I'd like to field some questions if you have any I'm single,
and I'm rich.
No.
[LAUGHTER]
I shouldn't as well.
Serious questions, any serious questions about how I write.
You probably don't want to know.
Yes.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh, I have a problem with too many ideas.
I wake up and I go about my job, my day,
and I just come up with lots of ideas, hundreds of ideas.
It's a real chore for me just to concentrate on what I'm doing.
So they just come.
They're just there.
Yes.
[INAUDIBLE]
I get up in the morning and write,
and then after I write until noon,
I get up at 6:00, write until noon,
and then I go out to the poor housing areas
and help poor children get back in the school,
help poor families get paint and fix windows,
get new utilities, new stoves.
And I work till about four or five with the poor families.
In June, I got 73 jobs for kids and painted
a lot of houses and stuff.
I didn't do it, but I have a way.
They say I got a gift of gab so I go to the housing authority
and convince them that these people need things.
So that's what I do, and I write.
Yes.
How do you know if [INAUDIBLE] When you do that,
are you doing [INAUDIBLE]
I do it, I do it unconsciously.
And I do it so that I don't betray the poem.
I really believe that you don't have
to make your poem a scientific formula coded
so Russians can't get it.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, I think that if you simply approach something, and you
and you and you write it, just if you just
write it very simply, I think there's a real tendency for us
to feel insecure about that because we were hit with so
much things that are not true.
But as a poet, I think if you just approach it simply and say
what you want to say and work that, you're
going to trigger a poem.
Yes.
[INAUDIBLE]
I think so.
I think you're absolutely correct.
Because if I was not to put in colloquial Spanish
that we use in the Barrio, or Mexico Spanish, or whatever,
I don't think it would be poetry.
I think it would be something words put together
from a dictionary.
And now, the poems are coming from people who actually live.
I wanted to read to you just a series of words here to show
you how people really talk.
I didn't try to do that earlier, but here is some really--
here's a kind of here's the kind of bilingualism I use.
This is about a guy who got bewitched by a woman.
She embrujó.
She put a spell on him for love.
And this is what one of the guys say to somebody else.
Me recuerdo Casper the Ghost.
You know what I said?
Let me tell you.
This guy is talking to somebody else.
He says, I remember Casper the Ghost,
that guy from [? Varanas ?] who always
was fighting every which way.
Well, check this out.
That old, wretched witch, she changed him.
After one visit to her house, the light bulb went on.
That's a really good instance of bilingualism,
and it wouldn't work otherwise.
Any more questions?
Yes.
Do you find that you [INAUDIBLE]
I do both.
I take both extremes.
I take both.
If I'm working on something spontaneously,
I usually have something in the wings
that I'm constructing very tediously and slowly.
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh, Evelyn, yeah.
When you write about [INAUDIBLE]
Absolutely.
When you do a poem, it traverses through many labyrinths.
You go from here to there, to there, to there,
and really, a lot of the poems that I'm doing about New Mexico
have their originality, have their birth,
in different states, ranging from New York, Miami, Montana,
North Carolina, Virginia.
But they blossom in New Mexico.
I don't know what that's going to mean.
And then there's a lot of people who
love the poems from different states,
and I guess that's something to do with it.
I believe that poetry, even though I am a Chicano,
I believe that I as a poet, and human being,
transcend that into a world human being.
I just happen to be from Mexico.
I happen to be very aware of land grant issues.
But when I'm in New York, I sit down
with Italianos, Jewish people, Blacks,
and we just have a good time.
I'm a worldly Chicano.
I call myself the cosmopolitan Chicano.
The CC Kid, the Cross-continental Kid.
I'm sorry to be so humorous sometimes.
I just can't help it.
Is there any other questions that I can-- yes.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yes, it's a curse of sorts with me because on this last book,
the Black Mesa poems, it was the most grueling book
I've ever done because it was about a place.
I wanted to try to take a human being because what happened was
I saw a lot of violent human beings.
And I wanted to see how I could take one human being that
was violent, in theory, and what's
the process that human being has to go through
to become a peaceful person?
So that's what Black Mesa is about,
and it's been really a tough, tough job because I've
had to create a place and create a people that I saw.
And I've had to look into their hearts and their lives
and try to find the poem there.
And it's been very difficult because I've
created a lot of people that are common people.
I've created them into heroes based on their commonality.
