Recall a night in
I remember that night of talented degenerates—and those times—very
well. There was a Latino cultural renaissance in
What happened? Many of us left
He was right. We were
I don't want to sound as if you sprung fully formed from
the head of Zeus, but you appeared with a remarkable maturity of voice and
presence, even then. I recall hearing you read "Mrs. Báez
Serves Coffee on the Third Floor" and never forgetting it--not so much the
exact lines, but the tone and feeling of the poem. We used to joke that
you were "the most famous unknown poet in
If I did spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, I’m quite sure
I would’ve tripped and broken my ankle. In fact, I was never certain of my
destiny, but I was certain that I wanted to be a poet. I should point out that
I got a relatively early start publishing my work. My first book was published
in 1982, when I was twenty-four years old, before I arrived in
I wasn’t always a poet. In fact, I was a terrible student, not unlike a certain chief executive I could mention. I flunked English one semester in the eighth grade, and now I’m a professor of English, which only demonstrates how one life can zig and zag. I wrote my first poem when I was fifteen, as a result of a classroom assignment, and I’ve never looked back.
The term “evil-doers” sounds ironic or hyperbolic, but in fact there were some evil-doers in Chelsea District Court among the landlords, attorneys and judges I encountered there as a tenant lawyer. Ultimately, however, the system was more evil than any one individual. It was a system that valued property over people and rewarded the well-crafted untruth. This was a place for the exercise of raw political and economic power.
I was the Supervisor of Su Clínica
Legal, a legal services program for low-income, Spanish-speaking tenants in
Working in the “legal trenches” had a definite effect on my poetry. Both as a lawyer and a poet, I was an advocate, speaking on behalf of those without an opportunity to be heard. I wrote poems about Chelsea and the law—many of them appear in a book called City of Coughing and Dead Radiators—but my advocacy as a poet went well beyond the law or that particular community. I saw no contradiction being both a lawyer and a poet, since both, for me, involved advocacy.
Of course, there were lawyer-poets long before me. Edgar Lee Masters and Charles Reznikoff come to mind as two of my favorites. I appreciate Masters’ Spoon River Anthology and Reznikoff’s Testimony as a poet and a lawyer. There are also contemporary lawyer-poets I admire, like Sam Allen, Ilya Kaminsky and Lawrence Joseph.
Talk about your dad. There can be no doubt that he had a profound influence on your vision, or at least on The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero, your first book.
My father, Frank Espada, was a political activist and leader of the New York Puerto Rican community in the 1960s. He was, and is, a documentary photographer, who directed the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project, a photo-documentary and oral history of the Puerto Rican migration from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Thus, his influence was personal, cultural, political, and artistic. He not only provided an activist example, but also taught me something about the visual image which is, I think, reflected in my work. My first book, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, published in 1982, combines my poems with his photographs. He also did the covers for four subsequent books.
In 1949, when my father was nineteen and serving in the US Air Force, he was arrested in Biloxi, Mississippi for refusing to go to the back of the bus. He spent a week in jail; that was his political awakening. In 1964, he was arrested and jailed again. This time he was protesting against the racially discriminatory hiring practices of the Schaefer Brewing Company. There was a demonstration organized by the Congress of Racial Equality at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion during the New York World’s Fair, and my father was one of many arrested there who simply disappeared into the legal machinery.
Being seven years old in 1964, and with no other explanation forthcoming, I concluded that my father must be dead. I would hold a snapshot of him in my hands and cry. One day, to my amazement, he walked in the door. Once he established that he was not dead, he realized that he had to explain his absence. That was, you might say, my political awakening. I wrote a poem about it thirty years later:
The Sign in My Father’s Hands
For Frank Espada
The beer company
did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans,
so my father joined the picket line
at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion,
amid the crowds glaring with canine hostility.
But the cops brandished nightsticks
and handcuffs to protect the beer,
and my father disappeared.
In 1964, I had never tasted beer,
and no one told me about the picket signs
torn in two by the cops of brewery.
I knew what dead was: dead was a cat
overrun with parasites and dumped
in the hallway incinerator.
I knew my father was dead.
