One act of kindness brought a homeless poet's work out of obscurity

Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho wrote every day on the streets of São Paulo, Brazil for 35 years and no one knew what he was writing. Then, a women named Shalla Monteiro befriended him and brought his work out of obscurity.

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Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho had been homeless for 35 years when Shalla Monteiro met him in April 2011 in São Paulo,Brazil. He lived on a street median. Raimundo called it “The Island.”

He had become known as the homeless man who sat and wrote alone in that spot everyday. He always seemed to have pen and paper in hand. Still, few knew what he was writing. “When I saw him for the first time, he gave me one of his poems. From that moment, he started to be a part of my life,” Monteiro says in a documentary about the poet.

Monteira began collecting more of Raimundo’s small poems. She wanted to know more about who Raimundo was. She became his friend.

“Writing is his passion. He writes everyday,” Monteiro says. “Raimundo always wanted to publish a book of his poems and as a person who lived in the street, it seemed impossible to him.” Still, he wrote stories and poems every single day from his wooden stool. He took up whatever scraps of paper he could find, carefully cutting them to be the same size and dating them each with a serial number.

Hope is the heaviest weight a man can carry. It is the bane of the idealist. Signed, the Conditioned.

Raimundo is 77 years old. The poet and philosopher became homeless in the late 70s and has worked diligently for half his life on the streets in obscurity. That is, until Monteiro befriended him. She was impressed with her new friend’s work and decided to start a Facebook page for the poet. She wanted to publish Raimundo’s work so that others could see it and so that Raimundo could “recognize himself as a man and an artist.”

Material hygiene. Mental hygiene. Here, I don’t know which is harder to practice. Signed, the Conditioned.

Raimundo’s Facebook page currently has more than 140,000 fans who have been touched by his story. “As a writer myself, I find this man to be a great inspiration of hope for the rest of the world,” writes Erasmo L Gusman, Sept. 11. Many others are touched by Monteiro’s actions, “Thanks to you and Raimundo for blessing so many. We must never turn away from someone we may not understand. We might be turning away from an angel,” writes Audrey Van Vliet.

In São Paulo shortly after Raimundo’s work was published on the internet, people began to pay attention. They stopped by to say hello and chat with the poet just as Monteiro had done. Many even admitted that they always had wanted to talk with him, but were afraid to do so. Among those who wanted to contact Raimundo was his long lost brother who had sent a message through the Facebook page that Monteiro had set up.

His brother had wanted to find Raimundo for more than 57 years. When he came to the island, he’d found Raimundo surrounded by trash. His brother was unkempt, his hair matted, his body dirty. He was dressed in black plastic bags. It was a shock. “I suggested that he come live with me,” he said.

Damned is the man who abandons himself. These words show that the worse the situation is, never, ever should a man consider it lost. Signed, the Conditioned.

On April 23, 2013, Raimundo left “The Island” to live with his brother and his family. Now, Raimunda is a part of his family again and with Monteiro’s help, is working to publish his book.

*originally published at the now defunct Examiner.com

I have poems at the Denver Crossroads

in front of one of the Santa Fe Arts District murals
"History of the Westside Community," by Marc Anthony Martinez, 2002

*****

Some time ago, Denver poet, Carson Reed asked me to give him some poems for his wonderful project, The Denver Crossroads. Below follows one of those poems. Following the poem is a link to more of them, and in the sometime future, there will be more poems from me for his site.

He takes submissions! Links for more info follow below!

*****

a strawberry field in Oregon, summer of ’96

My beau, smiling in the sun, 

cracking jokes in Spanish

never looked so bright, crouched in the fields
with his friends.

The ladies, too, wives,
buckets full already, gossip and laugh,
and I’m trying to pick faster.

My beginner’s Spanish,
my 1/10th full bucket of berries,
my wobbling ankles and lips already cracking;
no hat for sun, and clothes
too warm for this — I’m only 40 minutes in,
feeling faint and weak.

I’d like to taste
a berry, juicy, sun-warmed,
straight from the bush,
but I need water, shade,
and a bushel or two.
No time to pick for me.

I am a tourist here
and when the farmer comes
looking after the workers,
poking fun as they blink,
throwing a bonus of Taco Bell
to supplement a pittance, I turn,
lips quivering, tongue
sticking in my mouth, telling him
I speak perfect English.

