“That is beautiful. I just think that is so awesome.” Leonel says with great enthusiasm after someone reads from their work at the Big Pine Key writer’s group
Another member (me for example) cuts in, “I don’t know, maybe some of the descriptions are too long.”
“No,” Leonel says with conviction. “I love it. You can feel that you are there.”
Leonel Valle is a writer’s writer, a writer’s reader who approaches each work with a certain delicacy. He is never false, or condescending, he just has an abundant and abiding love for beauty, and the astonishing ability to follow disparate voices, allowing the writer to trust, follow their instinct.
I always come away from the Big Pine Key meeting filled with hope and faith that I can tackle whatever is put in font of me and much of that is because of Leonel Valle.
His own work is spare, rhythmic often celebrating his union with life forms in and around the Florida keys .
He writes in English.
And Spanish.
My favorite work from Leonel are his moody poems, projections as he imagines the lives of fish and other creatures around him. I think my favorite line is from a poem called Shadows whereby the narrator lies in ambush, stalking the “wiley bonefish” Lost in thought he muses on his past while waiting for the fish to appear. Bonefish appear in shadow, themselves hunting for food. The poem ends with my favorite line
“& I,
not knowing why,
Let them go by.
This delicate line, resists the impulse to tell us how much respect, sympatico he has for his fellow struggling creature, linked in that one poignant moment, a random act of connectedness, kindness. His best poems have that signature light touch, as does the man himself.
If you have seen the TSKW exhibition
Worlds of Dreams: Perspectives from Three Cuban Exiles
Then you may have a sense of the man and the world he comes from, his two friends, their work.
If you missed it, get a copy of Keys Latitude – poetry of the Florida Keys– deceptively transparent poems of longing, nature and a hazy homeland that lives in sudden dreams & images.
Very nice tribute to an excellent poet.
I had the good fortune to first see and meet Leonel and Deborah Linker at the Big Pine Key Fishing Lodge last winter. I closed my eyes, listened to his poems and suddenly I was there…..