The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica

A free verse poem, “The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica” evokes vivid experiences through sense imagery and brief, purposeful lines. Cofer focuses on specific details that illuminate the immigrant experience. Displaced from Latin American countries, the deli’s patrons fill the store with Spanish and crave foods that remind them of their native countries. Meanwhile, the deli owner remains the steady, motherly center of the place, turning her customers into poets as they explore a wealth of “canned memories” (Line 9).

As a child, Cofer split her life between the United States and her birthplace in Puerto Rico. Her work often concentrates on this cultural duality. How do people maintain their native customs in a new land? Do their identities change the longer they spend away from home? This poem asks these questions by keeping the US in the background and placing patrons’ homelands in the foreground. Cofer names the customers’ various home countries and populates the poem with Spanish phrases. She thus magnifies patrons’ loyalty to their homes as they make their way in the United States.

Cofer also draws out her themes—and appeals to the readers’ five senses—through focusing on food. Food is a gateway to culture: both as a learning tool and as a reminder of one’s native culture. The smells, tastes, and sights customers encounter in the deli evoke strong memories of home. From the too-expensive Bustelo coffee they spot on a shelf to Suspiros, “the stale candy of everyone’s childhood” (Line 28), these specific items create mental pictures for the reader and transport the deli’s customers to deeply meaningful times and places.

Cofer also magnifies specific details throughout the store with short poetic lines. For example, Cofer doles out a single phrase on one line, describing the deli owner as “she smiles understanding” (Line 24), and allows the reader space to imagine the image before moving to the next line. Readers can concentrate on her highly specific language in these lines that resemble snapshots, like “the heady mix of smells from the open bins” (Line 4).

The poet connects these phrases, stacking one atop the next, with punctuation like commas and em dashes. These punctuation marks invite the reader to pause. Sometimes these pauses (or caesuras) occur in the middle of poetic lines. For example, the colon creates a caesura in “tied with string: plain ham and cheese […]” (Line 31).

However, Cofer rarely stops a thought completely with a sentence-ending period. In fact, the entire 38-line poem is only two sentences long. The phrase “she is the Patroness of Exiles” (Line 7) contains the subject of the first two-stanza-long sentence: she. In fact, both grammatical sentences in this poem use she, or the deli owner, as their subjects. This indicates the woman’s role as anchor in the not only her community but in the poem.

Cofer paints a vivid picture of the woman, standing behind the “formica counter” (Line 1) with “her look of maternal interest” (Line 21). She comments that the woman “was never pretty” (Line 8) and describes the care with which she prepares “jamón y queso” (Line 30) sandwiches and wraps them in wax paper. Unlike the Bustelo coffee, this sandwich “would cost less at the A&P” (Line 32), a popular American supermarket chain at the time Cofer wrote the poem. The specter of a large American corporation looms as this woman runs her small business, a market of a very different kind. However, patrons need to visit the deli to connect with the woman, each other, and the “places that now exist only in their hearts” (Line 37).

As an ars poetica, this poem also comments on poetry itself. The poem finds not only Cofer but also the deli customers finding inspiration at the deli. Through “complain[ing]” (Line 10), “reading the labels of packages aloud” (Line 26), and “talking lyrically” (Line 16), the patrons all fill the deli with poetry.