SOURCE: “I Can Hear You Now,” in Parnassus, Vol. 8, No. 1, Fall-Winter, 1979, pp. 297-311.

They keep coming back: the ring of a streetcar on Grand River Avenue, the flies that hummed by a light on the screen porch, the squeak of my grandfather's huge leather chair. Under the spell of Stanley Plumly and Gary Soto, these and other sensations of my own World War II childhood in Detroit have surfaced and re-surfaced in recent weeks. Set down here in discursive prose, they can't be heard by anyone except me. But when you read Out-of-the-Body Travel and The Elements of San Joaquin, your past, too, will swim up out of the lost worlds into which Stanley Plumly's and Gary Soto's memory books plunge us. …

Gary Soto's poetry carries less life-lived-through than Plumly's. The Elements of San Joaquin, winner of the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum, is a younger man's book; it isn't patronizing to say so. The poems lay down before us a period in the speaker's life which is only recently finished, the 1950's of his childhood. But Soto's first book is no nostalgic venture into “Happy Days.” Soto is a Chicano, and probably the most important voice among the young Chicano poets because his poetry comes to us through poems, not propaganda in drag:

Young Mexicans
Went into ovens
Squint-eyed
And pulled out the pipes
Smeared black
With tar.
Far from home,
He had no place
To go. Nights
He slept in cars
Or behind warehouses
Shivering
Like the machinery
That went on and on.

(from “San Fernando Road”)

A former student of Philip Levine, Soto shows stylistic affinities with what has been called “The Fresno School”: short lines, a denuded vocabulary, an enumeration of small objects seen not as symbols but presences which build the speaker's situation. The single line is not of great interest in itself; in fact, it may sound “anti-poetic” to some ears. Soto has learned from Levine to enjamb a flat statement with another flat but raw one, exposing the soft underbelly—and the claws.

Because there are avenues
Of traffic lights, a phone book
Of brothers and lawyers,
Why should you think your purse
Will not be tugged from your arm
Or the screen door
Will remain latched
Against the man
Who hugs and kisses
His pillow
In the corridor of loneliness?

(from “After Tonight”)

At times the poems talk to us by shifting from one foot to the other, as if in a hurry to be off somewhere; side by side, too, the enjambed lines may seem melodramatic or mannered. Worst of all, strong statements may assume a kind of equivalence, as in the middle of “The Level at Which the Sky Begins.”

Through the streets
Cars fleeced in a light frost
Smoke lifting above the houses
A boy porching
The newspapers that would unfold like a towel
Over coffee over an egg
Going brown over the radio saying
It's 6:05 this is the music
of America
Where the young got up hungry
Roosters cleared
What was caught in their throats
All night

Soto does not want to shut us out in protesting his condition and that of his brothers—one understands his need for a quiet insistence—but when the texture of a poem is reduced to the objects of everyday life and the poem sets image after image before us, a tremendous pressure is put on the poet to find exactly the appropriate correlative line after line. Levine and Williams (from whom Levine probably learned it) take off their gloves when they feel the reader needs a right hook with the bare hands. Think of “These things astonish me beyond words” in “Pastoral” or, in Levine, “Today I want to ask her / what she hoped to find / last night, I want to say, / I'm with you in this life” (“The Sky Falling”).

In most poems, though, Soto is convincing in giving us a situation which is some part of his lost world of San Joaquin. The speaker approaches his reconstruction with a genuine tenderness, the short lines suggesting tentative, halting evocations:

That was the '50s
And Grandma in her '50s,
A face streaked
From cutting grapes
And boxing plums.
I remember her insides
Were washed of tapeworm,
Her arms swelled into knobs
Of small growths—
Her second son
Dropped from a ladder
And was dust.
And yet I do not know
The sorrows
That sent her praying
In the dark of a closet …

(from “History”)

Though both urban and rural, there is no neat city / country topology at work in Soto's San Joaquin. The earth, in fact, is related in the title sequence to the enslavement of the speaker as a worker in the fields. This sequence implants us in the minute particulars of the worker's situation by drawing us down to the insects and plants which crawl and scratch the lines. It is a protest poem that succeeds by its gentle but willed negations, offering no salutary measures but merely insisting on our sympathy.

The wind strokes
The skulls and spines of cattle
To white dust, to nothing,
Covers the spiked tracks of beetles,
Of tumbleweed, of sparrows
That pecked the ground for insects.

(from “Winds”)

When autumn s flatten sycamore
leaves,
The tiny volcanos of dirt
Ants raised around their holes,
I should be out of work.

(from “Rain”)

Gary Snyder's sheer pleasure in physical work which removes him from the life of industrial society seems tepid middle class revolt after reading Soto.

