I just watched the news..............the Nationals are visiting the White House................and the news was remember the Capitals?? But they did not mention the Mystic........a WNBA team......................feminine basketball............................nice.............left out backwards innuendo.........sexism, we do not care thing............sarcasm of course...........men typically own the stations,.................TV networks....
Review: Be Recorder by Carmen Giménez Smith
Reviewed by Emily Pérez
Be Recorder
Poems by Carmen Giménez Smith
Graywolf Press, August 2019
$16.00, 96 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1555978488
In Be Recorder, her most important collection of poetry to date, Carmen Giménez Smith retains the signature notes readers seek in her poetry: the ironic prophecies of the TV-and-consumerism-obsessed masses, the neurosis of the mother who simultaneously trusts and doubts her powers of parenting, and the pathos of the immigrant’s daughter wishing to make sense of her family of origin as it has been translated into an often-senseless US culture. As in past collections, her topics are by turns humorous, heartbreaking, and affirming; her lines are linguistically playful and complex. But in Be Recorder Giménez Smith’s speaker asserts power as specifically rooted in her Latinx, descendant-of-immigrants identity. By giving readers “the context for the twenty-first century Latina lyric I,” she does nothing short of destabilizing our current MAGA-loving moment and mapping a new national order.
In the opening poem, “Origins,” the speaker warns the reader not to misjudge or mis-see her. She knows that others project things onto her, and she tells the reader that some may call her perception “paranoia, but I call it / the profoundest consciousness on the face of the earth.” Within four lines she throws the gauntlet. If we dismiss her as paranoid, then we should be dismissed from this book. If we see her profundity, we experience with her the memory of a racial microaggression, a time she was called, by an instructor in graduate school, another “brown name.” Though “that sting took years to overcome,” she knows she will not be fungible again. In a move that lets us know the author and speaker are aligned, the speaker declares that it is her name—Carmen Giménez Smith— “that’s at the front of this object, a name / I’ve made singular, that I spent my whole life making.” From page one, this speaker kicks down the fourth wall to tell us that while holding the collection authored by her, we daren’t NOT see her in all of her complexity, in layers that have taken a “whole life” to make.
This poem comes in a section called “Creation Myth,” which lays out in ten poems multiple identities the speaker inhabits—mother, consumer, immigrant’s granddaughter, member of the mob, a girl wishing for the freedom of masculinity, a woman spurring women’s “world domination” by calling all women to cease apologizing. Many of these pieces are wry: “Interview Follow-Up” casts the speaker as a job applicant whose “qualifications are that / I am an immigrant mother twice removed thus / motivated to ruthlessly carry my babies to the top.” However, the anchor to this section, “Self as Deep as a Coma,” is clear and sincere. This piece, an exploration of a life with manic depression, is yet another creation myth, for the speaker recognizes her own worth and practices self-care, despite familial, cultural, and internal resistance. In childhood, her depression is minimized by her family:
The various identities in section one help ground our sense of the speaker in the much wilder and more experimental second section, “Be Recorder.” In a forty page poem series the speaker grapples with how she is implicated in the underbelly of the United States and how she must incite revolution. Its opening movement declares her purpose: “it’s like shitting on the giant tapestry of the nation / since that really brings us all down emphasis theirs.” The implied eye roll in “emphasis theirs” tells us that she will shit on the giant tapestry, but she refuses to be brought down.
The speaker rightly codifies her use of “American,” managing to critique both the nation’s narcissism and herself in the definition: “by / American I mean North American and by / North American I mean US and by US / I mean I’m a US citizen.” Indeed, part of the pleasure of this section is that while Giménez Smith excoriates capitalism, chauvinism, white supremacy, and consumer culture, she identifies herself as inextricably bound into the system.
In a past-tense self-audit, the speaker describes how she became and absorbed “American,” and, how she made her way through. Though born in the US, she describes becoming “American” as a process of acculturation that led to valuing nationalism and whiteness.
