Judith Ortiz Cofer Poetry: American Poets Analysis
Most notably, Judith Ortiz Cofer is recognized for her themes of assimilation and transformation. She has often returned to the story of a young adult whose move from Puerto Rico to the United States begins a process of cultural assimilation that coincides with spiritual, artistic, social, or romantic awakening. Her poetry often covers the topics of religion, women, history, family, loss, grief, and death. In her writings, Ortiz Cofer draws from a broad palette of the human experience and from her wide-ranging interests, ranging from the Bible and Homer to photography and anthropology. Her early influences include writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty.
In interviews, Ortiz Cofer often speaks about storytelling and how one can use language—especially poetic language—to discover and shape the meaning of one’s life. Her works relate the power of storytellers, including her grandmother and other women in her family as well as in history and mythology. Her experience speaking and writing in Spanish and English while growing up has shaped her views on language and given her a rich heritage of words and images from which to draw. Her poetry, while typically in English, incorporates Spanish words and phrases, though often with an immediate translation as in the title poem of The Latin Deli, in which she describes “slicing jamón y queso and wrapping it in wax paper/ tied with string: plain ham and cheese. . . .”
The Latin Deli
Ortiz Cofer’s combination of poetry, essays, and short stories in The Latin Deli touch on the challenges of growing up in a Puerto Rican family in the northeastern, urban United States. However, in the poetry of The Latin Deli, the primary themes are of spirituality, the power of language and storytelling, the power of women (“Las Magdalenas,” “Paciencia”), and grieving and loss—especially the loss of a father and a grandfather. In “Absolution in the New Year,” the speaker weaves in several of these themes as she forgives her long-dead father for reading her diary as a child. As she approaches the age that he was at the time, she absolves him, and conjures an image of standing over his grave marker, leaving poems, and addressing him:
. . . Father,here is more for you to read.Take all you desire of my words. Readuntil you’ve had your fill.Then rest in peace.There is more where this came from.
Several of the poems, including “Guard Duty” and “The Purpose of Nuns,” describe the power of spirituality, namely Catholicism, while turning an eye toward the dark or bitterly realistic side of religion. The church in “The Purpose of Nuns” has “. . . Sunday sermons long/ as a sickroom visit and the paranoia of God always/ watching you . . .” and “. . . freedom/ from the worry of flesh . . .” in the community of sisters into which she is invited. In the world of The Latin Deli, religion in the greater sense is expansive and transformational, but it is rarely a comfort and cannot soothe those who seek comfort in its rituals, such as Juana in “Juana: An Old Story” or the poor country farmer in “The Campesino’s Lament.”
The poems in The Latin Deli are rich with images and strongly described nouns: In “Paciencia,” the images trickle from each line to build a narrative about the oldest woman in the village: “toothless gums” sucking the “meat of figs” and her “paper-thin skin” revealing the“dance of her bones” as she works. The images conjured from language culminate in the title poem, “The Latin Deli: An...
(This entire section contains 881 words.)
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Ars Poetica.” In this poem, the woman who runs the Puerto Rican grocery wields the power of memory simply by stocking the foods with Spanish names: “. . .Suspiros,/ Merengues, the stale candy of everyone’s childhood.” Language, in Ortiz Cofer’s world, has a straight line to memory, to the heart, and to power.
The Year of Our Revolution
Serious and full of shadows, the poetry in The Year of Our Revolution typically emanates from the experiences of a young woman—from age twelve through high school—but reflects on these years as a perilous time of contemplating weighty issues and dealing with difficult realities. The poem “El Olvido” asserts, “It is a dangerous thing/ to forget the climate of/ your birthplace; to choke out/ the voices of the dead relatives when/ in dreams they call you. . . .”
The primary theme of the book is divergence, contrasting the “good Catholic girl, wearing my Queen of Heaven High School uniform” with the young woman wearing “bell-bottom blue jeans” and sensual hippie clothes outside school in “Gravity.” Other contrasts include the disparity between her home and those of friends and lovers, between Puerto Rico and the United States, and between the studious, well-mannered child and the sexual, artistic poet. These mixed feelings of fear and the desire to mature and grow appear in “Fulana,” a descriptive poem about a childhood acquaintance, “. . . the wild girl/ we were not allowed to play with” because of her inherent sensuality and passion, her love for stories and “. . . songs about women and men/ loving and fighting to guitar, maracas, and drums.” Fulana is described from both the eyes of the mothers who worry about their “impressionable little girls” and those of the little girls who might wish to follow in her footsteps.