Urayoán Noel

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Interview with Urayoán Noel

Date: October 5, 2006

Time: Unspecified

Interviewed for ILS by: Francisco Aragón

Transcribed by: Ernesto Gloria and Shirley Natoli

Total number of Tapes: One tape (both sides)

Location: Julian Samora Library, Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame

UN: Urayoán Noel

FA: Francisco Aragón

SIDE ONE OF TAPE

FA: First of all, I want to thank you for agreeing to be a part of the Oral History project

at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. My name is Francisco

Aragón, and today is October 4th, 2007. For purposes of documentation, I’d like you to

just give us your name, where you were born, where you grew up, and where you are

living today.

UN: My name is Urayoán Noel. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1976. I currently live in

the South Bronx right by Yankee Stadium. Represent! [Laughs]

FA: OK, cool. Just to give you an idea of how I want to proceed, I’m going to be asking

you questions. We are going to be doing three areas. One will be just general questions.

Another will be questions informed by a forthcoming conference here at Notre Dame

called Trans-nationalism, Translation, Trans-nation: A dialogue on the Americas. And

finally I’m going to be asking you from time to time to read a poem and perhaps

comment on it. It occurs to me that it will be useful and interesting for viewers of these

interviews to hear you perform your work in addition to hearing your ideas about the art.

So I’ll start very general. Could you talk a little bit about how you first came to poetry,

both as a reader and a writer?

Urayoán Noel

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UN: Sure. Well, in my particular case, I think there are two moments. There is the

moment of poetry in a literary sense, and there is a moment of performance. I was

fortunate enough to grow up in a household of poetry readers, so there were books all

around the house. My parents were both teachers, and I had access to their collections. I

think I am a pop culture junkie, so I developed into this weird mix of highbrow poetry

lover and pop junkie. At age fourteen or fifteen, I was reading Poe and Dario. At the

same time, I was watching bad sitcoms and infomercials and thinking, How can I

reconcile these disparate cultural elements, the two languages?

FA: So you were reading Poe in English and Dario in Spanish?

UN: Yeah. I was raised in a bilingual household.

FA: When you say a bilingual household, what do you mean? Can you elaborate?

UN: Yeah. Well my dad was born and raised in California. He was white, and my mom is

Puerto Rican. Actually he was her English Professor at the University of Puerto Rico.

FA: So he was teaching English in Puerto Rico.

UN: Just retired a few years ago. So I grew up at home speaking both English and

Spanish.

FA: OK. Presumably, you spoke Spanish to your mother and English to your father?

UN: Yeah. They would mix it up though. I think they were purposefully quirky about it.

[Laughs]

FA: What about your schooling while you were in Puerto Rico? Was that primarily in

Spanish?

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UN: In Spanish, yeah!

FA: If pushed, what would you say? Because I think you are unique in this sense in

contrast to some of the writers that I have interviewed who do use Spanish in their work .

. . and also having read your book; but I want to just confirm my hypothesis. What would

you say if you had to choose the language that you feel most comfortable with when it

comes to writing poems and even discussing—let’s talk about writing poems—or is it

equal?

UN: Ok. Both. I think in terms of my own life, what I felt most comfortable with, I would

have said at one point Spanish because I was born and raised in Puerto Rico; although I

was very comfortable in both. It was just the language of my day-to-day life, not counting

my interaction with Dad at home. Ever since moving to the States, especially now living

in heavily Latino bilingual neighborhoods in New York City, I think I’ve started to

appreciate just the privilege of living a fully bilingual life.

FA: The reason I asked that question—my hypothesis was that perhaps you’re equal if

not more comfortable composing in Spanish because of the formal quality of some of the

poems in Kool Logic1 that are in syllabics and that are rhyming in a very accomplished

way in Spanish. So I thought, “This is someone who is writing formal verse in Spanish,”

which for someone who is living in the U.S., perhaps one wouldn’t think that would be

common. Can you talk a little bit about how you developed that skill of writing formally

in Spanish?

UN: Well, I’d say just reading and being amazed by people like Dario; that was early on.

I think Dario is a poet of great beauty, and he’s read that way. He’s also a foundational

poet, right, of Latin American [unclear]. I think Dario’s Prosas Profanas, the 1896 book,

he has these decadent, very French-vibe poems with very extravagant rhymes, and I

1 Noel, Urayoán. Kool Logic/ La Lógica Kool. Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingual: Tempe, Arizona 2005.

Urayoán Noel

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thought, “Wow, how exciting.” And somehow the poems describe these very artificial

landscapes, but they have this amazing vital movement. I’ve always felt that people like

Dario and Poe would be great spoken-word poets; they’re slang poets. The musicality and

the speed and almost the vertigo of their lines . . .

FA: So you weren’t necessarily seduced by what the poems were saying but rather how

they were saying it, the Frenchified poems.

UN: Yeah, I think the sense of beauty—but also beauty in the highly stylized and

sometimes disconcerting way, like those poems where he takes elements of the royalty or

the jewels or the paintings and sculptures of the Far East, France, and India; he creates

these weird collages, right? You can read them as very apolitical poems. But you can also

consider this is a Nicaraguan poet, almost recasting a culture into this particularly Latin-

American hybrid.

FA: As you’re describing that phenomenon in Dario, can you think of a poem of yours

where you’ve tried to do something similar?

UN: Definitely a poem like “Kool Logic,” especially the original in Spanish, “La Lógica

Kool.” There is an attempt to just enumerate and catalog these cultural ephemera, these

phenomenons, these trends, and these fads. So those were my equivalents almost on

Dario’s jewels and tapestries and paintings [laughs].

FA: So in some ways “Kool Logic” is a poem that’s inspired by some of Dario’s poetics.

