1

As a poet Alma Villanueva is consciously preoccupied with a search for a universal female community. The influence of the women's movement in the United States seems to have reached her without significant interference from the Chicano social movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Like the other poets discussed in this book, Villanueva is the product of a process of socialization; yet, unlike the rest, she has an overriding objective: to transform her concrete experience into a vision of a personalized myth. She achieves this objective in Mother , May I ? her most interesting and dynamic work.^[1]

In 1977, a year before Mother , May I ? appeared, Villanueva published two poetic autobiographies, Bloodroot^[2] and Poems .^[3] The latter won first prize in poetry at the University of California, Irvine, in the year of its publication. Collectively these three works demonstrate that Villanueva is a poet who senses her personal development in terms of time. In fact, among the poets discussed in this volume, she is not only the most sequential in presentation but also the only one to write a poetic autobiography, an achievement that makes her unique also among Chicano poets. Well-known male poets like Gary Soto, José Montoya,

Tino Villanueva, and Raul Salinas have indeed written personal poems that capture fragments of their lives, but none has written a sustained narrative sequence in lyric form, as Alma Villanueva has done. In Mother , May I ? she records the important phases of her life from childhood to her early thirties.

In comparison with the other three Chicana poets, Villanueva seems to have had the most urgent need to compose an autobiographical poem. Because this literary genre necessitates a retrospective look at the author's life, including an explanation of his or her arrival at a certain point in that life, an autobiography gave Villanueva an opportunity to confront compelling questions about her personal development which stood in the way of her desired poetic vision. For instance, in Mother , May I ? a mother's abandonment of her child is of prime concern. Of secondary importance is the issue of an unknown father: Villanueva never knew, or even saw, her father. She did not learn until later in life that he was of German descent. Although it is the search for a mother, not for a father, which stimulated the poet's quest for self-definition, the issue of her ambiguous origins is a biographical detail that conditions the outcome of the poetic peregrination.

In light of the absence of both a mother and a father, it is understandable that Villanueva's protagonist in Mother , May I ? must achieve the birthing of a personal self, or her "I." Her search for continuous participation in a mythical, female community may stem from a deeper wish to transcend the interruptions she perceives as having marred her own relations with her real mother. The fact that Villanueva was raised by her Mexican grandmother until she was eleven years old may account for her emotional identification with Mexican culture. Since her closeness to her grandmother is part of her childhood, her Chicana, or Mexican-American, identity plays a minor role in her adult poetic persona, which lies more within a community bounded by gender than within one bounded by race or ethnicity.

When compared with the poetry of Cervantes and Zamora, Villanueva's shows the least awareness of a Chicana consciousness. Her solution of the dilemma of being both a woman and a Chicana is to respond primarily as a woman to the dominant masculine society.^[4] Her primary intent is to reveal to other women an intimate record of her individual existence rather than to communicate the experiences of a communal group to a wider audience, as Cervantes does. The tension in Villanueva's poetic

world is manifested at the level of a personal quest to achieve self-definition as a woman. In Mother , May I ? her journey in search of her womanhood is also a journey in search of her poetic identity.

Although no significant conflict dramatizes the relationship between Villanueva's identities as woman and as Chicana (as it does for Zamora), they are not totally integrated with each other (as they are for Cervantes). Her two identities are juxtaposed rather than fused in her poetic voice, as shown by her shifts in focus: from past to present, from an urban to a rural setting, from linear to circular time, from a social-documentary style to a metaphoric-mythic style. In Mother , May I ? a sequential progression of events is disrupted in favor of a more subjective reality.

As fragmentary attempts to confront the realities and desires of Villanueva's life, Bloodroot and Poems are a preparation for Mother , May I ? In the two earlier works Villanueva seeks to explain her development as a woman and as a poet by juxtaposing a personal, documentary voice and a mythic, universal one. The first voice speaks about her social reality; the second one tells where she desires to be. In Mother , May I ? she establishes a linear sequence in the narration of her life by using the first voice to speak of her past life and the second voice to speak of her present life.

