Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, and
professor. He is the author of two previous poetry collections: Tertulia and
Stereo.Island.Mosaic., which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber
First Book Award. He is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile deJongh
Literary Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting
Award, a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York State Council on the
Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts
Individual Artist Fellowship for poetry. His poetry and prose have been
published in dozens of magazines and journals and have been anthologized in
Chorus: A Literary Mixtape, by Saul Williams, Puerto Rico en Mi Corazón, Best
American Experimental Writing 2015, Até Mais: Latinx Futures, and The Breakbeat
Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. He is an assistant professor of English at Rider
University, a Dodge Foundation poet, and a contributing editor for Kweli Journal.
1 - How did your
first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your
previous? How does it feel different?
I think participating in the process of art making is always life
changing, even when there’s no final product. There were many tangible and
intangible changes that came with that first book finally being out in the
world, but two stand out to me. The first change was psychological. Before that
book, there was a general disquiet I was carrying, a vexing sense of urgency.
It was a long road to getting that first book published. There were 20 years of
detours and setbacks, which included starting an MFA program that I could not
afford to finish. Through most of it I had to work two to three jobs, and I was
coming from a working class background where I didn’t have many connections or
guides to help get me there. When at thirty-six I decided to try an MFA program
a second time, I was already trying to come to terms with the reality that it
might not happen, that maybe I just didn’t have it in me to finish and publish
a book. So when I finally got there, publishing my first collection at the age
of forty-one, some of that panic of “what am I doing here?” subsided. It
bolstered my confidence to know that I could make it happen, and that feeling
ended up extending into other parts of my life, my relationships, my teaching,
how I went about my day to day.
Another way in which it changed my life was that it got me “in the
room.” Having a book out helped me gain access to the communities of writers
and artists that I admired and respected and wanted to be in conversation and
in collaboration with. My central desire has always been to live a life
populated with art and artists. That first publication rendered me visible to
groups of people who quite literally did not see me before (even though I was
in fact there). My new found visibility brought me in contact with the kind of
people I wanted to be around, and provided opportunities that made my desire to
be immersed in a world of art a reality.
Each of my books are (to my view) quite distinct from one another. But
this third book is a huge leap from what I am doing in the first two. There has
always been an experimental aspect to my writing, but with Hivestruck
I took a lot of risks with regard to what I was writing about and in the
methods I used to create the work. In fact, I made it a goal to write poems
that were not like the ones in my first two books. Those books very much grew
out of my experience as a spoken word/slam poet and stage performer. They were
driven by sound and orality, poems to be performed in a public space. With
HIVESTRUCK, the starting point for the poems was not musicality and orality.
Instead, I began composing with a focus on what I would call the “conceptual
architecture” of the poems. That is, I treated the poems like art objects that
might be mounted in a gallery, where the physical structure and the look of the
poem is central to making meaning. For some poems, I even gave myself the
challenge of writing a piece that couldn’t be read aloud or performed (knowing,
of course, that all language can be pronounced and recited).
I also made the decision to write a “book,” rather than a collection
of poems. During TERTULIA’s release I did a podcast conversation with Willie Perdomo where he said that he doesn’t write poems anymore, he writes books. For
some reason, that hadn’t really occurred to me before, and that notion sparked
something in me. I connected what he said to the work of The Mars Volta, a band
that I am unabashedly obsessed with (honestly, I can’t believe it took me this
long to mention them). Early on, their albums were all concept albums where
each song is woven into a larger unifying idea, more symphony than a series of
“singles.” This spurred me to make it a goal to write HIVESTRUCK as a “concept
album” rather than a bunch of “singles.”
Moreover, my first two books were very much about Puerto Rican and
Latinx Identity, the poems coming out of my work as a social justice arts
educator in New York. These are themes and fields that were already a part of
my body, ideas and histories that I lived and that I already knew quite a bit
about. But HIVESTRUCK is engaging with issues related to technology, astronomy,
math, and computer science. Though I had a long standing fascination with these
things, I possessed only a very rudimentary education about them when I started
to construct the book. The learning curve was a long one to get me to where I
felt I could write my way through these subjects meaningfully. I had to spend
about a decade reading and researching to become an “amateur expert.” As a result of all this, this book feels
radically different to me, almost as if a different author wrote it.
