2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
not come from the same politics of exile as the Cuban American experience, it too is marked with a sense of loss and nostalgia. Both of their global migrations capture the particularity of places and spaces, giving meaning to each locale within these critical and creative works. Smith-Soto’s Time Pieces oscillates between taking pictures at a Costa Rican women’s prison and meditating on his relationship with the sea while on Topsail Island, NC.2 His poetry pays close attention to the artifacts and actions that make up everyday life in these locales: azaleas in full bloom in the poem “April Inventory,” “white pajamas scribbled all over / with baby elefantes in blue and red” in “Un Beso,” and his dog Chico’s whining at twilight in “Night Watch.” Yet from these everyday minutiae, he extrapolates sometimes political and sometimes humanistic didacticism and prophecy. While the pedantic turns and prophetic one-liners sometimes muffle and distract from the power within these details, Smith-Soto’s poetry performs the cultural movements from there to here to the inbetween “nowhere.” One particularly emphatic instance that Smith-Soto performs these movements is in his narrative poem “Getting Ready.” The poem opens with Uncle Enrique’s words of wisdom for the young narrator, stating that we always know where we start but we never know where we end. Immediately, the sense of place is ambivalent,
2
The poem “Last Retreat to Topsail Island,” included in Time Pieces, received NCLR’s James Applewhite Poetry Prize in 2012 and was published in NCLR 2013. Watch the award presentation and hear the poet read the poem at the 2012 Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming at East Carolina University.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TERRY KENNEDY
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moving from certainty about one’s origins and uncertainty about one’s telos. This is poetry in movement, to extend Octavio Paz’s idea of a poetry that is circular, where the search for the future always ends in the past and the future also reinvents the past.3 As such, it is a metaphor for the temporal and spatial movements of the self, yet Smith-Soto grounds this abstraction into more tangible imagery. Uncle Enrique’s wisdom is a reason to not travel with an empty stomach as they drive to the Arenal Volcano or “sloth-country in the southern forests,” justifying their detour to the “brand new / Wendy’s, the first in Costa Rica.” Rich with both political questions about Americanization in Costa Rica and aesthetic questions about the materializations of abstract metaphor, the poem’s second stanza moves from the narrator’s memory right before Enrique dies of “cancer, hepatitis, diabetes, maybe / HIV” to the narrator’s experience
with his terminally ill friend who is refusing to eat. The friend’s hunger strike in the face of death presents an “exception” to Uncle Enrique’s “general rule.” Firmat, too, places great significance on this “state of exception,” which he argues is Andy Taylor because he is a single father through the whole series and the unquestionable center of the town, making him the sexless, marriage-less sovereign ruler of Mayberry (94). For Smith-Soto, the motif of food, eating, and consuming becomes the materials in which this exception can be seen, but he ends the poem on his own lived experience: “And watching her / watching me for that second before she turned her eyes away, / I knew she was teaching me just like my uncle had, / back when I was a kid and just beginning my travels.” The poem becomes a movement between his past in Costa Rica and his present psychic space, joining together these two experiences and using the poetic form to come to terms with these lived experiences.
Octavio Paz et al, Poesia en movimiento: México 1915–1966 (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1991; rev. ed. 1966) 5; also see Carlos Roberto Conde, “Poesía en movimiento, Caducidad del Instante,” Circulo de Poesia 15 Oct. 2012: web.
ABOVE Mark Smith-Soto at the annual
“Will Read for Food” benefit, Weatherspoon Arts Museum, Greensboro, 15 Nov. 2012