“Of the Threads that Connect the Stars” was written by the American poet Martín Espada. It appeared in the collection Vivas to Those Who Have Failed published by W. W. Norton in 2016.

This is the work of a mature poet, comfortable with his own voice and confident in his place within a long tradition of Whitmanesque artistic advocacy. Both the title of the book and the poem are drawn from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” which in section 24 Whitman writes:

Through me many long dumb voices,

Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,

Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff

And of the rights of them the others are down upon (Lines 13-18).

“Of the Threads that Connect the Stars” takes the mystical ecstatic of Whitman and places it into the skies of Brooklyn and the lives of Espada’s family.

Espada is a storyteller and a political activist. This narrative poem exemplifies the intersections of personal experience, story, and political engagement as it traces slow progress through three generations.

Poet Biography

Martín Espada was born on August 7, 1957, in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a Puerto Rican political activist and documentary photographer, who even after his death in 2014 continues to be a major influence on Espada’s life and work.

When he was 13, Espada's family moved from East New York to Valley Stream, a white suburb of Long Island. There, he experienced racism and bullying—another facet of the social injustice his father was protesting.

Espada started to write poetry during a 10th grade English lesson. When he was 16, he worked at a printing plant where they made legal pads. The experience would later inspire his poem “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” (1993). After a brief time at the University of Maryland, Espada attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison starting in 1977. He worked his way through school, taking jobs whenever he could, including one as a bouncer at a local club where he eventually had his first public poetry reading. In his first year, a clerk position at the Wisconsin Bureau of Mental Health transformed into a job as a patient rights advocate. In 1981 he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history. He then attended and graduated from law school at Northeastern University in Boston. After graduation Espada became a tenants’ rights lawyer for low-income Spanish speakers in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He also taught during the years he practiced law. In 1993 he became a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

His race- and class-consciousness, labor experience, and involvement in social justice movements has fueled much of his art. His first poetry collection, The Immigrant Iceboys Bolero, was published by Waterfront Press in 1982. His third collection, Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990) won both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the PEN/Revson Award. Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), Espada’s fifth book, won an American Book Award. The Republic of Poetry (2006) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2018 he won the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which is a lifetime achievement award. Other awards and honors include two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the Robert Creeley Award. In 2021, his collection Floaters won the National Book Award for Poetry.

In addition to his poetry, Espada has written books of essays, including The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive: Essays and Commentaries (2010) and Zapata’s Disciple (2016). He has edited three poetry anthologies and with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo has translated The Blood That Keeps Singing: Selected Poems of Clemente Soto Vélez (1991).

Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He continues to write, speak, and advocate for justice.

Poem Text

Espada, Martín. “Of the Threads that Connect the Stars.” 2016. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

The poem begins with the speaker’s father asking his son “Did you ever see stars?” (Line 1). He doesn’t mean the stars in the sky. Instead, he is referring to the firing of neurons in the visual cortex—those sparkling lights triggered by a blow to the head. The speaker says that in Brooklyn this joke played well among the men because it “might be the only heavenly light we’d ever see” (Line 4).

The second stanza shifts to the speaker of the poem, a version of Martín Espada himself. He says, “I never saw stars” (Line 5). He hadn’t experienced fights and the night sky in the Brooklyn of his childhood was obscured by factory smoke and burning mattresses (Line 6). He adds, even if the stars had been visible, he wouldn’t have seen them because of “the riots of 1966 that kept me / locked in my room like a suspect” (Lines 7-8). Outside, his father was trying to forge a “truce on the streets” (Line 8).

The third stanza moves to the third generation. Espada’s son can see the stars. He uses a telescope, has studied astronomy, and can use its lessons to identify what he sees. The speaker says he can’t see what his son does. Their experiences are too different. “I understand a smoking mattress better than the language of galaxies” (Line 12), he says.

The fourth and final stanza once again traces the experience of seeing stars through the generations and shows that progress, however slow, is being made.