Steve Martha is going to welcome and introduce everybody and then Victor is going to read for about ten minutes, then he's going to run his mouth for about ten minutes then it's open for question.

Miguel Steve we've got to do the questions first because I gotta go.

Steve Yeah I know we gotta do the questions.

Victor It's OK like that? It's OK now?

Steve So go ahead Martha. You introduce and welcome everyone.

Martha Welcome everyone. This is a A Gathering of the Tribes. For those of you who may not know what we do, we publish a magazine twice a year and we publish great writers like Victor along with emerging writers who we also think are great.

Steve Emerging writers like Miguel.

Martha We're glad to have you all here today so that we can have this conversation with Victor and edit it into a nice piece for the next issue. So welcome. Like Steve said, we're going to hear Victor read for awhile and then we'll have a conversation with him.

Miguel But I have to go.

Victor Bueno. It's always good to be back to one of my homes. This is definitely one of my homes. I came to this neighborhood when I was five going onto six kind of. My mother, not knowing that there was such a thing as Kindergarten, kept me home until first grade so my contact with English comes about when I'm six and a half seven por alli. And even then it was a process of learning the English because at least in that building that I was in, it was a pretty Puerto Rican building at that time. We came in there was still a Jewish synagogue right on Eleventh street between B and C. There was still a horse stable around the corner, you know and those new Campo houses were still not there. There was all kind of strange looking factories around there, an ice making place and things of that sort, and it was a slightly different kind of community that we came in.

I've seen it go through all kinds of transformation. It was much more working class at that time. The Yiddish, the Ukrainians, the Polish, the Irish, the Puerto Ricans, the African Americans that were here, were here to be in close proximity to those buses, to go down to those factories down on lower Broadway or wherever it was that people kept shooting off to work. This is the early fifties into the early sixties.

I saw this whole growing art situation, poetry and music situation, start to blossom down here while I was right down here growing up, right down here looking at all these things. And I was right down here going into the Tompkins Square Library which I went walking through there now. Did they close that up?. ?Que paso? They're fixing it right?

Female Asbestos

Victor It's a neighborhood without a library now or what?

Steve There's Hamilton Fish.

Female There's one on First Avenue between twelfth and thirteenth.

Female Seward Park.

Victor Oh, well I must have gotten some of that asbestos back then because I was definitely in there reading books that I understood, reading books I didn't understand, reading books that were beyond me, but just taking everything out of there that I could possibly, you know, take the limit of what I could carry home. Hiding the books even, after awhile, when I get thirteen and fourteen, from the guys on the corner Ping and Che and Butchie and Little Man and those guys, because I didn't want them to goof on me you know what I'm saying? And take the books home and read them and come back, and bring them back to the library. But I managed to be able to read and also to go off to the different little bookstores that were up there and for ten cents you could buy a paperback. On Third Avenue there was a bunch of used book stores.

Female Fourth Avenue.

Victor Fourth Avenue. They seem to all be gone now.

Female No, the Strand is there.

Victor Strand is the only one that is still there. Strand is stranded there still.

Steve Forbidden Planet is across the street.

Victor So at a certain point I went to California and then I met a whole different situation there. I was actually in California for about twenty years, nineteen, twenty years, because I first came to California in '68, I go to Puerto Rico in '89, that's almost twenty years que no? In and out, in and out. I was in the Bay Area mostly, but I've gone through other places there too. But also I would come back, Steve knows I would jump back and forth. Come back in and live here for six months and then go back. When my family was here and they were trying to get back to Puerto Rico, I would come back and try to help them do that. And encourage them to do that, then I'd go back to California, and come back. So I kept touching base with the Lower East Side. I kept seeing some of the transformations that were going on.

So at a certain point in California I decided that I wanted to get back to Puerto Rico, to the climate, but also to the language. To begin to write in Spanish, to publish in Spanish, and to feel the culture and the rhythms and the mountains. And just to be back there and speak to the people who are of the Munoz Marin generation. The people who are agricultural people, who are still there, the pre- television people. And speak to them, and hear their stories of transformation, how they have gone from agriculture into industry. That was very important to me as a poet and as a thinker. To feel that, so that I could write more about that. And feel that from that point of view of being in there, rather than from the perspective of being nostalgic about it from a New York City point of view.

And so all these things that are points of residency and points of places where I have been, are also part of my poetry. The tendency is that I'm writing more in Spanish. Poetry in Spanish and prose in English. I've been in Puerto Rico as I said seven years. I'm beginning to publish locally and do some things on both radio and some of the newspapers. I've written some articles, some critical stuff is coming in, but I am at a point in a limbo because I am in the process of fully going into Spanish and publishing in Spanish. There's an essay of mine coming out in a Madrid journal, called Federico Bulletin, Federico Garcia Lorca, will be out in March. It will be one of my first essays direct out in Spanish. There's things coming out in (Cupe)which is (?) Noyas magazine coming out of the Universidad Metropolitana and there are all kinds of other things that are beginning to establish me not as a North American writer but as a Latino American writer. And that's what I look forward to establishing in the future.

Miguel Alguerin, who I've known for many many years, and I've seen the things that he's done with the cafe, and the situation that he's done with the Nuyorican perspective. I don't know if he had a specific question for me.

Steve Yeah. Miguel has ten thousand questions and he wants to ask them before he has to go because he wants to run.

Miguel First of all I want to say that Victor and I grew up in this neighborhood. He came at the age of six. I came at the age of nine. I was raised in the Lillian Wald projects. The richness of the neighborhood was really incredible. The one thing I liked best was being in my house, taking the elevator down six flights, and walking one block and finding myself in another world. My mother's eyes didn't exist there. You take the corner and you're elsewhere, but that meant a lot of things. That meant you were in the Ukraine, you were in Poland. Avenue C was still filled every day with horse drawn carts. And the horses were taken away, and the shit was cleaned up. And there'd be pots and pans and everything. There was an incredible sense of community. We belonged somewhere. I never forgot and I don't think Victor forgot. But unlike Victor I never went away for twenty years. So the first time, and this is a question for you, that I read SNAPS in '68 , Juan Vazquez walks in and says "look Miguel, a young Puerto Rican guy from" where was it?

Steve Random House

Miguel "Random House just published his book". And then I see a little blurb by Ginsburg you know and it was really an affirmation of how he'd continuously provide avenues you know, but what I am interested in is the sense of community that that book has, and I would like you to explore for us what it was like then.

Victor Uh huh, OK that's interesting. Actually SNAPS was not my very first book you know. In 1966 I published a little chap book called Papo got his gun. It was really homemade and it was like made from scratch. So I have felt the making of a book with my very very hands. Because we did it on stencils on one of those old mimeograph machines that different peoples from the anti-war movement and from the housing movement here in New York used to have. This mimeograph machine that we had, used to belong to the East Eleventh Street Block Association that was doing different types of rent strikes around the block. And we kind of appropriated it for awhile, and borrowed it and took it to the sixth floor on 632 East Eleventh Street. And there myself and a guy named Ken actually just did the book from scratch. We heated a wood block. I did a cut out that said Papo Got His Gun. We got a spray can and we just sprayed 'em. Sshh... you know all this toxic stuff was going on and it was summertime you know. And we just sprayed the book and we did the book ourselves. We had an errata that was a page and half. Because like who edited that you know. We just put that stuff on those stencils and we would have these stencils hanging up and he would dale la (?) then I would dale la (?) for awhile, but we pulled out about 350 copies of that little book called Papo Got His Gun. And then we walked it to the bookstores. We actually walked it to the old Eighth Street book store and there was another book store here that old East Side bookstore where that guy Ray Bramser used to be there at the cash register. I don't know, they used to say he used to steal half the money. I don't know what was going on there. And we just took it to the other little bookstores. We took it right in to the Eighth Street Bookstore. And put it right next to the books of (Creely) which is where the guy said it belonged in terms of the alphabetical order of things. We left like twelve copies there and we came back in three days and they were all gone. Those are some of the early poems.

