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  • “Locate Your Body in the World and Pay Attention”:An Interview with the Poet Rigoberto González
  • Rodrigo Joseph Rodríguez (bio)

INTRODUCTION

Born in Bakersfield, California, but raised in Michoacán, Mexico (from ages 2 to 10), Rigoberto González is a prolific Chicano poet and author whose works are taught across the country in university poetry and creative writing courses, as well as high schools; courses in teacher preparation programs; and workshops held in correctional facilities. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, and the editor of Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing. His most recent volume of poetry is titled Unpeopled Eden (Four Way Books, 2013). González earned a bachelor’s from the University of California, Riverside and graduate degrees from the University of California, Davis and Arizona State University. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and winner of the American Book Award [2007], The Poetry Center Book Award [2008], The Shelley Memorial Award of The Poetry Society of America [2011], and the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award [2013]. Moreover, González is the founder and one of the organizers of the writers’ collective (Chicano/Latino poets and writers) named “Con Tinta,” which is committed to affirming a positive and proactive presence in American literature. For ten years, he was a Latino book reviewer and columnist for The El Paso Times and currently writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also a contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine, and member of the executive board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. Finally, he is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.

In the following interview, Rigoberto González shares his vision of Chicano poetry in the Americas and his contributions for the advancement of U.S. literature that includes a pluralism of voices and perspectives. He shares information about his current projects as an activist-writer with a wide range across literary genres that are interconnected to poetry, as well as his vision for Latina/o poetry in this century. His most recent volume of poetry, Unpeopled Eden, documents the lives of migrants, immigrants and border crossers in the form of memorials and prayers for our diverse literary heritage. This interview was conducted via e-mail messages and telephone conversations, from late Summer 2013 through early Fall 2013.

Rodrigo Joseph Rodríguez (RJR):

Your poems cast a clear, meticulous lens into the migration of humans and even the monarch butterflies. as described in the poems “Penny Men” and “The Flight South of the Monarch Butterfly,” respectively. Tell me about the poems you’ve written that interpret the hemispheric Americas as a whole, connecting us with many migrants, border crossers and people leaving, and even coming, home.

Rigoberto González (RG):

Migration is the universal story, and movement is the migrant’s soul: not a departure or even arrival, though those two points are also part of the journey. As a son and grandson of migrants, I feel completely at home allowing my imagination to inhabit that wondrous and dynamic state of existence. But this state of being also brings sadness and loss and grief. I wanted to revisit those themes that muscled my first book, So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks, but as an older, more seasoned and experienced writer. In my fourth book, Unpeopled Eden, I draw lines between the many ways our fathers leave us: they die, they abandon us, they move away to work, they go to war. If and when they return, they come back changed because their stories speak of new experiences. If they don’t return at all, their absence has already changed the place they left vacant. And in both cases, they change us, their children, their communities. I believe this is the lifeblood of the Americas—a continent in constant shift, just like the Earth’s plates. The rumbling beneath awes us, terrifies us, reminds us of our ephemeral nature. I suppose that’s why death is...

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