William McLeod Rivera

Cafe Select William McLeod Rivera

"Truth, a dominatrix/asserting love is all..." W. M. Rivera writes in "Prelude," one

of the opening poems in the book you are holding. Truth can be pleasurable, and

painful all at the same time, like love and sex. This exploration of truth and love as

double edged sword runs through

Cafe Select.

Rivera's poems are lusty gems,

there's a fighting spirit, and a wise one at work in these poems, sometimes wrestling

with itself, other times wrestling with the great spiritual chink in our armor, other

people and their influence upon us.

Rivera kinks it up in

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, and I'm not just talking about sado-masochistic sex, or

a lusty young couple in heat, the lines of these poems screw into each other creating

a dense tough lyricism that is coupled with gritty reality:

these 'sperm on the wing.'

Most won't make it.

Some end up in luxuriating in Rimbaud's bathtub boat

on a pond in Tuileries Gardens. Some labor

growing pains on death-row's dry concrete.

In suburbia most land on fertile ground.

Even the run-amucks multiply in manicured cracks.

Rivera's describing dandelions seeding into air in "Manicured Cracks," how most

won't make it, that the seeds of the weed, the most iconic of spring youth images,

faces a fate like all of us. They might live on to flower again, or they won't. As human

counterparts, many of us will die along the way, and often the worst of us, the

weeds, thrive. What I like is the music in Rivera's poems. The alliterative urge, the

hard consonant sounds, very much like later Seamus Heaney, acting like sharp

edges to confine and crib the lines and feet.

Poetry and art are created by privilege, and these poems are unabashed at their

modernist raiment made possible by a privileged life. Paris is both the geographical

and figurative heart of the book. Paris, the literal city, and Paris the epitome of cul-

ture. Rivera is at home on both fronts, and relies on music to drive his poetry for-

ward; the imagery, well that's extra sauce for the pudding, and whether he's

referring to the city of lights, to art in a gallery, or to ancient Occidental poem, it

doesn't matter. For Rivera their origins are the same. The urge to create, to be re-

born.