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| Luis J. Rodriguez |
Luis J. Rodriguez was born in El
Paso, Texas in 1954, though his family lived in Ciudad Juarez. At the age two, Rodriguez’s
family moved to Los Angeles where he grew up. As an adult, he moved around
California and eventually lived in Chicago for 15 years, the same number of
years he’s been back living in Los Angeles.
Rodriguez
is an award-winning author of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He is perhaps best
known for his 1993 memoir, Always Running,
La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. Rodriguez has noted that this book has sold
almost half-a-million copies, and in some places is the most checked out—and
the most stolen—book.
Rodriguez
now has 15 books in poetry, children’s literature, the novel, short stories,
and non-fiction. His last poetry book, My
Nature is Hunger, won the 2006 Paterson Poetry Book Award. And his last
memoir, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey
Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, became a finalist for
the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.
On
October 9, 2014, Mayor Eric Garcetti appointed
Rodriguez as the new Poet Laureate of Los Angeles for a two-year term. In
making the appointment, Mayor Garcetti observed, “Luis Rodriguez is an example
of how powerful an impact literature can have on young lives, and as Poet
Laureate, he will impact youth across Los Angeles. I have no doubt that Luis
will run with this new role and take it to new heights.”
Rodriguez’s
present wife, Trini, is his third and they have been together some 30 years. He
has four children, five grandchildren, and a great-grandchild, with another one
on the way.
Q: What do you
want to accomplish as the new Poet Laureate of Los Angeles?
A: I’m for poetry
to become an everyday, every occasion thing. To me poetry is deep soul talk
that utilizes sounds, images and words to powerfully express and impact our
world. Most social language appears dishonest or exploitative, giving you news,
advertisement, information, but largely inauthentic and unrevealing. Over the
past thirty years, there has been an explosion of rap, slam poetry, open mics,
and independent publishing that has brought blood and vitality to the periphery
of our culture. The center of culture—with multi-billion industries in
publishing, film, TV, and radio—appears hollow in comparison. Poet Laureates
not only celebrate their cities, communities or countries, but also write poems
that are timely as well as representative of our times—good, bad, and
in-between.
I
currently have plans to do readings and workshops in libraries, schools,
festivals, conferences, and other venues throughout the vast and colorful Los
Angeles metropolitan area. I also believe in the art of poetry, the rigorous
discipline and practice to make language, story and ideas as compelling as
possible. Here’s a recent sonnet I wrote that I hope maintains an adequate
measure of gravitas, claritas and integritas (gravity,
clarity and integrity) that all art should strive for:
A
shadow hangs where my country should glow.
Despite
glories shaped as skyscrapers or sound.
More
wars, more prisons, less safe, still low.
Massive
cities teeter on shifting ground.
Glittering
lights, music tracks hide the craven.
TV,
movies, books so we can forget.
Countless
worn out, debt-laden & slaving;
Their
soul-derived destinies unmet.
Give
me NASCAR, lowriders, Hip Hop, the Blues.
Give
me Crooklyn, cowboys, cool jazz, cholos.
Give
me libraries, gardens of the muse.
Give
me songs over sidewalks, mad solos.
Big America improperly sized.
Give me your true value, realized.
Q: Aside from
being a poet yourself, you are also the founding editor of Tia Chucha Press, not in
its 25th year, and co-founder/president of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore
in the San Fernando Valley. What is the interplay among these different roles?
A: I created Tia
Chucha Press in 1989 to publish my first collection, Poems Across the Pavement. This was when I lived in Chicago, which
at the time was the birthplace of poetry slams. The book became a hit, which I
sold out of the trunk of my car and while doing readings in bars, cafes,
libraries, street corners, homeless shelters, prisons, Hip Hop and lowrider
shows … you name it. Soon other Chicago poets wanted me to do their books. Why
not? I had a great designer in Jane Brunette, of Menominee-German-French
descent, who has designed our close to 60 books (of other poets, mind you)
since then. In a couple of years, we obtained interest from poets across this
great land.
I’ve
published anyone whose manuscripts knocked me off my feet: African Americans,
Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, Native Americans, Japanese Americans,
Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Korean Americans, LGBT, and more. I moved
back to Los Angeles in 2000, and a year later my wife Trini and I helped create
a cultural café, bookstore, performance space, workshop center, and art gallery
called Tia Chucha’s Café Cultural. Now we are a non-profit renamed Tia Chucha’s
Centro Cultural, serving 15,000 people a year, and teaching writing, theater,
music, dance, murals, and Mexica/Mayan cosmologies, among other arts. We also
have the only bookstore for 500,000 people in my section of the City of Angels.
By the way, I named both the press and center for my late “Tia Chucha” Maria De
Jesus Rodriguez who was the creative (often called “crazy”) member of my
family.
Q: How has poetry
affected your life?
A: There are many
ways to obtain knowledge, and I can vouch for most of them—study, stories,
paying attention, being inventive, making mistakes, trying again. Poetry is a
path to knowledge as well as of the imagination. In my case, when I was a
teenage drug addict and gang member, books became my saving grace. Once I was
briefly homeless, sleeping in abandoned cars, all-night movie theaters, vacant
lots, along the Los Angeles River. My refuge then was the downtown L.A. public
library. I loved the African American experience books of the 1960s—Malcolm X,
Claude Brown, George Jackson. But also later of Puerto Ricans and Chicanos like
Piri Thomas, Miguel Pinero, Ricardo Sanchez, Sandra Cisneros, and Victor
Villasenor. I went back and studied classical American poets such as Walt
Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but also more contemporary poets like Haki
Madubuti, Juan Felipe Herrera, Joy Harjo, William Stafford, Philip Levine, and
many more. When my imagination
grew to encompass the idea that I may be a poet, with books on the shelves,
then this became the seed of an immense possibility. I let go of drugs and
gangs by age 20; I went through 20 years of drinking after that, but I’ve now
been clean and sober for almost 22 years. My writing, my poetry, proved to be
medicine—a healing stone, a destiny. I’m blessed to have achieved what I’ve
achieved. I’m a child born on the border, in El Paso, and for most of my life
living in L.A., the San Francisco Bay Area, the “Inland Empire,” or Chicago I
felt put down, dismissed, invisible. None of this stopped me in the end. I
realized that my life like everyone else in my circumstances has value,
meaning, direction. Poetry woke me up, and I’ve never let this go.
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| Trini and Luis Rodriguez |
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