I Am Offering This Poem

Fiction | Poem | YA | Published in 1990

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Related Poems

“Poem by Poem” by Juan Felipe Herrera (2015)

Contemporary American poet Juan Felipe Herrera has served as poet laureate for both California and the United States. Like “I Am Offering This Poem,” Herrera’s "Poem by Poem" features direct address and meditates on poetry’s power. “Poem by Poem” urges readers to fight injustice through speaking against it. He dedicates the poem to each of the nine people killed in the 2015 shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

“Sonnet XVII” by Pablo Neruda

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) is one of the most famous South American writers. He was renowned for his love sonnets, one of which is the well-known “Sonnet XVII.” Like Baca’s poem, Neruda’s speaker focuses on the mysterious yet precious nature of his love.

“Here It Is” by Mohja Kahf (2020)

Contemporary Syrian American poet Mohja Kahf included this poem in her 2020 collection My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit. This poem resounds with the refrain that is also its title. The speaker marvels at the love in her life, so powerful that it distorts her sense of time and decay.

Further Literary Resources

“An Interview with Jimmy Santiago Baca: On Writing, Prison, and the Human Spirit” by Sy Safransky (1980)

This interview appears in The Sun, an independent magazine based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In conversation with Safransky, Baca describes his earliest efforts to write poetry while in Arizona State Prison, comparing his first poems to “scribbles of screams and singing,” full of grammatical mistakes and spelling errors. Baca explains that without poetry, he would not have survived prison, making a compelling argument for the role of art in the lives of all humans.

“On Singing at the Gates: Selected Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca” by Ronald A. Sharp (2017)

This review of Baca’s 2017 collection of poetry appears in the Kenyon Review. The poet selected all of the poems in this collection himself, and while they work together to represent Baca’s long career, the reviewer Ronald A. Sharp, who is an English professor at Kenyon, notes that Baca did not select “what he considers his most important poems for this new selected.” Rather, Baca selected poems that he feels “perhaps has not received the attention [they] deserve.” Throughout the review, Sharp’s deep understanding of Baca’s work and his career trajectory illuminates the chronological significance of Baca’s selections.

“Literature for Justice” (2018)

The Literature for Justice committee at the National Book Foundation selected Baca’s International Award-winning memoir A Place to Stand for its inaugural reading list for its ability to “shine a necessary light on the American criminal justice system.” Baca was 22 years old and illiterate when he entered prison, and he taught himself how to read and write while incarcerated, standing up to gang members and risking his life in order to practice his literacy skills in his cell. Baca’s story about his years in a maximum-security prison for selling drugs offers readers a deeply personal context from which they can explore the experience of being incarcerated in America.