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Morton Marcus: Evening everybody, this is Mort Marcus and this is the Poetry Show. And tonight a very, very special interview that I did with Ray Gonzalez, the poet, essayist, and editor who was born in El Paso, Texas, is the author of,

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"Memory Fever," "The Heat of Arrivals," and most recently, "Turtle Pictures," as well as five other books of poems. Ray Gonzales is the editor of twelve anthologies, "Muy Macho: Latino Men Confront Their Manhood," and "Touching Fire: Fifteen Poets of

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the Latino Renaissance," among them. He has been the poetry editor of the Bloomsbury Review for seventeen years, and has started two years ago his new journal, Luna. He's won an amazing amount of awards, all of them are richly deserved. I

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think he's one of the most exciting poets in America today. He was on the West Coast, we had a chance to talk to him. He'll be back giving readings in the Santa Cruz area in April. Before we go to the the interview, let me just read this, because I

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think it really describes what Ray is doing: "Ray Gonzalez has forged a new Chicano Manifesto, a cultural memoir that traces both his personal journey and the communal journey that Mexican Americans have traveled throughout the century across

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this land." I think he's much more, I think he represents all of us with a new and exciting verbal vision, let's go to this interview which I was lucky enough to do with Maria Garcia Tabor.

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Hello, this is Mort Marcus and we are here with Ray Gonzalez and Maria Garcia Tabor. And we're going to talk to Ray Gonzalez, a wonderful poem from- poet from El Paso, Texas who has lived around the country and now finds himself at the University

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of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. Ray, welcome to Santa Cruz and the Poetry Show on KUSP. Ray Gonzalez: Thank you for having me here. It's been a great visit to California.

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Morton Marcus: Well, I have been excited by your work for some time and have been introduced since you've been here to your latest book, "Turtle Pictures," and I just think it is a marvelous, mesmerizing poetic experience. Tell us a little bit

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about yourself. You are mostly characterized as a Chicano poet, what do you think that word really means in your case? Ray Gonzalez: Well, I think I've talked to a number of poets who are both Chicano and, you know, from outside the culture. For

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many people, it's been a political slogan or label from the 60s and 70s, but I think for a writer like myself, it really means that I was influenced from a lot of the political events that happened during that time twenty-five, thirty years ago.

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But for me, it also means that as a poet I continue to carry that experience, and the traditions of my family, and the area where I grew up on the US Mexican border into some contemporary view that both incorporates my past and my

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experience in the present, and through poetry capturing that spontaneous moment that creates a point, but also being able to bring the past into that spontaneity. Morton Marcus: And the past in your case is very much the

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Yaqui-Indian past, the Native American past of the desert of the Southwest. Ray Gonzalez: It is on my grandmother's side, on my father's side is a different story, more of the European,

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Spanish dominant side. But, you know, as a poet, I continued to write about the desert landscape and have been gone there now for over twenty years. But each time I go back, I find something new and continue to uncover the history of my family, the

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history of the desert, all the changes that continue to happen and appear in the media all the time about that very unusual and dynamic part of the country. Morton Marcus: Just one more thing, do you feel that the

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culture, your culture, has been swallowed in this homogenizing melting pot of overall American culture, whatever that may be? Ray Gonzalez: In certain ways, I think it has, specifically with poets and poetry and the struggle to find a larger

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audience. I think many groups of poets regardless of what they write about or where they come from, really have to work together to find that larger audience, and that could be through readings, through publishing journals, through

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getting more books of poetry out there. But at the same time while you're doing there one reality is that there are many fragmented segments of American poetry, so when I keep writing and talking about the past, I think it's important to bring

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the history of your family and the history of the language that you choose to place into your poems in order to be a part of the larger American poetry scene, but also to never lose sight of where you came from.

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Morton Marcus: Yeah, that's- and as many of the listeners know, this is one of the great themes of what I'm always talking about about poetry. I said that Maria Garcia Tabor is with us. She is a poet, but she has also been writing articles about Ray and

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has hosted his visit here. Maria, you're going to join us on this interview so why don't you get a question in here for Ray? Maria Garcia Tabor: Well, I think that it's important to

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Ray Gonzalez: Well, I think for a poet it has to do with, as I note, particularly when we're studying Chicano writers, that w seem to say, or students wil say, "Oh, this is how the said a minute ago, going with a spontaneous moment, the mystery

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e people live." And yet if we re studying Faulkner, we h ar people say, "Oh, this man re lly details the human experie ce." What I find in Ray's poet y is that there's this mythos th t is about at one point the individual's journ

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y in isolation, and yet, the t emes speak to this collective v ice. I'm thinking here of, "C bato Sentora," the latest colle tion of poems. I'm wondering i you could try to articulate this idea of the individual and this link to the c

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of creating a poem, that it also has to do with images that reoccur constantly in a poem and specifically with mine, the desert Southwest. It's almost like you have to go into, not in a mysterious way, but into some kind of literary or linguistic

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trance to draw the past forward. And once you do that, and let go to the language, the imagery, the emotion, and the poem, before you know it, yes, you have your poem, but also, you have created something that other readers, other writers are

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going to relate to, and thus y u make the connection to th t communal voic Morton Marcus: You know, I do have a personal poem that illustrates this, I don't know if you want to do this, but on

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the bottom of page five of "Turtle Pictures," and continuing on to the next page- And if could you read us at least some of how you do this, which is, it seems to me, and this is not as we will certainly hear the way most of Ray's

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poetry goes, but he induces this trance by writing down one line, and then taking rhythmically off that line since it is continued almost like, well, in many ways an African American Baptist Church service. It takes them into a series of fragmented

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images, but they are so full of implication and meaning not only for Hispanics in this country, but for everyone in this country, and I think every other country, that it really works beautifully. And I wonder if you'd read some of that for the

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audience to just see how this works. Ray Gonzalez: Okay, and again, the chief recurring image is the river and that's a reference of course, to the Rio Grande River- Morton Marcus: And the River of Life.