She admits she would “once have left / brown behind / having already / left the tribe behind / and her tongue / and the garb that made me / theirs behind because it felt / like leaving hoi polloi behind / to finally put behind the chola / in my mother’s tongue.” This too is the message of America, that all who are not white can succeed by moving away from where they are “from” and aspiring towards whiteness, casting “hoi polloi” and “chola” aside. But this speaker will not escape herself so easily. Realizing she cannot cast aside her “dignity,” “anarchic spirit,” or her “poison pen,” she brings those with her in the fray:
As in “Origins,” she sets a test for the reader, here figured as a lover: “can I trust your simpatico or will my dark repel / … / …will you Spartacus / with me will you jump in and fight can it be your caravan too / record my face lover record my limbs record them for / us all I’m lucky I’m lucky I’m so lucky that I’m lucky.” Will we stand beside her and “Spartacus”? Will we take both her and her caravan—a reference to the thousands of Central American migrants seeking asylum at the southern border of the US? Will we record her accurately? The end of this segment and its emphasis on luck, is slippery, at once recalling the ironic “luck” of those who receive the “event” of America, but also, in its repetition inviting more possibilities. Again, we must decide to move forward, not just as readers, but as partners in the speaker’s plan
The sequence gains gravity and momentum, as it takes on the Trump era, blurs the map, nods to the seemingly contradictory demands of modern life (“should I mother or write / serve art or the state”), pays homage to Latinx poetry and Latinx labor through a section after Pedro Pietri, and imagines possible avenues for revolution. By the final movement, those who have signed on to the speaker’s project form a tribe around her. She urges: “let’s admit our own complicity release into / the wound” describing a wave of humanity from the “deserts and islands” ascending, incanting an “insurrection against the wound” and creating a new city from “the letters are shaped like us.” The speaker acknowledges that this vision might feel a bit kum-ba-yah, signaling this by suggestion we circle the wound “with linked hands / around it a common song in Esperanto for instance,” but the accretion of ideas in the previous forty pages makes this soaring vision feel plausible, hopeful, and gives it a solid foundation on which to land.
The book’s final section, “Birthright,” contemplates origins and legacy. Though this is an American story, the speaker refuses the trope of being “self made” and in this section she calls forth those who have enabled her to create poetry. In the first poem of this section, “In Remembrance of Their Labors,” she describes the family, thinkers, and artists that birthed, funded, and fueled her work. On her father’s side, there’s the “long lineage of fuck-up hustlers”; “On my mother’s side: civil servants.” She calls forward her pantheon of “feminist poetic discourse,” naming “Gloria, Cherríe, bell hooks, Audre Lorde” and many, many others. She calls forward racism. She calls forward the “Latina lyric I” and the “future flor de cancion.” She is the hero of this collection, but she keeps her focus on kin and community.
The “Birthright” section contains several stunners, including a sprawling and beautiful piece “American Mythos,” about whether or not the speaker should participate in Amazon.com consumerism to buy her son a video game. This of course, is just the surface; the piece travels through love, race, inheritance, and gamified violence. My favorite piece in this section, however, is the playful and profound “Terminal Hair,” in which the speaker contemplates female facial hair as an inheritance from her ancestors. “We speculate our moustaches / connect us to a remote ancestress whose moustache / was denser than ours.” Hair will also transmit power to future generations—“someday / my great-great-great-great granddaughters / will stand on a cliff and survey their vast terrains, / the wind bristling in the hair above their lip.” I love this image of female power in the form of facial hair; something society has deemed unsightly and in need of removal becomes a subversive flag waving in the wind over “vast terrain.”
Part immigrant’s daughter, part harried mother, part citizen-revolutionary, and all oracle, the speaker in Be Recorder establishes herself as the Sybil of our troubled nation. She is both real and mythic, horrified and hopeful. Through this profound investigation of “America” and what it is to be “born foreign in America” Carmen Giménez Smith not only reaffirms her place as one of our nation’s foremost poets, but demonstrates the role poetry can play in cultural criticism. Through the title of the collection and its continued exhortations, she calls upon readers to take the first step towards doing the same—to record, such that someday we too may proclaim.
Born in New York, poet Carmen Giménez Smith earned a BA in English from San Jose State University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Cruel Futures (City Lights, 2018); Milk and Filth (2013), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is the author of the memoir Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (University of Arizona Press, 2010), which received an American Book Award. She also coedited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath Press, 2014).
