Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He received a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison as well as a law degree from Northeastern University and held various jobs before becoming a tenant lawyer in the Boston area. He has published seven collections of poetry, including Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002 (W. W. Norton, 2003), Imagine the Angels of Bread (W. W. Norton, 1996), which won the American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (Curbstone Press, 1990), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize and the PEN/Revson Award. He edited Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination (Curbstone Press, 1994) and co-translated The Blood That Keeps Singing: Selected Poems of Clemente Soto Vélez (Curbstone Press, 1991). His collection of essays, Zapata's Disciple (South End Press), appeared in 1998. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Brian Henry conducted this interview in Espada's office in Bartlett Hall on May 1,1997. The interview appeared in Volume 15, Numbers 1 and 2 of Verse.

Because of your Puerto Rican heritage and bilingual background, the issue of language for you acquires an urgency unlike that in the work of most poets. How does bilingualism enter and influence your work?

Bilingualism enters into my work in a number of ways. First of all, I want to point out that bilingualism enters my work as subject, that I frequently write about language politics, that I frequently write about the fear which the majority seems to have for the minority tongue, or tongues, and that I write about incidents which have come to my attention in terms of language discrimination. So in that way bilingualism is subject in my poetry.

Bilingualism certainly appears as form in my poetry as well, in the sense that I utilize code-switching, going back and forth between the languages for effect, whether that effect is drama, irony, emphasis, a sense of authenticity. That was especially true of my earlier work. I do that somewhat less now, but it still goes on. Bilingualism also enters my work in the sense of translation, because I have one book which has been entirely translated into Spanish. And there are other individual poems in other collections which have been translated into Spanish, and that has been quite a blessing for me because it enables me to take my work into settings where no one speaks a word of English. And I can do a reading in Spanish for an adult literacy program or an ESL program.

Finally, bilingualism influences my writing even when I'm working solely in English, because there is a flavor of Spanish in my English. For example, I am highly unlikely to use contractions; rather I will find myself using prepositions in English even though the option is available. Spanish does not have contractions: you look at the Spanish language, and everywhere you look you see those prepositions instead.

I have noticed your use of Spanish words or phrases in poems diminishing over the course of your career, but Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands is a bilingual edition, entirely translated into Spanish by you and Camilo Pérez-Bustillo. How does the translation process work between you and Pérez-Bustillo? Is it a case of the translator working on his own and showing you the finished product, or is it more of a symbiotic relationship?

It's symbiotic. First of all, it is true that the presence of Spanish within the English-structured poem has been diminishing. Paradoxically, my Spanish has been improving. Maturation in general has produced a maturation in my use of Spanish as well. Certainly, if you look at the poems that have been translated, you will see a pattern. First of all, one of the reasons why I do less code-switching in my poems now is because I think about the poem as existing in English and then in Spanish.

So you write expecting to be translated?

Hoping to be translated, yes. It's enormously difficult work, very time-consuming, and very precise. It requires a sort of surgical skill in two languages in order to render a good translation. As far as my relationship with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo is concerned, it works more or less like this: he's a very dear friend, very dear compañero, who can climb inside my head probably better than anyone, who understands the nuances of what I'm saying and understands the social and political issues I'm grappling with as well as anyone. So I have great trust for him. What characteristically will happen is that the two of us will sit down and we will bat the translation back and forth. Camilo is one of those phenomenally multilingual people. He also speaks French fluently.

Is he a poet himself?

He is an essayist, of course a translator, and a lawyer. He is currently a professor of communications at the University of Monterrey, Mexico City campus. And in fact, he's had some political problems there because he appeared on a government enemies list due to his human rights work. He has worked as a legal representative for a union of striking bus drivers in Mexico City. The leadership of that union was imprisoned a couple of years ago, and Camilo helped to get them adopted as prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International in London. And he's also had some dealings with the Zapatistas in Chiapas; he led a National Lawyer's Guild trip into Chiapas. Occasionally I hear from him that he may try to get out of Mexico. But for the time being that's where he lives with his wife and their three children.

