SOURCE: “Mutability and Stasis: Images of Time in Gary Soto's Black Hair,” in The Americas Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 100-07.

In the following essay, de la Fuentes discusses Soto's treatment of time and his emphasis on death in Black Hair.

In Feeling and Form, a theory of art developed from her Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer defines the role of the poet in terms of how well he “uses discourse to create an illusion, a pure appearance, which is a non-discursive symbolic form.”¹ Central to this theory is the distinction between the “actual” and the “virtual” experience:

The appearances of events in our actual lives are fragmentary, transient and often indefinite, like most of our experiences—like the space we move in, the time we feel passing, the human and inhuman forces that challenge us. The poet's business is to create the appearance of ‘experiences...