world as sacred burning heart is a collection of poems set in Colonial Latin America that weaves together three strands: 1) prose poems about Captains like Columbus, Cortés, and Las Casas that play with the language and syntax of sixteenth-century chronicles and use irony to interrogate the official story; 2) ekphrastic poems on maps, on quipus, on Aztec featherwork mosaics, and other cultural objects; 3) poems of resistance and poems of coming into knowledge.
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To live in the American hemisphere is to live in a colonial state. These poems examine and interrogate that legacy. They respond to the self-aggrandizing myths the Western world tells itself about its own past. This collection argues that America (North and South) is a palimpsest, a layered story, born out of colonial occupation and resistance. Ultimately, these poems ask two urgent questions: can we live with “the madness/of finally knowing who we are?” and “how do we sing a song that remembers the world into wholeness?”
For a brief essay on iconoclasm and historical poetry in relation to this collection, see, On Iconoclasm.
an excursus on Captains
Johannes Stradanus, Allegory of America
ca. 1588
Captain (n.), late 14c, from the Latin caput, which means head, not to be confused with kaput, from the German, which means broken down. Captain, leader, chief, principal, head. As in, the main man. As in, one in charge of an armed division of men. Sometimes as in, magnate, robber baron, Captain of Industry. Sometimes, in fact, a term of endearment, as when the jealous king Leontes, from The Winter's Tale, who imprisoned his wife, says to his young son who later dies of grief: “Come, captain, we must be neat; not neat, but cleanly, captain.” Or Captain, as in a superhero whose name is America. Though not the sailor named Amerigo who surprised America loafing on her hammock. He was just a merchant with little experience in captaining a ship, but like all good merchants he knew marketing. Or Captain, as in an antihero run amok.
on maps
Maps are cultural products with their own particular history and we have to be trained how to use them. Yet, for the post-Enlightenment world maps are self-explanatory, utilitarian objects. Though we might not know the development of the portolan chart, the ins and outs of William Smith's life (an English geologist who created the first detailed geological map of a country and was overlooked by the scientific community because of class bias), or the travails of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, we are used to the work of surveyors and geographers. Before the advent of Google Maps, few self-respecting travelers would embark without a trusted Rand-McNally in the car to help them navigate from one place to the next. For us, navigation is the very function of a map. Yet, this form of encoding and using knowledge had to be created. And while roads, routes, coordinates, and geographical features are part and parcel of our ideas of what a map is, these had to be developed developed over time.
T & O map, 1472
Hans Bünting's Clover Leaf Map, 1586
The above T&O map is a classic and often reproduced visual representation of the world in European letters that can be traced back to the 7th century and the writings of Isidore of Seville. (Some argue that the T & O map can be traced to the Babylonian imago mundi.) As evidenced by the image, the orientation is not yet on a north/south axis, but an east/west one: in part because of the rising sun, in part because Paradise was thought to be in the East. This design also places Jerusalem in the middle, and some suggest that along with being a reference to the division of the world after Noah's flood it is Trinitarian in design. In the end, T&O maps are more about locating oneself within a set of ideas about the world than they are about locating where one might be within the physical world. Hans Bünting's Clover Leaf Map makes the Trinitarian ideas in the T&O map even more visible, as it uses the trefoil to represent the Old World. It also shows America (Die Neue Welt) in the lower left-hand corner.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, portolan charts were used by navigators in conjunction with astrolabes and sextants as a means of plotting a course over the open ocean. Our use of maps today, whether the topographical map of someone hiking in the backcountry or those that plot the interstate and highway system, like a Rand-MacNally Atlas, are the direct descendants of these kinds of portolan charts.
1439 portolan chart by Gabriel de Vallseca
Europeans are not the only ones who used maps. The native peoples of the Americas did as well. From what we know, there was a mapping tradition in Mesoamerica. In fact, Cortés makes reference to Moctezuma's maps. Unfortunately, no Pre-Contact maps survive. There are, though, 16th and 17th century maps that let us see how maps would have been used. Some of these, like the Codex Xolotl (1542), are of indigenous production as part of an indigenous text that recounts the history of the of Aztecs. While the Cortesian testimony lets us know that Moctezuma used maps as part of his imperial administration, maps like these let us see that culture of Central Mexico used maps as storytelling devices. This mapping tradition stands behind the cover image of the book and the last poem of the book. More can be read about this in the Author's Note at the back of the book.
prompts
Codex Xolotl, ca 1542
ekphrasis on a map
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Pick a map, any map, it can be a simple topographical map of the region where you live, Galileo's maps of mountains and craters of the moon (see here for more background and drawings by others), the anonymous Fool's Cap map from the 16th century (my poem fools on the stage is based on this deeply suggestive map), a map this culturally syncretistic map of Teozoalco from the 1580s (the last poem in the book was inspired by this map), or even maps like these 20th century artefacts.
Read Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Map" or "From the Country to the City," or "Florida" all from her collection North & South, or "In the Waiting Room," from Geographies III; or read Archibald MacLeish's poem "Definition of the Frontiers" or "Geography of this Time," (these are not properly ekphrastic, but they use the language of geography in curious and productive ways); read the Jamaican poet Kei Miller's collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (a few selections); or, Rita Dove's poem "The Sailor in Africa," or read Debra Kang Dean's poem "Lady Slipper."
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There are many ways to engage a map ekphrastically, or any object for that matter. Here is a compendium of uses and approaches. My poems, as Debra Kang Dean has noted, are dispraises. One can use the map to create a historical or a personal narrative. One can speak back to problematic content or uses of the map. One can praise the mapmaker. One can, like MacLeish use the language of geography to interrogate the problems and threats and dangers of the present moment. One can, like Dean, turn and turn away again from the initial moment of ekphrasis and expand the vision to see the photographer and expand again to look at the stars and the Mars rovers. Her poem shows us how to fold multiple moments into one poem.
So, go find a map or five and respond in the way you like.
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on the captain poems
The Captain poems are not quite persona poems. They are all written in the third person rather than the first. But, one way to think about them is as if they were persona poems or a kind of dramatic monologue; or, at least, as if they rely on the ventriloquism of the persona poem. Two such poems I remember from college are by Robert Browning his "My Last Duchess" and "Fra Lippo Lippi." These are not his only examples, but both play dramatic irony and voice in masterful ways. Other masterful examples are the York poems by Frank X Walker: see his collections Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, When Winter Come: The Ascension of York, and Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evars. For an in-depth discussion of the persona poem by another master of form see this essay by A. Van Jordan.
When writing these, I went back and forth between keeping them as the prose poems that they are (and were originally conceived to be) or putting them into something like the octava real, the stanzaic form for 16th and 17th century epic verse. But the language and syntax these poems drew from were the journals, letters, and histories of Christopher Columbus, Ramón Pané, Hernando Cortés, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas and other conquistadors. In the end, though, the example of Caesar´s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars and on the Civil Wars and the formal aspects of Columbus´ Ship Log convinced me to keep them in prose in to keep the ambiguous play between the first and the third person as part of the poems. In the case of Caesar's text, he writes of his campaigns in the third person. In the case of Columbus, the extant diary or ship log has come down to us through Las Casas where the first and the third person point of view mix and mingle.
Find a passage from Thomas Jefferson's Notes of the State of Virginia, or Roger Williams' A Key into the Language of America, or William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation. Find the rhythms in the syntax, in the way the phrases are put together. Let that music be the music with which you write.