I started writing poetry in 1996.  I signed up for a Chicano/a literature course at Arizona State believing it was an ordinary survey class.  It turned out to be a writing workshop.  I almost dropped the course.  I can still remember how my hands shook, how my voice trembled when I read out loud the first poem I wrote for class.  The instructor, Dr. Arturo J. Aldama, saw something in that meager first poem.  Dr. Aldama was a wonderful mentor.  He encouraged me to write and write.  He gave me lists of poets I should read.  He was the first person to call me a poet.  He forced me to meet the poets in the English department: Alberto Rios and Norman Dubie. 

I slipped a batch of my poems under the office door of Alberto Rios with a note asking for a meeting.  Thankfully, he took time out from his busy schedule and met with me to discuss my poems.  Rios was kind to my poems.  He tore them apart gently.  I must admit that I was star-struck when I first met Rios.  Here I was talking to a poet whose work was in the Norton anthology!  I remember just nodding yes to whatever suggestions Rios had for my poems.  Who was I to disagree with him?  And I remember staring at the tall bookshelves behind his desk lined with hundreds of books and journals.  Did he really read all of them, I asked myself.  I'm guessing he did because he's still one of the most intelligent men I've ever met.  

Norman Dubie was also generous with his time.  Dubie is a tall, large man with longish hair and a white beard.  But he has a small dark office in the English building.  The wall opposite his desk was plastered with posters, postcards, and photographs.  While we discussed my work he would smoke.  I enjoyed the way cigarette smoke weaved in and out of his beard.  Dubie was a demanding reader of my work.  He read each poem individually, but he knew my poems didn't spring from a void.  He respected how my ethnic and sexual identities worked their way into my work.  But he never treated my work as the work of a "minority" writer.  He encouraged me to read from various literary  traditions.  He was the first teacher who told me that my work was an extension of the American project. 

What was the question?  Ah, yes.  I was due to graduate in the spring of 1999, but I didn't know what I was going to do after graduation.  I was still writing and reading poetry.  I had taken an undergraduate workshop with Beckian Fritz Goldberg and a graduate level workshop with Dubie.  So I decided to pursue an MFA degree in creative writing.  I bought the AWP guide to creative writing programs, and Dubie gave me a list of MFA programs that he thought would be a good fit for me.  I applied to seven programs and got into seven programs.  I picked Iowa because they offered me the best financial package.  At Iowa I did feel like a "minority" writer.  The lack of writers of color in the curriculum and on the staff was stunning.  How bad was it?  Well, the only time I remember discussing issues of race was during a conversation about a Frank O'Hara poem.  The atmosphere at Iowa  made me feel invisible.  I felt like an affirmative action case.  So I just shut down, and withdrew from workshops.  And if I did attend workshop, I would rarely speak up.  I remember telling myself that this poetry thing wasn't going to work out during my second year at Iowa.  And for a while I did stop writing poetry.  That's what Iowa did to me.  It made me want to quit writing.  But I couldn't stop writing.  Images would constantly pop into my head.  Lines assembled themselves in my head.  Once I left Iowa I began to write again. 

What is your usual drafting process for when you write a poem?

My poems usually begin with a central image.  And then it becomes a question of placing that image inside a dwelling of sound & meaning.  I'm a slow writer.  Often, it takes me up to a year to finish a poem. 


As a recent arrival on the blogging scene, how has this experience affected your own writing practice, if at all?

Blogging hasn't changed the way I write.  Should I be worried about this?

What dialogues are you hoping to generate from your presence on the web? What useful dialogues have already emerged?

I blog about my life and about my struggle to complete my first poetry collection.  So most of the dialogues on my blog are entertaining but frivolous.  And I wouldn't have it any other way.  But once and while an issue strikes a cord and a heated discussion will ensue.  Once I blogged about the importance of my ethnic and sexual identities in my work.  I need to write from a gay Chicano perspective.  I want to be known as a gay Chicano poet.  Unlike some other writers, I'm not afraid to be "colored."  I'm fully aware that any tag before the word poet automatically places my work in a box in the minds of most readers.  One certain level that's what I want.  I want readers to read my work with certain expectations.  Sometimes my work will fulfill those expectations.  Sometimes my work will leap out of that little box in their minds.   

After this post a wonderful dialogue followed.  And the dialogue was cordial until an ugly anonymous comment appeared attacking one of my readers.  I was surprised.  I thought of erasing the comment but in the end I allowed it on my blog.  I knew the person being attacked could respond articulately.  And this ugly anonymous comment reminded me that blogs are just another version of bookstores or coffee shops: spaces where artists meet to converse and to argue. 

Who or what are your influences?

Lorca.  Beloved.  Lorna Dee Cervantes.  Derek Walcott.  Cyndi Lauper.  Elizabeth Bishop.  Pre-Columbian Literatures.  Homer.  CNN.  Ted Hughes.  Donald Justice.  Agha Shahid Ali.  Midnight's Children.  Paul Valery.  Gwendolyn Brooks.  Keats.  REM.  Yehuda Amichai.  Seamus Heaney.  Paz.  William Carlos Williams.  Rilke.  Robert Hayden.  Mexico.  David St. John.  Robert Duncan.  My family.  T.S. Eliot.  One Hundred Years of Solitude.  James Dickey.  Hart Crane.  Rita Dove.  The Smiths.  Whitman.  Juan Gabriel.  Chicano history.   The Magic Barrel.  Robert Hass.  The desert. 

How have you negotiated these influences in your poetry-writing practice?

Honestly, I don't know.  One hopes the best from one's reading seeps into the work. 

What does poetry give to you?  What do you get from poetry?

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

You have just been awarded the position of Poet Laureate. What's the first thing that you do?

Buy a blue dress!  And then I would invite the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E and Neo-Formalists poets to an arm wrestling conference.   

Ron Silliman vs. Dana Gioia.

Annie Finch vs. Lyn Hejinian. 

Charles Bernstein vs. Marilyn Hacker. 

Describe your favorite pen.

My mother as a young girl in a small village in Mexico would use homemade pencils to practice her penmanship.  Her father would drill holes into lengths of whittled wood.  He would pack the holes with bits of coal.  But he never painted or stained the pencils.  Once a year, at the end of the harvest, my mother would purchase a pomegranate.  She used its seeds to stain her pencils.