So he believes in taking literature into the social realm as well.

Absolutely. We both come at it from the same place. We sit down with a poem, and sometimes we start from scratch and sometimes he shows up with a sheet of yellow legal paper with some scrawl on it, and we begin hammering away. And we do look at every word and weigh every word very carefully. The dynamic works well because Camilo is a veritable walking dictionary of the Spanish language; he understands nuance very well. At the same time, I am there to help render it from translatese into poetry.

Do you feel qualified to write poems in Spanish?

I sometimes fool around with it, and, as I said before, I've written poems bilingually with the code-switching.

Do you think in Spanish?

Sometimes, yes. If I'm in Puerto Rico and have been there for a couple of days, I'm thinking in Spanish, and it may even be hard for me to figure out what to say in English. It takes a little time for the bilingual mind to make that three-point turn, but once you've made it, you certainly end up thinking in the other language.

Mind you, my experience with the Spanish language, although I was born and raised in Brooklyn, is quite varied. I have traveled in Latin America – not only Puerto Rico, but also Mexico and Nicaragua. I have worked extensively in the community; for example, I was the supervisor of a Spanish-language legal clinic in Chelsea, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, and that required using the language on a daily basis. I have done radio in Spanish, I have done lectures and workshops in Spanish, and in fact I've even done court interpretation in Spanish, all of which required a great deal of work on myself. However, in matters of literary translation, I realized that the poet can be his own worst enemy, because the natural tendency is to insist on the most literal possible translation of your own work. When you go from English into Spanish, what you gain is music, the music of the Spanish language.

That music is also present in your poems in English.

Yes, there's a seed of it to begin with. What you lose, however, is a shade of meaning. Spanish is an older language than English; there are, simply, fewer words. So there are times when you have chosen a word in English and you go to translate it into Spanish and you can't really find the equivalent because there aren't enough words to reflect the nuance that you're looking for.

Or a Spanish word has to do more work.

Sure. In a way, there are a lot more ambiguities in Spanish because there are many Spanish words that are pulling double and triple duty, that mean two or three things that are totally different from one another, and so you need the context to determine what the meaning is. All of that can be quite maddening for a poet who simply wants the poem to exist in as close a form as possible to the original, and realistically that's not going to happen in many cases. So you need someone there to give you some distance, you need someone there to give you a sense of proportion, or a sense of perspective, to say "No, if you really want to convey this image, you cannot use the cognate in this case, you cannot translate it literally; what you must do is use this idiomatic expression or this phrase, which will convey much better the flavor, the spirit, of what you're saying." And that's what Camilo provides to me. He's always very, very precise when it comes to those issues.

You also have worked with Camilo on translating a book by Clemente Soto Vélez, the great Puerto Rican poet. Has translating Soto Vélez helped your own poetry?

I think that translating Clemente Soto Vélez was a great help in a variety of ways. First of all, Clemente Soto Vélez is not only a great Puerto Rican poet with a political history, he's also a surrealist. So it forced me to work quite a bit harder in order to have the linguistic competence necessary to translate very complex, difficult, and at times confusing work. It was useful for me to climb inside his mind and wander around there for a while. This is someone who, at first, was a great influence for me ethically. I thought that his example was a stellar example to follow – someone who was political, who was a poet, who went to prison for what he believed in, who never gave up, who was a mentor to countless writers and artists and other people.

In a sonnet dedicated to him, Jack Agüeros says, "He was so tall that he towered over himself and his mouth / was so big that he spat whole Spanish dictionaries." His presence must have been huge.

Yes, vast, enormous, incalculable really. At first, I believed that his influence on me was limited to the ethical. However, what I found out subsequent to translating his poems is that he was having an aesthetic influence as well, in the sense that some of my poems became distinctly more surreal.

Like "Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies," which is dedicated to him.

