Slamma Lamma Ding Dong: An Anthology by Nebraska's Slam Poets Book

I appreciate Francisco Aragón's effort at "expanding borders" with this anthology. Certainly, the theme of "borders" is important to Chicano and Latino poets, given this country's history of expansion and ongoing simultaneous admitting and disallowing of Chicano and Latino bodies across the USA/Mexico border.

Aragón does a good job of outlining his project, keeping the process transparent, revealing its limitations, going so far as to include the names of poets whom he'd hoped to include (but couldn't for various reasons of communication and delays), as well as more poets he'd learned about later on (too late to include in this project). As well, he places the work within particular historical contexts -- Chicano/Latino poetry movements as well as those in American poetry. He includes an epigraph from Gloria Anzaldua's monumental BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA; it is from this epigraph that the anthology's title comes.

His premise that the current state of Latino poetry owes much to the highly politicized Chicano Movement is valid and helpful in reading the work here. It's apparent in Sheryl Luna's precisely punctuated and structured "Her Back, My Bridge," a poem giving tribute to a woman elder (grandmother?), and whose title references Cheri Moraga's and Gloria Anzaldua's THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK, Writings by Radical Women of Color, or in how Albino Carillo's long poem of New Mexican workers' lives is reminiscent of Jimmy Santiago Baca and Rudolfo Anaya. So here, younger poets are building upon what's been established by ancestors, considering the previous generations, i.e. the importance of the foundations of Latino poetry.

Aragón discusses younger poets who engage in "experimentation," and here, I think of poets such as Paul Martinez Pompa, whose "While Late Capitalism," enacts upon the page the suffocation and crush of migrant workers' bodies in an abandoned trailer in the desert. Aragón also discusses the poets' relationships with Spanish and English as a recurring theme, and calls attention to Urayoán Noel as a fully bilingual (and bi-literate) poet, code switching, translating, (also writing about late capitalism) in the Puerto Rican traditional poetic form, the décima. I'm interested in the theme of late capitalism and what it means to have this theme explored in the anthology. So it's these blendings of traditional poetic form with "new" uses of language and multilingualism, or political themes explored in "experimental" forms, and tribute to poetic forebears.

With this in mind, Juan Felipe Herrera's foreword is apt. His description of this project as sensorium and vortex I appreciate. It speaks to the relative diversity of the poets' aesthetics and treatment of subject matter, as well as the inability to pin down one safe and limiting definition of contemporary Latino poetry. As well, Herrera discusses the "contraction" rather than expansion of borders. Here, he's talking about that lyric I and individuals' microhistories and herstories.

My one criticism is the absence of mention of the Nuyorican Poets in Aragón's introduction. I am sure the Nuyoricans strongly inform members of this emerging generation of Latino poets.