Cruz, Victor Hernández 1949–

PERSONAL:

Born February 6, 1949, in Aguas Buenas, PR; immigrated to United States, 1954; son of Severo and Rosa Cruz; married (divorced); married Amina Quizane, c. 2000; children: (first marriage) Vitin Ajani, Rosa Luz; (second marriage) Mohammed Amine. Ethnicity: "Hispanic." Education: Attended Benjamin Franklin High School, New York, NY.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Aguas Buenas, PR; Morocco. Office—P.O. Box 1047, Aguas Buenas, PR 00703. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Poet. East Harlem Gut Theatre, New York, NY, cofounder, 1968; University of California, Berkeley, guest lecturer, 1970; San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, instructor, 1971-73; University of California, San Diego, visiting professor, 1993; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, visiting professor, 1994. Also worked for Mission Neighborhood Center, San Francisco, 1981; associated with San Francisco Art Commission; cofounder with Ishmael Reed and others, Before Columbus Foundation. Editor, Umbra magazine, 1967-69.

MEMBER:

Academy of American Poets (named chancellor, 2008-2014).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Creative Artists Public Service award, 1974, for Tropicalization; National Endowment for the Arts fellow, 1980; New York Poetry Foundation award, 1989; Guggenheim award (Latin America and the Caribbean), 1991; Ten Best Books of the Year designation, Publishers Weekly, 1991, for Red Beans; Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist, 2002, for Maraca: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2000.

WRITINGS:

Papo Got His Gun!, and Other Poems, Calle Once Publications (New York, NY), 1966.

Doing Poetry, Other Ways, 1968.

Snaps (poems), Random House (New York, NY), 1969.

(Editor, with Herbert Kohl) Stuff: A Collection of Poems, Visions, and Imaginative Happenings from Young Writers in Schools—Open and Closed, illustrated by Sean Chappell and Phillip Crowder, Collins & World (New York, NY), 1970.

Mainland (poems), Random House (New York, NY), 1973.

Tropicalization (poems and prose), Reed, Canon (New York, NY), 1976.

The Low Writings, Lee/Lucas Press, 1980.

By Lingual Wholes, Momo's Press (San Francisco, CA), 1982.

Rhythm, Content, and Flavor: New and Selected Poems, Arte Publico Press (Houston, TX), 1989.

Red Beans, Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1991.

(Editor, with Leroy V. Quintana and Virgil Suarez) Paper Dance: Fifty-five Latino Poets, Persea Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Panoramas, Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1997.

Maraca: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2000, Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2001.

The Mountain in the Sea (poems), Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2006.

Cruz's work has been included in anthologies, including An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, Morrow, 1968; Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writings, Random House, 1975; and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties, edited by Ray Gonzalez, David Godine, 1992. Contributor of poetry to Evergreen Review, New York Review of Books, Ramparts, Down Here, Massachusetts Review, Black Renaissance, and Revista del Instituto de Estudios Puertorriquenos.

SIDELIGHTS:

To North American readers, Victor Hernández Cruz is among the most well-known Puerto Rican poets. A cofounder of the Before Columbus Foundation, Cruz has been an integral member of the Nuyorican movement in American literature, a movement characterized by Puerto Rican writers who, having lived much of their life in the United States, write in the linguistic combination of English, Spanish, and Black English known as "Spanglish." As a testament to his work giving voice to the Hispanic experience, in 2008 Cruz was named chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the first Latino to hold that post since the academy was established in 1946.

Among Cruz's published works are the collections Snaps, By Lingual Wholes, Tropicalization, Panamas and The Mountains in the Sea, as well as the essay/verse anthology Red Beans. In addition to poetry, Cruz has edited several collections of Nuyorican verse and is a speaker at writer's conferences around the world. Reviewing Red Beans, Library Journal contributor Frank Allen dubbed Cruz a "vigorous bilingual Latino troubadour."

"My work is on the border of a new language," Cruz once noted, "because I create out of a consciousness steeped in two of the important world languages, Spanish and English. A piece written totally in English could have a Spanish spirit. Another strong concern in my work is the difference between a tropical village, such as Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, where I was born, and an immensity such as New York City, where I was raised. I compare smells and sounds, I explore the differences, I write from the center of a culture which is not on its native soil, a culture in flight, living half the time on memories, becoming something totally new and unique, while at the same time it helps to shape and inform the new environment. I write about the city with an agonizing memory of a lush tropical silence. This contrast between landscape and language creates an intensity in my work."

Cruz self-published his first book of poetry, Papo Got His Gun!, And Other Poems, when he was only fourteen, during a period of his life when, after his parents' divorce, his mother struggled to support the family. Papo Got His Gun! and Cruz's next poetry collection, Snaps, received great critical acclaim. The poems in Snaps combine "the rhythm of jazz poetry and the political optimism of a young man beginning to test his power and place in the U.S.," according to Encyclopedia of American Literature critic Maria Melendez. The title of the book refers to the finger-snapping of dance and musical rhythms along with images of life in el Barrio, an area of New York City populated mainly by Spanish-speaking Americans. "The underlying sense of beat and polyrhythms, informed by jazz or Latin music, gives structure to Cruz's minimal poems, his ‘city snaps’ and ‘clips,’" according to Francis R. Aparicio in MELUS. As Aparicio added, "Throughout Snaps one finds the constant movement of subways in New York City, the uptown/downtown and inside/outside references and numerous indications to walking and driving in the city."

Cruz focuses on interstate and international travel in Mainland and infuses tropical culture into New York City in Tropicalization. The poems in Mainland commence in and around New York City and then branch out, stretching to encompass the Midwest, California, and the Southwest. Cruz ends the collection with an international move into Puerto Rico and then returns to New York City. Critics observed that this ending symbolizes the poet's own migration from Puerto Rico, his birthplace, to New York City, where he was raised. Melendez concluded that the New York City ending "signifies a recentering of the self in the reality of New York urban life."

Tropicalization brings the rhythm of the Caribbean to New York City. As Melendez noted of Cruz's 1976 collection, "Many of these poems are more lyric than his previous works, and the collection also includes some of his first published poems."

More humorous in tone, By Lingual Wholes finds Cruz expressing his social and political concerns. In a New York Times Book Review appraisal of the work, Richard Elman maintained that the poems "often speak to us with a forked tongue, sometimes in a highly literate Spanglish." Cruz is "a funny, hard-edged poet, declining always into mother wit and pathos," Elman added. Melendez observed that By Lingual Wholes evidences "a growing sophistication in Cruz's language use and wordplay." Pondering the poet's decision to translate his poems into English, Aparicio concluded: "The title of the book By Lingual Wholes, may partly explain this decision. Its bilingual texture exhibits a complex dynamic between English and Spanish that extends beyond the oppositional linguistic dialectic prevalent in the earliest bilingual poetry of United States Latinos."

Released on the eve of the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's landing in the New World, Red Beans received high praise from reviewers. The title of the collection is a play on the words "red beings," a reference to Puerto Rican mestizos who are descended from a mix of Spanish and African ancestry. Reviewers characterized the volume as a highly imaginative exploration of Puerto Rican history as well as the Puerto Rican people's history in America. In a review for the San Francisco Review of Books, Jose Amaya wrote of the work that "Cruz experiments with the vast linguistic and cultural possibilities of ‘indo-afro-hispano’ poetry and comes up with a strong vision of American unity." "Red Beans celebrates a migratory poetics that is self-reflective, lyrical, lush, and often dead-pan humorous as Spanish and English dance a lambada through its pages," observed Ann C. Bromley in her appraisal for the American Book Review. Commenting on the development of Cruz's style, Amaya noted that "Cruz is at his best in Red Beans when he portrays … the distinct sounds and voices of Caribbean life which crash into his poetic consciousness like a wild ocean surf." Melendez found the book to embody a more mature and reflective poet, writing that the "sense of spontaneity, the barrio language and irony that characterizes Cruz's earlier works is tempered."

"Cruz has a message, and his voice should be heard," proclaimed Lawrence Olszewski after reading the poet's Panoramas. According to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, in this 1997 collection Cruz "achieves a musical vitality that surpasses any of his other volumes." "Like a salsa band leader coaxing and challenging dancers to more and more complex steps," the critic added, "Cruz dares readers with dizzying poly- rhythms, polymetric stanzas, back-stepping word structures and a sense of improvisation." Writing in World Literature Today, W. Nick Hill observed that the poet writes from "a secure position from which Panorama becomes a natural mode of discourse, and it opens … to reveal pictures of his early life, and more of his intellectual commitment to the centrality of language as rhythmic community."

Cruz's development as a poet is mapped in Maraca: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2000, which encompasses nearly four decades of work. Appraising the collection in the American Book Review, John Olson cited in particular Cruz's "An Essay on William Carlos Williams," in which the poet "states his poetics with invigorating brevity" and "champion[s] … the primacy and essential energy of speech." Olson also regarded the title of the collection as appropriate. A musical instrument, the maraca is traditionally made from a dried gourd. It is, according to Olson, "a metaphysical symbol with dual meaning: as a hollow implement, the gourd may be used as a container for food, or as a vessel for dead things. It is both a womb and tomb: life force and repository for the dead" and therefore the maraca "lends itself quite appropriately as a symbol for poetry."

Reflecting the influences he has encountered through a marriage with a Moroccan wife, The Mountain in the Sea finds Cruz "energized by the infusion of cultures he observes around him" in his wife's homeland, according to Library Journal critic Jack Shreve. From Arab culture, he moves to a reverential portrait of Spanish-language writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Ramon Mongo Santamaria, and ends with "Tricofero," a poem dedicated to his late father. Noting the poet's subtle interweaving of cultures, Shreve praised The Mountain in the Sea as "mature and inspired poetry for a global consciousness."

Cruz's writing, like his Puerto Rican culture, continues to grow and change. In an essay published in the Americas Review, he explained, "Unlike other groups who have had to erase their own cultural memories, Hispanics are moving forward, maintaining their own tradition and language. We will be the first group that does not melt; our ingredients are raw and the Anglo fire is not hot enough to dissolve them."

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:

Cruz contributed the following autobiographical essay to CA in 1992:

THE RHYTHMS THAT MOVE YOU AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SKETCH

The tropical morning with its orchestration of sounds and melodies. The aroma of café like a song permeating the air. Dancing in the memory the coquís who through consciousness and deep sleep print their Morse codes upon the inner drum. A dog barking on a distant mountain. The hot dark air has wings for sound. The pores of the molecules stretched. Night musicalities. When the sun rises all material follows.