2 - How did you
come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry first because I came to music first, and poetry is,
above all things, music. My fascination with music goes back to when I was
maybe three or four years old. As my mother tells it, I would go about the
family apartment belting out a toddler’s cut-up version of the chorus to
Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” and Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “New York, New
York.” I grew to not only be fixated on singing and sound making, but also
lyrics. In middle school, my amigo Terry and I were fanatically memorizing and
spitting back to each other lines from the raps of Public Enemy, Run DMC, and
Ice T. This was all a prelude to when my first mentor gave me a copy of Pedro
Pietri’s Puerto Rican
Obituary when I was fifteen years old,
which led this scrawny Boricua kid who grew up in a house without books to
decide that he was going to be a poet.
In hindsight, I can see that I had always been thinking and operating
“poetically,” even with no frame of reference for it back then. In elementary
school, I was reprimanded several times by teachers because I refused to write
in paragraph form. Stanzas felt inherently natural to me, while I still feel
relatively uneasy with the paragraphs of prose. But I do have a real love for
fiction. By the 5th or 6th grade I was reading a dozen or
so novels a year. I take great pleasure in reading fiction, I just never had
too much interest in writing it. When I am compelled to create something that
needs more conventional narrative methods, I turn to playwriting, which shares
some elements with poetry, such as the emphasis on sound (voice) and a layout
on the page that is not the paragraph. But it goes well beyond just preferring
the stanza whenever I take up a pen. I think and communicate in ways that just
seem instinctive to poetry. Poetry is my operating system. It is how I process
and engage with the world.
3 - How long does
it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially
come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to
their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The short answer is it takes forever and is incredibly slow. Pero the
thing is, a “project” is a “product,” and I can’t really say I am focused on
product making most of the time. Like I said, poetry is just my way of being in
the world (and of coping with it). The process elements of reading/researching,
drafting, revising, and performing are components of my day to day existence,
so it is hard for me to pinpoint when a specific contained work of poetry
“begins” and “finishes.” I am also the opposite of a creature of habit. I am
repelled by habit and routine, so these process stages of my art happen
disproportionately and in rather varying time intervals. It’s more of a binge
and purge, feast and famine situation with regard to my writing habits. A lot
of time is spent collecting language and references, sketching ideas, and
playing with sound and text. There is a fair amount of improvisation and play
involved, and an absolute excess of reading. I suppose I typify Roberto Bolaño’s satirical characterization of the Latin American writer as one who
reads a lot and publishes a little. It’s more like sculpting to me. I dedicate
substantial time and space to “make clay” or to gather materials for my
sculpture. 90 percent of the process is making clay.
I do eventually get to a place where I have all this “clay” sitting
around in my notebooks and different computer folders. Then I will start to
review it all, shuffle, dice and splice things until something like a more
fully formed poem begins to reveal itself. Then I expanded this method into
weaving a series of poems, then sections. At some point in all this I do get
product minded and take up shaping what I have into a book. An effect of
functioning this way is that the work for all three of my books happened on an
overlapping timeline. So the earliest poems in STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC. can be
traced back to spoken word pieces I was performing under the title GODS AND
GUNS back around 2000 and 2001, with the last poems written in late 2015, about
six months before the book was published. TERTULIA’s earliest pieces were
composed around 2006, when I was living in Texas and working as the theater
director for the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, with the most recent poems in
that collection completed in February of 2020. There is a poem in HIVESTRUCK
that was initially sketched out in 1998, but I really started creating
materials for this book around 2011 when I started my MFA at Rutgers. The last
poem I wrote for this book was composed in January of this year. I figure
that’s about a ten to fifteen year arc for each book from beginning to end, if
I had to pin down specific moments of inception to publication. I got compadres
who hammer out a book a year, so it seems like I do have quite a long, slow arc
in my process by comparison.
4 - Where does a
poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up
combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from
the very beginning?
Oh, I think I might have answered this one cumulatively in my previous
responses. So I’ll just reiterate that I find it difficult to pinpoint where a
book begins or ends for me, and that for my first two books, the focus was on
writing solid singular poems that I later worked into collection, finding the
conceptual framework only after most of the poems were written. Whereas with
this new book, the intent was to write a book from a fairly early stage in the
process.
