“Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” is one of the best-known works by Martin Espada, a leading American poet of the late 20th and early 21st century. It features as one of the poems in his evocatively titled 1993 collection City of Coughing and Dead Radiators. The poem is a short piece of free verse in two stanzas, detailing an experience working in a printing plant. It is written in simple, direct language and focuses attention on the often-hidden figure of the factory or manual laborer. The poem should be located in the context of an American poetry scene which in the 1980s and 90s increasingly engaged with urban social and political realities. Espada was a key figure to emerge from this scene, and like his contemporary Mark Doty, whose poems captured experiences of the AIDS epidemic, Espada puts lived experience at the heart of his poems. While Doty memorializes the tragic experience of that time for many gay people, Espada’s work aims to bring into focus the lives of the urban, immigrant poor. In “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper,” as in many other poems, Espada speaks and writes from a position of authority on his subject. Growing up in East New York he did several manual jobs including working in a print plant, before he qualified as a lawyer and represented clients in tenancy cases against landlords. This lived experience at the heart of the poem is evident in its visceral representation of the worker’s conditions, the importance of labor materials, and a near-obsessive focus on timekeeping. These details, and the plain language in which Espada writes, means the poem would be relatable to anyone who has done such work, without any need for a literary background. Indeed for the directness of his address and his focus on the concerns of the working man, Espada has a strong connection to songwriters such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and even Bruce Springsteen. Though hardly a rock star, and still working full-time as a lawyer, by the time of writing “Who Burns” in 1993, Espada was reasonably well-known as a poet. He attracted media attention, not least because the combination of ‘poet-lawyer’ was considered so unusual. While he later left the law for an academic post, his desire to make his poetry speak for the poor and make connections to the US’s Spanish-speaking neighbors has never diminished. In recent works, he focuses on the tragedies of migrants dying trying to cross the Mexico-US border, and the devastation wrought by hurricane Maria on his father’s native Puerto Rico.

Poet Biography

Born in 1957 in Brooklyn, New York, Espada was deeply influenced by his father, Frank Espada, a Puerto Rican who emigrated to the US and became involved in the civil rights and labor struggles while also working as a documentary photographer for the Puerto Rican diaspora. The close connection between father and son was evident in the poet’s 1982 debut The Immigrant Ice-Boy’s Bolero, which included some of Frank Espada’s photographs. After qualifying for law school, Espada was deeply influenced by his experiences as a young tenant lawyer representing clients in the working-class town of Chelsea on the edge of Boston. Most of these clients were from El Salvadorean or Guatemalan immigrant communities, and Espada found himself immersed in a world where poverty was often added to by discrimination and injustice. The title of his second collection, Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction, underscores his desire to give a voice to these dispossessed individuals, on the page as well as in the courtroom. This and many of Espada’s other early poems drew praise for the dynamism of their narratives. They feature a cast of memorable characters often based on people he had met, as well as his father and his own experiences, such as his first visit to Puerto Rico.

Moving into his thirties, Espada continued to combine his trademark narrative style with direct references to political and social events. His work began to attract significant prizes, including a PEN/Revson award for Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990) and an American Book Award for his 1996 collection Imagine the Angels of Bread. In 2002, his poem Alabanza addressed the events of 9/11, and has since been widely performed and anthologized. More recent collections include The Meaning of the Shovel (2014) and Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Espada has been outspoken in his criticism of the Trump Presidency, and addressed poems to political controversies such as the treatment of migrants at the Mexican border. In 2018, Espada was awarded the prestigious Ruth Lilly Memorial Prize, marking a lifetime of poetic achievement, the first Latino poet to win the award. He lives in Massachusetts, where he is a professor of English at the University of Amherst and is married to fellow poet and teacher Lauren Schmidt.

Poem Text

Espada, Martin. “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper.” 1993. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

On the surface at least, the poem is straightforward. Its first stanza presents a recollection, in simple terms, of an after-school job the poet did as a 16-year-old kid. This involved the manufacture of the yellow margined notepads which have become synonymous with legal and office work throughout the US and beyond. The poem describes the individual laborer’s contribution to making these pads. His task is to bind the separate pages into identical stacks using glue. The work has a physical cost specifically to the hands, which suffer paper cuts and sting from the glue. In the second stanza, Espada reveals how after leaving school he went on to train as a lawyer himself. This means the memory takes on an extra significance, as he finds himself using the same type of pads and remembers the labor that went into producing them. The final lines show his awareness that the pads are still made in mass quantities by thousands of anonymous workers. His own experience becomes a lens through which he focuses on all of these people who labor in hard conditions for very little reward or attention.