Rhina P. Espaillat
FEATURED POET
Interviewed by Deborah Warren
Dominican-born Rhina P. Espaillat has published thirteen full-length books, four chapbooks, and two CDs, comprising poetry, essays and short stories in both English and her native Spanish, and translations from and into both languages. Her work, which appears in numerous journals, anthologies, and websites, has received many national and international awards, including the Richard Wilbur Award, the Nemerov Prize, the Eliot Prize, awards from the New England Poetry Club, the Poetry Society of America, the Frost Foundation, various honors from the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture, and a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from Salem State College. Espaillat is a founding member of the Fresh Meadows Poets, the Powow River Poets, the Melopoeia trio, and the quintet known as The Diminished Prophets.
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DW
Rhina, it’s such fun to have you at my mercy so I can grill you. I’m trying to come up with questions I don’t know the answers to. With you there’s plenty to wonder at, but also a few things to wonder about. Here goes:
I know you were a precocious poet, with a poem in a big magazine when you were in your teens. Did you write your first poem even before you were fluent in English?
RPE
It was The Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1948 issue: three poems. I was sixteen and trying hard to sound sophisticated and passionate, like Millay. Dreadful stuff—mine, of course, not Millay’s!—but prosodically impressive. My first poems were in Spanish, from the age of four: my poet grandmother wrote them down for me. None of those survived after Grandma died, and just as well.
I understood that poetry was a game, a form of adult play with mysteries in it, a strange vocabulary and odd rules, but fun. It could mesh with other games grown-ups played: music, painting, dance, sculpture, storytelling, drama—in short, all the arts, which I could see were the games people invented and played when they got to be too old for dolls and other familiar children’s games. They all had limitations and boundaries, but they were not duties, like work, or means to any ends but themselves, or obligations, like religious rules. So much for my definition of poetry as I knew it in Spanish.
Thanks to my teachers, I learned that the game of poetry could be played in English too, and apparently in every language, including those spoken by my refugee classmates from every corner of the world. Missing my lost family, as many of them missed theirs, I discovered the current of shared meaning under the music, the pain under the play, and the fact that poetry, when it sang, very often sang because the author was trying very hard not to scream. My teachers by and large did not tell me what to find in the poems we read, but only where to look, and what to make of repetition and pattern, wordplay, and all of the musical elements that I once thought were pure play, when I heard them in Spanish, and danced and clapped to them.
But when, at the age of seven, I found myself in the United States learning to speak English, the poems I learned in elementary school revealed that poetry was, indeed, play, but also something else that could be sobering and dark, and still beautiful and somehow healing. The poem “Little Boy Blue,” by Edward Field, was the first that had the profound and unexpected effect of making me cry in class, because the child who dies in that poem leaves behind all his toys, which his parents keep just as he left them. The situation, sentimental but shocking to a child who had left her first home and many members of her family behind, along with beloved toys, reminded me of all that, suddenly and without warning, and taught me indelibly that poetry can hurt as well as—and while—it delights.
Language is the imperfect tool we use to think about and convey outer and inner reality, which is like trying to catch the wind with a net, or trying to dress reality in the fashion of our own times and circumstances, when the truth is that under the style of any given period reality itself insists on being naked, no matter how hard we try to stuff it into the verbal hoop skirts and wigs, dungarees and sneakers, suits and ties and togas and spike heels that are familiar to us at different times. And there’s the auditory fun—the ever-present, inescapable music of poetry which can act as a vehicle for more serious freight: the expression of subtle, complex emotions and observations that are difficult to convey in the language of the office or the supermarket.
Poetry is good not only for travels in space, to touch strangers far away that we’ll never meet, but also for time travel. It’s a long conversation across the ages that allows us to hear from the dead, and answer them with our own words, and even leave words behind for those who are not born yet. In a way, the poet is the quintessential and earliest mailman of the human race.
DW
You “write” a poem in your head before even writing it down—an incredible feat. Would you be able to do this if you didn’t write in regular meter? Can you keep an entire poem (a sonnet, say) in your mind until you write it down?
RPE
I have no choice: if I take notes or do an outline first, something happens to the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower” and the current stops. I don’t understand it, but the act of creation just stops, like a miscarriage, as if the intellect/discipline/conscious mind had let a cold draft into the space.
Yes, it works the same way when it’s free verse. I write it down when the first draft is done in my head.
DW
By the way, do you usually revise heavily?
RPE
That depends on how much is wrong with the . . .
. . . . . . .
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