Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Miami’s Poet—Whether He Likes it or Not
by Armando F. Mastrapa
One of Miami’s premier intellectuals, the poet and art critic Ricardo Pau-Llosa was recently featured on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the first Floridian to be included in its monthly Poetry Series. Pau-Llosa was born in Havana in 1954 and fled communist Cuba with his family in 1960. He has lived in South Florida since he was 14, after spending his childhood in Chicago and Tampa. Miami emerges often in Pau-Llosa’s work, though not always flatteringly. In his fourth collection, Vereda Tropical, local nightclubs and bars provide the setting—in a consciously theatrical way—for “imaginative journeys,” as Pau-Llosa would describe them—into the spirit of the place. The vibrancy of Miami as a city and the lushness of its natural setting come through in the poems, yet Pau-Llosa refers to Miami as “Thing City,” an environment where crass materialism overwhelms subtlety and, more deplorably for the chronicler of Cuban cultural survival in exile, historical awareness. In a provocative New Year’s op-ed piece published in The Miami News (“Artists Lead Dade to New Cultural Fusions,” Jan. 1, 1986), Pau-
Llosa even then spoke about having a “promising love-hate relationship” with South Florida. That promise has turned into six volumes of poetry (the last four from Carnegie Mellon U Press, the latest title being Parable Hunter), a dozen monographs on artists, countless essays in art magazines and exhibition catalogues, and a dozen short stories, some of which have made it into major anthologies (e.g., Norton’s Sudden Fiction International: Continued) even though he hasn’t published a book-length collection in this genre. His legendary third collection of poems Cuba (1993) was picked by Carnegie Mellon as the 100th title of its renowned Poetry Series. The dozens of literary magazines where his work has appeared include: Ambit, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Iowa Review, Kayak, Kenyon Review, Manoa, New England Review, Partisan Review, PN Review, Salmagundi, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly.
Pau-Llosa has played a major role in launching the careers of numerous visual artists—primarily Latin American, many based in South Florida—especially during the 80s and early 90s when he was a senior editor for Europe’s most prestigious art magazine, Art International. In 1989 the survey exhibition of Cuban exile art Outside Cuba/Fuera de Cuba which he co-curated at Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Museum and wrote the major catalogue essay for, came to the then Center for the Fine Arts (now Miami Art Museum) with much fanfare. He is also an avid collector—he describes it as an “addiction”—of modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures, folk carvings, Naif paintings, and tribal art. Most importantly, however, is the fact that Pau-Llosa’s 34-year career in the visual arts has generated a unique critical approach to the art of Latin America, one that studies how tropes shaped patterns of visual representation and abstraction in the region’s art, setting it apart from European and American modernism. Even Pau-Llosa admits that, had he not lived in Miami, his explorations of Latin American art would not have been possible. So why does this poet struggle with a place that is so central to his life? It is a question that sheds light on him and his work, but more importantly, it illuminates the Miami that provokes and sustains, or ignores and suppresses, the life of the creative mind. In the News-Hour piece on Pau-Llosa, Miami was showcased, beamingly, as part and parcel of his work and identity, and in it, he seems very much like Miami’s at times irascible ambassador to the world of ideas. Perhaps the poet doth protest the place too much, or his rejection of it—always tempered with tongue-in-cheek—is really a Frostian lover’s quarrel with his world.
AM: Why do you live in Miami?
RPLl: Where would you have me live?
AM: Wherever you like; as a writer and artist, you’ve established yourself nationally and internationally. Why here?
RPLl: It’s not that easy to pick where one lives if you make a living as a college professor. Poetry and art criticism aren’t exactly cash crops. But I did make a decision to stay here—that was in the late seventies. Then, I thought Miami had a destiny, which I, foolishly, fell in love with. Miami hasn’t lived up to it, however. I guess I wound up living that destiny in my mind. And rootless by nature, I seek a place where rootlessness seems natural, even mandatory. So a combination of factors keeps me here, though less happily than in the past.
AM: What was that destiny that Miami didn’t fulfill? Most folks think that Miami has come into its own over the last decade.