UN: I’d say it’s more complicated than that because there is also the use of politics

because of the political aim there. I mentioned to you before a Puerto Rican poet named

Jose Ramon Melendez, a [unclear] poet, a very committed anti-imperialist Puerto Rican

nationalist. He recast the décima, which is an old popular Spanish form, into this very

humorous and very irreverent and very political poetry; at the same time very technically

accomplished.

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FA: So he takes what in some circles might be viewed as this sort of stuffy form but

breathes new life into it?

UN: I’m not sure if the décima is particularly stuffy, unlike say the stanza that Dario was

working with, certainly very stuffy and very French. The décima is a popular Spanish

form. The Jíbaros still have a décima contest, too. They have those in el barrio in East

Harlem. I was just checking out what the improvisadores [improvisers] are doing with the

décima. It’s a form that’s given to repetition and also the social commentary; it has those

refrains. You are given an eight line, an eight-syllable line that serves your refrain, and

you have to come up with the rest and improvise it. An element also in which music and

rhyme almost grounds the poem. And the poem is a function of your inventiveness or

cleverness of your rhyme. So in this book, he recasts that into a political tool. His book is

called Decimos Decimas. We say décima, which is called . . . [unclear]. He was friends

with Pedro Pietri; he was an early—it seems to me—Puerto Rican poet from the island

who, despite the long-standing differences between diaspora writers and island-based

writers, felt that there was infinity there, that somehow what the diaspora- and the island-

based writers were doing was complimentary. I mean, it was tied to a vision of Puerto

Rican liberation, a political-take on culture, an irreverent attitude towards the sort of crass

commercial culture, both in the U.S. and Puerto Rico—Puerto Rico being an American

colony.

FA: One of the things I found really fascinating about “Kool Logic” is that in the Spanish

version you have this one stanza with the two . . . I guess with the refrain at the bottom.

And then in the English version, they seem to be four line stanzas; in other words, they

don’t look the same. Can you talk a little bit about what came first, whether it was

Spanish or . . . ? I’m assuming the Spanish version came first, and then you came up with

the English version. It’s not quite a translation, it’s a very . . . What is going on there?

Urayoán Noel

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UN: I first wrote it in Spanish, as you are right to notice, as décimas; I’d written all these

décimas for a first book, a self-published kind of punk book called Las Flores del Mall2,

which was taken through the mall culture, the suburban culture of contemporary Puerto

Rico, and sort of celebrating it ironically, if that makes any sense. And I felt like I needed

a statement poem. I thought that I’d been testing, arriving at that kind of poem throughout

that manuscript, but I hadn’t hit upon it. It was almost like a manifesto poem where I say,

“This is my take on culture. Here is my irreverent point of view boiled down into one

poem.” Also the global perspective, not just beyond Puerto Rico, but sort of in the ways

in which the whole planet now is a mall with these competing discourses that you can’t

make sense of. And I was looking for that refrain that made sense to me, and I thought of

[Postmodernism, or] the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. It seems to me that there’re

these late capitalists’ phenomenon, taking a quote from Jameson, the Marxist theorist. So

it was a way of both reflecting on what was provocative and insightful about Jameson’s

work and also just making fun of an economics.

FA: Talk a little about the form though. In other words, how you arrived at the English

version after the Spanish version.

UN: Well, I guess, I should backtrack a little bit and tell you about my own relationship

to prosody and metrics in Spanish. As I mentioned in the book I am a syllabic poet.

Metrics in Spanish are syllabic, not iambic or whatever the way it is; it’s not based on

metric feet the way it is in English. So I just taught myself by reading the Spanish poets

like Dario. So you divide lines based on syllables; for example: La ló-gi-ca cul-tu-ral,

that’s seven syllables plus one, because of the stress on the A-L. Del capitalismo tal río,

that’s nine syllables but still you arrive at the musicality of the line by counting syllables.

What happens when you actually change that into English? It doesn’t work because

English is not that kind of language; it’s more irregular; it’s not regularly accented. So

basically what I do is write syllabic verse in English and try to disguise it [laughter].

What happens usually, eight-syllable lines become iambic pentameter more or less in

English, and so I try to sort of smuggle my [laughter] syllabic verse and pass it off as . . .

2 Noel, Urayoán. Las Flores del Mall. Ediciones Alamala: Brooklyn, NY 2000.

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FA: How did you arrive at the two stanzas, like in part one which I am going to have you

read in minute? It’s two quatrains in part one, and the Spanish is just one.

UN: Yeah. I was thinking—first out of necessity . . . . I felt I was putting together my

manuscript, and I knew it had to be bilingual. I really wanted it to reflect the entirety of

the kind of work that I do, and I thought “La Lógica Kool” was so much of a great poem

it was almost my statement poem, so I had to keep that in there. How do I do that in

English though? I tried just translating it as a décima; it was way too hard. I could do it,

but I couldn’t retain the rhyme; as I said, the rhyme in a way is the hook of the poem. I

thought, “What form could I use in English that could be sort of topical, that could be a

little bit rough around the edges, but still allow me to preserve those rhymes.” And I

thought, “Let’s look through some sort of sloppy quatrains and probably get at it,” and I

kept refining it and having it be a little bit tight and a little bit loose. So they tighten up

and loosen up, depending on the ebbs and the flows of the poems. I thought that just

captured the ebb and flow of capital, constricting you and at the same time liberating you.

I thought that was a very trial-and-error kind of process. Also I think part of the logic is

just performing it: what sounds good when you read it? The good thing about décimas is

that they almost have their performance built in because there is a history. I am very

conscious of trovadores [troubadours] and performers doing a popular performance. It

was easy for me in a way in Puerto Rico because I was referencing this pre-existing

tradition of a performance. But then in an American context, what is this? These weird

quatrains pass as performance poetry. I think they are something like Ginsberg’s work,

which was important. Ginsberg in the 70s has these books about ballads and sings songs.

