An Interview with Martín Espada

Martín Espada graciously agreed to be interviewed by GCC student and Plum intern Tommy Nielsen. The interview took place on March 21, 2025, in Shelburne Falls, MA. Below is a transcript of that interview, which has been lightly edited.

TN: I read that you were a tenant lawyer, and you worked with low-income people.

ME: Yes, I went to Northeastern University Law School Boston in 1982. I graduated in 1985, and ended up working for a program called Su Clínica Legal. It was a program for low-income Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea, right across the Tobin Bridge in Boston. It’s a gateway city, a city of immigrants, always has been. When I worked there in the late 80’s and early 90’s, immigrants were coming from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean: Puerto Rico, the DR. But they were also coming for the first time from Central America, in flight from the wars there funded by the Reagan Administration. We were seeing people coming from the same places they come from today—Guatemala, El Salvador. We did eviction defense, no heat cases, rats and roaches, crazy landlords, conditions. It was a program sponsored by Suffolk University Law School. We were representing these tenants in these housing cases, but also training and supervising law students to do the same. That was our team. So yes, I did that from 1987 to 1993.

TN: You’ve spoken about how resistance was as natural as breathing in your childhood home. Can you share a specific memory that illustrates how your upbringing prepared you for a life of combining art and advocacy?

ME: Well, that would have to do with my father. He was a community organizer and documentary photographer. He was a leader, some would say the leader, of the Puerto Rican community in New York City during the 60’s and early 70’s. I grew up with an ethos of resistance all around me. I can remember my father disappearing when I was seven years old. He had been arrested and thrown into jail for protesting racial discrimination, with many other people in Brooklyn CORE, and no one knew where he was for a week or so, maybe more. I would sit there holding his photograph, and I would cry after school every day. Then one day he walked in the door! I remember saying to him, “I thought you were dead!” And he laughed. Then he realized he would have to try to explain to me why he was gone for a week or ten days. It was difficult because I was seven, and I didn’t understand it all. But at that point I think he realized he had to start integrating me into his political life.

TN: Yeah.

ME: It wasn’t that much later, in 1966, when I was nine years old, when I went with him and many others, including my mother, on a candlelight march and vigil to protest the murder of Agropino Bonillo. He was a short order cook with nine kids who was surrounded and kicked to death by drug addicts on his way home from work one night. This was a protest organized by my father and other leaders in the community in East New York to campaign for safe streets and civil rights. That was my first demonstration. I later wrote a poem about it called “The Moon Shatters on Alabama Avenue” in reference to all the candles people carried that night. My father’s photographs are all around us on these walls, and they hung on the walls of our apartment in Brooklyn, which meant they also hung on the walls of my imagination.

TN: Of course.

ME: And they’re still there.

TN: How did growing up in such an activist household shape your approach to poetry as a writer?

ME: I always believed that’s what poetry was about. Why else would you write it? The first poetry I remember was political in nature; it totally confirmed what I believed. I saw my father using photography to advocate for his community and speak out against injustice. I saw that marriage between politics and art, which made it very easy for me to imagine that poetry should do that also. There was a model for me right there.

TN: You have published over a dozen poetry collections spanning nearly forty years. How has your poetic voice evolved from your early works to more recent collections like Floaters, which I’m enjoying reading.

ME: Well, I mean, to a certain extent, I’m still concerned with the same things—the same subject matter, the same point of view. I think if I’ve changed, it would be in terms of the craft, in terms of the images and in terms of the music of the poems. The lines have gotten longer, but they’ve also gotten tighter. The vocabulary has changed. I hope so because I’ve been doing this for forty years.

TN: Of course. You’ve edited anthologies of poetry like Poetry Like Bread and What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump. What responsibility do you believe sits with poets during periods of social and political crisis?

ME: Well, poets have to be true to themselves, for starters. Not everybody can write the same poem. I think it’s important for poets to look at the world around them and see where the conflicts are. Where the tensions are. Where the conflicts and tensions arise from race, or class, or gender because that is also all around us. Obviously, we live in a time of tremendous upheaval. If you’ve got something to say about that as a poet, you should say it. Having said that, the old adage still applies—that you write what you know—so if you’re going to speak as a poet of injustice, speak of it from your point of view, from your personal experience, even if that is an experience of privilege. You still have a knowledge of the world that is unique to you. You know something I don’t know. Tell me what it is. What I wouldn’t do is start scrolling, and find a headline sufficiently enraging to inspire a burst of rhetoric, because it won’t be good poetry. It has to be good poetry for it to work on any other level, as protest or anything else.