Steve Now you've got to tell Miguel...

Victor What I gotta tell Miguel?

Steve He wants to know how did Snaps, what do you call it, help celebrate the sense of community that you were feeling at that time?

Victor After those poems in Papo Got His Gun, which I was still trying to actually write in an English that had certain laws of meter from the Spanish such as (coplas) or even the (Decima) forms from Spanish into like the English. Once I liberated myself from that by reading Lorca's The Poet in New York, reading some of William Carlos William's poetry, running into the Allen anthology, some of the Beat writers, Leroy Jones and other forms of poetry, I began to develop a different style that was more immediate and more taking pictures of the streets, more local. It was a very local book that I was doing. It was a language, you know, contemporary, personal, lyric, American language based on sounds and things that I was continually hearing in my neighborhood, in my space, because I wanted to write about this space. It was almost like I had to write about this space in order to clear it away, because I had a urging or desire very early on to leave the area. Actually the galleys for Snaps, I corrected them at Mel's drive-in on (Shadduck) Ave. in Berkeley. Because when I left New York City I left that book cooking at Random House and so they sent me the galleys and that 's where I corrected the Galleys

Miguel I understand that but when you read SNAPS you are in the Lower East Side. You're eating rice and beans.

Steve Dancers and Music.

Miguel You are telling the story of the sounds the smells of the Latino Lower East Side you know, and it comes fully alive. And you never left that. Almost all of your books are surrounded by this very Latino identity, yet you just finished saying you wanted to leave it behind, cut it off. Why?

Victor Well I wanted to see other things. For one I still had a lingering memory of Puerto Rico. Because even though we were here we had family that was coming back and forth. That's why I was able to keep my Spanish alive all the time. I was always hearing echoes and getting glimpses of other regions of the country that I wanted to explore and see. And on a personal basis, the intensity of certain personal situations of mine on East Eleventh Street between B and C at the time with friends and family, said to me that maybe I should take a little vacation and see other spaces and clear this space so I could get some perspective. So that I could grow and be able to come back.

Miguel Your mother had a restaurant for awhile.

Victor My mother had what they call a (friquitin), over there on Eleventh Street between B and C for awhile. She would cook for the community.

Miguel Right, and I remember very clearly that one of the things that happened to me was in the Lower East Side that was in my books, not so much in your books, was the discovery of pastrami and knishes and bialys and bagels. Those things were, in the fifties, already in my life, but they were not to be found in Madison Wisconsin. There were no bagels in Idaho yet I guess that's what I want to say is your sense of community in SNAPS, and now that I remember in Papo Got His Gun, was a premonition of what the culture of the Lower East Side would do for the rest of the nation. Because the culture here, the food, has covered the nation.

Steve Stick with culinary habits.

Miguel It's very important you see. The food has covered the nation. The dance, the music, has let out, right. And through your work people in Berkeley met what they were soon to see as the utter reality. Lox and bagels would become a morning staple there, you know, and it took a good ten years. By '78 all the world you were describing in SNAPS has reached the West Coast.

Victor Yeah, I have actually knishes next to red beans in a lot of my poetry very early on. That was part of it. We used to get knishes and put them next to the plantains and the red beans.

Steve Let me shift from the culinary habits of the natives and get into the language habits of the natives. When you published, and when you got the desire and decided you were going to dedicate your life to poetry, why is it, or did you have any problems, in terms of what language you were going to communicate in, and did you decide consciously that you wanted to write in English and not in Spanish, and if so why, and why now in Spanish?

Victor I didn't have no choice by then after growing up in New York City and picking up the English here. Actually my Spanish at the level of spoken, well first of all understanding. I always understood Spanish because you have to understand Spanish because you had to understand like when your father was angry at you or something like that. Or when they gave a command or something, those kind of things. Then the other thing was the usage of it verbally, you know? And then the next thing would be the reading of it which would be then slightly less, and then finally the actual using of the language, to be able to write it down . And the last one is the one I 'm picking up now the most. The actual using those thirty letters, knowing where those accents go and just knowing how to use the Spanish. People that see my Spanish stuff in Puerto Rico say that I do some of the stuff that the Latino writers do in the United States, who reverse things around sometimes. Because you're thinking in Spanish and writing in English and now I'm down there sometimes thinking in English and writing in Spanish. I say "but is it wrong?", and they say "no it's understood but you do it weird, it's weird. It's there but it's turned around". And I say just let it be. That's the way it should be because that's the story of my body. My body has been these migrations from geographic places to another and linguistic jumps also from different spaces you know. Then growing up here, hearing all the English that I did. Hanging around the housing projects there and just hearing all the Yiddish, the Polish. I mean nobody spoke English down here. Nobody spoke English. It was all mushed up. Everybody had a version, and we just came down here and added our own version.

Miguel Now Victor, one of...

Steve Martha you have to get in this don't let Miguel dominate the discussion.

Female He has to leave.

Miguel You asked me to do this now you've started fucking around...The last thing that you did when you said, that I think is visionary, is when you in returning to Puerto Rico and picking up the language that is in your tongue, but not in the intellect and not in the pen, for the first time applying the transmission of the poetic thought, of the transformation of feeling into language signals that are in Spanish, that's, I think, prophetic of what the Chicano is going to go through soon, and what they have been going through when they go back to Mexico. But its also very important that we, the Puerto Ricans of the fifties and the forties, that came here, after awhile we forgot that we are a Caribbean people. Not that we forget we are Caribbean, Puerto Rican or Dominican or Cuban as such, the label, but the behavior and the carriage and the content of the language you see shifts so radically. You're right, you see, there was no English spoken in the Lower East Side. It was Yiddish, it was Ukrainian, and a mixture of all of it. And so we are well prepared to go back home and become Caribbean men again. And so I want to ask you at this point is this a phase that makes you feel most comfortable?

Victor Well It's a phase that puts certain things back, well, in the place where things started for one. When my family, originally we were going to go back. I mean the thing was that every year there was talk about going back to the island. So the luggage was always half full, half empty Get the luggage out we're actually going to leave here. We're going to head back to the island and we're not going to stay here. So there was always this trauma, this tension, this argument, this dialogue, going on all the time, with the idea that we were actually going to go back to Puerto Rico. They were really never comfortable here because they were part of that large migration, that large exodus, that was almost forced upon the agricultural peoples of Puerto Rico. With the Munoz Marin policy, with operation boot strap, which took agriculture away from the campesino and made these large areas of unemployment. As the island was building factories, as there was industrialization of the island. So there was no place for these people to go. Instead of that place that was supposed to be a showcase for democracy, making a comfortable space especially for the campesino peoples to be in their own, it actually began to work with international capitalism or with North American capitalism, to make it very easy for those inland campesinos to move out of there, providing transportation towards the San Juan area.

Miguel Making them citizens.

