Catholicism and Poetry #3 Soto

Gary Soto is a contemporary American Poet, raised in Fresno, Ca who writes about growing up as a Catholic migrant farmworker kid. Not all of his poems, of course, are on this topic, but no one in America today has explored this area so well or so deeply. Soto has authored many books, poetry, novels and children's books. A complete list can be found on Wikipedia. I highly recommend his "Home Course in Religion and I tried to find some U-Tube readings from that, but u-tube posting are not infinite. Only in heaven will we have infinite u-tube posting.

Here is a poem that touches a little on being a Catholic School Boy.

Here is another poem that touches more simply the question of being a young boy:

But neither of those poems give us much of the Catholic feeling of Gary Soto. So I found a link to a poem about confession:

http://www.akoot.com/garysoto8.html

In this poem Soto sees his Catholic Childhood with very old eyes and gets us to look at our own childhood with our own old eyes. He talks about the Monsignor he knew as a boy, a character in several of his poems. Another poem, from Home Course in Religion that talks about the Monsignor is Pink Hands

http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2009/02/24/by-gary-soto-2/uncategorized/

In this poem Soto gets at a lot of what the culture of Catholicism was when he grew up, and what it is now. And beneath the changing culture we see the spirituality of the religion.

Soto is a free verse narrative poet, but it would be wrong to accuse Soto of being chopped up prose. Read some of this poems out loud and listen. Soto knows that poetry is rhythmical and he knows how to tell a narrative story with rhythmical phrasing. I believe Soto is on the better living American poets, and I love his poetry, even though it's style is very different than my own.

Gary Soto's website has some great photos and biography:

http://www.garysoto.com/index.html

Wikipedia on Soto:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Soto

Here is a link to some more Soto poems:

http://project1.caryacademy.org/echoes/poet_Gary_Soto/SamplePoemsSoto.htm