Gravy Donuts, 24/7

Juan Felipe Herrera and I were on our way back from the water park in Davenport, Iowa, with our assortment of children, an hour’s drive straight down Interstate 80, in the summer of 1988. Of all the theme parks, the water ones are the most exhausting. The big straight slides like ski jumps, the curving spiral tubes, the wave machines and circus rides, combined with the fried food and sugar blasts—sugar drinks, sugar cones, sugar cotton, sugar bars—frazzle you over the hours, and on the ride home, the kids were a bit morose, a little whiny. Juan Felipe decided that we should get some gravy donuts, that we should all be on the lookout for gravy donuts, try to find the gravy donut store. Nobody asked what a gravy donut was, everyone just quietly giggled as he went on a gravy donut riff for twenty minutes. I could almost taste them. On either side of us was nothing but corn and soybean fields, the occasional woodlot or farmstead—for twenty miles at a time not even a gas station—but we all repeated, after Juan Felipe, “I bet up that road there are some gravy donuts. That looks like Gravy Donut Avenue.” We ate imaginary donuts and digested our day. “To get those donuts,” he said, “we’ll need to rustle up some horses—twelve horses—and some cilantro.”

That was when I first realized—though I would see it again and again over the years—that Juan Felipe was a twenty-four-hour poet, an openall-night poet, a man who, I like to say, never speaks in prose—a person whose spoken words are spoken word, who rarely stops smelting reality into language, who rarely stops conceiving new worlds, rarely takes a break from enhancing life with words, rarely stops producing pleasure through recorded and unrecorded speech.

Is it strange to write about a poet by telling random anecdotes? I think not. Besides, Herrera is a most autobiographical poet: not just in the more obvious memoiristic poems and pieces like Mayan Drifter (1997), “Shawashté” (Giraffe on Fire, 2001), “Autobiography of a Chicano Teen Poet” and other poems in Facegames (1987), the diary entries of Love After the Riots (1996) and Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler (2002), or the “Aztlán Chronicles” in 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (2007), but everywhere, ubiquitously. His first young adult novel for Scholastic, Downtown Boy (2005), is at least partially autobiographical, as are, of course, the poems about family,

Juan Felipe Herrera, September 15, 1993. Photograph by Laverne Harrell Clark, courtesy of The University of Arizona Poetry Center. @1993 Arizona Board of Regents.

and the many autobiographical moments that blossom within so much of the other writing.

In a postscript to another book for young readers, Laughing Out Loud, I Fly (2015), he writes about discovering, as a seventeen-year-old in a San Francisco bookstore, a small book of poetry by Pablo Picasso, and how alive the words were that danced off the page, so alive that he smelled the pears and oranges. He felt the smooth almonds on Picasso’s table, and the artist’s childhood friend, Mesalina, even ran up and tugged at his shirt. This, he realized, is what he wanted his poems to do: to bring the real into the eyes and mouths and hands of his readers, and this is what he offers young audiences—representation, but more than that, significance; and more than that, something so real it seems sensorial and palpable. In the end, he offers them pears and almonds. And gravy donuts.

A section of that book can stand as a manifesto:

Laughing out loud, I fly, toward the good things, to catch Mamá Lucha on the sidewalk, after school, waiting for the green-striped bus, on the side of the neighborhood store, next to almonds, José’s tiny wooden mule, the wiseboy from San Diego teeth split apart, like mine in the coppery afternoon.

Like much of Juan Felipe’s poetry for young readers, this is a poem that inhabits a child’s perspective, but assumes that children need no more handholding to experience the sublime than adults do. It assumes, in fact, that they need even less—children are readier to laugh out loud at juxtaposition than adults are, and juxtaposition is the poet’s tool, rather than the linear stuff that animates prose: narrative, sequence, causality, necessity, reason, procedure. Gravy. Donuts. It is a juxtaposition that encourages narrative and frustrates narrative in equal measure. That makes meaning and laughs at meaning and multiplies meaning.

