Calle Florista
by Connie Voisine
University of Chicago Press, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-226029532-9
Toward the middle of
“The Self after Modernism,” the last poem in Calle Florista, Voisine writes:
“I feel responsible for it, the poem I will write.” And Calle
Florista is a book of responsible poems, thirty-three of them about life in
borders places, class, migration/immigration, and intellectually flavored
existential questions. Most are lyrical, free verse poems with irregular lines, stanza
size, and few rhymes. Throughout the
poems, the “I” and the “not-I,” the “I as other,” the “other as I” dance in and
out of the foreground, often not quite located in an easily defined point of
reference. The reader must be willing to shift focus, consciousness and
footing, often within the same poem. In “The Self after Modernism,” Voisine goes on to muse: “Maybe there’s
some hope for this poem/if I open the door to the random, the fragmented,/the
flimsy scraps that more genuinely//compose the day, the mind, the night, the
dream.(60-62)”
The first, and title,
poem, translated “Florist Street,” is a bittersweet description of an
apparently misnamed street that had few "cultured" flowers and only a recent “
’Florista’ started last year.” Or was
the street named for some ancient place of beauty, long lost by the time the
speaker arrived? In any case, the street
described was “more/ a bunch of rocks lined up in a particular way,” and
cluttered with cats, their kittens, pecan trees, and “weeds of the nightshade
family,/unwatered except on irrigations days/ when the whole neighborhood stood
up to its knees in water.” The narrrative’s main character is Tio who was “kind
of kingly/sitting in his minivan,” his status shored up by his “one fat
Shar-Pei,” while Tio waited for the pecans to drop. Meanwhile, a boy hit the speaker’s “car with
a stick,” while his sister “stood in the plastic swimming pool.” Tio’s “worrying about the occasional
helicopter/battering by/ and the dog and the cats, who were not cat’s at all
maybe” suggests a more sinister flavor to the destruction and the listless
waiting. The images conjure up scenes from Breaking
Bad.
Meanwhile, the speaker spent her days “…in that little house, writing about/our street, which changed
every day//subtly and in complicated ways”—culling something she sees in the street’s untended,
disorderly, yet fecund existence, a deeper meaning often unseen by the mainstream
American eye. Finally, the last four
lines surprise and catapult the reader into the heart of a poem: an absent
other the speaker longed for—a child, a lover, an undeveloped part of self, or a
reader who “didn’t exist” for the speaker at the time of the narrative events. The reader is left wondering: was this other totally nonexistent anywhere in this
world, or simply absent from the speaker’s life at the time of the poem’s
events?
But for you it was most different—
you were the one who didn’t exist,
except as someone
who did not live on Calle Florista. (4)
These last four lines catch
the reader, easily absorbed in a poem
that is apparently “only” describing a dawdling border town, They bring one back to the first
three lines of the poem.
Don’t you remember
our little house on Calle Florista,
the calle with lots of flowers? (3)
Just who is being
addressed? On first reading, these lines seem to be a rhetorical invitation to
a generic “you,” not pointing to a particular person listening to the simple
reminiscence that follows. And the poem
would be only a dark, somewhat cryptic, yet superficial reminiscence, but for
the connection between the first three and the last four lines, which lift it
to another level of reflection for both speaker and reader. The
lines suggest a desire to open a window of understanding—however broad or
specific the audience—into the life experience of not only the speaker, but
also the other characters in what was once the speaker’s neighborhood.
Several poems indict
the colonizers’ mentality. One of these,
“New World,” weaves elements of the French as New World colonizers, and their
English rivals. Britain eventually displaced France making the French, in turn, colonial
subjects of the British North American Empire.
The poem reflects on the wonder, hope, and optimism, as well as hubris, greed,
and exploitation of Europeans. In the New World, all things,
represented by pronghorn antelopes, and high-plains grasses, “bound to the edge
of the compound, the edge of town, the edge of, the edge of—.“ The coup d'état is gold:
“Let’s have nothing/but gold—it’s so pleasing.”
The irony of this line can better be understood if we consider something Voisine said in her 2010 online interview about “Sorry I
Don’t Like You,” a poem not in this collection. Voisine spoke about “the book I am working on
now, where the autobiographical aspect is nearly gone—where the ideas, images,
metaphors take the stage and the speaker’s identity is what I call the “Citizen
I.” Her closing comment: "That is what the speaker sees in
herself—naive choices based on a silly American optimism. The French in me should know better.” (http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2010/07/connie-voisine.html)
In the mid 18th century, when English might prevailed on the American continent, the French in America, bartered away
by France, felt the sting of being a conquered people. They suffered greatly in
English Canada and across the border in WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)
dominated United States. I believe this
French heritage sensitizes Voisine’s “Citizen I” voice to the life experience of
the dispossessed, as evidenced in “New World” and other poems in this
collection.
The first stanza’s
wonder over the bounty of the American continent, falls into the speakers tearful response to a waltz. Sentimental loneliness for the old country or
foreboding about the cruelties of colonization?
The next two stanzas suggest the reason for the tears is both/and rather
than either/or.
I knew
a lot, once.
Wasn’t
Naturalism about to happen?
And
really, the French and the English,
why
should they quit—a battle here, one there,
and
their navies refulgent?....
Once I
knew
that
pastries could have a thousand leaves.
