Victor Hernandez Cruz
The Berkeley Poetry Review Spring 1990
Francisco Aragon, June 10th, 1989

Introduction

Arte Publico Press in Houston recently issued Rhythm, Content & Flavor, Victor Hernandez Cruz's New and Selected Poems. But pay no attention to the book's bad introduction which, in stating that Cruz's work can't be "pigeon-holed," creates an even smaller box to put him in. According to the editor at Arte Publico, ''What coa- lesces the images of Victor Hernandez Cruz's first four books. . .is the dominant presence of the poet himself and the beloved pulsating rhythm of salsa music..." All this, no doubt, to match the book's tasteless cover, for which the author himself had no input whatsoever. The introduction stumbles on, mentioning "salsa" three more times, as if this were all there is to Cruz's work. Arte Publico's simplistic and rather embarrassing introduction, coupled with the shoddy, unprofessional work (the publisher acknowledged not one literary journal that had published Cruz's poetry, despite the author's specific instructions for doing so) made what should have been Cruz's most attractive book a shame. Their botched job is in keeping with how Cruz's work is treated in general: people don't know quite what to do with it. In all fairness, the editor in Houston should be commended for putting the book on the bookstore shelves. Cruz's work isn't easy. One might find some poems quite accessible while others-with their unconventional syntax and lack of punctuation-require some deciphering.

I first encountered Cruz's work in a poetry class in the Fall of '85. My instructor, Ishmael Reed, brought him to class as a"guest one day. I remember him reading what still remains one of my favorite poems, "Two Guitars." Cruz places much responsibility on those who approach his idiosyncratic work. But it's a worthwhile challenge, most of the time: the reader might be treated to a mini- epic like the accidental migration of Puerto Ricans to Hawaii, the feast of a village's guardian saint, a monologue addressed to a hurricane, a spoof of the CIA, and, yes, poems that bring in musical elements, such as "The Latest Latin Dance Craze." The point is that Cruz's work derives from various concerns, including history, culture, the mingling of cultures, and linguistics. Politics does on occasion enter his work as well, but never in a heavy-handed or polemical manner. He's more prone to write a funny poem than to make a political point.

Victor Hernandez Cruz is well known in some circles, but doesn't enjoy the wide acclaim he merits. Rhythm, Content & Flavor got a superficial paragraph in a San Francisco Chronicle review that dealt with two other books. I expect this sort of review- ing from the New York Times, but not from a local paper, especially in reviewing someone who has been a vital voice in the community for some twenty years. Poetry Flash gave him a blurb that did little more than quote verses. Cruz's work merits more serious attention. Again, this lack of it may be due to the work's refusal to be neatly shelved under "Hispanic" or "Ethnic" poetry. It may also be due to the fact that Victor Hernandez Cruz doesn't bother with any of the literary politics or hobnobbing that poets who associate themselves with "schools" feel the need to take part in. It's just as well since Cruz's voice is singular and unlike anything in American poetry.

To his credit, he has done wonders for himself by winning back-to-back 'World Heavyweight Championship" poetry bouts at the Taos Poetry Circus in New Mexico. He defends his title for the second time on June 16 against Anne Waldman. All of this has not been to say that Cruz is totally neglected: he is not. But he deserves a publisher that does professional work. For example; Momo's Press of San Francisco (now defunct), did a very nice job with his fourth collection of poetry, By Lingual Wholes, in 1982.

Victor Hernandez Cruz's previous books of poetry include Snaps, Mainland (both with Random House, 1969;1973 resp.) and Tropicalization (Reed, Cannon & Johnson, 1976). The following interview is excerpted from my two-part conversation with Cruz in the BPR office and at his Lake Merritt apartment in Oakland. Cruz has been a generous contributor to the BPR over the last four years. We felt a substantial interview was in order on the occasion of his retrospective book. This interview takes on significance due to Cruz's imminent departure for Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, where his parents still live. In my last conversation witl) him on the phone, he spoke of a need to take a break from the Bay Area-perhaps for a couple of years-and get back in touch with the Caribbean, an area of concern reflected in his poetry.