That elegy deliberately dips into surreal imagery in order to reflect its influence and inspiration: Clemente Soto Vélez. But even in other poems, I was able to suddenly indulge in the fantastic, I was able to expand the borders of my imagination in ways I had not thought possible.

You mentioned that you were born and raised in Brooklyn. How did growing up in Brooklyn affect your poetry?

There are two ways to answer that question. Brooklyn has certainly been subject for me as well, the people of Brooklyn. I grew up in a working class housing project called the Linden projects, and I frequently return to that experience as subject matter for poetry. That experience oriented me to certain themes which have stayed with me throughout my life as a writer, whether it's concerned with the working class or concerned with the Puerto Rican community, concerned with the black community or concerned with the inner city. All of those things spring from the experience of living in Brooklyn. But Brooklyn also dearly influenced the way I perceive the world. It influenced my character, it influenced what you might call a certain pugnaciousness, which develops inevitably in urban settings such as that, where you tend to see things in terms of struggle and conflict.

And you don't look away.

And you can't walk away from a fight because if you do, you get hit in the back of the head. So certainly all of those things made a big difference in terms of who I became as a poet and a person.

What was the literary environment of your childhood like? Did you read poetry outside of school as a child or adolescent?

No. Poetry was not part of my life growing up. Neither one of my parents is college-educated, although both are literate. During my early years, my father worked for an electrical contracting company at a step below electrician. He hated that work, so he endeavored to maneuver his way out of it. His salvation was, in fact, that he became a political leader in the Puerto Rican community in New York during the 1960s and eventually was paid for that activity. His literacy was really focused on reading books of history, politics, and so forth. That's what he was interested in, so that's what I read, and I ended up with a B.A. in history.

But I was an English major for about ten minutes. I went to the University of Maryland for my first year, and up to this point I had not begun to read poetry. I had written poetry since the age of 15, but I started writing poetry before I began to read it. I started using certain literary devices before I knew they had names. I didn't know what a metaphor was, or a simile, or alliteration, or assonance, and yet these are things I relied upon instinctively in poetry. Poetry was not provided for me in high school. The closest I can remember, and this goes way back, was an experience where I had to listen to the lyrics of light opera, and I was forced by a grim-faced English teacher to read aloud those lyrics. I remember chanting something from the Mikado like "They never would be missed, they never would be missed" and absolutely despising it.

Shortly after that, I remember writing my first poem, which also came out of a school setting. During one semester, I actually failed English. I was a totally marginalized student. I also failed typing, I failed gym – how do you fail gym? I was really the bottom feeder in that environment. But we had a rather creative teacher who gave a group of us young thugs an assignment in class, to keep us from throttling each other. The assignment was to reproduce a copy of The New Yorker magazine, and he handed us The New Yorker, which we had never seen, and told us to make our own. So we passed it from hand to hand, and it came to the first guy, who opened it up to the movie reviews, looked at it and said "Oh, movies. I've seen movies." He became our film critic. When it got to me, the only thing left was a poem, and I was very perturbed. I had to write a poem; that became my assignment. I was quite concerned and thought "Oh no, a poem," but I didn't want to fail English again, so I sat down and began writing. It was raining that day, so I wrote a poem about rain. I don't have the poem anymore, I don't remember anything about it except for one line: "tiny silver hammers pounding the earth." I had made a metaphor without knowing what it was. I would find out eventually and then go strutting down the hallway quite taken with myself. But that was the genesis of it, and I kept writing. Even in that setting, we weren't reading poetry, but our teacher was introducing us to various off-beat ways of looking at what could be called poetry. He showed us a Simon and Garfunkel song and said "See, this is really poetry." But it wasn't a matter of reading poetry.