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Ray Gonzalez: And the River of Life and the river of poetry and really the domination of that landscape, that flowing river which is the border, and continues to create, you know, those poems for me.

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Morton Marcus: And border is so much a part of one world and another, not just in a political, social sense, but in a spiritual, poetic sense as well. And this is continually operating in your poetry, the idea of border, the idea of

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limits and the limitations that you have in trying to get over them. Ray Gonzalez: This is from TURTLE PICTURES: All I saw was the river. The brown faces coming out of the

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water. All I saw was the river. My father standing on the other side. All I saw was the river. The mountains slapping the sun without a place to hide. All I saw was the river. My mother's hands dripping mud, trying to hold up the walls. All I saw was

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the river. Young boys running to take over the bridge. All I saw was the river. Young girls opening their legs to change the course and the tide. All I saw was the river. The brujo stealing the moon and giving it to me to lick and bite. All I

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saw was the river. Voices calling me to go north and hide. All I saw was the river. Cesar Chavez not wanting anyone to make a movie of his life. All I saw was the river. Allen Ginsberg taking forever to get to the other side. All I saw was

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the river. My grandfather wanting more years to drink. All I saw was the river. Pancho Villa's horses galloping and exploding in the streets. All I saw was the river. My father's mother dying when he was five years old. All I saw was the

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river. I thought I was gone but the mud kept my shoes. And it's a longer poem, and the reason I paused there in that line is that somebody pointed out the other day some recurring image of shoes, and then on a recent cover of my- of the

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reprint of my book of essays, there's a photograph of a bare foot and so I told him, yes, the shoes are gone and here's the bare foot. Maybe the image of crossing that river, all I saw was the river, but the idea of shoes is almost like the

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struggle for many people on the border in the desert. The struggle almost like the metaphor for walking, and walking until your barriers, your shoes have totally disintegrated, and there's your bare foot and you're still

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walking across the desert and going with the tide of history and culture and writing your poems. Morton Marcus: Marvelous, I certainly- to all the listeners out there, "Turtle Pictures," as well as the rest of Ray's work,

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it's an extraordinary book with many different tones, many different approaches, which I think you'll love. Maria? Maria Garcia Tabor: The poem, the title poem from, "Cabato Sentora," cabato are those little symbols we make that only

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the maker understands the meaning. I'm wondering as poets, is this what we do? We make these little images in our poems, and only we understand, or in some way, trying to give voice to that which is silent?

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Ray Gonzalez: I think that's a good place to begin, especially when you're sharing poetry with other writers, you're trying to enlarge the audience for poetry, you're working with younger writers. I think nowadays, and even the whole debate about how

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technology and computers have changed the way people write and create, writers are very visual even though we work with the language, and so I do a lot of work with- beginning with that image. And I tell students and writers, well, find an object

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from your home, or an object you've created, or something you stumbled upon, and think about how many images are almost trapped like some magnetic force within that object, and begin writing from there. And for me, it was this unusual little

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bamboo, these little bamboo sticks on the wall in my grandmother's house, and for me that began the whole process of writing poems about my family that took me in a different direction. So I do think that's where poets, you know, begin

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quite often, it's with that visual imagistic impact, and from there it's like- that draws the language, you know, out of the poem and you begin to write. Morton Marcus: And then it ameliorates in you because it

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becomes- an object becomes a metaphor, becomes symbol, and it's startling. I've been reading all your books, the idea of black comes up again and again, black as death, black as the mark were marked with. And of course, the black widow

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spider comes up again and again, which is fascinating to see how it changes, and yet retains sort of its meaning and of course, the animals in your homes, plethora of animals, are very totemic. And this is where I get more and more of the Indian, I

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think. Read us a poem you would like us to hear at this point. Ray Gonzalez: Well, this idea of animals in many of my poems, I talk about and write about enormous landscapes, the deserts, the mountains. And in keeping with this idea with

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Maria's question about images and objects, in many ways, while animals have their own lives, also the details of that animal kingdom in that life is- those details are just as powerful and as important as, you know, the mountains and other things that

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I write about. So I have learned a lot through writing about animals, and reflecting on how as a kid I was always out there in the desert surrounded by snakes and lizards and so forth. This poem is from, "Cabato Sentora," it's called, "Two

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Striped Lizards," and while I've had -- and it's on page 63 -- while I've had many poems with images of lizards, this was very different because for the first time, one of the few times, these lizards did not take off and run and disappear when I

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stumbled upon them. TWO STRIPED LIZARDS They look like miniature orange-and-brown tigers clinging to the concrete blocks in the backyard, two lizards looking up

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at me as I lift the wood off their hiding place. They stick to the bricks, flatten themselves except for their heads and enlarged eyes, tiny faces looking curious and human, staring at me when I move, blinking as if I were going to

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grab them, one of them springing out of the brick, disappearing into the grass to lead me away from their home. Two striped lizards are a good omen for the man who knew the reptiles that led him to the well. Two striped lizards are signs of abundant

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thirst, plenty of water, their rapid movement and caution leaving me with something to grasp, a blade of grass, an abandoned spiderweb, a concrete block I won't move because I learned what the stripe lizard means. A tiger in the canyon is

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as good as the escaped dragon of the heart. The second lizard not moving as I leave it alone and close the lid on the muffled source of its trembling. Morton Marcus: Very, very nice. Maria?