Villanueva confesses to an early familiarity with the works of Pablo Neruda, having read (in translation) and admired his Residencia en la tierra and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924), but not to a familiarity with the works of Walt Whitman. We should not be surprised, however, to find Whitmanesque influences in Bloodroot , for during the period 1925–1936 Whitman exerted a major influence on Neruda, especially on Residencia .^[5] Thus in Bloodroot , when Villanueva speaks of her body—and by extension of all women's bodies—we hear a Whitmanesque voice in tone and imagery and especially in the theme of cosmic unity which dominates the work.^[6] Whitman speaks of the human body in a celebratory tone, conferring on it cosmic proportions; the same tone is heard in Bloodroot . Neruda, in contrast, describes his own body in humorous terms, stressing his consciousness of its materiality.^[7] When Neruda describes the female body in Veinte and in the erotic poems of Residencia , however, he too adopts a cosmic interpretation, depicting a woman's body as a microcosm of the world and a veritable force

in the universe.^[8] Villanueva's celebration of her body thus coincides both with Neruda's vision of the female body and with Whitman's general tone and attitude.

Although it was Neruda's works that directly influenced Bloodroot , it was really Whitman's voice that left its mark on Villanueva. Indeed, Villanueva's poetry reveals stronger connections with the Anglo-American literary tradition of Whitman than it does with the Latin-American and Chicano literary heritage of Neruda. The mythic tones of Neruda's description of the female body may seem more congenial with Villanueva's poetic sensibilities, but she is really tapping Whitman and her North American roots through her reading of Neruda.

In Poems , however, the influences are mainly from contemporary American women poets, especially Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, though Villanueva's poems in this collection are more loosely organized than those of either Plath or Sexton.^[9] Throughout Mother , May I ? Villanueva uses short lines, at times seemingly inattentive to where she breaks them, though occasionally a break signals an abrupt shift in focus or tone. Villanueva's stylistic devices, unlike Plath's clinical precision of image and her tight stanzaic and metrical patterns, especially in "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," are oral and presentational in tone. More than either Plath or Sexton, Villanueva desires to surmount the barriers between speaker and audience.

Villanueva's predominantly colloquial tone is characterized by a number of variants. One is a childish, or even infantile, language, a kind of little-girl baby talk that becomes a way of reliving the joys and pains of childhood. A second variant is the bawdy tone, most pronounced in some of the Bloodroot poems and in those of the Irvine collection. The bawdiness is testimony to the fact that Villanueva, like some of her Anglo women contemporaries, wants to invade traditional male linguistic preserves.^[10]

As an autobiography calls for a self-conscious appraisal of the poet's "I," Villanueva is better able in Mother , May I ? than in Bloodroot and Poems to scrutinize and analyze her persona. In this poetic narrative she reveals her growing consciousness of the development of her narrative and poetic voice, as well as of the constraints it imposes. For this reason, Mother , May I ? is less derivative than the earlier poems. Villanueva's desire to write an autobiographical poem might have been inspired indirectly by

Whitman. At the formal level, her poetic autobiography combines Whitman with Plath and Sexton. If Whitman provided the genre, Plath and Sexton provided the mode. Villanueva employs a modified confessional mode to disclose the private and intimate details of her life.

The poetic enterprise of Mother , May I ? is to create from concrete experience a personal myth of a universal womanhood. As an autobiography, the poem must incorporate both identities—woman and Chicana—into the poetic voice. On the first level of analysis, I treat the poem as a self-sufficient entity, freed from the context that conditioned it.^[11]Mother , May I ? is a fictional account of events and actions that explain the coming into being of the protagonist as poet. By closely reading the poem as a verbal artifact, or a string of words that echo one another, I argue that Mother , May I ? successfully integrates the identities of woman and Chicana into the poet's "I."