Victor Making them citizens, well this is even earlier, 1917. And that's this whole wave of peoples coming up here perhaps to fill a vacuum that was going on in these North American cities, with the working class here actually leaving a space here that had to be filled at that time. So we were part of that international game. That also took some Puertoriquenos over all the way over to the island of Hawaii from 1899 on, and in the early nineteen hundreds. So there is a Puerto Rican community all the way in Hawaii. Many of them who don't speak a single word of Spanish but in all other aspects Puerto Rican of the campesino types. And you'll see them around with the whole mentality intact, everything except the language you know, so a way of behavior and a cultural sense are still there, alienated totally from the use of the Spanish language you know. So I think my family, we were victims of that whole process. They were working class people who never... my mother was here so long...she didn't capture the full language of English. My father was always desperate to go back. He actually went back earlier. So I thought there was a sense that through these international maneuverings that I was taken away from my natural habitat. And I wanted to, physically when I was able to do it, to be able to go back, to that beginning space, and to fill in the (ibus), to fill in the missing time, to fill in the space with information, with things that I miss. To speak to the people, men and women of my age in Puerto Rico who were the little kids I ran around with in town when I was there. To see how they were. To see what they were about, to see what they had done, to compare notes. So I could have a better perspective of where I am as a person within a culture and a nation, and how I can write about that because I think my poetry, especially my recent poetry, is a poetry of culture. It writes from a cultural point of view, not so much from a personal point of view, but from a cultural point of view. If I start from the person, it's always the person who finds some other element of cuisine, of dance, of painting, of music, of whatever, of speech, that hooks back up into a cultural collectiveness, which is the Caribbean sense of being in the world. What it means to be from the Antilles, and what made the Antilles. What does that mean for not only a mixed cultural place, but a mixed racial place, since we are a people of mixed races.

Miguel And languages

Victor ..and languages and the different layers that that comes.

Miguel Welcome to the Caribbean man. I'll see you guys later.

Steve Get down to see Pineros plays tonight folks

Victor Maybe there's some other questions from a different angle here?

Steve You all come on up here and ask some questions. Martha you got the floor.

Martha Why don't we take a poetry break? Can we hear some poetry now?

Victor This is from a collection called Panoramas. Panoramas is, well panoramic view. Which is what I get every day going through the mountains from, I take the 156 from Aguas Buenas into (caguas) and from there I can get the (Altopista) into San Juan . I could be in Old San Juan in about thirty-five forty minutes depending on traffic. These poems, there's different poets that I was reading and feeling, not just feeling the environment, because I'm not just a poet of um, I mean, if I'm writing that means I'm also reading. So I'm also writing literature since I'm not a popular poet, or a cancionero. I'm not a lyric writer, so I also write with and against some of the literature that I read. Pedro Salinas the great Spanish poet lived in Puerto Rico and wrote great poetry about the panoramas and the ocean. El Contemplado is a very interesting beautiful poem about the Puerto Rican sea side and also there was Juan Jamon Jimenez the Spanish poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1956. You know all these poets had to leave Spain during Franco's era because Franco was either throwing poets in jail, as he did to Miguel Hernandez, or putting them against the wall as they did with Federico Garcia Lorca. Which is something to say about the Spanish and by extension the Latin American ruling classes. They're very sensitive to the word , at least in this culture, the Latin culture, there is a sensitivity to the word and of course that works with us and against us also, you know, because they know the power of the word and they know the power of the poet.

Female In Papo Got His Gun he got the word.

Victor Papo Got His Gun,. had I been doing that in different types of societies then I would have had to pay a different kind of price for that, for having the audacity to express myself, or the audacity to be different from the person, "why can't you just be exploited or something", as I said that works with us and against us. North America of course is such a big mush mash of things coming at you at the same time that the words get lost, and consequently they don't penetrate and it don't matter what you say here, and it don't matter what you publish here, because the ruling classes here they don't even hear that, and they aren't affected by that, because they aren't sensitive to that. So these poems are based on the panoramas.

The river flowing through.....

Martha We've had a lot of new people come in as Victor's been reading and we've been talking. As I mentioned we want to put this entire conversation or at least an edited version of it in the magazine. Everyone is welcome to speak with Victor, but if you could please identify yourself before you ask your question then we we can identify you in the magazine.

Victor Some questions?

Female More poems.

Victor What's that?

Male Do one more poem.

Group More poems.

Pedro I think you should do a few more poems.

Victor Should I go to English should I go to Spanish?

Male Both

Female One of each.

Female Chinese.

Female It's all good.

Steve Before you go to, before you go to, Victor?

Victor Yeah.

Steve Before we go to more poetry we got certain people in the room who I want to fire questions at you. We've got Pedro present, we've got David present and we certainly have Martha present. There are two key questions I want to ask you before we go to more poetry. We're going to go to poetry in a minute folks.

Victor Oh. OK.

Steve The two key questions is: Would you tell us something about your contact down here in the Lower East Side in the sixties with the UMBRA group of poets and out in California with the Before Columbus crowd. How did you get involved with UMBRA and when you got to California how did you get involved with Before Columbus?

Victor Well there was different ways that I got involved with UMBRA. Someone told me about Senor Ishmael Reed, that he was in this neighborhood and I remember I was sixteen and a half or seventeen. I couldn't go in the bars necessarily but I also was a big sixteen or seventeen year old fellow, and I grew a beard around that time so I said well I'm going to get into these bohemian places, I'm going to get into these bars anyway. And so I went right into these bars so I had to go into places like the old Annex, the old Reliable, and Stanley's Bar on Twelfth Street.

Steve Cafe Noire

Group Laughter

Victor That was too far west for me. Because someone told me that Ishmael could help me publish some of my poems. And I had by that time put out the little chapbook Papo Got His Gun and I wanted to give him a copy. And so finally I went someplace and I met Ishmael and we hooked up right away and became friends, and through Ishmael I met David Henderson, and David told me that they were meeting and putting out a magazine called Umbra and if I would come down to a place called Water Street where Mr. Len Chandler used to live, the singer, and participate in a kind of um, it was like a workshop, the Umbra collective. It was like a place of encountering, meeting, reading poetry to each other, discovering different types of information, and it was a learning experience. It was like an education for me to be around that situation at the age of seventeen, eighteen and nineteen. Some of my early work came out in Umbra and other in magazines that were floating around down here. I don't even remember their names. Evil, and the Manhattan Review, this guy Bob used to live around here. All kinds of magazines were flourishing here, well it's going to be 1996 in a few days, so it's thirty years from that situation that I'm talking about. Three decades ago. And it's still like what's happening here in this fermentation, the same situation was happening then at different levels and scales. And the country was different. The Vietnam War was going on, and other types of situations. The Black Power Movement was picking up steam and momentum. And it was a whole period of schools being taken over in New York City. I participated in that. You know different types of things were developing. I was able to work with Mr. Herbert Cole, who happens to be here today. Thank you for coming down. In the Teachers and Writers collaborative and going to schools. Even though I was a young person myself I would go into junior high schools and other schools. Things were happening. New ways of doing education. New ways of doing poetry and there was revolution in the streets in this country, in Berkeley, in Chicago, here, there was just a whole different panorama going on and that was the time that I was around the Umbra workshop.

Steve Now did that affect your work at all and now lead to Before Columbus.

