JILL PELÁEZ
BAUMGAERTNER: FINDING CUBA
Baumgaertner's
poetry, unlike
so much of what is prized these days, is important.
It is so because it's
bald and
artful. It gives us truths which are undeniable.
It gives us the longing,
the
restlessness we all experience, yes, but the poems
are limned in
resurrection humor
as well. And because they attempt,
time and time again, to
reach
for what she knows they can't finally, fully
attain and so give, they
become
emblems for the hope we all carry too.
George
Herbert's
poem, "The Pulley," is an oft-anthologized little number wherein God
discusses
(with whom we do not know) how He plans to gift humans with "the
world's
riches, which dispersed lie / Contract into a span." And so He
does.
But since He is God, He knows, too, that with the coming fall, His
gifts
won't be enough. So Herbert, an Anglican clergyman, has him
complete
the poem with the following stanza:
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.
In large part the above
quote might
serve as a kind of thematic statement for Jill Peláez
Baumgaertner's Finding
Cuba. Everything in our lives bears the mark of our longing
for
spiritual wholeness, but we do not find completion in this world,
neither
in dreams, nor in memory, photographs, stories of any ethnic exodus,
relationships,
sex, poetry, or nature. It's simply not to be got. But in
the
working out of the divine economy as registered in Herbert's poem, we
do
find that each failed attempt is turned to the good as we are led
back to the One who IS wholeness. And though that necessary
restlessness
can be resolved finally when, like Dante, we experience the beatific
vision
in heaven, Baumgaertner's poetry serves the important function of
showing
us how we live as we wait and struggle toward that end.
I suppose
it's
always been true that to get the news from American poetry, one has to
go to the smaller presses. Think of heroic Bill Williams banging
those keys in his attic after four heart attacks, one side of his body
too
paralyzed to be of much help. Think of Blake and Whitman,
Dickinson,
Joyce. The larger corporate presses have always sacrificed vision
for fine polish and a herd mentality ÷ and we shouldn't expect
much more
from them because they have to make a buck. But small presses can
afford to be more Quixotic because nobody there really expects to
vacation
on their earnings. And so these smaller presses can push the
envelope.
In the best cases, such pushing results in news. And we DO get
that
here. It's "Good News," yes, but because Baumgaertner is such a
seasoned
poet, she moves us beyond what many might expect from religious
verse.
There are no easy answers here, no either/or's because the poet has
gone
where most of the Christian poems are, to Paul's "fear and trembling,"
that is, to the place where we all haltingly work out our
salvations.
We are able to see life, not as we would like it to be, but as we
truly,
on most days, live it.
Baumgaertner's
poetry, unlike so much of what is prized these days, is
important.
It is so because it's bald and artful. It gives us truths which
are
undeniable. It gives us the longing, the restlessness we all
experience,
yes, but the poems are limned in resurrection humor as well. And
because they attempt, time and time again, to reach for what she knows
they can't finally, fully attain and so give, they become emblems for
the
hope we all carry too. Something in us keeps us going forward,
through
time, trying to become who we know we are meant to be. We can
never
complete ourselves, but the life that is in us keeps us pressing after
final answers.
Baumgaertner
uses the first third of her book to examine her own personal need to
find
the missing part of her past: Cuba. An immigrant herself, she
feels
displaced, incomplete, and so seeks to remedy the situation. But
if that were all she were up to, the poetry would not be especially new
in the "news" department. Minorities of an increasingly doubtful
stripe have been doing this pretty often lately (some without the help
of Bill Moyers), and the results are usually self-absorbed, hackneyed
verse.
But Baumgaertner takes the search motif much farther here, and uses the
nationality issue to make a larger statement about the human
condition.
And though we get beautiful glimpses of Cuba, that largely lost
culture,
none of them are enough to give her what she needs: wholeness.
And
this is all of us, whatever our search or current distraction. We
all seek it in some way, but it simply is not forthcoming on the
physical
plane.
