I first heard Martín Espada speak when I was a young grad student at the University of Kansas in 2005. He opened up the reading by thanking the custodians for setting up the event, then noted that the reading was co-sponsored by Coca Cola. He explained to the audience that the company was brutally attacking the National Food Workers Union in Colombia, SINALTRAINAL, leading to the deaths of 3 workers. He announced that he was donating the $1,200 Coke contributed to the event to SINALTRAINAL, and dove into the reading. That was how I was introduced to Martín’s uncompromising blend of politics and poetry.
Several years later, I invited Martín to read for some of the high school students I taught in the Bronx. He agreed and arranged for Norton to send each of them a copy of his Alabanza: New and Collected Poems. On a Friday afternoon in May, he arrived with fellow poet and now-wife, Lauren Marie Schmidt, and read poetry for a room full of students, talked with them about their own work, and listened while they read.
Shortly after I moved to Michigan, Martín was invited to Ann Arbor as the Zell Distinguished Poet in Residence. I picked up Martín and Lauren at the airport, but because I had missed the faded paint along the curb, we came out of the terminal to find my car attached to the back end of a tow truck. Martín talked the driver into letting it back down again.
Like the stories Martín tells in his poem, these anecdotes I’m sharing here are just that – stories of isolated experiences. But they are emblematic of the man behind his more than twenty books, including Floaters, which won the National Book Award, and The Republic of Poetry, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The moments stand for many moments, as he puts it. I was immensely fortunate to be able to talk with Martín for an afternoon about his latest book of poems, Jailbreak of Sparrows.
Ryan McCarty (RM): Jailbreak of Sparrows is like so much of what I’ve always loved about your work. It’s personal and political at the same time in such a deeply important way. It’s also threaded through with love. Love for people you know, love for people you don’t know, for figures you’ve encountered in history, the news, and communities of struggling people more broadly. Can you say a little bit about how politics and love are fueling you as a writer and just as a person lately?
Martín Espada (ME): I can’t think of a better motivator. I can’t think of a better source of hope. I can’t think of a better reason to believe in the world. It’s very difficult for us right now to believe that this world is not going to simply collapse in ashes and dust. How do we work through that? My response to the world around me is to investigate the sources within me to keep going. You must interrogate your own consciousness. You must interrogate your own awareness. I’ve always believed that there will be no revolution without if there is no revolution within. It begins within you as a person, as an individual. You may be aware of that in the abstract sense, but there are times when you must remind yourself to go back to the sources and essentially re-radicalize. To start over. My life has had many chapters. Many times in my life I’ve had to start over, where I’ve made radical changes, or those changes simply happened.
That brings us back to the nexus between politics and love. I wouldn’t be the first activist to point out such a connection. Likewise, many artists and writers have pointed to the nexus between their work and love, what propels you in times when you need that fire.
Every collection of my poems—this book is no exception—has this connection, not only between poetry and love, but between the political and the personal. What you’re seeing in Jailbreak of Sparrows is that the personal is in the ascendancy. There’s more personal revelation. I am allowing myself to be more vulnerable, to take more risks. That’s a place I’m willing to go with some of the “love songs,” as I call them in the book. About a quarter of these poems—there are almost fifty in the collection—have something to do with my wife, Lauren Marie Schmidt. They’re love poems and teacher poems. There’s a poem about her as a writer causing a ruckus at a reading. There’s even a poem about her as a New Jersey driver.
What this testifies to is not only her presence in my life, but also my priorities. It’s not as if I have abandoned political poetry. It’s still very much there. What shape do the politics take? How are the poems different? Am I learning anything? Am I getting better at this? I would hope so.