Victor Well it affected my work in that I began to read different types of writers. I remember reading at the Shomburg Library, myself and another person, we were selected through, I think it was either the Street Academies that were working in Benjamin Franklin High School, and I ended up reading at the Shomburg Library and the guest poet who was there to hear the young people read and to also comment upon our reading was Mr. (Jay Wright) and I remember speaking with him very early on. And I think that Jay writes poetry and his ideas have followed me over the years, and so I'm very much influenced by Mr. (Jay Wright) and some of his work. And I was able to read other peoples, Langston Hughes who I could have met if I was able to get above Fourteenth Street. Ishmael said "come on over man" when Ishmael lived on Twenty First Street, we're going to go up to see Langston Hughes. "He wants to meet you" and he was going to talk to Ishmael. I said I'd be over in a little bit but I just couldn't get past Fourteenth Street at the time. I just started going in to one place to another and you know, didn't make it. But I started reading different people, Richard Wright, then I started reading not only the English stuff but the Latin American stuff too, Neruda, Lorca, Marti and kind of integrating a whole lot of elements together which included not only the Lower East Side upbringing but different forms of English. The (Americanese) speech, the Black English that is in the poetry of the Puerto Ricans who write it in New York City, the music, the Jazz the Latin Jazz, the Symphony Sid Show, but, you know, trying to hook that up to at least more the turn of the century, Jose Marti, (?)'s poetry, all the great poets of Latin America because I was always reading and hearing Spanish very well. What I wasn't doing at the time was using it verbally very well, and then I started picking up the verbal also, and finally back in Puerto Rico the last seven years I'm picking down the actual technology of the language and where those accents go, and messing around with those thirty letters.

Male Wasn't it more fun before you knew them?

Victor No it wasn't more fun before I knew them because it's like playing an instrument, man, you gotta know the scale before you can improvise. You know all those great Jazz musicians that we know, they had to learn that scale, know that instrument, know different forms of music, go back and forth through them, comparing different forms of music, making them blend into each other, and then you can go off on your own and break the language down and improvise. I think the most experimental book that I've done is (Tropicalization) you know, and I'm glad, thank you Steven and Ishmael Reed for publishing that book, you know, because no one else was going to publish that book.

Group laughter

Victor I thought total break down of the English language, you know total break down of grammars and everything just coming together because it was merely a bi-lingual head, you know, grasping book, very much in flight, and it was choppy and everything, but it was a necessary book because it was like an experiment. But it got published, and I go back to it, and other people see it, and now some critics write about it and they see things I don't see.

Group Laughter

Victor I say "oh yeah, OK" . What's happening with that book? Which is short poems about New York, and a prose poetry section, like, in the back and, um, you know, then the next book kind of takes a different direction which is Bilingual (Wholes), which is actually the combining of the two languages and melting them down and creating a new space, or a new center. Something that I don't do anymore, because I don't write in Spanglish anymore. I either write in English or I write in Spanish and that's it. I figure languages are mixed up....

Pedro How come? How come? How come?

Victor I'm going to tell you how come, because languages

Male Question for Pedro.

Steve You better hurry up and get to Before Columbus Foundation.

Victor Languages are mixed up anyway as it is. The Spanish full of Arabian, Gypsy, Jewish words, uh, and other words it has picked up in the Caribbean. So when I'm writing in the Caribbean Spanish I'm writing in a language that has just about everything in it, African words, indigenous words, you know, all those other elements I mentioned that had already been in the language from Spain. And English which is an international language, as it is, you know, I don't want to mix them up anymore. They're mixed up as is. It's not my reality anymore. I only hear English when I come up here. I hope I'm still speaking it well. I read in English. I speak in English. I mean I read in Spanish. I speak in Spanish. I live in Spanish. And everything I do is in Spanish in Aguas Buenas Puerto Rico, but when I'm in San Juan, we're thirty five minutes from San Juan, it's still a small, traditional...we're a campesino town without agriculture.

Group Laughter

Victor You know. We used to be a tobacco area and that has somewhat gone down the drain, but there is still some (chinchallas)left , (chinchallas) is tobacco workshops, there's still some tobacco making in my barrio which is called (Guanabano). I live in a barrio that has the name of a (Tainho) fruit, and we have certain (chinchallas) there, and there's still (tabaqueros) and the big tobacco. We also used to have a coffee brand at the turn of the century that was used to be called (jibarito), so there was a lot of, between tobacco agriculture and production and coffee the town used to take care of itself, you know. But Munoz Marin's idea was to bring in like factories to make you know, electronic parts and petro- chemicals and all kinds of other situations. And that whole people who had this tradition of working these different agricultural situations had their lifestyles taken from under them. And you could feel that among the people. That they have gone through some transformation, some metamorphosis that went throug h there in the people. And that's a very interesting place, because it's a place between where agricultural is ticking inside but it's surrounded by all this other stuff that's quite not getting down there yet, that's quite not there yet, and I think that might be the condition of large parts of the planet Earth once you leave New York, Chicago and places here. Once you leave, or places in England, or some spaces in France, you see or some spaces in Germany, there's another, there's more world out there, and we're going through a whole different change, truly we're still transforming from agriculture into industry, and that is one of the spaces and places that I make my poetry from that lingering sense of ruralness that comes into the urbaness, that we experiences when we migrated here in the early fifties, where there was nothing to prepare one in the early fifties. I think today is different because the fusion of television around the world. You could be a kid in Tibet you know, in the Himalayas I mean could be somewhere else, Indonesia, by some river, and you could still have a TV and you could see an image of Manhattan. But not in the early fifties because television was beginning to be, was coming in. The sets were being bought up here in the United States mostly, and in rural areas like, or provinces, or out of the way places, like Aguas Buenas, we had no television, it was still radio, so we had no visual image of what we were coming to. We were coming into a world which was New York. And that's all we knew.

Female Victor before when you were talking you said that one of the things you're doing there is speaking with the pre-television people. Could you go into that a little bit. Like what is the change or you know in all the different ways between those (cults) and pre- television people.

Victor Well they have better memories. They have better memories, and there's still people who can recite poetry. Better or any of that sort. As you know the tradition in the (chinchallas) in the Caribbean , that was the tabaconnist workers, they had a reader come in and read them a book. It could have been Cervantes it could have been another classical writer, it could have been the newspaper, it could have been some gossip that someone came down and ran it down to the (tabaqueros) as they rolled their cigars. But it was a place, and people dropped off things for other people to pick up because it was a place that was always open in the community. And they were always there. They were always philosophizing. A lot of them were like socialists. My grandfather was a socialist. Not through any book learning but because it was a tradition got these tabaqueros to be rebellious like that. So my Grandmother Tina, she voted socialist and my mother was telling me that when she first voted in Puerto Rico she voted with the Socialist party also. It was like a people's thing. It was like the people, at that layer, in that layer and culture of society were to the left in that sense without being something that they strived for. It was just their natural position of rebelliousness, against who? Against those who were the rulers, the bourgeoisie, or those who were like the upper classes, and um, to sense that, that sense of singing, of boleros also, which my family was strongly into, of singing the songs of the Americas, to see people, and still to some extent you still see that, in some of the smaller towns and some of the rural areas of the world. To see people at five o'clock sitting outside on the balcony and talking because they are not watching television, or MTV or whatever that is. And so I saw a lot of that in '71 when I went back and I'm still seeing some f that aspect of people talking and having a communal life. As was with the indigenous peoples of the Antilles who pretty much used that sense of bohio, that sense of dwelling for rest and for some personal things, to take care of, basically the living room was by boulders, the living room was near the rivers, it was just panoramic landscape. You didn't have to hang no landscape painting in the living room because you were outside within it all the time. So that idea of being outside is interesting. Even in my neighborhood, I mean in the barrio that I live in now, it's a sense of, you know, one goes outside or the outside comes in to you also, so I wanted to feel that and participate within that.

