Formative Influence

I was the first in my family to leave for college, and I arrived at my first college apartment with a dresser and one of the bunk beds that had been mine since I was a child. I was still seventeen, and I had an interest in writing that was about as old as that furniture, but my interest was vague and exploratory. In those first years, I was taken with the spare approach in Raymond Carver's stories, and I was fascinated by the visceral blare of Hubert Selby, Jr. I read and re-read Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero (1985) (after seeing the film, if I'm to be honest) because there were scenes set in the shabbier side of Hollywood and because the novel opened with a quotation from "The Have Nots," a song by the Los Angeles rock band X, whose album Under the Big Black Sun (1982) was one of my favorites. The quotation made me feel that Ellis and I must have had something in common, but each time I read the book, I could see more and more that this impression wasn't true.

During that time, much of my reading was reading in search of traction, and it's fairly easy to say that I was adrift then. I didn't have an author or two after which I might model myself, someone who was doing it in such a way that made it seem I could do it too. I began fumbling around with prose poems, and around this time, a sympathetic professor suggested I read Gary Soto. I went to the library and found his poetry among the stacks. This work—especially the poems in his first three books and especially those in Black Hair—was the writing with which I connected with most directly and personally during that formative time. This encounter was a turning point.

As I read through the book, I took note of Soto's steady attention to money, to the shortage of it, and I most saw myself in the lean experiences that he had captured. I'm from a working-class and predominantly Chicano city outside of Los Angeles, a place where being Chicano or Mexican wasn't talked about much because it was a given part of our existences. But people did talk about money, and so I grew up feeling more attuned to issues of economic class, to the ramifications of economic class on my day-to-day life. In this way, Soto's poems felt true to my experiences. Poems such as "Landscape in Spring" and "How to Sell Things" and "Learning to Bargain" and "Eating Bread" became comforts to me, confirmations that the possibility for good writing existed in what I had already seen and done.

Black Hair also features "Oranges," one of Soto's more renowned poems, about a boy's experience with a girl he's looking to impress. The boy only has a nickel for a chocolate bar that costs a dime, but he manages to get the chocolate for the girl by substituting an orange as payment. The poem closes outside the shop, with the image of the girl unwrapping the candy while the boy peels an orange:

                so bright againstThe gray of DecemberThat, from some distance,Someone might have thoughtI was making a fire in my hands.

With this image, Soto finds a modestly triumphant moment in a cultural landscape so often defined by hardship, taking the melancholy feel of winter and employing it to make the orange vibrant and important.

I also noted that when references to Mexican or Chicano or Chicana culture occurred in Soto's poems, they seemed seamless to me, an organic product of the instance on the page rather than the writer flashing his or her membership card. For example, in the collection's title poem, Hector Moreno is a baseball player idolized by the speaker of the poem, a Mexican boy. The understanding that Moreno is also Mexican is balanced...