Consciously or not (usually not), all poets have to decide what kind of bad poet they will be. It’s not a limiting choice: most of us are able to be bad in many ways, many of us in many ways at once. If we’re lucky, though — if we have enough talent, opportunity, dedication, doubt, flexibility, and conviction, if our skills and desires and situation are sufficiently attuned — some portion of our failure will (sometimes) share its contours with something worthwhile to at least some readers, if we’re lucky enough to find them, too.
Here’s the first section of “It’s Only Day Whatever of the Quarantine & I’m Already Daydreaming About Robbing Rich People,” from José Olivarez’s Promises of Gold:
i would like to punch jeff bezos in his stupid face
& i would like healthcare in case my hand bruises
& i would like to live long enough to hug my friends.
to kiss my mom & dad on their foreheads
& not worry about infecting them. i would like to live
long enough to punch jeff bezos in his stupid face again.
is it stupid? stupid or not, i would like to punch it.
This is not, I would argue, especially good. Olivarez says so in the next section (“this isn’t a good poem / you could say. & you’re right.”), before repeating “i don’t have healthcare” three times and concluding “there’s no way to make that pretty.” There’s something a little too easy, too instrumental, in that move. Poems, after all, don’t need to be pretty to be good. I’m pretty sure Olivarez would say the same. But I also think it would be too easy to dismiss not only this poem, but other, better, poems in this book — wonderful poems — written in a similar style. And even here there are indications of the things that make Olivarez, at his best, so good.
There’s a lot that section doesn’t do. The desire and fear for friends and family are as intangible as the “healthcare” he desires. The poem’s concerns are never animated or embodied, and there’s little that’s surprising or surprisingly apt in the language here. If one expects efficiency or compression from poems, this falls short: it rarely achieves more than one thing at a time. And the ending, which matters disproportionately in short poems – like the punch-line in jokes – doesn’t put much of a charge into its short-circuiting of the section’s momentum.
But to say all that is to ignore the obvious: This is fun.
After the exaggerated plainness of the first line, where Olivarez mocks himself with the childish insult of “stupid” and the cartoonish insufficiency of a single punch in the face, the turn in the second line manages a surprising change of register and focus without interrupting the established voice. The riffing conures an audience, a group of friends who could delight in turning the tables on the powers that remain entirely out of reach. It’s good company. And even in the insufficiency of that last line, the speaker’s charisma is tangible — a welcome and a stay against loneliness that is far harder to pull off than it seems. (I’d like to imagine that, if it weren’t so hard to do, it wouldn’t be so very rare in poems, but I have my doubts.)
It’s nice to be reminded that poems can be fun. It’s nice to have fun, to be in good company, to enjoy the presence of another person in concert with some of the other things a poem can do. It matters for its own sake, and it matters, too, because it makes Promises of Gold an especially readable book. Even when the poems fall short (with more than 90 poems, Promises of Gold is guaranteed to have its share of poems that fall short), the version of Olivarez that Olivarez animates on the page is still there to keep the act of reading from feeling like a chore, and he does so without the cloying need to be liked that makes the work of a lot of supposedly fun poets feel like second-rate stand-up comedy to me.
Another poem in the book — a richer one — “Wealth,” borrows the shape of its opening from Lucille Clifton’s “cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty.” And if there’s a tutelary spirit guiding this book, it’s Clifton’s. Even at his worst, Olivarez will never be obscure — never distracted by the need to prove his sophistication. He will never fail to try to entertain. His poems shouldn’t really need a reviewer or critic to explain their appeal. But for those same reasons they may need someone to point out just how much skill and intelligence they actually entail — if, that is, we assume that the value of a poem depends on its intelligence or skill.
Consider “Poem Where No One is Deported,” which opens with a wish:
now i like to imagine la migra running
into the sock factory where my mom
& her friends worked. it was all women
who worked there. women who braided
each other’s hair during breaks.
women who wore rosaries, & never
had a hair out of place. women who were ready
for cameras or for God, who ended all their sentences
with si dios quiere. as in: the day before
the immigration raid when the rumor
of a raid was passed around like bread
& the women made plans, si dios quiere.
so when the immigration officers arrived
they found boxes of socks & all the women absent.
It’s almost always the case that something marked out as a wish in a poem will be in no small part about the reality that makes that wish impossible. So, too, for “Poem Where No One is Deported,” where the pleasure of imagining La Migra duped and foolish is an early animating force. But without much fanfare, something less redeeming creeps in, as Olivarez’s celebration of his mother and other women like her almost imperceptibly slips the tracks, revealing his imperfect feelings about the actual human he feels compelled to revere.
Eventually, the poem lands in the reality in which Olivarez’s family did stay safe, but by the time it does, he’s loaded the poem with enough complication that the last lines are both celebration and uneasy attempt to stand in a perspective that isn’t his own:
gracias a dios del chisme, who heard all la migra’s plans
& whispered them into the right ears
to keep our families safe.
