A Legend Speaks: An Interview with Nuyorican Poet Jesús Papoleto Meléndez
by Dimitri Reyes
Thinking of your poems “Subway Sleeper Car Sleeper” or “The Flood Came to Puerto Rico,” how do you think that writing politically driven poems help change the political climate in a time where social media has American dialogue moving so quickly?
Well, first of all, people need to slow down. Just because one is dealing with intellectual technology doesn’t necessarily mean that one is keeping up with it intellectually. I feel that people need to read more, than speak poetry. I am always dismayed when there is a conversation about poetics, et al, and many folk are unfamiliar with a lot of poetry, historic poetry, poets and poetry that mattered, and still does, if read. How many times has my head fallen to my chest when I ask about my great friend, El Reverendo Pedro Pietri, and no one, or very few even know of whom I’m speaking; Pedro’s passing just yesterday (March, 2004). So, I don’t think that people are paying attention, but rather, seeking it, via a poetic voice-device. Now, having said that, I’ll add that Poetry can tolerate the self-voice because within even the “self-voice” (vis-à-vis, the “I” or “Me” poem-speak), empathy still emerges; albeit, self-empathy. Poems as you’ve mentioned above are empathetic to situations “outside” of oneself. They are things that happen to other people, and therefore, are not necessarily “personal,” but rather, global, humanistic, about life. It is the empathy of putting yourself in someone else’s situation, and relating it. So, we need to study poetry more thoroughly; look to see where everything comes from, and, perhaps to where things are going. Poetry is not a stepping-stone to fortune and fame, or Hollywood for that matter — where, if the poet where to seek that, he or she would trade their voice for that of Hollywood, or fortune and fame, and lose their use of poetry. Poetry does not compromise itself for such mundane material.
In terms of our youth, can you talk about the importance of having poets in the schools and making poetry and performance a part of the curriculum?
When I was 19 years old, I started working as a poet in the classroom. I had just started getting published and was reading my poetry around New York town, and people were beginning to call me out as a poet. It was then, but we didn’t know it then, the beginning to the Nuyorican poets movement, and it was a very hot political time. With programs like Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and Poets-in-the-Schools, we were assigned to classroom teaching assignments, with the English subject teacher totally involved in the process of eliciting poetry from young students’ personal experiences, and connecting them to realities outside of themselves wherein they might find affinity.
Now, poetry in the curriculum has been relegated to after-school, recreational activity, competing with robotics. Poetry belongs everywhere, of course — but especially in the classroom. It’s not the sole purview of “teachers” in the classroom, but of poets in the classrooms as well. Visiting artists, and introduced as such — and not just student-peer teachers, but elder poets especially. When I was a kid the only poets you ever saw were Shakespeare (in depictions), Whitman (Mr. Selfie), and Robert Frost in photos. So, we really didn’t know what poets looked liked, or what they liked. I am very glad that poetry has permeated society in a myriad of forms, such as rap (the dozens, revisited), hip hop, spoken-word — even breaking-dancing to modern dance. But, the youth of today does not know every damned thing — especially, the past. Elders are very important people, especially if one is able to communicate with one. Damn it, take oral histories of your family. Look up “StoryCorps” (https://storycorps.org/listen/jesus-melendez-and-frank-perez/ part of the Smithsonian collection), where they keep oral histories. You’ll find the testimony that I recorded with poet Frank Perez, following the death of Pedro Pietri, wherein I give a detailed account of Pietri’s last moments as he drifts into eternity 45,000 feet above earth, in a private air-ambulance flying from Tijuana, Mexico to La Guardia airport. Pedro dies over Roswell, New Mexico — to prove a point! Hear it!
You are very in tune with “the spiritual” while navigating poems that take hold in very urban spaces; this also blends uniquely with views of commodification and capitalism. Are there subjects related to these two stratifying ideas that you think this new generation of poets needs to pay closer attention to?
Well, you always gotta be careful with capitalism — or any ism, for that matter. However, poetry writing is not a money-making adventure; it’s an adventure into the human soul, which might be different from the spiritual soul — one being more material than the other, as far as material things go. And, hell-yeah, art has become commodified, and the youth is buying into it. As young Nuyorican poets we were trying to speak for our people through our personal experiences socially, politically, and culturally via poetry. We were speaking for our people and creating a new idiom for that expression. Now, I find what I might characterize a cultural-capitalists, say, people utilize cultural idioms for the purpose of capitalizing on them for some bitcoins of fortune and fame. I say, it’s like our generation broke through and shattered the walls of the citadel of this society’s access to a voice, and the subsequent generations have sauntered through those gates to discover a shopping mall and they’ve begun a shopping spree. Seek the spiritual in poetry.
“Up on Housing Project Hill, it’s either fortune or fame; You must pick one or the other, though neither of them are to be what they claim.”
— Bob Dylan, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”
You dedicated Papolitico, “to the belief that The Nature of Poetry is the Universal Empathetic Expression of the Spirits’ suffering a Human Experience.” Can you speak to what that means to you? What is or isn’t “The Nature of Poetry” and “Human Experience” today, that it wasn’t 60 or 100 years ago.
Are we spiritual beings having a human experience, or are we humans having a spiritual experience? I believe the former is truer to life’s purpose. Life is an information-gathering expedition, built on one prime directive in two-parts: Gather as much information as possible via human experience; and live as long and fully as possible to do so. And, as we can now see, human society has “progressed” from the stone age, the iron period, et al, the industrial revolution, and revolutions outright, and now into the information age, of course, but to what end? Well, here on earth, there is one purpose — capitalism. However, the universe has a different view and need. The universe’s need is growth, expansion, which lies in information — the collection of cells into new forms — after all, what do humans really produce — ideas, then material things.
I believe that the universe is empathetic to the human experience wherever it exists, in whatever form. As a way to aid us in life, the universe sends out message of consciousness that spreads (like Sun rays) throughout the planet, and is received by sensitized human antenna, causing the effect of realization into idea, idea into action. Thusly, you have a multitude of humanity rising up for a singular global cause — say, human rights, women’s rights, ecology, etc. I call this cosmic-email. Poetry is cosmic email. And poems are about empathy. It’s peculiar in that, as I mentioned earlier, the spoken-word poet, speaking for him- or herself, is nevertheless speaking empathetically within the poem-speak.
What do you hope to see out of the new generation of emerging Puerto Rican poets?
True Love, not hype. Love for humanity, ambassadors of humanity, peace. Respect for elders, and what came before. Respect for one another, not competition. Unity. And, personally, more respect for the elder poets that are still around. There is no such a thing as an old poet. People are younger and older, chronologically, because of math of calendars, but spirits are young and old simultaneously. Poetry as a professional, life-long pursuit is one that offers wisdom with age, and that’s to be respected. I find that as an art form it seems the only one where one is not required to study the past in order to proceed into the future is a poet; you just get up (or sit down, as the case may be) and do it. Being a poet is a way of being, a life-style, one that might lead a person to stop and take a moment to smell a flower, and in that moment to realize how putrid life on earth can be.
-Jesús Papoleto Meléndez
October 6, 2018, El Barrio, New York City
To learn more about this poet, please visit this link: https://2leafpress.org/online/team/jesus-papoleto-melendez/