Island of images, island of sounds.

Balconies which are as of stages onto the streets, platforms that make the town accessible, where: speech crisscrosses with wind, where bird songs collide with vision, aroma integrates with thoughts. Separating the ether, the river distinguish itself as it rolls into the belly of the mountain, towards the spectacle of the coast, what is not tied down doing somersaults, tumbling through its wet power.

The river made a path through my ears, another color to the music of the insects, layers of sound poetry inhabiting horizontal and vertical planks of space. As far away as the word gone can get there were mountains dancing danza, danzon of courtesy and fragrance, movement of controlled passion, flirtation of eye and elbow, forestry of choreography, tilts of wind, ceiba trees bowing, suggesting hidden Taino grace. Plenas lifting out of the coast, frame that supports the cadence of Africa raining upon the red soil. Gypsy flamenco, transported heels tapping through the pineapple fields, each frog with its own guitar, serenading lizards that dash with sun glasses, the yellow rays of the sun turning amapolas into trumpets, centipedes playing bongos into the tamarindo flavor, azuzenas turning off the stars which migrate toward the verses of the mountains, for the troubadours to wear in their eyes, memory that keeps the stories stored in the rhyme of dream, falcons with fire in their beaks, bringing in the day, as the curtain of darkness rises upon the Andalusía tiles on the balcony of time.

Outside the little streets were being paved with cement, red dirt disappearing under the grey. Before, when the streets were all earth, the rain water used to run down

the sides of the streets like guayava juice. Progress was coming in on the wings of time. My childhood was a stage where I witnessed the transformation of humanity.

As a young child one doesn't separate dream from reality, we are too immersed in time to know or even to care of its passage. We had entered history. Petroleum was coming in through the tropical vapors, the landscape was being stretched like a hive, it was polluted with tractors and diesel trucks, bringing and taking cement, throwing the mix in every direction of yonder and beyond. Seducing mountains, raping them right through the middle. Upon the lips of the population a new word was being pronounced which sounded like: Nujol. A place far away that one can go to, another world, where jobs played like music. Migration is the story of our age. People folded up and jumped into suitcases, huge Packards took them off over the mountain, where they vanished forever.

We are born into a place and a time, a province, it begins to mold us, the language of the region makes footprints in our hearts. The flora and fauna enter our souls through our eyes. The trees, the mountains, the sounds of the coquís, space music that originates in the vast darkness.

I remember walking to a river with my mother, where she and the other women of the town washed clothes along the bank of the river upon the rocks. When they were finished they would hang the clothes on nearby bushes to dry. Children played amidst wandering cows, picking immediate fruit, listening to the tales of the women. Sometimes as a way of caressing the labor at hand, they would hum and sing songs. Singing boleros, the songs of lost love, of sadness, tragedy, the songs made popular on the island by singers like Felipe Rodriguez. The sound of Spanish landing like birds into my ears.

Languages also migrate, conquer, and marry one another. When in 1492 the Christians of Spain reconquered their territory back from the Arabs, who had occupied it for over 800 years, Arabian words remain standing like tents all over the Iberian landscape. The lament of the Arabian-Andalusían songs echoed through the Moorish structures that were recycled with Christ and Castilian. The vibrations of the guitar drank milk at the breast of the la'ud, its Arabian mother. Migrating on the ships of the colonization of the new world were the swords of language upon the lips of the people who are poetry. It was those songs which the women hummed by the river.

Poets are travelers out of curiosity and many times for outright survival. Many poets had to take flight out of Franco Spain. Federico Garcia Lorca was found by Franco's soldiers and used as a notebook, they wrote with bullets the sonnets of fascism. Pedro Salinas, Luis Cernuda, and Juan Ramón Jiménez heard the flow of the Spanish river on the other side of the world.

Juan Ramón Jiménez lived in many places of the Americas, including New York, but it was in Puerto Rico where he most felt at home. He heard the sounds of Andalusía in the talk of the Puerto Rican people. His words were full of the light of the island sun. In a book of conversations with Juan Ramón Jiménez, Ricardo Gullón, a Spaniard who was a professor at the University of Puerto Rico where he taught alongside the poet in the early fifties, reminisced about a trip they both took to the mountains of Jaqueyes, which is in my hometown of Aguas Buenas. They went to a small hotel which is set cozy in the tropical scenery. Could it possibly be within chance that they drove down the principal street of this small enclave and passed the wooden house wherein I dwelled deep in the midst of play? Resounding in the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez is the conference of the birds and the color of the flowers of my childhood island.

Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico's first elected governor, was born in 1898, the year of the North American invasion. I was born in 1949, one year after he took office—a child of a government of experiment, within a Caribbean culture comprised of aboriginal elements mixed with Spanish, which in turn is with Arabian, permeated throughout with African. That was the inside and the outside.

Our first governor was known as El Vate (The Bard), for he was also a poet. He frequented the cafes of Old San Juan in the 1920s, considered himself a socialist, a bohemian, and proclaimed the independence of Puerto Rico. He wrote proletarian verses and some which were fused with a Whitmanesque spirit. In Ricardo Gullón's memoirs he speaks of the fine receptions at the Governor's Jajome residence, where industrialists, intellectuals, and poets met. The gamut of the conversations must have run from literary anecdotes to the political future of the island. The poet Luis Pales Matos was a close friend of the governor. They even once wrote a poem together by each contributing alternating lines. As the liqueur passed around in these sessions, the island convulsed and struggled to get out of its eternal poverty. Many islanders gathered their past and stuffed them into suitcases to ship them into the future. Muñoz Mann, with a fiery poet's oratory, gave speeches in mountain towns to the Jibaros. Vegetation was listening to the drums of industry. His campaign of the late forties used Lenin's revolutionary slogan: Pan, Tierra y Libertad (Bread, Land, and Liberty). In the acquisition of his political power, the muse abandoned Muñoz. His new verses were factories on the landscape. His metaphors were petrochemical installations broadcasting sonnets of pollution, his coplas the machinery of industrialization. Smoke pipes littering the countryside the imagery of his new poetry. Westinghouse popping out of the banana leaves.

As the island of Puerto Rico industrialized and progressed, the exodus of the campesino (Jibaros) intensified. Turmoil in their culture. You would think that progress would do the opposite, keep people striving in their own land.

Through the tropical electricity of the radio, the music and the songs perfumed the bombs of progress. From my childhood, mountains had the awesome grandiose qualities of gods. Tremendous productions of nature emitting from their bowels a sound. Wooden houses lined the street where I lived, painted in colors that would impress the impressionists. Lizards, which Federico Garcia Lorca described as drops of crocodiles in one of his poem-paintings, were speeding through the walls and trees faster than the speed of bullets, almost as fast as the speed of thought.

Roosters were always chasing chickens. Bewildered cows would stroll into town as if looking for someone to talk to. When children played in the streets, goats would crisscross through the games. Singsongs and guessing games, our toys manufactured by the imagination. Once there was a great commotion created by a horse that went berserk, supposedly after bestowing its own image in the mirror of a house into which it had popped its head.

The television was the mountain tops, the flamboyant trees featuring the passion of their red flowers, the birds flying in unison towards the river through the blue silk of the firmament. Balconies had mouths and ears and told stories that went back towards Taino bones or upon the palms of the Spanish, back to Andalusían angels, who blew the wind for the sailboats of the epoch of exploration. In the town of my birth, language was a fertile rain storm, inundating, sliding, riding, bouncing, curving, surprising, synchronizing, as happens many times when you pass by a stranger and they shout out information which connects with the things you were puzzling in your head, becoming random advice. Proverbs preserved by grandmothers from generation to generation. Refrains bopping down Antillean street. Courtesies of speech and manner that fascinate and inhabit the total expression of the people. Television was a line of lips attached to a series of buttons located in the panels of memory. It was once upon a time and two makes three. The telling of stories was a cultivated pastime. Family incidents got swollen after each sip of coffee. Notorious occurrences, especially those related to love scandals, were seasonal reruns, sometimes with fresh information added to the stew. Everyone had a list of what today would be considered paranormal phenomena, but within that dwelling of a natural alphabet, within that space of the people who herbal and listen to the whispers in the wind, it was as if to say merely, look it's going to rain.

Sometime in 1952 or '53 Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, was teaching at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras. Perhaps he played with some of the ciphers of his mathematical propositions there, within that Carib moisture. Could it be that he met Juan Ramón Jiménez and toasted with a piña colada, as they weaved through the movements of Modernism? Aguas Buenas, hidden in the mountains some forty-five-minutes distance away from this literacy, within the same breath of existence, marched in a slower syrup, as many families who were in the agitation of migration waited for their airline tickets to fly toward the word Nujol, tickets that would blast them into a foreign epoch. Their prose technique was all-enpackaging, a venture off to a Borgenian library of buildings, to splatter onto the pavement of endless metropolis.

My grandfather made cigars; he was a tobacconist. He was also a fabulous singer of boleros and was hired to bring serenades to the balconies of maidens by their lovers. He knew hundreds of songs by memory. The place where cigars were made was known as El Chinchal. Tobacco is the gift of the Tainos to the Spaniards. It was used by the medicine shaman to cleanse people of evil drifts, it creates aroma to facilitate the communication with spirits. The cigarette arises from a much more primitive rolling of leaves. Modern-day tobacconists roll with the ancient music in their fingers, with a humming, with a swaying. Throughout the Caribbean it was a tradition for cigar makers to accompany the routine of work with singing, reciting of poetry, and the reading out loud of books. As if it were a library, a place where the popular meets the text, where words of a book are spoken by a reader, an orator of great charm. It was within that Chin-chal that I first heard a poem recited, in this case it was my uncle Carlos, who proclaimed the famous declaimer's poem "El Brindis del Bohemio," decorated with his dramatic hands, inflamed with the passion of one who was living the words he was speaking. The Spanish coming out in jolts as if from the throat or the center of the chest, the pores of my small body swallowing the melancholy sense, trembling to the point of tears. When the recitation ended, I walked out and stared down the tropical street.

As my grandfather Julio el Bohemio rolled the leaves of tobacco into cigars, singing the romances of one bolero after another, the gestures of his hands in conjunction to palm rhythms, Luis Muñoz Marín entertained the literati, advanced Hispanophiles, and third-world scientists, who came to marvel at the miracle, the showcase of democracy, which Puerto Rico was in the Caribbean. As one more cigar was accomplished and Muñoz showed off the fine books in his library, we packed our lives away, getting ready for the trip to heaven.

