This week’s ‘Poem of the Week’ comes courtesy of a Yale Younger Poets Prize winner, pulled from his recently released second collection Guillotine: ‘Córdoba’ by Eduardo C. Corral.
Corral, the son of Mexican immigrants, was born and raised in Arizona before attending Arizona State University for his undergrad degree and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (arguably the country’s best MFA program) for his Master of Fine Arts. As previously mentioned, Corral won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2011 for his first collection Slow Lightning, and the rest of his resume is just as impressive. His poems have been published in such diverse publications as Ambit, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry, amongst others, and he has received residencies from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has also won many awards, including a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the National Holmes Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Currently, Corral is an assistant professor in the MFA program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University, and he lives in Raleigh, NC.
Poetryfoundation.org praises Corral’s work for “seamlessly blending English and Spanish, [containing] tender treatments of history, and carefully exploring sexuality.” I couldn’t think of a more succinct way to put it either, and what I do have to say about him at large can be found in my review of his second collection Guillotine at this link. Of special note is to point out Corral's seamless blending of two different languages into one that flows from line to line. Throughout the first two collection’s he’s published, and other various poems that haven’t been collected yet, Corral writes in a way that some call Spanglish—he likes to write one line in Spanish and the next in English in the same poem, and in others he mashes them together in the same line, serving a truer sense of the way that language is spoken in many Latinx communities and throughout America today. He forces English-speakers to understand what he is saying in Spanish through context clues or by making them translate the poems themselves using their own means instead of doing it for them like some translated foreign collections of poetry, and it’s a rewarding job to do if you don’t already know Spanish before coming to his poems.
In ‘Córdoba,’ a simple but stunning poem, we see several of Corral’s recurring themes within thirteen lines—self-reflection, self-shaming, memory and the pain that can be associated with it, and queerness. The poem, when read literally, is about a man looking at his reflection in a mirror, gazing at himself in a way that is contemplative, reflective. He is in a room that, according to the description of ‘turquoise walls,’ takes readers to the bathrooms of Arizona and New Mexico, places in America obsessed with their turquoise-spattered landscapes, and the same places where much of Guillotine take place. He is simply staring at himself, wondering who he is and what he is doing at the moment, and he feels a sense of identity starting to wash over him. He needs to brush his hands, perhaps, try to stanch the bleeding of his thumb after cutting it on something small, and he came into the bathroom to do no more. But now, standing in front of the mirror, studying himself, he sees something beyond a simple glance, a reflection that we often have in times of sorrow or excitement, times when we take a step back in the middle of an otherwise normal day and suddenly ask ourselves who we are.
Underneath the thirteen lines is a very melancholic feeling, one that is drenched in shame and memory and the despair that comes with being queer in a family where that isn’t welcomed. By speaking about how he cannot touch his reflection, the speaker is reminded of the times when he was told by his father that men do not touch men, a trait that was mostly enforced throughout the Western world at large prior to the 21st century. But now, in today’s society, where younger generations are seeing the follies of their parents and grandparents and the absolute stupidity of their prejudices, people in their teens and twenties and thirties are now being able to be themselves without having to hide who they are, loving who they love and being with whom they choose, no matter the gender of each partner. At the same time, family will always be family, and there is always the sting of rejection and disappointment when you go against what your family tells you to do or when you realize how bigoted they can be with some of their views. The speaker, by not allowing himself to touch his own reflection in the mirror, signals to us that he is still wrestling with complicated queer feelings and how to look at them and either embrace or reject them through the lens of family and memory. It’s a beautiful but dark closing to such a simple poem, and it forces readers to linger on its idea of painful familial ties and mental health related to sexuality.
To read the collection where this poem came from, request a hold for pick-up from our catalog here, or buy it from Amazon here or locally here.
'Córdoba'
In a bathroom
with turquoise walls,
my reflection bleeds. I reach
to clean, with my thumb,
an oval mirror speckled
with toothpaste
& smeared now,
with penicillin-rich blood,
then I remember--
pull back my left hand.
I don't touch mirrors. It's wrong,
my father always said,
to touch a man.
Comments