The Earth is a Satellite of the Moon , and:

High/Blood/Pressure (review)

Denise Boerckel

Minnesota Review, Number 29, Fall 1987 (New Series), pp. 145-147 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

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 Reviews 145

77ie Earfft is a Satellite of the Moon by Leonel Rugama. Trans, by Sara MUes, Richard
Schaff, Nancy Weisberg. WiUimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1985. pp. 139. $9.00 (paperback).
High/Blood/Pressure by Michelle T. Clinton. Los Angeles: West End Press, 1986. pp. 45.
$4.95 (paperback).

Nicaraguan poet Leonel Rugama was murdered on January 15, 1970, at the age of 20
by Somoza's National Guard. A cultural hero in Nicargua, Rugama's influence and popularity
are readUy appreciated throughout the country. His verse is a favorite among the country's
graffiti artists: in Managua or Mayasa, Rugama's poetry is spray-painted on walls by revolu-
tionary cadres. Of course, Rugama can be placed historicaUy within a long tradition of
Nicaraguan poet revolutionariesErnesto Cardenal is the best known to American audiences.
This collection, deftly translated by Sara Miles, Richard Schaff and Nancy Weisberg,
should do more than introduce Rugama's work to this country and link his poetry to Cardenal
and the exteriorismo school of poetry. Rugama's work is brilliantwithin the stylistics of
exteriorismo, he fashions a powerful revolutionary poetics. "Epitaph," the poem which begins
the collection (one of two epitaph poems in the volume), serves immediately to situate the
American reader:

Leonel Rugama
rejoiced in the promised land
in the hardest month of the planting
with no choice but the struggle
very near death
but nowhere near
the end. (p. 9)

The poet writes his own epitaph, his own self story, within an ideological framework which
will not allow his own death. This is a poetics of presencethe individual subject sustained
and reinscribed in terms of the collective struggle.
Rugama consistently affirmed the necessity of poUtical poetry: "if the artist gives up creating
what we would call the poUtical nebula radiating throughout human naturereducing it
with propaganda and proclamations from the barricade itself to a secondary, sporadic sun
who then would be touched by that great and wondrous spirit in aU of us?" (p. 139) Though
Rugama's poetry definitely exhibits the formal qualities of exteriorismo, (by Cardenal's defini-
tion, "narrative and anecdotal poetry made with the elements of real life and what is con-
crete, with personal names and precise details . . ."), it is precisely the lyric strain informing
Rugama's verse, his expression of "the political nebula" that distinguishes his work.'
For example, in the title poem of the coUection, "The Earth is a Satellite of the Moon,"
Rugama's simple line, his use of repetition and concrete imagery, opens up in the fourth
stanza to a skiUful denunciation of Western values:

Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1

Apollo 1 cost plenty.
Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2
Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
ApoUo 1 cost plenty.
Apollo 4 cost more than Apollo 3
Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2
Apollo 2 cost more than ApoUo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty.
146 the minnesota review

Apollo 8 cost a fortune, but no one minded

because the Astronauts were Protestant
they read the Bible from the moon
astounding and delighting every Christian
and on their return Pope Paul IV gave them his
blessing.
The poem continues by juxtaposing the specific reality of Rugama's Nicaragua against the
yanqui Imperium:
The great-grandparents of the people of
AcahauUnca were less
hungry than the grandparents.
The great-grandparents died of hunger.
The grandparents of the people of AcahauUnca
were less hungry than the parents.
The grandparents died of hunger.
The parents of the people of AcahauUnca were
less hungry than the children of the people
there.
The parents died of hunger, (p. 11)

