Preface

Ricardo Sánchez is well known in the realm of Chicano literature, and known in the larger sphere of North American literature as a Chicano poet. On the one hand, this is as it should be, for it is impossible and would be foolhardy to try to consider either Dr.Sánchez or his poetry apart from a Chicano identity.

On the other hand, the designation "Chicano poet" has probably overdetermined his audience. In labelling Ricardo Sánchez as a Chicano poet and his poetry as Chicano poetry we must be careful not to lose sight of the fact that Dr.Sánchez is a very accomplished American poet, writing in a specifically American idiom and out of a uniquely American experience.

In the case of Ricardo Sánchez that experience is hemispheric; his Americanness cannot be contained by either national borders or presumption's frontiers. Nevertheless, if we read his poetry as American poetry-meaning (narrowly, for a moment) a poetry arising in large degree as a voice within the chorus of poetry in these all too United States-we discover remarkable things. Not the least of these is that Dr.Sánchez has played a part on a literary stage larger than but including that of "Chicano" poetry.

In the liveliness of his language, its spontaneity, its singing rhythms, its playfulness, its long sonorities, one observes the outlines of a Beat Sánchez, bopping,finger-snapping, posing, jiving in urban scapes scattered over North America, laying down a verbal jazz weaving poems out of song and monologue and lapses of scat. In the way he appropriates personal detail as the envelope for his insights into the human condition he resembles the confessional writers, Lowell or (even more in his sense of line and meter)Sexton.

Unlike the confessional poets, however, Dr.Sánchez does not write individual poems as such, each with an autobiographical content and representing in at least a conventional sense a closed and complete work of art. Rather, he composes an ever enlarging autobiography of which any poem is a slice or section. It is in the sense of this connectedness that his poems end in ellipses (and could just as well begin with them). Each poem is resonant and substantial, but no single poem is the conclusive or defining image or speech. We should probably, in fact describe his poetic units not as poems, but as cantos--understanding that last word simultaneously in both its English and Spanish meanings-individually rich contributions to one great life work.

The nature of this autobiography also differs from the confessional writers in that it encompasses a greater subject than the life of the artist, offering a witness to therichness and strength of Chicano culture, of American cultures, and of the struggle within these cultures for social justice. In this he may be compared favorably with other autobiographers of social witness in our literary history, and it may be said that his poetry owes a piece of its authority to a tradition that we most often associate with African-American literature, whose luminaries are voices such as Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright and Malcolm X.

My cultural and artistic collaboration with Dr.Sánchez traces back to the early 1980s in Austin, Texas, and later, through the middle to late eighties, in both Austin where I continued to reside and in San Antonio where Dr.Sánchez established the bookstore/gallery/ performance space, Paperbacks...¡y mas!. Although we each had different primary collaborators throughout this period, the two of us worked deliberately in one another's circle to foster what we referred to as a Tejas/Texas fusion. Through poetry and other arts, conveyed by a flurry of independent publications and both taped and live performances, we sought to claim our most marked differences as traits held in common and to expose the ways in which the differing communities of a genuinely multicultural society share in and are enriched by each other's conventions, histories and presences.

The present volume grew out of a meeting Dr.Sánchez-my friend, Ricardo-and I had on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, in autumn of 1993. Dr.Sánchez was in Ames to give a speech, and I had driven over from Iowa City(my current home) for the occasion. As we sat talking during the afternoon before the event I proposed to Ricardo that I publish a limited edition chapbook of the single poem, "Orale, Don Cristobal, or Rapine ét Columbine," a poem of which I had had some hope of publishing since I had first read it in 1992.

Over the next couple of hours, the project grew to about a dozen poems, more or less, with other additions made in later weeks. During that afternoon the scope also grew from a limited edition to the present project. The collection was near its final form when the spirit of Zapata rode the new year out from Chiapas. Ricardo's response to those events produced "Canción Chiapaneka." With this final piece the collection was as it stands now.

I would like to offer sincere thanks to Chista Cantú for his beautiful illustrations. Further thanks to Linda Nelson without whose advice and support this venture would not have been possible. Finally, I want to thank Ricardo Sánchez, Ph.D. for writing poetry that demands attention and for allowing me the privilege of publishing some of it.

--Rob Lewis