The young adult books, too, make no concessions, dumb nothing down. The speaker of Skatefate (2011), the skater, adapting to his new foster home, often speaks like a skater: “Whatever you call it dude,” he says, or “dunno,” or:

hey wazup wait wait aha wait now now what wait did you say Aha wait my cell oh well oh aha my cell wait ok Ok ok now where was i wait hold Up i’ll be there i am almost there

But in the same pages, too, pure poetry, with all its ontological alchemy, is given equal sovereignty.

in brown & sepia music in blue nest nothingness absolute singular & cut to glass transformed into light & sky & void

Young adults, he knows, hear this. They hear “wazup” and they hear “blue nest nothingness,” and they hear them without fear of contradiction. They hear them in apposition, in juxtaposition but also in combination—it is the province of both youth and poetry to accrete dream and reality, the conceptual and the concrete, the imagined and the unimagined. Youth and poetry play in a world of complex collage and layering, mixing given language and invented. We have multiple generations formed by hip-hop, after all, with its intense mixture of the sacred and profane, its multiple slangs and neologisms and lingos, its mashups and remixes and overdubs, its embrace of everyday speech as the basis, but not the limit, of its art. And like much of the poetry for adults Juan Felipe has written, the novels in verse Downtown Boy and Cinnamon Girl (2005) and the other works for children and young adults—all of it is euphorigenic; it wears its desire for rapture on its sleeve: “Laughing out loud, I fly, toward the good things.” There is no hiding, no fear of enchantment—in fact, an embrace of enchantment, for how does one fly without enchantment? If he wrote “I fly toward the good things,” it might suggest a simple dead metaphor; “I fly, toward the good things” involves flying.

For years now, I have let his work wash over me: tonic, cleansing, a can opener for the heavens, and for darker realms. But sometimes I stop and try to discern how it works, how it enchants, how the magic is produced, how the trick works. The poetry comes in all shapes and sizes, all flavors and colors. Sometimes, as in “Black Tenor on Powell Street,” from the early Exiles of Desire (1985), the lines are staccato, marching down the page.

Between the St. Francis and the palms

in the center between bent mute drivers on the side

on the last cable car dreaming to the sky

you sang from the asphalt altar

in the noon of sirens and statues

Each line makes its point, becomes a fulcrum to the next, and that line makes its point but pushes us forward, too. Ten years earlier, the poems in Rebozos of Love (1974), his first book, often use one-word or two-word lines in this way, in English, Spanish, and Spanglish:

Quetzalcóatl no sorrow vida brillando

quetzalcóatl plumed heart of struggle feliz laborando transformando dying constellations…

Sometimes these lines can be read like a sentence (Between the St. Francis and the palms in the center, between bent mute drivers on the side on the last cable car dreaming to the sky, you sang from the asphalt altar in the room of sirens and statues), but in “Quetzalcóatl,” the lines do not follow syntactical logic, they insist, word by word (or phrase by phrase), on standing alone, on being considered as themselves (of struggle—happy—working—transforming—dying constellations), and later in the poem cycles of thought-action and raw crying sangres, requiring us to let each do their own work, whatever that might be, and fit together as collage, not as syntax.

Exiles of Desire also has a number of short-line poems composed of few lines with more than seven or eight words, many with three, two, or one, as in “The Dreamboxer.”

With his hands the soft ends of imagination cutting across the other face

blood opens its bell

This poem opens and is punctuated with what reads like stage directions in paragraph form:

(He wakes up, rushes through clothes. He dresses. Leaving the apartment, leaving the gallery of silent morning rituals, he will penetrate the city; facing somewhere, some jovial coat, some nude statue, some quick mirage of shuffling ankles. He will follow the daily exercise of his existence.)

The structure is as the structure does—each poem forms its form. I suppose this could be seen as a trivial statement: what poem does not form its own form? But upon reviewing the poetry from his first books to the present, I see a continual, evolving exploration of the relation of the poetic line to relational meaning. His masterpiece (I’ll return to this poem later), “Saturday Night at the Buddhist Cinema,” achieves sublimity precisely through its deployment of the multiple relations of meaning to syntax, to collage, to apposition and juxtaposition, to narrative, to story, to discourse, to form. But if “Saturday Night” is the apotheosis, throughout his career he has kept these many different balls in the air. As a shorthand, for now, I’ll collapse all of them into the two categories: juxtaposition and narrative. In “Uno por Uno” from 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border, for instance, the use of juxtaposition and narrative is apparent.

uno por uno dos por dos eran treinta eran cinco eran eternos un esposo uno quería ser estudiante quería libros para estudiar quería lucir un traje azul de contador una quería una casita otra quizás aprender inglés uno por uno

Within a single short line very complicated things can happen, and even here we can see his attention to collage interrupting syntax. For instance, “eran eternos un esposo” just above—what is the syntax of they were eternal a husband—not eternally a husband, but eternal a husband—and why

are the subject and object not in agreement? He was eternally a husband is a simple idea. They were eternal a husband is not.

