You’ve said that you felt you wanted to be a poet since you were a child. At that time, what did being a poet mean to you?

My passion for poetry began when I was seven years old. Since that age, I always wrote. I have never wanted to be anything other than a writer. I spent many hours of my childhood playing in my parents’cosmetics laboratory in Havana. My father was an industrial chemist, and my mother a perfumer, an artist who invented very distinctive scents. In that laboratory, I had complete freedom, as long as I did not go near the enormous metal cauldrons in which my mother mixed the ingredients of her perfumes, I wrote my first words. There also my love for reading was born. An illustrated history of alchemy, from my parents’ small library, became one of my favorite books. I had many wonderful pop-up books from Spain and the USA. They were very original. Maybe they provoked my taste for the visual arts. I owe my love for words to an illustrated Larousse dictionary.

From my Catalan paternal grandmother I inherited many poetry books and a love for art. From my mother, a realistic way of looking at life, a love for perfumes, and a sense of internal rhythm. From my father and paternal grandfather, I inherited my passions for music, travel, and my restless spirit.

I’ve never known exactly what it means to be a “poet”, but I’m very flattered to be called one. In childhood, I associated the word poet with magic and supernatural powers. Later on, in my adolescence, under the influence of Romanticism and the poètes maudits, with loneliness and death. I have been spending my life, obsessively, looking for words, enjoying the creative act of using language. That’s what makes me a poet.

I am, if we can say it, an autodidact poet. Poetry found me one day while I was playing with bottles caps at my parents’ laboratory. In my family, the word poet was somehow foreign. With the exception of the Irish poet Thomas Caulfield Irwin, a very distant relative of my grandfather, there were no writers in my family, just antiquarians, merchants, chemists, lawyers, perfumers, musicians, and farmers. Who wanted a poet in the family?

I have always said that my Afro-Cuban Nanny Blasa was the one that planted the poetic seed in me. She used to sing to me very poetic lullabies. From my Catalan paternal grandmother I inherited many poetry books and a love for art. From my mother, a realistic way of looking at life, a love for perfumes, and a sense of internal rhythm. From my father and paternal grandfather, I inherited my passions for music, travel, and my restless spirit.

Many of your poems are about the theme of memory. When you think back today on your life as a child, which images are still vivid?

Carlota Caulfield
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

What I remember best about my childhood and adolescence is staying in my room reading and daydreaming while, in particular my mother, kept asking, “Why don’t you go outside and play? Why don’t you go to the park and ride your bicycle?” I played with other children and adored to ride my bycicle, but reading and taking city walks with my father were my favorite activities. I was essentially a solitary child.

I was barely seven years old when my parents discovered that I was a moonlight sleepwalker. I would escape from the house after midnight, and walk the empty Havana Streets near our home, not far from the sea. Thanks to the stories that my mother told me, I can press the buttons of my memory now and I rew/play/ff/pause/still and stop. I can picture myself barefoot, wearing my pajamas and opening the main door of the house. References to sleepwalking children appear frequently in my poetry.

Memories come to me in the most amazing ways. Some of them appear in my poems as allusions, other ones are direct references, in particular in my first poems. I have very vivid images of many summers I spent with my family in the town of San Miguel de los Baños, not far from Varadero Beach. My father went there for the mineral-medicinal waters. I liked being there to ride my horse Mariposa and to experience a freedom that I did not have in the city. I think than those trips were crucial in my formation as a poet, even though I always prefer cities.