Michael Torres/Christopher Buckley: You have spoken about growing up in the small agricultural towns of the San Joaquin Valley; I believe Fowler was your hometown? Which places do you especially remember and how have they contributed to your vision and voice in poetry? How much does place figure in your work?
Juan Felipe Herrera: Yes, I have mentioned Fowler quite a bit. Part of it has to do with early days in elementary school. Students were called to mention their birthplace on occasion, and I knew no one (I imagined) would know about Fowler, where it was or what it was. Later, I made it a point to put it on the map, at least through my picture books. At another level, the San Joaquín Valley is a highly significant arena — its social movements, its global agricultural core, its people most of all, that is, its migrant generations and immigrants. Not to mention its writers, artists, and social and educational pioneering since the 70’s. It is good to acknowledge people who do not ask for applause yet who merit our full and lasting embraces. Place is always in poetry, be it local, regional, national, global—or, as Levertov said in her essays in Light Up the Cave, “inscape” and “outscape.”
MT/CB: Your parents were farm laborers. How much of an oral tradition did they pass on to you, stories, songs etc. as a child? Looking back, does that seem a likely background for the development of a poet? Those must have been difficult times for the family?
JFH: Yes, it is true. Even though we traveled from one day to the other or from one street to the next, rambling across the San Joaquín, Lake Walefer, Ramona, Escondido, Vista, San Diego, Milpitas, and San Francisco, for starters. Every day was a story-telling day, a singing day, a poetry day, riddles, and sayings and wordplay, a word-ad infinitum day. I lived in a world where language turned as fast as the wheels and horizons gained momentum. Only now do I realize it. I had a Mark Twain Chicano brain early on. Home-spun stories, sayings, songs and remembrances were the foundations that little by little, word by word, became my literary life.
MT/CB: How did you come to poetry and develop as a poet? When did you first begin writing? Who were your models, who were you first reading then? And of course, how did you end up at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?
JFH: Little by little. Every impromptu story my mother performed in the tiny kitchen or “living room” was a lesson, a literary track. My migrant oral lit anthology, so to speak, was the Pancho Villa story, the Leaving Mexico City to the USA a Few Years After the Mexican Revolution story, the Family Women stories (they were brutal), the Young Woman in Juarez stories, and many more. Each of these had the passion of poetry, longing, dreams, fervent remembrance—and different ways of speaking. Of course, the poems my mother happened to learn in her few years of schooling in El Paso, Texas or when she was put in Mexico City’s Venustiano Carranza Orphanage in the early 1900’s (my grandmother was penniless after my grandfather suddenly died at the age of 40).
Iowa? Well, everything that happens to me is by chance. Karmic choices, causes and effects. By the mid 80’s, after graduating from Stanford and working for Poets in the Schools in the Bay Area, I was invited to teach part-time at De Anza Community College. Bang! After a year or so, George Barlow, who taught English there, said, “Hey, Juan, I am leaving for Iowa City, maybe you want to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?” “What is that?” I said. “You go, you write, you sit in a circle and talk about it.” “I can do that!” I said. Not long after that, all of us, Margarita, my wife and kids were on Highway 80 (and my brothers-in-law, along with Barlow and his family), all the way to South Johnson Street. What a magnificent experience. It was the second half of my poetry life, in a sense—the first was one of storytelling, bilingual spoken word, Chicano Movimiento empowerment and community roots. The second word-life was made of caesura, enjambment, stanza work, and power hitters like József, Gombrowicz, Richard Hugo, Wordsworth, Stieglitz, Bishop, O’Keeffe and on. My professors were magnificent—Marvin Bell, Gerald Stern, and Jorie Graham (whom I had seen on the cover of the American Review). Ain’t that superb?
MT/CB: I seem to remember a phone conversation we had a few years after you were out of Iowa, early to mid ‘80s. I was at Murray State University in Kentucky and I believe you were teaching somewhere in Illinois? I think you had a creative writing position—hard to come by then as now—but you said you needed to get away from there. Was it the lack of support for creative writing in the department as often is the case, or was it generally the problem of surviving culturally in an environment not the least simpatico?
JFH: I am thankful to the good people of Southern Illinois University, the English Department specifically. We lived next to the Shawnee Forest, open country, snow, local fish fries and neighborhood Mulligan Stew—you can’t beat that. Even softball games with the faculty! The students were solid, super creative and open to my West Coast experimental Dadaisms. I learned much from them and their lives in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Illinois. The difficulty was from the extreme right-wing vibes that were beginning to show up in the children’s banter. This was not good for our son, Robert, who was in elementary school. This marked the end of our stay. Blessings to all.