But just as often the poems employ long lines, comparable to the breathless breaths of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. The prose poems, of course, are built this way, like the sutras in Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler or Night Train to Tuxtla (1994) or the “Aztlán Chronicles.” Even the vertical poems can sound this way, while at other times the poems are formatted as classic long-line poems, like the poems in Howl or Leaves of Grass. And then, sometimes, they get super long, like this line from “Giraffe on Fire,” canto 25 (Giraffe on Fire):

He of the small mouth and large anus, he of the calling wire and the fast hand signs, as if he knew our songs, as if he knew our shuffle across the ashes and the crests where we take cane flutes for the winds and place bitter eucalyptus and rosemary for the Ceiba deity, as if he knew how to angle the hands and dip them into darkness, with weakness not strength, as if he knew the rose patterns of Chávez and the high thin voices of García’s broken lyre made at San Juan Chamula and washed with pox, the nectar of the peasant students, as if he knew all this and the dark rings around our balché bowls in the circle of the night sweats and prayers, in front of the New Year God Pots, as if he knew this, he raises his hands in the shadow of Moya de Contreras, in the shadow of Valenciaga…

Top that, Whitman! Take that, Ginsberg! This is the longest of long lines, the equivalent of saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s circular breathing, a line of endless, unbroken breath. It is impossible to not see some of the same processes of juxtaposition and collage at work, even as we read something else, something narratively more complex, syntactically more complex, and thus more complex in signification. Where the staccato poems ask us to slow down, to think through the relation of word to word and not just read for narrative, the incantatory effect of these long lines as well as this enchant-atory effect works like a mantra, a meditation, a guided meditation that encourages us to see what the Buddha suggested we might if we follow the Eightfold Path—it enables us to experience the collapse of the distinction between reality and illusion, between nirvana and samsara, between self and other, between signifier and signified, between poet and reader. It is the reason monks chant endless chants from France to Bhutan, from St. Petersburg to Bangkok—the song a mirror of the heart’s beating, lyric in

the center of the sentient being’s breathing, language with the rhythm of the conscious breath.

We drove once in those years from Iowa City to the East Coast. I had some weird family in Connecticut, and he had relations in New York state—not at all weird, but complicated at the time. We were going straight through, a thousand miles, and we sailed past the water park in Davenport and across Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, and an hour or two over Ohio’s eastern border, flying along that long, hilly, surprisingly straight highway through the Pennsylvania woods, we stopped to gas up and take care of business. Getting back on the night road, quiet now in the darkness, ourselves quiet too after having talked for a dozen hours, absorbed by the strobe of headlights against the unbroken trees; we were solemn as we approached our duties. An hour later we saw big signs saying Welcome to Ohio, the Buckeye State. We were deflated, but also a bit kooky at three a.m., realizing we had been going the wrong way through the summer night, hours of misdirection. We laughed, wept a little, laughed some more, and got another coffee as we turned around. “Ohio is so welcoming!” Juan Felipe said. “Ohio is always welcoming us! And now Pennsylvania! It welcomes us again too!” At seven or eight a.m. we pulled up to his family’s place.

The cross-country drive in America has a long history, and its representation in literature often involves discovery and wonder, but also often involves the return to our flight from family, and almost always offers a representation of the endless, restless diasporic churn of the American experience. Somehow, back before cell phones, I managed to pick him up on the way back. We were quiet again. The giddy fun of the ride out was gone. We had too much weight. In an interview recently, Juan Felipe talked about his family, about not knowing his half siblings from his father’s first family, and the interviewer, Andrew Winer, asked him if he felt anger about that. He said, “it was a hot coal.” “You felt anger”? Winer asked again. “A little anger, and a hot coal, a little volcanic anger, and that little tiny hot coal.” That night on Route 80, we drove home with our inner embers aglow, making sense of the twists and turns of family. “I come from a family of madmen and extravagant women,” he writes in “Crescent Moon on a Cat’s Collar” (from Facegames), a family narrative, both restrained and fabulist, and I have some version of that myself. We were both still young men in those years, and better at having fun than dealing with demons.

