JOHN OLIVER SIMON | About David Huerta
into a mountain of shimmering veils in the work of the gay Argentine Nestor Perlongher, dead of AIDS at 43, and it achieves nanoscopic clarity with Coral Bracho (Mexico, 1951) and hieratic playfulness among the Pharaonic cats of Olga Orozco (Argentina, 1920-1999) but, like any formula, it becomes unreadable in less talented hands. The editors of Medusario write perceptively of David Huerta: “Words, sounds, the eye, the mirror are the favorite themes of David Huerta’s poetry… Negation as a mechanism to question what it affirms, in an incessant process of autocriticism. The text is a reflection of the world, but in its effort to read and interpret, language becomes an obstacle to any true reading, which can only be obtained by silence… there is a certain philosophy of perception in David Huerta. Selfreflection acts as a negative force…” An Un-Meeting In October 1996, a dozen prominent Mexican poets were invited to Hayward, California for an Encuentro, a Coming to Meet with their best-known Chicano counterparts. Nobody has written about this event on either side of the border for fear of opening a thousand cans of worms. Fue más bien un desencuentro, I can only say it in Spanish, it turned out to be an un-meeting. The Chicanos, brown-skinned, proud of their pre Columbian ancestry and campesino roots, framed by their militant identity as an oppressed minority, highly educated and most of them teaching creative writing in high-quality MFA programs, speaking English natively, often hesitant in Spanish, were anxious for the validation of la madre patria, and like children unsure they will be loved, read their most confrontational work to shock their mother. Me vale madre. The Mexicans, pale-skinned, mostly upper-middle class, equally well-educated with a better foundation in the classics, highly erudite in Spanish and often inarticulate in English, proud of their status as international intellectuals, most of them supported in their writing by government becas, an elite in their own culture but with a chip on their shoulders vis-à-vis Uncle Sam, really had no idea what they were supposed to have in common with these ragged pochos. The magnificent Lorna Dee Cervantes, as tiny against the podium, as she painfully noted, as any Indian woman from Chiapas or Oaxaca, complained about how the Mexicans were translating and publishing white yanqui writers, but not their Chicano cousins. While many of the poets present made a valiant attempt to treat each other collegially as tú, Lorna Dee continued with great formality to address David Huerta as Usted.
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| 2_ 2006