When Rage Becomes Poetry

“Lost causes,” affirms Luis J. Rodriguez in “Hearts and Hands,” “are the only ones worth fighting for.”

The cause that Rodriguez finds so compelling begins with what he calls “a cultural malaise of isolation and meaninglessness.” The real victims of that malaise, he insists, are the young people of America. And their anomie is expressed in acts of seemingly senseless violence, not only in the barrio and urban areas but in the suburbs of Littleton, Colo., and Santee, Calif., too.

“It’s time,” he insists in “Hearts and Hands,” “to make sense of the senselessness.”

Rodriguez is a poet, a publisher and a pundit, among other things, but he is best known for his memoir of growing up on the mean streets of Los Angeles, “Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.”

Nowadays, he is also a community activist who works with “at-risk” youth in San Francisco. But he insists that we make a mistake when we write off drug abuse and street violence as “diseases” that afflict only the barrio and urban areas.

“The disaffection of our young people is deep,” he warns, “and no gated community or relatively wealthy environment is going to buffer them from the smoldering rages.”

“Hearts and Hands” is a manifesto rather than a memoir; but Rodriguez brings us face to face with the young men and women whom he regards as the victims of “a protracted war against children.” We follow him into the troubled homes into which they are born, the tough neighborhoods where they grow up, the courtrooms where they are judged, the prison cells where they are locked up, the cemeteries where they are buried.

“First we must recognize that our battle is with a society that fails to do all it can for young people,” he writes, “then unjustly lays the blame on them.” But he insists that it is not enough to mobilize an army of teachers and social workers. Rather, he calls on the “elders” among us to act as “root doctors” by tending the “soul-seed and soul potential” of the troubled young men and women in our own communities. And he urges us to regard the reading and writing of poetry--something that Rodriguez teaches in prisons and homeless shelters as well as at colleges and prep schools--as “a life-and-death issue.”

“I’ve lived the violence of this age, this easy rage, over turf, money, drugs, pride, and so-called national interests,” he writes. “But when there is poetry in one’s life, the rage becomes petals imploding in the hand.”

Rodriguez is a relentless truth-teller, an authentic visionary, a man of profound compassion but, at the same time, a bitter enemy of complacency and conventional wisdom. He acknowledges the lessons we can learn from the social sciences, he scrutinizes what succeeds and what fails in the realm of public policy, but he never allows us to forget that the rescue of young people is also “a spiritual quest.”

“Whether we are ready or not, we’re going to have to look into the nooks and crannies of our own souls as well as those of our communities and society,” he exhorts in “Hearts and Hands.” “Something deep, central to our lives, is askew. This is not about throwing blame around; it’s about being true to the demands of the crisis, of challenging ourselves to meet the actual levels of pain, loneliness, and fear.”

Poet and novelist Aram Saroyan, son of William Saroyan, bears the burden of a famous last name, and he acknowledges the fact in a brief introduction to his latest collection of short fiction, “Artists in Trouble”:

“In the end, these novellas and stories are about the generations--man and woman, parent and child, the imperfect circuit of love, the trials of work and money--and the way the world is there, somehow a tender medium, in the dark when we discover we are lost.”

The point is made, for example, in “Love Scenes,” the novella that opens the collection. Saroyan introduces us to Wesley Sender, whom he describes as “a man in his middle forties with a back-log of suspiciousness,” an actor of “Armenian Italian Jewish” origin--”two genocides flanking the bon vivant.” Sender’s marriage has failed, but he is up for a career-making role in a new movie, he has embarked upon a bicoastal affair with a costume designer and he is taking an inventory of both his real life and his dream life.

“With his father and mother as the giant stage phantoms of his post-adolescence,” writes Saroyan, “and the shallowness of his identity as a beginning actor, Wesley knew he’d been scarcely capable of any of the larger emotions....”

Saroyan is always alert to the ways that life sometimes checks the creative impulse and sometimes sets it afire. In a brief sketch titled “Traffic School,” a chance encounter between a beguiling woman and a frustrated painter named Stevenson reminds the artist that “he’s regularly in pain and panic” and, at the same time, allows him to reconnect with the kind of inspiration that he first experienced with “those cellophane packages of four rectangles of four different colors of clay that were given to Stevenson to play with as a child.”

All of the stories in “Artists in Trouble” are presented as fiction, but the novella “My Literary Life” so closely parallels Saroyan’s own career that it is very nearly a roman a clef. He writes with searing and often unsettling honesty about the price one must pay, in both Hollywood and New York, in the pursuit of a writer’s life. And the narrator of “My Literary Life,” like Saroyan himself, always struggles to make sense of his own father.

“You see, you never ‘got’ your Dad,” says the father in “My Literary Life,” “even though your Dad probably understood you better than you think.”

Indeed, Saroyan returns again and again to the particular plight of the adult child in the shadow of a father who is departed but not forgotten. “There is a specific gravity known by the child of the famous that I’m certain is quite different from the gravity that holds most people to the planet,” muses the character who narrates “The Musician,” a man who is haunted by the reproachful dreams of his late father, a famous cellist. “My father’s face in the dream had a clear-eyed, open expression, a look that said he was custodian of his talent, charged with exercising it as fully as he could, and that this was an innocence in him.”

Nowadays, the short story seems to be often the last refuge for the writer with nothing much to say, an opportunity to perform a fast rhetorical tap-dance and then exit with a deep bow. “Artists in Trouble,” by contrast, is the work of a writer who looks deeply into himself and his own experience, confronts what he finds there with real courage and reports what he has experienced with a measure of candor that is both breathtaking and, at moments, heartbreaking.

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Book Review, is the author of “The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People.”