There were no books of poetry in my house when I was growing up. When I went to the University of Maryland, I had been writing for a couple of years, but with no support. It's not that people were unwilling to support me, but they didn't know how to support me. I went to Maryland and took two courses in my freshman year – creative writing and poetics – with the idea that I would eventually become an English major. Both were miserable experiences for me. This was 1977, I was 20 years old, and I had the canon pointed at me. I got Ezra Pounded. In the poetics course, I was exposed to the canon in its most conservative manifestation – not that we shouldn't know the canon, not that we can't gain something from knowing the canon, but we also have to recognize that the canon is constantly mutating, expanding, growing.

By the canon, do you mean what we generally consider the modernist poets – Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Yeats, et al?

Et al. Yes. The fact that I was not presented with any sort of alternative at that time was very disturbing. Langston Hughes was not mentioned in this course. I brought in Allen Ginsberg, whom I had found on my own, and was seriously discouraged from pursuing Ginsberg, but I did anyway.

And this was 21 years after "Howl."

Yes, so you can imagine. Whitman was not part of this course.

One would have a difficult time finding the influence of high modernists in your poetry. In fact, your poetry has more in common with a poet like Whitman than with the modernist poets. When you encountered Whitman, did he make poetry seem attractive to you?

Absolutely. I had to come to these poets on my own; they were not part of any formal education, and it was not part of any background at home. I came to these poets because I was hungry for this poetry, and so I had to trace the lineage backwards – I began with Ginsberg and worked back to Whitman, I began with Neruda and worked back to Whitman. But even before I could reach that point, I had to reach this apogee of frustration, where I dropped out of school. Not only was it a problem for me to be in the poetics course, but the creative writing course was likewise disastrous. I was referred to as hostile and aggressive by the professor because of the nature of my verse. I began to internalize these lessons, dropped out of school, and was essentially on my way to becoming a professional dishwasher, when a friend of mine, Luis Garden Acosta, gave me a book – Latin American Revolutionary Poetry, an anthology from Monthly Review Press edited by Roberto Márquez. And it was bilingual. Luis, who was a friend of the family for many years and a political protégé of my father's, handed me the book and said "You are going to be a poet." He was aware that I had been writing poetry, that I had dropped out of college and had stopped writing. So his words were deliberately designed to give me a jump start and it worked. I opened the book and found Ernesto Cardenal, the great poet-priest of Nicaragua, and his poem "Zero Hour," which is about the Samoza dynasty of the twentieth century in that country and the Sandinista resistance to that dynasty going all the way back to the 1930s. I saw next to that poems by Nicholas Güillen, the great Cuban poet of negritude, and next to that poems by Pedro Pietri, who was speaking about the New York Puerto Rican experience. Obviously I had something in common with that perspective, and I began to realize that I was part of a history, that I was part of a tradition. What reading that anthology meant to me was that I was no longer a literary amnesiac, which was the beginning of a certain self-respect and self-confidence, which were necessary prerequisites for sitting down and writing poetry. I began to write again and have been writing ever since.

One can see the influence of Neruda, particularly his determination to make the ordinary extraordinary, everywhere in your poems. What about Neruda – there are so many Nerudas – attracts you? Is it a particular Neruda, or is it the fact that he did so many different things in his life and in the poems?

I think Neruda is the most influential poet in my life, and I have come to realize that I don't know him nearly as well as I should, even after teaching a course on Neruda three times. I have begun to immerse myself in his life and work, and realized its vastness, realized that I have only begun to explore this poet. What I have also realized is that there are certain Nerudas I appreciate more than others, as anyone does, but that I can benefit from learning to appreciate other Nerudas I don't appreciate as much as perhaps I should.

I can see you gravitating more toward "Canto General" than toward Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair or 100 Love Sonnets....

Yes, "Canto General," "The Heights of Macchu Picchu," the historical epics, the sweeping political poems seem to be the primary attraction for someone like me. Or "Spain in the Heart," the poems about the Spanish Civil War.

But I can also see how Residence on Earth, say, perhaps via a poet such as Soto Vélez, could intrigue you and push you into new territory.

