Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes

Chicana poet and activist Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in the Mission District in San Francisco, California, on August 6, 1954, to a working-class Mexican American couple. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was an artist. In 1959, after her divorce, Cervantes's mother, Rose, moved with her two young children to San Jose, California, to live with her mother. Cervantes grew up in East San Jose in a barrio called "Horseshoe," where poverty, gangs, and street violence were ubiquitous. Although the poet experienced a tough childhood and adolescence, as she writes in some of her autobiographical poems (i.e., "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway"), she survived and thrived, thanks to the love and support of her maternal grandmother. Poetry also played an important role in her life; at the age of eight, when she penned her first poem, Cervantes discovered that writing poetry enabled her to make sense of her experience as a poor urban Chicana. Later in her teen years, when she joined several civil rights movements (the National Organization for Women, the Native American Movement, and the Chicano Movement), poetry became her weapon to denounce racism, sexism, violence against women, and the oppression of the disempowered. Indeed, these concerns inform all of Cervantes's works. Since the publication of Emplumada (Pittsburgh Press, 1981), her coming-of-age debut collection, Cervantes has garnered critical acclaim by scholars and writers alike. Fittingly, Chicana dramatist Cherrie Moraga has called her "our Chicano poet laureate" (qtd. in Kevane and Heredia 104). Emplumada received an American Book Award and is a fundamental text in Chicana/Latino studies. In comparison to Emplumada, Cervantes's second book, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Publico Press, 1991), is more lyrical and abstract. It centers on the poet's experiences with loss brought on by divorce, her mother's death, and historical discontinuity. Although From the Cables of Genocide has not enjoyed a wide readership because of its hermetic nature, it has received several accolades, including the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Latino Literature Prize. In Drive: The First Quartet (Wings Press, 2006), a fifteen-year project, Cervantes continues her commitment to justice by denouncing political violence (i.e., the 1997 massacre in Acteal in the Mexican state of Chiapas) and genocide--particularly that of her Chumash ancestors, whose bones are still entombed in the adobe walls of the Santa Barbara Mission. Cervantes is one of the best read and more anthologized Chicana writers; her work appears in major anthologies such as the Heath Anthology of American Literature, the Norton Anthology of American Literature, and the Hispanic Literary Companion. She has been honored with several awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant for Poetry in 1978 and 1993, Outstanding Chicana Scholar by the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Scholars (NACCS) in 1993, and the Wallace/Reader's Digest Writer's Award from 1995 to 1998. This interview took place on May 31, 1999, in Davis, California, in the home of Chicano poet and educator Francisco X. Alarcon. For over two hours, Cervantes spoke about poets who have influenced her work, such as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Mexican poet Jose Gorostiza, and American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Bob Hass. She also provided insights into the themes and symbolism found in her poetry and offered her perspective on the future of Chicana and Chicano poetry. Sonia V. Gonzalez: Who were the poets that influenced you at each stage, when you were writing Emplumada, From the Cables of Genocide, and Drive? Lorna Dee Cervantes: I started writing when I was eight years old, and there were a couple of influences right around the same time. Pablo Neruda has been a sustaining influence since I first discovered him when I was fifteen years old and my brother brought home The Heights of Machu Picchu. …