the iceworker sings and other poems
Andrés Montoya
Bilingual Press, Tempe, Arizona
In the days after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Octavio
Paz said he hoped to be remembered for five or six poems. His statement
suggested that he identified himself, above all, as a poet. It also
implies that writing a good poem is one of the most difficult tasks
there is. The late Andrés Montoya left us about forty pages
of compelling, heartfelt lyrics. His collection, the ice worker
sings, is made up of four sections. In section one, the three-paged
"denial" begins:
i am limping again
across the huge cracks
in the concrete city
i call home. it's wet,
rain falling for days,
car fumes turning purple
in the night.
light bouncing
off puddles created
by a boy's
despair
as he kicks it
with his friends
in front of the shop-and-go
by radio park, on the corner
of Clinton and first streets,
where they killed louie,
where lion puts his mark
in beautiful graffiti growling
in reds and yellows
as you drive by the bus
stop and telephone poles
and fences or whatever else
he can tag his hope on.
Given that the scene is Fresno, one might be tempted to name Philip
Levine or Gary Soto as models. The poet Luis Rodriguez, author of
the memoir Always Running, seems a more plausible influence.
A little later in "denial," we have:
i keep running into things I know:
a car busted on the side of the road
like the bruised back of a boy
…
i keep running into myself:
hungry and disgusted
at the scars on my back,
These passages are characteristic of what there is to admire in Montoya's
work, and also give us a glimpse of one of his recurring images. As
in any good poem, Montoya is attentive to sound-the repetition of
the consonant /k/ in the first four lines of "denial" suggests
the hard surfaces of the city. The first several lines are also loosely
glued together by the assonance of "home," "for,"
"boy's," "shop-and-go," "radio"…all
the way down to "yellow," "pole," and "hope."
In the context of this particular poem, the utterance "O"
connotes or suggests an utterance often associated with one expression
of despair, which seems to grip the characters in the poem-thus, here
we have a successful marriage of subject and form (form in this case
being sound). Notice, as well, what he does with his graffiti artist,
giving him the nickname "lion" and saying that his "graffiti
growls" "reds and yellows." This technique of
talking about one thing in terms of another is handled by Montoya
in a way reminiscent of the "creacionism" of the
Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. The Spanish "creationist,"
Gerardo Diego, wrote, in an early 20th century manifesto, about the
rapport between two different elements that, when combined,
produce something new and autonomous. Here is Montoya, the "creationist,"
at work:
a huge army
of petrified water standing at attention
("the ice worker sings")
*
the skin of the garage
was peeling…
("1981")
*
the sun was yawning
into the beautiful bruise
of the horizon
("some days")
We have blocks of ice as soldiers, the garage as peeling—as if
suffering from sunburn, and the sun as a sleepy sphere highlighting
the attractively blemished horizon. "Creationist" poetry
has also been called "cubist" and Kenneth Rexroth, when
introducing Pierre Reverdy, wrote: "It is the conscious, deliberate
dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity
made self-sufficient by its rigorous architeture." There are
passages in Montoya, then, that cause a similar effect as when reading
Vicente Huidobro and Gerardo Diego. Take the beginning of "the
ice worker speaks of endings":
the moon has turned into an accusing
street lamp
and I keep hearing the loud breath of
helipcopters
and the incessant cough of guns going
off everywhere—
That is vintage Montoya. The poem goes on to introduce elements of
God and religion, which is another recurring motif in the collection.
In this particular poem, Montoya is successful. The results throughout
the collection, however, are mixed. In the second half of the book,
he tends to rely more on statement and abstractions in ways-with their
lack of image, simile, and metaphor-that aren't rhythmically interesting
enough to sustain interest. Unlike, for example, this, in the first
half of the book:
Christ came walking up blackstone avenue
and I dragged him into an alley
and spit in his face. he didn't say
anything
and it pissed me off.
I shoved a beanie of thorns onto the
thin skin
of his head and laughed…
…
the whole city came to look
so
we set him on the alley's
trash-can
throne.
all
of us applauded, even you…
("the ice worker considers mercy
and grace")
Indeed, there is an undercurrent of violence throughout the ice
worker sings, and this brings us back to something we saw early
on: "the bruised back of a boy", and "scars on my back."
This image of a wounded and blemished back is emblematic. What's interesting
to note is that it appears in both the first person and the third
person—as if the speaker, on the one hand, were resisting identification
with this image, and on the other, suggesting that speaker and author
are one:
hope exposing
the savage hieroglyphics
spattering his belly
and back…
("the ice worker finds hope in
cold storage")
*
don't
you see
the scars on my back? my
life made them.
("brittle green teeth")
*
we swam shirtless in ditch water,
mud squishing through our toes,
and never once did he say a thing
about the purple-black welts on my back
("lágrimas)
It's this tension, this abiguity, that keep the poems from falling
into first-person confessional poetry—or, rather, ineffective
first-person confessional poetry.
Although the latter half of the book is less engaging , it does
contain one of the collection's strongest pieces, "fresno night."
Here, again, Andrés Montoya:
….
off
in the distance, perhaps on tulare ave,
a cop's corrupt hand is finding its
way around
the
neck of a boy suspected of being illegal
and
in the park, radio park, lovers laugh
at the imagined future of their unnamed
children,
at
the stories they'll tell as grandparents
still
savoring the breath of each other's skin.
….
The shifts and movement from stanza to stanza are skillful. Montoya
is successful at incorporating his religious language because his
rhythms are alert. His poem ends:
….
here
in this city i sit, the trumphet's trembling song
fading away like an adulterous man,
and I am left with car horns
and
gunshots and shouts and smells of grapes
just about to rot on the vine, surrounded by wasps
whispering lies and mothers weeping
for children brainwashed
with
insanity, and I am determined to know nothing
but Christ and him crucified.
And finally, there is a poem in the latter half of the collection
comprised of short, numbered, titled pieces, called: "contemplations
from concrete: nine movements." Here is one:
#6 education
I am learning
the
braille
of
your breath
the
word
your voice
leaping
up
from the page
into
my mouth
What comes to mind are the "sides" in Victor Hernández
Cruz's Tropicalization. In some ways, the ice worker sings
is reminiscent of that collection—Victor Cruz evoking life on
the Lower East Side. Here, it's Andrés Montoya's Fresno, perhaps
with less humor, but with equal passion.
