RATTLE Conversations

Luis J. Rodriguez

226 rattle conversations Luis J. Rodriguez is a leading Chicano poet with four books of poetry, including his latest My Nature is Hunger: New & Selected Poems (2005, Curbstone Press/Rattle Edition). He’s also founder/editor of Tia Chucha Press, publishing amazing poetry books for 18 years; and Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, a bookstore/cultural center/Open Mic in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. A CD of poetry and original music called My Name is Not Rodriguez with Luis Rodriguez and the band Seven Rabbit came out in 2002 (Dos Manos Records). Luis was a leading East LA poet in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He moved to Chicago in 1985 where in a couple of years he became active in the vibrant poetry scene, including poetry slams. He took part in the first “Slam Poetry” tour of Europe in 1993 with such Slam pioneers as Patricia Smith, Paul Beatty, Neeli Cherkovsky, Dominique Lowell, and Alan Kaufman. He’s also published award-winning children’s books, fiction, and nonfiction, including the international best selling memoir, Always Running, LaVida Loca, Gang Days in LA (Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster). Luis J. Rodriguez October 8, 1998 Fox: How did you come to start writing poetry? Rodriguez: I don’t know. I guess like most kids, teenagers, only my life was more like in the streets and in jail and stuff. For some reason, I started to write. I don’t know entirely why ‘cause I wasn’t very good at language and I wasn’t necessarily good in English, but I think it’s more like an art that calls you than something you choose. It’s more like I was gravitating toward the written word for some reason, just putting things down on pieces of paper and telling ghost stories, vignettes. I was terrible with grammar, I was terrible with syntax, and I couldn’t spell very well, but it didn’t matter. And to me that was probably more important that it came off that way because learning grammar, syntax and spelling is the easy part. But having that innate drive to want to voice something, to tell a story, to me that’s probably the most important end of it. Fox: Did you experiment with other forms or has it always been poetry? Rodriguez: I didn’t even know it was poetry. There was no formal poetry sense. Somebody told me it was poetry and so I believed him [both laugh]. But when I was about twenty-five years old I decided to go to classes at night and hang with writers and join workshops and that’s where I really learned more about the formal parts of poetry and the difference between poetry and short stories. That’s when I learned, but I already had a massive amount of work by then, that I was just writing, with no purpose other than to just put it down. So it helped that I could finally know the differences and then dedicate something to say—this is a poem, this is a story, this is an essay, whatever. Fox: Did your work change in any important ways as a result of going to school and hanging out with writers? Rodriguez: I think it helped because you’re isolated, you’re out there by yourself, you don’t know what writing is. I read books, but if you don’t know 227 228 rattle conversations what’s really going on in the writing world, you’re really not going to be a part of it. And nobody could see any “genius” in my writing while I sat by myself, writing this “great work.” I wasn’t Emily Dickinson who wrote this great stuff and she hardly got out in the world. So I needed to connect with writers, I needed to connect with knowing what the writing world was, what the writing life was like. Pablo Neruda was first introduced to me in a workshop; I never heard of the guy. Then I came to find out how important he is to poetry in the world. So these are the kinds of things that I opened up to. By then I was hungry for it. Then I read Walt Whitman, and everybody else I could get a hold of, like Wordsworth, and I always liked Edgar Allen Poe when I was a kid. I would...