In 2024, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Victor Hernández Cruz discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy, and I’m here today with our Guest Editor for December, former Chancellor Victor Hernández Cruz. Victor is the author of Guayacán. Victor, welcome, and thank you for joining me today.

Victor Hernández Cruz: Welcome. Marhaba!

Poets.org: [laughs] All right, let’s jump right in, please. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for December?

Hernández Cruz: Well, I’ve known so many poets over the years, and so I contacted some of those poets and they in turn got me in touch with other poets. I was looking for young poets that they [sic] are starting to write, or they’re in the twenties or thirties. It’s amazing how many people are beginning to write and seeing poetry even as a career. They’re serious about it, even though the bad situation of poetry [sic] in the United States. It’s not like in Latin America where poets are made diplomats, like Octavio Paz, a diplomat to India from Mexico. And Pablo Neruda was a diplomat to various countries from Chile, and he was also a senator with the Communist party. And he was constantly in Latin America. The governments use poets in politics, something that doesn’t happen in the United States. So, poets have a low profile here. They have the … visiting poets at the Library of [Congress], as Juan Felipe Herrera was doing for a year,* but that’s about the minimum amount of ...

They never make poets diplomats to other countries, or they never really support poetry that much in schools, in public schools, in public settings, unlike the Medellín International Poetry Festival in Colombia, which has audiences for poets of four to five thousand people in a single reading. And Chile, for Pablo Neruda, after he got the Nobel Prize, at the Estadio Nacional de Chile in Santiago, he had an audience of seventy thousand people for his poetry reading there. And so, we don’t have this kind of situation in the United States, you know, where you fill up stadiums for a poet. So it’s amazing that poets are beginning to continue to write and approach the word, and see it also as careers [sic]. So I looked for all of those kinds of poems, and a lot of those poems started to come in from friends that I have made over the years, and so I read a lot of amazing poetry and selected some. And I hope that answered your question. Is that good?

Poets.org: Of course. One thing that might be a little bit unexpected, you’ve included a poet from the Umbra movement in your curation. Can you tell our audience a little bit more about the Umbra poets and your relationship with them?

Hernández Cruz: The Umbra poets were a group of actually African American poets who were busy on the Lower East Side, making a connection with the African American musicians and poets and writers who were living on the Lower East Side. And primarily it was David Henderson, Lorenzo Thomas and Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, figures like that. And I began to know them through Ishmael Reed and through David Henderson, and I met them all, and they invited me to their group, which was meeting Monday nights at Len Chandler’s house, who was a singer. He’s passed away this last year.

And so we would meet there on Monday nights and discuss poetry and select poetry for the magazine. They were publishing a magazine called Umbra, and that was a lot of fun, and it was a learning experience for me because I was a young lad. I was in high school at the time, and [it was an] eye-opener to meet all those people, and we had a great time. And so they have all gone on to become very well-known writers, Ishmael Reed, David Henderson. And David Henderson is still around. He’s going through some changes now, but he has a [sic] interesting poem there in the December Poem-a-Day about blues, because David was always into music. He wrote Jimi Hendrix’s biography.

Poets.org: Mm-hmm, right.

Hernández Cruz: Yes.

Poets.org: So Victor, what are you reading right now?

Hernández Cruz: I’m reading some textbooks. I’m reading now Borges’s La eternidad … My wife is getting a book of mine: Historia de la eternidad by Jorge Luis Borges. And I’m reading some of Shakespeare’s introductions to his plays. They’re a little like poems. And those are two things I’m reading. And I was reading Marcel Proust and a book of [Vladimir] Nabokov some time back, but right now I’m reading Borges. And I read and reread because reading is not just ... You have to live with books. You have to read them over and over again. And so sometimes I read at night, and sometimes at day, and they seem to have different ... The atmosphere has an influence on how I write and how I read also, you know.

Poets.org: Sure. Speaking of your writing, what are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Hernández Cruz: Right now, I’m polishing up some short stories that I have, and I look forward to see [sic] if I can publish them within the next couple of years. And I’m rewriting those and doing another book of poetry. And I also want to do a book of poetry in Español, it’s my native language. So I know both languages and I write in both, and I read in both, I live in both, and so I’m bilingual that way all my life, and so I want to write specifically a book on poetry in Spanish and publish it in Puerto Rico or in Spain. So that’s a project that I’m doing. And the prose is something like five hundred, almost five hundred and fifty pages, so it’s a lot of work. It’s like a sea of words, you know, so you have to go through every period, every comma, every dot, and write and rewrite, because writing is not just ... Rewriting is rewriting [sic]. All the time, you have to go through that stuff many times. And so I’m finishing that up and maybe in the next couple of months, I’ll be finished with that sea of words and the prose.

Poets.org: Sounds great. Now, you live as an expatriate in Morocco. How has your life there influenced your work?

Hernández Cruz: Well, life here is quiet and family-orientated [sic]. I’m not in the public eye that much, and I don’t know really too many writers here; and there’s no scene, a poetry scene like there’s in New York, so I miss New York. I miss the poetry scene there, and speaking to writers. And I’m going to get back to New York now, and I think in about a month and a half, I’m going to go to Puerto Rico and then to New York and make connections with lot of my poet friends in New York. I miss New York a lot. Sometimes it can be boring out here, but I have my books. And I concentrate on my language, just Spanish and English. And in a sense, I get isolated from the community because they speak Arabic and French, and so it really makes me focus on my languages and it keeps me home, tranquilo, and that’s kind of good. So I have good times with my imagination.

Poets.org: Sounds about right. Yeah.

Hernández Cruz: Solitude and time to write no … interruptions. I don’t drink. I don’t do anything. I just read books and write and take care of my family. That’s what I do here. 

Poets.org: Yeah, it’s a simple life. That sounds great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Victor.

Hernández Cruz: Thank you, Mary. Thank you.

 

*Juan Felipe Herrera served as United States poet laureate for two years, from 2015 to 2017.