1. Since leaving Pueblo, Bernice Zamora has lived in Palo Alto, California, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas. She presently lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Although she reads and writes Spanish, her primary language is English. She has taught English expository writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and creative writing in poetry for Chicanos at Stanford University. She is now in the final stages of a Ph.D. at Stanford in English and American literature. Her second collection of poems, After the Salmon Leave , will soon be ready for publication. For more biographical details and cultural information about Zamora, including statements about her poetry, see Juan Bruce-Novoa, Inquiry by Interview (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), pp. 203-218. break

2. Joseph Sommers was the first to mention intertextuality in a Chicano literary context ("From the Critical Premise to the Product: Critical Modes and Their Application to a Chicano Literary Text," New Scholar 6 [1977], 59). For the most part, I follow the notion of intertextuality as argued by Jonathan Culler ("Presupposition and Intertextuality," Modern Language Notes 91 [Dec. 1976], 1380-1396). Although Culler does not define intertextuality as the investigation of sources and influences, I include this dimension of intertextuality, but I do not limit it to sources and influences. A revised version of Culler's article appears in his book, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 100-118.

3. For examples of poems by Chicanas which protest the internal contradictions of the Chicano's sexual and political behavior in the movement, see Emy López, "Apartment 107" and "La Gringa," El Fuego de Aztlán 4 (Summer 1977), 32-33, 35; Lorna Dee Cervantes, "You Cramp My Style, Baby," ibid., p. 39; Lorna Dee Cervantes, "Para un revolucionario," Revista Chicano-Requeña 3 (Winter 1975), 21-22; Marcela Christine Lucero, " Machismo Is Part of Our Culture," in The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States , ed. Dexter Fisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), pp. 401-402; and Anna Montes, "Bus Stop Macho," Comadre 1 (Summer 1970), 24-25. For brief commentaries on some of these poems, see Elizabeth Ordóñez, "Sexual Politics and the Theme of Sexuality in Chicana Poetry," in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols , ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 316-339. Tey Diana Rebolledo includes "You Cramp My Style, Baby," in her article of the use of humor by Chicanas, "Walking the Thin Line: Humor in Chicana Literature" in Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature , ed. María Herrera-Sobek (Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press, 1985).

2. Joseph Sommers was the first to mention intertextuality in a Chicano literary context ("From the Critical Premise to the Product: Critical Modes and Their Application to a Chicano Literary Text," New Scholar 6 [1977], 59). For the most part, I follow the notion of intertextuality as argued by Jonathan Culler ("Presupposition and Intertextuality," Modern Language Notes 91 [Dec. 1976], 1380-1396). Although Culler does not define intertextuality as the investigation of sources and influences, I include this dimension of intertextuality, but I do not limit it to sources and influences. A revised version of Culler's article appears in his book, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 100-118.

3. For examples of poems by Chicanas which protest the internal contradictions of the Chicano's sexual and political behavior in the movement, see Emy López, "Apartment 107" and "La Gringa," El Fuego de Aztlán 4 (Summer 1977), 32-33, 35; Lorna Dee Cervantes, "You Cramp My Style, Baby," ibid., p. 39; Lorna Dee Cervantes, "Para un revolucionario," Revista Chicano-Requeña 3 (Winter 1975), 21-22; Marcela Christine Lucero, " Machismo Is Part of Our Culture," in The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States , ed. Dexter Fisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), pp. 401-402; and Anna Montes, "Bus Stop Macho," Comadre 1 (Summer 1970), 24-25. For brief commentaries on some of these poems, see Elizabeth Ordóñez, "Sexual Politics and the Theme of Sexuality in Chicana Poetry," in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols , ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 316-339. Tey Diana Rebolledo includes "You Cramp My Style, Baby," in her article of the use of humor by Chicanas, "Walking the Thin Line: Humor in Chicana Literature" in Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature , ed. María Herrera-Sobek (Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press, 1985).

4. Menlo Park, Calif.: Diseños Literarios, 1976. All the poems discussed, except for "Notes from a Chicana 'COED,'" are from this collection. "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" was first published in Poetry , a special edition of La Onda (Stanford University), 1 (April 1975).

