Stopping by with Martín Espada

What is the last thing that moved you?

Jack Agüeros was a New York Puerto Rican poet, playwright, fiction writer, essayist, and the director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. He was also my second father. He died of complications from Alzheimer’s in 2014. I visited him on his deathbed in the company of my wife, Lauren Marie Schmidt; that was the only time she ever met him. Later, Lauren wrote a poem called “At the Bedside of a Man You Don’t Know, Dying.” Every time she reads it aloud, I choke up. It happened again at a reading Lauren gave the other day in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.

What is a poem that greatly influenced your life?

At the age of twenty, I had dropped out of college and was well on my way to becoming a professional dishwasher. A friend and protégé of my father, Luis Garden Acosta, stopped by to visit. Luis was a brilliant community organizer, the co-founder of a community center in Brooklyn called El Puente (The Bridge). He knew that I had written poetry and had stopped. He handed me a book of poems with the words, “You’re going to be a poet.” The book was Latin American Revolutionary Poetry from Monthly Review Press, edited by Roberto Márquez. I grunted at Luis but took the book. I flipped it open to “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri; then moved on to the epic “Zero Hour” by Ernesto Cardenal, the poet-priest of Nicaragua; then turned to Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, as so on. I realized, as a Puerto Rican from Brooklyn with aspirations to be a poet, that I was part of a poetic and political tradition, reaching from Latin America to the Latino diaspora. I started writing again and never stopped.

What is your first memory of poetry?

My first memory of poetry comes from the eighth grade, when a dour English teacher forced me to read aloud the lyrics of “I’ve Got a Little List” from The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan, a light-hearted ditty about everyone the singer wants to see beheaded.

What do you see as the role of art in public life at this moment in time?

The role of art in public life at this moment should be to humanize the dehumanized, since dehumanization is the specialty of this deranged administration. For me, that involves pushing back against the narrative of the dominant society, making the invisible visible. I recently wrote a poem called “Shame,” based on the eyewitness accounts of activists protesting at the secretive migrant internment camp known as Alligator Alcatraz. That also means bringing poetry into so-called non-traditional spaces, which are, in some ways, the most traditional of all. Every year, I read at The Care Center in nearby Holyoke, Massachusetts, an educational program for mothers who have dropped out of the conventional school system, most of them Puerto Rican.

How do poems help you make sense of your daily life and the world around you?

Poems help me makes sense of my life and the world by reminding me that human beings have endured what we’re experiencing and much worse, yet often come through it with intelligence, humor, and dignity. I replenish my understanding of Trump by returning to Cardenal’s “Somoza Unveils Somoza’s Statue of Somoza at the Somoza Stadium.”

What do you want people to take away from your work?

I want my work to be useful to people. Maybe a poem like “Haunt Me,” where I grieve the loss of my father, consoles others who grieve; maybe a poem like “Floaters,” where I document the drowning deaths of two Salvadoran migrants, father and daughter, stirs a sense of outrage in others that leads to action; maybe a poem like “Love Song of the Disembodied Head in a Jar,” a bizarre love poem written for Lauren, encourages others to write their own off-kilter poems to the beloved. Even in the social media age, I hope that my poems would be passed from hand to hand or read aloud somewhere because they’re useful.

Are you working on anything right now that you can tell us about?

I am working on a new collection tentatively entitled All Houses Burn. I cannot say more, except that negotiations with a publisher are promising.