Over the radio we listened to el Duo Irizary y Cordova, a man and a woman singing duet, the Trio San Juan with Johnny Albino, the plenas of Canario. My uncle Carlos went to the Korean War, because that was one of the privileges of North American democracy. His body vanished over the mountain onto the other side where there seems to have been a carnivorous mouth swallowing whole families. Lovers were separated, their kisses and caresses had to be continued in the penmanship of letters. On a corner of a street that bowed into verdant vegetation, there used to be a group of young men who quickly dissolved like ice cream being eaten by the sun. More than rumor was

that they were shooting rifles in Asia. Many soldiers coming back were seen marrying their sweethearts sporting the khaki uniforms of the army.

The island was jumping like a frog across a frying pan. We were fricassee upon a burning stove. Puerto Rican coffee once used to be top choice in world markets. The Dutch would import it by the crate, sipping the island flavor before going through the frozen canals to post themselves in front of Rembrandt imagery. It was the favored coffee in the court of kings. The island was getting ready to blast off in a rocket. The earth was abandoned, the newly planted crops were heavy metal making terrible sounds as they gasolined through mountain vistas. Everywhere there was a come and go, a Ven y Go which wasn't a Starry Night. The mountain became a divinity to worship, an object of long mementos of moist contemplation. Families took turns leaping over its plantains to plant somewhere else.

One day my father disappeared. There was no doubt that the mountain had swallowed him, for it was the path to the airport and on into the clouds. He left for the syllables Nujol. The plan was for him to go up ahead and scout the place out. Get a job, acquire a dwelling for the family, whereupon he would send for us. I was a child in a tropical dream and knew nothing as to how time transpires. With the Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco I repeat No Me Preguntes como Pasa el Tiempo and continue to acknowledge along the road of his poetry that for many who left the isle of enchantment it was Iras y No Volveras. We were like shrimp in the hands of Chronos, taken by the river of history. The motion of time and history that brought the Arabs to Spain to make gravel out of the rock of Gibraltar, also wavered the Spaniards to these isles. Now it was time for us to feel the strong directional pull of destiny and leave with it to unknown terrain, history guiding us away from our homeland, without pity or shame.

On the day that my family left from our interior mountain town toward the San Juan airport, there must have been many a festival alit across the country's plazas. El Trio Mayari could have been doing a rosary of love lyrics in the plaza of Cayey. Did I hear Mon Rivera doing Dada surrealism in Dulces Labios, Mayaquez? Was Ramito singing under a tree of fresh gourds a decimal to the East Trade winds? Was the plaza in Manati full of white Panamas dancing plenas and fending off solar heat? In stereo with our exit, in some remote corner, tractors and construction crews descended upon a row of flamboyant trees, cutting them at the root, preventing the destined red flowers from ever seeing the light of day. Since everything is simultaneously in motion, as the car spun us through the mountain road, could Juan Ramón Jiménez, the "Andaluz universal," conducting a conference on the politics of poetry in Rio Piedras, hear the propelling engine of a plane ascending through the clouds of his inspiration? At the very moment of our take-off, could he have been explaining to the class that in Spain the popular classes play an influential role in the development of literature, that they broadcast a strong radiation into the content, that people who do not read say the lines of Cervantes, without any awareness as to where they come from? The refrains, songs, and proverbs rise from the belly of the people into the most gifted cultured pens, who style a language of high

architectural splendor. Taking what they have heard into the regions of their dreams, giving birth to a never-before-tasted paella. At the very moment the Spaniard weaved with voice and hands his anecdotes of Ruben Diario, we were migrant swans, nouns which had become verbs, in motion to imaginary Cibolas, where who knows what beautiful princess awaited, dreamy-eyed upon red Italian sofas within a marble of a room. Off we went. Evicted songs of the mountains upon H.G. Wells's Time Machine, peeling space toward another age, a new dimension.

The first thing that struck me, that I could distinctly recognize, was the odor of the cold. A process that felt like this: after having jumped from the frying pan into the fire, we dove toward the refrigerator, falling into the center of the freezer; for of all seasons available, we chose the middle of winter to make our big jump to the states, November to be exact. November is truly the cruelest month, which puts me at odds forever with T.S. Eliot. The smell of this different atmosphere called New York is frozen cement and steel printed in the soul of my nostrils.

English was a sound, another sound like the racket of cars, sirens, and cans rolling on the street. Still in childhood I merely thought it was some unopened door of the Spanish, some back alley I didn't know about, another side of the language. My sister Gladys and I found a way of saying Spanish words in what we thought was an English fashion: "La Casin," "Dinerolis," "El Policin," "La Escuelin." Some other island kids who had arrived before us into the big orb of Manhattan were already scattering lip in this "Englishni."

My mother stood by the radio from which a Spanish language station sprayed the songs of the island into the falling snowflakes. She also followed a radio "novella" that was aired everyday at the same time. She always sang as she accomplished the chores of the house, the new language never even saying a thing to her.

The great invasion of English into our house was when my father showed up out of the cold with another man carrying a big box. "Es una televiseón," he announced. It was our first television. This box brought the world into our provincial transplanted Aguas Buenas that we were still living, in our newly adopted home. Hopalong Cassidy, Claribel the Clown, Groucho Marx all started weaving through our living-room minds, crisscrossing with the stories told in Spanish, blending with the singing, the guitar and güiro scratching of relatives and neighbors, our laughter and dancing in front of the sobriety of President Eisenhower.

English was like a new coat which didn't fit but had to be worn. In the New York City public school system, the speaking of Spanish was strictly forbidden. English ink was quickly spreading through my being, I was beginning to feel like a stereo system, speaking Spanish on one side and English on the other. It was not only speaking these two sets of sounds, it was also listening to them, thinking in them, feeling. Each language had its area. The language of my home, the Spanish of my parents, tenderness and discipline, the proverbs of advice and consolation. The Spanish of Andalusía animated and possessing flesh, here Taino sentiment, there Gypsy sway, here African beat, all the ancestral maneuvers depositing into an instant of street.

On the streets of the Lower East Side, there was a chop-suey English lingering in the neighbor hood from the Jewish and Irish past. Working-class bark. As if a peacock with feathers of sound fanned out in front of me, the center of a spinning wheel. Walking the streets of the Lower East Side, I exchanged Spanish with Afro-American friends. The English was bending, twisting and diving, new spices were seasoning the tongue, which was like a magnet drawing to it the music of talk, the tempo and the flavor of the city. Mixing it all with the language of my birth, the Romantic Spanish that crossed the Atlantic with the sails of the Renaissance. It in itself showing the scars of one invasion after another.

The metropolis of New York was like a work of art, with sound and motion. As a young man I took to walking the streets way beyond the borders of my own neighborhood. I became friends with Picasso's Guernica, which was hanging at the Museum of Modern Art. Van Gogh, Velázquez, Degas, Renoir, Matisse all ran through my pupils minutes before I went underground to catch a subway back home, where perhaps there would be some singing or, if my uncle Carlos was in the mood, the recitation of poetry.

My spiritual grandfather, a Cuban, Arturo Vincench, whom I have remembered in a series of poems that start off "Don Arturo says," was a classical guitarist who would for periods of time sit up on the roof and finger-pop Segovia melodies through the murmur of the tenements. The tune swept through the hallways like a distant light of a past moon. On those afternoons I would place a chair by the window and read the gypsy ballads of Lorca, transporting myself from the Nuyorican barrio to a view of the streets of Granada. The sirens of police cars passing below piercing like etchings onto the movements of a culture.

As a teenager, the only way to travel was through the pages of a book. Reading books was like taking boats. I read all the seafaring stories and accounts of other lands, other times and people, that I could find at the Thompkins Square Branch Library. The words that were entering were giving birth inside, divorcing themselves from their original meanings and walking new paths of invention, exploding into imaginings that opened upon an exit where they started to pour back out, especially onto a plastic loose-leaf notebook which I had found somewhere on the streets, the lettering on it told that it belonged to an insurance company. I filled it up with fresh sheets and started to keep a journal. At that youthful intersection, language stood up inside of me and pronounced the word: POET. With the words giving birth in my interior, I made a mask in space, and on it I placed a Spanish eye and an English eye—so that I could see the duality of the world.

PAPO GOT HIS GUN

My first book of poems was done on a mimeograph machine. A friend who lived in the neighborhood made a woodcut to resemble bricks, which we impressed onto paper to create the cover. The bricks were blazing red. The poems were angry, revolutionary. I wanted to knock buildings down. They did not reflect the poets I was privately reading. It was an immediate urban language. The poems were blasted off the top of my head. I was still not learning from the methods of other poets, that is, I still did not know how to read them. Enthusiastic about the content, overwhelmed with what was being said, I missed the features of their style, their temperament. I was reading poets like Federico Garcia Lorca, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Luis Pales Matos. It was the poetry of youthful fire which exploded out of my pen. Though language was beginning to grow inside of me, horizontally and vertically, my poetry was still issue oriented, it was full of passion for an ideal, momentary convictions. I thought the world could be reprimanded for its injustices, scolded into shape. It was 1966 and I wanted to eat and feel the world.

The Beat poets were important to me: Ginsberg, Corso, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and others. Their influence was mostly grammatical and not philosophical. It showed up in the construction of free verse.

Some of my first poems were done in rhyme, because I grew up around the tradition of popular poetry, which is declaimed, and the rhymes are an aid to memory. The repetition of a refrain is part of this poetic style. It goes all the way back to Moorish Spain, when certain Arabian and Jewish forms entered the Castilian. The form which carried refrains was from the Moslems and is known as zejeles, Mozarabic songs whose structures were taken over by cultivated poets. A lot of Spanish popular poetry flourished out of these forms and have been handed down for generations, all the way to the Latin-American popular masses. There I was writing in this fashion in English, which is a terrible language for rhymes.

Reading Lorca's "Poet in New York" freed me from these strictures. He was very traditional, yet free to experiment, making him utmost contemporary. There is always more inside than what comes out. Those early poems clearly show this. My cultural resources were inside of me dormant. I felt I had to document what was around me, bestowing opinion upon everything that moved. Still there was something developing which I liked, quick images charging out of the page, a razor swiftness cutting the thoughts.

We did the book ourselves from scratch. We typed the poems onto stencils, rolled them out on the mimeograph machine, and stapled them together. Rolling red ink onto the wood block, we pressed cover after cover. We cut out the letters on cardboard, placed the cardboard over the wood-block bricks, and sprayed the titles on each book individually. We took the books around to every bookstore that was within walking distance. A batch was left at the old Eighth Street bookstore in Greenwich Village.