The coming into being of the poetic identity is the precondition of the poem as text. In describing the process of how her protagonist becomes a poet, Villanueva also implicitly tells how she, the author, came to narrate the poem. On the second level of analysis, then, the poetic identity is not the object spoken about by a fictional narrator but rather an actual utterance by the author to a specific audience. I propose that the poem's epilogue is the enactment of the relationship between the author's poetic identity and her implied audience. As we shall see, Villanueva chooses to keep her two identities of woman and Chicana separate rather than to fuse them in a single all-encompassing identity.

Bloodroot and the Irvine Poems

Bloodroot is a kind of poetic journal, a hasty jotting down of notes, impressions, and ideas. Many of its themes are cosmic. Full of carnal and elemental images (blood, womb, stones, plants, minerals, water), these poems express Villanueva's nostalgic desire for a return to an original, maternal womb from which, presumably, both women and men emerged. The female body is

portrayed as a Jungian archetype. Villanueva's female speakers celebrate and rejoice in women's bodies and wombs, urging everyone, but especially men, to recognize their connection with their maternal bond. The opening lines of her poem "(wo)man"^[12] are representative:

(wo)man
     Yes, Woman!
I celebrate our bodies,
our wombs,
intact and perfect even as
we're born
out of our mother's
                  womb
I celebrate
because most                . . . If man is out
men have forgotten           of touch with
how to                                  the earth,
he is afraid                           how can he
of us, he                               touch woman)^[13]
denies us,
     —but in the process
     denies his own existence;
     when will he re/learn
     this ancient fact—

Villanueva's mythic "I" in this poem shifts into a "we" that desires to speak about, and to, all women. In the next stanza her "I" proudly asserts her body's functions ("the slick/red walls of our / wombs, / the milk of our breasts / the ecstasy of our clitoris"), whereas her "we" defines categorically the essence of women (in stanza 5):

we are the trees of the earth
our roots stretching deep and strong,
the stone of the firmament,
sister to the stars
that gave birth to the soil.

The title poem "bloodroot" describes a woman's fantasy in which she experiences a mystic pregnancy, one independent of any interraction with a male. Using Whitmanesque tones and images, the female persona calls upon trees, wind, and birds to perform the male reproductive act. Ecstatic and exuberant, she

receives, as in a trance, the "sperm" of trees and the nectar of hummingbirds. Bitterness and sweetness are conjoined in her.

BLOODROOT^[14]

I grow heavy with the sperm
of trees,
with the nectar
of hummingbirds (listen to their
motor, purring)
with the journeying
wind, it
fills me
and tiny kisses cover
my eyes, my neck,
my leafy hair: roots

threaten to form;
my toes ache;
my eyes shut
and chrysalis begins. I
see the sun in a
bloody pattern: colors dance.
different eyes will open
and my roots are wise; they
love me, but not
too well.

I grow heavy with the sperm
of trees.

The speaker celebrates the awakening of a mythic female consciousness and foreshadows the creation of a primal world where the blood of woman will be the root of all life. The images in "bloodroot" suggest a parallel between the speaker's body and the earth: "my leafy hair"; "my eyes shut / and chrysalis begins." The sun is associated with blood, a source of life in women's bodies: "I / see the sun in a / bloody pattern." Since "chrysalis" is beginning, the woman is in a process of becoming mature but has not yet reached the point of full maturation. The poem externalizes a woman's inner wish to birth alone. In the title "bloodroot" Villanueva joins two words together to call attention to the indissociable relationship of their meanings in her poetic world. She uses this same technique in the poem "ZINZ"^[15] by locating the creatrix in a non-Western "motherafrica." The neologism emphasizes the idea of union among all men and women.

                    we were
collectively, together
                              born
     out of
                           motherafricas
                       womb

In the early poems of Bloodroot Villanueva seeks to rediscover the resonance of nature and to make her readers aware of their interdependence with the female universe. She also desires to birth independently of a male power. Villanueva repeats these themes again and again in modified ways throughout Bloodroot . Although they did so in different ways, her masculine inspirators, Neruda and Whitman, energetically chronicled an awakening consciousness in their countries. Villanueva attempts to chronicle an awakening consciousness of a mythical womanhood. As Whitman urges humanity to reestablish its connection with the natural universe, so Villanueva urges her audience to reestablish its lost connection with a female, magisterial cosmos.

