“Speaking Wiri Wiri” (Red Hen Press, 2013) by gay poet Dan Vera was the winner of the inaugural Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. The book, Vera’s second full-length collection, consists of 45 poems arranged in five distinct sections. Taken as a whole, the collection possesses a cohesive voice and message. Latino, queer, the son of immigrants, fascinated with language and memory (two of the sections are titled “The Trouble With Memory” and “The Memory Of The Tongue”), Vera’s book couldn’t come at a better time, with immigration reform and LGBT issues at the forefront of the national debate.
Written with authority, assurance, and passion, “Speaking Wiri Wiri” has earned Vera a rightful place alongside his poetry heroes. The Agenda spoke with Vera to commemorate April’s designation as National Poetry Month.
When did you begin to seriously write poetry, and how did you come to it?
I began writing poetry in college during the lead up to the first [Gulf] War, [around] 1989. The country was gearing up for war and although the news was filled with reports, there seemed to be little conversation among my circle of friends about the impact the war could have on my generation. Poetry allowed me a way to express my own concerns about this war. I don’t know why it was poetry, but when I shared it with friends, they seemed to find a resonance with the fears and questions I was raising. I kept writing, mostly as a solitary act and didn’t seriously begin to write poetry, to dedicate myself to it, to immerse myself in it, until years later.
Where does prose fit into your writing?
I’ve written essays on gay identity and history which probably come out of my academic background in anthropology and history. In many ways I see my writing as storytelling and uncovering and retelling histories that are worthy of recording.
Who do you consider to be your poetry heroes?
I used to joke that my life was like the first 19 minutes of “The Wizard of Oz,” until the day I picked up a volume of [Pablo] Neruda (William O’Daly’s translations of “Libro de Preguntas”) and my life went Technicolor [laughs]. I’d been writing [for] a few years but that volume unlocked something inside of me. My other poetry heroes include Emily Dickinson, for her persistence to write in solitude and her engagement with the world through her writing. There’s something rather heroic about that. There are other poets whose work has inspired or influenced me from time to time and for a variety of reasons: Nemerov, Ginsberg, Doty, Seiferle, Nye. But my reading tastes are rather broad.
Did you have an overall message in “Speaking Wiri Wiri?”
The first three sections are titled “The Trouble With Language,” “The Trouble With Borders,” and “The Trouble With Memory.” I didn’t go into writing these poems with these ideas in mind. [But] those titles are a blunt admission that we are never perfectly served by language, borders, or memory, which seem to me to be porous and malleable by time and repetition. We cling to language and borders and memory in a vain attempt to give some control to our lives, to make sense of life—our identities are tied up with these matters. I just feel it’s important to be reminded that language and borders and memory are fluid and liable to change.
The poem “Ambrosia on Four Legs” opens with an epigraph by openly-gay Cuban poet Richard Blanco. As a gay poet of Cuban heritage, what is the tradition of queer Cuban writers?
[Blanco, Achy Obejas, and the late Reinaldo Arenas] have been sources of great pleasure and reassurance for me. Certainly as a gay Cuban kid who grew up in South Texas, their being gay and Cuban meant a lot to me. I remember finding an immediate resonance with Obejas’s “We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?” Here was a writer mediating these multiple identities. I came to Richard [Blanco’s] work much later and found a kindred writer exploring mixed identity and sifting through family memory. Our similarities may be more aptly a part of the immigrant writers’ tradition, certainly first-generation writers who are struggling to mediate these multiple identities here in the United States.
As for Arenas, his memoir “Before Night Falls” served as a priceless testament of the repression faced by queer people like me in Cuba. It certainly wasn’t new for those knowledgeable enough to remember [Beat poet] Allen Ginsberg being kicked off the island for being a “perverse” influence on Cuba’s young people. But to my mind, Arenas belongs to that rich tradition of Gay Cuban writers like Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, and Severo Sarduy. As in all cultures, gay people have been among the central pillars in Cuban culture. Unfortunately they’ve been largely sidelined or silenced in the last 50 years.
What did you think Blanco’s poem that he read at President Obama’s second inauguration?
I loved Blanco’s ability to thread the personal with the aspirational in that poem. That’s never been done in an inaugural poem and [it’s] a hell of an accomplishment. He managed to find a way to be communal and meditative at the same time. I loved what Elizabeth Alexander, the last inaugural poet, said about creating a moment of quiet in the midst of the pomp and pageantry. Richard did that, but he also found a way to express the myriad and the shared. Just lovely.
Have you started writing or thinking about your next book?
I’ve begun preliminary writing on some poems. I’ve been doing more research and reading, and my interest seems to be centered on a lot of forgotten history. I’m interested in how Latino history is tied up with the tension between America’s democratic and imperialist impulses. But I’m also conspiring on an anthology of “crush” poems with a poet friend. For now I’m just happy to have the opportunity to share these poems with new audiences.
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