*originally published at the Denver Crossroads

To learn more about the Crossroads poem, developed by Carson Reed, go here: http://denvercrossroads.wordpress.com

How Natasha Trethewey's Chapbook Thrall Begins

I just found the following quotes as the introduction to the chapbook called Thrall, which was written by Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey:

What is love?
One name for it is knowledge.
    --Robert Penn Warren. 

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?     --T.S. Eliot.

What a beautiful beginning to a poet whose work I had not yet read!

I haven't much to say yet about the work that is inside. To be honest, I stopped at the quotes. While I understand the quotes have other significance in context, they also have significance to me without their context. Further, the quotes bring together two of my favorite poetry forms which are the found poem and exquisite corpse. 

Arguments for Writing Poetry (1)

I love this quote from Mark Strand's The Weather of Words: 

I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?

The quote makes me happy, giddy, really and it also reminds of the following quote from Ted Kooser's The Poetry Home Repair Manual: 

Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I’m certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don’t think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say ‘We loved the earth but could not stay.

I like adding to energy, and creating poems to the whole process of creation seems like adding energy to me. Further, all of this rings of some kind of spiritual and moral life. These things are also close to my heart. I live a life of some sort of spiritual discipline, hoping to add to the good in the world.


There are so many arguments that poetry is dead but I don't think that is true. It's not just these quotes that make me think that but the way in which I see poetry working in the communities around me. I see poetry as a healing conduit, a way that people connect, share, vent, transform, understand, make connections and build dialogues. Perhaps what is dead is the ego in poetry. The Poet's work is for all not just for one. I think it's probably always been that way, despite any of our initial hope and search for glory.

Brand Spankin' New Poem in a Brand Spankin' New Anthology

I have a new poem, written especially for this issue of Cellar Door: An Anthology. I have only scanned part of the poem. To see the rest of it and some other really great writing, art, comics and more, check out Cellar Door's Etsy page. You can also find many wonderful buttons created by local artists. Buttons feature authors, rappers, persons of note and quotes to go along with them. Funds help support the anthology.

No Shirking

Last night, I told someone I haven't had time for poems though I saw poems brewing. The truth is images and ideas come to me fluidly, serendipitously. They are brilliant like the fiery sunset I watched last night as some friends and I descended from the mountains from a special time together in love and meditation.

Images like that leave their imprints. They are gifts, metaphors already written. . . .

I told my friend I hadn't time to catch them, just yet. Putting them onto the page would have to wait. I would have to mix them into lines and stanzas later, whenever time permitted.

It's 5 a.m. I have been awake since twenty to three after only having slept a short time.

I haven't written much in the last year. I have finished a journal, intermittently made myself sit down to free write and I know better. All of this is fleeting and the filter through which I see any of this right now changes. Plus, the memory -- it can't be trusted. Memory is such a tricky thing.

The poems are brewing. The gifts present themselves. I must be willing right now, no matter how busy I am, to give something to it. My conscious tells me so. The nervous sour smell in my room tells me so.

I want to sleep and I want to sleep soundly.

I want to share something with you:

A lot of people know about the poetry therapy and other therapies workshops that Art from Ashes (AfA) uses to empower youth. Many do not know that AfA also hosts poetry therapy workshops for adults. I have attended two of their workshops now, have seen many youth workshops, and have adored the work that the folks at this organization do. I have adored the organization for many years now. What they do is powerful, beautiful, effective, and very close to my heart.

I want to share the following because I deemed the exercise as helpful and I really love what came out it. Reading it almost every day has been empowering, and I plan on continuing in this vein. I want to live a happy and empowered life, to make decisions from my heart, not from my hurt, and to transform my view of everything about me that seems to me as broken into blessings, or gifts for myself and those around me. I hope that doesn't sound silly, grandiose, or egoic. I hope it sounds true, because this is what I mean it to be; true and healing. The experience, both times with the workshops, have been healing ones for me. I am grateful for the work that the organization does and I am grateful for the ways in which the workshops have begun transforming my mindset.

i.
-----------------------------------
I choose to let others be where they are without expecting them to live up to their promises or my hopes, wants, or expectations.
I choose to enjoy my own company.
I choose to make myself the beautiful meals I would make for a lover.
I choose to love what I have considered my deepest faults.
I choose to believe that the colors green, orange, and red seeping in through the window blinds as the sun rises as healing colors. I see them, and they are healing my deepest wounds.
I choose to believe that I am as wise and strong and powerful and beautiful as the sign on my door says I am -- the one I read just before leaving my house.
-------------------------------------

I hope you are all well, whoever is reading this.
Peace.

