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MIPOesias Magazine ~ ISSN 1543-6063 Volume 15 ~ January to March 2004 |
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Interviewed by Angela Armitage |
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Willie
Perdomo is a New York City Poet for the People.
He’s got a loyal local following, and is rapidly gaining
national recognition as a significant spoken word artist.
His work has been featured on PBS and HBO, and he’s the author
of several collections of poetry. He received the 1996 New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction
Fellowship, and the 2001 NYFA Poetry Fellowship.
He recently shared his insight and experience with MiPo. Much
of your poetry is political. Many political poets find themselves
unwittingly pigeonholed by critics due to this, and find publishing
works of a different style to be difficult. Have you experienced this? I
haven't. I've published work in a few genres to date. I
have found that people often take offense to labels like "political
poetry," and still more people dismiss this type of poetry as
puerile. I’m inclined to believe that all good poetry is political.
What are your thoughts on this? I
agree. From Baraka to Neruda, Shange to Espada, Gibran to Hammad, all
poetry has politcal value. I always urge my students, regardless of race
or class, to write about what's going on in the world and how it affects
their communities. Many
of our readers haven’t had the opportunity to hear you read. Your
performance is nearly as important as the pieces themselves. Can you
expound a bit on your performance style? It's part Bill Evans piano solo, part Slick Rick, and part Fania All-Star ready to do a son. Pinpointing
the language of the people is a rare talent that becomes even rarer when
considered within a poetic context. I believe that the dialect and
attitude present in your work is a direct reflection of that which I
might find if I were to go to East Harlem. To me, this is the strongest
aspect of your poems. The poet himself often holds quite different
opinions from his critics, however. What do you believe is your poetic
strength? The
ability to be universal without having to sacrifice the power of that
East Harlem idiom you mention. Can
you list a few of your largest literary influences, and talk a bit about
why their writing has been so instructive to you? Langston Hughes: Told me it was okay to write in voice of barber, number runner, landlady, etc. Piri Thomas: Blew the doors wide open for me to write. Baraka: Power and politics. Ntozake Shange: Verse music. Hector Lavoe/Willie Colon: gangster, prankster, assaulto navideno, love. John Cheever: Passion and the effect that an overcast day can have on you. Rilke: Spiritual value of poetry. William Carlos Williams: Poet as Observer, participant, Paterson dialect okay for poems, so is East Harlem, salsoul barrionese. La Lupe and Billie Holiday: unrequited love. Baudelaire: Prose poem. Miguel Pinero: Street poetry. Pedro
Pietri: Aburdism. Literary influences aside, can you list some of your favorite poets, authors, and/or essayists? John Rodriguez, Pat Rosal, Major Jackson, Sapphire, Kevin Coval, Toni Morrison, Henry Dumas, Paul Beatty, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jean Toomer and Junot Diaz. Where do you
usually write? A friend of mine brings a laptop to Bob’s Big Boy every
day and conducts most of his writing there. I can’t write unless the
doors are locked, the windows open, and I’m alone with my computer and
a cigarette. What about you? Do you have a regular workspace? What’s
it like? Right now, it's my makeshift bedroom and usually after waking up my stepson for school, driving my wife to work, dropping my son off at his grandmother's, and coming back to wait for a parking spot on the alternate side of the street. A few mid-afternoon hours I can squeeze in if I'm not teaching or on the road. It's there, the Virgin Megastore Cafe, or any of the various hotels I stay in during road trips I usually work on my Sony Vaio with notes taken from my 3 x 5 memo pads, or the more sophisticated (and expensive) Moleskine travel journals. Describe
your ideal audience. First 50--from all walks--to get in at this intensely intimate theater space at the New York Theater Workshop. (The theater group Universes set this up for me a couple of years ago.) Tell
us a bit about the early stages of your writing career. Did you have a
difficult time establishing a name for yourself? What are some of the
trials you’ve endured? The
early stages happened really quick--or so it felt. It was a six year
turnover before I got on Nuyorican mic to read a poem (age 22), flew all
over the world, shot a few videos, recorded a few tracks (23-27) and
published a first collection (age 28-29)). I think a few of the trails
are implied in my latest book, SMOKING LOVELY. You
deal mostly with the spoken word scene. That aside, however, what do you
think about online publishing? Online is cool. I'm old-fashioned, though. I'm like that 72 year old editor who still types all his/her letters on an electric typewriter. (Even though I use a computer, I still have to print out my work to see it on a page.)
Papo's
Are Poetica I'm stuck in a
poem that sounds like This poem looks
like a My eyes are buried
inside this poem's My teeth bite on
this poem I'm stuck in this
poem like a I'm home in the street of
this poem ("Papo's Are Poetica" from SMOKING LOVELY © Willie Perdomo, (rattapallax press 2003); reprinted by permission.) |
MiPo
recently had the opportunity to speak with David Lehman on a large
topical spectrum ranging from literary politics, to online publishing,
to the nature of writing as a whole. The
creator and series editor of The Best American Poetry series,
Lehman may be called, without hyperbole, one of the world’s foremost
fountainheads of recent literary insight and criticism.
