Luis Alberto Urrea

It would be courting melodrama to say that Stephen Crane saved my life. Still, it would be close to the truth. Certainly, Stephen Crane pulled me from the weedy dirt lots of the barrio and the fire-prone yellow canyons of Southern California, and he opened the door on a long process of a derangement of the senses. I struck out on the path of my inescapable fate -- a life of writing.

Imagine how hard it was for a boy from Tijuana to appreciate "By the shining big-sea waters." Iambic pentameter and its ilk were a demonic babble, some crazy spew that school teachers thought up to torment us. John Greenleaf Whittier and dear Longfellow were my deadly enemies. It was God's little joke to make me cleave to the meanest teachers, and one, a lone bastion of literary smarts in my junior high school, took me aside in a tumult of exasperation. He ordered me to go directly to the lie-berry and check out Stephen Crane.

"But I hate that book!"

"Which book, Lewis?"

"The Red Badge of Courage," I announced, thinking I'd shown his gringo ass a literary thing or two. I knew my books, dude.

"Lewis, Mr. Crane wrote more than one book. I am not talking about his fine novels. I am talking about his poems."

"Poems! Aww...."

"Go. Now."

I went, and I dawdled, and I tarried, and I moseyed. I went to the librarian and confessed, abashed that I was asking for pomes -- old pomes at that. I'd asked her for countless spaceship books, venomous arachnid books, racing-car books. But this was simply unbearable. Presently, she tossed me a faded paperback called something imaginative, like A Lot of Poems by Stephen Crane.

I don't know when I first opened the book, but when I did, the trapdoor opened and I went down the chute. I didn't know poems could be mordant. I didn't know they could be free, unrhymed and un-rhythmed. And they were cranky as hell, and funny, and even scary. And they were short.

At the time, I was listening, like all good boys, to The Doors, The Beatles, Bob Dylan. I was also some kind of beatnik homeboy, for I loved Leonard Cohen and other strange, haunted balladeers -- folks who wore suits or black sweaters and used language I didn't always understand or even hear correctly. (One song used the simple word, "stupidity." I heard it as "Dubiddideeg." I became the embodiment of the word when I went around trying to uncover the definition.)

Books were cheap. (Do you remember the Fawcett Crest paperback? It cost 65 cents. It was a devastating blow when the books rose in price to 75 cents.) I did yard work for books and $3.19 records. In some sense, Stephen Crane joined The Doors in that era.

I was standing in my favorite bookstore, looking at poetry books. There was good ol' Steve -- The Black Riders. I perused the shelves, looking for something cool. And there was Jim Morrison's The Lords, and the New Creatures. I must have thought something along the lines of What ho! It was probably bitchen, man! But wait -- there was Leonard Cohen's The Spice-Box of the Earth. And there was Bob Dylan's Tarantula. And there was John Lennon's A Spaniard in the Works. It was time for an adolescent epiphany. The choir of angels sang hosannas, the ray of light came through the ceiling -- I squinted to double-check, in case I'd missed a poetry book by The Monkees -- and I grokked it! Morrison is, like, a POET! Rock stars are POETS! Ipso facto, poets are ROCK STARS!

Holy crap, I had to get out of there and write some poems. I wanted to be Jim Morrison. What, are you kidding? In my bathroom, with the shower on, I was Jim Morrison. And good ol' Steve, my poet best pal, was going to teach me the secret way to become one. If anybody was a rock star, it was Stephen Crane. Together, we formed a kind of literary Yippie party, taking control of the, dig it, paradigm! (A senior taught me that.) We made many really, really bad poems together.

Is today the / day after yesterday, or / the day before / tomorrow? The horror, the horror.

Aside from believing every poem was some kind of curandero ritual, changing the world when I hit a rare good note (of course, like all first-time poets, I thought every note was good), I was onto a Top Secret. And that secret was: Everything Is A Poem. That's right. The text of the world was somehow linked, and if you could position it just right, link the paragraphs and chapters and essays and songs, then true epic would be revealed. I tended to think in these ways as an energetic youth. My heroes, the weird and wonderful surrealists (heroes probably 'cause they reminded me of Mad magazine, who knows) made me think every object was Art, especially if it was placed in a jarring setting. So I stole my mom's iron and mounted it on a pedestal in my bedroom. I'd lie in bed and stare at it and feel like a very clever fellow, indeed.

Here's where I found hidden poetry scriptures: Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America; Farina's Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me; Dali's The Diary of a Genius; Vonnegut's anything at all. And then some other homies moved into the hood. I found Bukowski's The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills for three bucks. Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind. That old-timer Whitman.

I wrote and wrote. I wrote some more. I sat up under my blankets and wrote with a flashlight. I'd call Becky and Colette and read them my poems, and when I made them cry, I knew I was in some sort of pantheon. The day my poems won me my first kisses on the lips, I might have even thought I was a god. To hell with Jim Morrison. And I wrote. About 200 notebooks down the line, I published my first real book of poems, The Fever of Being. It's a swell book -- buy 10 copies. (I was fortunate enough to win the Western States Book Award for that; nice for a first book.)

I may never be brave enough to call myself "Poet." How could you? How hubristic that seems. Poetry is too sacred a thing, too evanescent a being to be captured like that. I am not yet worthy to stand beside Issa, or Basho, Ginsburg or Ammons or Oliver or Wakoski. Neruda -- good God! That's like saying I can dance like James Brown! I can't.

I will keep on scribbling in notebooks, and I will hope that when I die, my wife will hide them away. I have three poetry books published now, and I have two more completed (somebody please call Black Sparrow for me!). Then I have this plan for a true epic, and.... Well, listen, I have to go. I have to call Steve and Jim, and we have some heavy lifting ahead of us.

It ain't like the old times, but it'll do.

Luis Alberto Urrea works in many genres: poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Though best known for his nonfiction -- his 1999 memoir Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life won the American Book Award -- Urrea has also earned numerous awards and accolates for his poetry and fiction. Born of an American mother and a Mexican father, Urrea uses his humor and love of language to explore themes of isolation and the search for love and acceptance, as well as to celebrate the world around him. Author of nine books, Urrea has written of his work with a missionary group administering to the poor living in the dumps of Tijuana and his journeys through the Rocky Mountains and the American West. He is currently living with his family in Chicago where he teaches at the University of Illinois-Chicago.