BPR: I'd like to start from the beginning: Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico. I wonder if you can talk about your first few years there.

VHC: I was born in the house in this region of the Caribbean around 1949. There was no such thing as a hospital-in many of the rural areas of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, people were born inside their homes and a curandera-a mid-wife-would come and deliver you, and that's how I was born. I don't know the lady that delivered me, but she's still alive.

BPR: Is Aguas Buenas a small town?

VHC: There's about twenty thousand people there now. At the time it was a lot smaller, and I recall the streets were not paved, and it had this red kind of earth, kind of like the earth you find in Colorado here in the States. There was a red dirt allover the place, and I remember when it rained how this red water would flow down through the streets.

BPR: It's interesting that you mention this red earth and red water, because one of the things I've noticed in your work is [a predominance of] the color red. There's a poem in your first book called «energy," which begins: «energy / is red beans..." What is it [that you find fascinating] about red? VHC: Well, it comes both from sensual observation and from mental research. I understand the Mayans of Central America considered themselves to be the «red culture," and to have come from the red earth, and that we are the red race. And so I've taken off on that as an intellectual and emotional theme.

BPR: How long were you in Aguas Buenas?

VHC I was there about five years. My family took the road of migrjltion, which a lot of Puerto Ricans were doing at that time because of the devastated economic situation.

BPR: In those first five years, besides the red earth, was there anything else that sticks out in your mind?-any images, sights or smells?

VHC: I remember the over-abundance of animals; of chickens and roosters. At the time a lot of the homes were made of wood and the chickens and roosters would actually live underneath us and we'd hear them all night long. And then, in the morning of course, the roosters would wake everything up there was just animalism everywhere, I mean besides insects and frogs-it's a world full of everything in motion-cows roaming down the street, bulls, horses: the different types of animals that were just everywhere and very close at hand. So I remember growing up around a lot of beasts. That and the sound of the Puerto Rican toad known as the Coqui, which fills the whole night air with a special sound: coqui coqui coqui.

BPR: In a lecture I heard you deliver at New College, you talked about your father and uncle and how they worked with tobacco.

VHC: Yeah, well, it was mostly on my mother's side of the family. My grandfather, who was Julio Bohemio, was a tobacconist. He made cigars for a living. This was his trade. And so did my uncle and other men in the town. So I grew up around the cigar makers and, in a sense, their stories because they were notorious oral poets and storytellers. There's a tradition in the tobacco workshop of reading the classical literature, like [Miguel de] Cervantes. They would have a big book of Cervantes' stories and they would read a few pages a-day. . .

BPR: -While they worked?-

VHC: ... While they were working they would do this. Or they'd read the Bible, or they'd read Charles Dickens, or Victor Hugo, in Spanish. This is a great tradition among the tobacconists of the Caribbean.

BPR: So do you think that at this very early age you might have begun to develop a sensibility with regard to literature?

VHC: Yeah, perhaps unconsciously-that's something that's hard to detect from this angle. But I'm sure those were my first experiences with hearing a poem.

BPR: What were the circumstances of your family's migration to New York?

VHC: The bottom line must have been economic. There were also some other unique personal details to my own particular family's migration. But there were thousands of people migrating off the island at the time because agriculture had broken down, and the campesino society was dissolving because the big coffee plantations were going down; the big sugar cane plantations were no longer the priority of the agricultural administration of the island of Puerto Rico. So all those people who were campesinos, who relied on these types of jobs-picking coffee, picking tobacco, cutting sugar- cane-their whole society began to dissolve and they found themselves jobless in this rural setting.

BPR: How old were you when you came to the U.S.?

VHC: 1 was five, and 1 came to this situation called New York,
which was one of the biggest cities on the planet by then, and there's a very well-established city. And it wasn't like moving from one geographic place to another, it was like moving from one age to another. It was that kind of shock. BPR: Did you arrive by boat or by plane?

VHC: 1 went by airplane: it took eight hours in one of these
propellor-planes that barely made it. It took us eight hours to get there and the first thing that hit me, man... we got there in the middle of winter: to go from a tropical country into this cold region of a northern city is another shock. 1 remember the smell of the air.