Story Collecting

During the last portion of my undergraduate degree in writing, I decided to take an interpersonal communications class. Among all the things I learned, familial story telling intrigued me the most. I learned that families could become close-knit by telling each other their stories. A close-knit family is something I have craved since I was a kid. Both sides of my family are spread across the country, literally, and none of us keep in regular, open contact, let alone tell stories about our lives to each other. We know little about each other over our impressions of who we are. The impressions are something, certainly, but without experience of another, there is no or little rapport.

I want a rapport with my family members. Because of this want and this knowledge that stories can build family closeness, I decided to take another class about writing biographies. I had an urge to become a story collector, to compile the stories into a volume for my family members to share. I wanted to contact my aunties and uncles, what grandparents were left, and have conversations with their great-great grandchildren. This became overwhelming to me, not only because of the long lists that began accumulating in my mind of persons with whom I wanted to contact, but because those I contacted were hesitant, closed, almost unwilling to share the stories that I asked for. I related that we could just remember the good things, the happy times, fun quirks and tall tales if there were any, but the hesitancy remained. I was even told to just "make stuff up."

I almost gave up then. Of course, I needed to complete my assignments for the class, else fail, so I inserted some fiction.

During that time, I consulted my mother a lot. Out of all the people I interviewed, she was the most open to share. In fact, she gushed. I couldn't keep up, and I had to call back many times with questions to fill in the gaps.

I know that my Mom wants to write a book sometime about her life, and I think she should do so. I am not sure if she has put word to pages, yet. I do know that she is eager every time I call to ask her about her memories. Because of my mother's eagerness, I decided to start a series of interviews and poems related to her stories. It's a way for both of us to satisfy something. I can deepen the relationship between my mother and I through story telling, and we together can begin putting her life to pages.

Sometimes I feel as if I am doing something wrong, that she should begin her book, and I should leave her stories untouched until she is ready to write them. The trouble with someone else writing your stories, is that there will always be another filter through which the story is being told.

One example is the first poem of the collection I am writing for my Mom from her stories, called "Mermaid," which documents some images from her time in Okinawa during the Vietnam war. My mother commented to me that her time in Okinawa was one of the happiest times in her life. It wasn't enough for me to document the images she related as just that. I applied my own irony, my own filter, and then published the work.

The poem was published last year in the online poetry magazine called Pirene's Fountain, and follows:

Mermaid

When Mom wasn’t making cakes
or practicing her off island dialect
of Japanese to the scowling market ladies,
when she wasn’t taking classes on ikebana,
when my sister and I were not at school
on the Kadena air force base,
she drove us across Okinawa.
We’d hang out of the windows,
hair plastered to our necks, enthralled
by green on green, terraces and vineyards and jungles
green, women with baskets on their heads
traveling down the road in their bare feet.
We passed cart-driven men, their ox carrying
bundles of sugarcane. We left them in dust,
giggled as we passed, waved and smiled,
pointed until Mom made us stop.

These were the best times for me:
When the car arrived at the reef,
after we’d seen the oranges, yellows,
and the reds of the sun setting over the water,
after fried chicken and Nehi soda,
after the first sighting of stars,
we hunted cowries with our flashlights,
the drying starfish and conk shells there.
We found shells nicked by seagull beaks,
with something inside of them, still living.
We found sea glass, coins, trinkets, sand
dollars and oyster shells.

One night there was a woman
balanced on a rock over the water.
She was just sitting there, running
a comb through her impossible length
of hair. At first I thought
her a mermaid, but her feet
folded to her side like arms
hugging in close. Her tattered
skirt and ill-fitted blouse
waved in the cooling night.
Her hair, greyed-black, whipped
at the rock, just as the air force jets
sped across the sky on their courses
to and from Vietnam.

She became a silhouette against the sunset,
etched behind my eyes, forever.