Giménez Smith is chair of the planning committee for CantoMundo and is the publisher of Noemi Press. A professor of English at Virginia Tech she is also a poetry editor of The Nation, with Stephanie Burt.
Emily Pérez is a granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of House of Sugar, House of Stone and the chapbooks Made and Unmade and Backyard Migration Route. A CantoMundo fellow, her poems have appeared in journals including SWWIM, Copper Nickel, Poetry, Diode, and Fairy Tale Review. She teaches English and Gender Studies in Denver, where she lives with her husband and sons.
Be Recorder
Poems by Carmen Giménez Smith
Graywolf Press, August 2019
$16.00, 96 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1555978488
In Be Recorder, her most important collection of poetry to date, Carmen Giménez Smith retains the signature notes readers seek in her poetry: the ironic prophecies of the TV-and-consumerism-obsessed masses, the neurosis of the mother who simultaneously trusts and doubts her powers of parenting, and the pathos of the immigrant’s daughter wishing to make sense of her family of origin as it has been translated into an often-senseless US culture. As in past collections, her topics are by turns humorous, heartbreaking, and affirming; her lines are linguistically playful and complex. But in Be Recorder Giménez Smith’s speaker asserts power as specifically rooted in her Latinx, descendant-of-immigrants identity. By giving readers “the context for the twenty-first century Latina lyric I,” she does nothing short of destabilizing our current MAGA-loving moment and mapping a new national order.
In the opening poem, “Origins,” the speaker warns the reader not to misjudge or mis-see her. She knows that others project things onto her, and she tells the reader that some may call her perception “paranoia, but I call it / the profoundest consciousness on the face of the earth.” Within four lines she throws the gauntlet. If we dismiss her as paranoid, then we should be dismissed from this book. If we see her profundity, we experience with her the memory of a racial microaggression, a time she was called, by an instructor in graduate school, another “brown name.” Though “that sting took years to overcome,” she knows she will not be fungible again. In a move that lets us know the author and speaker are aligned, the speaker declares that it is her name—Carmen Giménez Smith— “that’s at the front of this object, a name / I’ve made singular, that I spent my whole life making.” From page one, this speaker kicks down the fourth wall to tell us that while holding the collection authored by her, we daren’t NOT see her in all of her complexity, in layers that have taken a “whole life” to make.
This poem comes in a section called “Creation Myth,” which lays out in ten poems multiple identities the speaker inhabits—mother, consumer, immigrant’s granddaughter, member of the mob, a girl wishing for the freedom of masculinity, a woman spurring women’s “world domination” by calling all women to cease apologizing. Many of these pieces are wry: “Interview Follow-Up” casts the speaker as a job applicant whose “qualifications are that / I am an immigrant mother twice removed thus / motivated to ruthlessly carry my babies to the top.” However, the anchor to this section, “Self as Deep as a Coma,” is clear and sincere. This piece, an exploration of a life with manic depression, is yet another creation myth, for the speaker recognizes her own worth and practices self-care, despite familial, cultural, and internal resistance. In childhood, her depression is minimized by her family:
We’ve seen
the world, my family would tell me. In the world
suffering is hunger, war, disease, they said,
and because those calamities were terrible,
I was ashamed for the insignificance of mine.
Many cultures within the United States see mental illness as
something one should be able to lift herself from “with mind,” but the
speaker looks through a specific, second-generation immigrant’s lens.
Against her family’s lived experiences of “hunger, war, disease,”
depression within a context of relative privilege seems insignificant.
The child speaker attempts suicide at age 11, emerging “woozy” and
ashamed. She seeks solace later in writing and words:the world, my family would tell me. In the world
suffering is hunger, war, disease, they said,
and because those calamities were terrible,
I was ashamed for the insignificance of mine.
When I was a girl, I collected reams of paper, soothed
by the white over and over, the hope of starting
from blank. I hoped to conjure being well
enough, enduring, because I wanted to live.
The third section of this poem performs the pleasures of mania, as it too, propelled her writing:by the white over and over, the hope of starting
from blank. I hoped to conjure being well
enough, enduring, because I wanted to live.
