The following is an interview of Farid Matuk, conducted

by Brian Lam, João Nascimento, and Xi Gao. The

interview was done over email in January - February
of 2011.

This interview is posted with permission from the

author.

1. After doing extensive research on your biography,

we are finding little information about your biography.
Would you care to share anything you feel is important?
For instance, we noticed that you emigrated from Peru
when you were six years old. We are all immigrants our-
selves, and we are very interested in your experience. If
you feel like it is at all important to a more in depth
understanding of your poems, we would appreciate it
if you shared.

I can tell this is a great question because it makes me un-

comfortable. It’s not fashionable to talk about one’s life
when talking about one’s poems, at least these days, or
at least in the overlapping poetry communities where
I’ve found an audience. We don’t even call them poems;
we talk about our “projects” or our “work,” maybe be-

1
cause we’re always applying for grants and these words
emphasize the toil and product of poetry and so make
us seem serious enough to fund. It’s true that from the
beginning of my encounter with poetry the poems that
have meant the most to me struck me suddenly, with-
out my knowing much or anything about the author.
I hold that out as a standard when I’m writing, I try
to make poems for people who’ll never know me and
who may come from drastically different circumstance
than I do or did. But I know that the kinds of questions
I ask when I write poems and the kinds of pleasures I
try to make in my poems (sonic pleasures, rhetorical
pleasures, etc.) come at least in part from things I’ve
lived, books I’ve read, and people I’ve encountered.
And, finally, the poems I’m most attracted to reveal,
either in their content or their mode, or both, the ways
in which the poet got through the condition of being a
person. I’m thinking of the travel journals of Tu Fu or
the poems of James Schuyler and many others. They
made beautiful poems that are these crafted things that
stand independent of their makers, but that seem to me
traces of the psychic negotiations their authors made
in order to deal with mortality, beauty, social power,
and all the other elemental forces that determine the
circumstance of our lives.

So, that was maybe an excessive warm-up to telling

you that my mother kidnapped me out of Peru and

2
away from my father when I was six. They’d never
married and, though he’d promised marriage, he took
up with another woman shortly after I was born. There
was an ugly custody battle. My father and his partner
found various ways to abuse my mother. They ha-
rassed her by phone; my earliest memory is of a brick
my father used to break one of our windows in our
apartment in Lima. He had written various slurs on the
brick – things I imagine would translate to “bitch,” and
“whore,” and “cunt,” and “slut.” This all culminated,
at least in my mother’s telling of it, in a moment when
he struggled with her, trying to get me out of her arms,
I must have been very young, and he kicked her hard
in the shins. My aunt, my mom’s sister, came down
and drove him away. The custody issues settled and
they got into some routine. At some point my father
had taken a contract job in Venezuela so he was gone
for weeks at a time. One of his relatives tipped off my
mom about his plan to take me to Venezuela and never
bring me back. My father’s brother was a high-ranking
official in the police force, filing a complaint, thought
my mom, would have been useless. So my mom and
aunt sold their apartment and possessions, got a five-
year visa through a friend who worked at the U.S.
consulate, and took me to Anaheim, California where
their eldest sister had lived since the early 60s. Our
visa expired in 1985, we were “illegal” until 1987 when
Reagan’s amnesty law came through, granting us our

3
“green cards.” I didn’t see or talk to my father until
I was 20. The year was 1995. New Gingrich had just
led a Republican take-over of Congress riding, in part,
a wave of anti-immigrant fervor. Things were so bad
that congressmen were seriously proposing that legal
immigrants be denied access to social services. I got my
U.S. citizenship that year and took my new passport to
Peru to meet my father for the first time.

