Reprinted from The Poetry Project Newsletter #208 October/November 2006

On This Tortured But Beautiful Planet

A Conversation with Victor Hernández Cruz & Quincy Troupe

Quincy Troupe & Victor Hernandez Cruz recently corresponded via email, exploring their origins as poets, the currents driving their methodologies & the effects of geographic & cultural location on their writing. Victor emailed from hot, humid & rainy Puerto Rico, sometimes at home & sometimes in a cyber cafe amid the Spanish-constructed buildings of old San Juan. Quincy was in his Harlem study “looking out of my window on the seventh floor. I am looking south, toward Puerto Rico, where you live, peering out over the top of trees in Central Park, and I can see the Empire State building and other structures in mid town Manhattan. From below, the sounds of 116th Street and 7th Avenue rise up and fascinate my ears with the sounds of car horns, music, the intricate rhythms of Senegalese Wolof, French, Spanish and African American speech. It is a fascinating jumbalaya, and is something I try to marry in some of my poems.”

Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2006 2:46pm
From: Quincy Troupe
To: Victor Hernandez Cruz
Subject: On the island

Victor,

Brendan Lorber, the editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter, wants us to exchange questions with each other about anything our minds take us to. I would like to start out talking about poetry and music and see where we go from there. Since time is very important I will ask the first question, and give my answer to that question and then you can answer that question and pose one of your own. My first question is: what started you writing poetry, who were the first poets you were drawn to, what musicians and what was your view of how poetic language could serve you? My answer follows.

I started writing poetry in my early 20’s, in the early 1960’s, and have always felt I had a lot of catching up to do: I still feel that way. I started writing poetry after I suffered a traumatic knee injury that ended my promising basketball career: I was living in Metz, France, playing on an Army basketball team and a French one. I was always a voracious reader and while I was recovering from my knee injury I read some poems by Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet, that caught my attention. I already knew about Langston Hughes, Edgar Allen Poe, and Emily Dickenson and a few other American poets I read when I was younger, but none of them made any impact on me at the time because I wasn’t into poetry. Rimbaud caught my attention for some reason. But the first poet who I really loved was Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, after I read his poem, “Only Death.” That poem just floored me and I started trying to write poetry seriously after that. I also loved music at the time, especially Miles Davis, and other so-called jazz musicians, so music had a profound impact on me and my poetry. I wanted my poetry also to be musical, flexible, fluent, magical, mysterious like great music is, and I wanted it to be image based, and full of surprises running through the way the language was fashioned, and the manner in which images were woven throughout the texts. But in order to do all of this I first had to learn to write well and that took a long time.

Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 4:38pm
From: Victor Hernandez Cruz
To: Quincy Troupe
Subject: Answer/Question

Quincy,

So good to hear about your exciting beginnings in poetry. As for me, I think poetry started writing me before I knew what was happening, it was a language possession, it included an early love of books which I took out of the library and hid in my coat from the guys on the corner. I also remember poetry recited by family members which came from the tobacconist workshop experience which we knew before coming to New York. I was in New York as a young lad between the Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem I went to school in Harlem and had a lot of criss crossing with Afro American culture, I mixed early Eddie Palmieri with Wilson Pickett and the street duwop with bokero music from the trios of Latin America.

My poems I think are always historical research, I write with and against and uncovering history, making connections of my mestizo soul. I write in English and Spanish, live outside the continental USA in Puerto Rico or Morocco. My poems are full of Christian and Islamic imagery, the sounds of Arabic and Spanish lean against my English words.

My question to you is, since you know the Caribbean, how do you see the writing from this area in relationship to North American writing?

Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 6:18pm
From: Quincy Troupe
Subject: Re: Answer/Question

Victor,

Great hearing from you.