5 - Are public
readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of
writer who enjoys doing readings?
This might be the simplest and easiest question to answer: Yes! Claro
que si! Absolutely!
I am theater trained, and I got my start in poetry doing slam at the
Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Performing and writing are inextricably linked for me.
They are not separate things. I would even go so far as to say that the
performing of the poem is THE thing, it is the reason for even writing the
poem. In the poetic lineages of BIPOC people and people of the Global South,
poetry’s essence resides in the oral tradition. It’s music! It’s theater! And
the reason for all of it is to create and nurture community.
You know, for the first year or so of the pandemic, I found it
impossible to write. I came to understand that this inability to write at that
time was because I had no real reason to write, because I write in order to
make community. The whole point is to write something that you can bring to a
stage, go into a classroom with, huddle up in a bar around, to share it out
loud with others. As my body was despairing during the pandemic that it had so
little human contact, I started to question if I would ever get to inhabit such
spaces again. For a spell, my creative spirit just gave up on the idea of
writing, because writing is only the bridge to community. Fortunately we are
back in the world, together, and I have gradually gone back to my old writing
process, because the meaning for it all has returned. I tell you, I cannot live
without experiencing oral poetry and stage theater and live music. Or at least
I wouldn’t want to.
On a quick craft point: Live readings are also part of my editing
process. Hearing my poems out loud and gauging them with audiences helps me to
hear what is working, what needs tweaking, and provides me with a more complete
vision for a piece and what it is meant to be doing.
6 - Do you have
any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you
trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
I’m not sure if you are asking about theoretical concerns in craft or
in vision, but I think posing, engaging, and exploring questions is the primary
engine of the work. I regularly share with my students this interview with
Julia Alvarez where she paraphrases Checkhov, who insisted that the purpose of
an artist’s work is not to provide answers, but rather to articulate a question
clearly. That says a lot about my approach. With each art poem/play/book, I am
attempting to articulate a particular question for myself and for the
reader/listener/audience. The questions I am trying to articulate are expansive
and varying from poem to play, but with my three poetry books, each had an
overarching, guiding question that unified the collection.
STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC. examines the very personal question of “what
does it mean to be Puerto Rican/Caribbean/Latinx?”
TERTULIA explores the question of “how do BIPOC groups in the U.S. and
the people of the Global South resist the coloniality of power?”
HIVESTRUCK asks “in the age of the technopoly (Neil Postman identifies
the technopoly as the current era where humans have chosen to worship
technology like a religion.), what is a person?
I think all of those questions are still quite relevant. At least,
they are relevant to me, as I am still engaging with them, and will probably
continue to try to unpack them in future work. Of course each of them have
hundreds of disparate but related questions springing from their branches.
7 – What do you
see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have
one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Well let me start with how I sense others currently see that role.
Here in the U.S., a culture still locked in the thrall of Global Militaristic
Capitalism, there are those people who want to deify the writer, to give the
writer a privileged place in the hierarchy, and to prove that writers deserve
to receive some of the spoils available to the privileged. Then there are those
who think the writer is a useless annoyance (unless their books can generate
massive revenue) who is better left ignored, and is entirely undeserving of
said spoils. I’ve come to see the writer outside of the Capitalist framework
that renders us as either “special people” or “non-people.” In fact, it is my
conviction that the idea of there being “special people” is a violent notion bolstered
to help maintain systems of inequality.
I think writers and what we do are absolutely vital to the world, but
in the same way that nurses and electricians and mathematicians and farmers are
absolutely vital. We contribute to the larger whole by providing a specific
essential service. Our particular contribution is in making and codifying
culture, in synthesizing the different fields of knowledge, in transmitting and
translating those fields of knowledge, in articulating and critiquing the
machinations of power, and in evolving how collectivities of human beings think
and operate. It’s the synthesizing part of that statement that is most
important. Octavio Paz, in making an argument for the important of the
humanities, claimed that those of us that work in the humanities (which, of
course, includes writers) are the ones who weave together and makes sense of
this world of cordoned off “specialists” that the post-industrial world has
produced. He said without someone to unify these otherwise isolated fields of
knowledge and to make them accessible to everyone, social entropy will take
hold. We need the writers (and others in the humanities) to perform this
function. And there will never be a time when human societies are not in need
of someone to do that work. So though what writing looks like and how writers
write will inevitably morph over time, I can’t foresee a human world where the
writer will not have a place. I think the writer’s strike this past year did a
good job of revealing this to be true.