Or at least some demons. Akrílica was published that year, 1989, and it has complex poems about a cousin in San Quentin, about the suicide of Lupe Vélez, about the war in El Salvador. The personal poems in this collection, such as “She Wants the Ring Like He Wants the Suit of Scars/but,” which is also rendered as “Ella quiere el anillo como aquél quiere el traje de la

cicatriz/pero,” are hermetic, emotionally compelling but opaque, while the political poems are polemic and forceful and clear, as in “24th & Autumn”:

the bodies of bright red oxygen who denounce the plague America the gangrene the Intervention the sores the CIA the pus of bayonets in El Salvador the mothers with daughters of seven and twenty Lenten years point at the Junta…

The distinction between the personal and the political is simply an analytic distinction (if not plain stupid), one that occurred to me because I kept seeing, as I reread in sequence, a difference between the nightmares of national and international violence (and dreams of local and national and international unity) and the personal dreamscapes. There is less of the playfulness—both at the level of image and structure and signification—in the political poems than in the poems of love and family and finding one’s way, as might be expected. But beyond that, the darkness of what I am calling the political poems is, at times, as in “Your Throat Burns, Red,” from Giraffe on Fire, total, encompassing, brutal, unrelenting. “They burn her. // They execute with rapid fire. / You wake up from the dead army rot / and you cry, sucker.” This kind of language employs a different representational matrix than “She wants the ring like he wants the suit of scars/but….” That opening line asks us a number of questions—what is the suit of scars? Why does he want one? What is the relation of the ring to the suit? Why “but”? I suppose there are some questions we could ask about the passage describing “the plague America / the gangrene the Intervention the sores the CIA the pus of / bayonets in El Salvador….” but the questions are less the point than the violence is—it is an indictment.

Juan Felipe and I both moved from the Bay Area to Iowa City in the late summer of 1988, me to start my first tenure-track job at the University of Iowa and him to do an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. We had met only once in California, at La Peña in Berkeley, through José Cuéllar, a.k.a. Dr. Loco, ethnic studies scholar, anthropologist, musicologist, and bandleader, who had known him since the 1970s, and knew we were both about to move to the Midwest. It was a loud and crazy night—i was playing with José in Dr. Loco’s Original Corrido Boogie Band—so Juan Felipe and I didn’t make much of a connection, but within a couple of weeks we had met again in Iowa, and he had exercised one of his superpowers, which is to transform people immediately into old friends. We spent time at poetry readings, at music gigs, and hanging out in each other’s kitchens and with our young kids. I supplied music for his readings, and he named our twoperson “band” (Geoff Becker and me) The Real World. This was a year or

two before the MTV show. Like a wizard, he turned the two of us into a band, and he made me, with a phrase, own the real world, pulled me out of my head and placed me—presto! laughing!—in front of the real. This, too, is what poets do.

Night Train to Tuxtla was the inaugural volume of University of Arizona Press’s Camino del Sol series, that seminal line of books by Chicanx authors. The title poem is one of his prose poems, a single long paragraph, narrative in a surreal mode. An excerpt from the middle reads:

Macedonio laughs. He’s got his money wound in his socks. Glass socks he mumbles, bought them at the San Antonio bazaar. A man with a little green suitcase pulled them out, twisted them and lit one up with a match. Then, he stabbed it with a stiletto. Glass, he said. When do we get to Tuxtla?

I’m reminded of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a twenty-four-hour-long film composed of thousands of clips from classic movies, all with clocks or watches in them. As the film progresses, the clocks and watches click off the minutes in real time, minute by minute, and the quilt of movie moments somehow keep you on the edge of the seat. There is no narrative in a recognizable mode—that is, we don’t follow plot points or character arcs, or act breaks, but we are following something story-like; we feel the tension and suspense of filmic narrative, and of course a clip from High Noon arrives as the music swells. This is what it is like to be under the spell of Juan Felipe’s narrative poems and narrative moments in lyric and other poems. We are given narrative situations, narrative lines, but not ever a simple story. The events in the paragraph here—macedonio laughing, the man with the green suitcase, the glass socks, the mumble, the stabbing with a stiletto, the lighting on fire—lighting what, glass socks?—it all makes you wonder. What of it is happening, what is metaphor, what is mumbled, what thought, who is he talking to? None of it is simple, but it works, we get the tropes, we get the flavor, we get the noir attitudes, the tense cool, we get, finally, a complex image, and that is the payoff: not a tale with a beginning middle and end, no moral to the story, but an intricate objective correlative.

