Poetic Dissidence: An Interview with Luz Maria Umpierre

I interviewed Luz Maria Umpierre in Rochester, NY on May 25, 2000. This was my second meeting with her since the 1999 Modern Languages Association Convention in Chicago. Umpierre allowed mc to conduct this interview not only because of renewed public interest in her poetry, but also due to a renewed concern for Puerto Rican and Caribbean studies programs in US colleges and universities. What follows is my interview with Umpierre, in which I attempted to let her speak not only as a poet, but also as a literary critic, intellectual, human rights advocate, and teacher. Speaking to Umpierre, one gets the distinct feeling that she docs not mark boundaries between the various social roles she plays. A product of two linguistic realities, Spanish and English, and two cultural realities, Umpierre constantly bridges the socio-political and cultural divides that often separate people of different tongues, economic status, and ethnic origin. Transgressing these boundaries in her personal and professional life, Umpierre creates and celebrates an independence of being that transcends and defines classification. MD: I know you first gained attention for your writing and poetry while doing doctoral work at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. But, when did you start writing, and how did you become interested in poetry? LMU: I began writing when I was thirteen years old because I was a victim of sexual abuse. I began writing things in a notebook. One of my cousins got a hold of the notebook and read it and burned it. I wrote a lot of essays and things like that in school, but I didn't write again until I was a teacher at a high school in Puerto Rico and I wrote a poem to my aunt, a poem to my mother and a few other writings and I put it in a booklet for my students' graduation. Unfortunately, I have no copy of that. I started to write again when I took a course at Bryn Mawr College. I had a professor who taught a course on the Vanguard Poets and he would allow me to write poems following the characteristics of the Vanguard movement. So, the first poems that appear in El pais de las maravillas are part of exercises that I did for that class and then after I started writing more when I began working at Rutgers, in 1978. MD: What is it that attracts you to poetry as a literary form? Why not the short story or novel? LMU: I have written one short story. I had a friend who wanted me to write a story about my childhood and I did, and it has been published. But I don't like to write short stories and I don't write novels. I just can't do it. Poetry comes very easily to me. I also read poetry more than anything else. I had a teacher in high school who had us memorize poetry and recite it. She took it very seriously. Because of that, I became interested in poetry. I must say I was fortunate to have had in my life someone who loved poetry, and who taught me how to love it, too. MD: When I first mentioned the idea of writing a paper on what I call "gastronomic discourse" in The Margarita Poems, the person to whom I was speaking did not initially accept that a semiotics of food can (and does) exist. To prove my point to this individual, I read aloud a statement by Margaret Atwood, "Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality and language" (2). Can you comment on the references you make to food in The Margarita Poems and also comment on Atwood's statement? LMU: I have always made references to food perhaps because as a child I suffered from anorexia. This was not diagnosed until I was thirty years old and only after the doctor saw pictures of me when I was younger. When I came to Bryn Mawr, I noticed that people were more interested in asking me for recipes of Puerto Rican dishes than in asking me about the socio-political conditions of my country under colonialism. This I found so odd that it drove me to write one of the poems in The Margarita Poems. …