Juan Felipe Herrera is an author of 29 books that include poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and young adult novels. A graduate of the University of California in Los Angeles, Stanford University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and has garnered many awards, among them the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, the PEN USA Award, the Josephine Miles PEN Oakland Award, and the Latino Hall of Fame Award in Poetry. He is professor of creative writing at the University of California in Riverside. Herrera is currently California’s Poet Laureate and was just named the top honor of serving as the next U.S. Poet Laureate. We are honored to have an essay he wrote on the power of reading included in our Open a World of Possible collection.
"Ahhh, Behhh, Cehhh,” I repeated out loud, ambling sideways through the streets of Escondido, California, at the age of five, tuning my voice to my mother’s as she read me the first three letters of the alphabet from a late 1800s Spanish primer she had discovered at La Segunda, the local second-hand store. It was like singing and almost like storytelling with a harmonica—like the one my father would jiggle in his hands making it flutter like a dove, and then sparkle and sizzle like a tiny orchestra of Texan accordionists as he paused and spoke about catching a train, at 14, to El Norte, the USA, in 1896. Letters and words and stories were all honey-coated música to me—until I was spanked in first grade for speaking in Spanish.
In third grade, in front of the class, after inviting me to sing (and after I yanked myself up from my desk after three years of silence), Mrs. Sampson said, “You have a beautiful voice.” Beautiful?
From that day forward, words and sentences and books, I discovered, when read and recited, could heal a tender heart. Even though we moved from barrio to barrio, reading became my place of rest, my garden. The more I read out loud, the more I played with words and dreamed up stories. Soon, I discovered that if I played softly, carefully, with words, I could write a poem. And if I read the poem to others, for others, I could inspire them—this became my life’s mission as a poet.
What is a poet’s garden? A poet is an intense reader who loves to read the same sentence many times to catch the kind notes of each letter, like the A that opens and flies by you like a flock of geese or the J that makes you smile when you pronounce it. Yet, most of all, a poet deeply listens while reading—to delight in the deep-inside stories and meanings. On rare occasions, someone speaks up and reveals his or her innermost story. That is when you write—write fast and slow and then go, writing until the poem is born, blossoms, and glows.
My brother-in-law, Roberto, a Vietnam War veteran, was a moody man. No one asked him why he was always so serious and jumpy. They knew it had to do with what he had experienced in that terrible conflict. But, what was it, really? After years had passed since his return from Vietnam, we sat down together and suddenly, he burst with his story. I scribbled it down after I came home—a poem with his words. He read and read it, over and over. Everyone in the family did. Even the Veterans of Foreign Wars local hall wanted copies. They poured over it, noticing its familiar volleys and voices about life and death. Reading—whether a poem or a personal remembrance or just one phrase, such as, “You have a beautiful voice”—can put a broken human being back together again.
These days, as California’s Poet Laureate, I amble through schools, libraries, and community centers throughout California inaugurating parks and new bridges rising tall over emerald-colored bays. At strawberry farms I give away books, trading stories with families until the moon comes up. Hear me call out the letters of the alphabet, like Mama did—A is for All, B is for Beautiful and C is for the new Challenge of this Century —to read all voices, in all languages, about all peoples.
ABC—it is that easy.
