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“I am your memory now” reads a line from Villanueva’s “At the Holocaust Museum. Washington D.C.” The note is bracing as it remembers European calamity. Memory, however, holds not just for the one poem in the Villanueva oeuvre but a whole roster—varying threads of remembrance across a life of Chicano roots, America and Americas beyond Texas, and Europe. This is remembrance in English and Spanish, but also languages inner and personal, public and historical. In the interview we conducted for MELUS (vol. 35, no. 1, 2010), he goes as far as to speak of “memory as muse, memory as identity.” The essay at hand seeks to take up these touchstones, the accomplishments of memorial voice in each of the collections starting with Hay Otra Voz Poems (1968–1971) (1972) and poems like “Pachuco Remembered” and his “Chicano Is an Act of Defiance: In Memoriam a Rubén Salazar.” Shaking Off the Dark (1984, 1998) carries both memory of the past in “Nuestros abuelos” and, as it were, the memory of now in “Speak Up, Chicano, Speak Up.” Crónica de mis años peores (1987, 1994) offers the symptomatic “Dejar de recordar no puedo” [I can’t stop remembering] with its axis of self-becoming. Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993) “resees” the film through a memorial Latino lens, especially “The Fight Scene.” One of the collection’s closing poems, “The Slow Weight of Time,” offers a gloss as to working memory. Primera Causa / First Cause (1999), which opens with a quotation from Carl Jung on memory (translated by Villanueva), gathers intimacies like “Memory That Never Ends” and “May Memory Help Me / Que me valga la memoria” into a parallel English/Spanish chapbook. With So Spoke Penelope (2013), Villanueva remembers The Odyssey and the figure of Penelope as she, in her turn, remembers Odysseus and their life’s interval and rejoining. “I write out my heart’s memory,” says the poet in “Something Beyond Light” in Shaking Off the Dark. Memory, to be sure, is not the only dynamic in Villanueva’s poetry, but it has been a wholly major source of his imagining. It invites due map.

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Heart’s Memory: The Remembrances of Tino Villanueva

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • A. Robert Lee

摘要

“I am your memory now” reads a line from Villanueva’s “At the Holocaust Museum. Washington D.C.” The note is bracing as it remembers European calamity. Memory, however, holds not just for the one poem in the Villanueva oeuvre but a whole roster—varying threads of remembrance across a life of Chicano roots, America and Americas beyond Texas, and Europe. This is remembrance in English and Spanish, but also languages inner and personal, public and historical. In the interview we conducted for MELUS (vol. 35, no. 1, 2010), he goes as far as to speak of “memory as muse, memory as identity.” The essay at hand seeks to take up these touchstones, the accomplishments of memorial voice in each of the collections starting with Hay Otra Voz Poems (1968–1971) (1972) and poems like “Pachuco Remembered” and his “Chicano Is an Act of Defiance: In Memoriam a Rubén Salazar.” Shaking Off the Dark (1984, 1998) carries both memory of the past in “Nuestros abuelos” and, as it were, the memory of now in “Speak Up, Chicano, Speak Up.” Crónica de mis años peores (1987, 1994) offers the symptomatic “Dejar de recordar no puedo” [I can’t stop remembering] with its axis of self-becoming. Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993) “resees” the film through a memorial Latino lens, especially “The Fight Scene.” One of the collection’s closing poems, “The Slow Weight of Time,” offers a gloss as to working memory. Primera Causa / First Cause (1999), which opens with a quotation from Carl Jung on memory (translated by Villanueva), gathers intimacies like “Memory That Never Ends” and “May Memory Help Me / Que me valga la memoria” into a parallel English/Spanish chapbook. With So Spoke Penelope (2013), Villanueva remembers The Odyssey and the figure of Penelope as she, in her turn, remembers Odysseus and their life’s interval and rejoining. “I write out my heart’s memory,” says the poet in “Something Beyond Light” in Shaking Off the Dark. Memory, to be sure, is not the only dynamic in Villanueva’s poetry, but it has been a wholly major source of his imagining. It invites due map.