BPR: what was it?

VHC: Well, it hit my nostrils: it was this cold air, this cold air that smelled like.. .cold metals, cold steel. 1 had been in a world that had a whole different aroma: the smell of tobacco and the smell of local vegetation.

BPR: What part of New York City did you settle in?

VHC: We went to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

BPR: One thing I've neglected to ask you: Did you learn English in New York? Did you know any before you came?

VHC: There was no way 1 wotiId know English in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico...1 mean, we spoke Spanish! 1 didn't really learn English until we got a television some two years after 1 was in the States. ~

BPR: So your first two years [in the U.S.] you were unschooled in English?

VHC: 1 didn't go to school for two years 1 didn't go to school 'til 1was seven-and-a-half, eight years old. My mother didn'tknow there was such a thing as kindergarten.

BPR: Did you have any trouble makingfriends? VHC: Well 1 lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood; most of the people were immigrants. So I spoke Spanish on the streets,too, 'til about seven, seven-and-a-half; at about that time, 1hit the first grade and when the television came into thehouse, we turned it on,and then we were talking some English.

BPR: Did you continue speaking Spanish after you learned English?

VHC: Oh, yeah, I've never stopped speaking Spanish, I was able to keep both Spanish and English, whereas a lot of New Yark City Puerto Ricans and Hispanics who grow up in the U.S. lose their Spanish as they learn English.

BPR: You mentioned in your lecture that you went to high school in Spanish Harlem.

VHC: I went to Benjamin Franklin High School on 116th Street. BPR: What kind of books did they have you read in high school? VHC: You still didn't have that big m9vement toward finding relevant literature in Black and Puerto Rican communities. We just read the regular poetry and stuff that was offered to the generation before us.

BPR: Do you remember which poets they made you read?

VHC: We read things like [Walt] Whitman, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, things of that sort. I mostly read on my own. BPR: What did you read?

VHC: I read all that I could get my hands on. I read [Franz] Kafka,
I read some of the Beat [generation] poets as a teenager. I read [Allen] Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka-LeRoi Jones, I read U ack] Kerouac-On the Road, things of that sort. Out of junior high I was already doing a lot of reading on my own that had nothing to do with English classes.

BPR: What kind of high school student were you?

VHC: Well, the problem was, I had good grades in terms of.. .when
I took tests, but I wasn't an ideal student. I used to go about with some scoundrels and do all kinds of mischievous things, and cut out and be on my own. I was very rebellious about being disciplined, about going to stupid classrooms and staying put: I would walk out of my English classes and just leave the building and go off into the worlds of east Harlem and the Lower East Side and hang out.

BPR: When did you begin to write poetry?

VHC: A small pamphlet of my work was published in 1966.

BPR: How old were you?

VHC: Seventeen, eighteen, thereabouts. It was a small pamphlet that I mimeographed that I took around to bookstores myself.

BPR: Could you talk a little nwre about this pamphlet?

VHC: Papa got his gun, which is a collectors item. The block association on East 11th had a mimeograph machine, and when they weren't using it to put out their leaflets, I used the thing at night to put out this poetry that I was doing in mimeograph form; I put out a whole book. And a friend of mine did a cover with a woodblock and we put the whole thing together.

BPR: How many copies?

VHC: We made about 300 copies.

BPR: And you don't have one today?

VHC: And I don't have one today, to this day. It was just little. flurries of street Puerto Rican poetry written in some kind of
broken English-Black English-that was also prevalent in the neighborhood; that was also my language as I was growing up. And the poems were picked up by Evergreen Review; one of the editors at Grove Press liked the poems and he wanted to do a spread. And somehow one thing led to the other and I got a phone call. And they sent a photographer from Washington to take some pictures of me. The spread came out, I think, in 1967 in Evergreen Review.

BPR: Is that what led to your first book with Random House? VHC: I had a large amount of poetry in manuscript, and I had only published in a few magazines on the Lower East Side. And then Grove Press wanted to do a book of mine. Thev wanted ~ to do the book originally. And then I made some co~tacts
. with Random House through some friends. And so_they offered me a contract and I went with Random House. BPR: So how old were you when Snaps was published?