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Maria Garcia Tabor: This surrealism in your poetry, you know, that we like to call magical-realism attracts a lot of Latina, Latino writers. It makes me think of "The Madwoman in the Attic" and how women use that as a way of appropriating

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power. I'm wondering, is there any of that in the attraction toward the magical? Ray Gonzalez: I think there is, and even though I think the idea of magical-realism and the surreal tone of many Chicano

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poets, even though we can talk about and appreciate it, it's also one of the hardest things to understand. And for me, it's one aspect of the poetry, not that I want to leave alone, but it's also like that part that so overwhelms me as it continues to

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sweep me into writing in that style. I've talked to other poets and writers from the Southwest and there are so many wonderful Chicano writers born and raised in El Paso, or those that have left, Juan Felipe Herrera, Lalo Delgado, Pat Mora,

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and they continue to say that this surreal tone, they believe, comes from almost the blood and the history of the area, that- the people that have come and gone and died and are literally buried under the desert, but it also comes, once again to- from

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some of my common themes, the landscape, the river, the desert. If you're born and raised there, and even if you leave there as a child, there's something about the desert Southwest that almost mixes up reality and offers that gift of

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being able to write in such a manner. And a lot of my poems are also written in a very literal, I don't know, chronological, realistic, from point A to point B, but also I keep getting drawn back to that magical-realism that I think the

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area gives me. Morton Marcus: Yeah, I've been asked this a lot because my poems move into surrealism. And someone said, "Well, you know, you're writing magical-realism." And I say, no, no, no, no, no,

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no, no, no, there is a huge difference between surrealism, or even the deep image, and magical-realism. Magical-realism takes as its basis myth and folklore of usually the writer who is writing it. This is very, very different. It's not that

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level of realism that I think, you know, we're getting so stuck in, especially in British and American literature. It really is talking from that deep place where you are expressing the cells and the biological relationship you have to the

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people who have lived in the area and share the blood that you have. And it's almost below consciousness. And Isabel Allende has said the exact same thing, that it's not surrealism, it really deals with the folklore and with the mythology

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of the person who is writing. Ray Gonzalez: I think the literary world often functions by choosing certain ways to describe styles and movements in writing. But getting beyond that I, again, I know many writers

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and ask them, you know, where is this common thread and style come from? And like you say, there's something there in the history, there's something there in the blood and the violence and the conquest and the surrender and the survival that

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keeps doing those things. And for me often writing in that mode- And perhaps there is a certain influence by one of the famous surrealists, Robert Desnos, about going into trances; and so I was reading his work recently and I think,

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you know, I have a poem that I had marked here, it's a newer poem that might fit right into this because it does incorporate this idea of the style of poetry, and how you have to go back to that history under the earth in order to be able to

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extract and write the poem. This is a fairly new poem: IN THE HOUR OF A TRANCE In the hour of a trance, there are cards with names on them, they're destiny's rays of light opening the August drum like a

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stunned flower in giving up its pollen. There would be a passage into a quarry of salt, bare feet turning white to show how we step in the wrong places, unaware of our silence wrapped in shame, hollowed out turtle shells hanging by a string on

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the door to warn us not to enter, testament to things we've hated to see, that throat pulsing like a lost bird, or a future without us rearranged in a hurricane, a sandstorm where a parrot flies out to land on the property of the mind. Its awful

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laughter haunting us until the blue sky opens and the faces of our lovers are hooded so we love without having to see. In the hour of a trance, there are glass bottles being blown to sound like the wind, transformed boys wondering why they are

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trapped here, mistaken for musicians thrown into the volcano when the eruption was an empty vessel stripped of its magical gifts. There will be an end to wishful thinking for what we know is what we give, dizzy hour of velocity passing beyond

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our closed eyes. The chance to pick the worm out of the grapes have long gone, the rumor we were listening end brilliant, broken by the way we open our eyes, destined to have to find the real things.

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Morton Marcus: Yeah, that's a great definition of what goes on. Terrific and, again, I'd like to say and make it clear to the audience out there that though we're talking about trance in this case, many of your poems are not trance poems.

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They are very realistic memories from your early years, times let's say when you went over to Juarez and saw an old woman, which stirred in you a sense of mystery, but they're told in a- in a very, very clearly realistic voice. And then other

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poems just take off into, really, rapture ecstasy. And it's the ecstasy of the brujo, the ecstasy of the shaman, and so there's this great variety when we're talking about these individual poems or themes or approaches, where really the

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overall picture is a poet of great variety of approaches, so I want to just make that clear. Maria Garcia Tabor: In the archetypal images that I see, particularly I'm thinking here of the snake poems in "The Heat

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of Arrivals," that at one point, you take this archetypal image of the snake, and you do a whole series of poems, and they're some of my favorites, and I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your attraction to the snake, and if you've shed

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your last snake poem, as it were? Ray Gonzalez: Well, several years ago, and actually now almost ten years ago, I wrote a sequence of eight or ten poems about rattlesnakes, and I wrote them after I had left El Paso

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for good, had moved up to Colorado and started having these snake dreams. And it ties in with a longer essay that took a long time to write, where I realized the wonder and the magic of these reptiles that were supposed to be dangerous

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and bite you and be poisonous. It was a process that instilled at first fear in me, by people that, I didn't, you know, they didn't understand snakes or my family, and yet by writing those poems and having those dreams, I rid myself of the fear and found

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a grace and beauty and power in that animal kingdom and in that whole reptilian process that I was supposed to- that I was told to stay away from because it would be dangerous. And once I let go of that fear, or worked through that fear, and accepted

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those dreams, I could write those, you know, those snake poems and was able to move on to something else. And it ties in with what you said earlier about not- the poems not really being trance poems, but being grounded in a real realistic human

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experience from day to day and from the past. Well, often, there are so many barriers between the poet and that history of those snakes, the things that need to be moved aside in order to get that history, in order to find that

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power from the land, and often it does take that trance-like state to move those barriers aside, whether they're political barriers, family barriers, silence, whatever, and get to that point, whether it's a realistic poem or a surreal

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poem. And I think I tried to do that, you know, with the snake poems, and finally laid that to rest, which doesn't mean I won't write about rattlesnakes again, but I needed to confront that in that sequence of poems.