8 - Do you find
the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Is it an either/or proposition? Can’t it be both? I mean, perhaps it
is my theater training, but I don’t really think any artist can function in a
void. We need collaborators and co-conspirators, someone who can look at what
we are doing from the outside and can tell us what they see, ask us questions,
provoke us to think about our work differently. But this is a relationship, and
all relationships require labor, patience, flexibility, a mutual effort to
understand each other. As a former collaborator from my theater days in San
Antonio once said to me, “pero es un lindo trabajo.” It’s beautiful work! Or at
least it can be. Like all relationships, a good deal hinges on who it is you
are involving yourself with. The right collaborators/co-conspirators can make
utter magic together. Conversely, it can be toxic if the people involved cannot
come to understand each other.
I have been quite lucky in my life to have worked with some really
wonderful editors. Janet Holmes, who ran Ahsahta Press where my first book was
published, handled my work as a new author with such care and patience. She
didn’t try to impose her own aesthetics and ideology on me, and as a white
woman editing a book rooted in Latinx and Caribbean poetic legacies, she was
not dismissive of what she didn’t understand (which I have experienced
elsewhere). Similarly, Paul Slovak and Allie Merola at Penguin, and their team,
trust that I know what I am doing and commit to my vision for a book, while
also guiding me to making the work as strong as it can be by asking critical
questions, encouraging me to dig deeper in places where they see I can go
further, and keep me focused while providing space for me to experiment and
take risks, which is in my nature as an artist.
They are and have been my official editors, but writers also have
those editors who are not listed in the rolling credits of the film, right? I
am very fortunate, and honored to be married to a first rate writer and
scholar, Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta. She is my first reader and has done countless
hours of unpaid editorial work, offering feedback, advice, and encouragement,
labor I hope I have reciprocated.
So it again goes back to this idea that art/writing is all about
making and nurturing community, no?
9 - What is the
best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
This relates to what I have been saying about the importance of
relationships and art as community building. I received this wisdom from my
first mentors in the theater world, from playwrights Carmen Rivera and Candido Tirado. It is not anything that can easily be summarized or wrapped up in a
catchy sentence. They showed me the very difficult truth that some folks are
genuinely there to build with you and want to help you and your work flourish,
and there are those who will take on the appearance and use the language of a
collaborator and co-conspirator, but they will try to sabotage your work by
weaponizing feedback and critique. They taught me it was important to learn how
to distinguish between the two, in order to protect myself and my vision, but
also to protect the artistic communities that I find myself a part of. As their
mentee, I watched them interact with other writers, directors, actors, and
producers, and saw how they carried themselves, how they made themselves always
available to help, but how they protected their space, their plays, with
dignity and without toxicity. Learning this from them has carried me through
these last 30 years of my career.
10 - How easy has
it been for you to move between genres? What do you see as the appeal?
Depends on the genre. I have always been a sponge for art and a
creative polyglot who loves what people consider highbrow and lowbrow art. Hivestruck
was inspired in part by science fiction films and novels, and my first two
books are heavily influenced by pop artists in music and visual art, from Björk
to Pedro Almodóvar to Basquiat to Octavia Butler and comedian Freddie Prinze.
Actually, central to my art is the act of blurring - or even eliminating - the
aesthetic and ideological walls of genre and style. It’s all Édouard Glissant’s
Poetics of Relation to me. The appeal, the joy, is in bridging all these
disparate worlds together in a way that also abolishes hierarchies. I also
blend forms and techniques, and I love to juxtapose vernaculars and jargon from
different subcultures. Genres can be fun, but they are also constructs designed
to sell and market products. It’s the artist’s duty to flip the script on all
that.
11 - What kind of
writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a
typical day (for you) begin?
I think I covered this a bit with one of the prior questions, but I am
rather anti-routine, which can feel liberating, but I know it is also a
personal obstacle. I grew up in a rather chaotic household, there were no
rituals we adhered to. We were taught to be responsible about meeting
obligations for work, but outside of that, life is a free for all. This bred me
to be averse to routines and stubborn about doing only what I want when I want.