5. The idea of tension and conflict rather than of synthesis and resolution is important for my reading of Zamora's poetry. This perspective distinguishes my interpretation from that of Juan Bruce-Novoa, "Rituals of Devastation and Resurrection," in Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 160-184. Bruce-Novoa argues that Zamora's poetry moves toward resolution.

6. My decision to begin with "Gata Poem" rather than with "Penitents," the first poem in Restless Serpents , is another difference between my analysis and that of Bruce-Novoa. My order of presentation differs from his for three reasons. First, I want to discuss "Notes from a Chicana 'COED,'" an important poem for understanding Zamora's perspective which is excluded from Restless Serpents . Second, Bruce-Novoa's decision to begin with "Penitents" attributes an continue

importance to this poem which in my opinion it does not have. "Gata Poem" has a higher value for me because it reveals the contradictory relationship of the poetic consciousness as a woman and as a Chicana in both traditions. Third, as Zamora herself told me in a conversation on February 16, 1983, she did not intend the poems to be read as a narrative sequence. While I do not take an author's statements about his or her intentions in a work of art as dogma, I think it important to recognize them.

7. As the linguistic particularities of the poems I analyze relate to the definition of the poetic voice, I insist on noting whether the poems are written in Spanish or in English or in a mixture of the two. I also insist on discussing the implications of choosing one language over another. My attention to this aspect is another feature that distinguishes my discussion of Zamora from Bruce-Novoa's. Because he does not consider the language of a particular poem, he says that "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" is aimed at "Chicano machos" since "boxing is one of the macho rituals most admired among Chicanos" ( Chicano Poetry , pp. 454-455). In addition to the fact that this assertion is unsustainable because the sport of boxing is also supported by Anglo and other ethnic groups, the possibility of a Chicano audience is practically eliminated by the poem's syntax and diction and by the literary conventions it presupposes, as I point out below.

8. Keith Whinnom explores the use of death as a euphemism for the sexual act in the context of sixteenth-century Spanish poetry ("Hacia una Interpretación y Apreciación de las Canciones del Cancionero General de 1511," Filología 13 (1968-69), 361-381, esp. 372-381.

9. This poem appeared in Caracol 3 (May 1977), 19. Caracol , published in San Antonio, Texas, for a few years, folded during the financial setback suffered by small presses in the late 1970s. To my knowledge, "Notes" has never been reprinted.

10. In "Pueblo, 1950" Zamora's ambiguous use of the pronoun "you" creates irony and humor because it refers to Fred Montoya in the first and second lines:

                        PUEBLO, 1950
I remember you, Fred Montoya.
You were the first  vato  to ever kiss me.
I was twelve years old.
My mother said shame on you,
my teacher said shame on you, and
I said shame on me, and nobody
     said a word to you

The irony depends upon the reader's also linking the "you" in lines 4 and 5 with Fred Montoya. When the final "you" makes clear that the referent of "you" is really the girl, the reader is confronted with the irony of the situation: the girl, not the boy, is made the object of shame. The confusion experienced in reading the poem humorously makes Zamora's point about the privileges that society gives the male. Vato is colloquial Spanish for "dude."

In another poem too long to quote here, entitled "Mirando continue

Aquellos desde los Campos" ("Looking at Them from the Fields"), Zamora also shifts perspectives, only this time the shift involves the two languages. The first half of the poem is in English, the second half, in Spanish. In the English part Zamora uses the Spanish third-person pronoun, ésos ("those"), as an adjective (" esos propagators") to speak about aquellos ("Anglos"). In the Spanish part she inserts a two-line phrase in English, using the second-person pronoun, your , to speak directly to Chicano males. Ironically, to establish a critical position of Anglo culture, Zamora must use Spanish, the language of the culture that gives dominance to the Chicano male. Also ironic is that she must shift into English, the language of the dominant culture, to establish a critical perspective of the Chicano male.

11. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , An American Slave , Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845). Douglass tells the story of his Aunt Hester who was whipped by her owner because he had found her with a black man. Douglass's narrative makes clear there were many other cases similar to his aunt's (see pp. 3-8).

12. Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). The "maxim of manner" is one of four sets of rules governing conversational behavior proposed by the British language philosopher, H. P. Grice, and discussed by Mary Pratt in her study on speech act theory. The maxim of manner states: "Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity." The language of Zamora's speaker violates this maxim. For Pratt's discussion on "flouting" see pp. 159-175.

13. For a discussion of Renaissance women who wrote sonnets in the Neoplatonic and Petrarchan traditions, revising and questioning the roles assigned to women in sonnets written by men, see Ann Rosalind Jones, "Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and Literary Influence," Yale French Studies , no. 62 (1981), 135-153.

14. Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry , pp. 172-173, discusses this Shakespearean sonnet as a direct literary source for Zamora's. I agree with his point that Zamora criticizes Shakespeare's magisterial position. Whereas Shakespeare can speak universally about love, the social conventions defining Zamora's milieu make it impossible for her to do so.

15. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 30.

16. Zamora says that "the poem's persona is meant to be the spirit of females—mothers, wives, sisters, daughters of penitentes " (Bruce-Novoa, Inquiry by Interview , p. 206). Although I acknowledge her intention, I also think it important to stress that this poem implicitly defines the persona as female, in contrast with poems that explicitly do so.

17. Marta Weigle, The Penitentes of the Southwest (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1970). Weigle's pamphlet and William Farrington's Los continue

penitentes: A Brief History (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1975) both provide useful historical information.

18. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure , p. 7.

19. For theories of origin, see Weigle, Penitentes , p. 5.

20. Alabado comes from the Spanish word, alabar ("to praise"). See ibid., pp. 18, 28.

19. For theories of origin, see Weigle, Penitentes , p. 5.

20. Alabado comes from the Spanish word, alabar ("to praise"). See ibid., pp. 18, 28.

21. Reuben Arthur Brower, The Fields of Light (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 21.

22. Alicia Ostriker, "The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking," Signs 8 (Autumn 1982), 71. Ostriker makes insightful comments on the uses of myth in contemporary poetry by Anglo-American women. She defines the bent of their poetry as "revisionist mythmaking." That is, poets like H. D., Susan Griffin, and Anne Sexton, authors of book-length mythological poems, appropriate figures or tales from myth and use them for altered ends—"the old vessel filled with new wine." The poets "correct" the old stories so that they "can no longer stand as foundations of collective male fantasy." Their stories are "retrieved images of what women have collectively and historically suffered; in some cases they are instructions for survival" (pp. 72-73). My poets share common themes, interests, and approaches with those discussed by Ostriker, and they are also "revisionist" in bent, but as Chicanas they tread cultural terrain unavailable to Anglo-American women poets.

23. For another interpretation of this poem which sees the ritual in more positive terms than I do, see Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry , pp. 162-166.

24. The title literally means "stumbling around at Stanford." One may either walk or talk a tropezones : jerkily, with fits and starts. The expression is mainly used in popular, familiar conversation. Its juxtaposition with "Stanford," a "gentlemen's" institution and a symbol of refinement and high culture, produces a comic effect because the phrase is contrary to one's expectations about Stanford: one should not "stumble" in style or speech at so high-toned a university as Stanford.

"A tropezones en Stanford" is aimed at the Spanish speaker, though the effect of the word "Stanford" is to tease the English reader. The Spanish reader will transform "Stanford" into estanford , the typical linguistic adaptation made by Spanish speakers when pronouncing English words that begin with s . The title would then read "A tropezones en nestanford" instead of "A tropezones en Stanford." The Spanish pronunciation deflates the aura around Stanford because it undermines the correct English pronunciation. This effect is appreciated, however, only if the poem is read aloud.

25. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1964), III, 7. In a non-Western mythological context, Campbell implies a connection between warrior tribesmen's mastery of the camel and the horse and the fall of the cosmologies of the goddesses. break

26. I would place "Bearded Lady" in a tradition of writing by contemporary women poets who attempt, in the words of Alicia Ostriker ("Thieves of Language," p. 75) "to retrieve, from the myth of the abstract father god who creates the universe ab nihilo , the figure on which he was originally based, the female creatrix." Ostriker refers to Sharon Barba's "A Cycle of Women," Rachel DuPlessis's "Eurdydice," and Adrienne Rich's "The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen as One."

