Poets From The United States

"Even if they are not guilty of anything and are not convicted of a crime, because of the draconian bail system and the fact that they are poor and can’t make bail, they can sit on that island for three years. I just got so much clarity that we’re doing it to adults, you know, we’re doing it to children. And they’re all, you know, black and brown…"

"The performance obviously is the main reason you’re going to the theater, but what’s unique about this medium and hopefully the audience we’re attracting is the diversity. I have a diverse group of characters on that stage. If they’re just performing for one kind of people it’s not the same experience for the audience themselves, so I really want to think of it as, yes you’re going to a one-person show, but you’re also a participant in a hundred person show."

"The outsiders. I’m interested in the people that don’t necessarily fit and the thing that gives you permission to be uncomfortable. I like dark work because you’re forced to learn about certain things…"

"Poems have helped me figure out a lot about queer sexuality – it is a big hill to climb. The ability to transform myself in poetry helps me imagine myself differently in the real world."

"On the interrelationship of poems and politics in “‘Every poem is political’: Danez Smith, the YouTube star shaking up poetry” in The Guardian (2018 Jan 28)"

"Every poem is political. In poems not obviously political, the writer is trying to avoid something…"

"Naming is important. In many black cultures you learn the importance of giving the right name or not naming things…"

"For me, it’s about writing a good poem. The questions of page and performance come later. My first allegiance is with what the poem wants to be, in terms of how it looks. The question of performance is something I ask myself at a later date once the poem is finished, when I ask myself, ‘can I read this to an audience one time through and be able to make them feel something?’ Some poems are just easier to translate to a space of performance than others…"

"…Drift is the tension and play between spirit and matter. Spirit wants to be unbound. It’s the tension between spirit and letter as well, the play between spirit and letter, the tangential way of knowing that the expression “you get my drift” gets at, not to mention the turns spirit and letter take toward each other and away from each other. Language, especially poetic language, replicates or is infused with the relationship between spirit and matter, the traffic between spirit and letter, its analogue…"

"…I think figures accrue to and build on feeling, and it’s no doubt the case that orphaning speaks of and from an emotional disposition I’m both inclined toward and see applying beyond myself. The orphan is such an archetypal figure, recurrent not only in my work but in world culture, because it tugs at the roots of our sense of belonging and the mix of anxiety and solace that goes with that sense…"

"…to the extent that categories and the way things are defined -- the boundaries between things, people, areas of experience, areas of endeavor -- to the extent that those categories and definitions are rooted in social and political realities, anything one does that challenges them, that transgresses those boundaries and offers new definitions, is to some extent contributing to social change…"

"I think that the audience for poetry has widened in recent years and maybe it's continuing to widen—I hope so. The whole poetry slam phenomenon has created an interest and widened the audience for poetry in significant ways. There's a lot that needs to be done, obviously. But poetry is one of those things that just won't go away, and people keep rediscovering it. I think every generation has a poetry boom, or gives a boom to poetry, gives itself to poetry. There is also a growing sense that poetry has great variety to it, that there are many ways of going about it. I think with the recognition of that variousness, there's been a growth in the audience."

"…The song does remember the deceased, and it’s the song that helps the deceased move on—to ascend, in the words of the poem, to the next life. I wanted to take that and apply it to senses of transition and, hopefully, ascendance within life, moments where one feels one has to move on and move up. I didn’t know it would become an ongoing, theoretically endless series—"

"It's very beneficial to Mexico that these workers [come to the U. S.]. It relieves a lot of social tension. It empties out the countryside of the poor and the needy. It stops revolution from happening. And it's sending back a tidal wave of money. The remittance money from the United States is the second or third largest source of income in Mexico now. I guess you could argue that we have an extremely generous foreign policy…"

"I felt everything crashing down and I didn't know what to do. It was such a harrowing experience being with his body. I sat in a room with him all night, his body, dealing with the police. And then I had to go to the border and deal with immigration and have all of his papers…By the time I got back to San Diego, I had forgotten English. It took me a minute to get back into being an American. I had only one way to deal with it, which was writing. I had been writing since high school, and so I wrote about it…"

"I have always been amazed that it seems to come as a shock to people that Mexicans are human beings. And on a philosophical level, I always remind interviewers that “the border” has nothing to do being Mexican or not. The border is simply a metaphor for what divides and wounds us as people – and I mean that “border” between any group of people, gay-straight, black-white, Muslim-Jewish, etc…"

"Chicano" was a bad word when I was coming up. At least that's what the elders said. The word referred to a Mexican born in the U.S., so by that definition, I'm not Chicano. I was born in Tijuana, but the Mexicans didn't see me as Mexican and the Americans didn't see me as American. I'm a man without a flag. When I started working among Chicanos as an adult, some accepted me, but some didn't. On either side [of the border] I was the "other"; I've always been the other. Later on when I had a bit of success, people on both sides were much more enthusiastic about embracing me. The word "Latino" seems meaningless to me, and "Hispanic" is just wrong. These days, I just tell people my nationality is "Writer."