MT/CB: When then did you come to Fresno? You contributed a lovely tribute to First Light, the festschrift published for Philip Levine's 85th birthday in which you recalled your first day on campus at Fresno State and Phil being there to welcome you. Talk a bit about that.
JFH: As you know, I was born in Fowler, 10 miles south, inches from the famous I - 99. Of course, just for 29 days, as my mother would tell me. Just enough time for her to almost heal-up from the cesarean surgery and head on to the next crops to be harvested. As a child, on occasion, we would return to visit the Villescas family in Fresno. Little did I know that they were from Mesquite, New Mexico, a small town about 10 minutes south of Las Cruces. After a while, I discovered that most, if not all, first-gen Mexican families are in a state of continuous migration. In 2010, I met two of my sisters (another story to tell), one in her eighties, Sarah Chavez and one in her mid-nineties, Concha Contreras. Concha told me, as she recounted my father’s story, that she had lived and worked in the fields of Fowler. I was bowled over. A bold discovery—Fowler-Fresno comprised a migrant ellipse for my family since the forties.
Fresno rotated back to me in 1990, the year I received my MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—in the form of a letter inviting me to apply for a tenure track Assistant Prof. position in the Chicano and Latin American Studies Program. Beautiful. At the Workshop, Gerald Stern often spoke about his friendship with Phil, their jaunts in Paris and on. Gerry at that time was so magnetic and visceral that, as Phil recounted one day, if you stared at him, he would stare back and “peel the skin off of your face.” To my surprise, the first time I checked into the Chicano Studies office, guess what? Phil was there, his casual self, to receive me. No words, to express this, why would he be there—for me? As we all know, Phil was genuine, caring, warm and also, could knock you out with the plain ol’ truth, in one way or another. From that point on, I cared for him, his work and most of all, his humanity. The tiny, good-hearted readings the poetry students organized in the barrio, in Chinatown, for example, Phil would join in and blast out his solid Pulitzer prize winning poems. That was Phil. This welcoming encounter with Phil made poetry and being a poet more human for me, it was not a “job” or “career,” it was not just “craft,” “meaning,” “voice,” and all that razmataz. It was as Buber would say, “I and thou.”
MT/CB: To what extent were Levine and Peter Everwine resources for you while you were in Fresno? Were they important to you as a poet those years?
JFH: Both were deeply significant for me. I knew we lived together, in a sense, on campus, in Fresno, next door. Believe it or not, being linked in this manner, gives you (and gave me) a foundation of and for a poet’s community, small or large. We wrote, we read out loud, we peeked at each other’s work. We sat in the library, we hauled books and funny fountain pens, we thought about stuff—maybe we didn’t care about many other things. But we cared. We were an akimbo family.
MT/CB: How about the other poets in Fresno during that time? Were Ernesto Trejo, Gary Soto, Jon Veinberg still in town, in the workshops? And what about Luis Omar Salinas—had you known him before you came to Fresno? Did you know his books and which ones were the most inspiring for you? And what about the work of Roberta Spear, Greg Pape, and Larry Levis; did you know their poems? So in general, how did you find the community of poets then, the support and energy and inspiration?
JFH: I know these beautiful poets, except for Pape and Levis, the way poets know each other— on that long road of poetry. Coffee bars, readings, classrooms, state-wide poetry festivals, and on one-on-one occasions. Some I knew for quite a while, others for just a click of time, and others in-between those crazy, social sparks.
1990, maybe 1991 or ’92 I ran into Trejo at Fresno State, at a reading with Li-Young Lee, both serious readers, meticulous, humble, and intense. Ernesto read his “Larynx” poem, short and lethal. Li-Young, as always, leaned into the podium and scalded the mic and our mind, with work from his Rose, perhaps, I don’t remember. Margarita, my wife, after the reading, took time with Li-Young and I with Ernesto. We chatted about Mexico City where he lived (and where my mother was born) and produced his elegant hand-sized chapbook series. Later, I would run into him on those wide streets of the capitol and also, I would bump into Li-Young several momentous times. It hurts when you lose someone close like poets can be, years later, like Ernesto. Those two magnificent writers and thinkers will be torches lighting the way.
MT/CB: In a 2008 interview, you said some of your favorite poets were the Post War Polish poets—Szymborska, Herbert, Celan, and Radnóti. What influences, moves, approaches etc. did those poets suggest for your own work? In which of your books specifically? In other interviews you listed Ginsberg and Lorca as major influences. They seem two very different responses to experience, and two very different voices and energies when compared to the Post War Polish poets, especially Szymborska’s sly use of logic and directness. How have Ginsberg and Lorca then helped you with any of your earlier work, how did they influence or guide, and in which particular poems/books?