RPLl: I imagined, at one point, that Miami would be the first bihemispheric metropolis, a place where the high, middle, and low cultures of both North and Latin America could mingle irrespective of the assimilationist hierarchies associated with native vs. immigrant identities and agendas. That began to happen in the seventies, but it was derailed. The major institutions resisted that idea vehemently. The local museums, for example, pay only cursory attention to the Latin American and Caribbean legacies of Miami, and then only the work of artists who have found approval in New York or other metropolitan centers. They are afraid of affirming, in universally valid terms, the culture that is produced here and merits that affirmation. I have done precisely that in my work in the visual arts. Miami cannot shake the vocation to be obediently provincial, suffering the urban equivalent of arrested adolescence and only fooling itself into thinking it is a grownup city because of its buildings, congestion, and the countless galleries that rehash what other places tell them is art.
AM: What was it exactly that made Miami unique?
RPLl: What made Miami unique was its geographic proximity to the Caribbean and Latin America and the resulting presence here of cross-sections of populations from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, and many other countries of the region. There are excellent artists here who are native-born North Americans, whose work I admire—Barbara Neijna, Chris Mangiaracina, Bob Thiele, among others. However, for all their talent and discipline, the North American artists of Miami cannot be a part of Miami’s epic of terminal displacement, what I call the Minoan dimension of the self that is awakened by the destruction of one’s culture of birth. For the Caribbean and Latin American artists who moved to Miami, and especially for those who came as exiles and not as immigrants, Miami was something very different. Think of Humberto Castro, Ana Albertina Delgado, Heriberto Mora, among dozens of other Cuban exile artists. It was our Venice, the new cultural hub created by our flight from terror into freedom. And that positing of a new cosmopolis made this exilic art something very precious as an affirmation of the self. That’s the juncture that the local institutions refused to understand and turn to their advantage nationally and globally. That was the niche that institutions in real cities would have wanted Miami’s risible museums and universities and the non-existent cultural magazines and academic presses to fill, but the small-mindedness of the cultural and educational leadership and of the local media impelled them to reject this destiny, to everyone’s loss.
AM: Yet so many of your poems draw on Miami as a setting, and not just the bar and music-inspired poems in Vereda Tropical. “Terraces” from the early 80s captures the luxurious voyeurism of the then new high-rise condos on Brickell. You have many excellent poems set in the Florida Keys. Urban birds—gulls, ibises, herons —proliferate in your recent poems. Poems about Miami seen from airplanes. Beaches, foods...How can such a damned setting be so inspiring to you?
RPLl: I’ve lived in Florida since 1962 when my family moved to Tampa from Chicago; in Miami since 1968. We were in exile in 1960. I am not at odds with everything in Miami, but with the prevailing winds that have taken it away from a unique cultural destiny it can no longer recover, let alone fulfill. The fauna, flora, and architecture of any place where an artist lives are bound to manifest themselves in that artist’s work—it is the vocabulary life has assigned you to work with. What one does with that raw material is what determines the kind of artist the individual is. I can criticize the place vehemently while letting it play a role in my creative life. I see no conflict between these two attitudes. It is always best to love critically.
AM: I’ve heard it said that poets, in their personal lives, are never as interesting as their work.
RPLl: I certainly hope this is true in my case. There is far too much interest in personal lives these days. The passions and eccentricities of life are best lived to their absolute fullest through the life of the imagination, in the work of art. This is because to live them absolutely—that is, without restraint—in one’s life can only court disillusionment or worse.
AM: But if one doesn’t live one’s passions to the fullest, doesn’t that lead to an inauthentic life?
RPLl: A central part of living authentically is grasping the dangers implicit in desire and acting accordingly. I’m all for discipline, accountability, restraint. For example, in the political sphere—and this is a vice of our time that is so rampant that few think it a problem—countless individuals are taken in by the slogans and superficial qualities of a political figure, and follow and support that figure on that basis alone. Their desire for a leader who has this or that surface quality—such as demeanor, ethnicity, charisma—or spouts this or that buzz word is enough to elicit their total support. Identity politics, which I deplore, rule the day. In politics, one should think coldly, analyze one’s own desires, and grasp that the attraction, whim, and yearning for this or that quality are not sound bases for a political decision, such as a vote. Politics is about having a just and critical sense of collective destiny and making that sense guide one’s decisions as a citizen.
AM: So, I take it you’re not in love with our current leadership.
