Winter 2006
The Poetry of Place
Ray Gonzalez
Professor, Dept. of English, Creative Writing
Education
M.F.A., Southwest Texas State U; B.A., U of Texas, El Paso
Recent honors & awards
Minnesota Book Award finalist in anthologies for No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets, 2004
Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature, Border Regional Library Association, 2003
Minnesota Book Award in poetry, and citation from National Book Critics Circle for The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande, 2003
Best Book of Nonfiction, The Underground Heart, Texas Institute of Letters, 2003
McKnight Research Award, 2002–05
Selected Publications
Poetry
Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2005).
The Religion of Hands: Prose Poems and Short Fictions (U of Arizona Press, 2004).
The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (BOA Editions, 2002).
Turtle Pictures (U of Arizona Press, 2000).
Essays
The Underground Heart: Essays From Hidden Landscapes (U of Arizona Press, 2002).
Fiction
Circling the Tortilla Dragon: Short Fiction (Creative Arts Books, 2002).
The Ghost of John Wayne (U of Arizona Press, 2001).
In this special essay for CLA Today, Ray Gonzalez, award-winning poet and professor in the Creative Writing Program, reflects on his experiences as a Chicano poet in Minnesota.
While living in Minnesota, I have continued to write about my desert homeland of the Southwestern United States, and I have learned how poetry transcends the boundaries of culture, home, and personal history.
I do not have to live in west Texas or southern New Mexico to shape new poems about my past life there, because the magical aspects of poetry have allowed me to bring the spirit of my home to Minnesota. Living in Minnesota has given me fresh perspectives about the area I came from. From my Upper Midwest home, new poems about the U.S.-Mexican border can emerge.
Perhaps my most powerful discovery in writing and teaching poetry in Minnesota is that all poets carry their homeland experience with them, no matter where they go. And, as I tell my students, a poet needs distance from his immediate and obsessive subjects in order to write stronger poems.
Often, poets' creative impulses come from the need to write and deal with their origins—where they came from, how their family molded their character, and how they see themselves in the larger picture of a diverse America
I had to leave the Southwest in order to explore how I felt about these things. Through poems written far from home, I began to chart a changing Mexican American sensibility, finding new dimensions that recognized cultural traditions while moving toward a place in the majority.
In other words, I had to leave El Paso to be able to embrace the larger world through poetry, to trust a poetic process that gives me a panoramic view of life.
Universality of poetry
When I came to Minneapolis in 1998, I found that several topics common to many area poets were also mine—including the work of two of the great poets of the past 50 years, James Wright and Robert Bly. These include explorations in the natural world, political concerns about the state of the nation, and a need to search our familial origins to be able to understand who we are today.
A Minnesota poet's poem about the Boundary Waters or the Mississippi River can explore nature's power in the same way I do as I hike through the Gila Wilderness in southern New Mexico or write about the Rio Grande River. My poems about the clash of cultures between the people of Mexico and the U.S make political statements very like those of Minnesotans responding to past wars like Vietnam or the current tragedy in Iraq.
Poems about families in the small towns of Minnesota reflect the universal struggles of native people in San Idelfonso Pueblo in southern New Mexico, just as my poems reflect the struggles of my mother's family in the railroad towns of Arizona in the 1920s.
Poetry allows language to be of use to all creative souls. As poets unravel their pasts, they carry everywhere a sense of home and place, never forgetting where they came from.
My poems will always recognize the native origins of my Mexican ancestors. They will deal with the search for identity in a country that, historically, has erected barriers to cultural and racial development. My poetic accomplishments will trace family tragedy and triumph in light of the lessons I have learned.
My poems will also dwell in the present moment, speaking for the concerns of vast populations that search for humane justice in a troubled time.
Most of all, my poems written in Minnesota will show that poetry gives a poet the right to redefine "home" as a place where the imagination dwells—an artistic impulse that rises from unique origins in the Chihuahua desert of southern New Mexico, or in the monumental rock formations at Pipestone, Minnesota.
Photos by Richard G. Anderson