VHC: About nineteen, twenty.

BPR: Had you finished high school?

VHC: I had pretty much left high school; because of different
intensities in my own personal life, I had to just leave the whole area. My education was on the road; my education was in the actual doing and producing and feeling of my own poetry .

BPR You mentioned in that lecture at New College an assembly at your high school at which Ishmael Reed singled you out and said, "Victor Hernandez Cruz is going to be a great poet one day." How did your association with Ishmael Reed begin? VHC: Ishmael Reed hung around the Lower East Side and I was seventeen, and I wanted to meet some of the writers that I knew hung out in some of the cafes and bars. At first, I went to a reading that he did over at the Guggenheim Museum. I met him there. I went up and introduced myself. We exchanged phone numbers and he wanted to see my work and I showed him some. He encouraged me and we became friends over the years; we have been friends since.

BPR: Was Snaps reviewed?

VHC: Snaps was reviewed just about everywhere. A poet named Harold Norse did a review for the L.A. Free Press, The Kirkus Review did a review, Ishmael Reed reviewed it for a newspaper called The East Village Other. So it had a good amount of publicity for a poet coming out with this raw energy; it was a very harsh and uneven book full of energy and passion and, in a sense, unedited.

BPR: Who were the poets you were reading at that time?

VHC: As I said, I read all the Beat poets and also poets like e.e.cummings; I read [Federico Garcia] Lorca.

BPR: How about Williams?

VHC: I read Paterson, I remember Paterson. William Carlos Williams I really liked a lot. Actually, there might be some influence of his in my early work. There are some attempts at achieving a poem similar to Williams' in a lot of instances, in Snaps especially. ~

BPR: You also mentioned in that lecture meeting Robert Lowell. What was that like?

VHC: When I signed the contract with Random House, Jason Epstein-an editor at the time-gave my manuscript to two people: Allen Ginsberg wrote a commentary that appeared on the back of Snaps. And Robert Lowell also read Snaps. I more or less knew who he was because I had been to the library. But I myself didn't know w!tat it was they were seeing in my own work: I had no idea what the fuss was all about because one, I thought I was copying some techniques that I had seen around-mainly the Beat poet topography- that sense of not using capital letters at the beginning of the
poem, and William Carlos Williams another.

BPR: So in your mind, at this point, you didn't think you werevery original but rather, a developing writer puzzled by all this fuss they were making over you?

VHC: I didn't think it was that original. I was immersed in my world and still couldn't see other worlds. I came from a \[ery heavy-duty barrio.

BPR: And Robert Lowell?

VHC: I went to visit the man. I was taken to visit Robert Lowell,and I entered his home. He had a tremendous home on the West Side of New York. That was the period when he was writing poems like.. .he had been jumped, I think, out in the street. Somewhere--he wrofe a poem that went something like "Delinquents, spare my life, perhaps behind each bush another life, delinquents, spare my life"-this was his poetry at the time. Now that I look back on it, I was talking about a subject area that had not been touched.

BPR: Which was what?

VHC: The Puerto Rican experience: the Hispanic-American experience had not been tapped in the U.S.A. at that level.

BPR: Do you think one of the reasons they may have made a fuss about you was that you were a Puerto Rican writer?

VHC: That's probably one of the reasons, now that I look back on it. It's possible that because I was coming from the area I was corning from, and because I was talking about the things I was talking about-all of that-the subject area was different.

BPR: You mentioned earlier you read Garcia Lorca. Were there any other Spanish-language writers you read at the time?

VHC: I was...l am drawn to the work of Cesar Vallejo, even though I didn't understand it at the time. He triggered something in my mind. I would read [Pablo] Neruda, and I would read Vallejo, and then as I grew, I decided I liked Vallejo better than Neruda. I feel that, in a sense, Neruda is a public poet, but that Vallejo is a poet of our interior, that he is a poet of our private world, and that also brings with him a private language. Vallejo writes about things that are there, but we don't know are there. He writes about the inner structure of the Mestizo [Spanish-Native American] mind, about a conflict of thought patterns, and you can almost see it on the page when you read his work.