I went mute and filmy-eyed, the slow boy
who did not hear the question in school.
I sat studying his framed photograph
like a mirror, my darker face.
Days later, he appeared in the doorway
grinning with his gilded tooth.
Not dead, though I would come to learn
that sometimes Puerto Ricans die
in jail, with bruises no one can explain
swelling their eyes shut.
I would learn too that "boycott"
is not a boy's haircut,
that I could sketch a picket line
on the blank side of a leaflet.
That day my father returned
from the netherworld
easily as riding the elevator to
and the brewery cops could only watch
in drunken disappointment.
I searched my father's hands
for a sign of the miracle.
Since we are looking at father figures now, perhaps you can offer a few words about Clemente Soto Vélez.
Clemente Soto Vélez was a dear friend of
mine. He was a major Puerto Rican poet and a leader of the independence
movement in
As a militant independentista—that
is, an advocate of independence for the island—he was convicted of seditious
conspiracy and served six years in federal prison from 1936 to 1942. Upon his
release, he settled in
Can you share some impressions of your transformative visit to
In July 2004, I was part of a small
Consider the context: We poets are told in this country, over and over, that we do not matter. We internalize the rhetoric of irrelevance. In this mercantile culture, poetry is quantified in terms of dollars and found lacking.
I hear the same dirge about poetry everybody else hears.
Then I went to
I was in the middle of two remarkable scenes at Isla Negra. The families of the desaparecidos—the disappeared, tortured, imprisoned and murdered under the Pinochet regime—staged a silent demonstration at the tomb of Neruda. The logic of their actions may seem, to us, extraordinary, but to them it made perfect sense to make their appeal for justice at the grave of a poet. To them there was an unbreakable nexus between justice and poetry.
When they found out I was a poet, they broke their silence. For my part, I promised that I would tell their story. And I did.
The other scene was more personal. I had just finished an interview with the national Chilean television station, which attracted a circle of onlookers. This is what happened next:
For Darío
At Isla Negra,
between Neruda’s tomb
and the anchor in the garden,
a man with stonecutter’s hands
lifted up his boy of five
so the boy’s eyes could search mine.
The boy’s eyes were black olives.
Son, the father said, this is a poet,
like Pablo Neruda.
The boy’s eyes were black glass.
My son is called Darío,
for the poet of
the father said.
The boy’s eyes were black stones.
The boy said nothing,
searching my face for poetry,
searching my eyes for his own eyes.
The boy’s eyes were black islands.
This experience was deeply moving for me. There is a kind of
challenge here: How do I live up to these expectations? On the other hand, I
was glad to be far away from the pose of detached, hip cynicism that
characterizes so much poetry in the
I teach a whole course on the life and work of Neruda at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Gabriel García Márquez said that Neruda was the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language. He may have been right.
There are many Nerudas, of course: The love poet, the surrealist poet, the political poet, the poet of historical epic, the poet of the sea, the poet of everyday things. The common denominator is the image. Neruda is grounded in the senses, and his imagery never loses the wildness of those early surrealist days, though at the same time he manages a startling clarity. He has a passionate appreciation for the fact of being alive, a great empathy that expresses itself in poems like “The Great Tablecloth:”
Let us sit down soon to eat
with all those who haven’t eaten:
let us spread great tablecloths,
put salt in the lakes of the world,
set up planetary bakeries,
tables with strawberries in snow,
and a plate like the moon itself
from which we all can eat.
For now I ask no more
Than the justice of eating.
(Thanks to Alastair Reid for the translation.)
Aside from Neruda—are there other influences? Do you see yourself as a member of any movement or "school"? And are you comfortable with being seen as a poet of witness?
I am part of a tradition that goes back to Whitman. I mentioned before the concept of the poet-advocate. It was Whitman, in #24 of Song of Myself, who wrote: “Through me many long-dumb voices.” It was Whitman in Leaves of Grass who constantly spoke for slaves, prisoners, and prostitutes, “the rights of them the others are down upon.” Whitman’s greatest disciple, Neruda, stood at the heights of Macchu Picchu and said, “I come to speak for your dead mouths.” They were poet-advocates, and I follow their example.