It's been tough because I feel very insecure about it,
like you do about your work.
I take a poem, and I feel very uncomfortable with it.
Someone else says, I love it, and I just go by that, I guess.
So I'm going to go by your applause.
Yes.
I would say that [INAUDIBLE]
OK, be more precise now.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh, jailed in their jails, is that the one
you're talking about?
To swing their picks or what?
[INAUDIBLE] Oh, I see.
I see the best to the Chicanos and angered
by the injustice, arbitrary injustice,
of the best of Chicanos and Chicanas jailed and in prison.
Yeah, I'm very upset by that because most of the prisons
that I go to give readings, the men and women
are in the healthiest medium of their ages.
It's just fascinating.
They're all between like 19 and 32, their prime.
It's when they should be doing the most work as a human being.
It's when they should be developing their vision
and life, when they should actually
be physically forming their vision with their hands,
with their eyes, with their voices.
And instead, I walk into a prison.
And I see a huge crowd of Indios,
a tremendous crowd of Chicanos, and they're all young like me.
And I say what's wrong here, why are
all the young healthy people in prison?
That's my question, and 80% of them are there for drugs.
Why?
And I go to Attica, San Quentin, Santa Fe, Florence,
and I see the people there are from 19 to 32,
the prime of their life.
And they're all filling the prisons.
Why?
These are young men and women who are beautiful,
who are strong, who are intelligent, who speak clearly.
Why are they in prison?
And they just stuff every cell.
Men sleep on the floors.
Women sleep on the floors.
Why are the prime, these healthy, beautiful people
in prison?
Why?
And I know you must think that's odd why I
say healthy, beautiful people.
But if you walk in, you see these folks who are healthy,
who may not have had an opportunity, who
may have robbed a grocery store, who
are for the most part all drug addicts, all of them.
Why are they in prison?
Can't anything else be done.
I've become very angry at that.
I go to the universities and I see a lot of young people,
or a lot of people over 36, but there's this huge missing gap.
Where are those other people?
I don't know.
And I'm not all blindly for prisoners.
If someone commits an atrocious crime, they should pay for it,
but it's just not that way.
You have a very small, very small,
amount of people who are that dangerous,
and the vast majority are just drugs.
Druggies, addicts, drugs is what it is.
OK, any more questions?
I just get kind of carried away on that question.
Yes, anybody?
Yes, sir.
[INAUDIBLE] explain about that.
In Arizona, they've got a law where second drug offense
is a felony.
So they'll go ahead and put somebody in prison
for a flat 25 to life.
You take a look at that young population.
You see any kind of answer about how
we at dope, how we look at what dope
does to people, how we look at what dope does to society?
Turn that around to how we might use dope to go ahead
and build airfields in Panama or whatever.
What's the medium?
I'll tell you what I think.
There was a little boy named Jesús [? Alfredo. ?]
He's a boxer, and he lives in South San Jose,
which is a very, very violent Barrio because of crack,
and cocaine, and everything.
And Jose wasn't dealing drugs, and he was boxing.
I went up to him the other day, and I told him, Jose.
He was kind of perturbed.
He says, I don't have any money.
Because school starts next week, I
don't have any money to buy me some shoes and no pants.
I got pants, but they're really old.
And he was telling the truth because is his father's
from Mexico and his mom's from here, but they're very poor.
And so I said, well listen, why don't we do this.
And I hustle him up a job where he worked two weeks
for $400 bucks.
This is the kid his mom and dad wanted him to box so bad
that they went and hawked their wedding rings just so that he
wouldn't have to enter a ring with torn up sneakers.
He had some beautiful black boots
that he walked into a ring in Vegas,
and he knocked the kid out.
They wanted him to be proud.
But the point I'm trying to make is
that when I looked into Jose's face,
I don't know what the answer is to drugs,
but I know that by putting Jose to do this little job,
that I was doing something.
And I don't know how to gauge it,
and I know that if I do that--
I don't look beyond the borders of the human face.
If the person's face is close to mine, I can help.
That's my boundaries.
Yes.
What is your history [INAUDIBLE]
What a question.
Ask them if we have all night, Jimmy.
Yeah, we'll be here all night.
Let's try to keep the questions to literary
because if we're going to social--
any questions on literary?
Questions?
No.
I want to thank you for being an absolutely wonderful audience.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]