Do you know what I’m talking about? Especially the epigraph from the book is from one

of those poems, the “Vomit Express.” I’m going to try to imitate now his singing.

FA: Ginsberg’s singing?

UN: Yeah, I think I’m rambling here, but basically…Well, Ginsberg was really an

influential poet, obviously, because of this counter-cultural beat persona, but I think also

Urayoán Noel

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the way in which he used popular forms. He actually did spoken words records. He

actually does a version of this with Bob Dylan.

FA: So how does Ginsberg sound doing it?

UN: I’m trying to imitate Ginsberg. This is bad, but it’s something like: [sings]

I’m going down to Puerto Rico

I’m going down on the midnight plane

I’m going down on the Vomit Express

I’m going down with my suitcase pain.

I mean, he had some weird guitars or fiddles or whatever he does it with.

FA: [Laughs] Really?

UN: Yeah, one of the seventies records. This is a quatrain and a pretty loose quatrain.

And so maybe I had Ginsberg in the back of my head when I thought of that.

FA: “Kool Logic” and “La Lógica Kool,” I imagine you’ve read this poem. Have you

ever performed this poem in its entirety in English and in Spanish?

UN: I try not to because it can be a little long. But I actually did it in a reading. Actually,

last week I was reading with Alfred Dorn, a formalist poet.

FA: Alfred Dorn or Korn?

UN: Alfred Dorn.

FA: No, no, I don’t know him.

Urayoán Noel

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UN: He’s sort of among the new formalist poets. And I thought, “Wow! Why not do it

with a formalist poet?” It gives me a rare chance to actually do a lot of my . . .

FA: So you read both versions?

UN: Yes.

FA: How did you do it? Did you do it all in Spanish first and then all in English? Or did

you alternate?

UN: I think I read it once previously and alternated it. In this case since I was speaking to

an audience that I assumed was interested in formal work, I read first the original and

then showed how I translated that into quatrains.

FA: Okay, if I was watching this interview and hearing you talk so far, I’d be saying to

myself I want to hear what this poem sounds like. [Urayoán laughs] So this is going to be

one of those moments—we’ve got time—where I’d like you to share with posterity—

which is what this Oral History project is going to be in some ways—the title poem of

your book.

UN: English or Spanish or both?

FA: Both.

UN: Wow! Ok, I’ll start with the Spanish. Again I am referencing here a particular kind

of jibaro popular performance, so I’ll use my typically inflective voice. Camera person,

you can call-and-response with me on this.

“La Lógica Kool”

Urayoán Noel

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Cantémosle al día mítico

de identidad-holograma,

quince minutos de fama

(veinte si eres político);

ya salió el sol sifilítico

en el pabellón sombrío

de la era del vacío,

lanza su luz desigual:

la lógica cultural

del capitalism tardío

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Filas de communes fosas

en las ciudades antiguas,

sexualidades ambiguas,

fast food, fronteras porosas,

guerras de químicas rosas,

etnias que escurren rocío

y la utopía es un río

que vomita capital:

la lógica cultural

del capitalismo tardío

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El amor desregulado

por nuevos medios de ocio,

senos plásticos, negocio

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de prótesis, Prozac, mercado,

eros suburbanizado,

pornografías de estío

como geishas de Darío

en flujo libidinal:

la lógica cultural

del capitalismo tardío

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Cada cual lo que la plazcaa,

música-mundo, new age,

Ricky Martin y John Cage

de gira por Tierra Vasca—

que el feto del odio nazca

de la hojarasca de hastío,

nueva trova, power trío,

queer punk, flamenco tribal:

la lógica cultural

del capitalismo tardío

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Cibernéticoestrambótico,

macrobióticoinformáticas,

supermodelos hieráticas,

geografías de lo erótico,

lo ecológico y lo gótico,

satélite, elite, mall frío,

simulacro o albedrío

en el chinchorro global:

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la lógica cultural

del capitalismo tardío

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NAFTA, Mercosur, o sea

Baudrillard y Lipovetsky,

el sports utility, el jet ski,

comunidad europea,

Hollywood Hills y La Brea,

D.F., Miami Beach, Río,

la favela, el caserío

y esta fiebre sin final:

la lógica cultural

del capitalismo tardío.

Whoa. That would be the Spanish version. And should I do the whole English?

FA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

UN: It’s sort of a similar melody. I guess I am kind of a tried and true performer.

Probably because I just do the same piece over and over, basically. [Starts snapping

fingers]

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I hope this finds you in good health

(Or at least gainfully employed).

We’re here to discuss the hologram-self

In the era of the void.

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Some say modern man is hollow,

Others say it’s a condition

Called “postmodern.” Do you follow?

Could this use some exposition?

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O.K. See the common graves

Rotting in the ancient cities?

The fast food? The porous borders?

The ambiguous sexualities?

The debt-bludgeoned ethnicities?

The wars of chemical roses?

Cash flows from Utopian rivers

And the market never closes!

This is the cool logic

Of late capitalism

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In the Prozac marketplaces

People hoard new modes of leisure;

Love has been deregulated:

Plastic breasts! Prosthetics! Seizures!

In the suburbs neighbors mourn

The death drive of their libidos,

Late summers full of soft porn,

Stolen Wonderbras, torn Speedos.

This is the cool logic

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Of late capitalism

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You can consume what you please:

From world music to new age;

Ricky Martin and John Cage

Are touring the Basque Pyrenees;

You can sing your songs of peace

(Pop! Funk! Folk! Tribal! Assorted!)

