E-Interview: Rich Villar coming back home to the Nuyorican

The biggest question I get to this day is: “Do you miss New York?”

My answer is always the same: “I miss my family, my friends, good pizza and real bagels, but I don’t really miss NYC so much.”

But every once in a while, I wish I was back in the old hood, specifically the Loisaida, for things like peeping Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child at the Angelika, eating a Reuben at Katz’s Deli and catchin’ my homie Rich Villar for his Friday Spotlight feature at the Nuyorican.

To celebrate his feature, I asked Rich a few questions about his past involvement with the Nuyo, what’s going down now and how he plans to negotiate it all. Full interview can be found at the Letras Latinas blog.

Plus, a bonus question post-Nuyo feature:

Oscar: So, how’d it go last night?

Rich: I am beginning to think that “home” is truly what you make of it. I think for many years I expected the Nuyorican to be this place where “the elders” or “the community” accepted me as one of their own, and when I didn’t get that coming in the door, I was disappointed. I realize now that I’M the community. Or rather, the people I surround myself with, no matter the venue, make the place “home.” Of course this is true. It works that way with family. Why wouldn’t it work that way in the arts world? I was surrounded by people I love, who love the word, even if they’re at different places with it than I am. And we made the Nuyorican ours tonight. It was quite something. That, and Julio seems to like me. Of course, next week…maybe not so much!

Our mutual friend and partner in crime Juan Diaz recorded the whole feature, so there should be clips up before too long. I felt really comfortable with the audience, my voice, and my critical voice…I made a statement about spoken word being a lie perpetrated on poets, and I actually believed it, and so did the audience. :-)

Acknowledgment: phati’tude Literary Magazine

I’m finishing up the last details of my new chapbook (some folks who have supported me through the years already have early draft copies) and I am happy to report that one poem from this new collection has already found a home in an outside publication: phati’tude Literary Magazine.

I remember hearing about phati’tude back in my early years of NYC open mics.  Even before I was ready to submit my work to publication, I knew I wanted to be in this kind of magazine—one not only open to all kinds of poetries but also one looking to highlight voices who have chosen to stay close to their poetic constituencies like Pedro Pietri and Louis Reyes Rivera.  Early heroes of mine who I was happy to see in print.

When the call for submissions to the relaunch issue came out, I was all over it.  On a real personal note, I like submitting to publications with cool names.  For reals, people, isn’t it cooler to be in phati’tude than to be in, say, Double Loop Farm Review.  (Pause, Oscar double checks through Google that there is no Double Loop Farm Review. Searching, searching… Ok, we’re in the clear.)

So many thanks to Gabrielle David and all the editors at phati’tude for including “Make Me A City” in their new issue.  It’s a poem I’m super proud of and now it is in some dope literary company.  You can peek a PDF preview here of the issue and if ya like what ya see then you should cop a copy now.  Especially if you are a fan of diverse literature.  phati’tude, like many other publications, faces a tough time to keep putting out their projects.  You can help by buying the issue or making a donation. Word.

More from Ms David:

We’re prepared to go forward because we’re dedicated to providing poets, writers and artists the best possible platform to showcase their works to the general public. But we need your help to continue, especially in light of funding cuts from the city and state. We need you to help us help you! So please, donate whatever you can — $5, $10 — to help keep “our thing” going at phatitude.org.

And more from phati’tude:

Doveglion is live.


Looking to advance conversation amongst political artists, promote quality literature, and respect the roots of orature, Barbara and I have set up a new imprint: Doveglion Press.

Barb’s first post Manifesto is already generating some nice discussion which is exactly what we’re looking for.  I hear so many opinions about the state of political art in the United States today but I don’t see enough of them posted in public forums. Maybe it’s because a lot of these forums mistake “public” for “completely open without regard to anyone’s feelings” and “free speech” as “you can say whatever hateful/ignorant thing comes to mind.”  Here is where curatorship is not just a CV line but an actually service to your community. However you define community.

Oakland Speaks! An Oakland Word student poetry reading

I’ve just finished teaching my Urban Poetry workshop with Oakland Word and feel very grateful to everybody at Oakland Public Library, most especially Kenji Liu, for this chance to share my love of poetry with all these fine writers.

Our classes ended up being wonderful sessions of generative exercises, open conversation about poetics and city, and great talks with visiting poets Tara Betts (who came through one weekend between VONA sessions) and Barbara (who shed light on the publication process and her take on urban poetics). More than anything, through all these conversations about poetics, I was able to add a new personal definition for poetry: Poetry is generosity.
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Viewing: Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

Inception is definitely the cure for the Hollywood summer movie blues of remakes, sequels, reboots, and remakes of reboot sequels. Bucking against the studio exec’s idea of a movie goer with a limited IQ, Christopher Nolan crafts a film that satisfies all the rubrics of an action blockbuster (beautiful stars, exotic locales, chase scenes, explosions, guns and bigger guns!) while daring to push the audience to think its way around the multi-layered labyrinth created by the characters and filmmaker.

Some immediate comparisons come to my mind while I was watching Inception and the most immediate one was that this is the true sequel to the Wachowski Brothers groundbreaking The Matrix, a movie so right on the cusp of the social networking age that it became prophetic and obsolete in almost the same breath in its commentary on how our interactions between the actual and virtual world can become so blurred that the definition of “the real world” has become a continuously complicated point of debate. Unfortunately, the Wachowski Brothers couldn’t push the envelope any further and instead of adding to their initial mythos, they fell back and let The Martix become allegory for older philosophies.

With Inception, Nolan grabs the baton and doesn’t stop at creating a dual version of reality but blazes forward and forges layers and layers of reality that fold into themselves. Staying true to the title, Inception is the creative process brought to cinematic life where the primary actors create subworlds with characters crafted with such vivid details that the subcharacters create their own agency and write themselves into the story that is both limited and freed by the vision of the original creator. Trippy, yes. Mystic, sort of. Fodder for adventurous storytelling, definitely.
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