The
bishop wore a fabulous hat,
and
forks and knives
were
polished monthly to meditate
in
their velvet boxes.
Here
the sky represents nothing
but
blue, and we go along
inventing
new ways of dying:
by the
cutting off of hands,
of
hair, death by one dirty blanket, and
death
by walking.
Death
by six pine nuts, by bloody
sunset,
by obscure mirage.
A number of other poems concern the challenge of simply going on day after day. Below is a selection of lines from these poems.
They demonstrate Voisine’s lyrical voice, her metaphorical and poetic
sensibilities.
“As Well As You
Can”: What
about the lumpen sadness of all shoes?
And
all day that gravel of socket and bone,
that heel like an
adze? (5)
“Say Uncle”: rain. How would you find vigil
and beautiful mouth, those two
last seen by the side
of the highway? (13-14)
“Midnight in the House: I had a lot of
ideas,
but
they became unlinear or not especially
productive
or forward-
looking—too
many frying pans,
smoky
celings, sticky red aprons,
the
sink that bosses, Throw the bones out!
and
a painting of Jesus that ignores. (28)
“This World and That
One: Sometimes you defy it,
I am not that, watching a stranger
cry
like a dog when she thinks she is alone
at the kitchen window…(30)
“Summertime”: nothing. Did we think
this could be life?
This
thick arctic of heat?
This tundra
of struggle? Even dogs
know it’s best
to pretend they are
dead.
By afternoon we don’t
believe in anything:… (22)
“After the First Road” AFTER THE FIRST ROAD
the next is a
habit. It makes hope the way
morning unsullies
those still
drowned in their
beds, the way a wren
of a word then
another gives itself to a sentence. (31)
“Two Years in That
City” ...Freud in his dark suit,
or
was it Kafka, kept whispering
melancholia wasn’t the sadness
of a lost lover, or a city, or a life, but
when you realized you
mourned
the
glittering, ravenous void of desire itself. (34)
Still other poems,
always timely at the US/Mexican border, concern the dangers, loss, worry,
bitterness, and loneliness of immigrating across borders where climate, people
and authorities can be harsh. “The Internal State of Texas,” “We are Crossing
Soon,” “What Is True Is You’re Not Here,” “In the Shade” are a few.
“You Will Come to Me
Across the Desert,” while located in the American Southwest, evokes the
human suffering of all the displaced people in our world. The first person voice sounds
like the scolding of a loving mother fearful for the welfare of her child
(adolescent/adult?) who has wandered away from the familiar/familial in search
of another life.
I went
looking for you,
here
of all places.
I said
when I get a hold of you,
you
better watch out.
You’ll
never eat sugar
as
long as I live and breathe.”
Variations of common
motherly humor, hope, bargaining, concerns, defenses, pleas and threats continue
for 20 lines until the speaker collapses into her anguish:
I said if I died now, I would die full of regret.
I wish this knowledge did not make me weep.
I said I have found everybody
else—where are you?
Don’t step there! The cacti are dangerous.
Trust me, you could die….
Four more lines, and we
read the ultimate maternal bargaining promise: “I said you will not be in
trouble if/you come home now.” The poem’s next and last line oozes magical thinking rooted in maternal despair: “I said olly olly in free (24-25).”
Jungian thought informs
us that we each have within us a multitude of potential selves: some
dormant and largely invisible, particularly to ourselves; some more obvious, especially to others.
We each have our own inner victim, inner colonizer, inner migrant/refugee, inner
terrorist, inner philosopher, inner philanthropist, etc. Circumstances in the
outer world evoke, cultivate or suppress aspects of the outer and inner self. These
circumstances can all but overwhelm our ability to actualize our assets,
understand or overcome our limitations. Often we project aspects of ourselves onto
others, preferring to see in them things we are uncomfortable acknowledging in
ourselves. Such projections easily drag us into harsh judgement about, or idealization of, others. Or they can enable us to feel
varying degrees of empathy for those with different life circumstances,
hopefully without assuming that we can know what only the other can tell us
about his or her life. True understanding and respect for the life experience of those different
from us is hard earned. In her own way,
Voisine addresses this in the interview accompanying this review:
Since leaving home, having changed not
only my location, but my culture and class, I am constantly aware of the places
where I don’t belong by any kind of birthright— in spite of all the points of
connection. How to write about a colonized space, one that doesn’t belong to you in any historical
way—that became my poetic question once I moved to New Mexico.
Calle Florista is, in my opinion, an excellent response to the
poetic quest Voisine set for herself.
To conclude, let me expand
on the line from "The Self After Modernism" that opened this this review.
I feel
responsible for it, the poem I will write,
which I can imagine with ultrasound clarity,
something fierce and kicking in the darkness.
Watch the poem swing its little arms, open its mouth
to a vast, fetal silence (60-62).
On many levels, the
poems in Calle Florista have much to
teach us as human beings and as poets who explore the “fetal silence” of our
imaginations, our lives and communities.
Caroline LeBlanc’s essays and prize winning poetry have been published in the US and abroad. In 2011 she received an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University. Oiseau Press published her chapbook, Smokey Ink and a Touch of Honeysuckle in 2010. From 2013-2015 she served as the American Military Family Museum’s Writer in Residence. She hosts a regular writing salon for women veterans. Her art has won prizes in numerous group shows. She is a founding member of the Albuquerque Apronistas Collective of women artists.
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