Interview with Martin Espada

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Martin Espada is a poet and English professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His eighth collection of poems, The Republic of Poetry, was published last October. He is, in the words of writer Sandra Cisneros, “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors.” He talks here with poet E. Ethelbert Miller. You can read his poem "Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits" here .

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E. Ethelbert Miller: You mentioned in a interview (Bloomsbury Review, Sept.-Oct. 2006) that there are many Nerudas. Which one is the most important to you? Why?

Martin Espada: There are, indeed, many Nerudas: the love poet, the surrealist poet, the poet of the sea, the poet of everyday things, the political poet, the poet of the historical epic. Certainly, the last two Nerudas matter most to me. There are several reasons. Neruda demonstrates the ways in which we can channel anger into art. In his first book of political poetry Spain in the Heart, about the Spanish Civil War, there are poems of artful anger like “I Explain a Few Things” and “General Franco in Hell,” works of intense fury that are also grounded in the image, in particulars. Neruda also articulates the role of the poet as advocate, speaking on behalf of others who will never have the opportunity to speak for themselves. We see this in Canto XII of “Heights of Macchu Picchu,” where he addresses centuries of dead laborers and says: “I come to speak for your dead mouths.”

Without the example set by Neruda in Canto General, his epic history of Latin America in verse, I never would have written historical poems about Puerto Rico such as “Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands,” about the Ponce Massacre in 1937, or “Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies,” an elegy for the poet Clemente Soto Velez, my friend and mentor, which is also a history of the independence movement in Puerto Rico against both Spain and the United States. This Neruda enables me to see myself as part of a great tradition, which goes back to Whitman and encompasses other influences of mine, from Langston Hughes to Allen Ginsberg.

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http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4125