RM: I was thinking about that as I was reading this collection and it seems like you’re taking on a different tone than so many of the other political statements that are happening right now. There is, I agree, this relationship to sources of hope, a response to the difficulty of believing that the world isn’t just falling apart. So much of what I hear from people as they walk through the world is so dour and hopeless. You know, you say to somebody, how are you today? And they say, well, have you not read the news?!? Right. But in that approach, there seems to be no way forward. And one of the things that I saw throughout this collection was a very serious awareness of all the dark things that are happening, and a bunch of little moments that help us move forward. Obviously, a poet has to speak the truth of the world, of what they see in front of them, and they can’t shy away from the darkness of things. But do you think that there’s an importance right now in finding these sources of hope, these ways to get beyond, the belief that the world is crumbling into dust. Is there sort of an imperative for poetry to help people do that, too, right now? Or is that overly-simplistic, or too directly-polemical, or things like that?
ME: Consider the alternative. It would be possible at this juncture in history to construct a poetics of despair. Not all these poems have happy endings, to put it mildly. There are certainly moments of despair and moments of tragedy. People die. Some are murdered by the state. We have to figure out where the source of our power lies because we still have that power within us, even as we lose battles in the wider world, even as the Supreme Court continues to do what it does, even as this despotic presidency continues to roll on, even as we’re now watching our fellow human beings kidnapped on the street by secret police and thrown into prison camps, even as those same streets have become militarized. I believe it’s going to get worse. I also believe that we have within us the strength to resist. For me, it means telling stories as I do, through the form of narrative poetry, that will reach people who may or may not know the story. If they do know, they feel seen, acknowledged, part of something bigger. If they don’t know, now they do.
I have no illusions about being a best-selling author. My books sell in the high two figures. I get royalty statements that would make a novelist jump off a bridge. However, once the poems are in the world, they’re in the world. They have a way of reaching places and people I could not reach myself. A friend and poet, Julio Marzán, used to say that poetry must be portable. It’s going places where you can’t go yourself. You have to be satisfied with that, with not knowing where it’s going, with the reality that if you publish or perform a poem, you’re putting it into the atmosphere with no way of knowing who’s going to breathe it in. Paradoxically, it’s an act of faith. No one is going to change the world alone, but we do whatever we can do. This is what I can do. If I could impeach the president, I would. I can’t. I can do this. You take my poems into your classrooms. Those are kids I will never meet in my lifetime, who will take those poems in, and perhaps that will change their perception of the world in some way.
RM: That idea of one person doing what they can in the world without being sure how it relates to all the other individuals that pick it up – it makes me think about how so many of these poems, as you said, are built from these individual stories. They’re based on the news or things that happen in the world. They could be stories that people know about or not know about, that people could learn about, or they could feel seen because these are stories that are part of their world. There’s so many in Jailbreak of Sparrows. They tell these individual stories that do this important individual work, but then they also zoom out and they generalize about broader realities, and I think that’s what makes your writing about current events really transformative. It can be a really difficult thing to tell an individual story that is also broader than that one story. This is true of a lot of current events poetry. So, when you’re writing individual stories that are about such a broader thing, how do you make that work? Sitting down with a story and doing it justice as one person or one situation, while also having it reflect something that might live beyond that one story, or extend, or connect to other people in a different way?
ME: It begins with the craft, grounding the narrative in the image, all five senses, with concreteness and specificity, with a combination of imagination and investigation. If I write a poem about an incident in the news, I am not simply basing it on a headline, although there’s one poem in this book that began with a headline. However, it’s not where I end the investigation. This is one scenario where my training as a lawyer comes into play, because I have research skills. I search for sources that go beyond the headlines to dig as deep as possible. I cite the sources in my end notes at the back of the book, which get more extensive with every collection.
I didn’t invent this approach. I have my influences, and one influence that comes to mind is a great historian and essayist from Uruguay, Eduardo Galeano. He wrote what I believe is the greatest history of Latin America, a trilogy called Memory of Fire. The third volume, called Century of the Wind, is about the 20th century and focuses largely on U.S. imperial domination in Latin America, and resistance to that domination. He captures in a paragraph or two not just the moment, but more. He begins with a kind of dateline, a caption, the time, the place. In that paragraph or two he finds the face that is many faces, the voice that is many voices, the moment that stands for a century. In his own prose-poetry, this form he invented, he gives us Latin American history as we’ve never seen it. I have my other influences, too. Obviously, we’ll talk about my father as an influence and other Puerto Rican poets as influences, like Jack Agüeros, but in terms of the question you’re raising Galeano was a major influence.