It was 1966 and I was a Latin from Manhattan. I wanted to dance. Putting a couple of my self-published books in my back pocket, I went to places like the St. George Hotel Ballroom in Brooklyn, or up to the Bronx Music Palace, showing the book around and spinning around the dance floor listening to Ricardo Ray and Tito Puente. The music dismantled my anatomy into parts and classified them. I couldn't believe the speed that Tito Puente achieved with his timbale sticks—so fast, they disappeared in front of you. I listened to the beats he was making, then turned quickly around and looked at what the dancers were doing with their feet. I would sit at such an angle that I would only see the dancers from the knees down across the whole floor. It was such a zigzagging cartoon, scissor work, knee bends, shoes flying. Right there and then I would jot down fleeting poetic thoughts on the back of the colorful flyers that were passed out when you entered the dance.

The music that I wanted to hear was a combination of jazz and Latin. Symphony Sid, a New York DJ, used to have a late-night radio show which featured a lot of the innovative contemporary Latin music. Every day I was anxious for night to fall so that I could stuff my ears with what they wanted to hear. I would put the Symphony Sid Show on before the Latin switch at 11 p.m. and listen to straight jazz. John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Oscar Brown, Jr., Nina Simone. Sometimes he would mix it all up. Play Eddie Palmieri's "Azucar Pa' ti" after John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things."

My poems were dancing to all these rhythms, in a very unconscious way. It was the mold I was in without awareness. The music of Afro-Caribbean rhythms and the romantic boleros lived side by side, without any contradiction. They were decorations in the living room of a family. Sentiments of love coming through voice, guitar, and drum. In the city of the Empire State Building, I was still connected to the songs that my grandfather mellowed out in the Aguas Buenas that was melting in my snow-covered dreams.

The city was spinning and I was divided into Spanish and English, the Latin and Germanic substratum, as if universes distributed through channels of thought and emotion, mental and physical. My friends were being eaten by the streets or disappearing to the Vietnam War which was raging in Asia. Sadness in the eyes of my mother. My father was gone. Upon them came the indifference of destiny, the toll charged by the migration. History has no heart; it is all drama and action, colonization, relocation. I loved knowledge but hated school, the language spirits inside of me made no compromises with the disguise of society. A bridge made of words across the rooftops of the city was my walkway. Everything within the air was enlarged or reduced with words. Experience was linguistical motions, polyrhythmic phrases. Living is reading the books of the faces, the chapters of the features, the sentences of feeling that flow out of the eyes. One book led to another. Everything is energy and nothing remains the same. After Papo Got His Gun, the poems were speaking more. I was living inside of them. The private persona began to explore the terrain of the

historical being, the cultural rhythms materialized in the experience of daily living. I was not just thinking of an issue or a specific opinion. A sense of how I was attached to the past through my words was beginning to crystallize, especially in Spanish which is ridiculous because I was writing mostly in English.

It was around this time that I read William Carlos Williams. A direct language opening episode, feelings peeling right onto the page. As the language of Williams cleared linguistic smoke, as if going toward a core of spoken psychology, verbal immediateness, Manhattan was feeling like the end of the world. I wanted to leave to a slower space. I thought of Puerto Rico. I longed for the island. My poems were planting fruits I was not seeing. Papo Got His Gun was picked up by Evergreen Review. They did a spread with photographs. My new poetry was read by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell. After I signed with Random House, I met Lowell and he accompanied me to my high school. Our conversations now dissolve into the urban fantasia of bricks and windows. Random House wanted to do a major collection. The poems were giving birth to themselves, churning with laws of expression hidden even to the vehicle which became a victim of their production. Leaving the book in the hands of an editor at Random House, I made plans to leave the space of my upbringing for the first time. Language was in my feet when in 1968 I danced in California, which used to be Mexico.

SNAPS

Snaps was the first major collection. I really consider it my first book. Papo Got His Gun was like a demonstration of passion, the flashing of energy. Some of the poems were written all in capitals. It was like billboard art.

Snaps is a walking and running book. Urban life bursting, accumulating, and detonating. The streets of New

York splicing by, the frenzy of a young man running through them, involved with the content yet detached, episodes of the streets without any coloring. Despair and the quick-moving images of reality in flight, an emergency, a departure, an escape. I wanted to clear the buildings, the structures, out of the way and see what was beyond them, anticipating a change in landscape.

It was a poetry very close to the events of my life. Instant autobiography. The element of the city, the outside pointing in, towards the interior of the person living this adventure. More and more the man inside was standing up, using available experience for ulterior motives. A searching coating the purpose of the language, a life claiming itself through the distress. The light of possibilities was bright. The contents of a personal life joining the jewels of research. The recognition that in writing something far more important than the details of a singular life is in operation. The truth of one's interior obstructed by the organized forces of a city, a mental layout, a physical bondage.

Some of the pieces I remember writing at the Village Gate: Symphony Sid used to have Monday night presentations there of the Latin musicians who were pumping the city with rhythm and flavor. Trying to capture Eddie Palmieri's keyboard, orchestrating gardens in the air, I would fill pages of a notebook. The first things that came to mind filtered through the plumbing system of specific concerns that were permanent features of an outlook, to which random flurries of words had to be submitted. The Village Gate dancers whirling like Rumi's dervishes, while the pen which was the first object to come from heaven deciphered bone and joint connections to Arawak ceramic patterns and Yoruba mofongo meshings. Ismael Quintana, Palmieri's vocalist, singing songs about yucca, mangoes, and pineapple while outside snow-covered streets were a testament to our Northern displacement. The ice of the outside contrasting with the inner humidity of sunshining mountains.

After reading Snaps, Allen Ginsberg wrote a note in which he said I was using language "the way Williams wished." In those days I was reading a lot of Williams, so his statement said a lot to me. I did not know then that William Carlos Williams was half Puerto Rican. His mother was born in Mayaquez, which is on the western coast of the island. She was born to a well-to-do family, but after her father passed away they went through some hard times. After studying art in Paris she moved to Rutherford, New Jersey, where Williams and his brothers were born. She never learned the English diction and had a way of talking which fascinated Williams. Reading Williams's biography of his mother, Yes, Mrs. Williams, I learned that this poet whose work I admired had grown up listening to the same refrains and proverbs as I had—proverbs which mothers and grandmothers are notorious for using, as ways of giving advice to their children. Her manner of being, of speaking, and storytelling entered his poetics. Like many Spanish and Latin-American poets who have been inspired by rivers, the structure of "Paterson," Williams' long poem, flows along the Passaic River. His poetic dissection of that city is a total holistic endeavor.

Many writers are embarrassed by their first book. After publishing his first book, Juan Ramón Jiménez tried purchasing every single copy and destroyed them as they came into his hands. The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier "disowned" his first literary manifestation Ecue-Yamba-O (the word is from an Afro-Cuban religious cult and means "Praise Jesus Christ"). Looking back on Snaps I am disgusted at the amount of coarse words. How one shoots off at the mouth without regard for the audience. A lot of the content of the book is distant from me. As I have mentioned, it is an escape book, a dispossession of the imagery and metaphors of New York. The galleys for Snaps were corrected in a Mel's Drive-In restaurant on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.

In California I ran smack into the university students getting beat up. As a matter of fact, on the first day that I chose to go up by the campus and visit the famous Cody's bookstore, I got caught in the street ruckus and had to flee from baton-wielding police. I was working with Herbert Kohl and Allen Kaprow on a project called Other Ways, working with teachers of the Berkeley Unified School District. The program sought to bring poets and artists into the classroom to liven up the public-school experience.

California was opening up like a tortilla for the ingredients of a burrito, but I was also homesick. I don't know why I was missing New York. Home there had not been like real earth to step on. My real home was the birds of my memory flying to the flowers of my island childhood. In New York my home had been halfway up into the sky, in a village which was vertical. What I still longed for was the movement of the streets and the music. I was music sick in California and rhythmic isolated. For the local record stores, Latin music was Herbie Mann and Cal Tjader. There were also some of those records which Willie Bobo made for college students. I was hungry for the source, the root, the clave. After some eight months in California, I was back in New York.

Walking on the continent of language which was rising from the water of my being, I continued to make discoveries of new nations and cities of expression. I like the structure of Snaps. I began in this book to write about the tropical past, to recognize the importance of my mixed racial blood. Spanish melodies sprinkling onto dried goatskin which has been tightened onto wood, indigenous harmonics rushing through the strings of the guitar. I saw the flesh of my bones connected to the drama of history. The radio signals put out by Cesar Vallejo were coming in strong. The Incas were over Manhattan turning the buildings into syllables, the junctions of their consciousness visiting the Spanish. The Spanish inside of me was giving the English lessons in courtesy. The first linguistic base was churning in the deepest chambers, where sound takes its shape. Like a rose shedding petals, I kept undressing the language. I wanted to get to some core, to the matrix. The buildings in New York were sticking out like pimples. Once again the clamor of the city was getting to my nerves. In order to pursue my poetic and personal vision, I felt the urge to migrate south like a bird. On a cold morning of 1971, I got a flash that involved the better part of the horizon. The mountains had sent a telegram. I never doubt those flashes and went for my suitcase.

When I went back to the island for the first time since the migration, I took a small amount of luggage with me. The rest of what I took was an invisibility which wanted to visualize.

MAINLAND

Mainland is the book that embraces my return trip to the island of Puerto Rico in the early seventies. Most of the poems were written there or right after my return to New York. The visit helped me recharge the Spanish. I stayed near the university in Rio Piedras and was able to visit the library and the surrounding bookstores. Along with the morning café and bread, I was devouring Spanish and Latin-American literature. The theater of the university featured concerts, plays, and film festivals. There was a corner cafeteria called La Torre where students, professors, poets, and painters gathered and exchanged caffeine, dark espresso of the thoughts sweetened with cane. Just seeing structures and going on voyages into the islandscape was enough for me. I was filling in many of the empty squares.

With my father I visited Aguas Buenas for the first time since I left at age five. Entering the town we took the breathtaking curves of the mountain road, a sensation of endorphic experience stronger than all the drugs you can come across in California.

I went down the streets I used to play in as a child and into the house where I once lived, where I was born as well, for in 1949 it was much more rural and all births were by midwife. The house seemed so small. Did it shrink or did I grow? The surrounding mountains kept their overpowering splendor of deities. All over I was getting whiffs of fragrances which were helping to recuperate memory. Some of the children were still eating the same homemade candies. Guayava, tamarindo, and passion fruit were playing maracás in the wind. My uncle José Antonio was still making cigars the same way grandfather Julio el Bohemio did. Like his father, José Antonio was a great singer. He and his friends would get together on Friday afternoons and with the poetry of the boleros create a halo over the town.