Villanueva's poetic voice changes even as she writes Bloodroot and the Irvine Poems . A more personal and autobiographical voice emerges midway through Bloodroot . In "I sing to myself"^[16] Villanueva takes up Whitman's dictum that poetry should lead a reader to compose a song of himself.^[17] This poem gives evidence that Villanueva is beginning to confront the paradox of her objective; to sing her spontaneous, natural song of beauty and wonder, she must first confront her own feelings of bitterness and distrust. The opening metaphor of an "over-ripe / fruit" represents the feelings that keep her from speaking and releasing her song.

I SING TO MYSELF

there is something
I carry deep
within me
like an over-ripe
fruit, one whose use is past and
won't rot and merge
and gags me
now and then;
            it is the fruit
of bitterness and distrust.
    oh yes, they planted the seed, but
I tend the soil . . .

Later stanzas of "I sing to myself" identify in direct language the referent of they in line 11: a father who never loved her ("I could weep and rage / against the man who never /  . . . desired me in a secret fathers / way");^[18] a mother who spent all her energies needing and desiring men ("never finding a breast to rest / and warm myself"); and a self-centered husband ("who loved me at his leisure and / neglected my deepest needs"). The final stanza metaphorically foreshadows Villanueva's conversion into the new Eve, who will birth herself by swallowing and transforming the putrid fruit:

I will swallow you whole and
accept and transform you
till you melt
in my mouth.     (you/man only
                                  bit the apple:
                                       you must swallow
                                  death—
                                            I/woman give birth:
                                            and this time to
                               myself)

The poem juxtaposes the two voices that later make up Villanueva's poetic identity in Mother , May I ? In "I sing to myself" the mythical voice allows her to express a vision of herself transfigured as the new Eve, and the private voice, to express her unhappy personal life. These two voices never merge or fuse in "I sing to myself," a division that indicates the distance between where she is now and her goal of transcendence. As yet there is only talk of transformation. The parallel between Adam biting the apple and the new Eve birthing herself is also important. The act of incorporating objects by eating them becomes a sustained image pattern in Mother , May I ?

The female persona of "in your body,"^[19] another poem in Bloodroot , makes attempts at individuation. Its frame is mythic, but, unlike the women speakers of "bloodroot," "(wo)man," and "ZINZ," who assume the existence of a female primal cosmos, the speaker of this poem realizes that if she is to gain that paradise, she must struggle for it and earn it. The poem draws an analogy between a woman's sexual orgasm and the process of evolution. Coitus is not simply an act between one man and one woman but the recapitulation of the creation of the entire universe, or a clashing between earth and ocean.

IN YOUR BODY

in your body
     I found
the oceans of the earth
saltless seas of distant planets
lava flow of the first eruption
that created
the first mound of earth
from the waters
        the lonely stormy waters
before earth was born—
in you/me I felt creations hot hard urgency
to be
     and I slept in swirling waters
floated in stagnant seas
cradled and crushed by the tides
your salty semen rushing
over my shores, leaving me pregnant and
exhausted in its wake,
        full of you, the saltysea.

storms and seasons and shifting sun and tide find
        us separate:

and my own body
feels the tide
a relentless gentle/fierce tide
and I wait at my shore for
a perfect, whole seashell
to cast up on the tide
     aeons of time in the
        making and forming
           of this perfect

              shell

           shaped like a

star.