Sure, this is what I mean by broadening my appreciation of Neruda. Now I can move beyond an appreciation of the historical epics or the political poems to also appreciate the surrealist verse, some of which I find enormously compelling, especially the Residencia poems that deal with death. I also find myself appreciating the odes, their clarity and ingenuity – the fact that Neruda has proved in his odes the proposition that, yes, you can write poetry about anything. I would like to be able to do that.

The ode to the artichoke.

Sure, the artichoke. That's his contribution to the literature of ugly food. But that's quite an achievement. Sometimes people dismiss the odes as trivial, and that really means that they've engaged only in a superficial reading of the odes.

I think the fact that Neruda could write love poems as a teenager, love poems as an old man, "Canto General," the odes, poems like those in Winter Garden – that sweeping range, that vastness – sets an incredible example for any poet in any language.

Neruda's example has also taught me the essential need to grow and change. Too often we see poets who know one trick, and they do the trick very well, but that's all they do, and they tend to repeat themselves. Neruda teaches that, in fact, it's essential for the poet to change and grow, to make leaps and take chances.

When you read poetry now, do you prefer poetry in Spanish or poetry in English, or do you read whatever seems appealing at the moment?

I am indeed part of a field. I am in the field of Latino poetry, which means that I have to keep up, and so I read Latino poetry when I have the opportunity. Certainly, it is a relatively small field, so I am personally familiar with most of the participants. I am very interested of course in keeping up with that work, so if Leroy Quintana comes out with another book, I get it and I read it. Usually I get it from Leroy Quintana. Likewise, when Gary Soto comes out with a new book, I'm probably going to get it. So those are the books that I tend to read, because those are the ones that land on my desk, from people I know who are in my field – besides, they're free books.

I am also doing what I can to expand my horizons all the time, and I will often read a poet who has relatively little in common with me on the surface precisely for that reason: I'm trying to broaden my perspective. I often try to go back and re-educate myself in terms of what I consider to be essential works, so lately I've been reading Whitman again. And I'm finding here a voice that speaks to me from the 1850s about the very same issues that matter so deeply to me today, as a poet and as a person. But there are all these poets who are coming to my attention, people that I've done a reading with, people that I see at a conference somewhere. To be an active participant in that community of poets means that this is how you discover new writers and new books. Remember that I worked for years as a lawyer, and during that time I was not able to keep up in the same way, so I have some catching up to do.

Robert Creeley and Amiri Baraka have written forewords to two of your books. I think that makes an interesting pair. Do you see any similarities among you, Creeley, and Baraka as poets?

Robert Creeley is an extraordinarily sensitive and open-minded individual who is not simply looking to approve poets who write like him. I'm not sure if I can articulate a connection between my poetry and his poetry, but I can certainly articulate a connection between me and him. This is a very generous individual who is one of the first poets who ever mentored me in any way. I've come to truly appreciate his poetry over the years. Baraka and I clearly have more things in common on the surface. Politically we're at the same end of the spectrum, obviously his aesthetic is somewhat different from mine. He is one of the most brilliant performers of poetry I have ever seen and I aspire someday to be half that good. With Baraka and Creeley, it's not a case of wanting to turn out a cookie-cutter version of themselves. They are willing to sponsor younger poets for the sake of that unique voice, whatever it may be.

Delivering your poems to an audience other than by the written word seems crucial to you personally and poetically. When you envision your typical reader, what kind of person do you see?

I have given the question of audience a great deal of thought over the years and realized that ultimately my audience is anyone who will read or listen to my poetry. So in that sense I begin with a vision of my audience which is as inclusive as possible. Sometimes I view my audience as a series of concentric circles. The circle closest to me is of course the circle of people who are closest to my own experience and the experience reflected in the poems: Puerto Ricans from New York. Maybe there's another circle around that which might be Latino, and another circle around that which might be working class, and another which might be African-American, another which might be urban, and another which might simply be the left because of the political nature of the poems, and another circle around that which might be lovers of language, lovers of poetry. My audience is drawn from all of those sources.

