I Am Offering This Poem

As his Pushcart Prize-winning memoir A Place to Stand and his autobiographical novel American Orphan attest, Jimmy Santiago Baca prefers to write about his past experiences openly, describing his early life troubles and his period of incarceration with frank honesty and vivid detail. Because his parents abandoned him early in his life to the care of others, Baca is aware of the value and importance of human warmth and connectedness as well as the emotional power of love. As a former prisoner, Baca has described the difficulties of life while incarcerated, where aloneness is, paradoxically, both a condition of life in a cell and a preferred state of being that can be difficult to achieve while living within a large group of confined individuals. Baca’s background equips him with a unique kind of knowledge about the world and about relationships, and the universal message of love in “I Am Offering this Poem” reflects that depth of knowledge.

Baca’s father was an abusive alcoholic, and after his parents separated, his mother deserted Baca and his two siblings in order to marry someone else. Baca lived with his grandmother after his parents abandoned him when he was 2, but when his grandfather died, his grandmother placed him into an orphanage. Baca spent a few years there before running away at the age of 13, choosing a life on the streets over one in an institution. The psychology of abandonment attests to the sense of isolation and aloneness present in Baca’s poem (see: Themes), and Baca’s early decision to be homeless yet self-reliant demonstrates his untimely understanding about what it means to live without relational stability.

After spending a few years drifting, Baca was arrested for selling drugs at the age of 21, and he spent over six years in a maximum-security prison in Arizona for his crime. While incarcerated, Baca encountered many conflicts with other inmates, but he also learned to read and write, spending much of his time alone in isolation, reading, writing, and tending to his memories of his early life. Baca writes about having learned much from his time in prison, and this learning impacts the tone and content of “I Am Offering this Poem,” a work that gives the reader insight into a complex poet with a complicated past.