This is his mother’s understanding in Olivarez’s words, shadowing his awareness of just how much his parents sacrificed while they leaned hard on a belief system that he clearly still can’t stand. That they were fortunate in never being deported is not, to Olivarez’s mind, actual good fortune; it’s just what passes for good luck in a brutal system that can’t capture everyone but still sends fear into every factory and home.
The poem’s most poignant lines come immediately before this, as the poem turns from the opening fantasy into the facts of Olivarez’s life:
the women would say it was god working.
& it was god, but the god
my mom taught us to fear
was vengeful. he might have wet his thumb
& wiped la migra out of this world like a smudge
on a mirror. this god was the god that woke me up
at 7am every day for school to let me know
there was food in the fridge for me & my brothers.
i never asked my mom where the food came from,
but she told me anyway: gracias a dios.
The lines present an unresolved and likely unresolvable perspective — though their impact is immediate. Olivarez goes from the frustrating illogic of a vengeful God who won’t take vengeance against his family’s enemies — and anger at the mother who told Olivarez to fear Him — to that same mother making sure he and his brothers were always fed, and his persistent failure to recognize her work and sacrifice, back into her frustrating insistence that he see God in all of this. He does so without posting any signs to mark his progress, and with an ear and wit that make the sentences move with fluid energy throughout. The poem is quick and lively, self-critical and complicated, making of its mixed feelings a seamless and moving whole.
Other of my favorite poems — poems like “Ode to Tortillas,” “Nation of Domination,” “Middle Class in this Mf,” “Canelo Alvarez is the Champ,” and “Eating Taco Bell with Mexicans” — move in different ways, but all of them keep moving. Not all of the best poems here depend on that measure of complexity. But each poem enacts a mind that moves fluidly and fast, that can delight in play in the same moment it registers anger, or disappointment, or disdain, and that doesn’t need to take itself seriously to say something serious. They are alert to the possibilities, accidents, and ironies of spoken language, as well as to what it takes to make spoken language speak inside a poem, and they feel like they are unfolding in the moment of that speech even though closer examination reveals a careful arrangement of references and ideas.
You can see it in “Nation of Domination,” where Olivarez moves via association from his mom to his sentimentality to magicians to music and dancing to pro wrestling before gathering all of them up to make the hard turn that ends the poem:
no one signs up to take a dive. in wrestling
there’s a team of writers who decide who wins & who loses.
the metaphor is obvious. my mom wasn’t born to play the role
of mom, i don’t care how many baby dolls she played with.
i dance with my mom to Los Bukis & you’re a fool
if you believe it’s her son she’s trying to hold on to.
In “Ars Poetica,” Olivarez writes, “My work: to write poems that make my people feel safe, seen, or otherwise loved.” I don’t doubt him, nor do I doubt the value of doing such a thing, or that meaningful and extraordinary poetry can be written to that end, though in most cases those poems will end up incorporating some counter-wish, including the wish to tell the sometimes-unsafe truth, which makes each wish more credible — more alive to and more capable of living in the contradictions of actual human life.
All of Olivarez’s poems, including the ones I love, are animated by that impulse toward generosity.* But sometimes, in his eagerness to comfort and love, he ends up with something like the ending of “Love Poem Beginning with a Yellow Cab,” where he writes “maybe god invented yellow for the cabs,/ so the first time we touched like this / it could be accented in gold,” or “When we hold hands, we invent a spaceship,” which comes at the end of “Shelter Island.” In other cases, it ends up in political statements that feel pre-sorted and over-familiar, too safe to draw blood. That includes his dozens of invocations of “capitalism” which, though sometimes sharp, more often render capitalism in terms so generic and dull as to make it seem like little more than a brand that’s fallen out of fashion.
For those of us who find them disappointing, these disappointments — or, at least, the ones from the first category — are likely to be worrying, too. So much poetry is armed against and flattering to the sophistication of potential readers. Armed, and armored: the achievement of so many poems is exoskeletal; the flesh, the vulnerability, is all underneath. (In some cases, it’s nowhere to be found.) Olivarez, at his best, is the opposite — a creator of fleshed-out figures whose skeletons are all inside, visible primarily in the confident articulations of the body as a whole. At his worst — when he is the bad poet he’s willing to risk being — he’s without armor, open to disdain. Reading those poems, as opposed to the bad work of a poet decked out in the interlocking plates of their sophistication, it’s easy to feel a little nervous about the joy I take in other poems here. But ultimately, I admire Olivarez for that, as I do for the rich beauty of a poem like “Poem Where No One is Deported” and the simpler but genuine pleasure in the deft rightness of poems like “Ojalá: Me & My Guys,” which, like his very best poems, a more armored poet could never write. The poem starts with the title and reads, in full:
need an excuse
to talk. one of them sends me
a mic, so we can play video games.
we make group chat after group chat,
so we can talk about basketball.
we’re good at reciting stats, good
at sharing rap songs, good
at cracking jokes. good.
my homies are always good
when i ask & i don’t ask enough.
* Also generous: flip the book over and you get Promesas de Oro, a Spanish translation of the poems by David Ruano González. Kudos to Henry Holt for ponying up the money to make that possible.
[Published by Henry Holt on February 14, 2023, 320 pages, $24.9/$19.99 hard/soft cover/