A well-earned reward for a powerful poet

I had dinner with poet Martin Espada a few years ago before he gave a reading on our campus. A power outage knocked out our favorite local restaurants so we took him across the river to West Virginia, which caused some trepidation--he'd never been to West Virginia before, and he knew Appalachia only from the popular stereotypes. 

It was an odd dinner. He was a lovely man but low-energy, almost morose; I worried about how he would reach the audience at the reading. 

But then he stood up and started reading. What a remarkable transformation: he performed his verse, chanting and swaying and sometimes shouting. Poetry that was pretty impressive on the page swept through the room like a cleansing fire. And I thought: powerful poetry--from a powerful poet.

And so I was delighted to hear that Espada's latest collection, Floaters, has won this year's National Book Award for poetry. The title poem (read it here) responds to a photograph of a man and his small child who drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande. The poem reminds us that

... the dead have names, a feast day parade of names, names that
dress all in red, names that twirl skirts, names that blow whistles,
names that shake rattles, names that sing in praise of the saints...

Espada is an expert at making us look at the world around us and see beyond the surface. A few years ago he wrote an essay responding to Shelley's claim that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Espada writes,

Poets should have no trouble identifying with being 'unacknowledged.' They grouse about being ignored, about paltry attendance at readings and royalty statements that would cause most novelists to jump off a bridge. Yet poets also contribute to their marginalization by producing hermetic verse and living insular lives, confined to the academy or to circles of other poets, by mocking themselves as childish and unworldly, by refusing to embrace their role as unacknowledged legislators. The only antidote to irrelevancy is relevancy. The British poet Adrian Mitchell famously said: 'Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.'

Espada's poetry does not allow us to ignore people, even the nameless, faceless people whose tragedies are so easily overlooked. His poetry is an antidote to poetic irrelevancy, and for that he deserves all the applause he is now receiving.