That’s a long and dramatic story, and I’m not sure what
it has to do with my poems except maybe in vague
ways. I know, for example, that my growing up was
marked by some displacements – my father lived in
this story, but he wasn’t with us; my birthplace was on
another continent, but I was growing up in and being
shaped by American culture; in my memories of her
from Peru, my mother had been this somewhat glam-
orous figure, but now she was working the late shift in
a nursing home and she didn’t know the language, so
she seemed smaller, less capable; we were living in a
predominantly Hispanic immigrant neighborhood, but
my mom’s bigotry prevented me from rooting myself
there, so whenever I got a ride I hung out with white
kids in their neighborhood; the only man in my life,
my father, seemed like a horrible person, and yet I was
supposed to grow into a man; we were good people,
but politicians and pundits talked about us as thieves
and criminals.

4
 I suppose it can be a help to a poet to notice early in
life the double nature of existence, that we can be fac-
tual and narrative, that Peru can be a place you could
touch and a very personal story you could tell. Gaps
and absences in the story and in life are also important.
In the case of growing up as a man, for example, I had
to reject what I knew about my father’s violence, but
had no other model to substitute, so I had to make my
own way. Nostalgia becomes an early mode of aware-
ness if you have this kind of growing-up. Nostalgia
can be great fun, but it can keep a poet from attending
to what’s immediate now, so that is something I work
through even now and, I think, makes an interesting
tension in some of my poems. Like the paired poems
both called “As You Accompany Your Death.” There’s
a hyper-awareness there of the mother being a story
and that story both brings her near (“this is how she
approaches me”) and makes her more mysterious (the
multiple versions of herself gathered “in loose gangs”
on the beach).

2. You seem to tackle identity, as well as social and po-

litical issues throughout your poems, i.e. “Talk,” “All
Stories Great and Small.” What compels you to write
about these issues in poetry, do you see any advantage
in using this medium? What is it, in our social behavior,
that you find problematic, if at all? And how does that

5
connect with the political?

There’s a lot I see as problematic in our social behavior,

but I try not to make poems that tell people how to live
or that try to teach people how to think. In fact, it seems
to me that if somebody comes to poetry to learn, say,
that racism is bad or that war is bad, then that person
has deeper problems than poetry could ever address.

So then what am I doing referencing the Hitlerjugend

or Mark Fuhrman in one poem, or lynching history in
another? It’s maybe easiest for me to answer this by
talking about the title of the book. The explanatory
note in the back tells you the title comes from a public
art project designed by the artist Daniel Martinez and a
couple of his collaborators. The note also suggests that
the artists meant to comment on the displacement of a
Filipino immigrant community that had been pushed
out in order to build the Moscone Center convention
center in San Francisco, the very site their public art
project was supposed to adorn. So there’s this sense
that the phrase “This isa nice neighborhood” is ironic,
that it’s pointing an accusatory finger at white civic and
business elites who steamrolled over a whole commu-
nity in order to make money off conference attendees.
All of this is true; all of this is there in the connotations
and potential tone of that phrase. But, for me, the phrase
is literally the same thing we would say when I was

6
growing up in a bad neighborhood in Orange County
and relatives visited from Peru and we’d crowd them
into our tiny car and tour them through Bel Air and
Beverly Hills. I can remember pressing my face against
the glass and fantasizing about what it would be like to
live in those estates. I lived instead in a neighborhood
where the police helicopter shone its search light into
my bedroom window at night to ferret out the guys
hiding in the alley and there were drug deals going on
in front of our apartment, but what’s fascinating to me
is that I could feel identified somehow with the rich
who lived in the nice neighborhood, I felt proud that
the rich and I at least shared this new country and we
could show off their gilded gates to relatives who came
from far away. So there’s a sense of desire there, some-
thing I wanted in the nice neighborhood that doesn’t
sound righteous or strong or correct to admit to. In fact,
just last night somebody on Facebook posted an excerpt
from Martin Luther King’s last speech in which he calls
for a boycott of Coca-Cola in Memphis. This was 1968.
Sanitation workers were on strike in Memphis. King
knew that the next phase of civil rights needed to be an
attack on poverty, extreme wage inequity, and various
corporate excesses. And he knew too that folks needed
to start building new alliances across racial and ethnic
identities, that we needed to see how we fit into this
or that socio-economic class. I love that position King
was calling for, I feel deeply stirred to action when I