Take this moment from a later poem in Night Train to Tuxtla, where I and my guitarist friend Geoff Becker seem to appear in a two-headed cameo, “Iowa Blues Bar Spiritual”:

ladies night, smoky gauze balcony, whispering. Tommy Becker, makes up words to “La Bamba”—request by Hard Jackson,

mechanic on the left side of Paulie, oldies dancer, glowing with everything inside of her, shattered remembrances, healed

in lavender nail polish, the jagged fingernail tapping. So play it hard above this floor, this velvet desert. I want

the Titian ochre yeast of winter, keyboard man, fix your eyes on my eyes and tell me, handsome, how long will I live?

It’s a noir novel boiled down like a French sauce to its demi-glace essence. And like the California noir writers, the worlds get mixed—the oldies dancer with chipped nails who wants the titian ochre yeast of winter— mixed until we can taste what they have in common, taste the human being transcending castes and classes, taste the pure salt of dread and desire, the narrative elements juxtaposed until the body is reduced to spirit, until the body is released to spirit, until, as the epigraph to “Night Train” (by his constant muse Margarita Luna Robles) has it, we find the “black clouds blending with the white ones.” The “story” comes to its inevitable end for the blues bar dancers, “jangling gold popcorn, chord makers // opal-eyed Suzie in a flannel shirt; we beckon the spark, the flaring / this lost body to live.” Again, the story works, but the story is not just a story—it is primarily there to activate the poem’s more knotty and thorny work.

Francisco Lomelí, in his foreword to Herrera’s Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (2008), is undoubtedly right to insist on Juan Felipe’s force, his influence, as a cultural nationalist, or as Rigoberto González put it in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “He has remained clear-eyed and committed to his vision: chronicling the historical, cultural and political landscape of his Chicano consciousness.” True, and many of the essays about his work address this. Even titles can make such consciousness clear: “Aztlán Chronicles,” for instance, or “Norteamérica, I Am Your Scar.” But Lomelí and González know this is only part of the story. His many poems about Gaza and Afghanistan and Syria, his many poems about unity—all the political moments put together produce a portrait of a humanist, a sum, as Lomelí also notes, of many parts, an amalgamator of social realms and global arts, and not just the literary arts—philosophical, visual, theoretical, social scientific (he was, after all, an anthropology doctoral student), musical, cinematic, theatrical, and, and, and—that and, and, and is the key; like his multitudinous influences, his art is additive, supplementary, containing multitudes, as Whitman says.

The poem that will be remembered as his greatest work is “Saturday Night at the Buddhist Cinema” from Notes on the Assemblage. Like Walt

Whitman’s “Song of Myself” or Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” or Wordsworth’s “Ode to Immortality” or Pablo Neruda’s “Heights of Machu Picchu,” this poem will be the definitive Juan Felipe Herrera poem—unless the definitive poem is not yet written. There are of course any number of other contenders: “This Is My Last Report” from the new poems section of Half of the World in Light is pure genius—it would take an essay of its own to dissect—and so would the astounding “Come with Me” in Every Day We Get More Illegal (2020), one of the unity poems, which finds yet another way to bring Spanish and English together. Or the twenty-eight-canto “Giraffe on Fire,” a great encyclopedia of a poem.

But comparisons are odious. Let’s just say that in “Saturday Night at the Buddhist Cinema” I find all of Juan Felipe’s tool kit fully employed. That is, in it we find all his strengths in full swing.

The title itself is a funny, gravy-donut mash-up, Americana in the age of mechanical reproduction, dharma on the big screen. It opens with the circus garishness of “elephants / in cabaret dress reddish & cadmium blue / & dolphins” and then, whisk, pulls us out of the world of surreal imagery with the sudden appearance, within parentheses, of a somewhat timorous narrator, afraid he is interrupting, who then interrupts himself, addressing someone—us?—“remember the Castro theatre off of Market?” he asks, and then appears to be talking to someone who had been at the Castro with him, “maybe / 1992 during the Rodney King revolt.” When he and whoever he is talking to were there, maybe they saw Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, and this is something else we haven’t mentioned: Juan Felipe’s RPM, his References Per Minute, because those references (films, authors, places, myths, books, and more) create a collage, a cultural matrix that places us and the speakers of the poems in a dense web of signification and experience and aesthetic context. But we are only there, watching Visconti, for a moment, because we slide between worlds again, in the space of a word, or in the space between words, actually, and now “the dolphin was working this out somehow tweeting / blinking his tiny saucy eyes,” while the narrator, sits “in the third row as usual.” Close parentheses.