This
might put
some readers off, especially if they are Christian, but it
shouldn't.
Yes, God is absolute and does not change, but we are not Him.
Even
the great mystics, after all, spent most of their time in the mundane,
in doing laundry or weaving baskets. They filled up their time by
doing what they did in God's sight; and if we, like them, do it well
enough,
perhaps we too can contribute to the furthering of the kingdom.
What's
so nice about poetry is that it refuses either of the easy outs: it
will
not go for the "keep the high" Christianity of t.v. evangelists, nor
does
it reduce itself to wandering through the trackless waste with a God
who
never ever reveals Himself. Baumgaertner seeks Him in the moment;
she sees what matters there, and hopes on, walking her walk. This
is real Christian poetry. It never "faiths it," eyes closed to
the
present as it holds to past revelations. No. She walks in
the
present, meditates on what's there.
The first
poem
in the section is titled "Uprooted," and in it the first thing one
notices
is the layering on of prepositional phrases. This is important,
as
we shall see with Adam and Eve when they come up, because women here
usually
comprehend the world by means of relationships: thus the
prepositional.
They are acute and see quickly while the male is more dazed, dazzled by
beauty, visuals. He is more ruled by perception. But as we
shall see as well in the later sections, the male and the female are
interchangeable
because they are both human. Each can see something of things
from
the other's perspective. But here, right at the start, the
groundwork
is laid:
The artists painting Cuba from memory
or from photographs, from family stories
of the exodus, from dreams, know
their bloodlines are not clear. The work
is mongrel, neither Cuban nor American.
Artists, as we shall see
as we go
through the book, are intent on delivering relationships, beauty.
Their work is hope in the form of artifact, because we need the
reminders.
But the work too is a measure of the incompleteness in each one of
us.
No artist can be purely Cuban, or purely anything else. Christ,
as
Augustine says, and only Christ, fills the hole we feel. But no
one
I know walks around feeling the splendor of His presence each
moment.
More often, we are like the artists, the poems, the dreamers, the
memories,
the photographs. We feel His absence at least as much as we feel
His presence. And because of our response to our situation, our
faith
grows. But, I hasten to add, that joyful sense of presence cannot
be kept altogether out, either. It's part of the package.
Consider
the source of the amazement the speaker shares as she delivers the
following
strikingly earthy Cuban imagery:
Parrots settle in the sour orange, fifty
at a time. They are netted and eaten
like pigeons, cooked with onion, garlic, bay
leaves, lemons. She remembers her father
discarding the diminutive bones of squab
on newspapers spread flat in the middle
of the kitchen table.
* * * *
. . . the greatest curiosity÷
children of ten or twelve dressed in stovepipe hats
and swallow-tail coats, in long dresses
with low necks, saunter arm in arm
through the broad paths. Most children
of the island, one parent tells her delicately,
know relations of the sexes.
["Cuba, 1905: What She Found and Why She Stayed"]
In this section the poet
is trying
to fill in some family blanks, and the attempts are evocative,
beautiful.
But she knows it cannot be done. All the characters, however, do
not or cannot share her insights. They can't seem to incorporate
that fact in a seamless view of the human condition. And so they
suffer, more than, perhaps, they need to. There's her grandma who
becomes a Ziegfeld girl, who left her family, children, to get away
from
the machismo confines of the island; there's her father, the silent
military
man who never speaks in the poems; and there are all of the people of
the
Cuban diaspora, who have to try and find a life that works in a strange
country. And finally there is the poet, too, who ends the last
poem
of the section, "Peláez Relinked," with the following:
It is this familar set of syllables:
as sheer as lawn,
I raise it, fragile page,
like a white flag.
Everyone in the section
has sought
and lost, and so what could be next? Well for Baumgaertner, a
Christian,
the move is not hard to guess. One must reach for a wider context
to make sense of things; in this book, that's Christianity. And
so
we get the second section of the book, entitled "Leaving Eden."