Perhaps that was why I didn’t make a great athlete when I was playing sports
back in my school days. The idea of doing the same workout everyday at the same
time repulses me. I am well aware that this is to my own detriment.
Theater did offer me another way, however. Stage productions operate
on a schedule, but for a finite timeline where you can see the finish line. You
work intensely for three months and then the run is over and you can go back to
an unstructured life. I suppose it is fitting I ended up a professor, where I
work intensely in four month intervals, and then go back to waking up and doing
things at different times every day. And I have adopted this for my creative
and writing life as well. I work intensely for marked intervals, and then I can
go back to living randomly for a spell, before I have to get back to living by
my alarm. When I am in professor mode, I am up early, my schedule packed
tightly, and steadily juggling the classroom with administrative work with my
work as an artist. In between semesters, my days are a random sancocho of
reading, drinking coffee, music playing, errands, film watching, city walks,
writing and other art making. A few months ahead of a deadline - either the
semester is about to begin or I have a piece I have to write or a production
coming up - I’ll tighten the reins and
push myself to keep more structured and saner hours.
12 - When your
writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better
word) inspiration?
Art. I return to some art or artist I know will ignite my intellect or
my senses. The impetus for me to write comes from two places: I set to work
when some injustice or corrosive power draws my ire, or when I have taken in
another work of art that moves me so deeply it fires up the impulse to create
again. The first impetus can’t be artificially provoked, and it would be awful
if one could spawn injustice to happen just to make art. With the former I am
usually taken by surprise and it's kind of a “drop everything you're doing to
work this out on the page” situation. But when I haven’t created new work for a
spell and I am feeling like I need to make something happen, I’ll go and watch
a Pasolini film, or hit up a museum, spend a few hours mixing up records on my
sound system, or - when I really need to return to the source - I read some
Derek Walcott. Walcott always makes me want to write, and to be a better writer
(and to question why I even try because he is just so damn good).
13 - What
fragrance reminds you of home?
Whatever fragrance my wife is wearing that evening, because she is my
home.
14 - David W.
McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms
that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Yeah, lo siento, pero I have to respectfully disagree with McFadden. I
take the position of Kurt Vonnegut here, who said, “I think it can be
tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind
other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up
its own asshole, so to speak.” Books coming from books makes for insular work
that exists in an echo chamber and risks being irrelevant to the world at
large.
I already mentioned how I tend to turn to film, visual art, theater,
and (primarily) music to replenish the creative well and gather material for my
art. But I also strongly advocate taking the time to learn from and engage with
things outside the realm of art. You referred to nature and science, for
example. I am puro city kid, not the outdoorsy type, but I find that going for
long walks (through any kind of environment) replenishes the well. Though I
struggle with a steady exercise routine, I do find that physical activity can
also kick things into gear. Playing some basketball used to do it for me,
before I tore up my ankle one too many times. And dancing, which I still do,
though now it’s just for 30 minutes in my living room; my clubbing days are
far, far in the past. I have writer friends who like tinkering with
electronics, some who knit, others who fish, who take up running. Whatever has
you engaging with the world beyond literature, so you have something to bring
back to the page with you when you return.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edouard-Glissant
15 - What other
writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of
your work?
During the release of my last book, Tertulia, Jose B. Gonzalez asked
me in an interview about my poetry being steeped in history. That’s because I
have such a small obsession with history, not for nostalgic reasons, but
because I am a descendent of colonized people whose history and culture
hegemonic powers have continually tried to erase. Reclaiming my history has
become crucial to my writing and my teaching. It has aided me in understanding
myself and mi gente, and it has also helped me understand our oppressor better.
So I read a good deal of Latin American history, politics, and cultural texts…
a lot of decolonial theory. Eduardo Galeano is essential reading. Aníbal
Quijano’s Coloniality of Power is cornerstone, and I think I already mentioned
Antonio Benítez-Rojo and Édouard Glissant. Their theories heavily informed my
first two books. There’s also Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Edward Said, Arundhati Roy, Judith Butler, Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román. José Esteban Muñoz’s
texts are absolutely necessary. And right now I am trying to read everything by
Marie Arana, one of the foremost writers on Latinx and Latin American people
currently working. Being an educator, I also read my share of pedagogical texts
such as bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Neil Postman, and Dr. Bettina Love. And I
read an unreasonable amount of books about music, too many to name here. Music
books are my go to when I just want to read for pleasure.