Some friends of mine lived in the very Afro-Puerto Rican coastal town of Loiza Aldea. I went there to stay during carnival. This town is very important for the traditions of rhythm and spirit, which have been preserved within its territory. The festival of the Catholic Saint el Apostol Santiago is really the festival of Ogun. A special poem in Mainland titled "Loiza Aldea" is dedicated to the meter and Antillean spirit of this town. Not only has "Loiza Aldea" preserved African forms intact, it has also maintained many Taino methods of cuisine and fishing. There was much corn between the Tainos and the Africans: the Spanish brought over to do the labor for them. Attempts were made to enslave the Tainos. Many committed suicide rather than work for the Iberios. Many took off for the interior of the island to still-standing ancestral villages. The African slave heard the native drum descending from the mountain tops, integrating its Morse code into a map for liberation. Between the African and the Taino, two world views which danced in the round, ceremony and food was exchanged. Rebel communities formed in the secrets of the jungle. Dissident and bohemian Spaniards also heard the melody and took off for the coffee brewing in the hill. In Mainland I was searching for these affinities, the movements and struggles of the Caribbean peoples, within the island that I knew. How history flowered out of the windows of a campesino house. How a musical structure contained both beauty and imperialism. Cultural narratives flowing out of facial features tumbling down Santurce streets aflame.

Luis Pales Matos was and is important to my poetic luggage. This great island poet was in the grain of the Antilles. In his language the island is in motion, panoramic views of our soul carrying its load towards the eternal waves of the ocean, mountain flowers the letters of his poems.

He was among the first poets of the modern era to see the importance of living the full Caribbean, of recognizing the expressive potential of this racially mixed region of the world. We cannot live in denial of who we really are. We must integrate all our components into a larger frequency. He was the first poet in Puerto Rico to sing our Africanness. Despite this I am not impressed with his so-called Negroid poems. These supposedly Negroid poems of Pales Matos are full of voluptuous black women, sensual dances, and onomatopoetic words which are meant to represent African vocabulary and sounds. Some of it is outright silly, some borders on racism.

Africa permeates and runs through the whole fabric of Caribbean society, Puerto Rico not excluded. To me our gestures, cuisine, music, language, and spirituality are all impregnated with African tonalities. It runs through all colors and social classes. What need was there for him (and the critics) to say that a group of poems are of "Negroid" sentiment and others not? In the Caribbean everyone has of everyone. It is the racial melting pot of the world, a confluence of tones and timbres, on the planet earth the highest manifestation of cosmopolitism. What isn't available?

A quote from a Pales Matos poems hangs at the entrance to Mainland, as respect for the poet and to focus light upon Puerto Rico as inspiration. Book covers are important because they are like the doors of the house you are about to enter. Quotes are like names on the door, welcome mats, that invite us to think and introduce us to some of the elements that live within.

One of the wonders of the world is a flowing tropical river. Poems about rivers are among my favorites, for poetry is like a river flowing in the language, the eternal current of words curving through the flora and fauna to reach the immensity of the sea of expression, an uttered phrase, a written poem, a group of words swimming together like a school of fish, which otherwise would be lost.

Before leaving the island I made a special trip to the mouth of el Rio Grande de Loiza in a ceremonial farewell. When I was there the poetry of Julia de Burgos was in the saltine air. She wrote one of the greatest poems ever written to a river, "Rio Grande de Loiza." If in it she saw the arms of a man lift out of the river and caress her, I felt her lyrics walking up my flesh. I could never look at a river without thinking of her. Her final years were tragic; she died after walking the streets of Spanish Harlem. She was heading toward Central Park, as if she wanted to die within proximity of the verdure of the trees. She collapsed across the street around 104th Street, her final strength setting in motion the task of clearing the cement of the city, to deposit her in the park's semblance of nature, so that her soul could better make it back to her island river. Dropping a white flower into the river in her honor, I parted toward San Juan. On the plane back to New York, I thought of California. After Puerto Rico, New York was too strong a pill to drop for a full year. I dreamed of the many people there that I wanted to see. Something was calling me, something pacifical, celestial, and sweet. Through the massive Carib clouds, the whispering of a woman's voice. I wanted to get back West which is closer to the East.

TROPICALIZATION

Everywhere in New York there were people mumbling to themselves. In subways and on the streets words were pouring out of mouths like on automat. The minute you lose your mind, language takes you over. Given that language is a strong force of nature, it overwhelms any forces that might stop it. It is for that reason that poets should treat language with utmost respect, like a loved one, with tender, loving care.

In Puerto Rico I gained a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of spirit which I felt had to be grounded, imagination which had to make itself available. Tropicalization is the musings of this period. Caribbean Spanish was dancing everything from danzon to mambo in my skull. It was like a Rolodex plugged to an electrical outlet. One of the books I read on the island was the

novel Trés Tristes Tigres by the Cuban writer G. Cabrera Infante. It was a total linguistic invasion, a séance possession, Cuban Spanish conjured by drums, candles, cigars, and chants. Metaphor and conversation extending themselves like rubber bands, each word exhausted for all its possible meanings, reverberations, permutations. Entities of technique taking total control of the writer (vehicle), staying in command until its purpose is accomplished, until it has molded and twisted itself through the whole color spectrum, trying out all the tempos and rhythms that the moment of the content calls for. Trés Tristes Tigres is Havana speaking.

Tropicalization is Caribbean Spanish in English. The ideas, especially in the second section of the book which is called "Electricity" to denote the volcanic energy issuing out of collective speech, were mostly embodied in a series of prose poems. It is more in the tradition of Spanish and Latin-American literature to use the designs of popular talk, feeling, color. The Spanish language changes from the bottom up, the people dictate its course. Verse pours down from the mountains, a way of thinking that verbalizes. Walking down the street suddenly one hears a fleeting satori, a tropical haiku. The writer creates from the given and adds to it personal magnifications, deduces, enlarges, reduces based on ingredients at hand. Tropicalization is like the greenhouse effect, a warming of the Northern latitudes, bringing writing concepts into the English from my other language. Importation of fruits and vegetables, vistas, mixing and confusing geographic locations. Racial and cultural miscegenation episodes jumping the monism of the States. A wind which to me comes in from the Modernist movement of the Spanish.

Modernism opened up a third rail for the Spanish language, commencing with many different poets catching the same wave, like lightning that flashed through the ether of an epoch. There were many poets who fueled its initial appearance: Mexican, Cuban, Peruvians. I believe it was Jose Martí leading into Ruben Dario that truly blew the embarkation whistle. Dario was born in 1867, a man with Spanish, Indian, and African blood renovated the poetic language of his times. This is the way it had to be for it is in the Americas where the Spanish spirit continues to grow, having moved away from its original sources, distancing itself from its grammatical rules, from customs and those things which tie it down. Like a person, language escapes from the provinces with only the best humor, leaving behind the phobias. In the Americas it reaches the highest plateaus, it improvises, receives new words. In the prose poems of Tropicalization I took the English syntax to the point of destruction. The result of having heard the contents with two different systems of sound reception. It is something actually beyond myself and out of control, that is conscious direction, the talk sense in the poems creating their own style and even shapes. The collective voice of the folk reinventing itself, with its own equipment. I was creating new metaphors and imaginings massaged by the invisible hands of spontaneity. I am merely another victim of the language, which was around before and will be around after we abandon our body cabinets. Sparks of chatter coming down the mountains and the streets like molasses.

It has always been interesting to be part of alternating periods between rural island towns and advanced urbanity such as New York, something about the contradiction which keeps you alert. Manhattan a merry-go-round, imposing upon one's attention. Back from mountain tranquility I saw more and more the

pressing accumulation of heads, popping, bopping, all ready to explode. I wanted to write a long poem about the city, which would express the way the city came at me, a gallery of voices, a montage of episodes. New York is one scene after another, like a long-playing record of endless sides. "New York Potpourri," the extended poem that opens Tropicalization, was like open windows, small glimpses that gathered together to form a larger mural of how I was filtering the city. Small lyrical side/slides that were mentally or physically in the city.

Later in '73 or '74 when I went to read in Europe to the One World Poetry Festival of Amsterdam and at the American Center in Paris, I ran into a lot of international poetic information. My work started to be translated into other languages. I wanted to take my historical/cultural information and innovate with it. Do like a folkloric avant guard. I was interested in doing haiku, not in their usual setting of nature but have the take the train into the city. I was even writing Elizabethan-period-type sonnets as spoofs on the form. Fill them all up with plantains, guayavas, and boleros in the courts of kings. This creative research went on towards my next book which was published in San Francisco. Within it I practiced many different techniques, escaping definition, having a fear of being pinpointed and classified. I had relocated back to the Bay Area. I was also now the father of two children. It was truly a creative and productive renaissance.

BY LINGUAL WHOLES—1982

Living in the Mission District of San Francisco during that period when one thinks one is a mature adult because of age, but really isn't because of lack of experience, there are so many things that one has to ride out or write out of the system. Spin, make a circle, and come back to the same point several times before jumping off the wheel. It was a living that I was writing, and a writing that I was living.

Ishmael Reed and David Henderson, original poet and writer friends of mine from New York, had also been living on the West Coast for several years and there was in a way a literary social community amongst us and other writers. Ishmael Reed had come in with some ideas that were talked about in New York and this was the seed for the Before Columbus Foundation. Bob Callahan, David Meltzer, Simon Ortiz, Shawn Wong, and myself were all founding members of this organization which hoped to promote literature that was being ignored by the New York establishment. They have since gone on to give the annual awards, known as the American Book Awards. Because the judges are also poets and writers, this tribute has gained in popularity and respect and is considered quite prestigious.

In California I met Latino writers and artists from just about every country in the Americas. I began to explore different dialogues of the Spanish and the way to use them within writing. I was seeing how racial and cultural mestizaje has affected the entire continent. Despite the painful origins of the Latin-American republics, the Spanish conquistadors raping the land and the indigenous women, somehow we are all a product of that collision, and must survive and evolve, inventing hybrid psychologies and technologies for our cultural fluids.

By Lingual Wholes was an attempt to write a language that was neither Spanish nor English. Some of the work in the book is outright visual. The letters were perceived as sculpture. Influenced by some Brazilian concrete poets, I wanted my visual experiments to be rooted in some purpose, a concept, to have meaning and not be mere decorations. That was an important criteria for all the energy painting and sculptural calligraphy, bilingual ink which was let loose within that book.