Then a stoic war horse is “pinned / with a hideous medal by the War Provosts,” waiting patiently for someone to take her home. This odd sense of longing—the longing of a fictitious horse to be taken home (where?) and freed from unwanted attention—this longing is as characteristic a feeling in Juan Felipe’s works as any, as is the vague dread provoked by the “War Provosts”—the who? This is precisely how these poems work: of course there were War Provosts, and of course there was a horse, and along with

the horse a cow, eventually a pig, and remember the elephant? The world is a constant surprise and yet everything new is somehow expected and if not appreciated—nobody can appreciate War Provosts—accepted, because this, too is the nature of the phenomenal world. “The cow was there // in a Mexican Pancho Villa outfit,” and this is funny, returning us to the circus atmosphere we started with, but it also adds a revolutionary gloss to the reference matrix. All of this happens fast in the poem, at the speed of reading, and the cow is not the end of the line, or the stanza: it was there, dressed as Pancho Villa, “spraying everyone with snowflakes,” and we swap out worlds again, wondering where we are—snowflakes?—and the narrator, now our friend, adds a kicker; here it is, starting with the cow:

the cow was there

in a Mexican Pancho Villa outfit spraying everyone with snowflakes & you you should have seen us.

“You should have seen us” is such an invitation to everyday intimacy, and a relaxed, unguarded way to treat not just the passing show, but us, his formally ordained auditors, as companions on this road—colloquial, palsy, complicit. You (we) should also have seen, the narrator tells us, the pig, the

pig in a wig of flames in pinkish pajamas & a cigar doing a Fatty Arbuckle schtick he even ordered 18 eggs over easy with 18 sides of sourdough cranberry sauce sardines & a side of pastrami

What can we say about this barrage of pleasure? “Cranberry sauce sardines” is a gravy donuts combo, except more so, and this kind of joyous catalogue is like Whitman on shrooms, as the riot of signifying continues. After the pig hangs off a ledge of the St. Francis Hotel yodeling to “a Gloria Swanson look-alike in a cashmere robe,” the narrator confides:

(it was hilarious it was what we all dreamed of yes that was it it was what we all dreamed of) the chicken in kimono pirouetted with piquant harpsichord arpeggios

Sonata in E Major by Domenico Scarlatti…

And we are just halfway through the poem. Among the things that fascinates me about this poem is the way, once I am done reading it, that I

reinterpret the title, or the title reinterprets the poem, because in what way is this Buddhist cinema, what is Buddhist about this cinema? I’m not saying I have an answer to this question, but the narrator gets one. “Where’s the exit?” he asks Ava Gardner in a “emeraldine scaly dress,” and she responds: “This is the exit.”

On one of our first nights in Iowa City we went out to a little basement bar that hosted a Monday night blues jam. I would spend most of my Monday nights at that jam for the next dozen years, as it migrated from bar to bar around town, and since there was no regular keyboardist it was easy to become the house player. But this night we were new, we knew no one, and the guy who ran it had some very strange, chip-on-the-shoulder energy. In fact, I’d come to know him well over that decade-plus and never come to like him. He was the kind of bandleader who gave other soloists two sets of changes and played over eight or ten sets himself. Every song.

But as I say, that night we knew nobody. The bar was a small shotgun room with booths along one side and standing room on the other, a raised platform at the far end that I assumed covered some plumbing—it wasn’t a real stage, one booth deep, the table of which held up some of the amps and speakers, the drum set barely squeezed in. We ordered the drink of choice at that time, a two-dollar pitcher of PBR, and listened to the local talent, which was quite good. The crowd became as rowdy as two-dollara-pitcher beer can make a crowd, and the applause for each solo and each song was raucous and good-natured. We entered the spirit of the thing completely, cheering and whooping it up, and it seemed to me at the time that Juan Felipe’s enthusiasm—and anyone who knows him has basked in the bighearted warmth of that enthusiasm—was part of what gave the night such a festive vibe. Somebody in the crowd was whooping loud, with a loud “HEY!” every few minutes. Each time he did, we would whoop in response. After we’d been doing this for a while, another musician leaned over and said, “Guys, guys, be cool, okay? He can’t help it.”

