Vox Populi
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Jose Padua: My Definition of a Boombastic Poetry Style
Going up to bed early
on the night before
his first day of school for the year
our four year old son asks,
“Is Daddy coming up too?”
and my wife says,
“No he’s staying awake
to write poems,”
and our son says,
“Poor Daddy,”
because already at this
young age he understands that
poetry is a motherfucker
even though he
doesn’t yet know
how
to say it.
—
copyright 2015 Jose Padua
Photograph by Jose Padua
Vox Populi 
Jose Padua really knows how to weave golden threads and precious jewels around our common rituals and concerns. Today is Bastille Day and Jose understands the transference of power from the aristocrats to the people which occurred 226 years ago. Before Bastille day the arts were created for the aristocracy, but on July 14, 1789 the Sovereignty of Kings was suddenly cut-off and the throne was renamed the Sovereignty of the People; the exaltation of the common place. Jose Padua recites the same vision and hope for the common man as Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda’s. But Pablo Neruda a poet of the 20th century expressed his thoughts on what he saw was the mission of the modern poet, in his Nobel Prize Speech ” Towards a Splendid City: Hacia Una Ciudad Esplendida, which was the beauty of the common place.
( excerpt form Pablo Neruda’s Nobel Prize speech “Towards a Splendid City)
“The poet is not a “little god”. No, he is not a “little god”. He is not picked out by a mystical destiny in preference to those who follow other crafts and professions. I have often maintained that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest baker who does not imagine himself to be a god. He does his majestic and unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colours and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship. And, if the poet succeeds in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an element in an immense activity, in a simple or complicated structure which constitutes the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which surround mankind, the handing over of mankind’s products: bread, truth, wine, dreams. If the poet joins this never-completed struggle to extend to the hands of each and all his part of his undertaking, his effort and his tenderness to the daily work of all people, then the poet must take part, the poet will take part, in the sweat, in the bread, in the wine, in the whole dream of humanity. Only in this indispensable way of being ordinary people shall we give back to poetry the mighty breadth which has been pared away from it little by little in every epoch, just as we ourselves have been whittled down in every epoch.”
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1971/neruda-lecture.html
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