Perhaps because the poems recreate a lost world without showing how the speaker leaves it (except to go “beyond the new Freeway, searching”), Soto occasionally has difficulty ending poems. Sometimes the final words are too obvious or demand more than the situation itself:

Left of the neon glowing Eat,
Right of the traffic returning home,
This cold slowly deepens
The old whose bones ring with the coming weather,
The stunned face that could be your father's—
Deepens the gray space between each word
That reaches to say you are alone.

(from “County Ward”)

You expect your daughter
To be at the door any moment
And your husband to arrive
With the night
That is suddenly all around …
But remember this:
Because blood revolves from one lung to the next,
Why think it will
After tonight?

(from “After Tonight”)

For Plumly the past was resurrected so that he could assume his father's body and spirit; for Soto the death of the father is important but finally only one of many losses. “Spirit” is one of his most successful poems because the dead father is at a double remove and the catalogued objects are not stage props of the past but properties the speaker ascribes to his vision of the father's ghost:

We know you came back father
And in the doorway
Leading to your bedroom
Wanted to fog
The family's photo
With the breath
You did not have
And years later
When your wife slept
With another
You waited
At their feet
Until they turned
From one another
Eyes closed
And sighing
Leaving them
A cupboard opened
The garage light
On and burning silent
As your jealousy …

The more one reads The Elements of San Joaquin the sadder seems Soto's sense of absolute loss, of a world all but erased except for his poems' memorializing. He has avoided the sentimental and the strident, and his voice possesses the kind of unaffected honesty we experience only in conversations with friends.

As if himself feeling the reservations voiced above about The Elements of San Joaquin, Soto's new book attempts to answer them. Two-thirds of the poems focus on two characters, who live in separate worlds and never meet each other. Molina, the character of Part One, is a sort of Doppelgänger for the Soto-I speaker; Manuel Zaragoza, who owns the last third of the book, is a cantina owner and sad clown. The middle third of The Tale of Sunlight contains poems which generally, through third- or second-person narration, avoid the stance of the naked-I speaker. Soto's abiding theme is still loss, but his new points of view open the lyric enclosure of his earlier poems to an imaginative expansiveness in which irony can sometimes sort out the images he hurries through his fingers.

The flat warp of the earlier poems' continuous enjambments is woven richer now with more cross-stitched rhyme. The rush of enjambments still comes at us, however; one would like to slow the loom when encountering a poem like this:

The moon going orange
Through a cloud
That refuses to move,
Molina in the yard
Talking to a chicken
That blinks with eyes
Blown deep
As targets. It circles
Its droppings
And says nothing
Of the wind that passes
Through a door
Nailed shut
By its own poverty;
Or of the galaxy
Of lint tilting on its axis,
Those unmapped stars
He counted twice
And named for his country.

(from “The Point”)

Such enjambing reduces all the lines to the same texture; one is tempted, as in most prose, to read for an extractable idea. The first three lines are an image cluster in their own right, but we scarcely have time to remember the color of the moon before we're hurried on. As the stanza proceeds, Soto leans twice again on a phrase introduced by the pronoun “that”; further, the metaphorical appositions in “galaxy / Of lint tilting on its axis, / Those unmapped stars / He counted twice / And named for his country” seem far too complicated for the simple character.

Sometimes the cross-stitching is too tight:

When fog
Stands weed-high
And sky
Is the color
Of old bed sheets,
Molina and I …

(from “The Little Ones”)

The “high”-“sky”-“I” rhymes in the right margin along with the “when”-“stands”-“and” of the left shut down the language, making it difficult to believe amorphous objects are being compared to the vertical dimension of weeds or the potentially dynamic “old bed sheets.”

Soto's earlier difficulty in ending poems has been solved, however, in poem after poem by just the right choice of images. The small fabliaux of many of his character poems are complete in themselves in The Tale of Sunlight and furnish a pleasant contrast to the naked-I poems Soto continues to write. Here is how Manuel Zaragoza stays alive:

One morning
He unearthed a salamander
Cut from bone, collared
With small holes
Where jewels shone.
He sold it
To a skinny gringo,
And in parting
With it, wept
And muttered like
A harelipped prophet—
Bird in the stupid tree,
Wink at me …
God above the tree,
Call me Manuel the genius—
And simply walked away.

(from “A Few Coins”)

Soto's tone is now so much his own and his control of it so strong in poems such as “The Shepherd,” “The Cellar,” or the title poem that after reading the book I can hear my own Soto poems writing themselves in my head. To put it otherwise: it would be easy to create parodies of Soto's voice. And to say this is to show how much his voice belongs to him, not to any “school” at all.