But the violence will not cease,

Hate’s fetus can’t be aborted!

This is the cool logic

Of late capitalism

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Macrobiotic-cybernetic-

Fiber-optic folderol!

Neo-gothic supermodels!

Satellites and virtual malls!

Vegan Power lunch grand slams!

Word Elites! Money-go-rounds!

Free will or free (pillow?) shams

In the global shantytown?

This is the cool logic

Of late capitalism

Urayoán Noel

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NAFTA, Mercosur, Hamas!

DVDs and open mikes!

Watercress and motocross!

SUVs and mountain bikes!

Trailer parks! Gated communities!

Highrise ghettoes and favelas!

Acquired diplomatic immunities!

Self-help prophets! Braille novellas!

Mexico, Miami, Río!

Euro-Disney, Bollywood!

Dell, Intel, Taco Bell, Geo!

Stanford post-docs in da hood!

I’ll stop fronting pedagogical…

One last question (extra credit):

This is kool logic ain’t too logical

But it’s still “kool.” Do you get it?!

This is the kool logic

Of the late capitalism

FA: So the question I have in hearing you perform that—and this is a question I would

ask any person I’ve interviewed in this series—is models. As far as performative models,

who’s your model for that kind of performance? Or who have you used as models? Or do

you think you are breaking completely new ground in performing? Well, you mentioned

Ginsberg might be one; are there others?

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UN: Well nobody is breaking new ground, let me just say that. Models? I’ve mentioned a

couple. I said Jose Ramon Melendez, the Puerto Rican Poet, in terms of décimas.

FA: Well, did he perform . . .

UN: He is not a performer, but he does have a CD of a Jíbaro music artist named Andres

Jiménez, really well known, doing his poems. So there is that performance aspect to his

work. They are also very vernacular in the way they’re written. He gave me an entryway

perhaps into performance in that way. Another is Ginsberg, obviously, his commitment to

oral poetry, to performance understood as a totality, and of course to blues and to records

and collaborating with musicians. And probably the most important one is Pedro Pietri,

absolutely. I think Pietri in a way built upon the kind of formal breakthrough that beat

poets . . .

FA: Are you referring to how he performed his poems?

UN: Yes.

FA: Okay, because I have never had the . . . Is his poetry recorded anywhere?

UN: Yeah. He put out a LP with Folkways, with Smithsonian in the 70s. He’s sort of a

cult figure, kind of a cultural figure. I don’t think he ever received . . . ever had the

visibility that I think his work merited. I think it’s one of those cases where you have to

see him. I don’t mean to minimize his poetry; I think he’s also a wonderful poet on the

page, but I think the full extent of what he stood for was visible when you saw him

perform. He started off as a standup comedian—I just recently learned in researching

about his life—as did I—total fluke there. And there was this sense of not just poetry as a

discreet entity on the page, or poetry as a vehicle to express your feelings, but also poetry

as a means of social provocation, poetry as an attempt to create a reaction out of

somebody, and also as a way to engage the audience and also to build an audience. He is

considered the founding father of Nuyorican poetry in a way because of that, because his

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poetry was this founding gesture, this call for people to respond, to let themselves be

constituted through poetry.

FA: What do you say to the following response to this: there is some people who say that

the test of poetry is how well it’s going to come off when it is uttered aloud or read aloud

by someone other than the author? We pick up a poem by Dario, and we are blown away

by its musicality. Or we recite a poem by Emily Dickinson, and we are just moved as

those vowels and sounds are moving through our blood and out of our mouths. How does

that reconcile with the work of someone like Pedro Pietri when you’ve just said that you

had to be there to see him perform to get the full extent? Does that mean with an artist

like him maybe when we recite him or read him on the page, after he is no longer with us,

it’s a little bit diminished?

UN: First of all, let me just say I don’t think there’s such a thing as poetry or poetries. I

think some poems are content to be articulated on the page, and they’re great poems. I

enjoy poetry that has no interest in performance qualities, poetry that’s image-driven and

not necessarily musical in any way. There’s work that’s strictly for the stage, and perhaps

it’s not even poetry; those kinds of genre distinctions don’t interest me very much. I

relate to work and engage with language whether it’s page-based or stage-based. I’m

researching performance now. One of the things I’ll tell you is that I think in a way that’s

the fragility of the performance, but that’s also what’s powerful about it. There’s a

distinction in performance studies between what’s called the archive and the repertoire,

and the difference is basically between the text as it exists in a fixed manner and the

performance itself. So when you’re analyzing my DVD in a performance, that’s not

actually a performance; that’s a document of my performance. A performance is a live

event that cannot be reproduced.

FA: That requires an audience.

UN: Yeah. What I’m saying, it’s the same way as when you like a band very much and

you buy their CD, but it’s not quite like seeing this band live. I think in many ways,

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someone like Pietri was very conscious of the religious dimensions of what he was doing;

he called himself a reverend and told a lot of people he was. He played with that in a way

that was satirical but also literal, in the sense that he was inviting you to partake of a

community.

FA: What implications might this have for the future of—and I use this in a very general

sense—poetry publishing or the publishing of poetry?

UN: I think it depends whom you ask.

FA: It seems to me that in order to really capture some of these works that you’re

describing, it would need to be recorded; it would need to be videoed; people would need

to go to these shows and record them because you wouldn’t get the same aesthetic

experience just by picking up the person’s book and reading it on the page.

UN: I think there’s also . . . A lot of these poets actually score their work for performance

on the page. You think a lot of the spoken word poets. You’ve got somebody like Willie

Perdomo for example; you can read his work and say, “I can imagine myself reading this

or this being addressed to me in a way.” So this is the way the work is conceived on the

page; just presume it’s a reality; it’s inner textually; that’s one dimension. What interests

me is that we become closer and more diverse readers. The fact is that those of us who

are used to poetry being page-bound become involved with performance, as opposed to

those who are used to maybe going to an open microphone. I’m thinking how poetry

transits back and forth across from these various modes of existing, modes of

distribution.

