Reflections through the Convex Mirror of Time / Reflexiones tras el Espejo Convexo del Tiempo: Poems in Remembrance of the Spanish Civil War / Poemas en Recuerdo de la Guerra Civil Española

PROLOGUE

Ernesto Antonio Mares, ¡Presente!

Enrique R. Lamadrid

One could wonder about Tony Mares’s lifelong obsession with the Spanish Civil War. Born in 1938, his earliest memories beyond his family and barrio were of World War II. Later, he realized that the fratricidal conflict in Spain was its first chapter, a touchstone of geopolitics both before and after. As a young child in San Felipe de Neri parochial school in the Old Town neighborhood of Albuquerque, New Mexico, teacher-priests fresh from Franco’s Spain forced him to his knees to give thanks to God for the great victory against the Reds.

This collection is a kind of palimpsest where Mares as poet and historian writes himself and humanity itself back into the picture. For him the war, with its dramatic and intense qualities, is a convex mirror where we can see ourselves as beings who fight a civil war within our very selves (xix). He dramatically positions himself as one of the Fallen Angels of Spain in the poem of that title:

He wanted to write a panoramic vision

of the Spanish Civil War,

the perfect poem about the war,

the poem with wings to cover

the distance between then and now.

He listened to the news the wind carried.

Through the train’s windows

falcons flew in searching for their prey.

Songs from the 1930s

mixed with Bob Dylan and Silvio Rodríguez.

Mares charts his own poetic genealogy—Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, and Ángel González—on the Spanish shore. A section in the poemario chronicles the death of Lorca through the sad lives of his killers, who tried, but failed, to assassinate art. The central metaphor is the convex mirror in which the poet deeply inhabits the periphery as witness and agent. As a seer in a context of history as prophecy, Mares shares the space with poets from American shores like Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo. This collection is Tony’s España en el Corazón, but the great Vallejo had already claimed that title during the same war.

Four angels loom over the ruins: the Fallen Angel of the Retiro (a sculpture of Lucifer in the gardens of El Prado); the Angel of Tenerife, a hideous monument to Francisco Franco; the apocalyptic Exterminating Angel of Comillas in a cemetery on the Cantabrian coast of Spain; and Ángel González, the greatest Spanish poet of his generation. By the end of his life, Tony effectively joins them.

In her critical epilogue, Susana Rivera, a leading critic of posguerra (postwar) Spanish poetry, places Mares in the same literary generation as her husband, Ángel González, despite the "mares—the seas that divide and unite Europe with America. With the words of poet Blas de Otero, she deems him a fiercely human angel" (un ángel fieramente humano) who channeled his anger and compassion to write beautiful poems for the sake of humanity.

In his research, fieldwork, and poems, Tony revisited the battlefields and scenes of the crimes against democracy, against humanity, and against art. In his touching prologue, poet and critic Fernando Martín Pescador recounts Tony’s visit to the Belchite battlefield site and the Virgen del Pilar with his own father, Marcelo. Astonishing miracles, large and small, keep hope alive, like the unexploded bombs in the Basilica of Zaragoza, hung from a wall near the Virgen on her pillar. But Mares did not believe in miracles.

Tony lived his life between languages, faithful to both English and Spanish, the twin flames as poet Levi Romero asserts—or, as social philosopher Tomás Atencio used to say, "El mismo guante nomás que al revés (It is the same glove, only turned inside out). He was fully armed with two tongues, two hammers, two wings, and he marshaled the poetic resources of both. Some poems emerged first in Spanish and others first in English, but they are in full conversation, not just translations. Since symmetrical bilingualism is relatively rare, readers dominant in either language get to explore and engage the other with the flick of an eye. This is how Tony’s published poems have appeared in journals and anthologies—face to face / cara a cara.

Since the day my own father introduced me to him, Tony was once and forever "el poeta." I was intrigued that my father was about as much older than Tony as Tony was than me. It made for some interesting intergenerational conversations, rare in our age-segregated culture. They both studied with the exiled Spanish novelist Ramón Sender, who was a great hero to them. My father fled Spain in 1937 as a twelve-year-old with his aunt, brother, and sister, just ahead of the invading Republican armies that were storming the mountains of the Cantabrian coast. It had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with invasion, privation, and the insanity of war. Poetry proved to be the most effective antidote to it all.

