Letter to Cole Swensen from Zihuatanejo  --by Luke Breit 

"I only wish I'd studied Latin more in school
so I could have understood more."
       Vice President Dan Quayle, 
       commenting on his trip to Latin America. 

Dear Cole, 

Finally back in a country that respects its poets, lying on 
the beach, knowing how deep 
words have been spoken here. 
A few months ago, an article on the front page of 
the Sunday New York Times Magazine 
told of how Latin American governments 
parade their new policies past their poets and writers 
before unveiling them publicly, to make sure they will be 
acceptable to beloved poets and thus to the people. 
Small wonder, 
in countries where children strew flowers in the paths 
of their great poets, 
where the poets are ambassadors to other nations 
or where, like now in Nicaragua, 
made part of the government itself. 
Imagine Reagan calling Gary Snyder, saying, 
"Gary, let me run this new welfare idea by you," 
and Snyder saying, "Just a minute, Ron, let me finish 
the line I'm working on."  No, as we know too well, 
in the U.S. poets suffer neither prison nor castigation, 
just the profound indifference of benign neglect. 
Meanwhile, the language atrophies and dies.  Politicians 
think the schools don't teach enough math and science 
while the children themselves have no language left 
to let us know of their screaming inside, sick with 
the cancers of television and fast food.  Your work 
with Poets-In-The-Schools has taught you 
how doors are opened
for the kids by teaching them the language of the heart. 
so I send you in this aerogram 
the Mexico of my soul,
this land where the hills are soaked in language, 
in nuance, in subtlety, 
where the beauty of the spoken word 
has not been diminished by television's homogenization, 
and where words are not stricken from the vocabulary 
because some group finds them offensive; 
I send you the desire I have to know this language again, 
this language of Neruda and Lorca, 
of Vallejo and Hernandez, 
of Paz, Marquez and Borges, and more, 
I send you what I wish 
every poet in our nation could have, 
what every Latin American poet has always known, 
the knowledge of how crucial it is to keep thrusting 
the language of truth into the jaws 
of the language of deception, 
to make each word resound with dignity and strength, 
to hold up the sky with these pillars of human sound. 


Copyright Luke Breit