Where do you go when facing an extremely painful situation in life? In my last book of poems, Massacre of the Dreamers, two children, facing too much pain at home, decide to escape to the world of Westerns. The world of movies, of popular heroes and their adventures, seems a good way to escape at the beginning but soon their dreams turns into a nightmare.
Massacre of the Dreamers
In this book, really a novel in verse, I pay homage to heroes like Sitting Bull, the wild West, and even to Buffalo Bill, who come to us through the frightful images created by two children trying to survive their childhood. The latter character was always specially fascinating to me. For e.e. cummings, Buffalo Bill symbolized and embodied death and destruction. The critic David Ray stated that this character symbolizes the destruction of the land, the destruction of the culture of the natives, the poet’s childhood and, in many ways, cummings blamed Buffalo Bill “for disappointing both his expectations of childhood and of America, for delivering him rather treacherously to a tawdry world of cheapened values.”
Custodio Writes the Dreams
In my book of poems, one of the children, Custodio, takes on the challenge of witnessing and writing those visions. Little by little, step by step, he uncovers not only the nightmares of Westerns but comes to terms with the reality of his own childhood. Ultimately these poems are a homage to survivors, to writing and to the power of creativity to transform suffering into beauty, chaos into insight. Ron Hansen, in the introduction to the book, writes “both [Juan and I] are fans of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the American frontier outlaw shot down by Sheriff Pat Garret in 1881. But Juan’s poems are more frightening, tragic, and heartbreaking for being, like dreams themselves, so seemingly authentic yet strange, and penetratingly experienced by wildly imaginative children.” If you want to download or read more about the book, check out this link: http://www.coleccionconjurados.es/MASACRE/index.htm
Now it’s your turn to meditate on your own dreams and transformations.
- Where do you go when facing extreme pain in your life?
- How do you use writing for transformation and insight in your life?
It is through the use of our creative energies that we can redeem and transform our difficulties through understanding and action. Meditate on those difficult moments and write about them.
Juan