I remember Tony from the Students for a Democratic Society meetings at the University of New Mexico and all the mobilization in protest of the Vietnam War. Paranoid times, since the scene was rife with infiltrators and provocateurs. SDS sponsored one of the first Albuquerque showings of Salt of the Earth, that dreadful, subversive film. It made us understand how seditious our very existence was. Then I drew number 10 on the first Vietnam draft lottery and got my letter to ship out. After consulting with my teachers, poets Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso, I staked a claim to conscientious objection based on the sanctity of all sentient things, including stars, rocks, trees, animals, and people. It was a line from one of Snyder’s poems. Tony was proud of that.

When I started pursuing Latin American poetry at the University of Southern California, Tony, Tomás Atencio, and Estevan Arellano visited me to attend the first Flor y Canto literary festival, my introduction to New Mexico’s illustrious cohort of off-the-grid thinkers, La Academia de la Nueva Raza. In 1974, by different paths, Tony and I ended up in a summer seminar in Madrid with Ángel González, the poet Gary Brower, and our wives. It was the first of several Iberian trips I enjoyed with Mares. In a military parade, from a balcony, we watched the Spanish army goose-step along the boulevards with their Nazi-styled helmets, an unsettling time warp that astonished us all. We were living nearby in a pensión on Cantarranas street in Lope de Vega’s old neighborhood near the Prado. Later we drove to Granada and Puebla de Cazalla, a small Andalusian town with a radical Flamenco deep-song festival. Tony was provoking the Guardia Civil officers around town, and it was all I could do to pull him by the collar and out of their way. After some wine, he would pound on their cars as they went by with their patent-leather hats.

I always appreciated the nature of Tony’s creative and social genius. He knew how to validate his fellow human beings in their quest to becoming themselves through action, through art. He could talk persuasively to dogs and cats. Children and adolescents loved his unselfish and generous attention. Yet his advice and recommendations were ever honest and sincere. His counsel broke through to people without offending them, like when he told the young poets in his groundbreaking online workshop, Writers’ Inn, Yes, your poem is great! But it isn’t as good as you think it is. Walk away, return, then work some more on it! Never give up.

In the end, as in the beginning, authorship is about authority through compassion. Not the false and shallow authority of political parties, universities, and bureaucracies, but the telluric and cultural authority of those who have sought out their voice and tested it against wind and waves. Like in Tony’s epic poem about Popay, the leader of the Great Pueblo Rebellion of 1680, his authority flowed to him from East, West, North, and South.

One afternoon in Madrid, Tony led me away from a guided tour of the San Antonio de la Florida chapel, filled with Goya frescoes and not far from the Casa de Campo and the university. Below the garden outside was a steep hillside that led to the bosque of the Río Manzanares. From those heights the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade heroically laid down their lives defending Madrid, democracy, and the Spanish Republic from the combined attacks of the Fascist armies that were soon to overcome the rest of Europe and change the course of all our lives forever.

PRÓLOGO

Ernesto Antonio Mares, ¡Presente!

Enrique R. Lamadrid

Se podría especular sobre la obsesión que tuvo Tony Mares por la Guerra Civil Española durante toda su vida. Nacido en 1938, sus primeras memorias más allá de su familia y barrio eran de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Después, se dio cuenta de que el conflicto fratricida en España había sido su primer capítulo, la piedra de toque de la geopolítica mundial tanto antes como después. De niño en la escuela parroquial de San Felipe de Neri en la Plaza Vieja de Albuquerque, Nuevo México, sus maestros sacerdotes recién llegados de la España de Franco le forzaban a arrodillarse para darle gracias a Dios por la gran victoria contra los Rojos.

Este poemario es una especie de palimpsesto donde Mares, como poeta e historiador, se inscribe a sí mismo y a la humanidad en el manuscrito. Para él la guerra, con sus cualidades dramáticas e intensas, es un espejo convexo en donde podemos vernos como seres que peleamos una guerra civil dentro de nosotros mismos (xxi). Se posiciona dramáticamente como uno de los Ángeles caídos de España en el poema de ese título:

Quería escribir una vista panorámica

de la Guerra Civil Española,

el poema perfecto de la guerra,

el poema con alas para atravesar

la distancia entre ayer y hoy.

Escuchó las noticias que traía el viento.

Entraban por las ventanillas del tren

halcones en busca de sus presas,

canciones de los años treinta

mezcladas con Bob Dylan y Silvio Rodríguez.

Mares traza su propia genealogía poética—Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado y Ángel González—en el terreno español. Una sección del poemario narra la muerte de Lorca a través de la triste vida de sus asesinos que intentaron matar al arte, pero fracasaron. La metáfora central es el espejo convexo en que el poeta habita las profundidades de su periferia como testigo y agente. Cual vidente en un contexto de historia como profecía, Mares comparte el espacio con poetas del terreno americano como Pablo Neruda y César Vallejo. Esta colección es la "España