RM: I want to talk about your father and his presence in this book in a minute, but you mention drawing on influences, being part of a larger tradition. Can you say a little bit more about that?
ME: The past is a source of inspiration and strength. I’m 68 years old. The people who supported me most ardently came from the generation before me. That generation had a strong political sensibility, from the Puerto Rican community and beyond. They were activists in the 60s, veterans of the civil rights movement or the farm worker movement, the anti-war movement or the student movement. We are losing them, their wisdom, their spirit and their appetite for the battle. The survivors are still here, but they’re in their 80s. They are mostly sidelined.
We seem to have forgotten what it means to look to our elders in the community of poets. I had a startling conversation with Donald Hall in 2018, not long before he died. He was 89. Don told me that the phone stopped ringing after he turned eighty. The invitations to read stopped. Invitations to festivals stopped. Invitations to conferences stopped. The honorifics stopped. And I said: “How is that possible? You’re Donald Hall. You were Poet Laureate of the United States.” Anybody in the poetry world who heard that name would nod, as you’re nodding now: Donald Hall, of course! Yet he was adamant. Once he reached eighty, it all stopped. If the world could forget Donald Hall, the world could forget me, my mentors and my teachers, the people on whose shoulders I stand. I’m aware of paying homage to previous generations, so, as a poet, I step back into history. It makes sense for me to be writing about a poet like Arturo Giovannitti, imprisoned for his leadership role in the Bread and Roses strike of 1912. It makes sense for me to write about the great Puerto Rican poets and independence advocates Juan Antonio Corretjer and José de Diego, both of whom appear in this book.
If we are not to lose ourselves in collective amnesia, we also must look to living history, to the people who are still here and have something to say about the world as they knew it. We must look further back into our own history to understand our present. Trump is what he is, but he is also a very American product. He is the logical conclusion of our own history.
RM: You mention the connection with living history and having to dig through older history. A lot of these poems, especially early in the book, are about your father, the great Puerto Rican civil rights figure, organizer, and influence on you. You have – in “My Fathers Practice Book” – that great moment of finding him and yourself in a box of archival history. So, can you talk a little bit about how your memories of him, or this awareness of him and the importance of the past – the leaders that we know, the leaders that have gone on – how those memories spark those poems that do so much to open up the book and ground it in history?
ME: My father, Francisco Luis Espada, Frank Espada, was born in Utuado, Puerto Rico in 1930, and died in Pacifica, California, in 2014. He was a leader, some would say the leader, of the Puerto Rican community in the 1960s and early 1970s in the city of New York. He was involved in the civil rights movement, the welfare rights movement, and many other movements.
His greatest contribution, however, was as a documentary photographer. He created the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project. He got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, now imperiled. That project resulted in almost fifty solo exhibits, a book, and the inclusion of his work in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Library of Congress.
I grew up with his photographs on walls of our apartment in the Linden Projects in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Those photographs on the walls of my imagination, too. Here was a living example of the intersection between art and activism. I thought that’s what everybody did. It turned out that wasn’t true. However, it was easy to visualize doing the same as a poet.