He’s got a knack for spotting good work that is very nearly
unparalleled. And unlike so
many of the literati, Lehman is, quite simply, a good guy with great
manners. Over
the phone, he spoke with a very nearly audible smile, and the exuberance
with which he answered our questions over the medium of e-mail certainly
testifies to that. It is
very clear that Lehman has a love for sharing his knowledge. We
began the interview by discussing online publishing. The
academic community as a whole maintains a less than amiable attitude
towards online publishing. What are your views on it? Ambivalent,
naturally. Like Frank O'Hara touting the telephone as a model for what a
poem can be, I feel that poetry is always being affected, modified,
changed, perhaps accelerated by the fastest means of communication that
are available. So e-mail and Instant Messages can become a kind of form;
they've affected my writing, I know, in ways I have welcomed. And I've
been gratified by the speed of response that one can get on the
Internet; the ease and convenience in the distribution of poetry are
unprecedented. But, then, like so many others, I find it much more
difficult to read poems on line than on the printed page, just because
the screen is less inviting than the page and, too, because the reading
of poetry is still, I think, a slow experience, involving a couch and a
lamp, whereas being online is a fast experience. There
appears to be a widening fissure within the English departments of
universities across the nation. Some focus on cultural studies,
while others on the traditional canon. As a professor at
Bennington College, can you expound a bit on what you expect the result
of this rift to have on not just academia, but the layman's overall
perception of literature? What, if any effects do you think it has (or
will have) on visible poets and authors now and in the future? You
refer to me as a professor at Bennington College. Well, I do teach in
the graduate writing programs at the New School and at Bennington
College, and I teach a course entitled "Great Poems"
each fall to honors undergraduates at NYU. And I suppose I am
professorial in some sense. But I don't think of myself in quite that
way. I think of myself as a writer and editor who has been doing a lot
of teaching in the last seven or eight years - but only after many years
of supporting myself as a free-lance writer. As the series editor of what is arguably the most popularly accepted and respected annual collection of poetry in America, what thematic or structural trends have you noticed within the past few years--especially post-9/11? A
perhaps surprising number of poets, among them some who disagree with
the proposition that the writer has a social or political obligation,
have written works that confront the changing global situation. In my
foreword to The Best American Poetry 2003, I note that many poems
chosen for the volume address issues of urgent immediacy. It may be that
the inflection of this urgency distinguishes this year's edition - and
points to the refusal of poets to tend their own gardens while buildings
are falling and armies are on the move. How
would you assess the general public's perception of, or level of
attraction to, art in America today? The
prestige of poetry has risen steadily in the United States in the last
fifteen years. On
fiction: For the benefit of our readers, could you name a few works of
fiction that have left you altered in some way? I'll
be happy to name some. I've been tremendously affected, in my own
writing and thinking, by James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man), Gertrude Stein, Henry James, especially those tales
dealing with artists or writers (The Real Thing, The Lesson of
the Master), the Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges, the novels
of Graham Greene (such as Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair,
The Comedians), murder mysteries by writers ranging from Agatha
Christie to Raymond Chandler, Kafka's parables, the stories of Edgar
Allan Poe. This is just a partial list. What
advice can you offer to fledgling writers who seek to better both their
craft and publication credits? Figure
out a way to make a living that does not put the burden on your poetry
or literary writing. Use your imagination not only in your writing but
in solving the economic problem that confronts us all, the search for
the right income-producing activity. You need freedom for your poetry to
flourish. If you pursue a teaching career you invite certain pressures:
you need to publish at a certain rate, you need to curry favor with
appointments committees. It would be better if your poetry needed to
please no one except yourself. What were the beginning stages of your professional writing and editing career? Did you meet many significant challenges and/or barriers? I
felt entitled to take myself seriously as a poet from that day in 1967
when as a freshman at Columbia I learned that I had won the university's
Van Rensselaer Prize for poetry, with a poem that The Paris
Review published a year later. After that heady success, it took
years to dent my foolish youthful confidence. Someone
once told me that writing is the most "devastating, suicidal
pleasure" he could imagine. How would you define the act and
process of writing? That
sounds a trifle melodramatic to me. The poet Kenneth Koch, who was my
professor in college, was always skeptical about the claim that writing
poetry visited agony upon the writer. His point was that people do what
they want to do, that poetry presumes freedom, and that not all poets
are high-minded masochists. Writing is joy. Writing is the
celebration of freedom. I associate writing with pleasure, like the
pleasure of an unexpected holiday or the evening cocktail that makes the
rigors of a long day easier to bear. As
a child, my mother forced me to memorize poems like Eugene Field's
"Little Boy Blue" and parts of Longfellow's "Hiawatha's
Childhood". I hated this chore then, and for many years didn't
understand the point of memorization. These days though, lines
from various pieces smack me upside the head at the most opportune
times, making everything just a smidge more significant. Do you
believe in the virtue of the memorization of poetry? If so, why is it
important to you? I
believe that memorization is the single most underrated pedagogical tool
for the study of great poetry. It is a great way to learn a poem, to
have it and possess it, and to be able to turn to it at any moment,
whether standing in a crowded subway car or driving an automobile
on the highway or waiting in an airport between flights. When I teach
poetry I always make the students memorize at least a couple of poems or
speeches from Shakespeare's plays. What do you love in a poem? Mystery, beauty, surprise, wisdom, wit, passion, and the love of life. April 26 ("April
26" from The Daily
Mirror ©
David Lehman (Scribner, 2000); reprinted by permission.) |
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