Carlota Caulfield
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Born in Havana, Carlota Caulfield is the author of nine collections of poetry in Spanish and English, among them, 34th Street and other poems (1987), A las puertas del papel con amoroso fuego / At the Paper Gates with Burning Desire (1996 & 2001), The Book of Giulio Camillo (a model for a theater of memory) (2003), Movimientos metálicos para juguetes abandonados (2003), Quincunce/Quincunx (2004), Ticket to Ride: Essays & Poems (2005) and A Mapmaker’s Diary: Selected Poems (White Pine Press, 2007). She is the editor of From the Forbidden Garden: Letters from Alejandra Pizarnik to Antonio Beneyto (2003), Alejandra Pizarnik, Dos Letras (2003), Voces Viajeras: Poetisas cubanas de hoy (2002), The Other Poetry of Barcelona: Spanish and Spanish-American Women Poets (2004), and No soy tu musa: Antología de poetas irlandesas contemporáneas (2008).

Her poems are also anthologized in Looking for Home: Women Writing about Exile (Milkweed Editions, 1990), These are Not Sweet Girls, Poetry by Latin American Women (White Pine Press, 1994), El gran libro de la América judía (Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998), Antología de la poesía cubana: Tomo IV. Siglo XX (Verbum, 2002), Poesía cubana del siglo XX (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), Las poetas de la búsqueda (Libros del Innombrable, 2002), So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2003), Breviario de los sentidos: Poesía erótica escrita por mujeres (Torremozas, 2003), Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2006), El tiempo y las palabras: Literatura y cultura judía latinoamericana contemporánea / Times and the Words: Contemporary Jewish Latin American Literature and Culture (Hostos Review, 2006), and Cuba per se: Cartas de la diáspora (Universal, 2009).

Her work has been included in a number of American, Latin American and Spanish literary journals, including Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry San Francisco, Visions, Beacons, The Texas Review, 580 Split, The Walrus, Sugar Mule, Baquiana, Puerto del Sol, Chasqui, Barcarola, Textos, Aleph, AErea, Tercer Milenio, Walrus, Tsé-Tsé, Nómada, Cuadernos del Matemático, Turia, and Alga.

Her writings also serve as the subject for many essays and two critical texts: Escrituras poéticas de una nación: Dulce María Loynaz, Juana Rosa Pita y Carlota Caulfield (Ediciones Unión, 1999) by Jesús J. Barquet, and Poesía insular de signo infinito (Betania, 2008) by Aimée G. Bolaños.

Awards for her poetry include a 1987 Cintas Fellowship for Poetry, the 1988 Italian International Poetry Prize “Ultimo Novecento,” the 1997 “Latino Poetry” Honorable Mention of the Latin American Writers Institute of New York, and the 2002 First International Hispanoamerican Poetry Prize “Dulce María Loynaz.” Currently, she lives in Berkeley, California. She is professor and head of the Spanish and Spanish American Studies at Mills College, California.

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.

Movimientos metálicos para juguetes abandonados (Metallic Movements for Abandoned Toys) BY Carlota Caulfield (Ed. Gobierno de Canarias / Consejería de Educación, Cultura y Deportes, 2003) The Other Poetry of Barcelona: Spanish and Spanish-American Women Poets EDITED BY Carlota Caulfield AND Jaime D. Parra (Corner, 2004) A Mapmaker's Diary BY Carlota Caulfield TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY Mary G. Berg (White Pine Press, 2007)