In this current collection, my perspective on him changes. As I grow older, as he recedes into my memory, having been gone more than ten years, there’s a different way of looking at him. I am more willing to explore his contradictions, his vulnerabilities. At the same time, I acknowledge the absolute centrality of his presence and the lessons he taught me. He was a great natural teacher. There’s a short poem in the book called “Look at This.” The action is simple. We’re walking together in Brooklyn through an alley. My father sees an elderly man digging through a dumpster, who finds this bag of chips. There’s nothing left, so the empty bag drifts to the ground. My father says, “Look at this,” indignant, but observant. He walks up behind this elderly man and says, with a big voice, “Good morning, sir.” And this man wheels around. My father shakes his hand, with a $20 bill in the handshake, then keeps right on going. He doesn’t even slow down. I’m walking with him, watching. Often, we hear people say, “Oh, I see homeless people on the street, but I don’t know what to do for them. I don’t give them money because they’re just going to squander it on drugs or alcohol. Whatever I give them, it’s not going to be enough.” There are any number of rationalizations. Sometimes they even talk about not wanting to violate the dignity of someone whose dignity has been violated a hundred times already that day. My father figured it out in one graceful gesture. He’s not doing anything to condescend to this person, to patronize this person, to violate his dignity. He’s now got the money and he’s free to do whatever he wants with it. Clearly, he was hungry. He had demonstrated that seconds before.
The point of the poem is not to sanctify my father, but to pose a question: When we look, what do we see? Some people look at tattoos and see Venezuelan gangs. Some people look at a hungry man in the street, but they don’t see the man or the hunger. My father taught me how to look, but also how to see. That is present in every single poem in Jailbreak of Sparrows.
You mention “My Father’s Practice Book.” There were times where I served as my father’s assistant, whether in the field when he was taking photographs, or back at the office, organizing and cataloging what he had photographed. Sometimes I was the guy carrying the camera bag with the lenses and rolls of film. Still shooting, he would reach back with his hand out when he wanted a roll of film. I had to be ready. Sometimes, I was the one recording the interview because we were also doing an oral history component. If you see a photograph by my father in a scenario where I was present, sometimes I was right outside the frame. Other times, I stood behind him, looking over his shoulder. I could see the way he composed the shot, so I became aware of his eye for composition, which became my eye for composition. In this way, I was influenced by the process of being there.
He had finally, after many years of waiting, reached the summit of his experience, and he published a book, a collection of photographs called the Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People. It was published only because a friend of his gave him money, with a press run of a thousand copies. Mind you, this was his first book, and he was 76 years old. Imagine waiting till the age of 76 to publish your first book. While he waited, my father made up what he labeled his “Practice Book.” I found it after he died. I saw that he had been practicing his signature in anticipation of signing his book of photographs. That signature starts off with both names, Frank Espada, then gradually evolves into first initial plus last name, “F. Espada,” played out over several pages. That sparked the poem I wrote, “My Father’s Practice Book.”
Well, his books ran out. That’s what a thousand copies will do. It wasn’t the economic panacea he and my mother had anticipated. Eventually, they circulated an email letter looking for “loans” so they could pay the rent. My poem moves on from there, after my father’s death. I found myself at the Smithsonian, in the basement, looking at the photographs in their Frank Espada collection. I got my hands on one that wasn’t mounted, so I turned it over and, sure enough, there was my handwriting on the back, cataloging the photograph. I pointed it out, “Look, there it is—that’s me!” The only reaction from the staff person at the Smithsonian was to hand me a pair of white gloves so I didn’t soil my own handwriting. Thus, this is a poem that pays homage, a tribute to my father as a photographer, but also exposes the vulnerability, the fragility, the economic catastrophe that ultimately awaited him. That was an important part of the story. That’s what I mean when I say there’s a new way of looking at him. It’s hard to read. But it’s there.
RM: Speaking of the things that you must look at, and what stories that you can tell, and even the things you tend to avoid, it makes me think about choices in documenting experiences, both in photography and in poetry. I was talking this morning with my kids about this, about how we tell stories if they’re stories of struggle – how you tell stories of difficulty without running the risk of fetishizing that difficulty, of making their difficulty your spectacle. We have had ugly bouts of that here, for instance, with Detroit, where we have a real problem with people coming and seeking out and make a scene of some of the suffering or the burnt houses, like they’re looking to cash in on rehashing images of the decay of Detroit. One of the things that I think that your poems like “My Father’s Practice Book,” which is only one of the great examples I can think of – one of the things they do is avoid that kind of fetishizing. How do you come to poetry where you tell people’s stories, without making that difficulty that you’re depicting predatory, or exploitative?