The
title gives the poet away here, but nothing is lost. A
religious/spiritual
grounding can help us make sense of our pain, but it will not relieve
the
whole of it. It will not provide a consistent distracting
spiritual
buzz. We are fallen creatures. We cannot go back, or
forward
if you want to talk the beatific vision. And it's from these
realizations
that the poems proceed.
What our
poet
does here is to see our lives through the lens of the Real, capital
R.
This makes sense of our loss. But as in the first poem of this
section,
"Genesis," she does more than just that. This poem beautifully
displays
the great joy and intimacy available within the parameters of who we,
fallen,
are. In the poem Adam is created and then names what he
sees.
The language is worth the price of admission here:
And Adam rises from the mud,
whole, moving his feet slowly
through the clay, as it sucks and
pulls him back, not yet ready to
give him up. His legs move
like shears cutting leather . . ..
"Sucks" and "shears" are
great choices.
And through them Baumgaertner allows us to participate in the joy she
finds
in creating, naming. This quality is emphasized when she has Adam
name things. He names many creatures, including "lynx, otter,
/ mistle thrush, marmoset." Wonderful choices, and she just
keeps
going: "Fairy / shrimp, lark, tamarin, sturgeon," and later "skunk,
/ pigeon, ibex, wallaby." There is a great, almost infantile
joy in saying and in feeling one's mouth muscles bend as we repeat
these
wonderfully odd words. Freudians would call this an oral
fixation,
no doubt, but I would choose to see it in a more positive light.
It's a gift, a kind of holy laughter. And there is much
"resurrection"
humor of a different kind in the poem as well ÷ a gift she might
have borrowed
from one of her mentors, Flannery O'Connor. It's the humor
readers
share as the characters interact. A good example of this is when
Eve responds to Adam by coming up with verbs which could be nouns as
well;
she takes things one level higher. Her words include "punt /
hedge,
fleece, speckle," and then later, "dice, pepper, twine."
It's a lovely one-upsmanship in that they're feeling each other
out.
Adam responds by getting latinate: "rationale, antecedent,
cogitation."
It's a humor that spells resurrection because it embodies such a large yes
to life. And the humor is picked up in another way too.
Adam,
earlier in the poem, was so slow in coming to ask questions about
origins,
but not Eve:
Eve knows she has been there always,
kindling his mind, teasing the hairs
on his arm.
Whatever the metaphorical
implication of her knowledge, it is wrong in the literal sense.
She
was just created. Here Baumgaertner seems to have a little fun at
her own sex's expense. Eve is precise, present, but on a very
literal
level, she is wrong. I found that delightful. And this
joyful
expression comes to a climax (almost) in the final image. After
showing
us how man sees through a lens of beauty and woman through one of
relationships,
our poet ends the poem:
His fingers
seek hers. She raises his palm and with
her finger spells her love inside it.
He moves close for her interpretation.
This
is rewarding
stuff. The intimacy, the inversion with the phallic image.
It's all very tender and affirming. Of course, the fall happens,
and the results are still with us today. And Baumgaertner does a
nice job getting that across by juxtaposing the Adam and Eve characters
with present day situations. They both try to relocate that joy
and
wholeness and sense of discovery, but they either cannot find it at all
or they cannot maintain it. And so they suffer. "Aubade"
ends
with the woman speaker absently recording, "She will become as tangible
/ as peaches crushed in ice." It's a deeply impersonal,
disturbing
image. She sees herself, after the man has gone, as less than
human.
We become things for each other, and despite the interruption by
"Spiritus
Sanctus," the problems continue. The husband in one poem, in
fact,
ends up looking by the wife when he sees her, because he doesn't want
to.
This is not lost on the woman. We are not enough for each other,
whatever the good times. She, the Eve of the poems, longs for
life,
like a cicada, seventeen years underground. But when does it come?
Psychiatrists,
especially psychiatrists, can't help when it comes to what's bothering
her, portable altars set up in airports can't seem to help
either.