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Morton Marcus: I'd like you to read one of these snake poems since we're talking about them. But as you do that, whenever I do a workshop around the country, in one college or another, I always say, you know, what we're trying to do with all

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of these verbal games that we're going to go through is, we're trying to get you to get to a place from which you can speak authentically. And that's what the trance poems do, that's when you suddenly find these images, let's say in this case of

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snakes, this is what happens. You get to that place you can speak from and obviously in Ray's poems, as I've seen again, and again, and again, he just slides to that place. It's like pressing the magic button and it's startling what continually

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comes up that is so original and evocative in approach. One more word: that realism, even in the river poem, every line - for the young writers out there, you've heard me say this again and again - the lines that follow the first line are always so

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concrete and evocative. This is the reality that the poet always has to search for, this concreteness, so that is what the reader really relates to in the words that she's hearing. Ray Gonzalez: Well, I don't have a copy of, "The Heat of

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Arrivals-" Morton Marcus: Oh, I do. Ray Gonzalez: Ah, he does. But what I want to do before I do read one of those snake poems, I said that I ended that snake

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sequence. Well, "Cabato Sentora," which was a later book, and I've said this to students in recent days, was my farewell book to the Southwest. This poem called, "Breastbone," I think was the first poem that there is a reference to snakes,

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the first poem I wrote after I had finished the rattlesnake sequence. In a way it's similar, but also it's almost like the next stage of facing those things. And the first three lines, this epigram, were taken from a newspaper article that I

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read. BREASTBONE "In Mexico, a young boy is bitten by a snake and lies paralyzed for months. His grandfather, a shaman, predicts

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that if he lives he will become a great leader." He lives and becomes Llaga, the blind man who sees through his nipples. He wears no shirt, his bare chest adorned with beads from broken beer bottles. He has polished them, hung them around

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his neck, brown glass reflecting what he can't see, hiding him from the people who trust him for advice. His nipples are dark and wrinkled. They never rise or harden. They must stay close to his heart, so he can remind those around him his eyes were

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the nests of the rattler that bit him, the oval entrances to their dying town. His chest is turning gray. Thin hair on it surrounds his eyes. When he bathes in the river, he can see under the water. No one in the town knows the name Llaga. He

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tells no one, but the name is there. It can be found in the thought that blinks inside the first stranger to approach him. Llaga does not reveal many things. His drum is torn. He can't be described without his white hair woven around his

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neck, hanging between his shoulder blades like the rope the strangers tried to hang him with, years ago, before he discovered he could see through his nipples. The young boy survived. He could see. He opened his eyes. The

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fresh strips of snake meat hung dripping a white liquid on the pole. Years had not passed. It was only a moment in the life of the fang. Maria Garcia Tabor: I should also say that this was included

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in the Best American Poetry of 1999. And Ray also has a poem selected by Rita Dove that was included in Best American Poetry of 2000. Ray Gonzalez: And I will read the short, short final poem in

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the original rattlesnake sequence, which I think in many ways this final poem, which was literally a dream and the last poem in the sequence, ties in with the breastbone poem. This is called:

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SNAKESKIN I thought the rattler was dead and I stuck my finger in its mouth, felt the fangs bite down, penetrate me without letting go. The fire removing my eyes, replacing them with green light

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of the reptile illuminating my hand. It entered my bone and blood until my whole body was green and damp, my whole left side turning slick and cool as I tried to pull it out of my body. I peeled my skin back to find my veins were green, and held

00:29:05.980 - 00:29:25.360

tightly what I believed, what forced itself into me. What I allowed to be given without knowing I carried that secret, crawled over the ground, became sinew the sun steps on. I leaned against a huge boulder, sweated, waited, slept, and by morning

00:29:25.360 - 00:29:48.300

found a new way of embracing that rock, new life in the green flesh of the world. Morton Marcus: Back to the interview with the great Ray Gonzalez. We are back and we are talking with Ray Gonzalez and

00:29:48.330 - 00:30:10.170

Maria Garcia Tabor, who is helping me with the interview today. And I want to throw a curve at you here, Ray: a lot of your poems really seem to me, they are about the lost father, your lost father, who suddenly disappears. You also know much

00:30:10.170 - 00:30:25.650

more about your mother's side of the family than you do know about your father's side; you are obviously a male and so you follow the son-father line. I'd like you to talk about that, but also, it seems to me, there is a sense of guilt as well as

00:30:25.650 - 00:30:40.260

responsibility to speak that comes up again and again. This guilt even shows in your relationship with animals, what you did to animals early on, and it's very interesting to me how the sense of responsibility and guilt really add sort of

00:30:40.290 - 00:30:56.610

attention to this whole archetypal theme. I throw it right at you. Ray Gonzalez: Well, I think this idea of guilt ties in with one of the first things that I think many young boys learn, obviously

00:30:56.640 - 00:31:12.900

language and then coming from cultures that spoke two languages, English and Spanish. In many ways that guilt came early on from wanting to be like my father, like the father who would say, yeah, here's the BB gun I got you for Christmas and

00:31:12.900 - 00:31:31.230

go outside and shoot the lizards and the birds because it's a cool, you know, man thing to do. And that's how I started growing up. And on the other side, my mother and my grandmother telling me stories, teaching me things in Spanish but also

00:31:31.230 - 00:31:45.420

encouraging me to learn English, which I didn't learn till I was five years old and forced to do that in school. And I think once I did that, in many ways, my creativity and my imagination was starting to develop. And yet my father, you know, "You should

00:31:45.420 - 00:32:03.240

be outside playing baseball or out there with your BB gun," and doing the man things. So I think the guilt comes from learning two ways to live, you know, in that desert world. Two live- two ways to live in family culture, two ways to be within that

00:32:03.300 - 00:32:20.040

strict Mexican-American Catholic upbringing that I had. And then my father's always been the- the quiet, silent one, yes, that guilt was enforced over and over again, and maybe from, you know, from my point of view as the son, I don't know if it's guilt

00:32:20.040 - 00:32:39.270

from not asking more things of him until many years later when he was gone. And I don't know if it's guilt, but as the poet it's almost like I'm speaking to him, you know, through my poems. So there is that silence between the fathers and the sons, and I

00:32:39.270 - 00:32:53.070

think even the dedication in, "Cabato Sentora," which many people point out. This book is for the silence of my father and my grandfathers, for the language of their silence. Another thing that the desert landscape taught me was this

00:32:53.070 - 00:33:10.650

incredible silence, but not to keep quiet or be mute and never do anything, but also find the power of silence between words, between language, between the lines and the poems, and also the power to take some kind of power away from that guilt

00:33:10.680 - 00:33:21.690

between father and son, and be able to do something with it. And I think the end result is to be a writer and to use my imagination and hopefully, you know, give it back to somebody else.

