{"id":13388,"date":"2015-06-22T08:23:41","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T12:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=13388"},"modified":"2015-06-22T08:23:41","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T12:23:41","slug":"stephen-kessler-on-juan-felipe-herrera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/stephen-kessler-on-juan-felipe-herrera\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Kessler on Juan Felipe Herrera"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This article\u00a0was first published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel<\/a> two days ago.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s new \u2018bard without borders\u2019<\/h3>\n
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\"\"Juan Felipe Herrera, California\u2019s poet laureate, the son of migrant farmworkers, will be the next U.S. poet in chief. Riverside Press-Enterprise file<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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By Stephen Kessler<\/strong>, Special to the Sentinel<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Juan Felipe Herrera, child of Mexican-American migrant workers, schooled at UCLA and Stanford, native Californian and outgoing state poet laureate, frequent visitor to Santa Cruz (last year he was here for an appearance at Cabrillo College and was interviewed at the KUSP studios by \u201cPoetry Show\u201d host Dennis Morton and me), one of the most original and creatively energetic writers alive, has been named United States poet laureate by longtime Librarian of Congress James Billington. It is a brilliant parting shot from the retiring librarian, a shot in the arm for Latinos nationwide, and a shot of high-octane health juice for American poetry.<\/p>\n

Juan Felipe, a friend of mine since 1980 when we met at the home of Fernando Alegr\u00eda, then chair of Stanford\u2019s Spanish and Portuguese department and Juan Felipe\u2019s professor, has long been known as one of the top Chicano poets, but far more than that he is a truly international, multicultural, multilingual voice of tremendous inventiveness, artistic scope, theatrical panache and political wit. A dazzling performer and improviser, he can make up a poem on the spot and speak it aloud \u2014 I\u2019ve seen him do this \u2014 as if it were all in a day\u2019s work, which in fact it is.<\/p>\n

Herrera\u2019s great range of styles, tones, formal innovations, moods, attitudes, musical and rhythmic moves, his militancy and his comedy, his compound ironies and poignant insights give him a working canvas of big dimensions, and he fills it with amazing images and colors and emotions and associations. Though he has made his living teaching in universities \u2014 he\u2019s recently retired from an endowed chair at UC Riverside \u2014 he is anything but an academic poet. While he is clearly in the modernist tradition and experimental in his radical poetics \u2014 he has been called \u201ca rock \u2018n\u2019 roll surrealist\u201d \u2014 he is also a people\u2019s poet, a populist, an entertainer and a joker. He is indeed a bard without borders.<\/p>\n

Herrera is a gust of fresh air for American poetry because he is such a master of his written and spoken medium that he can break all the rules and get away with it, switch genres and languages in the middle of a sentence, do whatever he wants to and pull it off with the grace of Brandon Crawford and Joe Panik turning a double play. His writing is both balletic and athletic, light on its feet and heavy-hitting in its depth of themes and intensity of feeling \u2014 it is funny and tragic and in constant and unpredictable motion.<\/p>\n

Juan Felipe\u2019s authentic humility is rooted in his sense of community, and while he has a completely distinctive individual voice (influenced by Walt Whitman and Woody Allen and Allen Ginsberg and C\u00e9sar Vallejo and Al Pacino and Carlos Santana and Frank O\u2019Hara and countless other creative models from every form of art), he understands that he also speaks for and represents the aspirations of others \u2014 not just workers or immigrants or Latinos but anyone alive enough to listen \u2014 and wants to encourage them through poetry to envision what he calls in one of his poems \u201ca life without boundaries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Juan Felipe Herrera has lived such a life and it is testimony to the power of unleashed imagination that he will soon be poet laureate of the United States.<\/p>\n

Stephen Kessler is a Santa Cruz writer whose latest book, a translation, is \u201cForbidden Pleasures,\u201d by the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article\u00a0was first published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel two days ago. America\u2019s new \u2018bard without borders\u2019 Juan Felipe Herrera, California\u2019s poet laureate, the son of migrant farmworkers, will be the next U.S. poet...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[908,42],"tags":[1672,682],"class_list":["post-13388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-celebration","category-essays","tag-juan-felipe-herrera","tag-stephen-kessler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13389,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13388\/revisions\/13389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}