The newly appointed poet laureate of the US talks about his upbringing as a campesinos in California, the role of poetry in political life, and Allen Ginsberg
“It’s a good thing, you know, it’s a good thing,” Juan Felipe Herrera told me on the phone last week, as he reacted to the news that he was going to be the next poet laureate of the United States – the first Hispanic American to receive the honour. But he would rather not stop there: “The more we engage in society, the more firsts we have, then there will be a moment when we have no more firsts.” He thinks about that statement for a second, then adds, “Or maybe there will always be new firsts.”
Few people in America would speak of poetry as a realm of endless possibility in the way Herrera does, not anymore. For many people, poetry is still stereotyped as the inaccessible, ivory-tower stuff studied by academics and force-fed on high-school students or to be found in Father’s Day cards. Even the size of the stipend Herrera will collect as poet laureate – $35,000 – indicates a certain amount of public disinterest in this particular art.
Blood on the daughter’s breast who sews roses
Blood on the father, does anyone remember him, bluish?
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