RPLl: I deplore all charlatans, for they are all obviously false. But I deplore even more those who take charlatans as the real thing, for they know that what they love is false.
AM: Do you follow the usual advice about avoiding politics in art?
RPLl: Nope. Anything is a viable subject or idea for a work of art. It still has to be a work of art, however, and not a harangue or simply the inane vomiting forth of a political position. I’ve written overtly political poems. The danger is that most readers, and certainly most critics, have political biases and are likely to let those guide their response to the work of art. So what? I write politically charged poems anyway, when I desire to.
AM: Common wisdom says one should avoid politics and religion in any civil conversation, so let’s talk about religion. Do you have any?
RPLl: I was brought up in a secular working-class family, but I attended Catholic schools, Jesuit especially. Graduated in 1971 from Belén Jesuit in Miami, where I received a great education, and I have always been interested in Christianity and other religions. I see religion as an enclave of poetry and theater in the world of ideas. I admire Mircea Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas, but I have always found it difficult to embrace one religious faith. The problem is faith, which all creeds require by definition, and poets and thinkers are addicted to other verbs, such as think, intuit, imagine. Believing is an eccentricity whose inherent limitations I, and most artists, see as inimical to creating.
AM: Is there nothing to admire in religion?
RPLl: I admire the religious impulse and am fascinated by what it discloses about the human desire to rebel against mortality, but I resist the self-mutilating and homogenizing impulse of belief. It leads to moral failure. Behold the Catholic Church’s utter disregard for the plight of
Cuba under communism, a once Catholic country, and the “Protestant Pastors for Peace” types and their idolatry of Castro. For me, these are, to use Auden’s phrase, “important failures.” In many recent poems, though, I parody the purely secular man by juxtaposing a parable or a sacrament with a worldly counterpart. When Jesus admonishes his followers to follow him, he could have been commanding them to think poetically, to create parables of the infinite, and not just blindly believe this or that lesson or obey a commandment. Everything he ever spoke was a poem. How could such a maker of profound and spontaneous parables admonish us to abandon the liberating, theatrical multiplicity of art for the compulsive singularity of belief? If indeed, liberation from the ego is essential for salvation, the creative process—much maligned as inveterately narcissistic—is perhaps the best way to escape from the personal and grasp something of the transcendent as immanent.
AM: Parables are indeed a major theme in your own work, but can the multiplicity of art ever become the firm basis for a belief system, hence a religion?
RPLl: If we think God has one face, one manner of expression, one code that he expects all to believe and follow, if we think that this is God hence religion, then clearly no. If we accept our miniscule range and our total inability to grasp God, then we can embrace the variables of the creative act as the closest thing we can manage to prayer, meditation, communion, and awareness of the divine. I actually prefer to think of the divine, or divinity, as an expression of spiritual reality we can barely graze, rather than imagining God as an invisible but palpable, often oppressive and irascible, subjectivity who lords it over us. In fact, the cult of faith, which lies at the heart of all the great monotheistic religions, has led directly to the cult of the State and the dictatorship of ideology in our own time. The problem boils down to this: the origins of personality. Do we believe that our subjectivity is a reflection of the divine or vice versa—that divine personality is a projection of human subjectivity in an imagined timeless realm? Or do we do away with this either/or and explore through our creative faculties the coincidence of the human and the divine in subjectivity? This third path is more interesting.
AM: How does this appreciation of variability lead you to what you said previously about the need for “discipline and restraint”?
RPLl: Very clearly, because an ethics is essential to civilization’s millennial advance toward freedom. I reject the incessant erosion of ethics in our social life, in all the arts and in our popular culture, perpetuated very maliciously in the name of personal freedom but leading exactly in the opposite direction. Pleasure abhors the slavery of addiction. Pleasure seeks no freedom from discipline. Identity borrows from groups a sense of tradition, and this loan is repaid by the creative transformation of that tradition into new, vital forms of living and creating. At present, the group is what defines identity, and the individual is trained to fit into this or that category. All categories have a political mission, so the individual is marshalled into an assigned militancy by virtue of his or her identity group. The thrust of modern “theory”—a word I dislike—is to deny creativity, originality, individualism and exalt the social environment as deity. Unreflectively, the only avenue for rebellion, for most, becomes immediate gratification, which is the denial of all that makes pleasure revelatory and transformative. At all levels of our society, we are facing a well-planned debacle born of id-driven behavior. We need to orient ourselves toward higher, more complex forms of aesthetics and not revel in the vulgar and the strident in the name of populism—a change that, of course, will not happen. I also reject this widespread notion that art is separate from ethics—usually mislabeled “politics” in this usage. If the artist is the person most needful of liberty, then the artist should be most obligated to defend it. Yet our time is rife with intellectuals and artists whose embrace of communist tyranny is seen as essential to the artist’s identity, a key part of his assigned militancy. No one should get a free pass. We should treat communist sympathizers with the same scorn with which we rightfully treat those who collaborated with fascism, for there is no difference between these.
