Tino Villanueva

Tino Villanueva Poems

Tino Villanueva Biography

Tino Villanueva (born December 11, 1941, San Marcos, Texas) is an American poet and writer. In 1963, he was drafted into the United States Army, and spent two years in the Panama Canal Zone. There he became immersed in Hispanic literature, reading Rubén Darío and José Martí. He graduated from Texas State University–San Marcos, on the G.I. Bill, from the State University of New York with an M.A. in 1971, and from Boston University with a doctorate in Spanish in 1981. He taught at Wellesley College. Villanueva currently serves as Senior Lecturer in Spanish, Department of Romance Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University. In the early 1970s, Villanueva began publishing his poems a part of The Chicano Literary Renaissance. He writes in both English and Spanish, often switching between the two languages. He founded Imagine Publishers, Inc., and edited Imagine: International Chicano Poetry Journal. His papers are held at Texas State University-San Marcos.)

The Best Poem Of Tino Villanueva

You, If No One Else

Listen, you
who transformed your anguish
into healthy awareness,
put your voice
where your memory is.
You who swallowed
the afternoon dust,
defend everything you understand
with words.
You, if no one else,
will condemn with your tongue
the erosion each disappointment brings.

You, who saw the images
of disgust growing,
will understand how time
devours the destitute;
you, who gave yourself
your own commandments,
know better than anyone
why you turned your back
on your town's toughest limits.

Don't hush,
don't throw away
the most persistent truth,
as our hard-headed brethren
sometimes do.
Remember well
what your life was like: cloudiness,
and slick mud
after a drizzle;
flimsy windows the wind
kept rattling
in winter, and that
unheated slab dwelling
where coldness crawled
up in your clothes.

Tell how you were able to come
to this point, to unbar
History's doors
to see your early years,
your people, the others.
Name the way
rebellion's calm spirit has served you,
and how you came
to unlearn the lessons
of that teacher,
your land's omnipotent defiler.

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