TN: That makes sense—to speak from your own perspective.

ME: You write what you know. Poets make mistakes too. We’re always in the process of learning and belonging to the world. Being involved in the world is the best way of guaranteeing that you’ll have something to say about the world.

TN: That resonates. Civil rights are important to me. I’ve seen it firsthand. In 2020, I didn’t actually get mad because of what was on the news. I experienced it myself. I too like to write from places of pain, or places of hurt, or memories. That’s where I get my inspiration.

TN: I’d like to [focus on] you as a teacher. As a professor at UMass Amherst, how do you approach teaching poetry that engages with political imagination? What do you hope your students take away from your classes?

ME: Well, we as teachers should be teaching what we love. We should be introducing students to the poets that make us want to write, the poets that move us. I’ve always wanted to get students fired up about the same poets that get me fired up. And that was always, in many ways, the most gratifying part of the job—when that clicked, and when I saw that students were actually, either in the papers they wrote for me or the poems they wrote for me, absorbing the influences of the poets that influenced me. It’s easy enough to introduce students to famous poets or canonical poets. What I’ve taken particular gratification in doing is introducing students to poets they would never hear of otherwise.

TN: Yeah.

ME: I want to point to another photograph on the wall. That’s a fellow named Jack Agüeros, a Puerto Rican poet, fiction writer, playwright, and essayist. He was the director of a museum in East Harlem called El Museo del Barrio, and he was photographed by my father at the Museo with an exhibit of hand-carved wooden saints from Puerto Rico. He was a good friend of my father, not only a friend but a political ally. Later in life, Jack and I became very close, so there were two generations of friendship there: first Jack and my father, then Jack and me. He and I travelled together and did readings together, had adventures. I considered him my second father. Jack got relatively little recognition for his work during his lifetime. There were a few books of poetry, a book of translations, a book of short stories. I’ve made it a mission to introduce people to Jack ever since. I taught a Latino poetry course for a while, and Jack was part of it. I taught Poetry of the Political Imagination, and Jack was part of it. The idea I wanted to convey to my students was this: I want you to know this poet you’d never get to meet otherwise. Right? A lot of students were quite enamored with the work of Jack Agüeros.

TN: I’m not familiar, but after this interview I will make myself familiar.

ME: You’re not alone. You should never feel embarrassed by what you don’t know. You should never apologize for who you are. You have a lifetime to learn about yourself. You know, Latinos are constantly the victims of cultural aggression, constantly deprived of their language, their history, their culture. And you spend a lifetime trying to get it back. I’m still trying to get it back.

TN: I understand. So, you were the first Latino recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2018. Congratulations. That’s amazing. How do you view the evolution of Latino poetry in American literature over your career?

ME: Well, you’ve got to remember when I came along, there was no body of work called Latino literature. It wasn’t studied in school. It wasn’t recognized as such. I published my first book in 1982. Needless to say, when I went to college, you couldn’t take a Latino literature course. You couldn’t read this stuff. You had to be a detective. You had to dig it up on your own. There were a couple of small publishing houses that were producing U.S. Latino literature, and later on I got involved with a publisher, a small press called Curbstone in Willimantic, Connecticut. At the time, they were focused on the literature of Central America. Working with them was a revelation because eventually, starting with me really in 1990, they began to publish U.S. Latino writers. Being part of Curbstone was a way for me to both help other Latino writers get published and help build a community of Latino writers. But when I was coming up, there was a void. There was a great big empty space. The Latino community had been established and writing in English, yet no one was reading and publishing Latinos. The big breakthrough in the Puerto Rican community was a book called Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas that came out in the late 60’s.

TN: Which was a completely different world.