00:33:21.960 - 00:33:35.070

Morton Marcus: That's great, that's a great definition for a question you did not know was going to come at you. One of the first places this appears, where I read it in early books, is a wonderful dream in which the fathers become very symbolic of

00:33:35.070 - 00:33:46.350

the past. And it's a dream you have, but also shows relationship to the grandmother who was a great influence, and takes you back to your Yaqui background. And I don't know if you want to read it or not, it's called, "The Eagles in the

00:33:46.350 - 00:33:58.580

Ashes," and it was a dream. Ray Gonzalez: Yeah, by coincidence, I read this the other day to students that I talked to and encouraged them and encouraged my own students to write down your dreams and

00:33:58.580 - 00:34:11.660

write poems about dreams because often we're told, "No dreams are just- they're too crazy to understand, and that's not the real world, you know, write about the real world." Well, to me the real world is based in dreams. And as a writer, as a

00:34:11.660 - 00:34:22.700

poet, you need to know your dreams in order to write about the real world, so many of my poems are literally dreams, the snakeskin poem and this one. THE EAGLES IN THE ASHES

00:34:23.800 - 00:34:41.080

Walking down the alley toward my grandmother's house where I grew up, I see trees, lawns, and houses in the barrio breathing a fine layer of ashes, mounds of gray powder piled against the torn fence. Five giant eagles rise out of it, enormous birds

00:34:41.080 - 00:34:58.900

with brown faces of long-haired silent men. Without flapping their wings, they step down the mound, strong-taloned feet sinking in the fine dust. Eagle walks past me without saying a word, their long, black hair swirling, bronze faces proud and

00:34:58.900 - 00:35:16.480

knowing, feathers shining in the ashes. They jump onto the wire fence, then land in the yard. One by one, they walk into my grandmother's house. I stand by the gate, sift ashes through my fingers, rub my hands together before climbing the mound,

00:35:16.810 - 00:35:34.530

trying to get over the fence, slipping down and getting up, slipping down and getting up, trying to open the gate. Maria Garcia Tabor: One thing I find interesting, particularly in contemporary Chicano writing is the subversion of the Virgin

00:35:34.530 - 00:35:48.120

Mary. The role that a lot of Latina women had up until this century, though it still exists today, was fostered by the Catholic Church. Now these writers are going back to the model deities as role models, who are more like real women

00:35:48.330 - 00:36:05.760

than Mary and appropriating these types of women into the writing. It seems to speak to what we were just saying about archetypal images, that it's harkening back to these kinds of pre-Columbian roots that I think you're giving voice to in a lot

00:36:05.760 - 00:36:19.680

of your writing. Ray Gonzalez: Well, I think it's true. The opposite of maybe what I said a minute ago about fathers, loving the Guadalupe is a powerful image. I think one reason that many writers,

00:36:19.680 - 00:36:36.960

whether they were raised straight Catholic like I was, or always doubted what was going on, one reason they draw themselves or are attracted to that symbol is the fact that the myth of loving the Guadalupe came after the Spanish conquest

00:36:37.200 - 00:36:53.670

of the Aztecs, after the Aztec civilization was destroyed. And this image came to a mestizo, an Indian, you know, Mexicano man, the race had already been created between the native people, the Aztecs, and the Spanish. It didn't come to the

00:36:53.670 - 00:37:09.840

Spanish, it didn't come to the Aztecs, it came to somebody who was already Mexican. And so in many ways that opens up, you know many possibilities and makes La Virgen de Guadalupe very attractive, almost beyond and above the strict Catholic

00:37:09.840 - 00:37:25.710

faith that many, you know, Chicano writers grew up in. And I think it's for myself and others who have written and used that image quite a bit and again, the opposite of some of the father guilt that I was talking about. The culture does

00:37:26.490 - 00:37:39.630

function in many ways on very strong mother figures, mothers and grandmothers. And like I keep saying over and over, and writing over and over about, my grandmother was very influential. And I don't know whether you know, this idea of

00:37:39.630 - 00:37:55.200

the Virgen de Guadalupe is almost like you have to go there in your writing, and kind of get, I don't know, a reality check to like, you know, where is my faith, where's my spirit? The history is telling me that my family has broken apart and

00:37:55.200 - 00:38:09.210

been shattered, and a lot of things in the past I'll never know. My history also tells me that as a writer, if I want to be successful and find my audience, I have to be out there in the real contemporary world. But often, I think, any writer,

00:38:09.210 - 00:38:23.550

any artist of any culture, you have to go back to those sources of faith and in this case, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and then keep going. And again, even if you're not that strict Catholic, there's always something there that you find. And I think it's

00:38:23.550 - 00:38:40.790

one of the few images in that kind of religion that almost creates different possibilities away from the usual strict dogma, you know, of the Catholic Church. Maria Garcia Tabor: So how do you think Latinos are impacting

00:38:40.790 - 00:38:56.250

the literary scene now? You've edited over twelve anthologies, and certainly you've helped many, many Latino writers. Ray Gonzalez: Well, more and more books are being published by them. To me, one of the major successes, and it has to

00:38:56.250 - 00:39:13.020

continue, is that more schools are using the textbooks, the anthologies, the children's books, you know, I think in the children's literature area, more and more writers need to move in that area. And now, I talked to a lot of writers that do not

00:39:13.020 - 00:39:28.260

teach Chicano literature or even Latino literature, [they] teach a modern American literature and now more and more, a number of books by Latino writers are part of the reading list in the- in the courses and they're not even focusing, you know, on Chicano