"Often my characters—a Jesus, a Hector, a Gloria—will be bilingual, or if not bilingual at least know enough Spanish to throw words and phrases into conversation. As a writer, I'm trying to capture the voice of my characters, who sometimes will speak in Spanglish…"

"Mine is literary, and mine has a story to tell about a little boy with gaps in his education who became a writer. I’m hoping that the visitor will be curious, not unlike when someone goes to another person’s house for the first time—you look around and learn something about that person. We’re curious creatures, right?"

"Poems written in rhyme and meter can be easily memorized, even longish poems. However, because I write in free verse, my lines are probably more difficult to take in, to absorb, to memorize. But I'm not seeking any students to memorize my poetry—heck, I don't even know my poems. I'm hoping for a sentiment that will linger in the reader's mind. Sentiment, or feeling, is so important to the reader…"

"I remember loving Chato’s Kitchen by Gary Soto and Susan Guevara; I couldn’t believe that there was a book in the library about people from el barrio (actually cats, mice, and dogs), dressed, speaking, cooking, and having a family life that resembled mine. These books—and countless others—are the reason why I started making my own books..."

"The kitchen was the United States; the living room was Mexico…One side was struggling with all her might to make me an American boy, and the other side, with all of his might, was trying to keep me a Mexican boy."

"It means handling words and images in an interesting way. All of us use words daily, unless of course we are the silent type. Everyday we say simple things like, "Gee, look at this tan of mine." Or: "I feel sort of sad." But say you wrote something like: "Our faces were the color of pennies," and "Our souls are broken like jars." The language becomes interesting and perks up our spirits and imagination. This is what poetry means—language that surprises and keeps us on our toes."

"(What about the work of younger writers?) RF: I have not seen much. I’ve only read Mayra Santos Febres’s books, which I think are very good, but there is not enough work to judge yet. Although I think that she is the most promising of all."

"My intention is to write things that can convey a vision of the memory lost, of a way of living in the world."

"what is sold as mainstream literature, I don't like it very much—very simplified, industrialized, Dan Brown stuff. I don't want to write like that."

"I think that art and especially literature is really good at teaching people how to be compassionate and how to put yourself, put themselves, in other people's shoes and trying to bridge the unbridgeable, which is to live through other people's perception. It gifts the eyes of the beholder, not the eyes of the writer, and that is a wonderful gift. That is absolutely wonderful—and that books—it's okay if they entertain, it's okay if they teach—but what they teach in a very profound level is to be human."

"literature and arts are defined in our cultures as an activity that produces both, or this product, that is for leisure and luxury—leisure and luxury. And that is a very weird definition of artists for an Afrolatina. That is a Eurocentric view of what is art, because for us it's basically about recuperating memory and telling the stories and raising the voice and exploring an aesthetic that is devalued."

"that's what artists are. We are the voices, and the memory, and the explorers of an aesthetic, and a sensibility, and a philosophy that has been silenced and devalued."

"Our stand as an island/nation/U.S. "territory"/colony is asking for a revision. Personally, I believe that we live in global times. New identities need to participate in the dialogue about civil rights, sovereignty, the need to look past nationalisms and their monolithic discourses on what constitutes citizenship."

"People believe that black people live the same way everywhere and that is not true. White people don’t live the same way everywhere, even if you have the same cultural references. Take music. Rap, of course, black rappers don’t live the same way everywhere. There are black rappers in Africa, black rappers in France, black rappers in the U.S. and there are black rappers in the Caribbean. I wanted people to see the way in which that music became a means of expression of a reality, which is at the same time both global and local."

"I do not see this novel as solely dealing with LGBT issues. I see Sirena as a metaphoric representation of the whole Caribbean. The fact that s/he is a transvestite is just a fact. Basically, I did what Flaubert did with Emma Bovary. He talked about his society through the character of a woman—an adulterous woman…"

"I prefer novels. However, I think that the theme of the piece determines its form. Some texts work better in poetry than in essay or stories or plays. It is good though to learn as many techniques in creative writing as one can, so that, as a writer, one has the flexibility to work with the piece and its need."

