John, your bio states you are a 5th generation Californian born in New York. Why is this such an important statement for you? Does this affect you as a poet?

My mother's maternal great-grandfather was Mayor of San Francisco 1863-67, and her paternal grandfather owned the largest whorehouse on the Barbary Coast. When I finally got to Berkeley in 1964, just in time to sit in around the police car* on Sproul Plaza in what became the Free Speech Movement, I figured I was home. My poetry grows out of that landscape, from California, moving, geopolitically, south.

*On Thursday, October 1, 1964, cops drove a police car onto Sproul Plaza to arrest mathematician Jack Weinberg, who was manning a CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) table.  Everyone in the area (some 2000 people)  immediately sat down around the police car, with Weinberg under arrest in the back seat. I joined the sit-in maybe three minutes in, and that police car stayed right there, surrounded by students, for the next 32 hours.

Do you remember what your first exposure / memory of poetry was? How old were you?

My stepfather, John Adler, was a great lover of poetry. His favorite poem was Tennyson's "Ulysses." I wrote my first poem under a full moon at the age of 14 and I was hooked.

Do you like performing public readings? Why?

I like performing my poems because I can hear their true cadence as I read them over and over in front of different audiences. That's where the work feels most alive, between my ear, the page, my voice and a listening silence. In 1995-96 I travelled down through Latin America for nine months and gave 30 poetry readings in Spanish. At the Poetry Festival in Medellín, Colombia, we read to 5,000 people, outdoors at night, in the rain.

What first attracted you to the art of translating poetry into English?

I fell in love with the Spanish language at the age of 39 and started traveling and translating. Translation has made me lifelong friends in several countries, and has enabled me to be of service to many wonderful poets. I now teach translation and poetry to bilingual elementary and middle-school students in Oakland, Berkeley and San Pablo, California, through Poetry Inside Out, a project of the Center for Art in Translation. Passing the torch.

You have a very strong interest in the ‘politics’ of the “Latin Americas”  What has pulled you in this direction?

America, in the largest sense, includes our whole double continent. My mother's ancestors helped steal California from Mexico. Of course, the Spanish stole it from the Indians in the first place. Most of the kids I teach speak Spanish in the home, so in some ways I'm coming full circle.

My area of expertise is more properly the literary politics which is often a subset of larger issues. I got blasted by Eliot Weinberger when I pointed out the nefarious role played by Octavio Paz using his magazine Vuelta as a platform for distorted attacks on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. I also got in trouble with Lawrence Ferlinghetti when I reported that the hottest young poets in Niacaragua today, the 400 Elefantes, are writing in bitter reaction against the poetics of Exteriorism imposed by Ernesto Cardenal, What's interesting as I spend deep time in one country or another is to watch the play of currents and counter-currents, like a call and response, generational skirmishes with an Oedipal flavor. For instance, Chilean poets feel about Neruda the way we feel about Eliot —they can't read him. They argue that the relatively slight Nicanor Parra should have won the Nobel instead.

Do you have any opinions about the current difficulties of inprisoned Cuban poet/journalist Raúl Rivero Castañeda & imprisoned Spaniard Iñaki Uria, editor for the now defunct Euskaldunon Egunkaria newspaper for the Basque Region in Spain?

It's outrageous that poets and honest journalists are subject to arbitrary arrest and detention. Rivero Castañeda was put away for 20 years after a one-day trial. Fidel Castro has never shown any tolerance for divergent, pluralistic thought. In 1990 I published in APR my translations of the poetry of the dissident Cuban María Elena Cruz Varela who was forced to eat her own poems by a "spontaneous," "revolutionary" mob. The caveat that Pinochet and the Argentine generals were several orders of magnitude worse shouldn't win the Left a whole lot of points.

What do you think the poet’s responsibility to society is?

To keep showing up. To include the world in our writing. To take the most authentic view we can.

When I gave a reading in Arequipa, Perú, a bullet-headed guy from the Sendero Luminoso jumped up and made a harangue, asserting that the poets should be posing and resolving social questions instead of all this emotional blah blah. I told him I was sorry he came in late and missed my poem on the Third World debt but asked why he thought that poets have any special expertise in solving social questions.

Pound was a Fascist, Yeats loved the Black Shirts, Neruda never met a Party line he didn't like. I have strong feelings about the current Presidential election but I have no illusions that my poetry is about to force regime change in the United States.

Do you believe poetry is the voice of reason?

No. I believe poetry is the voice of imagination.