PAPOLíTICO, Poems of a Political Puersuasion by Jesús Papoleto Meléndez

I N T R O D U C T I O N
IN THE MID-1980S, some years into our sojourn in San Diego, we met a young Puerto Rican poet
named Jesús Papoleto Meléndez. At the time he was living in Tijuana in an artist’s co-op behind a café
called El Nopal. His street-loving verses were tapped out on an old Royal typewriter, which he made
into chapbooks and sold on the very streets that inspired them. The poems, like Papoleto, bounced
and tumbled down the margins that were at odds with literary order and local authority.
Papoleto’s poetry weaves through city streets like a feral cat — passing walls with unexpected tags
and sun glinting alleys of truth. In his sixth volume of poetry, PAPOLíTICO, Papoleto does just that. It
is an exciting compilation of new and previously published poems designed to nudge people out of
complacency. Papoleto speaks truth to power. Defying the political and media rhetoric that is designed
to obscure and manipulate us. PAPOLíTICO marks this moment of political rupture by summoning the
collective strength found in the language of resistance and memory, subversion and declamation,
struggle and hope, with poetry. Throughout this volume, Papoleto reminds us why poetry remains a
necessary medium in moments of political crisis and social consciousness.
Poets are always, at some level, writing about current events, by way of personal, emotional, intellectual,
or cultural forces that have led to those events. What’s interesting about PAPOLíTICO is that some of
the works written twenty or thirty years ago continue to speak to the very issues we see today, rendering
the poems timeless and incredibly prescient, but timeless. For example, in “A Conversation with
a Blind Man” (p. 47), first published in 1993, Papoleto exclaims:
He’s locked
his mind’s door
/Against the face
of a society
of hoards
(p.54)
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