JFH: The Post War Polish poetry world as well as Celan and Radnóti, all these earth-shaking voices start with my dear friend, the late Victor Martinez. As you know, he was a student of Phil Levine at Fresno State and a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford where we began our friendship. I noticed that he was deeply immersed in global poetry, in particular poetry that was written with simplicity and a hacksaw and most of all, tangled in the cables of turmoil, resistance and revolution. This was Victor—a deep thinker, reader of literature, philosophy, and the Chinese classics. We happened to live a few rooms from each other at the Bell apartments building on 24th and Capp Street in San Francisco.
When I looked up the authors he mentioned, I was hit by lightning. I loved Celan’s tight, short-line, abstract work, his poem “Radix” is an example. A stiletto opens your mind and you must decide whether to yank it out or caress it. I caressed it. “Resistance” Polish poet and playwright, Różewicz, became my favorite. He was displeased with “ornamental” writing, that is, poetry that floats and dances with devices and does not arise or carry the naked suffering of the people, the Jews face to face with the holocaust, an irrefutable example. The last three lines of his poem, “The Survivor,” presents his case: “at twenty-four / led to slaughter / we survived.” Radnóti suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis. Yet, his scribbled notes were buried with him and survived and were later found. For some reason, I was magnetized by these writers, their experience and their existential choice to write this thing called poetry. Szymborska’s use of symbols without deviating from the horrors of the times attracted me. Her work was akin to my sense of how to say things.
It even was surprisingly knitted to my beginnings with Lorca and Ginsberg, mostly Lorca. In the late sixties, ambling on the main line of the Mission District, I discovered the only Latinx bookstore available at that time, Librería National. And guess what, I stumbled into that textured burgundy leatherish cover of Lorca’s Obras Completas, all he had written. A few years earlier, in ‘66 or so, at the San Diego Public library on “E” Street, I had picked up his Gypsy Ballads. With Lorca, it was his “green-moon” pallet, his dream-brush, his shifting registers and feverish styles, his drawings, his varied genres, his subjects and his relationships to Dalí, Buñuel and the various artists of Spain and—his formal manner.
If you lived in the Bay Area in the 60’s, you would eventually read Alan Ginsberg, hear him read or feel his grooves in the voices of the new wild writers. In my case, all three possibilities were true. His daring, his dedicated freedom, his deep agonies, his intelligence, his “plain-talk” poems, Beatnik pioneering, Buddhist boldness and why not, his titles and phrasing, thick imagistic concatenations, his knowledge of Jewish history, literature and thought and notions of breath, mind and line. All this and much more took me into what poetry and poetry life can contain. Being gay without fear, being a human being without apologies, contesting tidal waves of power day in, day out—my kinda dude. In terms of my books, many of them have busted chromosomes and fragments of their mind DNA. Ginsberg and Post War Polish Poetry strands —in particular, the sutras, in Chile Verde Smuggler and the manifestos here and there. Simplicity and writing power are key for a poem on the verge of being read and remembered by the people. And there are new ways too. Lorca and Ginsberg seem different, yet, they are true cousins of fury and love.
MT/CB: In 2015 the Univ. of Arizona Press published Half the World in Light: New & Selected Poems, a substantial and impressive collection. The poems that stuck with me the most, made the largest impression were the “New” poems, many about your parents, poems dealing directly with “la vida,” poems I think much closer in voice and vision to someone like Szymborska or Herbert than some of your other poems that you have described as being “open” or “sculpted.” A poem such as “19 Pokrovskaya Street” is a poem that is a good example. The deep humanity of those poems makes them weigh more heavily with me. How do you decide then on subject, form, strategy? Is voice dependent on vision for you? How important is memory?
JFH: Splish, splash, I go onto the page, without knowing what I am going to write and on and on until the poem is finished. Usually, two drafts. I used to ask myself “What’s the first thing that drives into a poem?” The title, yes, the first line, yes — but, what is under and above and through the entire moment? The feeling. It sounds a bit old-schoolish, and romantic. Think about it. If we overthink the poem, it will wilt. If we prepare a stimulating hybrid plan, maybe. Without the mind viscera at play, we might as well forget it. Let the inspiration-feeling-blood-beat lead you as you jump out of bed and dash to the nearest scrap of paper and write whatever it wants to be.