ME: If there’s difficulty, there’s also dignity. If there’s dehumanization, there’s also humanity. If there’s oppression, there’s also resistance. My questions would always gravitate in that direction: Where’s the dignity? Where’s the humanity? Where’s the resistance? You’re right that suffering can be exploited, distorted, used for other ends, as a prop in the personal drama of the writer. At the same time, it’s important not to shy away from writing about what is difficult, outside your immediate circle or immediate experience. Too often poets do that. We’re so used to saying these things to ourselves: “Oh, well, that’s not my experience, that’s not my community, that’s not my circle, that’s not my fill-in-the-blank.” Then we come back to the alternative, which is silence.
Let’s circle back to Detroit. I think of Phil Levine: Levine, who wrote about the working class; Levine, who worked in factories; Levine, one of our great poets. Levine said, in an interview with Ed Hirsch: “The test is the quality of the work. Period.” Writing also means listening, paying attention to what people say as a foundation of what you’ll say if what you say falls outside the purview of your experience. Or you can draw on parallel experiences. Don’t go wandering into a story simply to see the suffering in it, and to bring that out of it. There are several poems in this book, for instance, that deal with police homicide, but there’s resistance, too, and all is not lost. That’s where hope resides.
RM: That emphasis on listening and turning what you hear into something else makes me think about, as you already mentioned, the number of poems that are influenced by Lauren in this collection, in many different ways. But I’m thinking especially of the strong presence of teachers in it, so it makes me wonder how much some of these portraits are flowing directly out of conversations – of you listening, you know, at the end of the day, to her talk about teaching? Is this one more form of sharing someone else’s perspective, like you do in so many other places? Or is there kind of a different way that you come to a poem when you’re telling a story from that kind of day-by-day intimacy of connection?
ME: As the Notes section in Jailbreak of Sparrows indicates, my wife Lauren Marie Schmidt is the teacher in the teacher poems. She’s a poet in her own right, with four books to her credit, and she is an excellent teacher, mostly experienced in urban education. She currently teaches at the Academy of Charlemont up here in the hills of Western Massachusetts, but for many years she taught in urban ed, from Paterson, New Jersey to Springfield, Massachusetts. There are poems that take those experiences as points of departure. The poem “Gonzo” is based on an experience she had volunteer-teaching adult literacy at a rehab center in Paterson. She is the tutor in the poem. The poem began as an anecdote, a story she told me more than once. I came to her and said, “There’s a poem in my head about your encounter with Gonzo.” I asked very specific questions, and my wife, being a poet and knowing what I’m after, gave me very specific answers, the kind of answers I needed for a poem. It was a collaboration.
There’s a very different scenario in the poem “Isabela’s Red Dress Flutters Away,” based on one of her favorite students in Springfield. Lauren took this young woman to the ER after a beating at the hands of her boyfriend. Lauren spent the whole day, into the evening, at the ER, and had to leave her student there. As luck would have it, I was doing a reading that night on the UMass campus. Lauren arrived, then started to cry and shake. She couldn’t stop shaking, shaking, shaking. I got a friend of mine to sit with her. And I did my reading. Therefore, the story in that poem, as she would say herself, could only be told by me. The experience was too traumatic for her. To this day, she can’t talk about it without crying. She can’t even listen to the poem. I read the poem once in public, and afterwards she told me it was too hard to hear. Yet, she feels strongly that Isabela’s story should be out there. By the way, that’s a pseudonym. I’ve changed other details in that poem to protect her identity.
