“Tat Your Black Holes Into Paradise”: Lorna Dee Cervantes and a Poetics of Loss

Published over twenty years ago, Emplumada (1981), Lorna Dee Cervantes's first collection, was very well received; critics thought it marked the "threshold of a new phase for Chicano literature" describing a "world simply built by feminine ancestors" (Madrigal 137; Saldivar 87). Her work was groundbreaking because of its multiplicity and specificity of voice: it included female, Chicana, and working-class perspectives. Her second collection, From the Cables of Genodde: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991), also received literary prizes (among them the Latino Literature Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize), but was not so widely reviewed, nor has it been written about as often. (1) Perhaps one reason for the lack of critical attention to From the Cables of Genodde has to do with its departure in style from Emplumada. Where her first collection was very forthright, the second is slippery. Its range is broader and more self-consciously literary at the same time that it is adamantly Chicana, female, and working class. This self-conscious positioning of poetic voice, however, is not apparent on the surface of the collection; indeed Cervantes's careful development of deferral as a poetic strategy resists the claims of certainty that often shape readings of politically engaged poetry. This strategy of poetic deferral is created by both poetic form, the manipulations of enjambments and of the apostrophe, as well as content, the structuring tropes of love and hunger that embody recurring cycles of want and fulfillment. This deferral of certainty helps conceptualize historical loss and portray the absence of a clear, unbroken relationship to the past; yet rather than monumentalizing the dead, the poetry reimagines the significance of such a loss. Further, as structuring and thematic tropes, love and hunger offer a model of reading that values the evolution of meaning over time and encourages points of connection that are contingent and constantly revised, rather than fixed and permanent. Cervantes's continual stylistic deferral, most explicit in her manipulation of enjambed lines, reveals a prevalent postponement of meaning, desire, and certainty that creates productive tensions and multiplicities of meaning. In From the Cables of Genodde, love and hunger define each other as mutually constitutive drives. The poems refuse the monologic and the certain in favor of the polyglotic and the open-ended. Cervantes's sustained formal and syntactical ambiguities shape a poetics of loss as a negative space, like that which forms the patterns and intricacies of lace, knit by "lint-faced mothers" whom she urges to "tat [their] black holes into paradise" (42). These black holes, then, represent the possibility inherent in the refusal to replace what is lost, opting instead to consider those gaps as integral to the cultural and aesthetic fabric. Absence is not psychoanalytic lack, but possibility. We need not replace that which is lost, but create art and subsequently meaning around it. Indeed, as this line suggests, love and hunger are the threads of connection that knit together a poetics of loss, a structure that maintains difference and absence within itself. This poetic strategy is central to conceptualizing how Cervantes can "claim canons [and] cannons" (44), not only a place in American literary history, but also a clearly resistant Chicana subjectivity. In these poems solidarity depends not on a sympathetic sameness, but on an empathetic difference, developed in the formal strategies Cervantes employs. As a lyric poet, Cervantes explores the identificatory possibilities of the apostrophe, yet at the same time she resists an easy solidarity between reader and poem. The reader is simultaneously hailed by the poems' second person address ("you"), while pondering the relationship between the speaker and her subject. The reader's identification, then, is fragmentary and incomplete. The indigenous past invoked by Cervantes appears not as the promise of restoration, but as fragments articulated in relationship to a globalized range of myth and literature--the result of colonization, genocide, and the neocolonial relations of global capitalism. …