FA: You’ve brought up an interesting point. As I think about this, I sort of see you as a

bridge in the sense that I imagine that there are people—for lack of a better term—in the

page-based camp who would be very suspicious of the camp that is more interested in the

performance aspect of poetry, and who would look down and “Oh, that’s not poetry,

that’s just making a lot of noise up on the stage.” And there’re probably people—maybe

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I’m wrong—who are very involved in the performance aspect and who feel the more

accomplished work that’s coming out of the page-based camp is not worth their time. Is

that an over simplification? Do you see yourself possibly as someone who feels

comfortable in both camps at different times?

UN: Well, I’m definitely comfortable in both camps. I think that perhaps the time is

moving towards a more nuanced and integrated approach. People in this field are like

postmodern poetics, are re-reading Pound and rediscovering Charles Olson’s projective

verse, and just thinking of the ways in which a lot of us call postmodern poetry, really

depends on the voice that has performance elements to it. I think more and more we’re

seeing performance related to poetry breaking into publishing slowly, but surely it’s

happening. There are purists on both sides who think it’s bad thing. I’m not one of those

people. I think that anything which will complicate our sense of what poetry is and what

it can do . . . That’s why I like poetry as opposed to, say, novels or something. Poems

have so many possible conventions; they lead so many lives that in a way they’re opened

to all these circuits of communication, and that’s part of what attracts me to them. You

can make these poems travel these huge distances in a way some are really marginal

networks, but in a way that’s what can’t be legislated about poetry as it can travel both

ways.

FA: Have you ever—this is going to sound like a strange question—had the experience

of giving a nonperformative reading one of these poems? Because when I first read your

book, and I was reading “Kool Logic,” I was not doing what you just did, but I was

enjoying it very much because of how skillfully put together it was on both sides. I can

imagine. in fact, I imagine I did read it out loud to myself in a more conventional page-

based way. Have you ever done that with one of your own poems just to see what that

sounded like?

UN: Sure.

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FA: I want to ask you a question now that’s been informed by this conference that’s

coming up this next semester on the Americas. These questions were actually composed

by a professor in the English department here named Cyraina Johnson [-Roullier]; this is

one of the questions she asked: “Reading the poem of Urayoán Noel, I’m struck by the

linguistic plays on words that allude to U.S. cultural elements.” Then she mentions Lydia

as well, she says, “Lydia’s poems on the other hand seem to engage with linguistics in a

different manner. I’m thinking of Poema en un Carro Público.” Here’s the question:

“What role does such cultural linguistic references play in viewing, analyzing the

Americas, and in crafting poetry of the Americas, how do each of you . . . ”—in this case,

how do you Urayoán—“ . . . see these two related elements—the linguistic and the

cultural—at work in your writing?”

UN: That’s a multi-layered question. I think immediately, of course, given my specific

biography, I have a particular sensibility. I’m very comfortable I guess, on the margins

that exist between English and Spanish and exploring and exploiting those. But I think

also that for me the issue isn’t so much about language; language is one tool. What I’m

moving towards perhaps is what I would call interest in poetry as it relates to counter-

publics. “Counter-publics” is a term I take from a theoretician named Michael Warner.

Basically it means formulations that are public but that aren’t represented by the public

sphere or the mainstream, the official discourses. They have to still organize and

constitute themselves in a way of opposition to those kinds of discourses. That’s what

attracts me about these kinds of poetry. Not that I don’t identify as Latino, but what binds

us as Latino can be very boring; it can be the fact that we all speak English and Spanish

at home; that’s great. We can cry at the same grandmother’s poems and laugh at the

we’re-all-twenty-minutes-late kind of poems. There are these cultural generalities, and

there are more substantive reasons why we should build politics around Latino identity,

but it’s also kind of limiting in a way. What I relate more to these kinds of poetries—

whether are performance poetries, language poetries, and the performances of the

Nuyorican poets—is the sense in which these poets are trying to engage in and build

counter-publics. It’s not just that my poetry is important because I’m Puerto Rican or

Latino, and my poetry automatically reflects my Puerto Rican or Latino-ness. It’s because

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21

in a way I view it as outside of a certain power structure and seek to either question or

parody or complicate people’s understandings of how that mainstream culture operates;

you see what I mean? I’m less interested in language as a source of expression on my

particular bicultural reality, although it’s inevitably going to do that, also reflect my own

circumstance. More and more increasingly, as I attempt to either critique or parody or

complicate our understanding of systems of communication of pop culture. Does pop

culture reflect me? Does pop culture include me? What are its borders? These kinds of

more theoretical or political questions.

FA: Models for this concern include people like Pedro Pietri?

UN: Yeah!

FA: You mentioned Pedro Pietri was one, and you mentioned Allen Ginsberg; who are

some other models for this project as you are articulating it?

UN: I am probably going to read a piece tonight inspired by Alurista’s Spik in Glyph. I

think that Alurista and Pietri are in ways analogous; they’re both considered sort of poet

prophets of their respective movements. Puerto Rican obituary is the source point for

Nuyorican poetry. You can think of Alurista and of Federico Antonio Azlan as the vortex

of Chicano poetry. But I think they both have also this engagement beyond just

specifically Chicano and Nuyorican poetry and also a sense of themselves as engaged in a

critique of systems of power and systems of communication—systems that are English

dominant—and they try to eliminate differences. I think both Alurista and Pietri are poets

who celebrate differences and especially disjunctive ones as lines of difference. You can

build the counter-public out of poets like that, not just around the chair of Latino identity

but just include identities found amongst differences. That’s one thing I think is

encouraging about the current poetry scene is when African American poets read Latino

poets, who read queer poets, and I don’t know, disabled poets, in the sense these people

want to be fairly represented by these various mainstreams and can begin to learn from

each other in terms of their respective poetry.