AM: In any dimension of your life, what have you sacrificed—in terms of emotions or material satisfactions—for the privilege of pursuing your art?
RPLl: I am reminded of Paul Tillich’s “ultimate concern”—the one thing, which is at the heart of each individual’s psyche, the one thing he will not negotiate. The oxygen, as it were, of his identity. The First Commandment is God’s insistence on being our ultimate concern. Writing, thinking, living the life of an artist are indeed my ultimate concern. Every other dimension or attraction or appetite or interest in my life, however personal, is completely at the service of this one ultimate concern. As a political heretic who condemns the leftist babble of academics and artists, I accept gladly my considerable isolation from the members of my guild. Their complacency is revolting to me.
AM: But your creative life is multi-dimensional. Poetry, art criticism, art collecting, fiction. . . And you have a lively political side, too. Is there one dimension that functions as the center or “ultimate concern”?
RPLl: All of these dimensions are equally important to me. What lies at the center of all these dimensions is the creative life. I said in another interview that an artist is a digestive system. Let me add that it is the digestive system of a predator of the imagination—for every artist wants to devour the world. In a good way.
AM: You paint yourself, don’t you?
RPLl: No, I do not.
AM: But I’ve seen drawing pads of yours lying around, and I have seen you take pads out in restaurants or wherever and draw and write profusely.
RPLl: I draw but for my own cultivation, not in any public or professional way. The drawings help me, in ways I haven’t reflected on too deeply, to reconfigure the compression of images—the way, say, a metaphor or a metonymy can fuse ideas, sensations, and settings into a new clarity. I am not interested in juxtaposition for its own sake or in the Surrealist sense to unsettle or create some transitory effect. I am interested in juxtaposition only to the extent that it clarifies into a new naturalness of setting so that an idea can come into being in the mind of a reader.
AM: So the drawings are a means of feeding your imagination and also a device that helps you find the solution to an aesthetic problem.
RPLl: That’s a good way of putting it.
AM: You live immersed in art in a way I’ve never seen another person live. Each time I visit your house, and I’m sure this happens to others, I see new paintings and sculptures that, you say, have been there all the time but I’ve missed. Don’t you find it unsettling to be so utterly immersed in art?
RPLl: Not at all. Why would I?
AM: In light of what you’ve said, the drive to live a life governed by the imagination might be short-circuited by the art of others all around you.
RPLl: That’s an insightful thing to have seized upon. Yes, the art of others can overwhelm one’s own drive to be governed by the imagination, as you put it. I don’t particularly feel threatened by the art I collect. Quite the contrary, the art feeds me. It doesn’t pull me in different directions as I create and ponder, rather it enlightens the fact that multiple paths—stylistic, conceptual—are available simultaneously. Hence, perhaps, my interest in multiplicity and in the vividness of images, how these reverberate—to use [Gaston] Bachelard’s word—in the mind. Art has taught me to pursue vividness in language and to see the use of tropes as essential to clear thinking. It has also taught me to feel comfortable with a requisite simultaneity of thought, style, and idea.
AM: There is a tremendous mix of art here, though—tribal with contemporary, modernist fine art alongside Naif art, folk art next to kinetic sculpture. And you are an art critic and curator as well as a poet, so the art must live in your mind at different levels—historically, aesthetically, as well as a springboard for your own creative work as a poet. Don’t all these signals conflict in some way? How do you keep them straight?
