You published your first book in San Francisco and had a very active literary life in the city. Could you talk about those years?

We are talking here of the mid-eighties. My book 34th Street and other poems was published in San Francisco. The book takes place partly in the same space as much of the Cuban poetry of the diaspora, in terms of the theme of nostalgia. It is a book dedicated to my mother and is a poetic narration of many of my experiences in the city of New York. Not with the wrenching pain we find in the work of other Hispanic poets in New York. I think about Lorca and Magali Alabau, for example. My poetry is critical yet presents a harmonious gaze of a poetic persona on a voyage of discovery and remembrance of childhood. New York enriched me culturally.

34th Street and Other Poems
BY Carlota Caulfield
(Ediciones el Gato Tuerto, 1987)

In San Francisco, I became very involved with the literary community of the Bay Area. On two occasions, I worked with the poet Herman Berlandt as a volunteer in the organization of National Poetry Week in Fort Mason. I met many Bay Area poets, amongst them Jack Foley, who would play a major role in my development as a writer. It was in San Francisco that I began publishing and giving poetry readings. The San Francisco of those years was a great scene. I edited an international literary gazette, and organized many gatherings of artists, writers and performers.

I left San Francisco in 1988 to study for my Ph.D. at Tulane University, New Orleans. When I returned to the Bay Area in 1992, I moved to Oakland and became closer to musicians than to poets. The literary climate of the Bay Area in the nineties was somehow different. I returned to the Bay Area to teach at Mills College, and also began spending a lot of time traveling to Mexico, Spain, Italy, Ireland, and England, and I felt detached from the cultural life in California. During those years some of my most memorable reading experiences took place in Italy and Spain.

Does your experience as an editor date back to Havana where you worked at the Social Sciences Publishing House?

Yes, I edited many books on philosophy and history while working at the Social Sciences Publishing House. I really was a devoted editor constantly facing many challenges. I was responsible for many critical editions. Amongst them works by Montesquieu, Rosa Luxemburg and The Utopian Socialists (Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Comte, Fourier, Flora Tristán, amongst others). Therefore, when I began publishing the literary gazette El gato tuerto (The one-eyed cat) in San Francisco, I had some editorial experience behind me. Later on, in the nineties, I edited the online review Corner dedicated to the avant-garde.

What are some of the works that you think were most influential in your literary education?

This is a hard question. Since childhood I’ve been a voracious reader of poetry and fiction. In my adolescence, my three favorite poets were Heine, Hölderlin and Rilke. I studied German to read their works. But essentially, French literature was my favorite. I remember quite well my joy at discovering Stendhal, for example. Later on Balzac and Proust. Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud. I read Russian literature, in particular Dostoyevsky. I read Mayakovsky. I read Essenin and Blok. In a sort of pirate edition, I devoured Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a book that was prohibited in Cuba during those years. I discovered Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam, but it was not until I moved to San Francisco that I really read them thoroughly.

Carlota Caulfield
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

I knew more about Spanish Golden Age poets and playwrights than about Cuban or Latin American writers. It was not until I was in Zürich, and thanks to a Swiss friend that I began reading Latin American fiction and contemporary Spanish poetry, with the exception of poets like Antonio Machado, Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda that I had been reading since adolescence. Growing up, I was more interested in the French and Russian authors than in the Hispanic ones. English literature was a sort of mysterious land to me, in spite of my love for Shakespeare’s plays. At home there were some books of Irish ballads and love poems, but I don’t remember reading them. Now it seems to me impossible, because in my late twenties I was hungry for Irish history and literature.

I did not know many American writers except for Henry Miller, Carson McCullers, and Edgar Allan Poe, my ideal writer for many years. In Zürich, Saul Bellow became my favorite writer. Some friends exposed me to the writings of the Swiss Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Later on, in New York and San Francisco, I began voraciously reading the works of Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Anaïs Nin, J.D. Salinger, Saul Below, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, William Styron, H.D., e.e. cummings, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Erica Jong, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mina Loy, Robert Frost, and Robert Bly. At the same time, I read Latin American poetry, and discovered the incredible works of Alfonsina Storni, Octavio Paz, Jacobo Fijman, Rosario Castellanos, Julia de Burgos, and Alejandra Pizarnik.