MT/CB: Also re. Half the World in Light, I remember the first time flipping through and landing on, or perhaps being drawn to poems from Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler. There’s something I find particularly fascinating about the epistolary poems in that section. Maybe it’s the fact that the form can be one-part welcoming (I assign students to write letters-to poems) and another part gut-wrenching. Those poems demand a lot of vulnerability of the speaker. I’m rereading the “Undelivered Letters to Victor” series, wondering why the epistolary form for what you had to say here?
JFH: Letters, what else is there? They flow. They are personal. They give you room to lay on the wide floor of thought, syntax, idiom, ideas, discussion, secrets, whispers, shouts, dreams, and raps. In this case, with Victor, who was always open to digging deep into whatever occurred to me, would “listen”—I wanted his “listening,” I needed it. Yes, you do have to be vulnerable, or it is not a letter. But you don’t think about that while you are writing, you just write a “letter.” How did I get to the letter form, you ask? Having had many discussions with Victor and Francisco X. Alarcón who was mad about Julio Cortázar, sooner or later you would end up writing an epistolary poem. With Cortázar’s novel, Hopscotch (Rayuela), the universe cracks open for the poet and the novelist. Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, will mess you up and turn you into a writhing new kind of poet—we forget we live in an “American” writing culture, it is good to notice hemispheric and world writers, what they say and how they say it.
MT/CB: Lately, I’ve been thinking about the capaciousness of a poem. I ask my poems “What can you hold for me?” Which is another way of admitting I cannot hold everything myself. The facts of the sacrifices my family made for me. The things that happen in a life that we try to concretize in poems. I’m wondering if you thought/think about why poetry? I found myself agreeing with poems like “The Glue Under.” I see the speaker struggling with what a poem can hold “This is not a lyric as they say in the Nomenclature. / This is not a manifesto, as they said in Rodchenko’s Moscow, it is / not even a dream or a poem anymore . . . ” In “Enter the Void” it’s the lines “I had written this somewhere, in a workshop, I think, / yes, it was an afternoon of dark poets with leaves, coffee . . . ” Your speaker seems to step out of the moment without stepping out of the poem to call the reader’s attention. I keep wondering if you think about a poem’s capacity, and if so, what is a poem’s capacity?
JFH: As much as the poem wants to hold is the answer—as long as you do not break the “consciousness” of the poem. Artificiality in the poem’s own terms will not work. This is one of many ways to consider the poem. “Too much is possible,” think about Ginsberg’s’ “Kaddish,'' or Antin’s “conversation” poems or Artaud’s ritual, seizer poetry. And it can also be deadly when your poem turns into page talk. So many cool ways to lose yourself and fail and that is what poetry is also made of—inside that most “accomplished” poem, there are beautiful trash-basket shreds.
MT/CB: I am thinking now of two conversations we had on two separate occasions when I was an undergrad at UCR. 1. When I decided to move away from CA for grad school in Minnesota, you said, “It’s okay, we’re everywhere.” I was nervous to leave home/family/the neighborhood for a part of the country I knew so little about. And “We’re everywhere” meant Mexicans and Mexican Americans, meaning to reassure my decision to move. 2. Another thing you told me was: “A poem isn’t an image, it’s a piñata exploding.” Both these instances parallel each other, at least to me, in how they exemplify a type of reaching. I was reaching for familiarity in this strange situation of moving to another state. The bursting piñata AKA the poem is another type of reaching, of trying to communicate something to the reader.
Your poem “I Forget the Date” in The Five Elements makes me think of a kind of reaching. The speaker begins, listing: “ . . . soda on a tray // Women at the counter, mexicanas . . .” then moves across lands “Hidalgo // Texas // Sonora // Zacatecas // Chihuahua . . . ” before happening upon (or reaching) memory: “I think of my father, for a moment— / I see him again, robust, alone, walks to the park…” From there the poem expands and contracts, settling finally on song the speaker hears “in the distance,” the end of which brings us to the poem’s final lines: “why am I the only one / singin’ this desolation song?” These lines seem to be reaching if not for home then a yearning that home-ness might solve. Could you talk about writing about family and home?
JFH: Wish I could do that—most of what I write is inside my head, in some trapezoid of acrylic societies and simulacrums in loaded velocities. Sometimes I talk about my family, in short poems, or painterly prose and in children’s picture books—one of my favorite places to write. With “family” and “home” poems, there’s nothing to hold on to—more than subtlety or poetic plain talk, or both, it will involve meditation, sincerity, respect and love. I look forward to it. As a matter of fact, this morning I thought about writing a short album of poems, the 50’s-90’s, the jaunts of my uncles and aunts in California after their grueling journeys from Mexico City and from the Juárez, Chihuahua / El Paso, Texas borders.