Urayoán Noel

22

FA: In mentioning Alusrista, I’m curious to know, because I imagine growing up in

Puerto Rico and spending a lot time on the east coast—although you said you went to

Stanford—was Alurtista a door into Chicano poetry in general? Was there a moment as

you began to document yourself on the various poetries that you felt are worth

documenting yourself on…Did you systematically read a lot of Chicano poets? How

familiar are you with the canonical Chicano?

UN: As you can imagine it’s very patchy, so you pick up some there and even though I’m

doing research on Latino poetry, it’s not a subject that gets taught, especially the poetry,

as well as it should. In a lot of ways you have to be self-educated. As you know, in poetry

a lot of times, poets learn by being involved in communities; by going to conferences and

seeing what’s there; by seeing the poets who we like and what they were reading early

on. Perhaps it’s been more of an intuitive process, I would say. I love a lot of Latino

poets, a lot of Chicano poets, but they’re not necessarily people who influence my work

directly that I could say, “Wow! Do I love Jimmy Santiago Baca!” I think that in terms of

the language and the counter-public, counter-cultural critique, that I’m into in the sense

of irreverence in language play, naturally I gravitate towards people like Alurista and

Pietri.

FA: Are you familiar with the work of Juan Felipe Herrera?

UN: Yes, I very much enjoyed the early stuff like Exiles of Desire; he would be a good

example.

FA: You would see Juan Felipe Herrera as a writer who you might be able to learn things

from for your own writing? But Jimmy Santiago might be a writer who you admire as a

reader but who’s doing work that perhaps doesn’t inform what you see as your own

project as a poet?

Urayoán Noel

23

UN: It’s tough to draw a distinction. Maybe what I’m doing now. I don’t know what I

will be doing. I guess my commitment to poetry is long ranging and wide ranging and

total. That’s what I’m doing now, but God knows what I’ll be doing ten years from now.

FA: Tell me about your experience with—because this is a poet very dear to me whom I

began reading when I was like nineteen and twenty; I met him in the classroom . . . . Tell

me about your experience, your trajectory as a reader with Victor Hernández Cruz.

UN: I think he’s like a pure literary poet. That sounds like an awful phrase, right? All

poets are literary poets. As a poet of pure language, not necessarily a language as a

political intervention, although you could argue that there is political dimensions of his

work. This is one of the poets who can talk about going shopping, going to the bathroom,

and you would just listen because the tone of phrase, the sense of music, and the richness

of the image are so intense and so rewarding that you just can’t wait to see what he has to

say.

FA: Share with us how you discovered Victor Hernández Cruz. Do you remember when

you first became aware of his work?

UN: I think it was patchy as well. I know I read something before I read Maraca. I know

I might have stumbled onto something; it might have been, of all things, By Lingual

Wholes, his most avant-garde and disjunctive work. I think I must have run into that back

when I was at Stanford browsing through the stacks there. And I said, “What is this?

Wow!” I think I’d come across some poems before that, maybe more conventional

poems: “This is the same guy? That’s weird.” It’s ironic but his first book Snaps, which is

one of the books that’s claimed as an early reference for Nuyorican poetry, I had not read

until far more recently, so that’s the reason that I actually backtracked and read his early

work. I think that what’s great about Cruz is he has like nine lives. In a way his

commitment is to his poetry, and he just follows that to wherever it’s taking him. I even

had the privilege of introducing him at his recent reading last week at Teachers & Writers

Collaborative. I basically said to them, “Cruz is a writer of this location.” I think all

Urayoán Noel

24

diaspora writers are forced writers to this location because we all came from somewhere

else and are now here, and we would tend to acclimatize that. I think particularly Cruz,

almost like he sought out this location in his biography, in his trajectory.

FA: In his current biography; dividing his time between Morocco and [hard to hear due

to UN’s voice overlapping FA’s]

UN: If you think about it, it’s almost like he settles down in one place, and he becomes

bored; he moves onto somewhere else. He publishes Snaps when he’s twenty years old,

and by the end of the year, he’s in California associated with the west coast poetry scene.

Then he goes back to Puerto Rico and now Morocco; actually he’s a Puertorocco, [FA

laughs] that’s my one liner. I appreciate the sense that in a way poetry can both bridge but

it also can also just collapse this wide range in cultural landscape.

FA: So By Lingual Wholes was sort of a seminal book for you as far as your discovery of

Victor Hernández Cruz.

UN: I wouldn’t say it was seminal. I can be pretty experimental of my stuff, but I’m not

that experimental.

FA: He’s got that poem; I don’t know where it is, but I have the first edition of that book

called Momo’s Press in 1982. He has that poem that when you open it up, it’s like fire

flies. I forget what he titles it, but it’s just a black page with little white dots on it.

UN: I was also reading the concrete poets, the Brazilian concrete poets.

FA: There’s kind of a wonderful poem in there called “Two Guitars,” which is for me

one of my favorite poems of all times. Two guitars having a dialogue between each other;

they’re leaning on opposite walls, and they’re talking about their masters, the people who

play them. Then someone comes in, and they hush up when they hear someone walking

through the door. I’m going to ask you another Americas question: the cultures of the

Urayoán Noel

25

Americas may be linked in many ways by sharing historical experiences of violent

cultural encounter in the new world. What role does history play in your work, if any, and

how might your use of history speak to the histories of other ethnic groups of the

Americas?

UN: That’s a tough question. I tend to be somebody who doesn’t like the burden of

history placed upon him; I think it’s too much unless you’re Neruda, and not many of us

are. I think few poets, especially today, can say, “Here’s the burden of generations. Let

me place it on my shoulders and try to turn it into poetry.” Given my sensibility, I’m

more interested in what’s happening now in our current developments and in our current

popular culture. There are a couple of things that do impact my sense of place. One of

them is being in New York. I do have a sense of Latin American writers and Puerto

Rican writers in New York City before me, not just the Nuyorican writers, the writers of

the Puerto Rican diaspora who emerged in the sixties, and even earlier; we know Martí

and people like that. It’s weird in a way: the father of the Puerto Rican carnival, Luis

Muñoz Marín, was a young avant-garde poet in New York City in the late teens,

nineteen-twenties and so on. There’s actually this rich tradition of Puerto Rican poets

spending some of their formative years doing their far out crazy work in New York then

heading back. So my forthcoming book in Spanish, Boringkén, actually begins with a

quote from the early Luis Muñoz Marín, who’s still a very much loved but also a very

controversial figure these days in Puerto Rico, especially amongst a lot of Puerto Rican

poets who tend to be Puerto Rican nationalists; he was the founder of commonwealth. In

a way, I like to think about myself as a Puerto Rican poet in New York. I think about the

poets who came before and gravitate towards those works produced by writers when they

settled in New York and try to respond to that, sort of in the sense of running in a

tangential dialogue there.

FA: Do you situate yourself in this dialogue that seems to be coming from this

conference in the context of the Americas? How do you view yourself?

Urayoán Noel

26

UN: It’s always hard as a Puerto Rican poet, I think. Especially growing up in Puerto

Rico, I’ve been really interested especially in showcasing in my poetry the ways in which

Puerto Rican culture is dependant upon American culture in ways that are either positive

or really problematic or just sort of absurd. I think my obsession with malls in the

suburbs is in a way my reflection on the idea that we’re this great paradise with all these

beaches and these beautiful natural gifts, but we want to be as much as possible like some

place in New Jersey; no dissing New Jersey; I love you; you’re my peeps. So in that

sense, is Puerto Rico part of the Americas, or does it have to surrender that because that’s

part of America, the U.S., as an American colony? Well, I think I have a privileged

viewpoint, especially given my bicultural background, I always wonder if I’m allowed to

talk as a Puerto Rican poet when debates are happening concerning the Americas or Latin

America. Some people don’t even consider Puerto Rico a part of Latin America. So my

sense of terms towards the Americas is complicated, or I perceive it as complicated due

to my Puerto Rican experience. I will say that I do not have boundaries in the sense of my

identification with both Latin America poets, American poets, writing in English or

writing in Spanish, for that matter writing in French and Portuguese also, which I also

read. Are you asking me, do I think is [hard to hear due to FA’s voice overlapping

UN’s]?

FA: No. I’m asking you is this a question you’ve even thought about, being a poet of the

Americas, as opposed to being a Puerto Rican poet or an American poet? Because when I

hear the phrase “poetry of the Americas,” then that forces me also to think about Rubén

Dario, Vicente Huidobro, you know, the southern cone as well, and maybe even the

northern; maybe even Canada as well. Do you view yourself in that context?

UN: I think that maybe it’s different for us in the Caribbean. I think about Bolivar, it’s a

whole nineteen-century movement of Pan-American unity. That happened in a different

way, I would say; people like Martí and maybe Ostos in Puerto Rico, in a more

Caribbean level than a continental level. I think there is that sense of belonging to a

continent, but I think you also have the sense of belonging to an island that’s very much

unto itself. As somebody familiar with Latin American literature, I’ve seen the ways in

Urayoán Noel

27

which American-ness if often reloaded in a very problematic way. You think for example

in which all those grandes próceres [great heroes], those poet lawyers, those great

statesmen of the Latin American countries put forward this Pan-American politics. At the

same time there’s this difficult and racial dynamic or class dynamic that went on in their

own countries. I’m not helping you, but I just think this concept of the Americas....

FA: It may be an over simplified question.

UN: I think it can do a lot of political work, but you have to be clear in exactly where

you’re coming from, and I’m not sure I’m clear yet. I think it’s great to not have

boundaries and take from everywhere that you can. I do see, for example, a difference

between the poetry produced in Latin America and European poetry, the poetry in Spain

over the last fifty years.

FA: You mentioned European; we’ve talked about people like the Puerto Rican poets

who you view as your antecedents like Pietri. Who are some of the more mainstream?

Maybe that’s not the right term; who are some of the other poets in English language who

have been important to you? We started off this interview when you mentioned…You

immediately evoked Dario, on the one hand, and Edgar Alan Poe on the other. Who are

some other poets in the English language who you feel particularly . . . living or dead?

UN: There’re a couple of poems . . .

FA: Okay, that’s even more interesting.

UN: A lot of the young poets you read in high school when you’re generally not taught

very much funky poetry. I’ve actually talked to other poets; a lot of poets who I admire

also read these poems in high school; one of them is Langston Hughes.

FA: Lydia mentioned Langston Hughes.

Urayoán Noel

28

UN: I think any poet with the sense of performance in his work probably read Langston

Hughes early on and dug him, considering this sort of archaic, very stiff literary poetry

you read. Then you read Hughes in high school, and you say, “Wait a second, what’s

this?” So that opens up a window of possibilities. In my case, I was enriched by reading

Hughes and then reading Nicolas Guillermo, Luis Pales Matos and having a sense of

Afro-centric alternative in a way from the European . . .

FA: What about the modernists?

