The louderARTS Project is a not-for-profit arts corporation committed to developing constructive and challenging spaces for artists to create, critique, present, and teach poetry.
The following is my interview with Rich Villar, one of the louderARTS/Acentos collective, a poet and writer, and someone whose writing leaves an indelible mark in your mind. But before you read Rich on where he came from and what needs to be done, let me say a few words about his poetry.
It is frank, sinewy writing, the kind that lays bare those naked truths of the heart, of experience, unafraid to reveal where the scar tissue is. It's about loss and familia, but also stubborn in the ways it frames the set pieces of madre y padre without sentimentality and outside the stereotypes. But don't think that the depth of feeling isn't there....it rises up from the page, raw and tender and that same time. Read some of his poetry and feel your heart break open.
Describe your odyssey in becoming a writer. How does Puerto Rican identity and a New York sensibility influence your work? What would you say are your major influences, both personally and in a literary sense?
I attended fundamentalist Christian schools during my entire childhood in Northern New Jersey. Given that backdrop, my teachers encouraged me to read a lot of Bob Jones and Charles Dickens and write more poems about Jesus. But in college, a no-goodnik left-wing Literature professor taught me how to close-read poems and introduced me to the Beat poets and James Baldwin. I spent another few years writing occasional Allen Ginsburg ripoffs, and attending some poetry slams.
Two things happened in 2003: I came across the louderARTS Project, and I heard the work of Martín Espada. Martín was the writer who finally gave me permission to write about the things I cared about, in the language(s) I grew up with. The louderARTS Project and the Acentos reading series gave me the forum, the circle of friends, and the tough love I needed to stretch in my work. Coincidentally, Jesus started showing up in my work too, but he sounded far more conflicted than he did in my high school days.
I name the world through the lenses I see it with: my identities (Puerto Rican, Cuban, American, Latino), my family, my histories, my politics, my home. Any honest work I do must reflect these things one way or another, even when the poem is not explicitly about them. I am not a New York writer per se, but my experiences growing up and learning to write were not that different from the Nuyoricans in the Bronx, El Barrio, or on the Lower East Side. Reading Pedro Pietri really put that into focus for me. In the suburbs of Paterson, NJ, we didn't always sweat the rent or the heat, but we lived our own "Puerto Rican Obituary" under the thumb of the mortgage company and the credit card bills. My family is populated by viejitas like Pietri's "Tata." These are the real terms, people, places, and things which I find I MUST write for and about, in my own languages, in order to stay true in my writing and career.
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