The poem moves from a description of the woman's sexual orgasm with the cosmic lover's body (stanza 1) into a statement of separation (stanza 2) and, finally, into a description of the woman waiting alone to toss up the "perfect . . . seashell." The seashell represents either a child or a poem or both. The pattern of opening and closing, which pervades Mother , May I ? is suggested in "in your body" by the tide's ebb and flow and the biological rhythm of the woman's reproductive cycle.

The more personal, private poems in Bloodroot , which are

based on autobiographical incidents, describe relationships with key figures in the poet's childhood and youth: her mother, her aunt, and the Mexican grandmother who was so important to her. The fictional world of these poems is neither timeless nor universal, as is the world of the mythic poems. Rather, they describe a finite, temporal, and more overtly subjective world. Nevertheless, from its place in ordinary, everyday settings, the poetic consciousness expresses its longing for personal transfiguration. In "I was a skinny tomboy kid,"^[20] for example, the persona reflects on her adolescent years when she saw herself as a fated victim because of her female identity. Consequently she desired to be a man, equating her masculinity, or tomboy activities (climbing roofs and fences; walking down streets with tightly clenched fists), with freedom, movement, strength, and hardness, and her femininity with helplessness, standing still, softness, and letting go: "I vowed / to never / grow up / to be a woman / and be helpless / like my mother." The adult persona recognizes in retrospect what she did not see years earlier: "but then I didn't realize / the kind of guts / it often took / for her [mother] to just keep / standing / where she was." Her unhappy childhood led her to create a "legendary/self," "believing in my own myth / transforming my reality." Throughout the poems of Bloodroot , the private voice searches for a continuous harmony that can help her overcome the discontinuous quality of her life. She often looks for that harmony in nature and in cultural objects: in the bison whose hooves remember the ancient joy ("he has fed for two springs"); in green bean sprouts "intimately connected to the earth" ("i dreamt"); in the dazzling beauty of a piñata ("Let us celebrate").

A small number of poems in Bloodroot express Villanueva's social identity as a Chicana. Of the forty-seven poems in the collection, five are dedicated to relationships with her Mexican grandmother and aunt. They all portray particular concrete circumstances, many of which are recognizably Chicano for an audience familiar with the locations. References to Market and Guerrero streets, to the Mission district, and to welfare lines and clinics define an urban, Chicano, working-class context in the San Francisco Bay area. In "you cannot leave,"^[21] tensions between Mexican and Anglo worlds are revealed in the story of Villanueva's aunt, who tried to go to an Anglo church but found "their [Anglo] / faces . . . blank / and their / eyes / mute; they did

not / recognize her." In "to Jesus Villanueva, / with love,"^[22] a poem about her grandmother, the speaker claims that the main rule of Anglo society is "you lie. you push. you get." So she lies and pushes to make a doctor examine her ailing grandmother, to convince the welfare office to send her grandmother's check on time, and to persuade the landlady to spray her grandmother's house "for cockroaches." In the same poem Villanueva presents a humorous anecdote she heard from her mother about her grandmother's outwitting a border official. The "you" in this passage is the author's grandmother.

you were leaving Mexico
with your husband and two
older children, pregnant
with my mother.
the U.S. customs officer
undid everything you so
preciously packed, you
took a sack, blew it up
and when he asked about
the contents of the sack,
well, you popped it with
you hand and shouted
     MEXICAN AIR!

I assume that the grandmother told the story to her daughter in Spanish and that the mother then communicated it in English to her daughter, except for the phrase "Mexican Air." The daughter-author recounts it to us in English, translating even the phrase "Mexican Air," as her footnote states.^[23] In the initial lines of "to Jesus Villanueva" she remembers naming the food products of her grandmother's world:

my first vivid memory of you
mamacita,
we made tortillas together
yours, perfect and round
mine, irregular and fat
we laughed
and named them: oso, pajarito, gatito.