In San Francisco a group known as the Contemporary Music Players was putting on a production of Hans Werner Henze's 22 Voices, which was poetry selected by the composer and set to music and song in an operatic mode. When the director/conductor called me, a French fellow, it was the first time that I had ever heard of Henze's creative project and that it involved some of my work. The famous German composer had used two of my poems. One of the poems served as an introduction to the entire text, the other was set to music and performed by a soprano. It was a spectacular experience to hear Caribbean slang words which I had forged into the English being stretched out by a high-pitched soprano voice. I couldn't believe my ears. It was the second time that my poems had been set to music. Years earlier, in the '70s, Ray Barretto had done a poem which I dedicated to him in his album Headsounds. Using congas, timbales, and bongos, and turning off all studio lights, he and the other musicians went after my poem with percussive improvisations.

San Francisco was getting to be one ridiculous search for a parking space. On certain nights people just got eaten by a chill as they stared up at palm trees which produced no coconuts—they were constipated. I was tired of the Bay Area and the endless rotation within traffic. I felt that I had learned and developed as far as I could go in California and the United States. Once again the urge to go back to Puerto Rico was all over my mind and soul, but this time with a strong sense of not just going for a period, but to totally re-migrate, go back home for good. I wanted to go back to a rhythm, to a culture, to a language. I was longing for warm weather and to be bitten by insects. To see my hometown of Aguas Buenas, to speak to the people of my grandfather's generation that were still around, to hear with my grown ears the stories emanating from balconies, to integrate my thoughts with the nightly singing of the coquí—coki-coqui-ki-kikiki-coqui—to write the aroma of the past into fragrances of the future. When in 1989 I left California for Puerto Rico, I made a full circle in my life. Back to the geography of my birth and the nature of tropical rhythms that move. Once again I was in the hands of motion.

RED BEANS

Translation is not simple transportation of one word into its equivalent in the other language. What if the word does not exist? Sometimes it's a matter of arrival and departure. The way I left in Spanish is not the way I returned in English. Even the way you sit, stand, or walk has a relationship to your language, the language you are doing it in. Senses operate differently. You see in Spanish you would move your whole body into it, and here is what I am touching upon as I listen to the local conversation about taste. "I like my rice slightly burned, the bottom of the pot, toasty, crispy, even hard." Listening I understood there is no translation of experience. Only the representatives of life, words, are open to interpretation. Everything else is not lying, is not fiction. When you sit down to read, you're removed some twofold. In English there could be a yakkity yak of the mind that could put it out of business. It has to put the other half on patrol, otherwise it might blow up trying to analyze some fussing. Spanish has more outlets to the holy spirit. This rush could save you the burning of cells. Just relax, don't insist, otherwise you might bend iron with your looks. Just look at the way it comes to you in dream, without discussion, debate, essentially variable, kaleidoscopical. Looking everywhere for the word omnipresent. It's no use to flip the eggs over, or backward. You couldn't do it in Spanish without getting the mothers of invention involved. The atmosphere is weaved with saltine mist.

Landing in San Juan, the tourist strip known as El Condado looms to my left from the airplane window. So much riffraff has gathered there that it might as well be an international bastion for cheap manufacturers, their products, and the worst class on earth: the merchants. Quickly to the right you can get a peek of the first session of mountains on the outskirts of the metropolitan area. From it came the echoes of the areyto, a Taino celebration involving poetry singing and dance, maraca and drum, and also the rhyming of Spanish coplas, paso fino verse strutting by the side of purple orchids.

The Caribbean is rhythm from light to dark. Everything is in motion in steady flux. The East trade winds brushing the trees as if they were hair. The sky is a museum for the clouds. Within this thoroughfare of history, I live and write, rising early with the clear singing of the roosters. The earth is red.

Red Beans is a significantly different book. Between its covers I included both poetry and essay, dance and instruction. Much of the prose was written while I was still in California. The poetry was written in Puerto

Rico. In one sense it is a history book. More than ever I poeticize the forces of history. The poems set up a telescope at the intersection where civilization encounters the person, whose interior is nowhere on the societal program. It is a hybrid cuadra-cultural communication where the creative surges pursue their stimulus, to engorge them with self-awareness. Selfs meeting selfs.

Sinking into the caves as far as possible with the light of Germanic English, passing the torch over to the Latin Spanish. Writing in Spanish is seeing the scars of the body, its lyrics full of swords and whips. Merely to speak it is an act of violence, it bellows out with much more force than the English can ever gather up. As I vaporize into the meaning, into the patterns, each day I feel more at home. There is a lot to do. Writing is a responsibility to self and to the epoch. There are so many circles, squares, pyramids, ovals, pentagons, lines, and colors making up the mandala—that there is no time to waste. We need to start tracing the etchings on the quiros (gourds). Listening to it—dancing. That is Life. Eso es la vida.

Cruz contributed the following update to CA in 2008:

WHITE HAIR/TROPICAL MOON

Living on the island of Puerto Rico for the last twenty years I am beginning to dance with the Spanish language. It has not been an easy task as one might think given that I was born on the island and grew up listening and speaking with my parents in Spanish. For the poet immersed in a language that curve of adolescence, that period of coming of age, that point when one breaks out and gathers the strength to declare oneself a poet is vital and I took that curve in English in New York City in the early to mid-nineteen-sixties. I had to recuperate the grammar and not just the sound of the language, even my pronunciation has always been off center, these years on the island I have savored my maternal tongue. The everyday street of it, the radio of talk and music, the television and the newspapers. Reading books by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, reading in silence and out loud, listening to my Caribbean twist of tongue. Cervantes taught me the tales of very old Spanish popular streets with alleys and subterranean caverns of Moorish Arabic, Sancho Panza dispenser of proverbs, aphorisms. Making acquaintance with local poets and writers, listening, making linguistic mistakes are all part of the journey of recuperating a language which had been the undertow of my life.

The social cultural change, the contrast between the San Francisco Bay Area and the tropical island of Puerto Rico was intense, at first difficult to adjust, to focus. I had grown up in New York City and spent twenty years in California. Coming to live in a small provincial town was quite a challenge; what made it bearable was that Aguas Buenas is only thirty five to forty minutes from the San Juan metropolitan area, which is cosmopolitan, alive with cultural activities, museums, cafes. I established a social and cultural life weaving through the mountains dropping down into the urban area. Old San Juan a medieval city once fully walled like its counterparts of the same period in Europe. Parts of the stone wall have been torn down to open up for modern urban expansion.

When I was a child in New York my father Severo kept me in touch with the written Spanish language by going over words with me from a Spanish dictionary, how to pronounce them and what they meant, then we looked the word up in a Spanish/English dictionary to get the English equivalent. As an adolescent I was able to read the New York City Spanish-language newspaper El Diario. Coming back to the island and speaking with people I could see how off some of my pronunciation was. Slowly I began to adjust my phonetics, and this combined with reading and writing all helped me adjust my vision and my metaphors so that they can flow out of another language.

I also made contact with my father again; we had been estranged for many years and now as adults we were able to compare notes, sift through our memories of the past, review the reasons why we migrated to the north, examine stories about incidents in New York. We would go to a finca, a patch of land my father had acquired in the town of Aguas Buenas; it is an area that opens up into an expanse of mountains, a line of green mounds that disappear into Bayamon or perhaps Comerio. We took to the terrain with machetes, constantly trimming down the grass and the shrub. Puerto Rico is fertile, the entire island is truly a rain forest—not just el Yunque, an area in Luguillo designated as such. It is a tropical climate producing moisture with the morning sun which rises to bring down afternoon showers, sometimes quite thick. It is a climate where rain can fall down from a totally blue sky. Or you could be standing on a corner watching it rain across the street while the rays of the sun toast you. With my father I learned the names of trees and the strangest insects; in Puerto Rico again I tasted fruits which had never migrated to New York City neighborhood bodegas. I remember visiting the writer Olga Nolla in her old San Juan house. She had some fruits which appeared to me to be small pears, and she told me that they were nisperos. I had never heard of them. I remember her delight in watching me taste the new discovery.

My father would remember things which had erased in my mind as lizards dashed from the swing of our machetes. He provided details to my sensorial awareness of the past. We planted papayas, gandules, and plantains and kept an eye on the marauding goats of one of our jibaro neighbors. The most important seeds we planted was our union, which blossomed until the end when he passed away on June 25th, 2005, and left me alone facing the tropical bush with my machete in my hands. Before leaving he had built a house on the land he owned; it is where I now live and write these words of remembrance.

He was a hard-working, early-rising man, harsh in the measure of many, but responsible, aware of the many dangers life contains. He was hard on me and those around him, he came up from dire economic settings. The Puerto Rico he grew up in is not the Puerto Rico of malls and cars and television entertainment; it was the harsh economic and social climate of the twenties and thirties. He would always warn me against illusions and sentimentality. He had no imagination. He was in cold reality, in the practicality of it all. Speaking about my writing poetry, he once told me: "You have a hobby, now you have to get a job." As he saw my books and the criticism, he also saw the place where I stood creating, planting seeds with language, living within an epoch, feeling a geographic area, deciphering a history and he offered me his blessings. The day I buried him, when we entered the cemetery it was a day of sunny blue sky. After the protocols when we were lowered him into the earth a rain shower came down upon us. I knew immediately it was fertility that we decompose so that the aroma of guayaba can resurrect. I say "Gracias" and bendición to my father.

When creative language comes, when the bird of poetry flashes through my mind, tingles through my fingers, I have to wait, give it a moment to see if it lands upon an English branch or a Spanish trunk. Always for me writing is translation; I wait to see if it is flower or leaf. It is also geographical dislocations. My urban memory enters a lush tropical terrain. Migration, bilingualism, mestizo (multiracial) are all Cubist, disfiguring an eternal out-of-placeness. It is a distortion, a fragmentation, an out-of-context text, chaos. Did not the Cuban critic Benitez Rojo say in his wonderful book The Repeating Islands that "the Caribbean is organized chaos"? So many times even in my own island country I feel a stranger, a stranger in my native land. Is it not the eternal solitude of the writer peering into reality, deciphering it beyond the call of duty? In my poems I am listening and speaking to history, the history of our Caribbean flesh, how history manifests itself in our everyday events, in our relations.