UN: And the other one I was going to mention was Eliot’s “[The Love Song of J. Alfred]

Prufrock,” absolutely. I’ve always thought that “Prufrock” would be a great spoken word

piece. I did a spoken word in-form translation of Leopoldo Lugones’ “Himno a la luna,”

an Argentinean modernista poem very well known. Then there are poets who I absolutely

love, but I’m not sure how I’m actually influenced by them. People like Auden; I just

thought the guy was a great poet. A little too British for me, [big laugh] a little classical

and Anglican, and then stuffy, but in terms of language I think he’s a great poet.

FA: How about poets from Spain?

UN: I think of more contemporary people. I love Marilyn Hacker. She manages to use

the forms and fuse them with the vernacular that is very elegant and very natural at the

same time; she’s somebody I really enjoy. A lot of poets have to do with pop culture stuff

also, but I didn’t get to read the contemporary poets till a little later. Poets from Spain?

That’s a short list. [Laughs] Góngora, who wrote décimas, by the way, some pretty freaky

décimas. And, wow! It’s tough.

FA: How about Lorca’s generation? In addition to Lorca, are you familiar with any of

them?

UN: Yeah. Both the whole of Ventisiete [sic]. It’s weird, because a couple of people have

compared my work to Lorca’s A Poet in New York. A book I never liked, actually; I don’t

Urayoán Noel

29

particularly dislike it either, but if I had to pick a great Spanish language surrealist it

would be Neruda in Residencia la Tierra; that would be my pick. Probably the one I like

the most would be Juan Ramón Jiménez’ early on Diario de un poeta recién casado. He

has this coolest short poem about arriving on ship to New York City, and this cool trip in

the city, so probably that, not too much; I don’t know much about it either.

FA: What are you working on right now?

UN: Ten things. I have a manuscript in English.

FA: Is that the punk rock and other poems?

UN: Yes, it has the [undecipherable] punk rock.

FA: What’s the working title of that manuscript?

UN: I don’t even know. I’ve had so many words for that title.

FA: It might have been Punk Rock and Other Poems.

UN: Maybe.

FA: That’s the English manuscript you mentioned. Then you mentioned a book in

Spanish, which has been published or hasn’t been published?

UN: The books listed on the back cover of Kool Logic haven’t been published.

FA: So Boringkén has not been published yet.

Urayoán Noel

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UN: That’s an inside joke on my part. Basically both had been postponed forever, both

Kool Logic and Boringkén. I said, “Let me list both on each of the two books and then

one of them will come out, and let’s see which one comes out first.” It happened with . . .

FA: So Boringkén is done; it’s in production, but it hasn’t come out yet?

UN: Yeah. I’m working now on a spoken word CD with Moncho López, the same

composer where I went for the Kool Logic DVD. So I have that. I’m also doing an

anthology of Puerto Rican poetry from 1960 to the present. It’s bilingual, trans-

generational and includes island-based and diaspora writers. It’s also pretty stylistically

varied. I’m just hoping this will read like a map of what Puerto Rican poetry is and what

it includes.

FA: It sounds like it’s a very ambitious anthology, how many pages is it going to be? Do

you know?

UN: That’s a good question. Even the size of the book, I have specific ideas in mind for

that.

FA: How far along in the process is that project?

UN: We have almost all the poets. We’re just working with permissions and particularly

problematic cases.

FA: But you have a publisher though?

UN: Yes, it’s Terra Nova. It’s an emerging small press in Puerto Rico. It must have close

to forty poets . . . not that much, but it’s significant. A lot of Nuyorican poets and

nonaffiliated wonderful poets like Frank Lima, disciple of Frank O’Hara; people like that

and general writers from the island from the 70s to the present.

Urayoán Noel

31

FA: Is this going to be a book in English and in Spanish?

UN: Yeah. So that’s another project. I’m also, of course, working on my own

dissertation.

FA: Why don’t we wind down with that? Then I’m going to have you read a brief poem.

So you’re a poet-scholar. You’re getting a PhD; you’re writing a dissertation. How does

your scholarship, if at all, inform your poetry?

UN: I think I view the two of them as connected. Basically I’m a fan; I’m a groupie of

poetry; I’m a fan of it and passionate about it. So I ask myself, “Why do I respond to this

and why I do not respond to that?” And that question leads me to these more theoretical

reflections. It’s based on my own gut reactions to what I feel myself passionately

invested in. I think I’m not necessarily a natural pure scholar; I’m much more sort of a

punk intellectual; I perceive myself that way: writing prologues, writing introductions,

and writing these literary essays I love, like some of these rock critic people like Lester

Bangs. I wrote these passionate, ranting . . .

FA: Tell us the working title of your dissertation, and then I’d like you to read this poem.

UN: Okay. It’s something about NYPR blues, experimentalism, performance and the

articulation of diaspora in Nuyorican poetry.

FA: Cool. Would you close by reading “Death and Taxes?”

UN: Absolutely! This is a sonnet, but I’ll read in a particular funky way.

“Death and Taxes”

The housewives laugh at what they can’t avoid:

In single file, buckling one by one

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Under the weight of the late summer sun,

They drop their bags, they twitch, and are destroyed.

He hears a voice (there is a bust of Freud

Carved on the mountainside). He tucks the gun

Under his rented beard and starts to run.

(“The housewives laugh at what they can’t avoid.”)

Like She-bears fettered to a rusted moon

They crawl across the parking lot and shed

Tearblood. The office park is closing soon.

Night falls. The neighborhood buries its dead

And changes channels—Zap! Ah, the purity

Of death and taxes and Social Security.

FA: Thank you, Urayoán. I’m not sure if we got all that but it’s worth the try, thanks.

UN: My pleasure.

End of interview.