On Sept. 26, local poet Adela Najarro will be honored with an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her volcanic book of poetry, Variations in Blue. The American Book Awards recognize “outstanding literary achievement.”
Published by Red Hen, a widely recognized independent press, the book moves in multiple directions—among them Najarro’s survival of a 10-year relationship marked by domestic violence and her evocation of the Nicaragua from which her family emerged.
The motif that defines the book is the volcano, not just because of Nicaragua’s volcanic landscape.
With recovery from domestic violence, Najarro explained in an interview with Good Times, “part of that trajectory is anger. And so the roiling lava totally fits the anger that I feel. But at the same time, that lava pours out onto the landscape and forms new land.”
Through the poems, lava becomes “the female essence,” she said, “because it’s power, it’s anger, and it’s life-giving.”
She first imagined the book as built around Nicaragua’s 13 volcanoes, but then discovered that lava was a metaphor with many meanings. It speaks to Nicaragua’s fraught political history as well as the way it is a home for poetry.
As she writes in “Volcanic Poetics,” “Poems are his legacy/a lava-filled past/that percolated a revolution/of sound…”
For complex personal and political reasons, she has not been able to visit Nicaragua since she was a teenager, but she reinvents Nicaragua through the poems, several of which are in the voices of her parents.
The centrality of poetry in Nicaragua is part of her inheritance.
“Nicaragua is the land of poets,” she says, recounting her mother’s stories of going regularly to poetry recitals. During the Sandinista era, the revolutionary government was actively committed to the pursuit of poetry, and Ernesto Cardenal, a poet, was minister of culture.
Najarro’s poetry is democratic. She is committed to accessibility, saying that she wanted her poems to be understood.
“But I also wanted them to be complex and lyrical and multi-layered.”
They are poems that bridge the divide between spoken-word and written poetry, retaining the most musical elements of each.
Dialogue is apparent in her poems to and about her parents, about art, even about Cardenal himself. Her ekphrastic poems—poems about art—create a third form, a new incarnation for the art piece, painted with words.
Even the title, Variations in Blue, is dialogic; it alludes to Rubén Darío’s book Azul. Darío was the Nicaraguan poet who launched the Spanish-language modernist movement and held various public roles in the country.
Among the significant elements of Najarro’s work is her commitment to community.
As she puts it, “One of the things I’ve learned about being Latina in the United States is that family, friendship, community, caring, sharing—those cultural values—matter.”
While serving as an instructor of English at Cabrillo, she worked in the Puente Project, which supports educationally underserved students in transferring to four-year colleges, and also served on the Chicano/Latino Affairs Council.
She is part of Emerald Street Poets in Santa Cruz, participates with Writers of Color in Santa Cruz County and is active with Círculo de Poetas & Writers, which has just produced its 10th anniversary anthology.
Among the reasons she is involved with groups of writers, she says, is to develop her writing.
“In order to make your writing better, you have to see how it’s received and what other people think. And it has to be in situations or in groups where you trust people.”
“I reach out to many, many different groups. But it goes back to my culture that told me or taught me that community matters, that being with other people is what makes life meaningful.”
Najarro will read with Writers of Color, Santa Cruz County, at the Museum of Art & History on Oct. 7. The reception starts at 6 p.m. and the program begins at 6:30 p.m.
Other notable writers scheduled to read include Shirley Ancheta, Victoria Bañales, Farnaz Fatemi, Claudia Melendez and Shirley Flores Muñoz.
The Círculo de Poetas & Writers Anthology Book Tour’s first two stops will be in Santa Cruz at Satori Arts, Sept. 22 and Oct. 27 at 7 p.m.