BPR: What about Caribbean writers like Nicolas Guillen and Luis Pales- Matos?

VHC: Guillen is much more authentic rhythmically than Pales- Matos. Pales-Matos wrote this book-which was, like, Negroid poetry-it was an orientation he went to, whereas all of Nicolas Guillen's poetry comes out of that orientation, even if it's not about a Negroid situation. So there's two different kinds of poetry: Luis Pales-Matos went through a Negroid period; Nicolas Guillen is always in a Negroid period and can write about European society from a Negro- Afro-Cuban perspective.

BPR: There's two poems in Mainland that caught my eye, partly because they're set in the Bay Area. One is called "Berkeley Over," and the other "Part Three," which you dedicate to Roberto Vargas. How did you meet Roberto Vargas?

VHC: Roberto was a local Nicaraguan poet out of the Mission District in San Francisco and he was doing lots of work in the community. When I came, I was writing and somehow I ran into him and our careers kind of met and we became great friends. He, of course, went on to work very strongly in the Nicaraguan resistance, the Sandinista movement, and went on to become part of the government.

BPR: I'd like to ask you about the title of your third book. How did you arrive at Tropicalization?

VHC: That came out of a sense of me trying to tropicalize this Anglo-North American culture, to put a little heat on it, a little spice on it, to warm it up a little bit; of course, now the Greenhouse effect is probably doing that naturally. (laughter)

BPR: In this collection, you title the first section "New York Potpourri" and then you don't title the poems-that is, you title them "Side 1," "Side 2," and so on, all the way to "Side 33."

VHC: It's all one poem. It's all about New York City. The "Sides" are as if they were record sides, musical vignettes; they're all little observations of life in New York, the way it looks, the way it feels, the way it moves.

BPR: I'd like to ask you now about particular poems that interest me. "Three Songs from the 50's." Where'd it come from?

VHC: "Three Songs from the 50's" comes from my memory of family situations from that period. The Palladium Nightclub,
a famous nightclub in New York, was jumping-I remember a cousin of mine, Julito, who was a sharp, sharp dresser. He was always dressing to the point where he'd preserve the crease on his pants by folding them over when he sat down, so that he wouldn't destroy his crease. This guy, he'd shine the soles of the shoes-I mean I remember watching him shine his shoes: he'd shine the bottom part too, so I said [in "Three Songs"] he'd shine the soul, S-O-U-L, but I meant S- O- L- E because r d see him do that.

BPR: Is fulito the subject of "The Latest Latin Dance Craze"? VHC: No. "The Latest Latin Dance Craze" just came from all the
different dance styles and crazes that kept coming through the Hispanic community in New York, which came via the Caribbean. We had the Pachanga, the Merenge-so it was just something to agitate my imagination, to extend it to its ultimate limits of what possibly could be the next dance.

BPR: One of your latest poems is titled "Don Arturo says:" [BPR #21], and it's also about dance. But what I wanted to ask you is, Who is Don Arturo? He appears, ifl'm not mistaken, in all your books.

VHC: Yeah, he does. He was a real guy. Don Arturo was like my spiritual grandfather. I dedicated By Lingual Wholes to him. His name was Arturo Vincench. He was a Cuban guy who'd been in N ew York many years and became attached to my family by being good friends with an aunt of mine. She was some years younger than him. I think they had a little secret thing going on for years, and he was always part of the family. He was a street musician in New York. He'd play music at Macy's and Gimball's. He had these puppets and a special whistle, and he'd put a tambourine on his foot and a harmonica attached to a thing he had like this- [demonstrates an imaginary harmonica mounting for hands- free playing] -He'd sell whistles, puppets-people would give him money, and he'd be able to go out and make a living like this all the time. He played guitar; he had his house full of mandolins and he liked classical stuff: he would play classical music in the hallway of the tenement building I was in. ~

BPR: In a lot of your poems, you bring in historical events. One that carnes to mind is "Borinkins in Hawaii," the journey of these Puerto Rican people who think they're coming to North Alnerica but end up in Hawaii. For a poem of this nature, did you do any research?

