Paperback, 30 pages
ISBN-13: 979-8-88838-726-9
The thirteen poem sequence of Inventing the Americas depicts the true yet fabulous tale of how Christóbal Colón and Americus Vespucci explored the Western Hemisphere and why the continents were named for the latter not the former. Based on years of research and teaching, William Heath captures with poetic precision and telling detail what actually happened, even though some events are almost beyond belief. These voyages, bringing in their wake horrific consequences for indigenous peoples, profoundly changed the world.
Praise for Inventing the Americas
For William Heath the islands and continents of what the Europeans were pleased to call the New World were not so much “discovered” by Christopher Colón as invented. “The world in his head,” as Heath writes of Colón, “is not the one under his feet.” Off the coast of Venezuela Colón sees the Orinoco splitting into four branches like the rivers of the Terrestrial Paradise and writes to Queen Isabella “I have just found the Garden of Eden.” It is a paradise laid open to despoliation and rape. Heath tells the story of the misapprehensions, misnamings and crimes of Colón and his companions in their conquest of this immense land with a poet’s eye, finding just the right moment, the right detail to distil this long tale of exploitation, enslavement and death in thirteen brief poems. In the end Colón, the man ennobled as The Admiral of the Ocean Sea dies impoverished and the explorer and fabulist Vespucci gives his name to the lands Colón first reached, and in a sly reference to our own day
…America it remains, a land
where fact and fantasy merge,
and true histories are trumped
by pleasing myths.
— Zeese Papanikolas, author of Savages
Poems from Inventing the Americas
The Death of Marco Polo
A troubled priest kneeling
to administer last rights
admonishes Marco Polo
to confess his sins,
tell the truth about
his celebrated travels.
Everyone knows he has
exaggerated the facts,
told extravagant falsehoods
and fabulous tales of
golden cities in the East.
Surely he must set
the record straight here
before the eyes of men,
in the presence of God.
Marco motions the good
father to lean closer,
and, mustering what
strength he has left,
whispers loudly enough
for all to hear: I have
not told the half of it!
A New World
Amerigo sends letters about his adventures
to his boyhood friends in Florence.
Upon his return from his second voyage
in celebration of the new world’s wonders
he writes in Latin Mundus Novus.
This widely read pamphlet creates
a sensation in Europe by depicting
what is alluring and appalling. Far more
than Colón’s letters it vividly captures
the imagination of its readers.
Unlike the lands Colón thinks
he has found, Amerigo is first to insist
his discoveries are separate from Asia.
They belong to an entirely new continent
in an unknown quarter of the globe.
Amerigo becomes the Botticelli
of a Caribbean Sea whose Venuses
are beautiful, desirable, available,
and skilled in womanly wiles
to satisfy the most inordinate lust.
Decency bids us pass over those wiles,
yet he implies a potion or poison
is used to enlarge the male penis.
Plus a man can relax on fine cotton
as a hammock sways in the breeze.
In addition to an idealized Eden
of sexual gratification, Amerigo
portrays a golden world without toil:
kings and laws replaced by liberty,
equality, harmony, abundance.
In this Paradise custom-made
for male wish-fulfillment,
there are no priests, no religion,
people live together in large houses
and nobody covets another’s goods.
Mundus Novus provides an antidote
to the divine right of monarchs,
strictures of church doctrine,
privileges of an entrenched aristocracy,
hierarchal structures of feudalism.
On a venture into the dense jungle
Amerigo is startled by an anaconda
and then by fearsome crocodiles
yet a more deadly reptile lurks
in this Edenic garden—cannibalism:
One handsome, well-built Portuguese,
admired by several women, suddenly
is clubbed to death on the spot,
dragged off, roasted over a fire,
cut into pieces, eaten in triumph.
Europeans will use such horrors
to justify their future brutalities.
The victims of the Inquisition
are burned alive, at least the Tupi
wait until their enemies are dead.
The sensationalism of Mundus Novus,
its captivating blend of information
and outlandish fiction make a deep
impression on the Renaissance mind,
his version has a lasting impact.
When a German cartographer draws
a map of a newly expanded globe
a poet friend suggests that because
a fourth part has been discovered
by him, its name should be America.
And America it remains, a land
where fact and fantasy merge,
and to this day true histories
are trumped by pleasing myths.