There is another poem in the collection about the murder of one of her students at a community college in Paterson, but she was much less emotionally connected to him. The communication behind the poem was easier, the emotional impact of the poem more tolerable. Again, though, she said, I can’t write about that. You do it. There’s a dynamic. It starts as Lauren’s experience, then an anecdote, then an intimate communication between us, and finally becomes a poem, a tribute to her as a teacher and human being.
RM: It’s such a familiar list of stories for teachers, unfortunately. But they’re stories that need to be told – responses that need to be told. Thinking about her teaching and your conversations about students, it makes me remember the first time that I really met both of you, when you came to read for my students in the Bronx. And that was such a fantastic way to show the power of how poetry can move teenagers, move all kinds of people. I mean, as you said at the time, about 20 of them showed up on a Friday after school on a spring day and hung out and listened to and read and talked about poetry. And I think that so much of your poetry is about communicating and clarity, as I’ve heard you say before. You’ve said that your work might not look like some of the poetry that many people have seen – the kinds of poetry they’ve seen and then given up on. So what’s the recipe for that? There’s poetry out there that people – my students and others – can sometimes find alienating. What about poetry can engage them?
ME: It begins with an aesthetic of clarity, the urge to communicate. The impulse to tell a story is universal. So too is the impulse to hear a story. That’s the bridge we cross. It helps to have an extraordinarily committed and sensitive teacher to help construct that group, and that’s what I saw in the classroom with you in the Bronx. They were very well-prepared, unintimidated by poetry. But it is a question that’s been posed to me. How do you talk to high school students? My response is: “like adults.” The concern is always that you’re going to go over their heads. Let’s say you do. Hopefully, you motivated them, energized them to the point where they reach up over their heads and expand their understanding of what you’re saying.
RM: Yeah, there’s so much condescension when people think about writing for teenagers, or writing for the public, whatever that means, as if there’s people who read poetry and then the rest of the great unwashed or something. But poetry has often been pushed into an elite realm, or an academic realm, or a literary realm, when that’s the most ridiculous thing, right? Poetry, song, stories, oral tradition, is historically such the purview of people. So how do we – how do you – think about poetry as a more public thing? You get out and you talk to people about poetry constantly. PBS had that episode of Poetry in America centered on “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper,” which is a great example of public poetry, but there’s so much work to do with things like that. What are the things that you think we can do to push out poetry into the public and maybe repair some of this damage, this tendency of poetry being seen as this alienating thing or this condescending thing that people sometimes build it us as?
ME: When we speak of public poetry, we must define the word “public.” When we define the word “public,” we need to redefine the spaces where poetry will go. We could always bring poetry into “traditional” spaces, into the university, into the MFA program. The point is to bring the poetry to places where it’s not supposed to go, into those settings, which are, in fact, the most traditional of all. I go back to the example of your classroom in the Bronx. Some poets would be eager. Others would not. We need to see that as a space for poetry. Here was the concept of community, not in a rhetorical sense, but a pragmatic, grounded sense. Go where it’s not supposed to go. It could be a classroom in the Bronx. It could be a rehab center in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where I’ve read. It could be a jail or prison, where I’ve often read. There are more poets per capita in the prison system than the academic system, because people in prison have a lot of time on their hands and have a lot to say. Sometimes, when I do a reading in prison, it turns into a revival meeting.
I would love to see the left wake up and recognize poetry as an organizing tool, a means to galvanize people, to motivate the movement. This was well understood at one time. When you look back to the 30s, you see the Proletarian Poets. I mentioned Arturo Giovannitti, the labor poet who ended up in jail and on trial for his life in 1912. The left in this country should embrace the power, the vitality, of poetry. Surely, the politics of poets are usually consistent with the left. At the end of the day, it comes back to poetry as a form of community service. Whatever your community asks you to do, you should be willing to do. These days, it could mean doing a reading at a benefit for an immigrant rights’ group, as I just did. Thus, poetry becomes a public art.