In many poems you celebrate the city. You present yourself as a stroller, a flanêuse, someone who rambles through a city. In some of your poems from Movimientos metálicos para juguetes abandonados (Metallic Movements for Abandoned Toys) later included in A Mapmaker’s Diary: Selected Poems, you mingle urban images of ancient cities with contemporary references to cities like London, Barcelona, Rome and Paris, for example. Could you talk about your taste for the ancient past and ruins, as well as for the modern metropolis? Yes, you are right. Images of the city are a constant in my poetry. I am a very urban person, but I have many fantasies about remote and peaceful spaces. I am a persona inquieta / a restless person. A poet in transit. Pascal said that many of our major problems spring from our inability to sit still in a room. Somehow, I agree with him. My soul is a wanderer and probably will never find a place to rest. My life is particularly linked to Havana, Dublin, Zürich, Barcelona, New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, and London. As for the presence of ancient cities, in particular Greek and Roman ones, yes, they are definitely important presences in many of my poems. The city of Rome is fundamental in two poems from my book, Quincunce/Quincux. Rome has many poetic and symbolic-personal references for me. Martial is one of the poetic ones. The book begins with a quote from his Book 10, Epigram 58, in which the poet says: but now the immensity of Rome wears us down When can I ever call a day my own? We are tossed about by the tides of the city, our lives consumed by petty tasks… such affliction is daunting to a poet. The Rome of Martial is for me a symbol of the post-modern city, of the existential restlessness in which I live. The poet is the observer and participant in a world, both odd and fascinating. The Rome of Martial is a city already contaminated by chaos, a chaos similar to our own. In my poetry collection Movimientos metálicos para juguetes abandonados the city of Rome appears represented by “an old Roman home” as a way to compare it to the city where I was born, Havana, majestic even in its tatters, in its ruin. Perhaps “Les cages sont toujours imaginaires,” which is the title of the poem as well as a painting by Max Ernst, is the “central patio” of the whole book. Not so long ago I was the daughter of a strange country, I inhabited walls of scars while I learned that I would never have a true language. […] They are cities whose sounds enter the internal ear and destroy it, produce a beginner’s madness that, closely considered, is very much like the central patio of an old Roman house. […]

The Book of Giulio Camillo
(a model for a theater of memory)
BY Carlota Caulfield
(Eboli Poetry, 2003)

Of your published books, which one is your favorite and why?

I have a very special connection to The Book of Giulio Camillo (a model for a theater of memory). It’s a very personal homage to Giulio Camillo Delminio, one of the most original inventors of the Renaissance. He created a theater into which a single spectator put his head and looked, not at the stage, but at the levels where all the wisdom of the universe was presented in seven times seven doors placed on seven ascending levels. The real actors in this spectacle were wisdom, the planets and mythological beings. Camillo believed that studying his theater offered the possibility of knowing all the corners of the human soul and of arriving at the most recondite areas of the mind.

My poems also carry on a dialogue with the Sefer Yetzirah or Book of Formation, by an anonymous author, which is believed to date from the second century of our era. It is considered the oldest philosophical and metaphysical Hebrew text, and is based on the cabalistic cosmogony. It is a cryptic book of extraordinary lyricism and fantasy. The text is a meditation on the divine creation of the world, taking the the Hebrew Alphabet as its formative element.

My book is divided into seven parts, each one including seven poems of three lines each. They are poems about memory. Recreation, a stroll of my memory-self. Celebration of the tactile. Self-portrait of superimposed personal snapshots with autobiographical touches. Memory, gaze and hand (or hands) are my accomplices in this poetic meditation.

Alchemy and painting interlace and give form to many of your poems. Would you like to talk about this?

As I said before, during childhood, a book on alchemy made an enourmous impact on me. Years later, when I left Havana to live in Zürich, I became an enthusiastic reader of esoteric books. It was also in Havana that my passion for painting began. Although painters such as Boticelli, Fra Angelico, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Bosch and Odilon Redon had fascinated me since adolescence, it was not until through destiny, causality, or random objective, as Hegel would say, I had a revealing and liberating encounter with the works of the Spanish Surrealist painter Remedios Varo (1913-1963).

My Book of the XXXIX steps links alchemy with the work of Varo, who was also interested in the mystic disciplines, hermetic traditions, and cats. The thirty-nine steps or poems which comprise this book are made up of five lines each, and set forth a personal dialogue with different paintings by the artist, that is descriptive, although not always directly. For example, in poem XI, one of my favorites, I take the painting “Encounter” (in which a woman opens a chest and finds her double) and “Caravan” (in which a strange bicycle-castle appears, ridden by a hooded person, while in its interior a young woman with long hair plays the piano) and I mix them with this result:

My book is an homage to the theme of travel: Travels in time, in space, in memory. Mystical travels, fantastic travels. Varo was my bridge to the paintings of the Italian Renaissance Master Antonello da Messina. My other Renaissance inspiration is Leonardo da Vinci. I celebrate the Leonardo who drew pine trees, hands, pillars, birds in flight, flowing water, optical instruments, human muscles and horses. He is the one who makes me want to understand nature. His notes for constructing flying machines and other experiments help me envision him. My poem, “Of aerodynamic forms and navigators’ mirrors,” celebrates the Leonardian inventions. I quote from it:

There are many other painters in my poems, amongst them Parmigianino. Chagall, Tàpies, Riera, Beneyto.

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.

Which poets have the biggest impact on you?

Paul Celan, Georg Trakl, and José Angel Valente.

