About the Work: Kenneth Chacon
In our “About the Work” series, Olga Mexina and Tom Sokolowski ask recent contributors for insight into their writing or for current sources of inspiration. Read Kenneth Chacon's work in SER Vol. 42.2.
I don’t claim to know much of anything, maybe even less about my own writing, but I believe “The Red Bandana” is about how the power of image transcends Space/Time.
I remember when a professor read Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” to the class aloud. What depends on the wheelbarrow? What makes this a poem? The answer was always Image. When we read, we enter other worlds, other dimensions, sweeping across vast distances the way a character might in a video game.
My poem is a wormhole, a save point, into the ancient history of when I met my wife in high school. She gave me a picture and I would stare at it, ecstatic at the thought, the possibility, that she could love me. My mother had recently died and I was an awkward, introverted, nerd living in the gangsta’s paradise of Fresno, California in the 90s, looking to fill the hole. This was when I started dressing like a cholo.
This poem is from a manuscript that loosely follows my life from mama’s boy to gangster to professor to poet. It’s a snapshot into my adolescence, yet also includes a mystical quality, an Easter egg, hinting at the future—children, grandchildren—of these two who take the same bus to school.
In a way, this poem is an assurance to a younger self that things will be all right. After many years of struggling with well-being, I’m in a good place, largely thanks to Poetry.
KENNETH CHACÓN (he/him/that vato) is a 6ixth Sun Xicano from Fresno, Califas. He is the author of The Cholo Who Said Nothing & Other Poems (Turning Point 2017) and his work has appeared in Huizache, BorderSenses, The Cimarron Review, Spillway, Blackbird, The Colorado Review, Palette Poetry among others. He is a father of five and grandfather of five and teaches writing at Fresno City College.