Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Martin Espada's "Alabanza"

Transcript of Martin Espada’s ‘Alabanza’
Produced by Francesca Rheannon

TRAX: Martin Espada is America's best-known Latino poet. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957 of Puerto Rican parents, he's the author of seven poetry collections. His latest, Alabanza, published by Norton in 2003, was named an American Library Notable Book of the Year. An earlier collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread, won an American Book Award. He's received numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley award, the Pen Revson Fellowship, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Harpers, the Nation, and The Best American Poetry.*
I spoke to him on the occasion of the second anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center. He told me that he had wanted to write a poem after the tragedy, but the event was too overwhelming to encompass in its entirety. So he chose to address one small part of it:

AX: I began looking at the situation particularly of the food service workers killed that day, particularly the members of a union called HEAR Local 100, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees 100. And they lost 43 members in one restaurant, called Windows On The World, on the 107th floor of Tower One. Many of these workers were undocumented and they were invisible in life and even more invisible in death. Indeed, some of their families couldn't even come forward to collect benefits or even to grieve publicly with everyone else, because of their fear that they would be punished by the government because of their illegal status. I should say that "Alabanza" is the title and key word in the poem. It means "praise" in Spanish and it comes from the verb "alabar', which means, among other things, to celebrate with words.
[reads poem]

TRAX: Espada was pleased when he heard back from the union:

AX: One of the proudest moments I've had as a poet was when I received a letter in October in 2002 from the executive board of HEAR Local 100, signed by everyone on that board, expressing their gratitude for the poem and actually calling it "a unique kind of assistance". So that was very important to me. You know, we all choose our own particular way of remembering, our own particular way of grieving, and this was what I did.

Poet Martin Espada, reading his 9/11 elegy, Alabanza.

(*note: information about Espada taken from Poets.org at www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=250 and from Espada's website at www.martinespada.net)