Now in terms of a so-called nontraditional audience, which, by the way, is the most traditional audience of all for poetry, I make every effort to reach that audience. Why? Poets like me are subjected to censorship on a regular basis. Usually it's tacit censorship – the censorship of omission. We're usually not privy to the dynamics of censorship, but there's a pattern of exclusion which even today predominates with respect to both political poets and Latino poets, and I clearly belong to both categories. Once in a while the veil is lifted and you can see behind it. I recently had an experience with National Public Radio, where they asked me to write a poem for National Poetry Month. I wrote the poem, and then they refused to air it explicitly because of its political content, because it was about Mumia Abu Jamal, the black journalist who was wrongly convicted of killing a police officer in Philadelphia. NPR has a history with Mumia Abu Jamal – they refused to air his radio commentaries a few years ago – and they did not want, as they put it, to return to this subject in this way. So they were very open about the fact that they were censoring the poem due to its political content. The veil was lifted. Most of the time the veil is not lifted and we instead hear euphemisms or we hear silence. There's a way in which I constantly have to be concerned with making an end-run around these obstacles to my audience, and I have to take the words directly to the people who should hear them. I also believe this is important not only for me, but for poetry, which is in danger of becoming extinct unless it reaches out to people beyond the campus and the coffee house. It has to become relevant to the lives of people on a daily basis, and it can be if the effort is made. There is now an organized movement to bring poetry to these so-called nontraditional settings. There are all kinds of programs to bring poetry into prisons, hospitals, migrant labor camps, to bring poetry into ESL programs, adult literacy programs, community centers, to bring poetry into all sorts of places where it's never been before. I participate in those programs on a regular basis. I even did a reading in February at a boxing gym, in Willimantic, Connecticut, formerly known as Thread City, because that's where the thread mills were. A number of Puerto Ricans migrated to Thread City to work in those mills. Now the mills are closed and many of the young men are unemployed and they seek solace in the local boxing gym. So I did a reading as part of the Windham Area Poetry Project at the Windham Boxing Club. I came in, and the boxers broke training, sat down, and listened to me read for about half an hour. I read between two punching bags, and as I was reading, a number of these young men, who ranged in age from 10 to 20 and who were about two-thirds Puerto Rican, began to wrap their hands with gauze in what can best be described as a meditative activity, because at the same time they were wrapping their hands they were listening intently. I have a couple of boxing poems, so I read those, but I also read poems about their experience, whether it's working-class, Puerto Rican, or what have you. And that was something to which they could relate, so they sat and listened. If poetry can go into a boxing gym, it can go anywhere.

That you can take poetry into that kind of environment and that NPR rejected your poem due to its political content shows that poetry can have an impact.

Absolutely. Poetry is dangerous.

Creating change, whether that change is social, political, or personal, seems important to your poetry. Have any of your poems ever had a real-life impact other than on an individual level?

Yes, I wrote a poem called "The New Bathroom Policy at English High School," which was written in response to a case at Lynn English High School on the north shore outside Boston. At the time I was working for META (Multicultural Education, Training and Advocacy) as an attorney. We were representing the Hispanic Parent Advisory Council, which is the organization of Latino parents with children in the bilingual educational system in the city of Lynn. One of those parents called and asked us to come up to Lynn because Spanish had just been banned at lunch time. We went up there and took care of the problem; we had a hearing, and scared the principal, and they reversed the policy. Then I wrote the poem, which is essentially a parody of that situation. A few years later I did a reading in Connecticut, and afterwards a young Puerto Rican man came up to me, introduced himself as Wilson, and told me that he worked as the manager of a nursing unit at a hospital in Hartford (Hartford, mind you, is about one-third Puerto Rican). The hospital where he worked recently inaugurated a policy forbidding patients from speaking Spanish, because the doctors couldn't understand them; the notion of hiring some Spanish-speaking doctors had not occurred to the administration. Wilson took "The New Bathroom Policy at English High School" into a meeting of administrators and raised the issue of the new language policy and then read the poem. He told me they were so embarrassed that they changed the policy on the spot. There is one concrete example of how one of my poems found a home somewhere else and made some small difference.

