ROCHESTER — Iván Argüelles is Rochester’s most famous poet.
Most of Rochester doesn’t know it, because the Rochester that Ivan grew up in doesn’t exist anymore.
Iván was raised in the 1950s, when Rochester was a 25,000-person hamlet, a beltline highway separating neon-flashing civilization from countryside and cornfields.
Where the Apache Mall stands today was all cornfields when Iván was a kid. When IBM held its ground breaking for a new plant in 1956, Ivan graduated from Rochester High School.
His dual ethnic heritage, his parents’ desire to see Iván get an American education and his mom’s poor health contributed to a peripatetic upbringing: Iván was raised in Mexico City, Los Angeles and Rochester.
Iván’s mom was German descended from Rochester, his dad “pure Mexican” from Guadalajara. Conceived in Mexico City, born in Saint Marys Hospital, Iván had a unique perspective on Rochester: His was the only Mexican family living at the time in what was then an all-white community, he said.
After being born in Rochester, Iván was raised in Mexico City for his first five years. Later, when his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis, his family returned to Rochester and her brother, a Mayo Clinic doctor, arranged to have her put in a sanatorium. Iván lived in Rochester from second grade until he graduated from high school in 1956.
It was in Rochester where Iván felt the first stirrings to be a poet. Today, at 85, Ivan is the author of 50 published titles and winner of several awards and is still going strong, writing poetry every day. The sway of Ivan’ childhood memories would influence his poetry. References to Ivan’s boyhood and adolescence in Rochester resonate in his works.
Yet, you would be hard-pressed to find a book of his poetry in the Rochester Public Library. Like a prophet, Iván is honored everywhere except in his home town
His book, “Looking for Mary Lou,” won the 1989 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. The work, inspired by a high-school sweetheart in Rochester, explores innocence and adolescent love, of drinking Cherry Cokes at Weber and Judd drug store (now departed), of an America that no longer exists.
A selection of early poems, “The Death of Stalin,” won a Before Columbus Foundation’s award in 2009. He also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013 from the same foundation. In the early 1990s, Iván turned to writing epic, book-length poems, including the first volume of “That” Goddess, the two-volume poem “Madonna Septet,” and “Comedy, Divine.”
“Rochester is bedrock in my memories,” Iván said. “It’s a mythical place to me now.”
His father — a painter, colorful, mercurial and Clark Gable-handsome — stuck out in Rochester as “very foreign” compared to the pale community of German and Norwegian Lutherans. His personal history was as colorful as he was. As a member of the Mexico City police force, his father was once the adjutant to the President of Mexico.
As a painter in Mexico, his father counted Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo among his social acquaintances. He was a member of the Communist Party and knew Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. He was among those on the scene after Trotsky was assassinated in his Mexico City home.
“He never ceased telling my brother and me, ‘I never saw so many brains in my life,’” Iván said.
His dad’s social standing took a hit when he moved to Rochester. His first job was that of a cook at Saint Marys Hospital. But his dad had a gift for getting along with people, and within a few years, his social circle of friends had expanded to include doctors, other professionals and assorted lowlifes, he said.
It was in Rochester that Iván had his first brush with prejudice and racism. Iván had a twin brother, José, who later gained fame as a New Age writer and artist. (Indeed, so identical in appearance were they that Rochester teachers would sit them in different corners of the classroom to tell them apart).
On his first day of school at Lincoln, some classmates pulled Iván and José aside and told them, “you’re not Americans, you’re Indians.”
“I’m half German and half Mexican. But truth to tell, I never felt the German side. I just felt the Mexican side,” Iván said. “My father had a very dominant personality. In the United States, if you’re half black and half white, you’re black. If you’re half Mexican and half not-Mexican, you’re Mexican.”
He was mostly a mediocre student until he reached the ninth grade and discovered Latin. He ended up taking Latin all four years of high school. It proved to be an epiphany for Ivan as he discovered that Latin wasn’t all that much different from the Spanish he spoke at home.
It led to his introduction to the works of the Roman poet Virgil. He began devouring books from the public library, reading James Joyce’s Ulysses by 10th grade. William Faulker and T.S. Eliot became his favorite writers.
“At about that time, my brother and I started becoming the quote unquote intellectuals of high school,” Iván said. “While we may have been on the other side of the tracks, we were probably the most gifted kids in high school in terms of sheer intellectual avant garde-ness.”
In high school, Iván became a published poet for the first time when a national high school poetry anthology included one of his poems.
Iván today can read and understand literature in 10 different languages, including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, among the classical tongues, the Romance languages, as well as modern Greek, Hindi and Bengali.
Some 65 years after leaving Rochester, Iván’s stories and memories of Rochester tumble forth, from its architectural gems, landmarks, natural and man-made, to exact street addresses: He vividly recalls Mayo Clinic’s Plummer Building with its “august lobby” and “grand carillon” atop; Watching Elvis Presley perform on the “Ed Sullivan Show” on a black-and-white television in the mansion of a Pill Hill classmate; him and his brother floating down the Zumbro River with their dog Duke and christening a rock in the middle of the river, “Duke Island.”
In 1952, in high school, Iván met a girl, Mary Lou Willard. “I was so young, but yet we fell in love.” They dated off and on through high school. Her parents were from Mankato and bought and ran a hotel on South Broadway.
“Mary Lou and I were so inseparable much of the time,” Iván said. “The cornfields that are now Apache Mall, I used to go through those cornfields to get to South Broadway. We used to make out in those cornfields.”
Iván would later write a poem called “Looking for Mary Lou” that became a centerpiece for one of his poetry books.
Yet, his time in Rochester ended on a sour note. A Country Club dance was held in Rochester, and everyone who went from high school to college was invited. But neither Iván nor his brother were invited. And Mary Lou, who was invited, did not ask Iván to come. It left Iván with a sense of bitter rejection.
“That was ironic because I never felt that rejected all the time I lived in Rochester. But this made me feel very rejected. I felt like, ‘OK, these country club kids really don’t want me around.’”
“When you have that sense of resentment, you always wish there was something that would make everybody stand up and say, ‘Oh, I remember him. We went to school with him,’” Iván said.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is: It was so important to me. I’d like Rochester to know that this guy who’s a poet now felt that importance. Rochester was so important to me, but it didn’t seem to recognize what I was going to be or what I became.”