RM: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of people who sort of poo-poo on Instagram poets or things like that, but it’s getting poetry to new places. I mean, I can’t say I find much joy in reading Rupi Kaur’s poetry or things like that off Instagram, but it is keeping people engaged in the idea that words trigger your connection with other people, in ways that, you’re right, the left is missing out on as a tool.
ME: I feel like a door-to-door poetry salesman. You take the opportunities as they present themselves. The first reading of my poems happened in the same bar where I was the bouncer in Madison, Wisconsin. But hey, you can print leaflets with poems on them. Put them on the windshields of cars. Plaster them on telephone poles. Leave them in grocery stores. The more this administration consolidates its power, the more we’re going to have to rely on that sort of intimate communication – low-tech, below the radar, talking to people, one by one.
RM: What kinds of work are you seeing right now that you feel like is really pushing toward good politics, toward making things public, or is connecting the current struggles with poetry and other things? What kinds of work are you interested in?
ME: When I want to understand what’s happening in the present, I look through the lens of the past. I look to lesser-known poets of the past to see the new world. I’m thinking of Jack Agüeros, a New York Puerto Rican poet, playwright, essayist, community organizer, Director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, and my second father. I’ve written about Jack. He was also one of my father’s friends and favorite subjects. My father did several portraits of Jack. His influence on me was profound. He would loan me his couch whenever I would come to stay in the city. That meant climbing five flights of stairs at a time when I was beefier than I am now. That was an ordeal, but once I got up there, it was home. I would sleep on the living room couch. I discovered, sleeping on the couch, that there was a desk nearby stacked with poems Jack had written. He was writing sonnets, but they were sonnets of the street, about the Puerto Rican community, about real people, friends, some of whom were dead. I thought, “Oh, I can do this.”
Jack also wrote “psalms.” I’m not sure if he believed in God, but the psalms were short, funny poems he addressed to the Lord, usually about some social-political conundrum the Lord had overlooked. What I realized from reading these psalms was that I could use humor in poetry. That was a revelation. In turn, I helped Jack get his first collection of poems published, called Correspondence Between the Stonehaulers, from Hanging Loose Press. (He was 57 years old.) His collection of short stories, called Dominos, came out with Curbstone Press. Jack’s greatest contribution, though, was his translation of Julia de Burgos, the great Puerto Rican poet who died young, and left poems scattered everywhere. Jack tracked down what he called “the lost poems,” translated them, and got them out into the world in a book called Song of the Simple Truth, again from Curbstone. Then Jack developed early Alzheimer’s, and that window, which had so briefly opened, closed again.
Jack died in 2014, the same year as my father. I’ve written two elegies for Jack. Lauren wrote a beautiful poem for Jack called, “At the Bedside of a Man You Don’t Know, Dying.” (She published it in The Florida Review.) The only time she ever met him, he was on his death bed. In 2018, I got the Ruth Lily Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and they arranged a prime slot to give a lecture at AWP the following year. It so happens that 2019 was the year of the Whitman Bicentennial. Therefore, I did a lecture on Whitman—and I deeply regret it because I should have given a lecture on Jack. I could’ve read Jack’s poems. I could’ve read my poems about Jack and shown my father’s portraits of Jack. I have been kicking myself ever since because, instead of doing what I should have done, I did what I was expected to do. You’re always expected to cite the great ones when you talk about your influences and that’s what I did, instead of recognizing that my influences were right at my elbow.
That’s the truth of the matter: most of the time, your influences are right at your elbow. You know who’s a great influence on my poetry? My wife, Lauren. She did a reading the other night and someone came up to me afterwards to say, “You realize your wife’s brilliant?” I said, “Yup.” I was so proud of her. Her voice has made such leaps. Her new work is startling. There was a poem I asked her to read about her experience as a teacher, called “Lockdown,” about an active shooter situation, not at her school, but in the neighborhood. As a result, the principal of her school insisted on conducting a search of every single student. The teachers were ordered to go through backpacks, pulling out everything. As the poem relates, they weren’t going to find guns or knives or drugs. They were going to find peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or homework assignments. The poem explores what it means to be implicated in this violation of dignity, this invasion of privacy. It’s devastating. That poem is so good I wish I had written it.