I developed an eye that helped me
plow through the world like a comet.
I could burn down or out or err,
and I could be such a good poet in it sometimes,
…
plow through the world like a comet.
I could burn down or out or err,
and I could be such a good poet in it sometimes,
…
… I liked the brilliant
light words emitted, stars I arranged
in a sky like a god who would fall to earth
having made something beautiful and vainglorious.
Ultimately, however, the speaker admits that though she wishes there
were a way “of holding still half / to arrange the stars without the
burn” she depends now on her “newest organ,” Lamictal, a drug that
treats manic depression, because it “blunts the peaks and raises me from
/ the seabed.” There is no irony or play here; in this story of
self-creation, Giménez Smith makes her meaning plain. Illness, no matter
its alleged connection with art-making, must be treated, and this
speaker is more interested in self-care and forward momentum than a
meteoric blaze and burn out.light words emitted, stars I arranged
in a sky like a god who would fall to earth
having made something beautiful and vainglorious.
The various identities in section one help ground our sense of the speaker in the much wilder and more experimental second section, “Be Recorder.” In a forty page poem series the speaker grapples with how she is implicated in the underbelly of the United States and how she must incite revolution. Its opening movement declares her purpose: “it’s like shitting on the giant tapestry of the nation / since that really brings us all down emphasis theirs.” The implied eye roll in “emphasis theirs” tells us that she will shit on the giant tapestry, but she refuses to be brought down.
The speaker rightly codifies her use of “American,” managing to critique both the nation’s narcissism and herself in the definition: “by / American I mean North American and by / North American I mean US and by US / I mean I’m a US citizen.” Indeed, part of the pleasure of this section is that while Giménez Smith excoriates capitalism, chauvinism, white supremacy, and consumer culture, she identifies herself as inextricably bound into the system.
In a past-tense self-audit, the speaker describes how she became and absorbed “American,” and, how she made her way through. Though born in the US, she describes becoming “American” as a process of acculturation that led to valuing nationalism and whiteness.
I wasn’t born American
I know it’s hard to understand
but it’s also not hard I became American
when I memorized the national anthem
or when I had sex with a white boy
or when I thought my first
racist thought or when I decided
I wanted to always live in a place like US
which is how America becomes
an event that happens only for the lucky
so the question where are you from means I was born
foreign in America
She acquires American racism and chauvinism, while also remaining
keenly aware of her difference, that she is “foreign in America.” Thus
the message of “America,” much like the consumer culture it promotes, is
that the speaker is always lacking, always in need of something that
will make her part of the “event that happens only for the lucky.”I know it’s hard to understand
but it’s also not hard I became American
when I memorized the national anthem
or when I had sex with a white boy
or when I thought my first
racist thought or when I decided
I wanted to always live in a place like US
which is how America becomes
an event that happens only for the lucky
so the question where are you from means I was born
foreign in America
She admits she would “once have left / brown behind / having already / left the tribe behind / and her tongue / and the garb that made me / theirs behind because it felt / like leaving hoi polloi behind / to finally put behind the chola / in my mother’s tongue.” This too is the message of America, that all who are not white can succeed by moving away from where they are “from” and aspiring towards whiteness, casting “hoi polloi” and “chola” aside. But this speaker will not escape herself so easily. Realizing she cannot cast aside her “dignity,” “anarchic spirit,” or her “poison pen,” she brings those with her in the fray:
anger was my primary breathing
apparatus for so long
what a mixed blessing when it worked
I’d learned the most from the cracked
once I broke into pieces
now I break into wholes
She must move forward not as pieces of herself—those parts that are
most easily assimilated—but instead as her whole self, with its brown
skin and chola tongue.apparatus for so long
what a mixed blessing when it worked
I’d learned the most from the cracked
once I broke into pieces
now I break into wholes