00:39:28.260 - 00:39:46.410

literature, Latino literature. They're up there alongside, I don't know, Hemingway or Walt Whitman, or you know, whatever genre is being taught. So that's another success to break out of that literary body, or if you want to call it, and encompass

00:39:46.440 - 00:40:00.540

American literature as American literature that comes from different areas. At the same time, the more Latinos get published and are better read and known, more responsibilities are placed upon them. Do you forget your past, do you forget

00:40:00.540 - 00:40:16.530

those traditions, and you just become the nice cool, you know, with-it contemporary writer doing your thing, or whatever, in the literary community that's constantly changing, and you've forgotten the past because you want to be in. So there's a lot

00:40:16.530 - 00:40:28.400

of challenges there for, you know, so many of the writers. Morton Marcus: Well, as I always say, and this is a very fallacious statement, and I know it: It's a matter of character. Ray Gonzalez: Yeah.

00:40:28.750 - 00:40:43.450

Morton Marcus: And I know it's fallacious, I mean, Richard Wagner was the worst character in the world, but had sublime music and vision, but I still say that it's a matter of character in the end, and certainly that can take you a

00:40:43.450 - 00:40:52.950

long way. Ray Gonzalez: Yes, yes. Maria Garcia Tabor: Let's talk about process because writers are always interested in hearing about process. I think it's

00:40:52.950 - 00:41:09.510

different for everyone but certainly there's specific challenges to one who is teaching and writing and touring, and editor of two literary magazines. Ray Gonzalez: Well, my writing process, I guess you can talk

00:41:09.510 - 00:41:21.720

about that on different levels, the day to day process means writing early in the morning, and getting all my work done in the morning because- Morton Marcus: An influence by William Stafford, by any chance?

00:41:22.740 - 00:41:37.350

Ray Gonzalez: I don't think I can write a poem every day, but whenever I am writing on the kind that I can write thirty poems in one week, and not write a single poem for months and months and months.

00:41:37.270 - 00:41:48.820

Morton Marcus: Ray, that does not surprise me at all because obviously what happens is the volcano, the magma suddenly gushes up; it's happened to me. People just see me walking around in a trance, and say, "What have you been doing?"

00:41:48.910 - 00:42:02.490

"I've been writing poems out of my ears," and then the silence as gestation happens again, or whatever it is, yeah. Ray Gonzalez: And it happens and a lot of it is spontaneous and that's just the way I work, but a lot of it is almost like I've

00:42:02.490 - 00:42:16.980

had to channel that creativity in such an explosive manner because I'm teaching, I'm editing an anthology, I'm doing a book review, I'm going to go do a workshop, on and on and on, and so it kind of all gathers and it happens. Other writers

00:42:16.980 - 00:42:31.470

like the William Stafford model, they write one poem a day, 365 days a year. Other writers, other poets write five or six poems a year and that's just the way it is, and sooner or later, they probably have to accept it, otherwise they're going to go

00:42:31.470 - 00:42:49.770

crazy, but it just depends. So, you know, that leaves the rest of the day for reading and doing other, you know, and teaching, and grading papers, and that more businesslike side of being a writer. You know, so that is one approach to the process. And

00:42:50.100 - 00:43:06.240

I quit being frustrated about pouring out all these poems and then nothing happening for months and months. I quit fighting it and just let it happen. And when you- when you do produce a lot of poems in a short time, they're not all

00:43:06.240 - 00:43:16.950

great, but it also gives you time then to go back and revise and work and do different things on it. Morton Marcus: So revision is important in your work? Ray Gonzalez: Yes, it is and I revise quite a lot. And I tell

00:43:16.950 - 00:43:32.280

my students: to me, there's no such thing as writer's block. If you believe in writer's block, don't be a writer. And I know that sounds very cynical, and hard-edged, but I don't believe n writer's block. Even if y u write a list of words every d

00:43:32.280 - 00:43:45.840

y, or in your notebook once a w ek that make no sense, you ve written something down. Also, to me, there's no such thing as inspiration, even though thi gs happen that all of a sudden I ll rush off and write a poem do n, you know, something, s

00:43:45.840 - 00:43:58.020

me catharsis, some moment, nd maybe that's the closest to inspiration, but often yo ng writers sit around waiting or this ray of light to hit t em and I'm gonna go write, ou know, where's the muse? 'm going to go write my poem.

00:43:58.020 - 00:44:09.450

To me, not that it's mechanical, but you have to discipline yours lf, you have to take on hat responsibility, and I tel my students most important of ll, you have to respect yoursel as a wri

00:44:09.390 - 00:44:21.240

Morton Marcus: May I just say, you know, a lot of people, because a lot of people find many ways not to be an artist of any medium. And I just say, you know, when it comes right down to it, this is really a non-conversation, you just do

00:44:21.240 - 00:44:34.350

it, just do it. It has nothing to do with whether you're doing ten thousand things a day, if you have to do it, you'll do it. And that is really the only definition of the arts. But I did want to get you on the revision thing because you are a

00:44:34.350 - 00:44:49.740

poet in at least half your work whose spontaneity really comes through in the poem that you want, but that's artifice in many ways, and I can never ever, it seems - I've just been goin over the last twenty years - an convince all the people I t

00:44:49.740 - 00:45:04.110

lk to that revision is such necessity, really getting out o that rough nugget, you know, th real sense of what that nugge looks like and how it should b presented Ray Gonzalez: Yes, I think you know, revision is important. And

00:45:04.110 - 00:45:24.030

for me, it involves maybe 99% of what I write, maybe, you know, one out of ten or whatever poems come out and happen and- just like that. Again, I've done whole lectures when I talk about nothing but how computers have changed the way we write poetry

00:45:24.030 - 00:45:40.860

and revise it. I have a student who does a lot of revision, and she saves on a separate disk file every single revision, where she could have ten or twelve or fifteen files for every single version. And she goes in there and she says, the