The island poets Angela Maria Davila (now deceased) and Mayra Santos Febres taught me through their presence and work how to be a writer outside the hispano-file orientation. Through them and with them I can see the importance of our mestizaje, our mulatez, when they speak of their families they are reconstructing pictures of the past, of the conquest, of slavery, of the harsh relations of the social classes on the island at the turn of the nineteenth century and its ongoing repercussions in the present. The older people still have these narrations upon their flesh. Other native poets such as Nestor Barretto, Javier Avila, Elidio de la Torre, and Vanessa Droz bring to me the awareness of the potential of our invention, our postmodernist philosophic place, innovation space, our advance guard.

Informed as we are through the Spanish language, we were a true colony of Spain. Of the United States we are merely a territory frying in the greases of its fast-food chains. Our true undertow, the current that is pulling the sublet of our conscious, is the Caribbean mestizo stew which has cooked for centuries and made us colorful and profound. It is reflected in our musical rhythms which have traveled the whole planet; it is in the taste of our cuisine, Spanish and as such Arabic, Mediterranean, indigenous African ingredients that sizzle and bubble, weaving in and out of each other. We are amazed and astonished even onto our own eyes. All contrary to the critic Antonio Pedriera whose 1930s book Insularismo attacked our racial panache as a liability to our intellect. Uncomfortable even with the hot tropical sun which he thought was turning our brains into mush.

Modernism came to Latin America before it came to the United States. In the 1850s José Martí was writing poems of strong personal presence, Ruben Dario left the cacao trees of his native Nicaragua to travel the world of his imagination, somewhat French, somewhat Greek, so much Roman. The Spanish language gives a stronger linkage into the classical world. Traditional worlds convene in our new world, the African and the indigenous American. Perhaps we were a continuation of the cultural and social innovations of Muslim Córdoba, which was one of the most advanced European cities. It was the most populated and its multiracial people enjoyed public baths, libraries, and even lamplit, clean streets at a time when other European cities were in squalor. Spain sent its brutal and conquering men, the language and culture of the renaissance followed, the renaissance marked by the civilization of the Muslims in Al-andalus. Moorish- and Spanish- and Italian-inspired fountains sprang water in our plazas.

The first years of resettlement on the island were full of doubts. Friends in the states thought I had moved beyond reach; universities asked if I needed a passport to travel to give talks and readings. In a true sense I was incommunicado for a few years. I continued to write in English and project to the north my Caribbean-spiced words. It is from down here that I worked on the selection of my collected poems published by Cof- fee House Press in 2001. I went over the poems in my published books and I went into old files containing poems which were never published. Herbert Kohl, a longtime friend and colleague, informed me that I had once stayed in his Berkeley house and had left a box full of poems. He sent them out to me and I went over them. They had my name on them but I didn't recall the instance of their creation. The first section of the book contained work that went back forty years. Because I was no longer the person who wrote those poems, I felt I had no right to edit them so I just let them be; they were written by someone else, and I just touched up some of the spelling. The past flabbergasts us from all the sides of our thought rhythms.

Poetry has come to me as flashes, nervous jolts which of late I am beginning to tame, to slow the process down. In the "Seeds" section of the collection Maraca I have written about people who have had an influence upon me. The poems required research; it was a combination of study and improvisation. It is that attitude of slow contemplation which now prevails. Prose writing is taking more and more time and much more exertion than the poetry. I am a natural poet but prose comes to me after much labor, arduous, grueling work. As a poet I was not used to looking back as much; poetry happens in the now, the present, and jumps to a future, while prose deciphers the past that is moving toward a present that is flowing toward a future. Poetry and prose are different attitudes and procedures. Narrative combines the stories of different places which we are no longer in, recalled from the now-space that we inhabit. Reading and travel are necessary activities to the development of my writing.

I have been invited to Spain on several occasions. The very first time that I saw the land of my last names I was invited by the Federico Garcia Lorca Foundation. It was around 1997. On the plane going over I developed a fever which got pretty high, and I was having chills. When I landed in Madrid I was picked up by Manuel Montesinos, a relative of Lorca who, upon seeing my condition, took me to see a doctor. I was prescribed medicine and then we headed to La Residencia de Estudiantes. La Residencia was once an innovative learning institution where gathered many of Spain's creative minds, especially during the 1920s when Lorca himself was a student resident, along with Salvador Dali and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. It was an open space of performances and conferences, and poets Pedro Salinas and Juan Ramón Jiménez served as mentors there.

This fervent fertile environment was all interrupted by Franco. Many of the poets and the creative minds of Spain saw the fascist iron fist coming and crossed the Atlantic toward the other side of the language. When the information came that I would stay at La Residencia, I jumped with pride and joy because I knew the history of the place that hosted Einstein once and other mayor thinkers of the twentieth century. Through the Foundation, I was taken to the University of Salamanca, a school established in medieval times to read poems and talk to students.

Entering, I remember seeing a cloud of smoke in the hallways. I wondered if there was a fire but was informed that it was the smoke created by the cigarettes of students who at that time were allowed to smoke wherever they wished, in the classrooms as well. Taking in all that secondhand smoke, I arrived back in Madrid with a sore and hoarse throat and remained that way into the next day when I had to read and present La Residencia. I must've sounded like a horse underwater to the audience, but I excused myself and pointed toward the tobacco which Spaniards first encountered when they invaded the Caribbean islands. It was the tobacco of my Taino ancestors. Caribbean natives used tobacco for relaxation and to invoke spirits, never in a habitual manner. Now here were the descendents of the conquistadores smoking up tobacco smeared with all kinds of unnamable chemicals causing harm to themselves. In some ironic way, the natives of the Caribbean have taken revenge.

Spain is always a mystery to my feelings, to feel through my mestizo bones a love, a rejection, a thought always that I might have a link with the people that pass me by in cities like Granada and Córdoba and Seville. The collision of bloods have made us look so different, yet at other times we are of the same blueprint. That the Spanish type got prettier when it brewed with native and African blood in the Caribbean is clear to see from the overwhelming sight of a morena, a mestiza, a mulatta, and yes even a white, blue-eye blondness, yellowness of Mediterranean tinge.

Walks through Granada streets and other Andalusían cities, we find the geometries of our Old San Juan architecture, the cobblestones of its streets, the curves that slant toward fountains gushing water, water sprinkling, streaming, the sound of it relaxing, the Muslim sense of water which the Spaniards acquired from the 800-year visitation of the Moors. Canals of water are everywhere in the new Córdoba of the Caribbean, on patios, courtyards, interior music within when I passed through. Forever I need fusion and fragmentation, the unfocus of distortion, confusion, jaggedness, multiplicity and then unity. How different we all look and how very right it should be. As if we are all unequal notes of music in different levels of the sky.

In 1995 I got to go to Mexico City to participate in a performance festival. I was like a cockroach who invades a party of chickens. Since I am not a performance artist I had to come up with a gimmick, so I invented and worked on a poetry reading with multimedia: video, slides, music. The visit coincided with the Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. I was in Mexico City on November 2nd and got to walk across the plaza del Zocala and perceive skeletons and flowers, candles. During the performance festival, other "artists" were killing goats, or showing their private parts, or entangling themselves in toilet paper. What I did was really a straight reading with all these things happening around it.

I am not particular to performance art; it seems that the mediocre who cannot write well or paint well or act well or sing well figure that if they throw them all together they will create enough intensity for some applause. I know it didn't go over with the punky perfomeros; no one spoke to me afterward. To my surprise, therefore, sometime after that I was invited to do a performance in London. Did my reputation as a performance artist spread? By the time I got to London I had honed my performance skills, using lights and three reading podiums. At the end of each poem darkness fell and I scurried to the next podium while music and slides kept the audience looking at Caribbean images, listening to music, enjoying the energy all around me.

Luckily, a real performance artist was the feature of the night, a Chicano man out of Los Angeles—how much can we take of this flat pancake of endless suburbs? His performance was a one-man acting show. I now forget the details, but did he come out on skates circling round the stage in a woman's nightgown, or was it see-through lingerie of black silk? A big, old-fashion washtub full of water; his poetry rang out something about his father … or was it his mother? He stopped at the tub, and spoke some chingada, cliché word of Chicano poetry then he immersed his head in the water. He held his breath for such a long time that people wondered if this artist came to commit suicide in front of them; he came up gasping for air. The second time he sank in he stayed longer, then came up with his nose drooling mucus. It was beyond performance, in the realm of reality check. I thought that perhaps I should leave, but stayed through the end and the thunderous applause that combined with a standing ovation.

I knew then that I could never match such heightened art and declared to myself that my performance artist career was over. I am not even spoken word; luckily this slam stuff came after I was way passed thirty. I am a writer. I don't know if I should brandish the word poet—I am suspect of that word as well—but I do write poems because I can clearly recognize that they are not narratives. I borrow from history and experience, relations, words that have dropped near the doorway of my ears. You write poetry thinking, dancing, flowing. A nervousness. A now-instant jump.

History, culture, links, mergers, mestizaje fascinate me, and they are many times the themes of my poems. My poems are historical/cultural investigations. The essence of my sensibility flavor Caribbean-ness with links to Africa: our style, the way we feel, North Africa rising north to the land of the Spaniards. Castilian. Indigenous. All these energies going in and out of each other.

My second visit to Spain was in 1997 to attend a conference of U.S. Latino writers that was sponsored by Casa America. In Madrid I arranged my return ticket in such a way as to provide me with an extra week and a half so that I could be a cultural tourist. I was anxious for years to see Granada and Córdoba, and Seville; I wanted to feel Andalusía, the place where the Muslims settled for close to 800 years. I have always felt my family name has roots there; my blood/bones have a link to that mestizo region. Following the readings and the presentations, I took off on my own, boarding the AVE train in Madrid and shooting out like a bullet toward Córdoba. I got off the train and made my way to the area near the big mosque. I found a small room in a hostel, rested and took a shower, and jumped quickly to the streets in search of Averroes: to see and view the present that history has made of this great city, to taste flavor, hear the music of the architecture, witness Roman ideas, Arabic horse-show doorways, windows in this city which opened Europe to the Modern epoch. Imagined Muslim scholars, going over books in one of the many libraries, felt the antiquity mixed with the new, the perfume of black-haired señoritas passing by boutiques.

From Córdoba, I went on to Granada, the birthplace of Lorca and the city of his sensorial poetry. The last region to fall to the Christians, its beautiful mosque of many chambers overlooks the once-totally Moorish sector of Albaicín. Washington Irving once slept in the structures of the Alhambra's Generelive and felt the duendes, elves, and other spirits flashing about, piercing into the real light of his retina. After two days in Granada I left for the gazpacho of Sevilla, the capital of Andalusía. In the plaza of Sevilla I encountered an enormous book fair, kiosk after kiosk representing independent bookstores selling their literary brews. Books on every imaginable topic.