RM: It’s such a great reminder: to know that there’s so much to be taken from great poets off there in the wherever, but the equally strong influences – even sometimes greater ones by far – are near at hand. And they add to us, remind us not only of what can be done, but of what is being done, of what we can do. You mentioned that in all of the things that you learned from Jack, one important thing was the possibility of humor in poetry, and so much of your poetry is tragic and angry and hopeful and all the rest, but some are also really funny. The first time that I heard you read, in Lawrence, Kansas, you read your “Thanksgiving” poem, which is hilarious at points, and I’m pretty sure you read “Do Not Put Dead Monkeys in the Freezer.” Both of them carry a darkness in their own right, but you also bring a humorous approach. The love poems in Jailbreak of Sparrows do something similar. I think that in a lot of ways, people talking about serious topics are afraid of humor in a way that you don’t seem to be. Was it just from Jack that you learned that you could take on politics and humor and poetry in that way, or are there other people who have inspired you in that way, that you can be serious and funny and political and joyful and all of that?
ME: My father was funny. My mother, who is still around at the age of 94, is funny. I’ve known some people who were brilliant when it came to making other people laugh, none more so than my best friend in college, Todd Godwin. His ambition was to be a stand-up comedian, but Todd was on the stand-up circuit before cable TV, before HBO and other networks filled their hours with stand-up comics. He missed his chance, suffered a terrible accident, fell into depression, and, ultimately, shot himself. There’s a poem about him in Jailbreak of Sparrows called “Moderation,” a poem I couldn’t have written till now.
The poem is not funny, for the most part. There are better examples of humor in the love poems, where I write in persona, usually some weird creature: “Love Song of the Moa,” “Love Song of the Bat with Vertigo,” “Love Song of Frankenstein’s Insomniac Monster,” all in a section entitled “Love Song of the Disembodied Head in a Jar,” the most bizarre poem of the bunch. It came from a prompt Lauren gave me.
In this book, there’s a broader range of voices and registers. I’m trying to take on more diverse challenges. The last section begins with elegies. There are three poems about police homicides, including one about a police homicide in Philadelphia, the killing of a man from Puerto Rico by the name of Eddie Irizarry. It opens and closes with images of resistance: balloons inscribed with the word justicia floating into the sky, released by his friends and family.
RM: There’s all that hope, all that humor, all that love and – yes, all that awareness of darkness. But the focus seems to be on us. The villains themselves are back-burnered a little bit, it seems to me. I found myself thinking about that as I was reading. While your writing is certainly reminding us that we can’t turn away from them, can’t ignore the fascist movement, can’t ignore the dangers, what do we get from keeping the villains from taking center stage?
ME: In the last book, Floaters, Trump was a villain, to use your word. He’s in one poem here, called “The Snake,” but there are other villains: The cop who shot Eddie Irizarry, the cops who killed Mario Gonzalez Arenales by pinning him face down in the dirt for five minutes. There are also personal villains in several poems that convey racist incidents from my life, such as “The Critic’s Tongue Did Not Sparkle with the Diamond Stickpin of Wit.” But it’s not a collection about the villains and that’s a deliberate choice. In this collection, I am deepening the roots of my relationships with the community, sketching their faces, echoing their voices.
Sometimes we feel, as poets of social consciousness, that we are irrelevant. I recall an expression often repeated to me by a professor and mentor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Herbert Hill: “Ideas have consequences.” We must hold fast to that notion. We must have faith in what we do, even though what we do cannot be measured, weighed, or labeled. We must move forward regardless. We also must realize that the pages of history turn. Our time will come, and it will come because we never stop doing the work, whether it’s poetry or teaching or marching in the street or talking to family across the table. We must keep in mind that this is a solitary art form and, since it’s a solitary art form, we often feel isolated. But we’re not alone.