You wrote your doctoral dissertation about the Spanish poet, José Angel Valente. What do you like in Valente’s poetry?

Indeed, my thesis title is “Entre el alef y la mandorla: Poética, erótica y mística en la obra de José Angel Valente” where I studied Valente’s poetry and essays. He was also an excellent translator of Celan and Trakl.

I love words. My poetic education keeps developing while translating. Translating inspires my writing.

Valente’s writings always surprised me with his meditations on language and his interest in other arts, particularly painting and music, as a way of exploring more directly the nature of poetic creation. He was my bridge to Buddhist philosophy, Spanish and Jewish mysticism, erotic poetry and even silence. I am very interested in music, and in order to understand Valente’s poems, in particular Tres lecciones de tinieblas. I studied, under the guidance of one of my doctoral dissertation advisors, the music of the French baroque composer François Couperin, a key for a better understanding of Valente’s book. The poems took me also to the magnificent music of Tomás Luis de Victoria and Thomas Tallis.

Valente is a difficult poet who demands much of the reader. I like his linguistic force, his risks, his precision. Poetry is sacred, and didn’t Mallarmé say that whatever is sacred, whatever is to remain sacred, must be clothed in Mystery?

Did you translate a selection of his poems into English?

Yes, I did. In the Spring 2004, the Cuban poet Jesús J. Barquet, professor of New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, invited me to collaborate in a dossier dedicated to the Spanish poet. Barquet was aware that Valente has been sparsely translated into English and wanted to assemble a selection to be published in Puerto del Sol, a journal of the English Department of New Mexico State University. Suddenly I found myself facing an enormous task, an extraordinary challenge for an amateur translator like me. The translations were possible thanks to the collaboration of other American translators, including yourself. The dossier — “José Angel Valente (1929-2000): A Selection of His Poetry” — was published in 2005.

Could you talk about other translations that you’ve embarked upon? Is translating an essential aspect of your writing?

I love languages. I love words. My poetic education keeps developing while translating. Translating inspires my writing. Working with you and with Angela McEwan in the translation of my own was the best school for becoming a translator myself. I had some minor experience as a translator before coming to United States. When I was an editor in Havana, for example, I translated a history book from the French, and some articles from English into Spanish. In New York and San Francisco, I did some translations for an advertising company.

Libro de los XXXIX escalones
BY Carlota Caulfield
TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH
BY Angela McEwan
Carpeta de Poesía Luz Bilingüe nº 2
(Luz Bilingual Publishing, Inc.)

My first literary translation was Framment /Fragmentos/Fragments by Luigi Minghetti, published in 1997, in Italy. Agreeing to do the translation was a bold act, but it initiated me into the art of translation. Many of my poetry translations are from English into Spanish, for example, poems by Jack Foley and Cecile Pineda. But I like to take risks, and after acquiring some theoretical expertise, in particular after attending many workshops at the ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) meetings, I wanted to translate more into English as a way of expanding my sense of the language.

I collaborated with Stacy McKenna in the translation from Spanish of Antonio Beneyto’s Còdols in New York. With other translators, I worked on poems by Spanish, Catalan, and Latin American women poets for the anthology The Other Poetry of Barcelona, a bilingual edition. I participated in the translation of “Kodak Ensueño,” the avant-garde poems of the Cuban poet Regino E. Boti, included in the book Kindred Spirits, published in the United Kingdom in 2005.

Recently, I finished translating Beneyto’s Un bárbaro en Barcelona/A Barbarian in Barcelona to be published next year in a bilingual edition.

My last major project was the translation of Irish poetry into Spanish. The bilingual Contemporary Irish Women Poets anthology project began in Stanford, at the 2000 literary festival “Finnegans Awake: A Festival of Irish Writers,” while speaking with the English poet and critic John Goodby. I coedited the book with him. Translating the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Elán Ní Chuilleanáin, Sara Berkeley, Rita Anne Higgins, Paula Meehan, Eavan Boland, Mesbh McGuckian and Catherine Walsh into Spanish was not at all an easy task. It took me almost two years to finish the translations. Some of the poets were very generous with their time and they helped me to solve important translation problems. I need to give also credit to Angela McEwan for helping me to revise the final versions. And to you also for suggesting very valuable solutions in some cases. The anthology was published by Ediciones Torremozas of Madrid in 2007.

While translating, I also began writing poems in response to some I have just translated. They are part of an unpublished manuscript titled Diario Dublinés.

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.

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.