I checked into the Europa Hotel around the corner from the plaza, then took a brief siesta. Yet it was long enough to become dream images; did I see turbaned men speaking Arabic, streets of a city I had never been to?

Once out on the street, I headed back to the ocean of kiosks with their waves of endless books. Spotted a man with a cane, a silver-handled snake, dressed in a grey suit with a black beret covering his bald head. I noticed that he was scrutinizing a Borges book, El informe de Brodie, Historia universalde de la infamia. I had once glanced at the book in a New York City Spanish-language bookstore and I was anxious to buy it. I watched the man to see if he was going to indeed leave with the book. Suddenly he put the book down and marched out of the kiosk. I seized upon it, paid the bookwormish clerk the pesetas—the Euro had not yet arrived—and headed toward a late-night meal as is the custom in Spain. Did I have cod fish—known as bacalao, not in the stew version made from dried salted cod popular in Puerto Rico and Brazil, but the fish itself—a good slice of it, with potatoes, a salad, and a glass of red Rioja? To the streets again, walking, marching to burn the food off, finding the Guadalquivir river, walking along its margin, along streets full of bar restaurants. Sitting with the locals, I would speak my Caribbean Spanish and be recognized immediately. The encounters between Spaniards and Latin Americans is always a charged experience in the sense that we are strangers who are linked through the many defaults of history.

Upon a wall along the street next to the river I stumbled upon a poster that announced a salsa and merengue dance in a club called the Salamandra. It was scheduled for later in the evening. I hopped along streets, crossing bridges circling, until it became almost ten o'clock. The I asked passing Iberians for the location of the club. When I got to the Salamandra, there was a man mapping the entrance. I asked him what happened to the dance, and he told me that it did not start till after twelve, that it was only ten in the tarde (afternoon), and the whole concept of the dark part of the day being afternoon struck me as odd. When I returned way after twelve, the place was jumping with the descendents of the conquistadores dancing to Afro-Caribbean rhythms, the culture and rhythms of the slaves making a full circle and influencing the modern cultural life of twentieth-century young people. I put my marks on the floor till almost four, when I left to return to the Hotel Europa.

At the front desk I spoke to the clerk working there who told me that Africa was just five to six hours away. I was interested in the connection and he gave me all the information needed to make the passage. I wasn't sure I would go, but back in the room the idea tossed and turned in my mind as I sank into sleep. I once again dreamed of people speaking Arabic, of men and women in gondolas and jellabas. The next morning the sun and the blue sky spoke to me clearly, and I decided to go to Africa, to Tangiers.

I took off for the bus station. While waiting I spotted a Moroccan woman climbing aboard; she sat directly behind me. We did not speak. The bus took off through endless curves of olive trees, making its way to the southern coast. When the driver stopped in front of a café an hour and a half later, he announced a fifteen-minute rest. Stepping out, the woman who had been silent behind me spoke to me in Arabic; my obvious Middle-Eastern semblance assured her that I was Moroccan. I told her in Spanish that I spoke no Arabic, that I was from the Caribbean. Luckily she spoke Spanish and we were able to converse in the café and then for the rest of the bus ride.

When we climbed the Euro-Ferrys boat to cross the Strait of Gibraltar we sat together. We got comfortable with each other and she invited me up to Rabat, the

capital, where she lived. We decided to meet the next day; meanwhile she left for Rabat later in the afternoon and I took a hotel in Tangiers. In Rabat she took me everywhere that was possible within her three-hour lunch break.

We stayed in touch, Amina Ouizane and I, for the next year. I came back to Morocco to visit her, staying with her family. Another two years passed and Amina and I married. That is how I have come to live between Puerto Rico and Morocco for almost ten years now.

Because the Moroccan people and the Puerto Ricans resemble each other so much, I sometimes don't know where I am. Also the Arabic-North African love/romance Eros psychology is similar. It must be why Latin-American television serial novellas (soap operas) are dubbed into Arabic and are popular throughout the Arabic territories. Over all it has been a cultural and linguistic infusion, a geographic discovery, a personal and literary growth, a point of comparison. I sense the Caribbean through the North African, the link with Andalusía from where the journeys to the New World took off, boats that were filled with the flavors of North Africa, of Arabia and the Middle East. This whole Spanish culture is a hybrid dance. The Maghreb and the Caribbean, two worlds that mix in my poetics, all are part of a panoramic cultural view. My poetry is following, my poetry is being chased, forms and flavors, languages bursting.

My son, Mohammed Amine, the fruit of our marriage, is four years old. He speaks Arabic and Spanish, turning toward me he talks Spanish, turning to his mother he speaks Arabic. Slowly I learn Arabic and some words in French, the second language of Morocco.

While in my home base of Puerto Rico, I was invited to the Medellin International Poetry Festival in July of 2007. Colombia is a stressed South American country. There are real conflicts in the countryside, with government forces fighting bands of guerillas of both right- and left-wing persuasions. Paramilitary groups, people and bodies disappearing. The still-lingering drug cartels. Still, walking the streets of Medellin, I felt no stress. I always look at the people, listen to the local refrains, to the public temperature. I felt the excitement of Latin America, the brew of cultures printed upon the passing faces. Saw the beautiful mestizaje of Colombia. Poets from all over the world arrived to form a kind of third dimension, a poetic dialogue in the face of potential explosions.

Some years back a bomb exploded and blew up a Botero sculpture in a Medellin plaza dedicated to his work, thirty Medellin citizens blown up with the art. The editors of Promoteo magazine have been dropping creative poetic language upon this disarray of horrid imagery. For eighteen consecutive years, their festival of the spoken word has sprayed dialogue and metaphors upon the poetry-loving citizens of Medellin. In past gatherings, poets have read in venues that had been threatened with bombs. On the day of the big outdoor inaugural reading close to 5,000 people sprinkled a beautiful amphitheater, surrounded by trees, half way through the reading young people were detected sitting high up in tree branches, hanging like fruit reaching toward the light of the words. It was astounding to see such a chunk of Medellin humanity come out to listen to poets of text, to the spoken word.

The festival organizers accomplished my request to read in Cartagena de Indias, the beautiful colonial city of Colombia's Caribbean coast and truly one of the most attractive in all of Latin America, its Spanish colonial architecture intact as if we were walking in the 1600s. When I felt the high humidity and higher temperatures—a contrast to cooler Medellin—I knew that I was home. The climate and the people are like Puerto Rico; it was like walking the streets of Loiza Aldea and Santurce. Cartagena is an African-based city, a Caribbean city where many people still dress in white.

The Medellin International Poetry Festival reopened my eyes to the role of literature in society. Poets read at Metro stations, clinics, and union halls, as well as at the obvious university settings. Audiences were made up of many different social and economic classes, and the people truly concentrated on the meaning of the words. Most of the poets had to be translated into Spanish, the patience of the people was double. Visiting Colombia was a consciousness-raising, Latin-Americanizing, and Caribbeanizing experience.

In Puerto Rico I work early in the mornings upon a novel that I have been writing eternally, or I wait for nighttime, my favorite creative time, as darkness surrounds me with creative energy. I am also preparing a book of poetry in the Spanish language. Spanish was my first system of sounds, and I have recuperated the written and grammatical parts that were lost in the migration to the north. What is my life? I am a sailor between ports, I am cubist geography, fragmentation, pieces broken in the dawn of the modern world.

Jorge Luis Borges implied in a poem that poetry was given to him by the night and by the books; the life that we have lived and the search for words to narrate it, our personal wounds, the hurt of people, what we gather in the night of power, the night of turmoil and peace. The forms we become through music and painting, through philosophy and spirit awareness, the architecture of the city and the nature of the sea and the mountains where the roosters sing to raise us into the sun.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Encyclopedia of American Literature, Continuum Publishing (New York, NY), 1999, pp. 239-240.

Poetry Criticism, Volume 37, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2002.

Suarez, Virgil, and Ryan Van Cleave, editors, American Diaspora: The Poetry of Displacement, Iowa University Press (Iowa City, IA), 2001.

PERIODICALS

America, July 18, 1992, James S. Torrens, "U.S. Latino Writers: The Searchers," p. 39.

American Book Review, February-March, 1992, Ann C. Bromley, "The Poetics of Migration," pp. 26-27; November-December, 2002, John Olson, review of Maraca: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2000, pp. 5-8.

Americas Review, fall-winter, 1986, Victor Hernandez Cruz, "Mountains in the North: Hispanic Writing in the U.S.A.," pp. 110-114.

Booklist, March 1, 1995, Donna Seaman, review of Paper Dance: Fifty-five Latin Poets, p. 1175.

Cross-Cultural Poetics, October, 2002, review of Maraca, p. 123.

Latino Studies Journal, January, 1995, Francisco Cabanillas, "Spanish in English," interview with Cruz, p. 49.

Library Journal, October 1, 1991, Frank Allen, review of Red Beans, p. 100; October 1, 1997, Lawrence Olszewski, review of Panoramas, p. 86; August 1, 2006, Jack Shreve, review of The Mountain in the Sea, p. 92.

MELUS, spring, 1989-spring, 1990, Frances R. Aparicio, "Salsa, Maracas, and Baile: Latin Popular Music in the Poetry of Victor Hernandez Cruz," pp. 43-58; fall, 1998, Carmelo Esterrich, "Home and the Ruins of Language: Victor Hernández Cruz and Miguel Algarin's Nuyorican Poetry, p. 43; summer, 1998, W. Nick Hill, review of Panoramas, p. 619.

New York Times Book Review, September 18, 1983, Richard Elman, review of By Lingual Wholes, p. 36.

Publishers Weekly, September, 1991, review of Red Beans, p. 99; September 22, 1997, review of Panoramas, p. 77; September 3, 2001, review of Maraca, p. 83.

School Library Journal, July, 1995, Michele L. Simms-Burton, review of Paper Dance, p. 105.

World Literature Today, summer, 1998, W. Nick Hill, review of Panoramas, pp. 619-620; summer-autumn, 2002, W. Nick Hill, review of Maraca, p. 96.

ONLINE

Academy of American Poets Web site,http://www.poets.org/poets/ (February 11, 2003), "Victor Hernández Cruz."

Diverse Online,http://www.diverseeducation.com/ (April 30, 2008), Clarence V. Reynolds, "Poetry Man."

Victor Hernandez Cruz Home Page,http://www.victorhernandezcruz.com (May 25, 2008).