RPLl: I don’t know exactly. Perhaps I don’t manage to keep them straight, hence the poems based on art, and the philosophical approaches to interpreting art, and the historical joining with the aesthetic, and so forth. I may well be an undiagnosed mess when it comes to the catalysts that drive my work in all its forms. However, I find it a comfortable way to live, the only way I feel at ease. That may well be the result of having drifted into all the tumult of images and not a plan of some kind. If it all turns into clarity in poems and essays, then it was necessary. If it obfuscates the work, then it was a muddle I didn’t have the wits to escape. Readers decide.
This interview was conducted over three sessions between May 25th and 30th, 2009 at the home of the poet in Schenley Park in Miami.
Llosa even then spoke about having a “promising love-hate relationship” with South Florida. That promise has turned into six volumes of poetry (the last four from Carnegie Mellon U Press, the latest title being Parable Hunter), a dozen monographs on artists, countless essays in art magazines and exhibition catalogues, and a dozen short stories, some of which have made it into major anthologies (e.g., Norton’s Sudden Fiction International: Continued) even though he hasn’t published a book-length collection in this genre. His legendary third collection of poems Cuba (1993) was picked by Carnegie Mellon as the 100th title of its renowned Poetry Series. The dozens of literary magazines where his work has appeared include: Ambit, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Iowa Review, Kayak, Kenyon Review, Manoa, New England Review, Partisan Review, PN Review, Salmagundi, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly.
Pau-Llosa has played a major role in launching the careers of numerous visual artists—primarily Latin American, many based in South Florida—especially during the 80s and early 90s when he was a senior editor for Europe’s most prestigious art magazine, Art International. In 1989 the survey exhibition of Cuban exile art Outside Cuba/Fuera de Cuba which he co-curated at Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Museum and wrote the major catalogue essay for, came to the then Center for the Fine Arts (now Miami Art Museum) with much fanfare. He is also an avid collector—he describes it as an “addiction”—of modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures, folk carvings, Naif paintings, and tribal art. Most importantly, however, is the fact that Pau-Llosa’s 34-year career in the visual arts has generated a unique critical approach to the art of Latin America, one that studies how tropes shaped patterns of visual representation and abstraction in the region’s art, setting it apart from European and American modernism. Even Pau-Llosa admits that, had he not lived in Miami, his explorations of Latin American art would not have been possible. So why does this poet struggle with a place that is so central to his life? It is a question that sheds light on him and his work, but more importantly, it illuminates the Miami that provokes and sustains, or ignores and suppresses, the life of the creative mind. In the News-Hour piece on Pau-Llosa, Miami was showcased, beamingly, as part and parcel of his work and identity, and in it, he seems very much like Miami’s at times irascible ambassador to the world of ideas. Perhaps the poet doth protest the place too much, or his rejection of it—always tempered with tongue-in-cheek—is really a Frostian lover’s quarrel with his world.
AM: Why do you live in Miami?
RPLl: Where would you have me live?
AM: Wherever you like; as a writer and artist, you’ve established yourself nationally and internationally. Why here?
RPLl: It’s not that easy to pick where one lives if you make a living as a college professor. Poetry and art criticism aren’t exactly cash crops. But I did make a decision to stay here—that was in the late seventies. Then, I thought Miami had a destiny, which I, foolishly, fell in love with. Miami hasn’t lived up to it, however. I guess I wound up living that destiny in my mind. And rootless by nature, I seek a place where rootlessness seems natural, even mandatory. So a combination of factors keeps me here, though less happily than in the past.
AM: What was that destiny that Miami didn’t fulfill? Most folks think that Miami has come into its own over the last decade.
RPLl: I imagined, at one point, that Miami would be the first bihemispheric metropolis, a place where the high, middle, and low cultures of both North and Latin America could mingle irrespective of the assimilationist hierarchies associated with native vs. immigrant identities and agendas. That began to happen in the seventies, but it was derailed. The major institutions resisted that idea vehemently. The local museums, for example, pay only cursory attention to the Latin American and Caribbean legacies of Miami, and then only the work of artists who have found approval in New York or other metropolitan centers. They are afraid of affirming, in universally valid terms, the culture that is produced here and merits that affirmation. I have done precisely that in my work in the visual arts. Miami cannot shake the vocation to be obediently provincial, suffering the urban equivalent of arrested adolescence and only fooling itself into thinking it is a grownup city because of its buildings, congestion, and the countless galleries that rehash what other places tell them is art.
