Adela Najarro is a G.

Adela Najarro's poems "Throughout New York City" and "San Francisco" struck me in the realest way. Her description of place is grounded in blatant observations, and the "caught" moments -- the ones everyone sees and feels, but no one feels comfortable discussing. Like that old, wraught, indescribable place: the soul.

Having lived in Brooklyn for two years and some change, "Throughout New York City" struck me immediately. She manages to encapsulate all of New York -- the rich, and the impoverished -- in one poem, which ironically is rarely done in a discussion of the city (and its boroughs). Its structure towers and reaches, with two-lined stanzas, broken apart by only one space. It feels cluttered, but she provides in that one space a moment for the reader to breathe. She captures the claustrophobia of the city by swinging us from image to image, weaving in and out of objects, people, and places like a yellow cab. Within this, she also weighs in on the emotional rollercoaster that the city provides its residents:

Emotional instability demands a new pair of shoes

and a leopard-print coat. All the men are beautiful glass

houses. Desire struts down Fifth Avenue, past Gucci and Chanel,

throwing blocks while shaking the rattle. I have been behaving 

badly chasing after a man in a blue wool coat who lisps

in Spanish and smiles with a crooked eye. A late night

phone rings and rings, while in the morning 

dreams morph a black crow's claws onto my left

ankle, a scavenger picking pieces from the not dead yet.

I should leave this city and practice patience...

I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to leave the city while I was there, and how all of these outside elements left me with that feeling constantly. The feeling of being impatient, of deceptively feeling unproductive, never leaves you. She places all of these things (man in blue wool coat, phone, Fifth avenue and all its consumerist glory, even her dreams) in the first five stanzas, neatly packed and processed like the Empire State Building, all while the city races with rage against time. There's never enough time for anything. 

Fortunately, there's room for the Earth's circumference in the poem as well, and "damn near perfect" leaves. This is the only mentioning of nature in the poem, as the rest is conquered by the massive iron horse that is the NYC subway.

Before we realize it, we are walking with her down the steps, whilst her body undergoes "an unnamable interior ooze". I want to pause and mention this ooze has a place too, it's contained within her body. It causes me to imagine the ooze that sits and does not settle in all 8 million inhabitants of the city, and how this ooze is ignored in order to assume the role of being in New York, which means being in many places at once (emotional, physical), and the performance of impatience and assertiveness in order to be "productive". Being around millions of people takes people to many emotional places, all in the course of one day -- from the person who bumped into you on the train, to the stranger who complimented your shirt, etc. Or, it can simply make you feel invisible, or having no place to belong at all. All of these emotional places collide, to the extreme, and on steroids, in New York City.

The subway is a contained place that gets you from one physical place to another, and it has continued to crack me up how there can be so many people in one place who (most often) never interact. I am so thankful to Najarro for describing these accidental interactions, and the grouping of people who feel so painfully individualized:

We find shelter under an aluminum awning over a five-story

parking garage and by running down subway

mid-summer sauna steps to another connection,

another train. All holds still

with permission to touch a knee, hip, shoulder,

a slight seductive brushing

back and forth as we sit on pre-fabricated easy-to-clean

subway seats...

She collectivizes the subway experience, through the use of "We". She makes us feel a little less lonely on the train, and zeroes in on the (un)authorized permission of body parts that can't help but speak to each other on the train (even if the people will never speak from their mouths). What is New York if it's not a city where everyone is experiencing "the ooze"? The fact that she puts this into words speaks volumes.

...Our bodies, 

moist and pliable, wait for the one who seeks

to calm or release or turn-the-table on that same interior

ooze and find refuge, a palm in the dark. In the lilt

of so many bodies swaying with the continual rocking,

there is only more of ourselves. 

Yes, yes, YES! She contains the mess that is happening inside the human psyche and spirit in this poem, and embodies the experience of finding solace in a place that is paced for you to have it all figured out, all the time. The truth is quite the contrary, of course.

To exit the subway is a tremendous feat, as anyone who's been on the trains knows. Pushing, shoving, rushing, efficiency. No one truly wants to be on the subway, but they have to take it, in order to get where they're going. It's almost as if she's formed a twisted metaphor on facing the ooze, which I equate to be the dark, ugly matter in our souls: You have to face what's below the surface in your soul, and plunge deep within it, in order to move past it, and get on with the rest of your life. 

Lastly, she describes the underbelly of the city, the "tiles falling from turn-of-the-century walls", that New York as a place now masks (think Times Square 1970s vs. today's Times Square). Its massively erected buildings, its shows, its fashion, have all been built to boast perfection, and assuming its place as "the best city in the world". Of course, then, there's everything that's not Manhattan (Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Staten Island) that is less-than-perfect (although the massive gentrification of these boroughs has a plan to create this facade of a perfect, sellable "product" once more). 

Contrasting this poem with "San Francisco", which, albeit in form is similar, feels a lot more spread out, and is located in its snapshots of people. There are many different ethnicities in this poem (Cuban, Cherokee, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean), as well as cuisine, so it feels much more familiar, and less jam-packed. Street names are also present, and it is through the mercados that we get a true whiff of para los quesos y los chiles:

...One

whiff and the world is not so small.

There is an air in this poem that provides breathing room, both in the space between stanzas, and the indentation of each line in the stanzas. Here, it is through the whiff of food that people are taken to many places -- past, present, and future -- as food is linked to memory through the olfactory sense. This food is the one element of culture that many folks have retained with them from immigrating to the US, and it is through cooking (and/or selling) this food that they can transcend space and time, and cause others to do the same. The world, truly, is not so small then.

This poem is considerably less claustrophobic, and less manic than "Throughout New York City" -- no rushing taking place, no weaving in and out of traffic, just "Tooling". Now, a lot of where a person's physical place is has everything to do with their emotional place, and it appears that San Francisco is leading folks to be a lot more aware of the world around them, with life being found even in the space between the Direct TV satellite and the gay pride flag.

I have much to also discuss about the emotional and spiritual place in the poem "Between Two Languages", but I will save that for class! Long blog short, Adela is uhhhmazing.