It turned out that it wasn’t somebody cheering the band along, it was a guy with Tourette’s, a great sax player I’d later play with regularly, and when we turned around to see, sure enough, yes, it was Saul with a tic, not a passionate fan cheering. Chastened, we realized we had been unintentionally obnoxious.

I don’t know why I wanted to tell that story. But the poems sometimes do that, too, turn on a dime from jubilation to dejection. Life.

We felt terrible, for the same reason we were jubilant—we were experiencing the communal exuberance of song, and then we found we were breaking the rule of community, however accidentally. Although in his years as Poet Laureate of California and Poet Laureate of the United States,

Juan Felipe’s dedication to building community was given a bully pulpit and a bright spotlight, it has always been at the center of his vision and practice, from the early days of Alurista’s floricantos on. And at the center of his Buddhist thought and his community activism is the concept of unity. His poem in 2020 in the New York Times, for instance, uses its first line as a title: “i want to speak of unity”:

—i want to speak of unity that indescribable thing we have been speaking of since ’67 when I first stepped into L.A. with a cardboard box luggage piece I was distracted by you your dances askew & somersaults the kind you see at shopping centers

& automobile super sale events—the horns & bayonets most of all

I wanted to pierce the density the elixirs of everything…

And in the beginning, see “(A m e r n d a One Heart),” from that first book, Rebozos of Love.

one heart rise rasa rise la primavera to flow and churn our destiny cultivando laborando one heart nation liberando one heart cosmos

Politics, Buddhism, unity. That is one summation of the work. But it leaves too much out. Humor, politics, Buddhism, noir, beat, unity, enchantment. The humor for me is key. “The Soap Factory,” in Notes on the Assemblage (2015), for instance, starts “Soap soap soap soap / All we do is make soap here….” I find this very funny, funny like the chicken pirouetting in a kimono in a theatre in the Castro. Is this just me? I don’t think so—the fourth repetition of soap is funny, the slight exasperation of the second line (all we do!) is funny. The meta-function of the line—as a description of poetic method—is funny.

And of course, my reading of the poetry is inflected by my time with the poet. Juan Felipe and I have spent a fair amount of our relationship laugh

ing with each other, and it may be that I inflect the poems with my sense of his conversation, but that is not all. When we first met I was working for Culture Clash, which billed itself at the time as “The Only Chicano Comedy Troupe in the Universe!” This was the big Culture Clash, not just Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Sigüenza, but also José Antonio Burciaga, Marga Gómez, and Monica Palacios, and that gig—i was their Paul Schaffer, running the band on the side of the stage—was a crash course in Chicanx humor. I was also playing with José at the time, as I mentioned, who like Juan Felipe could move from life-and-death commentary to ebullient humor in a flash, in his conversation and in his stage persona. As in the case of the Borscht Belt comics, their comedy was insider art for some of the audience and outsider art for others. But even more often the humor is based in the pure joy of juxtaposition—gravy donuts—and the absurdity of human desire. It is Zen humor. “Where’s the Tuna?” people shout at the Buddhist cinema. “We want the Tuna? / We want the Tuna! / What about the Tuna?” Where, indeed?

I once got an email from Juan Felipe, replying to one I sent setting up a faculty meeting at UC Riverside. It read:

As long as you bring the sardines and bread rolls. I’ll get the celery sodas.

A two-line poem. Making the first line into a sentence, rather than a clause, makes it much funnier. As long as you bring the sardines and bread rolls. Period. Funny. Bread rolls. Funny. Sardines—the funniest fish. Celery sodas. Funny. And these two short lines, all by their little selves, popped me out of the ridiculous mundane bureaucratic nonsense of everyday life and into the realm of reawakened sensual experience, into the realm of thought, into, in other words, the realm of poetry.

Gravy donuts.

Juan Felipe Herrera has taught me much over these thirty-some years, some of which is not just the matter, the stuff of this essay, but its structure. He explains what I mean by this in “A Percentage Will Survive,” in Half of the World in Light:

All this lacks definition (on purpose),

it is my nature to lack proportion, volume, figure, intelligible historicity, time and its spatial quadrants, remember—rubble, that is all I truly have—and you.

It’s an odd place to end, a poem about nuclear war, about the Nomenclature and ideology like a bit between the teeth. But of course, it is much more complicated than that. It is also about poetry remaking the world.

For that, he knows, we will need a lot of horses. And some cilantro.