Your previous occupations are more diverse and interesting than those of most poets, and they often form the subjects of your poems and affect the logic of your narrators. What about these jobs, from tenant lawyer to primate lab attendant to bouncer, compels you to write about them?

Well, I've had a colorful life. The jobs I've held appeal to me as the subject matter for poetry first of all because they make good stories, and it's my impulse as a storyteller that often determines what I choose to write about. Certainly, if telling tales about being a bouncer makes sense when you're sitting with friends, maybe it would make a poem, too.

I embrace the genre of work poetry in general. Work poetry tells us a great deal about our lives in this particular economic system, it reveals certain contradictions or shortcomings of capitalism, it is a way of documenting exploitation and resistance to exploitation, and it reveals something fundamental about the human psyche, even beyond the question of a particular economic system.

If you take a look at the sorts of jobs I'm writing about, you will find the poems very often reflect a working class kind of experience, or perhaps so-called unskilled labor, which I think has always been a cruel term. If you're working in a job where, let's say, you're a janitor and you're only seen for what your hands can clean up, your mind is dismissed, and once your mind is dismissed you become invisible. People therefore will say or do just about anything right in front of you, because you're not there, and that's wonderful if you happen to be a poet, because poets are spies.

Some of your poems address the life of migrant workers, which is a subject that few poets write about, with the exception of someone like Gary Soto. Do you feel an obligation to call attention to the often-invisible or the often-ignored?

First of all, there is a genre of farm worker poetry, written by people who in some instances were farm workers themselves at some point in their lives. Gary Soto is best known for that kind of poetry, but Tino Villanueva also has written that kind of poetry, and there are others as well. Diana Garcia, for example, has written of that migrant farm worker experience. In the Chicano literary world, this is a fairly significant subject. I don't know if anyone besides myself has written poems about Puerto Rican migrant farm workers, who tend to populate the northeastern states. But I have written those poems, not from the experience of being a farm worker, but a farm worker advocate. I worked as an intern for the Migrant Legal Action Program; and realizing that I spoke Spanish, they sent me into the fields and labor camps of Maryland and Delaware to do outreach in the Spanish language among farm workers and explain their legal rights. Do we need to put this into poetry? Of course we do. What did William Carlos Williams say about poetry? That men die every day for lack of what is found there. The way I understand that statement is that poetry is part of a larger tapestry of awareness, where we become gradually more and more cognizant of the lives of those people half in shadow, and that includes of course migrant farm workers, who live in conditions that most of us would not tolerate for our pets. Yet they do the work that provides food for us. It is still to this day a shocking scenario in this country, almost forty years after the famous Edward R. Murrow documentary "Harvest of Shame," where some of these conditions were first revealed. We're obliged to speak of these lives, and I do think of myself as an advocate in the poetry, speaking on behalf of those who don't have an opportunity to be heard, not that they couldn't be heard quite well given the chance, not that they couldn't speak for themselves, but they don't get the chance to speak for themselves. How could I know what I know and not tell what I know?

Authority figures, especially those with clubs or guns, but also policy makers, are often the villains of your poems. You're obviously working to subvert the current power structures and to call our attention to the various abuses of power in our governmental, military, and educational organizations. How can a poem stand against an unjust law, or against a machine gun for that matter? You mentioned how it can change a policy, but are you trying to pick up that vein of resistance in Latin American poets such as Cardenal, Soto Vélez, and Neruda, to call attention to practices that might not be as overtly brutal as the ones those poets wrote against but are still oppressive?