Male When you say the pre-television it sounds like your...is it also pre-literate culture or is it, for instance the people coming to read....

Victor Well to an extent it's an oral situation and that's a very interesting thing because in a sense if you look at Spain, the part of Spain that has the highest illiterate rate, Andalucia, is also that part of Spain where all the great poets come from. So it seems to me to have great poetry and I think great art, you need a certain amount of tradition that comes from oral or even a self taught tradition that we find in the campesino communities around the world. And I think that's essential.

Pedro Victor. Would you talk a little bit about the poets in Puerto Rico, you contemporaries, people that you've met there. DO you associate with them, do you communicate with them, do you go to readings together? You know, like over here you know, every day or every week there's a different reading, like (Che Melendez) those people, can you talk, I mean you know.

Victor I never see (Che Melendez).

Pedro You never see uh

Victor I never see (?)

Pedro (Alfredo Marti)?

Victor I see (Alfredo Marti) occasionally.

Pedro Like when I go there right. I know these they're really good poets, you understand, really far out people, and I think they should come to the city too. So I just wonder if you ever, you know...

Victor I rarely see them you know.

Pedro I rarely see you too.

Victor I see some other poets on different levels, but um...

Pedro Because they're people, like you know the crowd here, they're hanging out people, that's what if you talk to me about them in Aguas Buenas anyway.

Victor No I very rarely see them. But I do um, before coming here I canceled a couple of readings which would have involved some of the people you're mentioning. I also publish locally in (COUPE) and I'm in touch with the people at (NOYA) and people of that sort and occasionally I go to a reading or a book presentation and I run into the Puerto Rican literary scene, all the Puerto Rican writers. And they know that I'm there, because there was a big article on me that came out in Nuevo Dia, and Nuevo Dia also reviewed Red Beans, you know, what's her name, Carmen Dolores (treas), who is doing a book of interviews, I think she interviewed you, of English language Puerto Rican writers.

Pedro From the States man.

Victor From the States, and I'm the only one that was in Puerto Rico, and I'm the only one that she did the interview in Spanish with. And now she has to translate my interview from Spanish, into the English so's it could be part of the English language poets from the United States. Even though I told her we're not gonna be doing this much more because they're not gonna, you know, like I said I was in this kind of limbo..

Pedro She got me drunk.

Carmen This is a question related to the whole issue of the Puerto Rican identity and language. One is like, could we talk about the distinctions that you took into consideration when you moved back to Puerto Rico, and how moving back influenced your writing.

Male That's going to take awhile. I'll be back.

Carmen And also in terms of language because I know that whole issue, you mentioned a couple of days ago, like how to keep Spanish alive the people that are not like, the, how do you say, (la clase d'art, la clase pobre......) um you know could talk a little bit about that?

Victor Well one of the things that I was trying to round out about language is that the language, or the source of the rich language in Puerto Rico comes from the rural areas. You know. And so if those rural areas begin to break down, as has been happening, and has been happening since the industrialization of the island. We began to lose that crowd, I mean that population that came up here, which would have been the campesino population of the island, was cultivating certain kinds of ways of talking, of saying stories, of home cooking, of home remedies.

Certain kinds of ways of sewing, certain ways of dancing, certain ways of being. You know it was a whole culture there, not just language but all the arts and all the expressions of human kind. It's very necessary to have that center. In all societies, in order for the urban area to also be supplied with the richness of language flowing, going back and forth. If that gets shut down in Puerto Rico, then we're just gonna have these urban areas, which are now beginning to be industrialized and consequently, in a sense, North Americanized or even westernized. Then the richness of particular kind of Caribbean language will start to show some defects. Because it has to be that constant flow. That flow was very rich in Andalucia where they had all these great traditions, all those traditions, you know, not University learning type of situations, of street learning, mountain learning, learning, folk learning that comes from people communicating with each other, passing on recipes, songs, poetry from memory. You know it's important to maintain that.

And that's why that all those rich poets came out of that area. Pedro Salinas, Juan Jamon Jimenez, Federico Garcia Lorca and all his work with the gypsies and with Flamenco, and when all these situations, it is only when I see that, that I see poets making those bridges. The kind of thing that Langston Hughes did with blues, you need the blues, you need those blues to continually supply certain things in the language or there wouldn't be no rock and roll, there wouldn't have been this whole process, you've gotta have that there, and you have to keep that there churning in a sense, and you need agriculture, and agriculture's not going to go away nowhere because everybody here wanna eat.

Group Laughter

Victor You know. And so the campesinos, your gonna need somebody gotta go get that stuff, bend down, have those rhythms to know when to go back and get it. And so that richness of that language that's in the middle has to be given nutrition and those traditions have to be given nutrition, so that there can then be different forms of Spanish supplying, playing one with the other. Because you know in Puerto Rico there's the mountain campesino Spanish, there's the coastal Spanish, and there's what I call the Rio Piedras Universitario Spanish. So you've go three or four layers of Spanish in Puerto Rico, you know, just like you have different types of time zones existing at the same time because you have people who are in the thirties or in the twenties and who are still listening to Phillipe Rodriguez forever. I mean Phillipe Rodriguez these are like hits, there gonna hits ten years from now, they're gonna be still heard. It's music that continues to be, that never dies out, that always stays in style, I mean there's certain things you know. Why does this obsession appear with avante garde things, things changing, you know, it's like making love, I mean does that change? There's certain things that have to be in language, in the way you use that language. So that's something that I see, something that I feel, in the island of Puerto Rico, you know to keep the quality of the Spanish vibrant and also useful for what we need it for. With this English contact surprisingly it's not that much of an influence. In a sense of there's bi-lingual pockets and there's some words of English which are going to be always now permanent in the Spanish language. Like the word stress, everybody's got stress now, you know. I was in the mountains of La Montana de la (?) and some (jibaro) take of his hat and look at this beautiful peaceful panorama and "hay tengo stress".

Group laughter

Victor Stress man? Where did it come from? It doesn't have any translation, sort of to designate where the stress comes from. The word stress has been accepted now by the Academia real de Madrid. It's spelled you know e-s-t-r-e-s. It's a word now. And if the North American leave Puerto Rico tomorrow, this word will stay in the Spanish of the area. Which is okay with me you know. That word and cool and OK a few other words that are gonna always stay. But given the hundred years that the Spanish has resisted the English, and it's a whole totally different situation. I mean it's not like Alexander the Greek invading Egypt and then like ten thousand Greek soldiers marrying ten thousand Persian brides all at once and this whole society transforming. You know, ten thousand north American soldiers have not gone down and married ten thousand Puerto Rican brides to create a class that you could say is visibly there. I mean there's pockets of that. There's always Roy Brown and other people like that who come from that, but it's not on that scale. And there's some North Americans living there, but it's not on such a scale that you're going to run into them in Aguas Buenas, which you don't. I would have to go out of my way to find a tourist.

Martha I have a couple questions. One is that you're speaking about the English and Spanish and so on. In Red Beans I also picked up quite a bit about the Tainho culture, before Spanish culture, and I'm wondering how much of that, because we think of Spanish sometimes maybe in context with English, as being, I don't know if an oppressed language is the right word or not, but Spanish was also a conquering language. How does that play into your concept of the language and your roots.

Victor Well the native people supposedly disappeared.

Pedro I'm still here man.

