Interview: J. Michael Martinez speaks with Pluma Fronteriza

J. Michael Martinez reads from Heredities
Originally uploaded by OBermeo

Profile and interview with recent Whitman Prize winner J. Michael Martinez is live at the Pluma Fronteriza blog. Here's an excerpt:

Pluma Fronteriza: Can you summarize your Heredities for readers who are not familiar with your work?

When I write, oftentimes, the work knows more of what it wants than me. It’s a consciousness more conscious than my own. I’ve learned to relinquish my intentions for the poetry to the poem.

As in meditation, where one empties the mind to move into a greater space of silence, so poetry moves my life to myself, speaking an unspoken world into language. In surrendering control, I learn from what has been written.

That said, I’m not sure if I can summarize Heredities.

I can say, when writing the poems that now comprise Heredities, I was in my mid to late twenties and coming to terms with what it meant for me to be Chicano in the US, responding to cliché conceptions and articulations of Latinidad.

Complete interview is here.