ME: I remember reading that book. Piri Thomas was writing about being Puerto Rican and Cuban, and growing up in New York. And he became very close to my father, so I got to know him very well. He was a big, warm, very generous man. That was the beginning, really. There were other writers who had published things in English, but Piri was the one who made the breakthrough. Piri was the first Latino author I read, Down These Mean Streets, which most people referred to as a memoir and others called a novel. The first poetry I remember by a Puerto Rican writer was Puerto Rican Obituary by Pedro Pietri. It was a long poem about Puerto Ricans in New York. I saw it in an anthology that was also life-altering, Latin American Revolutionary Poetry, edited by another Puerto Rican from New York, Roberto Márquez, and published by Monthly Review Press. Now of course, there are multiple opportunities for reading and writing Latino literature. I wasn’t the first, but I was there at the beginning. Let’s put it that way.

TN: Yeah. At the beginning of this [interview], you talked about working during the Reagan administration. You were talking about that and poetry… Were you referring to the war in Nicaragua with the Contras?

ME: Reagan, throughout the 80’s, was fanatically anti-communist. Secondly, he was dedicated to funding proxy wars in Central America, specifically in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Always on the wrong side. And that meant providing arms and money to death squads in El Salvador, or an extremely repressive government in Guatemala, and so forth. Naturally, this created first a trickle and then a flood of migrants. They came as far north as Massachusetts. They were here. Whereas I think for a lot of people the devastation of Central America produced by the Reagan wars was an abstraction, to us, it was very concrete. It was very real because we saw the people who were fleeing, and they were coming here to us.

TN: And they were risking their lives to do so. On the road from Central America through Mexico, it was not a guarantee you’d make it here, and it was not guaranteed you would make it alive. A lot of people traveling were victimized.

ME: Yeah, what’s happening today is different only in degree but not in kind. It is the old story.

TN: After decades of writing poetry that combines advocacy with art, what advice would you give to young poets who want their work to contribute to social change?

ME: Well, first of all, do a lot of reading. Read poetry. You can’t write poetry without reading it. But read everything. Read everything you can get your hands on. I don’t mean read all points of view; I don’t really think you need to read all points of view when you’re basically drowning in one point of view right now. What I do mean is, don’t rely on social media, and don’t rely on the internet for your information. Read books.

ME: And there are certain sources that you should be checking out. Some of them are quite obscure. If you want to know what’s going on with migration, there’s an organization called Witness at the Border, a small organization with a very modest website, but with reliable information about what’s happening on the border, what’s happening with deportation flights, for example. Certain individuals are paying very close attention to what’s happening and are cutting through the haze of all the rhetoric and all the disinformation that you find out there. You know, education is self-education. You read what you read in your classes, but it goes beyond that. Find out about yourself. Talk to people. If you’re fortunate enough to be on good terms with your family, talk to them.

ME: You’ve got a lot to say. And all of it is the stuff of poetry.

TN: You know, [I came up here from] Georgia. I realized that I needed to leave my city because I wouldn’t have been able to get away from the lifestyle that I had found myself so deeply integrated into. I knew of Greenfield, and I had relatives, which drew me out here, and I’ve been here ever since.

ME: When did you get here?

TN: 2019. I worked for a while, and I saved up and then decided to go for my education. I’ve never been dull. I just had always put my ideas in the wrong baskets, in the wrong moves, the wrong things. And really, I’m married and I have children, and I’m just trying to build the life that they deserve, that I deserve, and to lead by example.

ME: Amazing. There are several poets who came out of the prison system that you should know. The best, and the best known, is a poet by the name of Etheridge Knight, an African American poet who was a veteran of the Korean war. He was wounded and became addicted to morphine in Korea, came back and ended up as an addict, committing robberies to support his habit. Spent some time in prison, a number of years, as a result. He started writing poetry in prison and was mentored by a famous poet named Denise Levertov. He got out and made a life as a poet. You might be able to find a book called The Essential Etheridge Knight, published by the University of Pittsburgh. I highly recommend it because he’s addressing a lot of the same experiences. Even closer to home, there’s a poet by the name of Jimmy Santiago Baca, who came up through the New Mexico prison system. He started writing in that system. Jimmy published a book with Curbstone Press—a very early book called What’s Happening. You might not be able to find that one, but you certainly will be able to find others. I strongly recommend both Knight and Baca. Also check out Reginald Dwayne Betts.

TN: Okay. I don’t want to take up too much of your time.

ME: Well, I appreciate the thought. Here’s my book; I’d like to sign it for you.

TN: I appreciate that. Thank you.