AM: What was it exactly that made Miami unique?
RPLl: What made Miami unique was its geographic proximity to the Caribbean and Latin America and the resulting presence here of cross-sections of populations from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, and many other countries of the region. There are excellent artists here who are native-born North Americans, whose work I admire—Barbara Neijna, Chris Mangiaracina, Bob Thiele, among others. However, for all their talent and discipline, the North American artists of Miami cannot be a part of Miami’s epic of terminal displacement, what I call the Minoan dimension of the self that is awakened by the destruction of one’s culture of birth. For the Caribbean and Latin American artists who moved to Miami, and especially for those who came as exiles and not as immigrants, Miami was something very different. Think of Humberto Castro, Ana Albertina Delgado, Heriberto Mora, among dozens of other Cuban exile artists. It was our Venice, the new cultural hub created by our flight from terror into freedom. And that positing of a new cosmopolis made this exilic art something very precious as an affirmation of the self. That’s the juncture that the local institutions refused to understand and turn to their advantage nationally and globally. That was the niche that institutions in real cities would have wanted Miami’s risible museums and universities and the non-existent cultural magazines and academic presses to fill, but the small-mindedness of the cultural and educational leadership and of the local media impelled them to reject this destiny, to everyone’s loss.
AM: Yet so many of your poems draw on Miami as a setting, and not just the bar and music-inspired poems in Vereda Tropical. “Terraces” from the early 80s captures the luxurious voyeurism of the then new high-rise condos on Brickell. You have many excellent poems set in the Florida Keys. Urban birds—gulls, ibises, herons —proliferate in your recent poems. Poems about Miami seen from airplanes. Beaches, foods...How can such a damned setting be so inspiring to you?
RPLl: I’ve lived in Florida since 1962 when my family moved to Tampa from Chicago; in Miami since 1968. We were in exile in 1960. I am not at odds with everything in Miami, but with the prevailing winds that have taken it away from a unique cultural destiny it can no longer recover, let alone fulfill. The fauna, flora, and architecture of any place where an artist lives are bound to manifest themselves in that artist’s work—it is the vocabulary life has assigned you to work with. What one does with that raw material is what determines the kind of artist the individual is. I can criticize the place vehemently while letting it play a role in my creative life. I see no conflict between these two attitudes. It is always best to love critically.
AM: I’ve heard it said that poets, in their personal lives, are never as interesting as their work.
RPLl: I certainly hope this is true in my case. There is far too much interest in personal lives these days. The passions and eccentricities of life are best lived to their absolute fullest through the life of the imagination, in the work of art. This is because to live them absolutely—that is, without restraint—in one’s life can only court disillusionment or worse.
AM: But if one doesn’t live one’s passions to the fullest, doesn’t that lead to an inauthentic life?
RPLl: A central part of living authentically is grasping the dangers implicit in desire and acting accordingly. I’m all for discipline, accountability, restraint. For example, in the political sphere—and this is a vice of our time that is so rampant that few think it a problem—countless individuals are taken in by the slogans and superficial qualities of a political figure, and follow and support that figure on that basis alone. Their desire for a leader who has this or that surface quality—such as demeanor, ethnicity, charisma—or spouts this or that buzz word is enough to elicit their total support. Identity politics, which I deplore, rule the day. In politics, one should think coldly, analyze one’s own desires, and grasp that the attraction, whim, and yearning for this or that quality are not sound bases for a political decision, such as a vote. Politics is about having a just and critical sense of collective destiny and making that sense guide one’s decisions as a citizen.
AM: So, I take it you’re not in love with our current leadership.
RPLl: I deplore all charlatans, for they are all obviously false. But I deplore even more those who take charlatans as the real thing, for they know that what they love is false.
AM: Do you follow the usual advice about avoiding politics in art?
RPLl: Nope. Anything is a viable subject or idea for a work of art. It still has to be a work of art, however, and not a harangue or simply the inane vomiting forth of a political position. I’ve written overtly political poems. The danger is that most readers, and certainly most critics, have political biases and are likely to let those guide their response to the work of art. So what? I write politically charged poems anyway, when I desire to.
