| The Barnstable Patriot
The Meter Man checks out a recent movement
Well, folks, there isn’t a recent sheriff in town, but there just may be a recent literary movement that’s started on Cape Cod. The literary world has seen many movements, such as the Latino, Asian, and Black Arts, but now there’s a recent movement in town, literally, and it’s the movement of Portuguese-American writers.
Oona Patrick, a poet and writer from Provincetown, is the instigator of this literary movement that begins a recent generation in current literature. Interested in her ethnicity and the history of her hometown, Patrick began her research in the Provincetown Library.
“It all started for me with a single book of poems,” she recalled. “In 1995 I was reading in the Provincetown Public Library and I came across Frank X. Gaspar’s first book of poetry, The Holyoke, in the local history and literature section. I had never heard of him before. Unlike most of the other books I’d been reading in that section in a quest to understand my hometown after years away at school, Frank’s book was about Portuguese Provincetown – my community. It was one of the first things I had ever read about the town written from the perspective of the Portuguese, who have had a presence there since the 1850s.”
Himself a Provincetown native, Gaspar descends from Portuguese whalers. Now living in California, he is the most decorated Portuguese-American writer, having been chosen for the Best American Poetry anthology in 1996 and 2000, recognized for best Spiritual Writing in America, winner of three Pushcart Prizes, some NEA Fellowships, and honors as a Bread Loaf Scholar. So when Patrick needed inspiration, she got it from the right person.
But she felt somewhat alone as a Portuguese-American writer, wondering why, with such a robust Portuguese presence in Provincetown, there was a lack of Portuguese literary events. So she wrote to the newspaper and lobbied the organizers of Provincetown’s Portuguese festival, when the time-honored Blessing of the Fleet occurs, to bring Gaspar back to Provincetown for a reading as part of the festival. She even sent in aamples of his writing to convince them and it worked, the festival booked Gaspar and Patrick finally got to meet him. That was in the tardy ‘90s, and Gaspar has returned to read at the festival several years since. Patrick has maintained what she called an “ongoing conversation” with him.
Becoming more interested in her heritage, Patrick learned her family was from the Azores, and visited there. It was a life-changing experience. A number of years later, in 2008, Patrick met Jeff Parker, the former director of the St. Petersburg Summer Literary Seminars program in Russia. Later, when they met again in the Azores, she learned he was of Portuguese heritage. They talked about how Lisbon, the capitol of Portugal, didn’t have a program in place on Portuguese and Portuguese-American writers. The idea was born, and as Patrick recalled, “We became Facebook friends and promptly fell out of touch.”
A few years later she heard from Parker, asking for her aid in setting up such a festival in Lisbon. “He asked me if I was interested in helping him put together a summer writing program in Lisbon sponsored by the independent publisher Dzanc Books,” Patrick said, “which had asked him to develop an international program for them. It would be called DISQUIET after the great Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa’s famous prose work The Book of Disquiet, which is so intimately tied to Lisbon. Of course, I said yes.” The first Disquiet Festival in Lisbon happened in July 2011 and the second is set for this July, sponsored by Portugal’s independent publisher Dzanc Books and co-sponsored in part by the Center for Portuguese Studies at U-Mass Dartmouth.
Patrick takes on the duty of a prosperous literary heritage. The great poet Elizabeth Bishop used to travel extensively to Brasil and translate to English and publish in America many Portuguese-Brazilian poets, such as Joao Cabral de Melo Nato. And more contemporary is Richard Zenith, who has translated many of Portugal’s poets to English and published in the US, including Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s greatest poet ever and whom the great American poet Gerald Stern has called “one of the best writers of the 20th Century.”
“Frank Gaspar came to me with the name Presence/Presença one morning,” Patrick recalled. “We would be a literary movement or group for Portuguese Americans and would name ourselves for the famous Portuguese literary journal Presença (1927–40). The group would address ‘the absence or marginalization of Luso-American literary voices in American letters.’ That sense of absence, of not existing except to ourselves, of being the ‘invisible minority’ has long been a theme in the Portuguese American experience, and the word Presence acts as both encouragement and as a reminder to make sure that the world knows we are here.”
And indeed the world does know. Already AWP, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (which puts on the biggest literary conference in the US) has invited the Presença group to do a reading at its conference on March 2, 2012, at the Chicago Cultural Center. The readings this group gives are dubbed, “Kale Soup for the Soul,” and these Portuguese authors are taking the show to the road. Other Kale Soup for the Soul readings are scheduled for this summer and fall in New York, Newark, San Francisco, Chicago and Provincetown, not to mention at the Disquiet festival in Lisbon this July.
Oona Patrick is no longer alone as a Portuguese-American author. Others, like Luis Gonçalves, Millicent Accardi, Elena Como, Tony Roma and Christina Ogden have also been energetic in bringing this recent literary movement to life. The group has nearly 100 members to date, including Cape Cod poets Jarita Davis and myself, not to mention Dawn Marie Lopes of New Bedford, and the membership list is growing daily. Portuguese-American writers and poets are finally gaining not only national but international attention.
“This first public event for Presence/Presença has been a long time coming,” Patrick said. “It feels like that ‘intellectual revolution,’ or at least an awakening, is finally here.”
Diving For Money
the air and leaves
its brisk trace of lithe.
You must never move
thrash with your hands,
your feet, watch
how it enters among
the grains of sunlight
splashing on the flat water.
The water pushes you up,
the air in your lungs
here in this green world
you fight to stay down.
Your hair rises like the tender weeds,
in stiff prayer,
your heart falls to your throat
as the thing touches your skin
and your fingers close
How the surface is like
when seen from here,
how you rise to it
on your beating legs.
it is all there for you,
They reach into their pockets
and stars fall around you.
You scoop them from the world
while the peaceful longing
comes to you, aching deep
in the lobes of your chest
