Environment Tags Used in Events

[Pulling cards]

[Pulling cards]

[Phone ringing]

[Whirring]

[Sound of Bill catching hats]

[Sound of Bill tossing hats]

[Phone ringing]

[Sirens]

[Restaurant chatter]

But I don't believe that literature is only entertainment, even a very sophisticated entertainment. No, I think literature is something that transforms itself in behavior, in morals, in attitudes, in a very subtle way through the rivers. But I am convinced that what I am now is something that owes a lot to the great writers I have read. And that without these books and without these readings, I would be a poorer person than I am, more mediocre. My life would be much more restricted.

But what Latin Americans are reading until now are more or less the good writers.

Oh, well, I can answer with a Borges quotation. Say, when you look yourself at a mirror, you don't know how your face is. You don't know if you are handsome or very ugly. It's very difficult. You don't really know. I would like my books to have the same influence that the great writers that I admire, but I really don't know what my own books are, you know? I don't know. I cannot measure them with the minimal objectivity that I can value, books of others.

I, well, as a novelist, what I want is to create a world that can be persuasive by itself, by its language, its mythology, the strength of its characters. When I went to defend certain ideas, cultural or political or social, I write essays or articles and fiction for me is something much more mysterious, something that is not depending on actuality, something that in my case always came from very deep images.

And he went to look for this and looking for more primitive cultures. And as he didn't find it, he invented it in his paintings.

Well, Trujillo was there. And Balaguer, in a very well-written piece, said, well, did the the Dominican Republic has survived? 400 years of catastrophes, of invasions, of civil wars, of hurricanes, earthquakes.

Started small. It started with a meeting of all the available poets in the community in which we talked about it, what we hoped it would accomplish. And we had a money raising campaign. Got some pledges. Not a great fortune, but enough to start. And it's been rather fantastic since then in its operation and in its effectiveness. It has become really a national--I hate to think of it as an organization or an institution--but it is a communication center as far as...and a way to keep insisting that this country needs poetry and that it is an expression of our culture.

Where else are they going to learn? It is largely from other poets that one begins to be a poet. You're not going to become a poet through learning prosody. That's certainly true. But through the energizing force of the word. That is essential to one's education. I think every poet begins by simply being enchanted by the sound of words. Like other poets, I remember walking, running rather, through the woods shouting new words that I had learned.

Tall, petite. You know, I just loved the sound of that word. And to her it was beautiful. And who knows why, but she thought so.

It's usually a phrase, an image. It's a rhythm more than anything else. And I've always felt that poetry begins with sounds rather than with sense. And you ride on that rhythm until your own being takes possession of it. And really, the sound and the sense combine and then you have some sense of where you're going, aside from riding on that rhythm. But, to a large degree, I think the poem is more interested in perpetuating a flow of sound than it is of producing a meaning.

Sound comes first, meaning can come later. Do you still, when you write a poem, you speak it, you say it?

I think it was the editorial handling of the poem that surprised me more than anything else. Not so much that the review was strange. It wasn't. It was obviously a very positive review.

Yes. I wouldn't mind at all. Let me see. Do you have a pen?

Yes, right here.

Yes, I do. Jefferson Market, Food Emporium. And the garden.

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