VHC: Yeah, I did both book research and I did a lot of interviews with the Puerto Rican Hawaiians when I was there. So it's like an oral history that I put in print. It's a poem that's based on what people told me, what I read, and then I added some of the stuff so it has different ingredients...I believe a poem
should be well balanced like that: it should be half your own thoughts, and half something you have researched out of the historical thing.

BPR: Could the same be said of "Geography of the Trinity Corona"? I read that poem and it seems like you're trying to embrace various ethnicities.

VHC: I did both research and I saw people, and I saw societies in people; not as an historian, but as a poet or a painter. So I saw my people, Puerto Rican people as a. .. what they suggested to me. So I saw Puerto Ricans that looked Ethiopian, Puerto Ricans that looked German, and Puerto Ricans that looked Gypsy, Puerto Ricans that looked Nigerian, and that's what I wrote about in the poem: suggestions that they made to me. And since I'm not an historian, I went ahead and allowed those suggestions to live.

BPR: What draws you to the historical, given that the lyric seems to be the dominant mode in American poetry today?

VHC: It's a personal obsession with me to study the history of cultUres, my culture, the history of the Caribbean, how the Caribbean formed. To me, that's all very exciting and I have to make.. .find a way in my poetry to make the personal historical: I have to touch history through my personal life. So if I go eat a plate of food and I see green bananas, and I see some rice, and I see some Baca/ao, then I already see an historical situation there.

BPR~ Right on your plate?

VHC: Right on my plate, because if I'm going to eat this food, I'd like to know how it was composed. They weren't eating green bananas in Spain, because green bananas come from Guinea, from Mrica; and Bacalao is from. . . the Spanish and the Portuguese cultivated that way of cooking it; the-ways of putting other things in it were developed in the Caribbean.. .so I see right away the Caribbean; slavery; the Taino Indians, what happened to them; the interchange of cultures; and the shifts of the whole exploration era come to mind. This happens when I look at food or when I listen to music. So when I'm listening to music I see a Spanish melody going to an Mrican rhythm with indigenous instruments. So I see history right there.

BPR: What can you tell me about the poem, "Root ofThree"-one of your latest-which begins:
I walk in New York with a mountain in my pocket
I walked in Puerto Rico with a guitar in my belly
I walked in Spain with Mecca in my sandals.

VHC: The Arabs were in Spain 800 years. They contributed greatly to the culture: they themselves had a great civilization and culture there-C6rdoba, Sevilla-you had streets; fountains; orange groves; mosques, many mosques, four hundred-five hundred mosques; they had great scholars, it was the center of translation from the Greek to the Arabic, and from there to other languages. They revived the Greek classics, they had doctors writing books, they had great music.

BPR: Are you particularly drawn to Arab culture.. .Arab culture in Spain?

VHC: Well, via Spain, our culture is very much influenced by many Arabian things: the guitar, the most Spanish of instruments, is based on the Laud, which is the Arabian form of the guitar.

BPR: Have you been to Spain?

VHC: I, myself, have never been to Spain; Spain came this way, from what I read.

BPR: You might say your way of writing poetry is your; way of travelling.

VHC: It's my way of travelling.. .it's imagining other places; my poetry is very geographical in that sense.

BPR: There's a lot of hurrwr in some of your poems. One of the areas which you seem to bring hurrwr into play is in your "political" poems. I'm thinking of "Problems with Colonialism" and "It's Miller Time." I remember you read "Problems with Colonialism" at V.C. Berkeley around three years ago and you had the audience going. Is this your way of bringing the political into your work?

VHC: Humor and human have the same root. To be human you have to have some kind of humor; you can't be too serious; you have to be flexible and stretch. I think once a person breaks down and becomes humorous, a lot of the information stays with him a lot longer than if it was a serious situation. People want to remember the good times, the funny times, rather than think back and remember the dire times. So I use humor to make the poem. . . the message more memorable.

BPR: What about the politics of the poem?

VHC: It says a situation like colonialism is bad for the master and bad for the victim. That's what I'm saying in this poem. BPR: What about "It's Miller Time"?