27. I am thinking of poems like "From the Vestibule" and "As Viewed from the Terrace" ( Restless Serpents , pp. 44, 48). "Gata Poem" also contains the opposition between the sacred and the profane. Its first line echoes the Virgin Mary's canticle, De Profundis: "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord." In Zamora's version the male or Chicano god on the mountaintop calls out to the Chicana. The juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane in effect mocks the notion that a woman calls out to her lord. Zamora has the "lord" call out to the Chicana and then diminishes his aura of godliness by shifting into English in line 4.

28. Zamora begins "Mirando Aquellos desde los Campos" ( Restless Serpents , p. 27) with a quotation from the prologue to Dahlberg's The Sorrows of Priapus , which she identifies in the text. Three other poets directly identified by Zamora as influences on her text are Herman Hesse (see "Without Bark," Restless Serpents , p. 34), Theodore Roethke (see "And All Flows Past," ibid., p. 68), and Guillevec (see "On Living in Aztlán," ibid., p. 17). A literary influence that Zamora does not identify in the text but one that she herself pointed out to me is Virginia Woolf (see "A Litany for Mad Masters," ibid., p. 73).

27. I am thinking of poems like "From the Vestibule" and "As Viewed from the Terrace" ( Restless Serpents , pp. 44, 48). "Gata Poem" also contains the opposition between the sacred and the profane. Its first line echoes the Virgin Mary's canticle, De Profundis: "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord." In Zamora's version the male or Chicano god on the mountaintop calls out to the Chicana. The juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane in effect mocks the notion that a woman calls out to her lord. Zamora has the "lord" call out to the Chicana and then diminishes his aura of godliness by shifting into English in line 4.

28. Zamora begins "Mirando Aquellos desde los Campos" ( Restless Serpents , p. 27) with a quotation from the prologue to Dahlberg's The Sorrows of Priapus , which she identifies in the text. Three other poets directly identified by Zamora as influences on her text are Herman Hesse (see "Without Bark," Restless Serpents , p. 34), Theodore Roethke (see "And All Flows Past," ibid., p. 68), and Guillevec (see "On Living in Aztlán," ibid., p. 17). A literary influence that Zamora does not identify in the text but one that she herself pointed out to me is Virginia Woolf (see "A Litany for Mad Masters," ibid., p. 73).

29. In "Living in Aztlán" Zamora does not criticize the nineteenth-century French writer Guillevec from the perspective of a woman. Instead she identifies with him as a poet. What they share in common is that both are minority poets who write outside the dominant culture.

30. Bruce-Novoa has identified this Jeffers source ( Chicano Poetry , p. 176). For Jeffers's "Cassandra" see The Double Axe and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1948), p. 117.

31. For "Carmel Point" see Hungerfield (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 97.

32. I was the first to explore the relationships between Jeffers's Roan Stallion and Zamora's "California" ("Inter-Sexual and Intertextual Codes in the Poetry of Bernice Zamora," MELUS 7 [Fall 1980], 55-68).

33. Bruce-Novoa ( Chicano Poetry , p. 175), mentions important differences between Jeffers and Zamora. The critical element missing in Bruce-Novoa's perspective is the strong female dimension of Zamora's poetic persona when responding to Jeffers. He stresses "transhuman" (Jeffers) versus "human" (Zamora); I stress "man" versus "woman." break

34. James D. Houston, editor of West Coast Fiction: Modern Writing from California , Oregon and Washington (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), claims that the discovery of California was foreshadowed in a sixteenth-century Spanish novel, The Adventures of Esplandian , by García Ordóñez de Montalvo. The novel, published thirty-two years before the Cabrillo expedition first sighted the West Coast and twenty-five years before Hernan Cortés named what is now the lower tip of California, influenced the expectations of the earliest Spanish adventurers. See Houston, "The Literary West: From Mark Twain to Joan Didion," Los Angeles Times , Jan. 6, 1980, p. 3. break