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    The Concrete River: Poems
    The Concrete River: Poems
    The Concrete River: Poems
    Ebook159 pages1 hour

    The Concrete River: Poems

    By Luis J. Rodriguez

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A mesmerizing collection of poems of urban pain and immigrant alienation, humming with a current of genuine beauty and the pulse of life The Concrete River’s poems are dispatches from city corners that CNN viewers never see, that few dare visit, and that fewer still manage to escape. Rodríguez sings corridos of barrios and busted Chicanos trying to make it in L.A. and Chicago, from ballads of Watts’s broken glass to blues played alongside a tequila bottle under an elevated train. But the music also captures moments of true beauty amid the hard urban surfaces, where the cries of the ’hood “deliver sacrifices / of sound and flesh, / as a mother’s milk flows,” while love and community offer renewed hope.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of Luis J. Rodríguez including rare images from the author’s personal collection.  

    Editor's Note

    Urban Verse...

    Depicting forgotten corners of Chicago and South-Central LA, this collection beautifully reveals the struggle for belonging in the immigrant experience.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJun 12, 2012
    ISBN9781453259092
    The Concrete River: Poems
    Author

    Luis J. Rodriguez

    The son of Mexican immigrants, Luis J. Rodriguez began writing in his early teens and has won national recognition as a poet, journalist, fiction writer, children's book writer, and critic. Currently working as a peacemaker among gangs on a national and international level, Rodriguez helped create Tia Chucha's Cafe & Centro Cultural, a multiarts, multimedia cultural center in the Northeast San Fernando Valley.

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    • 5/5
      Rodriguez is a really original poet. His style is very honest—brutally so—but once in a while there are these real glimmers of beauty in it. Enough so that it keeps you reading, and keeps you engaged. Above all, though, it's real.

    Book preview

    The Concrete River - Luis J. Rodriguez

    The Concrete River

    poems by

    Luis J. Rodríguez

     for

    NELSON PEERY

    who taught me the poetry of the fight,

    and the fight in the poetry.

    It takes a hell of a miracle for some god to create a madman.

    —overheard at Wendy’s Restaurant in Chicago, 1986

    CONTENTS

    Publisher’s Note

    I. PRELUDE TO A HEARTBEAT

    Watts Bleeds

    The Coldest Day

    Deathwatch

    Tía Chucha

    Speaking with Hands

    Night Dancing

    Soundtracks

    II. DANCING ON A GRAVE

    Dancing on a Grave

    The Village

    Chota

    Writhing Skeletons

    The Concrete River

    The Best of Us

    The Threshold

    The Twenty-Ninth

    The Rooster Who Thought It Was a Dog

    III. ALWAYS RUNNING

    Always Running

    Colombian Star

    Waiting

    Black Mexican

    The Bull’s Eye Inn

    Don’t Read that Poem!

    Jarocho Blues

    Lips

    IV. MUSIC OF THE MILL

    Music of the Mill

    Jesús Saves

    The Blast Furnace

    Carrying My Tools

    Heavy Tells a Story

    First Day of Work

    They Come to Dance

    Bethlehem No More

    V. A HARVEST OF EYES

    A Harvest of Eyes

    The Quest for Flight

    The News You Don’t Get at Home

    City of Angels

    Mean Streets

    Every Road

    Chained Time

    Don’t Go Gentle Into that Good Expressway

    Every Breath, a Prayer

    This Tree, this Poem

    Then Comes a Day

    VI. Glossary of Spanish/Caló Terms

    A Biography of Luis J. Rodríguez

    Publisher’s Note

    Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

    But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

    In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

    But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

    Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s Disclaimer as it appears in two different type sizes.

         

    Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of Disclaimer, you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading Disclaimer on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead is a complete line, while the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn is not.

    Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the

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