As in “Origins,” she sets a test for the reader, here figured as a lover: “can I trust your simpatico or will my dark repel / … / …will you Spartacus / with me will you jump in and fight can it be your caravan too / record my face lover record my limbs record them for / us all I’m lucky I’m lucky I’m so lucky that I’m lucky.” Will we stand beside her and “Spartacus”? Will we take both her and her caravan—a reference to the thousands of Central American migrants seeking asylum at the southern border of the US? Will we record her accurately? The end of this segment and its emphasis on luck, is slippery, at once recalling the ironic “luck” of those who receive the “event” of America, but also, in its repetition inviting more possibilities. Again, we must decide to move forward, not just as readers, but as partners in the speaker’s plan
The sequence gains gravity and momentum, as it takes on the Trump era, blurs the map, nods to the seemingly contradictory demands of modern life (“should I mother or write / serve art or the state”), pays homage to Latinx poetry and Latinx labor through a section after Pedro Pietri, and imagines possible avenues for revolution. By the final movement, those who have signed on to the speaker’s project form a tribe around her. She urges: “let’s admit our own complicity release into / the wound” describing a wave of humanity from the “deserts and islands” ascending, incanting an “insurrection against the wound” and creating a new city from “the letters are shaped like us.” The speaker acknowledges that this vision might feel a bit kum-ba-yah, signaling this by suggestion we circle the wound “with linked hands / around it a common song in Esperanto for instance,” but the accretion of ideas in the previous forty pages makes this soaring vision feel plausible, hopeful, and gives it a solid foundation on which to land.
The book’s final section, “Birthright,” contemplates origins and legacy. Though this is an American story, the speaker refuses the trope of being “self made” and in this section she calls forth those who have enabled her to create poetry. In the first poem of this section, “In Remembrance of Their Labors,” she describes the family, thinkers, and artists that birthed, funded, and fueled her work. On her father’s side, there’s the “long lineage of fuck-up hustlers”; “On my mother’s side: civil servants.” She calls forward her pantheon of “feminist poetic discourse,” naming “Gloria, Cherríe, bell hooks, Audre Lorde” and many, many others. She calls forward racism. She calls forward the “Latina lyric I” and the “future flor de cancion.” She is the hero of this collection, but she keeps her focus on kin and community.
The “Birthright” section contains several stunners, including a sprawling and beautiful piece “American Mythos,” about whether or not the speaker should participate in Amazon.com consumerism to buy her son a video game. This of course, is just the surface; the piece travels through love, race, inheritance, and gamified violence. My favorite piece in this section, however, is the playful and profound “Terminal Hair,” in which the speaker contemplates female facial hair as an inheritance from her ancestors. “We speculate our moustaches / connect us to a remote ancestress whose moustache / was denser than ours.” Hair will also transmit power to future generations—“someday / my great-great-great-great granddaughters / will stand on a cliff and survey their vast terrains, / the wind bristling in the hair above their lip.” I love this image of female power in the form of facial hair; something society has deemed unsightly and in need of removal becomes a subversive flag waving in the wind over “vast terrain.”
Part immigrant’s daughter, part harried mother, part citizen-revolutionary, and all oracle, the speaker in Be Recorder establishes herself as the Sybil of our troubled nation. She is both real and mythic, horrified and hopeful. Through this profound investigation of “America” and what it is to be “born foreign in America” Carmen Giménez Smith not only reaffirms her place as one of our nation’s foremost poets, but demonstrates the role poetry can play in cultural criticism. Through the title of the collection and its continued exhortations, she calls upon readers to take the first step towards doing the same—to record, such that someday we too may proclaim.
Born in New York, poet Carmen Giménez Smith earned a BA in English from San Jose State University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Cruel Futures (City Lights, 2018); Milk and Filth (2013), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is the author of the memoir Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (University of Arizona Press, 2010), which received an American Book Award. She also coedited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath Press, 2014).
Giménez Smith is chair of the planning committee for CantoMundo and is the publisher of Noemi Press. A professor of English at Virginia Tech she is also a poetry editor of The Nation, with Stephanie Burt.
Emily Pérez is a granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of House of Sugar, House of Stone and the chapbooks Made and Unmade and Backyard Migration Route. A CantoMundo fellow, her poems have appeared in journals including SWWIM, Copper Nickel, Poetry, Diode, and Fairy Tale Review. She teaches English and Gender Studies in Denver, where she lives with her husband and sons.
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