SOMOS Writers Showcase to feature award-winning poet Martín Espada
IT COULD BE POSSIBLE TO READ Martín Espada’s narrative poem “Floaters” and not be moved emotionally. It could be possible that one would understand how border patrol units routinely use the poem’s title word as they scour the Rio Grande searching for dead bodies floating in the water. It could be that someone may read the poem and not feel the tightness in their gut — not have their eyes fill with tears. That person could be me — but it is not.
On Friday, April 12, the featured SOMOS Writers Showcase Poet, critically-acclaimed Martín Espada — who is also an essayist, translator, editor, attorney, and professor of English — will read his works and share his stories via Zoom as part of SOMOS’ annual Poetry Week. The following day, Espada will offer a virtual three-hour generative workshop entitled “My Last Name” and give participants, as he explained, “an opportunity to write on the spot and read their poems to the group, not to be critiqued but rather to receive thunderous applause.”
It is his description of his workshop that provides some insight into the poet who is recognized as an “emotional historian.” If a historian can make us think, then an emotional historian takes the craft to the next level. Espada can make us feel.
“I’m not a historian in a strict sense,” the poet said from his home in Massachusetts, “but what I do is different. It’s narrative poetry, it’s storytelling by looking for something different than what the historian usually seeks.” Espada takes abstract, concrete history and accentuates the faces, the places and the particulars of the event — he brings them to life. “I make them as vivid as possible — to show what it’s like to be human.” Through his emotionallymoving, inspiring and engaging poetry, Espada celebrates and laments the realities of the working class and illuminates the plight of immigrants, otherness, powerlessness and poverty.
Thoughtful and soft-spoken, Espada has the rare ability to give voice to those who are marginalized and to help others feel the pain of oppression and be moved by injustice. There is anger in some of his poetry yet there is no hint of it in the man. “I channel the anger constructively. If we don’t channel it creatively and constructively, it consumes us,” he explained.
A recent finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Espada has won numerous awards including the 2021 National Book Award for “Floaters,” the poem about two migrants — Oscar and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria — who drowned attempting to cross the Rio Grande at the Texas border. Espada has published more than 20 books. According to SOMOS Executive Director Jan Smith, “He combines the perfect symmetry of craftsmanship, publication, and teaching experience to be honored as Writers Showcase Poet.”
Though Espada cannot be in Taos in-person for the Writers Showcase, he has a special connection to the area. He was close friends with one notable and beloved local writer, the late John Nichols. When I asked Espada about his process for writing, Nichols’ name came up. Espada explained that he usually draws from his personal experiences rather than reading headlines but, “like any other teller of tales, there has to be a story and sometimes people come to me and say I should write a poem about a certain topic.”
It was Nichols who took Espada to the town of Alcalde in Rio Arriba County to see the bronze statue of conquistador, Juan de Oñate. “John thought I ought to write a poem about it. He was a great and generous spirit and he taught me how to be a writer. He was a workhorse of a writer,” reflected Espada. “The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate,” is the poem Espada wrote after visiting the site with Nichols and one he plans to include in his virtual reading for the Writers Showcase on Friday.
Nichols, who Espada described as “famously political,” had a deeplydriven interest in social justice — something Espada gleaned from his father who was a community organizer, civil rights activist and photojournalist. “John and I connected on the level of story, the narrative. When I saw Taos, I fell in love immediately. Taos was John Nichols. I really miss him, I miss his voice. I am disappointed I can’t be there in person and am moved to be a part of this Writers Showcase.”