AM: Common wisdom says one should avoid politics and religion in any civil conversation, so let’s talk about religion. Do you have any?
RPLl: I was brought up in a secular working-class family, but I attended Catholic schools, Jesuit especially. Graduated in 1971 from Belén Jesuit in Miami, where I received a great education, and I have always been interested in Christianity and other religions. I see religion as an enclave of poetry and theater in the world of ideas. I admire Mircea Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas, but I have always found it difficult to embrace one religious faith. The problem is faith, which all creeds require by definition, and poets and thinkers are addicted to other verbs, such as think, intuit, imagine. Believing is an eccentricity whose inherent limitations I, and most artists, see as inimical to creating.
AM: Is there nothing to admire in religion?
RPLl: I admire the religious impulse and am fascinated by what it discloses about the human desire to rebel against mortality, but I resist the self-mutilating and homogenizing impulse of belief. It leads to moral failure. Behold the Catholic Church’s utter disregard for the plight of
Cuba under communism, a once Catholic country, and the “Protestant Pastors for Peace” types and their idolatry of Castro. For me, these are, to use Auden’s phrase, “important failures.” In many recent poems, though, I parody the purely secular man by juxtaposing a parable or a sacrament with a worldly counterpart. When Jesus admonishes his followers to follow him, he could have been commanding them to think poetically, to create parables of the infinite, and not just blindly believe this or that lesson or obey a commandment. Everything he ever spoke was a poem. How could such a maker of profound and spontaneous parables admonish us to abandon the liberating, theatrical multiplicity of art for the compulsive singularity of belief? If indeed, liberation from the ego is essential for salvation, the creative process—much maligned as inveterately narcissistic—is perhaps the best way to escape from the personal and grasp something of the transcendent as immanent.
AM: Parables are indeed a major theme in your own work, but can the multiplicity of art ever become the firm basis for a belief system, hence a religion?
RPLl: If we think God has one face, one manner of expression, one code that he expects all to believe and follow, if we think that this is God hence religion, then clearly no. If we accept our miniscule range and our total inability to grasp God, then we can embrace the variables of the creative act as the closest thing we can manage to prayer, meditation, communion, and awareness of the divine. I actually prefer to think of the divine, or divinity, as an expression of spiritual reality we can barely graze, rather than imagining God as an invisible but palpable, often oppressive and irascible, subjectivity who lords it over us. In fact, the cult of faith, which lies at the heart of all the great monotheistic religions, has led directly to the cult of the State and the dictatorship of ideology in our own time. The problem boils down to this: the origins of personality. Do we believe that our subjectivity is a reflection of the divine or vice versa—that divine personality is a projection of human subjectivity in an imagined timeless realm? Or do we do away with this either/or and explore through our creative faculties the coincidence of the human and the divine in subjectivity? This third path is more interesting.
AM: How does this appreciation of variability lead you to what you said previously about the need for “discipline and restraint”?
RPLl: Very clearly, because an ethics is essential to civilization’s millennial advance toward freedom. I reject the incessant erosion of ethics in our social life, in all the arts and in our popular culture, perpetuated very maliciously in the name of personal freedom but leading exactly in the opposite direction. Pleasure abhors the slavery of addiction. Pleasure seeks no freedom from discipline. Identity borrows from groups a sense of tradition, and this loan is repaid by the creative transformation of that tradition into new, vital forms of living and creating. At present, the group is what defines identity, and the individual is trained to fit into this or that category. All categories have a political mission, so the individual is marshalled into an assigned militancy by virtue of his or her identity group. The thrust of modern “theory”—a word I dislike—is to deny creativity, originality, individualism and exalt the social environment as deity. Unreflectively, the only avenue for rebellion, for most, becomes immediate gratification, which is the denial of all that makes pleasure revelatory and transformative. At all levels of our society, we are facing a well-planned debacle born of id-driven behavior. We need to orient ourselves toward higher, more complex forms of aesthetics and not revel in the vulgar and the strident in the name of populism—a change that, of course, will not happen. I also reject this widespread notion that art is separate from ethics—usually mislabeled “politics” in this usage. If the artist is the person most needful of liberty, then the artist should be most obligated to defend it. Yet our time is rife with intellectuals and artists whose embrace of communist tyranny is seen as essential to the artist’s identity, a key part of his assigned militancy. No one should get a free pass. We should treat communist sympathizers with the same scorn with which we rightfully treat those who collaborated with fascism, for there is no difference between these.
