Poet Salinas dies at 70

Latino poets are hard to come by these days. Especially since the civil rights movement slowly died out.

From The Fresno Bee

Luis Omar Salinas, an influential poet associated with Philip Levine and other Fresno poets, managed a successful literary career and enjoyed the support of family in Sanger.

Mr. Salinas, 70, died Sunday of chronic pulmonary disease.

Levine taught Mr. Salinas as a young student at Fresno State College in the 1960s, and realized he was watching an incipient poet.

“He was a young undergraduate, recently out of the service,” Levine said Thursday. “This was in the 1960s, and he was giving me work enormously original, powerful.”

Mr. Salinas had withstood a tough early life “as a kid on the Tex-Mex border,” Levine said.

Cousin Carmen Molina cared for Mr. Salinas the last years of his life in Sanger, and remembered him Thursday for his intellect.

“His poetry is lush in imagery, like no other being written,” she said. She recognized his talent in high school, and he helped her with her own high school essays.

More recently, Molina had taken Mr. Salinas to a dermatologist’s appointment, and the doctor was thrilled to examine this poet.

“Students would come to the house just to meet him,” Molina said. “He was so happy.”

Mr. Salinas suffered from bipolar disorder, Molina said, and lived with great sadness and great joy.

“I believe he was deeply lonely,” she said.

When he got to Fresno State in the 1960s, Mr. Salinas began coming to Levine’s office, picking up his suggestions. He returned in a year or two with poetry that eventually was published. Levine read his work and saw the roots of his poetry. It wasn’t the vocabulary or syntax, he said, “but the vision itself. Latino surrealism gave an unusual edge to his work. I immediately could pick out poems of his out of all my students.”

Poet Salinas dies at 70