Group Laughter

Victor But the curious thing about that is that um, the way disappears was through genocide, direct attacks and also through disease, but also through mestisaje, I mean those were the different ways, but consequently if they disappeared through mestisaje, which is the bringing together, at this point, of the Spanish and the Tainho element, then that means that, well the Tainho is half here. I mean we're half there, it's half there. But the way they speak about it, especially the hispanophile anthropologists and historians, they say "well the Tainho has left us totally" which isn't true if you look at the way people look one, if you look at the way people cook two, and the names of towns, place names you know, names of rivers, names of fruits, vegetables, if you look at all those things then the Tainho presence is there in one setting. It's not there presently as a living tradition the way it is Mexico or Guatamala, and that's kind of interesting because then I see it, then it takes a different level, then it goes into the level of the imagination, consequently the Tainho becomes a strong energy to imagine it, to recall it, to reinvent it. And in the hands of the artist that's what has happened. In the hands of the poet that's what has happened. They have remade it from nothing, from scratch almost, or from those remnants that are actually ,you know ,there.

Martha Or maybe even from sub-conscious memory.

Victor Or subconscious memory. Dreams, or intuitions, or gestures or smiles or ways of walking, or T-structures that are still Tainhos. You see. And the language is full of (*Arouac) these are all European words we are saying, Tainho, (Arouac) ,and all that stuff but it's how we have to communicate now, and of course we're also talking in English, and we're so much removed from it but everything is translation of translation within translation but just so we can Hispanic?" immediately I would say yes, but you know with some contemplation I would have to say no, because you know I've never been to Spain. You know Hispania is some kind of turf somewhere in the Iberian peninsula, and I'm not a piece of turf. Or they say your Latin. Well Latin is a dead language. I'm not just a dead language I'm also a people and a culture you know. You just can't be a language, and you just can't be a turf. But you can't even call everybody in Spain Hispanic, because there's the Basque, and if your Spanish because you speak Spanish then everybody in Spain is not Hispanic. So everything is off you know. And since this whole place was a linguistic error to begin with, Columbus stumbling into this calling people Indians, thinking he was in Asia, then I say that it is the role of poets to be constantly correcting that you know. I think poets, more than other artists maybe, would get involved in precisely that, in changing that and correcting that. I remember getting into an argument with a writer by the name Enrique Fernandez, he used to write for the Village Voice, I don't know if you've seen his stuff.

Steve Yeah I remember him.

Victor You remember him? Well somebody hooked this thing up where we were going to be interviewed on radio from Sidney Australia, and Fernandez is over here in New York, and I'm in Aguas Buenas, but we're transmitting live to Sidney Australia and it's ten o'clock in the night in Sidney Australia. And there's this whole thing when the Mambo Kings came out, and they were all crazy about this Mambo stuff, you know hot, flairy, flashy, Caribbean culture, you know, and being interviewed at night like that in a three way situation live, me and Enrique Fernandez hooked up, or got into a fight, into a debate about the word Hispanic. He said "for me it's alright. I don't care" and I said "Well no , I just think it's important to clarify these things and this is why I feel that this term doesn't totally apply" you know. It leaves the indigenous element out. It leaves the African element out. It leaves the other elements out. And anyway we just got into this argument that was going to obviously go on , and he wasn't going to change my mind and I wasn't going to change his mind. And I was there 'how does this sound to these Australians in Sidney Australia in the middle of the night?' Someone sitting in New York and someone in Aguas Buenas arguing about this stuff, they just wanted to hear, Yeah I like mambo, I like the Mambo Kings. I like the Mambo Kings. It's hot and flashy and sensual and wonderful and sassy and this is really what is happening now. They don't want to hear no details you know. That's it's a culture that came together with elements that have come together through conquest, imperialism, slavery and resistance and they don't want to hear all this detail.

Martha I think that's a good lead in to my next question which is who do you write for? What's your audience and what generation. You're talking about pre-television culture and so on, and I'm wondering if you feel like your work appeals to the younger generation. And also in terms of culture are you writing most specifically for the people that you consider to be part of your culture or are you trying to reach a wider audience or do you not even think about that when you write?

Victor Well I think about a lot of things when I write. That's actually when I think, when I write. Because for me writing is a public affair because I'm writing in a language that's in the dictionary. You know the Spanish I use is all in the dictionary more or less, unless I invent a word or the other, and so is the English, more or less unless I invent a word or the other. So for me, when I am sitting alone writing is when the room gets crowded with people and when I'm most in communication with people. It's not like a sullen art, or something in solitude, you know, or something that I'm doing all by myself and all alone. I mean I'm using the language of humankind, I'm using what everybody is using. So that's when I'm in most contact with everybody. So I write for everybody. And from a position of being one of those bodies within a certain rhythm. If the world is a kaleidoscope then I come from the Caribbean point of it. And there is the point where different situations went there to mix, to interconnect, and not just to be standing there one right next to the other. Like this term multi-cultural. That is this multi, multi many cultures living one here, one here, one here, and one there. There's a mural in San (Jerman) that says "tres casas una cultura la Puerto Riquena. " You know, three races one culture. So there's a sense of different things coming together to make new things. So it's not supposed to stay all separate. It's supposed to blend and melt and mix and over the years make something new. New musics, new forms of making guitars, new forms of playing drums, you know, new everything. New faces new looks new visuals. All of that has come out.

David Could I ask a question? David Henderson here. Victor it's hard for me to ask this question because it's so convoluted, but I remember when you came to California and here was this Puerto Rican with the Mexican Americans, the Chileans, the Nicaraguans etc. and I remember, I thought you were very lionized, you were very important to them, being there at that moment in time. A lot of stuff happened around that.

Steve TinTan

David One of them would have been Somosa being overthrown. Which came out of, TinTan resulted in Somosa being overthrown in so many ways.

Victor We put a curse on him.

David Yes I think they had his face on the cover of one issue right?

Victor Well I wrote this poem and we put a curse on Somosa and I did the poem in a mostly Nicaraguan audience and we put a curse on him. I reversed his name in this poem and I took his name from the -a- s- and I came back forward the name, so I kind of reversed his name and three days later he got blown away.

Group Laughter

Victor But there was a lot of interesting... I like San Francisco because of it's multi-latino nature.

Steve Well I want I want to know Victor, while you're talking about that. can you expand upon how did that effect your understanding and knowledge of Spanish in terms of what you had been hearing here in New York all these years in the Lower East Side and of course expanding up to El Barrio and over to Brooklyn, and when you got up there and saw the explosion of Spanish out there, but it was coming from Central America and Latin America and how did that effect your ears and in terms of what you were hearing, and how did that effect your writing?

Victor I picked up..

Norman Sorry...I sort of correlated to that, I was wondering the same kind of thing but I was just in Mexico and if you say, when I go to Mexico, or when I go anywhere, and I say I'm from New York, in Mexico when you say you're from America they say "I'm an American too", and I found that to be you know, you had mentioned this also briefly earlier, interesting also in terms of here we call people Indians but if you go down to Mexico, they're still speaking indigenous languages down there and uh what connection do you feel like you say in San Francisco and like was Steve was saying in New York, and even in the Caribbean, Latin America, Mexican say, or the Caribbean's speak really fast, they speak a totally different Spanish. Some people say the Mexican Spanish is kind of medieval, and then you get down in South America. But all of this is a culture. To me what impressed me most was all of a sudden when I was in Mexico and I was in America at last. It seemed more American than being in United States because you have this whole culture that is linked from New York all the way down to Chile, all the way down to Patagonia.