16 - What would
you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I am extremely fortunate to be able to say that most of what I have
wanted to do with my life I have already done. But I would love to visit as
much of the planet as I can while I am alive. It would be great to get to see
more of Latin America, and to finally travel to East Asia and somewhere in
Africa. I also would like to one day be fully fluent in Spanish well enough to
read One Hundred Years of Solitude in its original
language.
17 - If you could
pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what
do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I think I am already doing the only other work I am cut out for:
teaching. If I can use this question to fantasize for a minute here, though, a
dream job would be hosting a travel show, one that focuses on culture and
history instead of food. Stanley Tucci recently did his “Searching for Italy”
show. I’d love to create a show “Searching for Latin America” and host it.
18 - What made
you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Well, I began writing because I was bullied and silenced as a young
child. There was a real danger in opening my mouth back then, there would be
physical repercussions, so I took to laying down what I was experiencing in a
notebook. Then when I started reading out of those notebooks at open mics on
the slam circuit I felt a kind of liberation. Writing and performing poetry was
the option that made itself available to me for inexplicable reasons. I suppose
part of that has to do with class. My one true artistic love is music, but
there was no money in my family for expensive instruments and private lessons.
A pen and notebook is the cheapest set of materials for any artistic
discipline. Anyone can take it up. That is why it is such a powerful agent for
personal and social change. Believe me, if I had had access to the resources
that could have made me a singer or a guitarist, I would have jumped on that.
It’s always been about sound and language for me.
19 - What was the
last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Ooh! I just finished reading Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. That is an utterly heart warming and mind-blowing book. The novel is
a kind of tapestry of the lives of Black women in contemporary England. With no
single character on a “hero’s journey,” the book serves as an antidote to the
single story problem (as articulated by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). The stories
in it are so eclectic and rich and complicated and surprising, with a wonderful
balance of humor and serious discourse. And there are hardly any men in the
stories. We are in secondary roles and not central to any of the narratives in
the book - which I find refreshing, and quite beautiful. And of course that
should be the norm. Anyway, I am adamant that everyone should read this book.
And I recently watched About
Dry Grasses by my favorite Turkish
filmmaker, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. In my book, Tertulia, I wrote an ekphrastic for his film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. His films are also an antidote: an antidote
for the “roller coaster” model of Hollywood films (to quote Martin Scorsese).
His films are sprawling, meditative, pieces driven more by character than by
plot. They are also visually stunning, every shot is a painting. Ceylan’s films
have the nuance and complexity of great novels, they don’t deal in the
simplistic good vs. evil binaries of Hollywood films. This makes it a bit
difficult to say what his films are “about.” They are about many things, but
more importantly they are an experience. What I can say is that About Dry
Grasses confronts the blurriness of what
we consider to be “truth,” and how disillusionment can lead to bitterness and
isolation. The film’s neo-realistic character study of teachers in rural Turkey
is blended with a few surprising, artful flourishes and lush cinematography
capturing the wintery landscape of central Turkey. I really do wish more films
like this were being made right now, films that illuminate the human experience
and do not shy away from subtlety and vulnerability, that use image as metaphor
- film as poetry.
20 - What are you
currently working on?
Right now, I am back to making clay. There isn’t anything concrete
yet. What I can say is that the handful of poems that I do have so far are a
kind of sequel to my first book, reaching back but expanding the themes of
Latinidad and Puerto Rican and Caribbean history that I was exploring there.
The working title for this series is Hurricanticle, but it is at a
very early stage, and my work can sometimes become something very different
from what I started with during the arc of my process.
It’s been almost seven years since I worked on a play, so I am hoping
to get back to that part of my creative life at some point as well. I have a
skeleton idea for a play, but there’s not enough there yet to even consider a
title or provide a tagline for it. We’ll have to see. Right now I am just
trying to be in the present and celebrate the fact that Hivestruck is
finally out in the world.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