VHC: Actually, that poem can be seen as both a poem against North American imperialism and against left-wing Hispanic radicals. It's like a spoof and I'm making fun of how easy it would be, or how dangerous: this thing of signing petitions and forms against every cause imaginable that comes up; and how they have a set opinion about everything.

BPR: Has your way of composing poems evolved over the years? Looking back at Snaps, which you wrote in you teens, was composition more spontaneous and less controlled than it is now?

VHC: They were much more spontaneous than they are now. BPR: Did you revise the poems in Snaps?

VHC: Most of those I just wrote them out and rolled them out. BPR: When did you begin to revise your poems?

VHC: I did much revising for Mainland. I wrote some of those two, three times; I was very concerned with effect, especially witll the Puerto Rican pieces.

BPR: And you still revise?

VHC: Now I revise. The thing about revision, though, is that you have to watch out because you don't want to lose that flow and spontaneity also; and so you could do too much revision and destroy the poem. And if you don't do any, the poem will not be as strong as it should be; it won't deliver right; you have to somehow find that balance between the immediate moment when you produced the poem and what you can bring back to it by going back and fixing it up, or adding things to it that come to mind later.

BPR: How do you know when a poem has been revised enough and should be left alone? Do you ever send your poems out to
friends to ask them what they think?

VHC: No, because 1 can pretty much detennine what 1 want to say,
and if it's what 1 want to say, it's gotta be how 1 want to say it.
And once 1 achieve those two things, then 1 don't have to
send it to anybody else. They know less about what it is 1 want to say.

BPR: But when you write your poem, you don't have an objective perspective. You have too much invested in the poem. If you sent it to someone for some feedback, they might say something like, "The first two stanzas are great but you lose me a bit in the third; you might want to drop that line, etcetera. " You've never done anything like this?

VHC: I've never done that because this is not like eye surgery or brain surgery; you can make a few mistakes in this scene (laughter). You don't have to be...1 mean how can you detennine what's perfect? These aren't blueprints for a childrens' hospital; this is poetry, and if it wasn't fully the delivery that 1 wanted then I'll keep trying in my life and I'll eventually achieve a so-called 'perfect poem: There is never a perfect poem; life is never perfect...1 mean life is of constant change. A poem can always have been written differently, no matter what that poem was: you could have used this word, or that word, and go on forever and never finish the poem. You have to, at some point, just let it go and drop it.

BPR: When do you let your poem 'drop?' Do you put it in a drawer and let it set there for a few months?

VHC: 1 have notebooks. And 1 fill those notebooks up; and then, at a certain point, 1 go back and say, "What can 1 use from these notebooks?" Because not everything that 1 write gets published, just like everything you think shouldn't be said (laughter) or you'd be in a lot of trouble. So you have to edit your stuff, and you have to write the stuff out too: you have to write a lot of junk. I've written a lot of junk; I've got my notebooks full of stuff: full of writings; of notes; things I've written on the streets, nightclubs, cars, trips I've taken... And most of which 1 might extract-Qut of ten pages, for example-five lines that 1 can use or invest somewhere else; in another poem that could come later, about the same theme, or subject area.

BPR: Do you carry a notebook with you wherever you go?

VHC: Just about. Or, when I come back I make it a point to write

things out at night about different things that happened; so I keep somewhat of a diary, and also some poems that I write all the time. But I don't use those poems at that point. I just save them, then I can go back to them, hook them up with some thoughts I'm having now, or find some other notes that I have taken-poem notes-hook them up... And then that can become one poem, and then that can be presented and published. With time, some things round out.

BPR: So you don't know whether something you've written is valuable or not unless you let it sit?

VHC: It has to hook up with one of my concerns; that's how I know if it's valuable. There's certain concerns that I have as a person, and as a poet, and as a thinker: like I'm obsessed with the history of the Caribbean because I come from the Caribbean. So if that poem, that writing that I put in the notebook has something pertinent to that, then I can use it and I say, This can be rescued.

BPR: What are some of your other major concerns besides the history of the Caribbean?