Although the first anecdote is transmitted by the mother, both anecdotes involving the grandmother were originally related in Spanish. The grandmother is the poet's link to Mexican-Chicano

culture and the Spanish language, but the narrator recounts in English her experience of naming objects in Spanish with her grandmother.

These poems reveal a speaker who is aware of a separation between Anglo and Mexican-Chicano cultures. In Bloodroot , as in Mother , May I ? the poet's voice as it relates to a Chicana identity is almost always associated with her grandmother and her early childhood. The mythical voice envisioning a female cosmic world, and the biographical voice desiring personal transfiguration, are always associated in Bloodroot with Villanueva's quest for a female identity. These two identities—Chicana and female—are juxtaposed rather than synthesized or fused.

Most of the poems in Bloodroot reveal Villanueva's preoccupation with defining her identity as woman and as poet. Whitmanesque energy, tones, and incantation help her to express and celebrate the birth and beauties of her womanhood, much as Whitman, in an earlier period, celebrated the birth and growth of a country. These mythic strains, however, do not permit Villanueva to integrate into her celebration of womanhood an expression of the particularity of her Chicana self.

In Poems , Villanueva turns to her two female models and adapts their literary persona of the poet-narrator as a witch, a wild and threatening woman.^[24] She acknowledges her female inspirators in "The Last Words,"^[25] dedicated to "Anne & Sylvia / & all those that burned before them / in Salem & other places." The theme of woman as witch continues in a somewhat altered form the mythical strain of Bloodroot because the tradition of woman as witch evokes mysterious and magical contexts. The identity of woman as witch/bitch is the opposite pole to the identity of woman as creatrix, the primal Earth Mother of the early poems in Bloodroot . Villanueva employs the witch persona to taunt and satirize men, who "claimed themselves gods and priests and oracles" ("witches' blood"). The mocking tone indicates that she has gained awareness since writing the more naive poems modeled on Whitmanesque vocabulary and imagery.

Villanueva defines her feminine "I" in Poems by resisting and opposing male society. In "The Last Words" she quotes the final stanza of Plath's "Lady Lazarus," the only stanza of that poem which refers explicitly to men:

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

The witch as poet-narrator describes a "hysterical mob" that would like to burn her at the stake for daring to utter notions about the human condition which society wants to repress: "the hysterical mob does not like to be / reminded of their true natures— / they would like to forget women like me." Nevertheless, she must write what she must, just as

witches' blood must flow! dry and crackle—
sink into the mother, turn to ash—
red fire/blood release the utterance—

Although the crowd may want to set the torch to her, the truth is that "they do not know I burn, self/imposed / in a fire of my / own making." Her fire is the "heat" or energy of love, of words, and of blood impelling her to write the poem: "my witches' secret: the poem as / my witness." Her poems, as well as those of Plath and Sexton, "cannot be destroyed. / they burn in the heart, long after / the witch is dead." Villanueva never explicitly identifies her enemies in this poem, but her use of Plath's line—"And I eat men like air"—suggests that she, like Plath, sees her enemies as men. She sees herself outwitting them with the daring ruse of self-immolation, which they do not expect.

A tone of bravado toward men is more pronounced in "witches' blood," "Of Utterances," and "Of/To Man."^[26] In "Of/To Man" Villanueva boasts of woman's ability to have numerous sexual orgasms at once, since "(spiritual orgasms count, too)":

you're limited to one
at a time: Is that the
main bitch?
well man, my man—
let's set herstory
straight. I come IN my cunt
IN my clit, you might say
my whole body is IN the
act.

At the conclusion of "witches'blood" Villanueva's female monster flaunts to the "priests" and the "oracles" her preference for

a witch identity rather than the goddess identity they have given her. Taunting them with a series of directives,

call me witch
call me hag
call me sorceress
call me mad
call me woman. do not
call me goddess.
I do not want the position,

she openly adores in herself what men have called unclean in women: "I prefer to gaze in wonder, once / a month at my / witches' blood." She critically denounces men who "have killed / made war / for blood to flow, as naturally / as a woman's / once a month." Villanueva shifted "witches' blood," which originally appeared in Bloodroot , to the Irvine collection, thus underscoring her technique of juxtaposition by placing old poems next to new poems. The technique becomes more meaningful in Mother , May I ?

