Monday, June 29, 2009

"Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed."Stephen Burt,The New York Times

Stephen Burt has clearly stated that Juan Felipe Herrera,is one very unique artist.One who can create an art.One who can write an art.One who can feel an art.Herrera was born December 27,1948 in Fowler,California.He was basically,a vagrant,and lived from crop to crop,trailer to trailer.This shaped his art instincts.He is a poet,performer,writer, cartoonist,teacher,and activist who draws from real life experiences as well as years of education to form his work.As you can see,his life shaped his art,and that's what makes his poems so life-like,so mystical in its common way.Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children in the last decade with twenty-one books in total.This shows how active he has been,writing books,poems,and various works to please the common.

Herrera has garnered the Ezra Jack Keats Award, the Hungry Mind Award of Distinction, the Americas Award, the Focal Award, the [[Pura Belpré Honors Award]], the Smithsonian Children’s Book of the Year Award, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choice, the IRA Teacher’s Choice, theLA Times Book Award Nomination, the Texas Blue Bonnet Nomination, the New York Public Library Outstanding Book for High School Students Award, two Latino Hall of Fame Poetry Awards, two National Endowment for the Arts Writers’Fellowship Awards, four California Arts Council grants, theUC Berkeley Regent’s Fellowship, the Breadloaf Fellowship in Poetry and the Stanford Chicano Fellows Fellowship. Herrera was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light.To be such a successful artist,he sure know how to write,and play!

In middle school,Herrera was an avid cartoonist.By high school,he had picked up a guitar and became an ensemble singer of Madrigals.He also began writing folk songs.He listened to many kinds of music,and this shaped his poetry.

Juan Felipe Herrera currently lives with his partner, Margarita Robles, a poet and performance artist, in Redlands, California. His children and grandchildren live in California, Oregon and New York. The author and artist Joaquín Ramón Herrera is his son.

POEMS =)

My word against theirs, my sickle humor
against their last glass of chianti. Simple,
Direct and compassionate—in a way, let us say,
it is in my nature to be generous: to remind
the passengers about the last stop in Anguish-
town, to spell integration with an X, to scrub
the word Prison with sneaky vastness inside.

It is my own penchant for skull symphonies
my embossed headdress, especially, that brings
me to your carpeted doom-time; this flowery intro
serves a purpose; every spirit strand is an exit,
a cash & carry star of exits and entrances.

In this poem,Herrera is Death itself.

I should have visited more often.
I should have taken the sour pudding they offered.
I should have danced that lousy beggar shuffle.
I should have painted their rooms in a brighter color.
I should have put a window in there, for the daughters.
I should have provided a decent mountain for a view.
I should have nudged them a little closer to the sky.
I should have guessed they would never come out to wave.
I should have cleaned up that mole, the abyss, in the back.
I should have touched them, that's it, it comes to me now.
I should have touched them.

In this poem,Herrera is the Guardian Angel of a person.

Into the tilted factories, the smeared taxis,
the stunted universities, into the parlor of bank notes,
in the cramped cookhouse where the dark-skinned
humans still stoop and pitch the daily lettuce bags.

This shows that no matter how advanced a place may be,there are always people in need of help.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Felipe_Herrera
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1822
http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/juan_felipe_herrera01.shtml