You were, in the nineties, without any doubt, one of the first or maybe the first Hispanic poet to publish an electronic poetry book. Your Visual Games for Words and Sounds: Hyperpoems for the Mac is a curiosity.

The concept of total hypertext establishes that there is a unique corpus of literature and that all we see is partial aspects of this whole. Actually, I have drawn from a variety of sources and I created a kind of collage. Someone wrote in regard to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake that the reader should be carried along on the torturous river of multiple meanings without trying to understand it all. Well, perhaps the “torturous” is not applicable to my book, but the rest is.

In my Visual Games I “travel” through different themes and experiences which are very related to my life. For example, the principal theme of these poems is the concept of exile. I establish a dialogue with texts from the Kabbalah and the Zohar. That experimental book was intended as an homage to the international avant-garde and to mysticism. There are poems in a DADA style that play with Buddhist ideas, references to medieval Spanish literature, and to Joyce. In them the composers John Cage and Alvin Curran are important presences. There are poems in English, German, Spanish and Italian. The poems also pay homage to modern dance. So I traveled through different themes and experiences which are very related to my life. It was great fun to create those visual games, but now they are part of the past. It is impossible to see them on the new computers. Perhaps we could talk of ephemeral computer art, in that my collaged poems are a typical product of our time, where everything suffers from a condition of rapid disappearance.

As a poet, how do you nourish the growth of your interior world?

Mostly by reading, by listening to music, by traveling, by falling in love with the impossible.

Where do you actually do most of your writing?

Usually in Berkeley. I need to be near my books and my cat. Another place where I can write is at my home in New Mexico.

Can you tell us about your collaboration with other artists, painters and musicians?

I love to collaborate with other artists. My experience is essentially with painters. Recently, I worked with the young Catalan director, Ona Vega Passola, in making the documentary Lligams. Nexus, Ties, Bonds, about the life and work of the Catalan painter Carme Riera. My newest collaborations are with composers. I have a number of projects going on simultaneously and somehow they feed each other.

We are collaborating in the translation into English of your collection Cuaderno Neumeister. You are a poet interested in writing that is interdisciplinary in nature. Would you please talk about this new book?

I studied music for many years. Although I don’t play any instrument any more, the passion for music has stayed with me. In Cuaderno Neumeister, music and particularly jazz is crucial throughout the book. I wanted to write some poems that convey the impression that the music of the American trombonist and composer Ed Neumeister produced on me. I went to one of his concerts at the Berkeley Jazz School and his playing took my breath away. Many of the poems meditate upon this impression. But the collection also includes other poems about music and homages to writers like Samuel Beckett. There is a poem inspired by Henri Michaux and another by W.B. Yeats. I also include the prose poems Flashes (Après Reverdy), from which a selection was recently published in Cerise Press. Cuaderno Neumeister is written in a free-verse style, with narrative poems that use visual imagery.

Currently, I am writing a collection of good-humored vignettes and stories about umbrellas, shoes, and lingerie. This is a book filled with humor, eroticism, and perfume.