"Afro-descendants in Puerto Rico fall between the gaps of two converging definitions of Blackness and Latinx-ness and therefore, remain invisible to both U.S. and colonial Puerto Rico's public policies. I have to say that Puerto Rican government administrations have used the U.S. current definition of "Latinx identity to further marginalize Afro-Puerto Ricans. For instance, administrations of all political denominations use the Latinx minority status to ask for aid for the whole Puerto Rican population, without precise statistical information that includes race. On the island, they use the overrated and old discourse of "mestizaje to further marginalize blackness. Most public departments refuse to use the category of "Afro-Latino or "Afro-Hispanic in their census. They do use the category "African American," which is not the identity with which many Afro-Latinxs, or Latin people of African descent identify themselves. Up to this point, we don't know, for instance, how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected people of African descent on the island. This racist policy does not provide us as Afro-Puerto Ricans with the necessary tools to demand government action nor changes in public policy to benefit our population."

"Like many Puerto Rican scholars of my generation, I am a huge admirer of Mayra Santos-Febres. She is one of the most prolific and influential writers, critics, and teachers on the archipelago"

"I was born with a particular sensitivity to words. Some people are very good with math and sports… I wasn’t but I could feel words."

"I have NEVER seen so many Afro-Latinxs at universities, holding Ph.Ds, and participating in public discourses about race in my life. Whenever I go, Colombia, Perú, Guatemala, México, Cuba, or Spain, France, etc., I have never in my life seen so many people of African descent sitting where decisions and discourses are being produced. I think this is a major change in the game."

"…and i am learning to hope like a bird learns its first affair with wind and sun like an orange learns to take flight into the mouth of a boy in summer…"

"i have found the face of story lying again. i’m tired. i’m a moth on sunday. i’m rain looking for a cup’s crippled rim…"

"The late Andrés Montoya was my first influence, and the largest…He believed that poetry fueled personal, societal and cultural liberation. He wrote about the downtrodden, the poor, the factory workers and the drug-addicted. He beautified what some deemed ugly and taught me that poetry is for all the people around you. I saw what language could do. We talked for hours about poetry, politics and race. I had found my first brother in poetry…"

"When I started writing, there were only two women writers that I knew: Lorraine Sutton and Margie Simmons. There were very few Latinas writing in English... So when I started, I was mainly surrounded by men-Pedro Pietri, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Tato Laviera. Many of them had books already published. I was like a sponge, absorbing different things from these male contemporaries."

"Puerto Rico in particular intertwines Caribbean Black Spanish. We dare to claim it. It is a source of pride and we are not linguistically crippled. My claim to fame is I can experiment, and sound intelligent with my linguistic experiments."

"Her (Sandra María Esteves's) struggle for language, like Tato Laviera's, is not just linguistic, cultural or national, but also racial."

"In the Lower East Side, the Puerto Ricans had already been ‘project-ed.’ The people were used to living in the projects. They worked on ships on South Street or in hotels. There were a lot of people collecting records, so music became a really important connection between New York City and Puerto Rico. We spoke English in the street and Spanish at home. A lot of music from Puerto Rico was played in the streets and in people’s homes. We listened to Bomba, Plena, pop music and Salsa."

"How is one to reconstruct a memory of a place that doesn’t exist anymore? I mean the buildings are still there, but the faces are no longer the same. Gentrified NYC has pretty much eviscerated the nuances of particular neighborhoods, like El Barrio…"

"Everybody takes his or her reality for granted. Everybody takes for granted the reality we see, we hear. That’s true for life as well as poetry. We grow up in certain circumstances, in a certain environment, and we understand that this is the way the world works. Sometimes we have to unlearn that truth, learn that there is a different or broader reality. I’m always open to that, and I’m certainly transformed any number of times during my life. And then I regress. We all do it…"

"A Puerto Rican writer from New York is doubly dislocated: first, there is dislocation from Puerto Rico; secondly, there is Puerto Rico’s dislocation from itself. Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. It may be a truism that you can’t go home again, but it’s especially true when home is an occupied territory. A Puerto Rican writer from New York, like myself, is twice alienated. I never forget that in this country I belong to a marginalized, silenced, even despised community; yet, in Puerto Rico, as a “Nuyorican” poet, I am marginalized again, for reasons related and unrelated to the island’s colonial status…"

"My diction, my choice of words, is as precise as I can make it. The images that I use, the evocation of the senses, again, relies upon a certain exactitude. You can see how what I did with language as a poet would bleed into what I did as a lawyer, vice-versa…"

"I use vignettes and dialogue as a way of relaying a moment. Storytelling is not a monotonic medium. Rule breaking is a conscious decision and, yes, it comes with consequences. I think the nostalgia is really a specific memory made of the right words that are more celebratory, elegiac, than nostalgic."

"At the risk of over-generalizing, my sense is that American poetry, where popular culture is concerned, is a poetry of freedom and permission—that there are certainly poets who embrace it and have enjoyed success, from a publishing perspective, in embracing it…"