The desire to give birth to the poem becomes the compelling theme of the Irvine collection. Villanueva accepts, in "Of Utterances," Sexton's advice that a woman must become her own muse. With ribald humor she attacks the theory of poetry which cultivates the myth of woman as the inspirational source of white male poets:^[27]

the "White Goddess"
to white men
to poets and men of genius
        "a source of inspiration;
     a guiding genius . ."
that beautiful goddess
that legendary Angel.

She goes on to describe in parodic tones the "legendary Angel" who descends

with her milky white limbs,
     full breasts, rosy at the
        tips with the milky
           stanzas and lyrics
              to the touch of man:
the cunt all acceptance,     opening wide
                                            to the mind of man and
                                     giving birth to their children
The Poem.     The Painting.                      The Sculpture.

After that satiric litany she interjects:

and I with my fetish for dark men.
and dislike (dis-taste) for sucking (this part's o.k.—
cocks and swallowing the salty sperm (this part's not—
of prose and rhymes.

Villanueva raises the possibility that she too might have to copulate with a white god just as her white male predecessors have done with the "White Goddess." Acknowledgment of her fetish for dark men, however, implies awareness of herself as different from traditional white poets. She, a woman-poet with a preference for dark men, cannot accept the white male model of artistic creation. Her images of "sucking . . . cocks" and "swallowing the salty sperm" of "prose and rhymes" parody the male poet who copulates with his white muse to produce his art piece. They also suggest a self-parody because she, metaphorically speaking, had sucked upon and swallowed Whitman's cosmic imagery and tones in her earlier poetry. Her mocking tone indicates that she now has enough distance to question a white male literary tradition before naively accepting it.

Villanueva further undermines and ridicules the stylized gesture of the white male poet invoking his angelic goddess with an unexpected deviation that substitutes African black gods as muses of women poets. Her suggestion is that if black gods did exist, she might accept them as sources of creative inspiration. She flouts this gesture, however, only to gain ironic effects, because she no sooner proposes the option of black gods as women's muses than she declares it nonexistent: "we women just don't have any / dark and lovely, / descending / 'Black Gods.'" Her resolution is to use her own "resources / and imagination" and become her own "source of inspiration; / my very own genius":

I grew my own wings, became my
own muse.

I decided to fly
and not
descend

Villanueva identifies with Plath and Sexton in their challenge to the white male ego and his literary discourse. She introduces the dimension of the nonwhite male and his literary tradition by suggesting the possibility of "Black Gods" as muses. She sees

herself at the center of an opposition between white male and black male or between dominant tradition and minority tradition. Although her references to women contain no specific indications of race, her choice of Plath and Sexton marks an identification with white women writers. Her references to "dark men" may suggest a Chicana consciousness, as "dark men" may include Chicanos as well as black men. These references, however, may also suggest her own identification with those white women who prefer black men as an alternative to white males who do not satisfy them. Villanueva sees her poetic feminine consciousness as apart from the dominant male tradition, but she does not specify the nonwhite group of which she is a member.

Except for five poems already published in Bloodroot , the twenty-one pieces in Poems are new. These twenty-one poems are designed to elaborate Villanueva's identity as a woman. Two of the five earlier pieces are about her grandmother: "to Jesus Villanueva, / with love," and "there were times."^[28] Her decision to include these two poems suggests that she continues to want them to form part of her poetic identity. Their poetic voice, however, which expresses a specific Chicana identity, remains unintegrated with the voice of the new poems which develop her vision as a woman. When the collection is viewed as a whole, the two identities remain separate and juxtaposed rather than integrated and synthesized.