VHC: The history of immigration in a world-wide sense; the idea of civilizations coming into other civilizations; what happened when the Spaniards opened up the oceans and began to explore the Americas and thought they were in Asia, mistook Cuba for Japan, and then thought they were in India. To me all of this is very fascinating, and because I am a product of that combination of cultures and races, to me it's an obsession to study those things; to study how the Spanish did when they first gave them pineapple: I read somewhere that when they gave the Spanish pineapple, they went and vomited because they didn't like the pineapple. The Indians gave them this sweet delicious pineapple, and the Spanish ran to the bushes to vomit. That should have been a sign of things to come because they started sawing everybody down. So anybody who doesn't like pineapple, you know is going to end up killing you (laughter).

BPR: Having said all that, one of the things I find refreshing about your work, particularly as an American poet, is your lack of the first person. You don't write what many would call autobiographical lyric poems. Was this a conscious decision?

VHC: Well, the poetry's not really mine. The poetry's not really about myself, it's about my culture. I'm not writing about my person and what I do.

BPR: So you use poetry as a way to get away from your personality?

VHC: One person is not very important on the planet earth. I mean one person in the history of time: we're alive eighty years. . . that could be like a second on the cosmic clock. And so my personal life could just bore somebody if I told them what I did everyday. There are things I can extract from my personal life, but they just instigate and I use them as stepping stones or a spring board toward other things. BPR: What about someone like Jimmy Santiago Baca, whose last book, Martin and Meditations on the South Valley, seems to be primarily autobiographical?

VHC: The autobiography of his life...I mean it's like he's also the mountain itself; he's like the Mesa; he's like the Valleys over there; he's like the rivers that he talks about. His person is not just his person, but is the panorama, this landscape, as if that landscape was talking. He's able to become boulders and rocks-you can feel that in his poetry-so he's able to extend out of his own person and into the land.

BPR: And yet, reading that book, you still get a strong sense of particular events in his life, assuming it's autobiographical.

VHC: And he's able to control that so well that he can still give you a lot of details.

BPR: Do you think it's possible to write a good poem about anything? A doorknob...a sewer system.. .anything?

VHC: Yeah, but I kind of stop writing about things that just kind of pop out at random. The mind has to be edited-as we said before-so that you don't just blab everything you're thinking out.

BPR: Yeah, I understand, but what I mean is, Is there any subject that should be taboo from poetry, that should not be touched? For example, some would place politics in this category, or even some forms of violence.

VHC: No, because poetry is language, and it's communication, and it's literature: literature has everything in it because literature is about life. And so if it's about life then it's got to be about everything that's within life, and nothing can be edited out of it. You can have a poem about shoe strings or you can have a poem about Venus. Something very small and something very big, and in between, everything. Now it's up to the individual poet to use some discernment, some judgement, to be selective; and you begin to see how each poet and each writer has an area of concern. Another poet that I like, Ed Dorn, has an obsession with the West and the settlement of America or a pioneer-sense that comes out in his poetry. Or let's say Gary Snyder: his concern with Buddhism, Zen, Meditation.

BPR: I'd like to talk about your punctuation, or rather, your lack of it. Are you ever concerned that your lack of punctuation will confuse your reader?

VHC: Well, if they read English, they can read one English word and the next one that follows. They're going to set their own rhythms to it. So it's best that they see the poem in print because if they see me read it, I'm going to force my rhythms on them. And they're going to have other hang-ups about the poem. They're going to see me: I'm a male; I'm an Hispanic male, I'm reading the poem this way. But if they can just see the poem disassociated from me, they don't have to give it a gender, a time, or a rhythm. They can just add that as the wish themselves because the poem is an idea that came through me and that's independent of me.

BPR: You've brought up an interesting point. Are you saying that each individual reader can bring his own individual rhythm to the poem?

VHC: There's no one right way to read the poem. Everybody can make use of the poem as they wish.

BPR: So you might say that although the punctuation isn't visibly present on the page, every reader of your poetry can bring his or her own punctuation and pause when he or she feels like it. In other words, you're giving some responsibility to the reader.

VHC: I hope so, because I hope the reader comes with some information of their own. .