00:45:40.860 - 00:45:50.970

reason this happens, she does this, is the cursor can wipe everything out, just like that and you've lost your early version. Morton Marcus: Well, let me ask you something: do you write your

00:45:50.970 - 00:46:07.840

first drafts on the computer? Ray Gonzalez: I do most of my poetry in notebooks and, ideas and fragments in my notebooks, and once I know a poem is going to happen, I can usually by now compose it on the computer if I

00:46:07.840 - 00:46:21.520

have enough, you know material ahead of time. It's very rare that I can sit down and compose a poem just on the computer. Even though prose, I could compose it without a single note on the computer all day and all night-

00:46:21.570 - 00:46:32.340

Morton Marcus: You talk about essays mostly? Ray Gonzalez: Yes, essays, book reviews, journalism, which I've done a lot. So for prose, I could just write and write all day and not worry about it, whether it's good or bad, I

00:46:32.340 - 00:46:45.900

could just crank it out. For poetry, there's still that physical hands process that's very, very- Morton Marcus: That's what I was getting to. For me, it's the same thing. I've got to have a visceral contact that is not in

00:46:45.900 - 00:46:58.580

any way connected with the mechanical world. I mean, it has to have a sense, maybe it's an illusion of it coming through me down my arm and my hand. Yeah, absolutely. Maria Garcia Tabor: But you know, that's Blake, you know,

00:46:58.580 - 00:47:09.380

we're inspired and we're writing and just coming through our hand. And I don't think that we necessarily need to privilege one over the other because certainly there's a lot of fine writers who are writing on the computer, but I do-

00:47:09.660 - 00:47:23.750

Morton Marcus: Are you writing on the computer? Maria Garcia Tabor: I do both. I do both but sometimes I can compose a poem on the computer, and certainly I go back and revise a lot. This idea of the poem as sacred is something that

00:47:23.750 - 00:47:41.840

for poetry students, you know, they think, "Oh, I can't touch it, because I have this, you know, Blakean vision from God on the page," and it's what I, as a teacher of poetry, have to abolish almost immediately, how the importance of- Actually,

00:47:41.840 - 00:47:54.650

sometimes what a poem can initially be a working out of a problem, or something that you're feeling, and then you must transform it into a piece of art, otherwise it's simply therapy.

00:47:54.960 - 00:48:10.620

Morton Marcus: Right, yes, absolutely, absolutely. Ray, how about reading another poem of your choice without our getting into any part of conversation? Ray Gonzalez: A more recent poem that I've marked. As I've said

00:48:10.620 - 00:48:24.660

to people in the last few days, one wonderful thing about doing so many readings back to back is you get to read a variety of things, get to try out some new things. One poem I read the other night was "Sentora," which I rarely read and I'm not sure

00:48:24.660 - 00:48:38.480

why that's from, "Cabato Sentora." This one is kind of like the closest point to that, it's a more recent poem. This is called: MISLYXTLA TRACE, and mislyxtla means "sweat stains on adobe

00:48:38.480 - 00:48:54.170

walls, their size and the fact that they don't disappear marking the history of a dweller's labor." To those unwanted before they breathe the looming sound beside thriving engines, appearance, appetite swallowed by

00:48:54.170 - 00:49:12.290

century-ending figures mistaken for lone rangers applying sin invented by those getting out with dollar bills, fresh volumes of love and understanding uncovered beneath torn floors, anthropological dance broken when Rio Grande floods caused

00:49:12.290 - 00:49:29.990

the wisdom to dry into the cottonwoods instead of the mud villages doomed in their distribution, bright feathers worn without masks, painted eyes watching you crawl towards the corn, wiped sweat from traces of sorrowed beliefs -- feet, toes,

00:49:30.140 - 00:49:47.000

wombs touching kiss upon cool brown skin, left over from ceremonies for the unwanted before they breathe the thriving fields green with onions, chilies, lettuce, roads brown with history snakes, mistaken vultures eating adobe after

00:49:47.000 - 00:50:03.980

running out of dead rabbits hit by startled tractors demanding the harvest turn into the kitchen tables marking the burned pans, the broken meals, the piles of nutrition mistaken for those life saving moments, the dishes found in the rubble

00:50:04.070 - 00:50:19.760

never used, the recipes surviving the agricultural landscape, the growth labor, the poisoned air, the fresh boxes packed for shipping to those unwanted before they breathed, the belly buttons opening, cutting the workers who fasten

00:50:19.760 - 00:50:33.040

themselves to the dust and sing. Morton Marcus: Great. Before, and we're getting to the end of the show, unfortunately, what I would like to do, which is something that, it's a delight when I can do it in these

00:50:33.040 - 00:50:46.270

interviews, is talk about the prose poem. Because you have now moved into the prose poems which has become my baby in the last eight years, and I'd like to know, how do you think it's changed the way you write about or maybe even think about

00:50:46.000 - 00:51:01.300

Ray Gonzalez: Well, I think you sustain the moment of creation poetry? longer in a prose poem, and by that I mean, like, if I have a story to tell I have more freedom to do it within the

00:51:01.300 - 00:51:18.820

prose poem, even though the poems I've read I think all have stories. Also I feel less pressure on breaking the line because to me a prose poem, in many ways, is one whole complete moment that is not so restricted by line breaks and stanzas, and

00:51:18.820 - 00:51:37.630

so forth. Also, I think prose poems, the detail in them, and once again, the poems I read have detail, but the details almost surround that first person voice if you choose to write a prose poem in the first person. If you're not in the

00:51:37.630 - 00:51:53.110

first person, it seems like those details follow the voice of the poet, and you've revealed something in the prose poem. And I think often in lyrical poems, even the greatest poems that I've read by my favorite poets, or they've influenced me and

00:51:53.110 - 00:52:12.340

really have moved me, often I wanted to go beyond those poems. And in prose poems, it's almost like, not that it's a complete package, but often they give me more of a complete experience than maybe a lyrical poem, you know, often does. I just think

00:52:12.340 - 00:52:25.070

there's more freedom to work with that form. Morton Marcus: There it is, again, anyone who's worked in the prose poem has come on this program is saying, it really gives you more freedom. I wrote Charlie Simic, I told the story

00:52:25.070 - 00:52:37.910

on the air before and I said, "Charlie, you know, it's really great working in this way and I'm just really unhappy that I did not discover how I can get all aspects of my voice in the prose poem. And I'm sorry, I didn't do it thirty years ago."

