Lately, I've been reading Salvadoran revolutionary poet Roque Dalton after encountering his essay "Poetry and Militancy in Latin America," in Art on the Line: Essays by Artists About the Point Where Their Art and Activism Intersect." After reading his poems in the bathroom, I walked into the living room and asked my roommate if she had heard of him. Of course, being a revolutionary scholar, she giddily said, "He's my favorite." When she grabbed his small book, Poemas Clandestinos from my hand, I had it turned to the poem, Como Tú, which I have copied below. While I don't pretend to be a literary critic of much worth, I do believe that the following line sums up a profoundly important and often lost truth about poetry:
"Creo que el mundo es bello,
que la poesía es como el pan,
de todos."
"I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone. " (Trans. Jack Hirschman)
As we fight media elites who create content without poetry and sell it like drugs to the masses, as we combat politicians and business leaders hellbent on privatizing education and stripping it of poetry, as we grapple with antiintellectuals who claim that poetry is for ivory towers and that the masses are asses, Dalton's words guide us forward towards liberation, a world where all people's need for bread and poetry has been filled and the ivory towers, the banks, and the government halls have been torn to the ground or turned into monuments of a grotesque and embarrassing past when thieves and murderers ruled the land and used poetry and bread as a weapon.
On another note, Roque Dalton did express some doctrinaire homophobia common in Big-C ideological Communists of that era. Now, I know it is wrong to pardon him for his propagandistic sins against my people, but one must take into consideration that he was extremely hot, militant, sweaty, and lyrical. Now, what could be gayer than that?
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