Don Marcos Review of Hard Knocks

Donald W. Markos: Review of Hard Knocks: Memoir of a Small Moment by Ray Lopez

Hard Knocks is a biography that engages the reader just as a good novel does. Lopez writes in a sophisticated but vivid plain style that calls attention to what’s going on in the world in which the author confronts hard knocks and gives some too. Lopez’s first chapter starts with the word “No,” his first spoken word and a forecast of a strong individualism. He was such a problem child that his parents called him “Groucho.”

The teenage years of this later-to-be devout Christian are marred by “booze and speed, and anger.” In a rage he runs out of the house and bangs his head against a telephone pole–a literal version of “hard knocks.” When his mother arrives in a Chrysler, its “Corinthian” leather seats foreshadow a distant conversion.

Lopez details his family origins in Mexico and the “Latino machismo heritage” that came with it. Raymond’s father-to-be gave piano lessons to the woman who would become his mother. His father, Alfred, served in the Philippines during the Korean War.

Lopez is candid about his early addiction to alcohol, stemming from sneaking drinks at big family parties. We find his low key wit in this account: “The key to success as a childhood drinker is waiting for the adults to get drunk before making a move.” 

Don is a transplant from Wisconsin and has been teaching American literature at California State University in Hayward since 1966.  His interest in writing poetry was revived in 1983 when he took workshops from Robert Pinsky, Frank Bidart, and Robert Hass.  Since then, with the aid of lottery funds, Don started an on-campus literary magazine, Occam’s Razor, which is going into its 17^th issue.

Don has published poems in The Berkeley Poetry Review, Northeast, Occident, Ariel (Triton College), The SouthernReview. He has published articles on modern poets and novelists in The William Carlos Williams Review, The SouthernReview, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in the Novel. He has  also published Ideas in Things: The Poems of WilliamCarlos Williams (Associated University Presses 1994). donald.markos@csueastbay.edu