00:52:37.910 - 00:52:51.350

And he wrote back and he said, "You couldn't do it thirty years ago. You had to learn all the disciplines and controls of poetry before you could take this freedom." And I know talking to Peter Johnson about the prose poem, he just says

00:52:51.350 - 00:53:07.880

again, and again, people don't realize what a prose poem is. Yes, it gives you more freedom, but you have to know that it's the poem and it's got to abide by all of those conditions of poetry, especially condensing. Yeah, great, I'm glad you said

00:53:07.880 - 00:53:18.080

that. I want to say one more thing, but then I want Maria to have the last word and the last question. One of the most brilliant parts of, "Turtle Pictures," and I'm sure you probably didn't even think about it and have never thought about

00:53:18.080 - 00:53:36.590

it, is that a lot of it is in the second person. The "you" that is being spoken to is actually yourself but it allows that you to also be the you of the reader and the reader's experience. So it makes the immediacy two pronged, or dare I

00:53:36.590 - 00:53:55.190

use the the snake image, two fanged. It is one of those brilliant little moves of art that open that book from being something that could be considered very hermetic to a huge audience, you know, we can take everything there very, very

00:53:55.190 - 00:54:03.620

personally, as well as mythically at the same time. And I just wanted to say that before the show's over. Maria, ask a question. Maria Garcia Tabor: I'll ask a good ending question, and that

00:54:03.620 - 00:54:19.370

is, what are you working on now? Ray Gonzalez: Well, continue to write prose poems, revise the recent book of short stories, and I'm always writing, you know, new poems of all styles and different things. But the

00:54:19.370 - 00:54:35.480

main thing are essays that I've been working on, talked a lot about my history in the Southwest, and certainly one reality is that it's in the news all the time: the immigration problems, the immigration issues, the environmental damage

00:54:35.480 - 00:54:49.310

to the Southwest, the Rio Grande River that I write a lot about. So I've been going down there and working and researching and doing a lot of nonfiction and essays for a second book of essays. And so that takes a lot of work, even though with,

00:54:49.310 - 00:55:04.250

"Turtle Pictures," and the prose poems that we've been saying, I've been doing a lot of prose but just that detailed, intricate, you know, layer upon layer of uncovering research and history, and a new perspective instead of just saying, oh, the

00:55:04.520 - 00:55:13.670

desert Southwest is all polluted, and it's all built up with shopping malls. Well, I need to find a different way to, you know, to write about it. Morton Marcus: Well, you also told me a few days ago, we were

00:55:13.670 - 00:55:27.180

talking in another way in, or different way, which is, you're also getting in touch with your uncle about this silent part of your father's history. Ray Gonzalez: Yeah, and that continues, and I wrote a bit

00:55:27.180 - 00:55:42.570

about it in "Turtle Pictures," and maybe in an odd way "Turtle Pictures," with its mix of genres and very unusual approach reflects my father's side of the family that, you know, still holds on to a lot of silence and secrets. And maybe that's one of

00:55:42.570 - 00:55:58.500

the first attempts, and maybe that fractured, surreal, mixed genre of tone and style of it also, you know, reflects that family side. So I continue to look into that and actually some of the essays that I'm doing for the second book also have to do

00:55:58.500 - 00:56:11.370

with almost like a revision of the family story that I've found and discovered, you know, over- it's been over ten or twelve years since I did most of the essays in the first book, "Memory Fever."

00:56:12.320 - 00:56:24.980

Morton Marcus: I'm going to ask you for a poem to end this, but you can start looking for one. What I was going to say is it's very interesting to me to see those poets who you really talk about as your influences. One of them is the Portuguese poet who

00:56:24.980 - 00:56:43.370

I love so much and have written about, in fact, the book that's coming out, that's Fernando Pessoa, and it is interesting when you think of the different voices and the different persona, called hectograms, that Pessoa had. And you really are

00:56:43.370 - 00:56:58.310

very similar because you're speaking in a number of voices for a number of lost voices and future voices. It's a different way to look at that whole situation that Pessoa had, but I just wanted to say that. Yes, the comment, and then have you

00:56:58.310 - 00:57:09.650

read the final poem? Ray Gonzalez: I think, not that I have been forced to do it, but as you go to the Southwest, and again, the surreal power that we talked about earlier, there are so many lost voices down there

00:57:09.890 - 00:57:24.470

because of the history. And as you go down there and write about it, you uncover these voices and they almost ask you and through the poetic process to borrow that voice, make it your own. And so it also influences the different styles

00:57:24.470 - 00:57:36.980

that I use and those different voices. I want to finish with a kind of a different poem. I think it also reflects many of the things we're talking about, but this is a little- rather odd and different.

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STUNG BY A BEETLE Stung by a huge flying beetle, I pinch it off my arm and throw the great thing against the wall. It's hard shell clicking on the bricks, breaking into marbles of hunger that roll into

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the grass, twitching like buried smoke I stepped on when I gave in to the lesser stars that fell without harm. I rub my arm as the red hole swells into a flute of skin. My lungs growing shorter as I sit on the grass. Wait for the poison to hit my

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pounding heart, bring me the age of symmetrical beauty, burning dust I breathe to imagine the primary colors glowing on the bridge. Stung by a buzzing that crashed into my arm, I sit low to the ground, whisper to the red fox that crossed my path

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last night on my walk, it's sudden appearance taking me back to the remains of animals hidden in the dark, it's bushy tail glimmering in the moonlight, it's silent warning staying ahead of a fever I am going to love.