When I’m in the Caribbean I’m much more aware of natural elements like wind, sea, trees, flowers and the way nature interacts every moment with human activity. I began to become aware of this profound interaction when I lived in California for the second time, while I was living in La Jolla and teaching at the University of California, San Diego. The first time I lived in California, in Los Angeles, during a nine year period from 1962 to 1971, I was too immature to pay attention to nature, and too tied to an urban lifestyle to care or even think it was important, although I did write a poem titled “Poem For Friends,” which was published first in New Directions 22, edited by the late James Laughlin, and recently in Transcircularities, my selected poems, which was published in 2002 by Coffee House Press. In this poem I tried to address some of the environmental problems I saw around me and that the world finds itself in today, like pollution, over fishing, over building, and the greed of human beings trying to exploit and possibly destroy many essential things on earth to make money. But looking back I don’t think I was mature enough about the subject to write a really deep poem. Today, if I wrote that poem I think I would do a better job. I have been going to the Caribbean since 1980, first to Haiti, where I went for almost 20 years, and recently to Guadeloupe, where I have been going regularly for 3 years since I retired from teaching. In Guadeloupe I live out in the countryside and wake up every day surrounded by the astonishing wonders and beauty of nature. Also, I’ve grown older, and hopefully more mature. Today I pay closer attention to all the wondrous things that surround me. So this new observation finds its way into many of my new poems in The Architecture of Language, and I hope this is a good thing.

I would like to ask you how you approach language and image? First I will answer.

I try to construct the language I fashion in some of my poems - especially the longer ones - in the manner a musician, a composer, approaches a composition or a musical score. I hear the rhythm in my head as I find my way through the poem. When I first started writing poems I trained myself to write my lines in iambics or hexameters. Because the way my poetic lines came to me - then and still now - are usually in long rather than short breaths: Creeley’s lines came to him in shorter breaths, as do many of Baraka’s lines. Mine are closer to the way Neruda, or Whitman, or Ginsberg wrote the breath of the line, which is longer. But as I learned more about poetics I began to transpose solos of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and later Jimi Hendrix and James Brown beats into the music of my poetic lines. In this way I could structure improvisational modes into the language I was beginning to utilize. A good example of this approach is in my poem “Words that Build Bridges into a New Tongue,” which is published in Transcircularities, and in “Switchin in the Kitchen” in my new book, The Architecture of Language. In both these poems I try to structure elements of surprise and improvisational modes into the structure and flow of the language. I also try to construct images in the same way, drawing many of them from a bizarre mix of the urban and natural world. I know it’s strange, but the world is strange today, and I want my poetry to mirror and reflect the weirdness we find ourselves living in.

Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 4:41pm
From: Victor Hernandez Cruz
Subject: Re: Answer/Question

It’s hot and moist right now and the sky is electric in the Caribbean. Quincy you know that when I feel and think language it is a dual process of two languages. My first language of speaking and listening was Spanish.

When my family migrated to New York I was five and intact in Caribbean Spanish. On top of my Spanish phonetics I had to put the language I learned to read and write in. It was a Spanish sound which didn’t go on to Spanish grammar but entered English grammar. I have forever an accent on both sides of my linguistic fence.

But from this intersection I feel enriched. I belong to the Spanish tradition of Spain and Latin America. My dreams are mestizos and I testify to human cultures that are not present but are within my intuitions. It is what I see and feel. Spanish language gives me strong images and textures as does the Caribbean world which is mountain and sea and breezes and insects. Writing for me is thus translation and, like you have mentioned, learning from musicians. I do the same with Caribbean rhythms.

Migration was like a rapture and this precise layering of personalities gives an awkward turn and twist to my writing in that sense that it isn’t precise sometimes not even clear, calls the reader to bring out intuition and imagination more than rational.

It’s sometime that my now happens by itself

It is the way the world fell down upon my self.

Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 7:50pm
From: Quincy Troupe
To: Victor Hernandez Cruz
Subject: Re: Answer /Question

Victor,

What is your question for me?

Quincy

Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 8:11pm
From: Victor Hernandez Cruz
Subject: Re: Answer/Question

Quincy

My concern and my question is about something deeper within the writing process and the precise nature of your techniques and methods.

For instance I need to read in order to write. I need to read literature, history, mythology, religion and spirituality as also I see my voyages as a form of reading and study and this is absolutely necessary for me to write.

