insurrectionary!
July 31, 2021
Martín Espada ** "How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way"
"Not songs of loyalty alone are these,
But songs of insurrection also,
For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over."
-Walt Whitman
I see the dark-skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell
before the whip and steel, the last blood pooling, the last breath spitting.
I see the immigrant street vendor flashing his wallet to the cops,
shot so many times there are bullet holes in the soles of his feet.
I see the deaf woodcarver and his pocketknife, crossing the street
in front of a cop who yells, then fires. I see the drug raid, the wrong
door kicked in, the minister’s heart seizing up. I see the man hawking
a fistful of cigarettes, the cop’s chokehold that makes his wheezing
lungs stop wheezing forever. I am in the crowd, at the window,
kneeling beside the body left on the asphalt for hours, covered in a sheet.
I see the suicides: the conga player handcuffed for drumming on the subway,
hanged in the jail cell with his hands cuffed behind him; the suspect leaking
blood from his chest in the back seat of the squad car; the 300-pound boy
said to stampede barehanded into the bullets drilling his forehead.
I see the coroner nodding, the words he types in his report burrowing
into the skin like more bullets. I see the government investigations stacking,
words buzzing on the page, then suffocated as bees suffocate in a jar. I see
the next Black man, fleeing as the fugitive slave once fled the slave-catcher,
shot in the back for a broken tail light. I see the cop handcuff the corpse.
I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads,
faces in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen.
I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn
will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder
how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves
still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke
every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.
Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: Poems ** Read in Washington, DC and Saudi Arabia (July 2021)
"Not songs of loyalty alone are these,
But songs of insurrection also,
For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over."
-Walt Whitman
I see the dark-skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell
before the whip and steel, the last blood pooling, the last breath spitting.
I see the immigrant street vendor flashing his wallet to the cops,
shot so many times there are bullet holes in the soles of his feet.
I see the deaf woodcarver and his pocketknife, crossing the street
in front of a cop who yells, then fires. I see the drug raid, the wrong
door kicked in, the minister’s heart seizing up. I see the man hawking
a fistful of cigarettes, the cop’s chokehold that makes his wheezing
lungs stop wheezing forever. I am in the crowd, at the window,
kneeling beside the body left on the asphalt for hours, covered in a sheet.
I see the suicides: the conga player handcuffed for drumming on the subway,
hanged in the jail cell with his hands cuffed behind him; the suspect leaking
blood from his chest in the back seat of the squad car; the 300-pound boy
said to stampede barehanded into the bullets drilling his forehead.
I see the coroner nodding, the words he types in his report burrowing
into the skin like more bullets. I see the government investigations stacking,
words buzzing on the page, then suffocated as bees suffocate in a jar. I see
the next Black man, fleeing as the fugitive slave once fled the slave-catcher,
shot in the back for a broken tail light. I see the cop handcuff the corpse.
I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads,
faces in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen.
I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn
will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder
how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves
still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke
every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.
Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: Poems ** Read in Washington, DC and Saudi Arabia (July 2021)
December 21, 2024
"I see the cop handcuff the corpse.
I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads,
faces in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen.
I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn
will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder
how we could have lived or died this way"
from "How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way"
This book, held aloft above floodwaters. These poems, thrust into the hands of the men with guns. These lines, vivid and bright images breaking fear, one after another, fist raised high in rebellion.
I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads,
faces in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen.
I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn
will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder
how we could have lived or died this way"
from "How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way"
This book, held aloft above floodwaters. These poems, thrust into the hands of the men with guns. These lines, vivid and bright images breaking fear, one after another, fist raised high in rebellion.
January 20, 2023
Maybe the tight-lipped, cigar-smoking man on the cover reminded me of my own father. Maybe the title touched some inner nerve of my own personal philosophy to celebrate all parts of life - the triumphs & gilded memories as well as the shortcomings & failures. I learned last summer after reading Floaters that Martin Espada speaks to me. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed does not shy away from the history we sometimes overlook, complex issues that we continue to grapple with, and a fantastic, heart-wrenching tribute to Martin’s father, Frank Espada (1930-2014)
September 13, 2021
Powerful, memorable poems by Espada, a social activist, historian, and former tenant rights attorney. The book includes poems focusing on Puerto Rican history and culture; his father’s colorful and expansive life and death; labor activism and organizing in the early 20th century in communities of color; and memorable moments in the author’s life. I definitely enjoyed discovering this poet and poetry collection. 4.5 stars!
July 15, 2023
I liked the sections titled: Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, Here I am, and A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body. Gotta love socialists trying. Gotta grit and bare when they fail. Scenarios imaginative and fun and real and unpretentious. Didn't care the ones towards the end but don't @ me because I got tired of reading towards the end because I skipped around, okay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvgZk...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvgZk...
May 26, 2020
Workmanlike poetry for the already converted. The Paterson poems were barely poems; they seemed like histories dressed in unusual line breaks. Much more powerful were the personal accounts, particularly those involving the poet and his father. Oddly by collection’s end I knew the father. The poet? Not so much.
June 14, 2021
not so into the poems - not sure if it is the style or the obsession with baseball
themed around the portarican experience
themed around the portarican experience
November 9, 2021
No bullshit. Martin Espada is a poet who overthrows the pretensions of poetry, and brings us "news that stays news." He's been at it for awhile, and he's totally trustworthy.
May 25, 2023
This poetry is at once personal and universal. Political and intimate at the same time. All well-crafted.
September 12, 2023
Favorite Quote = “A baseball sailing into a crowd makes monsters of all”
-from “ The Socialist In The Crowd”
BTW, my dog loved to hear these poems read aloud.
-from “ The Socialist In The Crowd”
BTW, my dog loved to hear these poems read aloud.
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