When Whitman writes, in the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, that the duty of the poet is “to cheer up slaves and horrify despots,” he is laying the foundation for a tradition of political poetry in the generations to come. (We can only imagine what Whitman would make of this administration, but he is the guy who coined the term “filthy Presidentiad.”)
Aside from Neruda, there are many other major poets I could cite working in this Whitmanesque vein throughout the twentieth century: Hughes, Sandburg, Masters, Ginsberg, Hikmet, Cardenal. They all influenced me.
There are also contemporary poets who have influenced me to one
degree or another: Forché, Rich, Piercy,
Komunyakaa,
Beyond influence, I have had mentors. There was Clemente Soto Vélez, but also Robert Creeley,
Sam Cornish, Andrew Salkey, and Sandy Taylor. In
I am perfectly comfortable with the idea of being identified as a “poet of witness.” This concept of witness, as articulated by Carolyn Forché and others, is closely linked to the Latin American “testimonio.” All it means is that we see and we speak. As I’ve said elsewhere, how could I know what I know and not tell what I know?
Here's a simple, complicated question: Latino, Hispanic, or what? Everybody's working their little label-making-machines, trying to find one that will help make a handy bundle of us for general consumption. What flavor are you, Martín? Are you and I different flavors? And how do you think auto-determination varies from our culture's definitions of us? This is important both personally and aesthetically.
If I were ice cream, I’d be Mango Beef flavor. Something exotic.
As for your simple, complicated question: Personally, I prefer
“Latino” over “Hispanic.” “Latino” is a term that emerged organically from the
community. The word is Spanish, being shorthand for “Latinoamericano.”
As such, it includes all those of Latin American origin or descent living in
the
On the other hand, “Hispanic” is a term coined by the US Census Bureau and picked up by the mainstream media, which is why its usage predominates . It’s an English word which, paradoxically, emphasizes our Spanish heritage at the expense of our African or indigenous roots. Generally, this is the term associated with the more conservative elements of our community. By the way, “Hispanic” includes the word “panic” in it, which is what many right-wing pundits and politicians are doing in response to all those Latin American immigrants coming across the border.
I also like “Latino” better than “Hispanic” because it’s more musical. Maybe that’s just the poet in me. We shouldn’t underestimate the musicality of words; no one says “Puerto Rican-American,” not only because it’s redundant, but because it’s awkward.
In addition to being Latino, I’m Puerto Rican, Nuyorican,
and Boricua. “Puerto Rican” is self-explanatory; my father is from
Auto-definition is critical. If I say that I’m Puerto Rican, Nuyorican or Boricua, that should be enough for anybody. We spend too much time inside our respective communities playing the authenticity game. Identity is a collection of experiences, and all of us should have the right to name our experience. We all deserve the benefit of the doubt.
We should all be wary of labels and boxes than confine rather than define us. At the same time, this language can be useful. I believe in useful language, and I am of the opinion that “Latino” is more useful than “Hispanic.”
Having said that, I should also say that I won’t scream and faint if someone calls me “Hispanic” rather than “Latino.” As long as I’m addressed respectfully, the nomenclature is of secondary importance. I’ve been called “spic” too many times in my life to worry about being called “Hispanic.” If you’ve had your head slammed into a wall by a gym coach spitting racial slurs at you, or received racist hate mail because you’ve written an editorial calling for Puerto Rican independence, then these linguistic distinctions start to blur.
One reason I do believe in an umbrella term for us—be it Latino, Hispanic or whatever—is that I recognize so much common ground in terms of history, culture, religion, politics, music, art, language, and, yes, poetry. We all confront the borders of racism, and transcend those borders. That is common ground, too.
I know, for example, that my sensibility as a poet owes a debt to the Mexican muralists, especially Rivera and Orozco. I know that my politics, which are essential to my poetry, have been shaped and inspired by Mexicans from Emiliano Zapata to César Chávez. My book of essays is called Zapata’s Disciple; I once interviewed Chávez for the radio. I am continually gratified by the support of Chicano poets and the response of Chicano audiences to my work. We should be building bridges and coalitions between these communities, and if an umbrella term like “Latino” helps us do that, then so much the better.