Victor Well let's see if I can understand what is the questions, because they piled up together it's like an airport man. This is like O'Hare International Airport. The plane's coming in and out every two minutes. But let me say this. I got to Berkeley, as I said in 1968, and you know I'm coming from New York, and I remember being mistaken for Chicano everywhere I went, and always correcting the situation, and I remember one time being at a party of some newly aquainted Chicano friends, it was 1968 and the guy says "ahorita esta comida" and so when he said that, in Puerto Rican Spanish ahorita is like coming later, it's something that hasn't happened yet, but in Central American and Mexican Spanish, ahorita is right now. And so he said "ahorita east la comida" and I said "oh, I'm going go down the street and get a beer, I'll come back to eat" You know, so I went off to get my beer down telegraph Avenue someplace and sure enough when I got back man the food was gone.

Group Laughter.

Victor And I said "hey que paso brother, la comida (?) ahorita y yo llego ahora y no esta la comida." He said "pero ahorita, llego ahorita it was now", he said, so I learned some of those differences real quick. And then down the line, all kind of other words. Words like Octavio Paz underlines in his The Labyrinth of Solitude. You know like hijos de la chingada, whereas in the Caribbean it's hijos de la gran puta, which is like a different situation you know, and I don't know what's the worst to be, or what's best, or if you were chingada, the raped one, or if you were the puta, the whore, the sons of, thereof, the thing is that we were all in that same kind of conquest that we all participate in that sense of mestisaje, and that at certain sub-layers of all these cultures there is also corn, and it's not true that corn centered dishes are not prevalent in Puerto Rico, cause there's (guanimas) and (cerullos) and there's all kind of other things that prevail from the Tainho element. You know there's little (ahijses) or hot chiles that Puerto Riquenos used to eat a lot of especially in the forties and fifties you know, so there's hot food and there's still piques that we use and things of that sort to also bring us into an indigenous element and culture on top of which there is also an African element in the Caribbean, and in Mexico too, so it was very interesting to see and feel all of that in San Francisco at the time because of that multi- latino kind of thing. To me people from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, which was actually the biggest group in San Francisco. Nicaraguans, Salvadorians and then Chicanos and then perhaps Purtoriquenos, it was that kind of situation and so to see and feel all those different ways of speaking Spanish and the different Spanglish that formed in those situations down there also, you know, and also the things that corresponded, the things that were the same. So it was a learning experience just to be out there in those seven years and continued to be back and forth in the early seventies, so I was hearing and feeling all those things while the Vietnam War was going on and different movements, the Young Lords were here, taking over of all places a church. You know I said "well look, in a country where people are taking over university offices and military sights boy the New York Puerto Ricans they took over a house of God." I said "these boys they took over a Pentecostal church". And that was kind of interesting cause

Steve Lincoln Hospital.

Victor And Lincoln Hospital. And um so I was just back and forth, trying to write, trying to read, trying to grow.

Steve Did it broaden or change consciously the way you would handle the Spanish language or handle your poetry when you were affected by that California connection.

Victor Not so much the Spanish yet. Don't forget I begin to deal with the Spanish when I go home to Puerto Rico seven years ago into a Spanish environment. I was dealing with the English poems but it begins to bring into my poems different types of Spanish slang that was Mexico derived, or Salvadorian derived, or Guatemalan derived, and then the poems in Mainland are then a national Latino poem of the United States and not just a poem that can be identified either with the east coast or the west coast. It's not a poem based in the barrio, because those poems were in Snaps, or in Papo Got His Gun. sense, that moves into a reality of being Latino in a continental sense and not in a neighborhood sense, like the poetry which I call the poetry of bricks, or like you know barrio poetry or something like that.

Steve You still didn't answer my question.

Female Give the man a break.

Steve In other words what I'm talking about, here you are in the Lower East Side and you're getting hip to everyone who's down here and you're finding your place and your niche with the Umbra poets and whoever else, then you bounce and you go out there, you run into Nicaraguan and Central American writers and blah, blah, blah, the question I'm trying to get to is that obviously that expanded and broadened your knowledge of Hispanic or Latino poetry, meaning they were hipping you to writers you didn't know about, or got a chance to discuss a lot of people you didn't know about. I'm talking about people like Ray Vargas and people like that, and in terms of that what I'm trying to get from you is how did your sense of place here, and their sense of a place there, how did that affect what you were doing in poetry as you learned more about that culture as well as more about this culture.

Victor I think I said it made my poetry more continental and more national by extension and not just a poetry of urban New York for instance. It brought new words, those words that I used to sprinkle my English poetry with Spanish that's when I was writing Spanglish. As I said now I no longer write in Spanglish. I'm writing either in English or in Spanish. Back then I would use different Chicano words or even Nicaraguan words. That were derived from (Nigoya) indigenous sources. You know beginning to get into my English poetry which was being published by Random House at that time.

Carmen When I was in Puerto Rico and we were studying literature, the Puerto Rican poets, (?)it was always like they were not considered the intellectuals, they were not considered like the boriccas that were here in the States as part of that creation, so, now that you're in Puerto Rico, do you see any change in terms of that dialogue between the Puerto Rican's here, the Puerto Ricans there, the whole issue of writing in English, writing in Spanish. Your whole position of saying you're writing more in Spanish, now that you're there.

Victor Yeah I see that a lot now. There was an anthology called (Erejes e mitifigadores?) I don't know if you saw that. That came out in '81 I believe. It was an anthology of New York Puerto Rican poetry translated into Spanish, done by (?) publishers in Puerto Rico, and you folks are all in it you see, and more recently I know that there's been some dialogues or conferences there on the island with island writers and New York City, I keep saying New York, but there are so many Puerto Rican writers that are across the country. Stateside writers who write in English, who have gone down to the university in (?) to talk and read and exchange words and to create a dialogue with each other. So that's happening more and more. Plus my friend of Carmen Dolores Treyes, she reviews all the Latin American books, and she writes in Spanish. She writes for Nuevo Dia. The fact that she interviewed all the Puerto Rican writers in the United States and is doing a book of text and photos that should be coming out in about a year. All of that signifies that there is that dialogue and that there is that communication you know going on. More so now than before. There was conflicts they tell me. There was all kind of conflicts that the writers, the island based writers were from the upper classes, that they were quote from the blanquitos, that the writers from New York City were more from the campesino classes, from the popular classes, that we were from the people who were more mixed in everything, and that's true because we were the ones who had to leave. Bourgeoisie never leaves. It's always the working classes that leave and any place. And so that all these things that we know, creating some friction some conflicts that something or the other and there was bound to be some tensions and conflicts when al these two situations came together. But it's interesting that they did come together I mean I don't if that has happened with let's say Chinese American writers going to Beijing to communicate over there or to be considered Chinese from that point of view of Beijing looking this way. I mean is Maxine Hong Kingston is she Chinese with all that explosive Latin American narrative that goes on in her stuff you know, or like Frank Chin and all that kind of Jazzy kind of stuff that goes on in his, I mean if you read Chinese literature is that you know, and the differences here, between the literature written in the island and as written here or that mostly was written here in New York City which had all these other layers of both Latin, jazz, of Americanese and black English and other forms that were, I mean to tell that to (Magalise Jamiz?) I mean specifically though she's a very brilliant woman, she might not grasp fully what that was because she's never been through here, but she understands a lot you know.

