(Ed note: This is part 2 of a 4 part series. Read part 1 here. sdh)
If a woman wants to be a poet, she must dwell in the house of the tomato.
—Erica Jong
In the field between the house I grew up in and grandpa’s house, vegetables bloomed—mostly tomatoes. It was my job, before dinner, to help with the watering. We dug trenches around the base of each tomato and serrano plant, and at the end of each row, grandpa extended the trench to reach the top of the next row. The water followed in a rhythmic trickle, circling each plant until it pooled over into the next. It was beautiful to watch.
I was a little girl crawling on my hands and knees ahead of the water as guide. Grandpa always stood at the head of the first row adjusting the hose or inspecting the perimeter to see what needed picking. We did this as he told me stories.
He held stories in his body—stories of picking cotton, baking pies, stringing up cabrito over a fire. He told stories about his brothers and sisters, about love and death. He told stories, because he never really learned to write. I see now that because we spent small amounts of time together—the hour between homework and dinner, Saturday morning before chores--and because he’d told his stories for years, they were tight, well thought out, precise. The pacing was always perfect, and his tone always turned just right. When I discovered poetry, I recognized my grandpa’s style: whole worlds in bite-sized bits. Grandpa, who learned how to record and revise in his head because he didn’t know how to write, was the first and greatest poet I knew.
I’ve been thinking about that tomato garden for two years. How efficient it was, how calculated. And, too, how this kind of system is one that is passed down from previous generations, inherited by those who’d have to find a way to feed themselves, adjusting and readjusting to the elements, to modernisms. The tomato garden was grandpa’s sonnet.
And while I had a hard time finding an access point into the sonnet, I was well aware of the workings of a tomato garden. I knew, then, that what I had chosen, this working of sonnets, was like a return to that field between our two houses. The challenge that I had taken on excited me, brought the only kind of engagement that could bring me comfort. I thought, too, about the heroic crown, and how the last line of one sonnet would pull you into the next, just like the water trickling over to the next row of tomatoes.
I wrestled with the idea of using the form for a man who would never know it. I thought about how he created, how he sustained himself: he used what he had. It was then that I really understood the magnitude of my own education. I knew how to write. In English. I knew poetry. I knew sonnets. I, too, used what I had.
I began to think of building sonnets as my grandpa built houses and gardens. I knew I didn’t want to write sonnets that looked or sounded like what anyone was used to--I wanted them to feel indigenous, easy, from the earth. I remembered my grandfather in his workshop, how he often left edges of a table, a bird house, a slab of sheet rock a little roughed up, never perfect. On the kitchen hutch he made for me of reclaimed wood, he left an emptied wasp’s nest intact and attached: character, he said. I wanted sonnets like that. Roughed up and with wasps nests attached. Dampened with rainwater, smelling of dirt. My sonnets are not perfect—in the English or Italian sense—but charactered, like us…working class, rough, Tejano…maybe even beautiful.
-LA
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