Urayoan Noel's Statement

Urayoan Noel may be trying to bridge Puerto Ricans and people living in the USA in his poems "Ballade of a Boy," "Kool Logic," and "Barrio Speedwagon Blues." I think this is probably the case since his poems' subject matter concerns mainstream American Culture and the “outsiders” (like Puerto Ricans) trying to fit in or just survive in it.

Unless his poems are supposed to be a challenge for people to go expand their monolingual horizons by learning Puerto Rican, some of these poems appear to not be meant for English-speakers like me. But then again, Mr. Noel has expressed an interest in removing some amount of clarity from poems. A bilingual poem read by a monolingual person would certainly help the poem achieve ambiguity.

To look more specifically at the message made about Latino culture, Mr. Noel seems to be trying to express how oppressive of an atmosphere the expectations and lifestyles of the USA are. This could mean that Puerto Rican life is freer and less dull than that of mainstream America.

Mr. Noel uses rhyme to make his poems euphonic, to emphasize the meter for each poem, and to link the words he uses, which is all quite standard for traditional poetry. His insertion of punctuation into each line of his poems is not traditional, however. Mr. Noel's punctuation for these poems may be of importance, since it is somewhat unique: Many poets wouldn't bother with that much punctuation, preferring instead to rely on line breaks to indicate when to pause for meaningful dramatic effect. With Mr. Noel's poems, the reader must then figure out how the poems are meant to be read aloud, since all the commas and semicolons and such punctuation marks accomplish much of the same effect in prose as line breaks do in many poems. At least Mr. Noel keeps the thoughts in his lines from spilling into the next stanzas. Pulling off that sort of befuddling trick of "crossing boundaries" of poetic form could be done cleverly, but I have a sense warning me that I would dislike the way Mr. Noel might try it.

Even when Mr. Noel's poems contain no character in particular, they convey a personal tone, which carries a sense of a history of nearly relentless discomfort (I can't quite call it "oppression") with society. Because the poems are touched by emotion, which must come from a source (whether individual or collective), and because the emotion is being processed in words, the poems are windows to a heart fed up with a misguided dominant culture, one with such messed up priorities that it traps itself in a paradox of many trivial options and no solutions to real problems.
Mr. Noel has said that he prefers "unstatements" over statements, but I cannot help but think that he is using his poems to try to state that "something is rotten" in the United States of America. He seems to be trying to bring a focus back to what needs to be fixed, starting with the fact that modern America is more concerned with distracting itself from big issues than dealing with them. Although America is a place people try to get into, the poems I read seem to contain a soul's desire to escape the intangible exigencies of living in America.

In "Ballade of a Boy," the porch screen is an example of a border and boundary where there was supposed to be a bridge. The main character's "eyes trying to glean" indicate recognition that the border of the two meeting again had become a boundary, and implies a longing for a bridge to be built between the two. I do not know what the speaker's background was supposed to be, but apparently there had once been a bridge between him and the main character, a bridge which must have decayed. The poem's speaker had a chance to reach out to the poem's main character, but instead the two of them maintained an awkward silence, and from then on maintained a relationship no more. The section covering this brief moment is pne in which noticing the punctuation will actually contribute to the feeling readers should get from the poem, for it includes the consecutive use of periods in its lines, giving the scene finality.
The speaker probably knows it is too late to reestablish a personal connection with the "Boy" of the poem, but attempts to prevent another wall being built up around the character as a result of damaged reputation. To avoid smearing the main character of the poem, the speaker calls him a "normal teen." This good word should be helpful in reestablishing a bridge between the "Boy" and the bulwark of society. In saying this, the speaker implies that adolescence is itself a time-bound boundary for most people, since a "normal teen" will "make trouble" and "careen," behaviors likely to distance others. Maybe we, as individuals, are expected to outgrow the boundaries around us, because nobody, even in America, really lives in a Utopia.