Irish literature and culture are a recurrent presence in your work. When did this passion arise?

Maybe in New York, I’m not sure when it began. Later on, in San Francisco, in the mid-eighties, my Irishness bloomed. I became an avid reader of everything related to Irish culture, history and literature, and I made many friends in the Irish community. This passion was just born one day, listening to Irish music. I went back to Ireland, looking for traces of my family. Genealogy has taught me a lot about who I am. Celtic culture is extraordinary and keeps fascinating me. In particular ancient Celtic philosophy and mysticism.

Your paternal grandfather appears frequently in your writings. Why does your grandfather fascinate you?

My grandfather Edward Henry Caulfield de Pons was a very exceptional person. He was an eccentric and an ardent Francophile who spent some of the best years of his professional life as a merchant and lawyer in Paris. There are some poems in my book Movimientos metálicos para juguetes abandonados where I mention my visit to his home at rue de la Messine in Paris.

There were many family silences about him. He was somehow a rebel with an extraordinary love of poetry, good music, and good company. He was apparently a very fine fiddle player. I read some of his letters to my grandmother and also inherited a document that gives some light into his life. He has been a mythical figure to me and a source of inspirations. Sometime I think that I am very much like him.

Unfortunately, I left behind in Havana some valuable family memorabilia which is now lost.

May I ask you to talk about At the Paper Gates with Burning Desire, one of your most quoted books?

At the Paper Gates
with Burning Desire
BY Carlota Caulfield
(Eboli Poetry, 2001)

At the Paper Gates with Burning Desire is a book inspired in part by Ovid’s Heroides. One of my favorite books of all time is Ovid’s The Art of Love. If you remember, in this book the poet recommends reading Anacronte, Sappho, Menandro, Propertius, Tibulo, Virgil and other classic poets. I think he also urges “students” to read his Loves and Heroidas, especially because the latter book is a new genre of which he considers himself the inventor (Ignotum hoc aliis ille novavit opus). Well, Ovid, contrary to other poets (you have the case of Propertius who speaks of his poetic debt to Callimachus) does not declare himself the heir to any other poet in the creation of his Heroides. And it is true, since although there were Latin elegies, like those of Propertius, which speak of the poet as above all a lover, what Ovid does in his Heroides epistolae is totally revolutionary. Ovid explores the details of his famous heroines (Medea, Ariadne, Phaedra…) and transforms them into modern lovers, expert in the art of rhetoric, with very definite personalities that differ from each other. I am a modern disciple of Ovid, and it is to him that I owe the inspiration for my poetry collection. As in his Heroides, my poems have the echo of the famous odi et amo of Catullus (another of my teachers). My heroines, like Ovid’s Phaedra, speak of writing as a passion that supercedes all taboos, all modesty, achieving what oral discourse makes impossible. The book begins with a verse from Sappho which says, “the tongue is silenced while the hand writes.” The collection consists of thirty-seven letters written by known and unknown women. There is a kind of “absurd tragedy” in them, which I very much enjoy, since love is precisely that.

I am especially interested in lyrical masquerades. I am definitely a believer in the multi-faceted subject, in spite of not being a Gemini, but a Capricorn.

My poetry collection Oscuridad divina (Divine Darkness) is another masquerade game. It is a book from 1985, the date I initiated the “I am others.” In this book the protagonists are goddesses from universal mythology, many of them relatively unknown.

In my prologue to A Mapmaker’s Diary I wrote “Carlota Caulfield might be defined as a verbal acrobat, a juggler of words and images, a magician of memory.” How do you see yourself as a poet?

As an apprentice exploring different fields of knowledge. I don’t limit my writing to just the field of literature, but also make use of philosophy, occult sciences, visual arts, and music. My poetry is a chorus of many voices and a skin with many tattoos. With different registers my poetry celebrates many gestures. Another aspect of my poetry is experimentalism. It is one of the hallmarks of avant-garde poetry which continues to exist in contemporary writing. I am passionate about the avant-garde, both European as well as Hispano-American. Different critics have called my poetry confessional, postmodern, and surrealist. I am fascinated by some of the surrealist love poems written by French authors. Unfortunately, I don’t always write surrealist poetry.