the Conversation: Willie Perdomo with Jon Sands

I met Willie Perdomo in 2008 when he was teaching at Urban Word’s Preemptive Ed conference. I told him I had just been commissioned for a workshop series at a syringe exchange in Midtown, and he said, “That’s great, bro. What’s your address?” I wrote it down, he said peace, and four days later a copy of “Smoking Lovely” was waiting in my mailbox. I’ve been reading and teaching from it ever since. I’d be hard pressed to say anyone’s work has been more influential on my personal journey through this art form than Willie. He’s an author who embodies how voice can only bloom through the act of listening – to the world, to the block, to the history of how we got here. Willie is the author of “Where a Nickel Costs a Dime”, “Smoking Lovely”, and the children’s book “Visiting Langston”.  A listener, an educator, an award winner many times over, but more than accolades, he’s a legend of contemporary writing in New York City and beyond.

The thermometer is moving to chill mode. Leaves are doing their two-step off the trees. Perfect time to sit cross legged at the base of Willie’s recliner, and put the volume knob on high.

- Jon Sands

 

JS: There is a folklore in New York City around the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the now generations that comprise its history. Can you talk about how you first found the club and tell us what an ordinary night was like?

WP: I first found the café through the original anthology of Nuyorican poetry that was edited by Miguel Algarin and Miguel Piñero, and I found the anthology at a used bookstore in Ithaca, NY. The anthology was called Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings and Algarin had developed a blueprint for the Nuyorican aesthetic in his introduction. Much of it was connected to poetry being a survival tool and in a lot of ways that still holds true today. Later, when I left school to become a poet, I went back to East Harlem and I remember reading an article in the Village Voice about how the Nuyorican Poet’s Café had just reopened and they were doing these things called “slams”. It had to be around 90, 91, I think. Back then the Nuyorican was still a place where a young poet could hang out with his smuggled forty-ounce brew and get real insight on the human condition from Julio the Bouncer. For me, it was exciting to see some of the originals—it was almost like seeing your favorite collectibles come to life—poets like Pedro Pietri and Bimbo Rivas would be in the house. After the last open mic, we used to clear the floor so people could dance and hang out and talk, share poems and fall in love. The scene was far from becoming the marketing phenomenon that it turned out to be. It was still underground, still a whisper in the old Village Voice.

JS: What were you studying in school before you left?

WP: I was what they called an “English 7-12” major, which meant that I was on track to become a high-school English teacher. By my sophomore year of college, I had been introduced to a number of literary and oral traditions of poetry and they were informing my young attempts at poems. The plan has always been the same: teach and write.

JS: I’ve heard you say, roughly, that if you’re going to write, then you should have something to say. At what point in your process do you generally discover that something needs to be said?

WP: The more we are told to shut the fuck up, the more we have something to say. The more we seek modes of spiritual transportation, the more we have something to say. I would imagine that when you’re standing at the edge of your grave, you might have something to say as well. I think that’s what William Carlos Williams might have meant when he wrote: “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.” Dope verse.

JS: How does what you have to say change throughout the creation of a piece of writing?

WP: I think it changes as you change. You ever start a poem on Monday and not pick it up for a season of Mondays and after experiencing moments of heartbreak, intense reading, love, isolation, laughter, insight, and epiphany, you come back to that Monday poem totally transformed, and you enter it right away, knowing exactly where and why you reached an impasse? It’s important to sustain the note of a poem and that can prove to be the most difficult part of writing a poem.

JS: There’s an incredible amount of community being written through your work. What drives that as a muse? The poem Crazy Bunch Barbecue at Jefferson Park Comes to Mind (when Phil says “Yo, go find something to do / write a poem / write something / do something / I got this / I’m the chef / you the poet”). In what ways has your role as documentarian influenced your relationship to your community?

WP: It’s not so much that I was a witness as much as I was there to cosign a feeling or a moment of sublimity. Without a community, my identification markers would fade away and this is coming from the ultimate cave dweller who sometimes has a hard time reconciling the concept of community with the fact that some of our greatest poets die broke and uninsured. The nastiest poets I ever heard have never been published and writing poetry was a way to honor that community as well. It’s cool when you can invite your friends to the jam session that a poem can be.

JS: When you write, do you ever feel like you are speaking to or for other people?

WP: For other people, no, never. I would be running for some sort of office right now if that were the case. But it helps to have someone or something specific in mind, I think. I always believed that you could find the answers to the universe by standing on a street corner. In other words, if you zoom in on a detail close enough, you’ll find all the universality that you’re looking for. That’s why I love that Robert Hayden poem, “Those Winter Sundays”, where we see the boy’s father rise early on Sundays, in the “blueblack cold”, warming the house and polishing his son’s shoes, then the poet asks, “What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?” It’s heartbreaking and inspiring in the same breath, and it’s pretty specific. As a father, I have been inside those offices. It’s possible to sample a broad truth from a detailed, individual glance.