But she does finally find a kind of resolution. In the last poem
of the section entitled "Ave and Benedicta," the airport liturgical
image
is redeemed and the call she's felt previously to become a receptive
Holy
Mary-like person is reintroduced in a stronger fashion. The poem
ends with the persona looking at a triptych:
She is rapt with love, she says yes to all creation,
knowing the image does not come
without the word.
She bears the word.
If Christian poets do not
bear the
word, how can they claim the Word has power in their lives? This
is the thematic center of the book. The poet reaffirms the place
of art and witness, and she reaffirms that central witness of Him whose
sandals we are not fit to unloose.
This
done, now
Baumgaertner can get "Under the Skin"; that is, she can look at her
life
perhaps more clearly now. She's done what she could with
identity,
both in a cultural/geographical and a religious sense. Things
have
remained difficult, but that is no surprise to her, nor to us.
This
IS a human condition after all. She is generous with men for the
most part in this section. They are as wounded as the
women.
And she keeps her resurrection humor alive while driving her messages
home.
In some poems she can't tell if she's the person listening, if she's in
her body or out of it. And this is good because it helps her to
maintain
her full humanity in the poems. As The Firesign Theatre once put
it: "We're all bozos on this bus." Male or female, it doesn't
matter.
The final
section,
"Under the Skin," begins with "What I Knew, Age 3." It's a fine
poem,
reminds me of a line I sometimes use with my students: "Poetry's the
only
occupation where you can't know much, but get to make a big deal out of
it." And so it is here. The girl is precocious, but she
gets
it all wrong: "I could / remember the darkness / that was before I was
. . .." It goes on: "I also knew . . . that if I stared hard
enough
without blinking / while mother cooked dinner my father / would appear
at the corner and walk / up the steps." The humor here is that
she's
partly right in that we order a good deal of our worlds through memory,
perception, poetry, but she's wrong when it comes to her cause and
effect
conclusions. (O'Connor would be delighted.) The poet in
this
section remembers: the second grade, her sister's delegging of a
spider;
but none of the past is of much help and none of it reflects the
significance
of the time being considered ÷ only God is objective enough for
that.
Nothing on earth brings a sustained wholeness, completion,
satisfaction.
Nothing this side of the beatific vision will.
But the
poet's
growth as a woman is also marvelously examined in this last section as
well, and in some detail. There is much pathos as we see the
young
girl learn something of what it means to be female from an older woman
named Florence. It's just one of the many nice touches in this
book,
beautiful poems which examine both her lot as a woman in general and
her
individual responses to gender issues. These are valuable poems,
in part because Jill Peláez Baumgaertner does not lose her
Christian
perspective while speaking with a feminist voice. She's very fair
in that she makes distinctions between difficulties which are
existential
and ones which are the result of male injustice. She doesn't give
us propaganda here, just good poetry.
The
problems
with males are real, palpable, and should not be avoided. (That
certainly
wouldn't help pre-born women in China or dowry-less women in
India.
Nor would it help the women each of us work and live with.) The
guilty
parties here are male artists (though I suppose all unjust men could
qualify
as artists since all people construct something of what they call
reality).
Degas, King David, and Pygmalion all abuse women in the three powerful
poems which close the book. These are first-rate poems, and
Baumgaertner
should be applauded for having the courage to end the book with
them.
I say this because too often Christians can act like there are no real
problems once they have found their way into the fold, no endemic ones,
no institutionalized one. But the poet here ends as fiercely as
she
has begun, refusing to fall into stereotypes, either those perpetrated
by non-Christians or those spread by Christians ÷ who sometimes
confuse
public relations and truth. (Jesus doesn't need the
former.)
Yes, Jill Peláez Baumgaertner has given us the news here.
Dig in. Turn the page. You'll enjoy the experience.
Baumgaertner, Jill
Peláez. Finding
Cuba. Valparaiso, Indiana: Chimney Hill Press, 2001.
ISBN:
0-962-73003-3 $12.95
© by David Craig
