Interviews and quotes

Interview

E. Ethelbert Miller: We both came out of public housing in New York City. Do you find this experience still singing a song in your imagination?

Martin Espada: I spent my entire childhood in public housing, growing up in the East New York section of Brooklyn. This had to shape my imagination. I recently returned there after many years in the company of Mari McQueen, a childhood friend who is now a writer and editor at Consumer Reports. Mari put those years in perspective. She said: "Everyone who comes out of this place has a hard edge... We learned early in life that disrespect has serious consequences, up to and including death." Mari remembered what I had forgotten.

I ended up writing a poem about this experience of going back, called "Return," which recalls a fight in the street in front of my building 40 years ago, a thrown can clanging off my head, blood everywhere, me banging on doors in the hallway for help. That's a song, I suppose, but it's a song of grief on the one hand, and a song to survival on the other.


E. Ethelbert Miller: Does a Puerto Rican writer today still write out of a feeling of dislocation?

Martin Espada: A Puerto Rican writer from New York is doubly dislocated: first, there is dislocation from Puerto Rico; secondly, there is Puerto Rico's dislocation from itself. Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. It may be a truism that you can't go home again, but it's especially true when home is an occupied territory. A Puerto Rican writer from New York, like myself, is twice alienated. I never forget that in this country I belong to a marginalized, silenced, even despised community; yet, in Puerto Rico, as a "Nuyorican" poet, I am marginalized again, for reasons related and unrelated to the island's colonial status.

Strangely enough, this sense of never being at home, this sense of not truly belonging anywhere, produces a friction that sets off the sparks of poetry. If I am always at the margins, then I am by necessity the observer; if I am always on the outside, then I am by definition independent; if I am never anchored to one place, then I am free to wander; if I am never blinded by loyalty, then I am free to speak the truth as I see it.
From: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/1565

Quotes

"A poem is not a pop-tart." — Martin Espada

Never pretend to be a unicorn by sticking a plunger on your head. " — Martin Espada

"Even the most political poem is an act of faith." — Martin Espada