In 1949, my father, Frank Espada, was arrested for not going to the back of the bus in Biloxi, Mississippi. He spent a week in jail. How can one person, who refuses to go to the back of the bus in the segregated South, make a difference? Well, it's 1997, and the South is no longer subject to legal segregation, and people who are dark-skinned – black or Latino, like my father – are no longer required to sit in the back of the bus. How did that happen? Because of my father in 1949, because of Rosa Parks a few years later, because of all the people who refused to sit in the back of the bus and all the people who supported them, because of the Montgomery bus boycott, because of Martin Luther King, but also because of the nameless thousands who sacrificed so that things could be changed. And each one of them made a small contribution, as my father did.

So a poem is also a small contribution?

I see a poem as part of a much bigger puzzle, as one more gesture, one more moment in a much larger movement for things to change.

The spirit of resistance indeed seems strong in your poems. How does music factor into that? In "Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction" for example, the music, which "swarms into the barrio / of a refugee's imagination," is all that stands against the "predatory squad cars." You incorporate various types of music – salsa, jazz, gospel – into your poems. Are you striving for a sort of mimesis, or does music become a force of resistance?

Music is one of those essential products of the spirit that demonstrates irrefutably our humanity in the face of inhumanity. In a poem like "Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction," music is being used directly as a metaphor for resistance, as a metaphor for cultural identity, and the strength of that cultural identity in turn enables us to have the self-assurance necessary for self-defense in a hostile society. But more broadly than that, I feel that music as a signifier in the poems represents a defiant assertion of humanity. From my earliest books to my most recent book, it represents something unconquerable about human beings, and the circumstances in which people sing certainly bear out that sense. If you've ever listened to a recording of a chain gang singing, you know that people can make art out of anything.

Creeley wrote that you are "a poet of great communal power," and up to this point you've mostly discussed the communal aspects of your poetry. But Creeley also referred to you as "the voice of intensive isolation." How do you reconcile the tension between the public and the private? And how does identity – not only your personal identity, but your racial identity – enter that dynamic?

To a certain degree, I don't fret too much about the distinction between public and private, between personal and political, because I've found that those distinctions become very blurry in my case. I do realize that I'm moving, especially in my most recent book, towards a more intimate poetry – addressed to my wife, son, father, friends – but a poetry that's willing to take certain kinds of risks that perhaps it didn't take several years ago. I'm aware of trying to become more fully evolved, more fully developed as a poet, which means exploring areas that in the past have been left in the dark. For me that means doing more exploration of the private and the personal.

Another recent development in your poetry is a new type of lyricism. From book to book, your poetry has become more powerful and more verbally daring. In Imagine the Angels of Bread, you experiment – and I would say experiment successfully – with a type of lyricism that is absent in your earlier poetry. Poems such as "Sleeping on the Bus," "Imagine the Angels of Bread," "The Prisoners of Saint Lawrence," and "Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies" register at a different pitch than most of your other poems. What attracts you to that diction, which seems oracular if not biblical? And do you think you'll return to it in future poems?

Well, certainly I'm still young as a poet: I'm 39 years old. And I am aware of my own growing pains, of the need to grow more, which means taking chances and experimenting with pitch, as you put it, experimenting with variations in voice. As far as the prophetic voice, or the biblical voice, that is something I see in the works of Whitman, Neruda, Ginsberg, Cardenal; and by using a term like "prophetic voice" I am not claiming for myself the ability to divine the future, but at the same time, I would point out that most of us attempt prophecy at one time or another. All of us attempt to act as prophets in some small way, to figure out what's going to happen next. So as a poet that's all I'm trying to do when I engage in that prophetic voice. I'm also doing what I can in those sorts of poems to broaden my vision as much as possible, to see the world as big as I can see it, because I think there is something I have to say on that scale.

The Verse Book of Interviews:
27 Poets on Language, Craft & Culture

by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki

Verse Press
Amherst, Massachusetts


Copyright © 2005 by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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Selected books available by Martín Espada:
Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002 — Paperback

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