I am also a writer who started in the mid-sixties with a Smith Corona manual and I published my first book on the extinct mimeograph machine. I still create with pencil on pad as an initial organization. I can then go on to word processor computer where the screen gives me a bird’s eye view of the text. But I always need that original flow from my hands, from the muscle.

I have occasionally done things to music. I remember, Quincy, that we on occasions collaborated with music but I still remain primarily a poet of text using music and painting and anthropology as a feeding filter towards writing.

I cannot sing or act so what is known as performance art is something I have sniffed at from the margins.

I tend to write early morning or late night. That is a geographical imposition as mid day in the Caribbean is hot and humid. Moisture making it difficult to write. My periods of concentration could last up to two hours when a sort of exhaustion and anxiety sets in. I could work prose religiously day to day.

Well these are some random thoughts. I was wondering how you dealt with these issue of inspiration and physicality that writing is.

Victor Hernandez Cruz

Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2006 11:15pm
From: Quincy Troupe
Subject: Re: Answer/Question

Victor,

Thank you for the question and answer, I have enjoyed this exchange immensely.

I too am always looking these days for the deepest, most spiritual place within myself to write from, to locate many of my recent poems in an almost religious space, that is informed by mythology, history and the reality of the moment.

I feel like Miles Davis felt — that none of us are ahead of our time, but that most people live in the past, are behind time, and that a few of us live and create in the moment, in the present here and now. He felt he was that way, and I feel that’s where I live and try to locate my writing.

I also see my writing as a kind of voyage, one which carries me many times from the present and the known into the unknown, which is an exhilarating experience but one that can also be frightening and carry risks. But I also believe that meaningful art has to always involve itself with risk.

I use to write almost exclusively at night, mainly after midnight when everything was quiet. Now I find myself writing most during the early morning, when the day is breaking and first light is spreading its mystery, magic and energy. I love writing now in my little house in Montebello, Guadeloupe, because I live out in the country there, am surrounded by the natural sounds of nature, and have no television or no ringing telephone to interrupt the flow of my thoughts. I also work from pen and paper (first from a small notebook I always carry, and next to a legal sized lined long pad of paper) before entering the poem into my computer, which is usually the 4th or 5th draft.

I am always revising my poems, usually 15 or 16 times. But sometimes I overdo it, as I almost did with the title poem of my new book, The Architecture of Language, which was first titled, The Architecture of Speech. I first started writing this poem in 1988 and ruined it by constantly revising it until it was an unreadable mess. I hated it, so I left it alone. Then, in 2003, after I retired from teaching, I was in Guadeloupe looking over some of the poems I had saved in my computer but had abandoned I came across it again. I saw immediately what was wrong with it and began the process of rewriting it. The poem flowed naturally from that moment and evolved into what is today. I changed the title after talking with my friend, Jan Castro, because the word language has a deeper meaning for me than does speech. Today I am happy with the poem, although it is longer than it initially was.

I also do not consider myself a performance poet, but one who loves working with texts, though I do love reading my poems and performing them with musical groups or dancers. I don’t look negatively at poets who work exclusively in the performance mode, I personally love working with the poem on the page.

The last thing I want to say is that I used to begin writing many of my poems with a political idea in my mind, and on occasion I still do. But now, for the most part, I let the poem itself dictate to me where it wants to go, and I just go with the flow. Of course I have strong political and moral beliefs and those beliefs definitely inform my consciousness and the thrust of my work. But I like to think of my poems as being most times in an improvisational mode, collages, in the same way that many painters work, intuitive, in the moment, freely associating with whatever comes into my mind and its creative processes and impulses.

The world is constantly changing around us while some things - poverty, racism, war, religious madness, ignorance, xenophobia, human beings’ relentless pursuit of power, money and control over others - remain the same.

But I find myself always creatively wanting to be in the flow of change, which for me at least is a form of freedom, and freedom is where I always want to be, and indeed must be - even if it means giving up my life - if I am to feel fulfilled living on this tortured, but beautiful planet.