AM: In any dimension of your life, what have you sacrificed—in terms of emotions or material satisfactions—for the privilege of pursuing your art?
RPLl: I am reminded of Paul Tillich’s “ultimate concern”—the one thing, which is at the heart of each individual’s psyche, the one thing he will not negotiate. The oxygen, as it were, of his identity. The First Commandment is God’s insistence on being our ultimate concern. Writing, thinking, living the life of an artist are indeed my ultimate concern. Every other dimension or attraction or appetite or interest in my life, however personal, is completely at the service of this one ultimate concern. As a political heretic who condemns the leftist babble of academics and artists, I accept gladly my considerable isolation from the members of my guild. Their complacency is revolting to me.
AM: But your creative life is multi-dimensional. Poetry, art criticism, art collecting, fiction. . . And you have a lively political side, too. Is there one dimension that functions as the center or “ultimate concern”?
RPLl: All of these dimensions are equally important to me. What lies at the center of all these dimensions is the creative life. I said in another interview that an artist is a digestive system. Let me add that it is the digestive system of a predator of the imagination—for every artist wants to devour the world. In a good way.
AM: You paint yourself, don’t you?
RPLl: No, I do not.
AM: But I’ve seen drawing pads of yours lying around, and I have seen you take pads out in restaurants or wherever and draw and write profusely.
RPLl: I draw but for my own cultivation, not in any public or professional way. The drawings help me, in ways I haven’t reflected on too deeply, to reconfigure the compression of images—the way, say, a metaphor or a metonymy can fuse ideas, sensations, and settings into a new clarity. I am not interested in juxtaposition for its own sake or in the Surrealist sense to unsettle or create some transitory effect. I am interested in juxtaposition only to the extent that it clarifies into a new naturalness of setting so that an idea can come into being in the mind of a reader.
AM: So the drawings are a means of feeding your imagination and also a device that helps you find the solution to an aesthetic problem.
RPLl: That’s a good way of putting it.
AM: You live immersed in art in a way I’ve never seen another person live. Each time I visit your house, and I’m sure this happens to others, I see new paintings and sculptures that, you say, have been there all the time but I’ve missed. Don’t you find it unsettling to be so utterly immersed in art?
RPLl: Not at all. Why would I?
AM: In light of what you’ve said, the drive to live a life governed by the imagination might be short-circuited by the art of others all around you.
RPLl: That’s an insightful thing to have seized upon. Yes, the art of others can overwhelm one’s own drive to be governed by the imagination, as you put it. I don’t particularly feel threatened by the art I collect. Quite the contrary, the art feeds me. It doesn’t pull me in different directions as I create and ponder, rather it enlightens the fact that multiple paths—stylistic, conceptual—are available simultaneously. Hence, perhaps, my interest in multiplicity and in the vividness of images, how these reverberate—to use [Gaston] Bachelard’s word—in the mind. Art has taught me to pursue vividness in language and to see the use of tropes as essential to clear thinking. It has also taught me to feel comfortable with a requisite simultaneity of thought, style, and idea.
AM: There is a tremendous mix of art here, though—tribal with contemporary, modernist fine art alongside Naif art, folk art next to kinetic sculpture. And you are an art critic and curator as well as a poet, so the art must live in your mind at different levels—historically, aesthetically, as well as a springboard for your own creative work as a poet. Don’t all these signals conflict in some way? How do you keep them straight?
RPLl: I don’t know exactly. Perhaps I don’t manage to keep them straight, hence the poems based on art, and the philosophical approaches to interpreting art, and the historical joining with the aesthetic, and so forth. I may well be an undiagnosed mess when it comes to the catalysts that drive my work in all its forms. However, I find it a comfortable way to live, the only way I feel at ease. That may well be the result of having drifted into all the tumult of images and not a plan of some kind. If it all turns into clarity in poems and essays, then it was necessary. If it obfuscates the work, then it was a muddle I didn’t have the wits to escape. Readers decide.
This interview was conducted over three sessions between May 25th and 30th, 2009 at the home of the poet in Schenley Park in Miami.