Technically, these Unes are the core of any historical narrative, yet Rugama transforms this
statement of Uneage into clear poUtical poetics. Rugama often utiUzes historical Uneage as
a device in his poetry. "The Houses were still full of smoke," for example, begins with a
listing of Sandinista heroes. The poems in this collection always work within a particular
historical moment and open it up to Nicaragua's long history of oppression and struggle.
"Ramps and Ramps and Ramps" details the feel of the evening of September 21, 1956,
when Rigoberto Perez assassinated Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The poem closes with Perez'
remarks to a few unspecified girls: "I have to go do something."
High/Blood/Pressure is the first book of poetry by Los Angeles poet/performance ar-
tist Michelle T. Clinton. Like Rugama's work, Clinton's poetry works to elucidate the
historical moment. CUnton's verse contrasts the Black political conscience of the 60s with
the popular conscience of the 80s. In "I Wanna Be Black" Clinton characterizes the con-
temporary mind:
Now folks don't know who's Ron Karenga
Fonya Davis, and if you say black panther
they think you mean animal, (p. 2)

Unlike Rugama, whose poetics of presence saturate the moment in the political, the
historical, Clinton blasts the peculiar ahistorical aphasia which characterizes the American
mind and forces each generation to rediscover history. High/Blood/Pressure is an attempt
to understand and recreate in contemporary terms Black cultural consciousness.
As such, this is an intriguing first work. Stylistically, High/Blood/Pressure shows the
influence of Black women writers Uke Ntozake Shange and June Jordan, who were instrumen-
tal in establishing a Black cultural idiom which voiced their concerns as women. "Ami Apart
Hate Art," in my mind one of the strongest poems of the collection, speaks to the necessity
for an American Black Art untainted by assimilation:
gotta rise above
their stink like a saint
be a Tutu, be a King
 Reviews 147

ami apart hate

and spit out
an american black poem
ami apart
hate
art. (p.37)

Yet, it is the more personal poems in the collection, "Leaving Janet," "Country Ethics
and Donna," which most intrigue. Clinton's word sketches capture exactly the generation
of the 60s grown a little olderliving in the country, cherishing baked bread and old roach
cUps, hoarding food stamps. These two poems are built around food and broken relation-
shipsperhaps the cultural touchstones of modern Americaand within the context of the
collection, Clinton presents to us the self-consuming emptiness of such an existence:
Then one time me & her was soppin' in the country
rain, gettin'
very loaded, tryin' to decipher The Grand Sadness
That's Always
With Us & she said
"Ya know, ya gotta have faith & read the signs,
like the time you brung me that casserole,
I had wished for a sign I wasn't gonna go hungry,
& Tom had just run off on me, & you brung me that
casserole.
I knew it was a sign." (p. 39)
This is a culture where the "sign" has deteriorated: Black Panthers replaced by casseroles.
It is this disintegration CUnton's coUection works to overcome as she discovers the voices
who have preceded her in her struggle.
DENISE BOERCKEL

NOTES
'For a discussion of exteriorismo and Nicaragua's "workshop poets," see Kent Johnson's
article, "Poetic Democracy in Nicaragua," minnesota review N.S. 25 (Fall 1985): 36-40.

Places/Everyone by Jim Daniels. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

pp. 80 + x. $6.95 (paper); $12.50 (cloth).
Shop Talk by The Vancouver Industrial Writers' Union and edited by Zoe Landale. Van-
couver, B.C.: Pulp Press, 1985. pp. 128. $8.95 (paper).
The Face of Jack Munro by Tom Wayman. Madeira Park, British Columbia: Harbour
Publishing Co., 1986. pp. 128 $7.95 (paper).

The term "work poetry" means diferent things, not all of them good, to different peo-
ple. And although Tom Wayman has gone a long way to legitimize the existence of this
sub-genre (by editing three anthologies), many still view it as less a poetry of purpose than
a celebration of tasks. Perhaps symbolic excursions into the lives of certain tools are com-
pelling on a first or second encounter, but the conceit wears thin with repeated use (as do
overly deliberate descriptions of machine operations.) Fortunately, work poetry is generally
about relationships: between people and machines, people and their jobs, people and other
people (fellow worker, wife, child). As Andrew Wreggitt writes in his author's statement
(Shop Talk): "I write poems because I believe they bring us together, make us more human.
Work is just one more place we find each other."