Victor Hernandez Cruz

Victor Hernandez Cruz was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York City with his family in 1954 at the age of six. Even though he didn’t start learning English until about two years later, he soon began writing poetry and publish his first collection of poems when he was only 17 years old. Since then he has published more than a dozen books of poetry and was awarded fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

His work frequently mixes English and Spanish and often reflects about the experiences of Caribbean and Puerto Rican immigrants in the US, in a particularly inclusive, almost Whitmanesque manner. As Jose Amaya wrote in the San Francisco Review of Books in 1991, “Cruz experiments with the vast linguistic and cultural possibilities of ‘indo-afro-hispano’ poetry and comes up with a strong vision of American unity.” – A unity which shines through particularly in poems like “Latin Music in New York” and “Red Beans”.

As a co-founder of both the East Harlem Gut Theatre in New York, the Before Columbus Foundation and a former editor of Umbra Magazine, it is safe to say that Cruz is one of the most important figures and driving forces of a Hispanic literary movement in the US.

This is also reflected in the comments of the judges for the International Griffin Poetry Price, which he was awarded in 2002:

“Victor Hernández Cruz has long been the defining poet of that complex bridge between the Latino and mainland cultures of the U.S. [His collection] Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000 proves the extraordinary range of this great, enduring poet, whose articulately persuasive humor and intelligence bear persistent witness to a meld of peoples.” 

Links:
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/victor-hern%C3%A1ndez-cruz
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/victor-hernandez-cruz
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Cruz.php

My response below is a reflection of my own situation in comparison with a writer from a minority background like Cruz. It considers the notion of privilege and its effect for me as a poet.


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intersectionality

white

middle-class

educated

female

handsome

tall

european

migrant

straight

cisgendered

able-bodied

WRITER

a jagged line runs through my life

runs through my thoughts

runs through my words

as speaker both and listener

i strip bare in front of those who doubt

the need for words that charge

and words that change

and words that

will not let you rest at night

that spark the fight -

my privilege most of all:

my voice.