JS: You have an extensive record as an arts educator, having worked with a wide spectrum of young writers. In what ways does the role of teacher influence your own creative process?

WP: What’s that line from Whitman? I think it goes, “I teach straying from me.” I hear of too many creative writing instructors leaving their imprimaturs on younger writers and that’s just wack. I try not to write too much when I teach and if I do, it’s usually in a different genre. So if I’m teaching a poetry workshop, I’ll try to work on a play or some narrative prose so that I come to my student’s work as if I was the blank page that they’re writing on. On occasion, I might be so motivated by a poem that a student submitted that I’m compelled to respond with a poem. The most important part of teaching, I think, is to understand the symbiotic nature of writing—there is no writing without reading. It’s the ultimate dialogue.

JS: What’s a poem from another author you feel like you needed to read/hear?

WP: Man, I wish I would’ve been turned on to Postwar Polish poetry earlier–talk about putting it all on the line. The poems are deceptively inornate and stray away from any unnecessary icing, which for me implies a direct confrontation with guilt, death, and silence. I could’ve definitely used some Syzmborska during what I like to call my Lost Age. Check out her poem “Under One Small Star.”

JS: As a writer who has now moved through many different phases, can you describe a specific moment (or series of moments) where you feel like your writing shifted and why/how that happened?

WP: Well, I took my dumb ass back to school after twenty years and can only say that it challenged my process. For the past three years, I have been digging into texts whose range is far and wide, like from Laclos to Defoe, from Eulalie Spence to Tiffany Yanique, and that can only expand your range as a writer, let alone a human being. Took me a while to remember and re-acknowledge that my writing is an extension—an expression even—of my reading.

JS: What is your relationship with bad poems? Do you ever write them? How are those treated?

WP: At this point in my writing life, the place for bad poems is called a trash bin.

JS: Ha. Fair enough.

WP: For real, I’ve written many a bad poem and would go so far (and you’re going to hate me for this, Jon) as to say that my first two collections were hampered by unmediated, uninterrupted mistakes, i.e., bad poems. I can say that now with a certain amount of healthy embarrassment.

JS: We’re gonna have to agree to disagree on this first-two-books theory.

WP: Fortunately, you, Urayoan Noel, Rich Villar, and Tara Betts are the only people I know who have read Smoking Lovely from front to back. I couldn’t ask for better readers.

JS: Can you pick one artist you feel most like family/community with and tell us the story of how you met and took to each other?

WP: When I first started reading poems in New York City, the dude who I connected with on the artist and camaraderie set was Paul Beatty, who also happens to be godfather to my son, Neruda. Before Neruda was born I told Paul that to be a godfather he had to denounce the devil and he just laughed at me. Paul was killing it at the Nuyorican. We first met on the page in the early 90s. We both had poems published in a literary supplement to a now-defunct Black newspaper called The City Sun. Then we met in person shortly after the publication and became instant homies. It was Paul that suggested I come down to the Nuyorican to read and I curse him every chance I get for that suggestion. When I hang out with Paul and the conversation turns to writing, he’s always there to tell me that I worry about too much shit that has absolutely nothing to do with the writing.

JS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received (either as a writer or not)?

WP: About three years ago, during National Poetry Month, my son, who was 6 at the time, was working on a poetry project in school and he came home one day and said, “Dad, I write the poems that bite back.” Since that day it’s been my mission to write the poems that bite back.

 

 

WILLIE PERDOMO is the author Where a Nickel Costs a Dime and Smoking Lovely, which received a PEN America Beyond Margins Award. He has also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Bomb, Poems of New York and The Harlem Reader. His first children’s book, Visiting Langston, received a Coretta Scott King Honor and his follow-up, Clemente! was recently named a Booklist Top 10 Sports Book for Youth in 2010 and 2011 Américas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University and is a three-time Fellow in Poetry and Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been on the faculty of the VONA Writing Workshops, National Endowment for Humanities Summer Seminar and currently teaches at Fordham University. He is founder/publisher of Cypher Books. www.willieperdomo.com

JON SANDS’ first full collection of poems, The New Clean, was released in 2011 from Write Bloody Publishing. Jon has performed and facilitated workshops extensively with university and arts organizations nationally and internationally, and is Director of Poetry Education at the Positive Health Project (a syringe exchange center located in Midtown Manhattan), an adjunct with the City University of New York, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. He delivered the 2010 commencement address at the Bronx Academy of Letters, and starred in the 2011 web-series “Verse: A Murder Mystery” from Rattapallax Films. He lives in Brooklyn, where he makes better tuna salad than anyone you know. Say yes to www.jonsands.com