Well, I also want to thank Alison Deming publicly
for being an incredible host.
She picked me up in Coolidge, which
is somewhere out there in the desert, and brought me here
and put me up in this beautiful place actually called
the poet's house.
This in Adobe house and it's just my size.
Everything is very small.
I can reach all the shelves.
And I don't know if it was constructed like for my visit
because I know Mark Strand probably couldn't fit there.
Don't ask any tall poets.
But everyone has been wonderful to me across Arizona.
And tomorrow we head for Flagstaff,
which I understand is five hours through the desert.
And I get to see all of your state
before I leave for home on Friday.
So I want to thank you for being here
and for making my visit so satisfying.
When Bob was talking about my lying,
I wanted to explain something, because
as some former Catholic, you can't let things
like that go by.
You can stretch the truth all you want, then
you go to Saturday confession and make everything right.
But since I don't go to Saturday confession anymore,
I have to make things right anyway.
What I was talking about and I'm going to begin with your leave
to by reading an essay from Silent Dancing
is the fact that the word essay used to freeze me.
I like you, I went to graduate school
and had to write essays and a thesis.
And I literally made myself sick over the thesis
because the professors kept insisting
that I write in this extremely detached way that
went completely against my personality.
And I did it because I wanted that diploma.
But lately in the last few years,
I've decided that I wanted to write essays,
but I wanted to write them in my own way.
I wasn't going to be writing them with footnotes.
I wasn't going to be footnoting my life.
And I was certainly not going to be reporting on my past.
And so I decided that I could lie about my life,
but not on purpose.
Really what I tried to do and what I'm going to read you
tonight is an attempt at the truth
that was taken over by my writer's persona at some point.
And it became something that has the truth of poetry
rather than the truth of history or the factual truth.
The reason for that is I'm going to read
you a story about how I learned to tell stories
at my grandmother's house.
And I was a little girl there.
And what I heard, I cannot report to you word for word.
I just know that I learned from this old lady
how to tell a story.
And I want to tell you that story.
But if I start thinking, I have to go back and interview people
so that I could put down the exact right words,
so that people will approve like my committee
and you're my committee now.
Then I won't be able to write it.
So that's what I meant when I told Bob that it's my life.
What are you going to do?
Go and interview my grandmother to make sure
that I told you the truth.
So what I would like to do tonight then
is to read you this essay from Silent Dancing,
and then finish with a poetry reading.
And the reason I feel free to do that, even though I was brought
here as a poet and not as a nonfiction writer,
is because the reason that I wrote this book was poetry.
The way it started, and I like going back
to the genesis of things because it allows me to understand
my work, I did a reading of the Bread Loaf writers conference,
and one of my literary mothers was in the audience.
I have several women across the nation that
have taken an interest in me and have sort of
helped me along the way.
That was Hilma Wolitzer, the writer
from New York, the novelist.
And she said, you know, those stories
you tell in between poems, she says,
they deserve a place in your art.
You should write those stories, either as stories or as essays.
And so I said that's a good idea.
So I started looking at my poems in a new way
and from looking at the poems and trying
to figure out what led me to write those poems,
I wrote these essays.
And so the essays do not explain the poems.
Sometimes they are only vaguely connected.
But I allowed myself to find that spot in time
or that place in my life or that thought that generated
that poem to become an essay.
And so every essay in the book is
followed by one, two, or three poems
that I feel come together in some way.
So anyway, I would like to say a couple of things
more, and then read you "Casa."
It's really the bulk of my work has
to do with growing up Puerto Rican in the United States.
And particularly from my life which was literally
divided into my time on the island and my time in Paterson,
New Jersey, where I spent most of my adolescence.
And that was because my father was in the Navy
and he was stationed in Brooklyn yard.
Every time he went on a tour of duty with the Navy,
he sent us back to my grandmother's house
on the island.
She was like the family's matriarch.
And while we were there, I lived among cousins and young aunts
and uncles, a large family.
I spoke only Spanish.
I went wild in this Caribbean island.
And then the rest of the year, I would
live in New Jersey in this big apartment building in a very
urban setting.
And so when I started writing, I found
that my brain was divided into those two worlds,
and that I could write about both experiences
and try to make them come together.
And that is the bulk, though, not all of my writing
because I'm also an English teacher,
and I was exposed to the same kinds of things that you were.
And so I also write about, like some
of the poems I will read tonight have
to do with taking some women from literature
and adopting their personas and pretending to be
like Penelope for example.
But I will first start with "Casa."
And casa means home, as you all know.
You have to know a little Spanish living here.
And the reason I called it casa is because I grew up
hearing about casa.
Whenever something went wrong, my mother
would say, well, in casa, it used
to be done this way or mama used to do It this way.
So casa became this mythical place
where everything went right all the time.
And of course, that didn't exist and I found out
when I went to Puerto Rico.
But still later on, casa became where
I went when I wanted to remember my Puerto Rican heritage.
So casa is the home of my imagination.
In this essay, it's a story about a storyteller telling
a story.
And in it, I trace my literary heritage back
to these women who sat around my grandmother's casa
and told stories in the afternoon.