MT/CB: Talk a little about your subjects—do they find you, or are you focused especially on social and community issues? Do you still write poems about “writing”? And do you see a shift generally in subject for your poems between your early work and your more mature work?
JFH: My subjects always find me. It is more about how they find me. With a line, a few words, a set of images or what comes right after a moment of empty-seeing. That is, if you scour the debris in your mind and let your clear consciousness go out there into the ethers, like an upwards fish line, it will catch you, for a millisecond. That is when you have to be micro-alert and take the insight to the table. For example, Buber’s notion of “sources” of knowledge. Recently, I found that to be an incredible finding, in terms of a people’s way of having a metaphysical, philosophical, and historical foundation for being, for who they are, a deep core of self. Now, for the poet in these times, for the various social groups in this nation and globally, we need to ask, what are our “sources?” Or have we been suctioned by the “absurd,” as Miłosz has written in The Captive Mind, that is, by materialism and militarism, by a rootless artifice, a dimensionless nationalism? So we float in this oppressive flatness. Buber and Miłosz hit a chord for me.
MT/CB: In a 2017 interview with Donald Munro for The Fresno Bee, you recalled “I remember in 1955 playing in the fountains in downtown Fresno. My father and mother and me, just passing through, and splashing around in the fountains. It was extremely hot. My parents working here in this area as farm workers, and my mother picking peaches—early cycles of my life. This is a big cycle, coming back, as I’m finishing up my laureate, I’m finishing the big journey of the story of my family and the story of many families.”
And I remember that you have kept a house in Fresno for many years now, even when living or working elsewhere. For instance while we were colleagues at UC Riverside you still had a home in Fresno, and since you have retired you have lived there. How important then is Fresno to your writing, how much of a source is it, how much inspiration and seat of voice and vision?
JFH: Fresno has opened for me like a Lotus flower. I say thank you to this city. Thank you to its students, Fresno State, all the colleges and schools, teachers and children. I bow before its peoples. I say gracias to the land, lakes, mountains, to its plants, animals, and trees — to all its workers, immigrants and migrants, its generations across many borders. How hard they have worked and continue to labor for all of us. My parents, brothers, and sisters were among them, since the 40’s. It takes time to realize who you are and what you are made of— I am beginning to see this now. All this finds its place in one way or another in my writing. It will be endless. It is life. My life and all of our lives. Thanks Chris and Michael, for your work, how you take time to put us all onto the page. And gracias for this digging-deep interview.
Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, California in 1948. The son of migrant farmers, Herrera moved often, living in trailers or tents along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California. Herrera received a BA in Social Anthropology from UCLA, a master’s in social Anthropology from Stanford in 1980, and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1990.
Herrera is the author of many collections of poetry, including Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights, 2015); Senegal Taxi (University of Arizona Press, 2013); Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008), a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971–2007 (City Lights, 2007). Herrera was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems.
Herrera has received fellowships and grants from the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Stanford Chicano Fellows Program, and the University of California at Berkeley. In 2015, he received the L.A. Times Book Prize's Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. In 2012, he was appointed California Poet Laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown. In 2011, Herrera was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2015, Herrera was named Poet Laureate of the United States.
Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His first, full-length collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series and will be published by Beacon Press in 2020. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Water~Stone Review, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and online as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week, among others. A VONA alum, Torres’s honors include awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center. Currently he’s an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Visit him at: michaeltorreswriter.com Instagram: @michaelpolodot01 Twitter: @torresremek
Christopher Buckley’s recent books are STAR JOURNAL: SELECTED POEMS, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press; The Far Republics, winner of the Vern Rutsala Prize, Cloudbank books, 2017; CHAOS THEORY from Plume Editions, and CLOUD MEMOIR: SELECTED LONGER POEMS from Stephen F. Austin State University Press. AGNOSTIC is published by Lynx House Press, 2019.
Among several critical collections and anthologies he has edited: A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis, 2004, with Alexander Long; Homage to Vallejo, Greenhouse Review Press, 2006; and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, with Gary Young, 2008.
With David Oliveira and M.L. Williams he is editor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets, 2001, and he has edited On the Poetry of Philip Levine: Stranger to Nothing, Univ. of Michigan Press 1991, and FIRST LIGHT: A Festschrift for Philip Levine on his 85th Birthday, 2013. With Jon Veinberg, he edited Messenger to the Stars: A Luis Omar Salinas New and Selected Poems & Reader, in 2014.
THE LONG EMBRACE: 21 CONTEMPORARY POETS ON THE LONG POEMS OF PHILIP LEVINE is forthcoming from Lynx House Press, 2020.
Photo by Simon Foot on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND