by Unknown
Letter to My Father: My father, Frank Espada (1930–2014), was born in Utuado, Puerto Rico, a mountain town in the Cordillera Central. His grandfather, Buenaventura Roig, was the mayor, 1917–20, 1931–32 and 1939–40. After Hurricane María, Jon Lee Anderson wrote in The New Yorker (October 10, 2017) that Utuado “has become a byword for the island’s devastation.” The quotation in stanza five, “These people are going to have an epidemic. These people are going to die,” comes from nurse Alicia Schwartz, cited in “These Volunteer Nurses in Puerto Rico Fear FEMA is Failing” by Jennifer Bendery, in the Huffington Post, October 16, 2017. (In August 2018, following a George Washington University study, governor Ricardo Rosselló revised the official death toll due to the hurricane from 64 to 2,975.) In stanza five, “las brigadas” refers to work brigades clearing away the wreckage, opening the roads to Utuado and more. “The last uprising” refers to “El Grito de Utuado” or “the Battle Cry of Utuado,” a Nationalist rebellion for independence on October 30, 1950. The poem is based in part on personal conversations with my father and my cousin Gisela Conn. Stanzas four and five rely in part on several background sources, including “In One Puerto Rico Mountain Town, a Wall of Mud Came Crashing Down” by Molly Hennessey-Fiske, in the Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2017; “Stranded by Hurricane María, Puerto Ricans Get Creative to Survive” by Caitlin Dickerson, in the New York Times, October 16, 2017; “The ‘Forgotten Ones’: 37 Days After Hurricane María, Puerto Rico Neighborhood Still Stranded” by Kyra Gurney, in the Miami Herald, October 29, 2017; and an interview with Rosa Clemente by Amy Goodman, on Democracy Now!, October 18, 2017. I wrote the poem for a benefit, #PoetsforPuertoRico: A Reading for Hurricane Relief, at Poets House in New York on November 4, 2017.
Acknowledgments
These poems have appeared or will appear in the following publications, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made:
The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner): “I Now Pronounce You Dead”
The Brooklyn Rail: “Morir Soñando”
The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making (Persea): “Love Song of the Kraken”
Guernica: “The Bard Shakes the Snow From the Trees”; “I Would Steal a Car for You”; “The Cannon on the Hood of My Father’s Car”
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History: “Remake of Me the Sickle for Thy Grain”
The Massachusetts Review: “I Now Pronounce You Dead”
The Night’s Magician: Poems About the Moon (Negative Capability): “Asking Questions of the Moon”
Nimrod: “Be There When They Swarm Me”; “That We Will Sing”
North American Review: “Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge”; “Aubade With Concussion”; “Love is a Luminous Insect at the Window”
Morning Star (UK): “Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet”
80grados (Puerto Rico): “Morir Soñando”; “The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances”
Pangyrus: “The Stoplight at the Corner Where Somebody Had to Die”
Paterson Literary Review: “I Now Pronounce You Dead”; “Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge”; “Flan”; “Floaters”; “Aubade With Concussion”; “Insulting the Prince”
Poem-a-Day: “The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances”
Poems from Pandemia (Southword, Ireland): “The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances”
Poetry: “Letter to My Father”; “Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge”; “Flan”; “Aubade With Concussion”; “Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet”; “The Assassination of the Landlord’s Purple Vintage 1976 Monte Carlo”; “Standing on the Bridge at Dolceacqua”; “Floaters”
Portside: “Morir Soñando”
Prairie Schooner: “Mazen Sleeps With His Foot on the Floor”; “Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn”; “Boxer Wears America 1st Shorts in Bout With Mexican, Finishes Second”; “Love Song of the Galápagos Tortoise”
The Progressive: “Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed Wire Fence”
Rattle (Poets Respond): “Morir Soñando”
Smartish Pace: “Why I Wait for the Soggy Tarantula of Spinach”
El Sol Latino: “Morir Soñando”; “The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances”
What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Curbstone/Northwestern): “Letter to My Father”
Many thanks to those who supported this work, especially Julia Alvarez, Brandon Amico, Doug Anderson, Dennis Bernstein, Jill Bialosky, Richard Blanco, Cyrus Cassells, Denise Chávez, Gisela Conn, Fred Courtright, Suzanne Daly, Jim Daniels, Kwame Dawes, Chard deNiord, Dante Di Stefano, Lauren Marie Espada, Marilyn Espada, Martin Farawell, Bill Fisher, Danielle Legros Georges, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Donald Hall, Everett Hoagland, Lawrence Joseph, Frances Lucerna, Eileen Mariani, Paul Mariani, Richard Michelson, John Murillo, Mazen Naous, Maria Nazos, Marilyn Nelson, Alicia Ostriker, Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, Allen Ruff, César Salgado, Luke Salisbury, Óscar Sarmiento, Jeremy Schraffenberger, Gary Soto, Maritza Stanchich, Leah Umansky, Rich Villar and Eleanor Wilner.
Many thanks also to the Poetry Foundation for the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, to the Academy of American Poets for a 2018 fellowship, to John Brown Lives for the 2018 Spirit of John Brown Freedom Award, and to the Bread and Roses Heritage Committee for the 2020 Bread and Roses Hall of Fame Award.
Naomi Ayala, excerpt from “Poverty” from Wild Animals on the Moon & Other Poems (Curbstone Press, 1997) is reprinted with the permission of the author.
Excerpt from “Afterwards” translated by Cola Franzen from Poem of the Deep Song in Collected Poems by Federico García Lorca, edited and translated by Christopher Maurer, copyright © 1991 by Christopher Maurer, is reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Paul Mariani, excerpts from “A&P Nightshift: January 1959” from Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected, and Revised Poems (Cascade Books, 2012), The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (W. W. Norton, 1999), and “Hornet’s Nest” from Ordinary Time (Slant / Wipf and Stock, 2020) are reprinted with the permission of the author.
About Martín Espada
Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. He has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His books of poems from W. W. Norton include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993). He is also the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
ALSO BY MARTÍN ESPADA
POETRY
Vivas to Those Who Have Failed
The Meaning of the Shovel
The Trouble Ball
Soldados en el Jardín
La Tumba de Buenaventura Roig
Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas
The Republic of Poetry
Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2002
A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen
Imagine the Angels of Bread
City of Coughing and Dead Radiators
Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands
Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction
The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero
TRANSLATION
The Blood That Keeps Singing: Selected Poems of Clemente Soto Vélez
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(with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo)
EDITOR
What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump
His Hands Were Gentle: Selected Lyrics of Víctor Jara
El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry
Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press
ESSAYS
The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive: Essays and Commentaries
Zapata’s Disciple
Copyright © 2021 by Martín Espada
All rights reserved
First Edition
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Jacket design: Yang Kim
Jacket photograph: © Frank Espada, “Angel Luis Jiménez,
Evicted Mushroom Worker, Kennett Square, PA, 1981,”
Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project
Production manager: Julia Druskin
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Espada, Martín, date– author.
Title: Floaters : poems / Martín Espada.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020027736 | ISBN 9780393541038 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780393541045 (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3555.S53 F58 2021 | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027736
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