Steve Before you read another poem we would like for your comment, since you're only here and there and only come up and see us once every thirty thousand years, would you give us your comment on what you think of the explosion of spoken word poetry that's happening down here and across this country and is the same thing happening in Latin America or even in PR? . Victor Well some of the poetry that I've heard, some's good some's bad. The thing about that is that I have to look at it from the perspective of the importance of the word in the Caribbean societies, in the Latin American societies, in the Spanish society, in the Persian society in Arabic society, I mean that's why Rushdie got into that problem with that book. I mean he wrote that in a book and that affected a lot of people, and that was how strong that was that they condemned him to death. There's a refrain in Puerto Rico, they say ("est mejor que le de una pecos por la uno de la calle, que tengo hablando de uno por el barrio). It's better to be slapped in the face than to have somebody talking about you in the neighborhood. Because a word carries a lot of emotion, a lot of meaning. So for me to sense what's a spoken word or oralness or poetry is also to feel a conversation. If I go into a cafetin in Puerto Rico I am in a (tertulia), I am in a session, we're having a beer, we're listening to bolero lyrics based on this music which is based on the guitar which has sub-Saharan elements which has flamenco elements, which has lyrics which are about this or about that, but there's poetry in those lyrics, there's conversation going on between us, that for me is a poetic performance, that is something that, and that has never died and that is still there present, so have to see it in terms of that whole thing, and not just the fact that now we have poetry like on MTV for instance that 's really new. It's different. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. You have to take things as they come. If you look at Spanglish you have to take it as it comes. If you say that William Carlos Williams wrote Poorer in Hell in 1921, well that's a Spanglish book, you know, that's using Spanglish as literature, and some of it, you know if you read that book, well it has some good parts and other parts where you get lost, with some of that prose he was writing, because he was an experimental guy. Even with some of his novels, you go on and you say , what, you know, you have to get the proper footing on it But some of them were, like, (Alquequere) writes a book with a Spanish title in 1917 and you can trace back the origins of Spanglish literature, in this case done by William Carlos Williams who was like half Puerto Rican, till about the turn of the century in 1917.

Female I never knew that

Victor So all these other experiments that are coming up now have their roots in some of that stuff he was doing. And the whole mixture of language, that's the tradition in this country. You know there's always Ezra Pound who used about thirty languages in The Cantos, including Chinese characters and everything else. So this is not nothing new

Steve Well I'm talking about it this way. For example you can walk around New York City today and there's about thirty or forty readings around this town. And I'm assuming that the same thing is probably happening not only in California but in pockets across the country too. The question is, is it also happening also happening down in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean or Latin America to your knowledge?

Victor We have reading series, like I said I had to cancel a couple of readings, one at the Ponce (Museo ? del Arte) one at (Coupe) and there was a reading series going on recently in Cafe (Serra) in (?)San Juan. And everybody read there. We all read. And that was Thursdays. You know you go there on a Thursday night and you read. And then they moved to El Cafe (Scenario), you know they go either from Cafe (Scenario) across the street or to El Cafe (Serra) or to all the points around the old San Juan area, which is where all the readings of that sort go on. Sometimes visiting writers come to the universities or sometimes also the local writers read also within the context of the university. But that definitely has been going on for many moons. Then there's the declemadores, declaimers, there was one (Boreo) who died recently who used to perform the poetry of Luis (Palez) Matos all the time or we call it (?) poetry. He was on television, he's been on radio, they have all the you know CD's of him all kind of stuff like that and other declaimers who go around declaiming their poetry here and there in the plazas here, in the plazas there. There's different layers of poetry, there's the popular layer, there's the cultivated layer, there's the layer of literature and there's all kind of words and there's all kind of communication between these layers, much more so than there is communication between these layers in a setting like the United States you know. Where as there is not that kind of communication with a Robert Bly poem or an Allen Ginsburg poem. How long would that take to get to me mouth off the people? But you got Jose Marti and (?) poetry that was getting into the people through popular forms. You know some of the poems of (?) who was a modernista, or a poet of literature, were appropriated by (Augustin Lara) who plagiarizes him almost word for word, and composes boleros, and they're sung all over America. The same thing with Jose Marti's (Juantanamera) Pete Seeger and all the people singing all this stuff that was written by poets of culture or literature.

Carmen If I understand you correctly you're talking like in the Puerto Rican culture that whole issue of creating poetry and all that, like it's more wholesome, it's not fragmented like here. What I'm getting at is that it's part of the culture. You don't have to go to a cafe like here, to create poetry, is that what you're saying?

Victor Yeah, I'm saying it depends on what your awareness of a what a poetic situation or poetic manifestation is. For me to hear the lyrics of a bolero, and for someone to say "tu's ojos son el mar" your eyes are the sea, or to hear some of those beautiful lyrics that if they were translated into American would do away with post modern literature in this country you know. I mean to hear that is for me to be in a poetic experience. I don't have to be in a poetic experience when I go to a class or open up a book or have that relationship to it.

Punum My name is Punum and I'm Indian and what you're saying to me is very natural because, in India, and I go there as often as I can, there is a level of

Victor You're from the real India by the way.

Punum I'm not Native American.

Victor OK. From La India. OK because we're part of this linguistic mistake and I had to clarify that.

Punum I'm glad you did. The thing that you're saying is very real to me, it's very natural, because when you travel through India you have through the urban centers as well as outside of the urban centers in the villages, and everywhere an amount of oral culture, if I can call it that, or that might be mistaken for something else, verbal culture, where there are storytellers, the poetry is religious, and the poetry is non religious, and it's historical, and you can always find a situation where people will gather to hear other people. It could be conceived of within those three levels that you said, the popular, and then the community kind, etc.

Victor And the cultivated.

Punum And then the literary thing, but one thing that I've noticed that I've been thinking about for fifteen years, is that when you're playing with different languages, or if you are a person who has different languages within you then these languages come from a certain part of your life. They come from a certain age, and a certain, you know what you were doing when you were getting into that language. Do you find that that is reflected in your writing. Like when you're writing like maybe about a certain feeling or a certain situation then a certain language, you're going to go to a certain language faster than you would go to another language. Are there certain things that come to you in Spanish and certain things that come to you in English?

Victor I'm in a constant state of chaos It's what Benitas Rojos said about the Caribbean, that we are organized chaos. And so I come out of that with these two languages. There's always that constant translation going on back and forth. So when I write every day something in my journal, either in Spanish or in English, it kind of depends what it is, because I also write purposely. If I want to write an article or an essay that I know I'm shipping to the United States I'm in that mode, with dictionary and things around me. I'm writing in English and it has to communicate, it's about facts, and they were written down, so there's not nothing original. I have to organize it and just to put it down. It's a certain form of language. It's different from that poetic situation which is half suggestion, half I'm in control, half I'm not in control. It's that sense of not being totally in control of the poem.

Punum That's the part I'm referring to. The part where you're not so consciously in control.

Victor To me that's the part of poetry. And the different languages that you have that you get from community and family and then the way the poems flurry up it's not supposed to be a total control. But I think prose is more of a total control. Or as much as possible of a total control. You want to take somebody somewhere and you want that person to perceive and feel the steps that you are moving in. So every question that you bring up, you have to answer, otherwise the person might get lost. You know to write clearly about chaos is the mark of good writing, because if you write chaotically about chaos forget it. Then we're really all lost. I'm going to read a couple poems to share and then we can maybe socialize. They took me up to a mother's day celebration up in the mountains of Aguas Buenas and the thing was going man, the whole thing. So I did this little thing para las madres.