7
hear his words. But that’s not what I want my poems to
do. I want my poems, whether they address obviously
political concerns or not, to be a place, a site, where a
reader can come, put some words in his or her mouth,
and thereby find permission to say aloud what they
may (not yet know they) want and thereby start to find
some compassion for themselves, for everybody. Righ-
teousness is useful, but its necessarily antagonistic, it
says, I know what’s right and those other people don’t
know what’s right, so I have to do something to correct
that. I’m more interested in a poetry that’s permissive
of our darker, less decorous natures. Not because I
want us to wallow like pigs in our own slop, but be-
cause acknowledging our own messiness seems to me
a deeper starting point from which to find connection
with each other. So, for example, in “Tallying Song,”
I’m interested in property ownership as a thing we all
share to one degree or another.

There’s nothing wrong with owning stuff, but it’s a

dehumanizing thing, I think, to identify as one-who-
owns-stuff, it stokes a sense of pride and protective-
ness that can limit our sense of compassion, but it’s
so normalized we don’t think about it. So you get a
situation where a New Orleans city official can de-
fend evacuation efforts during the Katrina hurricane
by noting that “the roads were full of early evacuees”
without considering the privilege in owning a car you

8
 could drive out. So, the world becomes a place where
people have their own cars and those who don’t be-
come invisible, they become ghosts before they ever
actually drown. The poem doesn’t criticize this man;
instead it looks for equivalencies, other ways in which
others and I manifest similar blind spots. So it spins
out into considering identities and histories of struggle
for justice themselves as types of “property,” property
we want to protect and defend. The poem suggests
narrative itself, the desire to make a coherent story out
of your trauma and your life, can be a type of property,
one that may be inevitable. The poet Robert Duncan,
in his correspondence with Denise Levertov, famously
said, “[t]he poet’s role is not to oppose evil, but to
imagine it,” and he asked: “Is it a disease of our gen-
eration that we offer symptoms and diagnoses of what
we are in the place of imaginations and creations of
what we are?” I guess I’m with Duncan on this. I see
poetry less as a way of expressing a meaning than as
a way of enacting what we can imagine, less an act of
communication and more an experience from which
we might emerge with some insight, but not because
the poem told it to us.

3. You evoke many different locations in your poems, i.e.

“An American in Dallas,” “I remember voices saying,
‘voda,’ then the felt of their tents,” and geography ap-
pears to play an important role throughout your poems.

9
What is it about geography, and geographical boundar-
ies, you find important in your life or in poetry?

I’m interested, as a lot of poets have been, in topogra-

phy as a fact that we can choose to deny or to reference
in our daily negotiations of the place where we live.
North Texas and Southern California, the two regions
where I’ve spent most of my time, are broad and open
and have been developed into car-dependent land-
scapes. So in these places you have both the Mohave
Desert or the southern-most reaches of the Great Plains
and the vaulted connector lanes of massive freeways
and you can choose to pay attention to either, you can
choose to note the wind moving in from the desert or
the vertiginous rush of speeding down a curving off-
ramp. More interestingly, for me, is that these days it’s
near impossible to separate the natural from the man-
made, and that’s lamentable to a certain extent, but it’s
also a fact of where I live, and you can either elegize
the loss of the natural or find beauty in the facts. I tend
to oscillate between mourning and praising what’s
around me.

More broadly, you raise the issue of “borders.” Border

culture and ideas of hybridity have been studied and
theorized rigorously for some decades now. There are
many more intelligent studies done on these zones and
the issues they raise than I’m familiar with. However,

10
I can say that my experience growing up was always
mixed or hyphenated. My mother was raised by immi-
grants herself, Syrian immigrants who ended up in Peru.
She never mastered her parents’ Arabic, they never lost
their accent when trying to speak proper Spanish. My
father was a mestizo, someone of mixed European and
indigenous ancestry. He and his parents were born in a
little town up in the Andes called Puno. So by the time
my parents’ relationship dissolved and she and my
aunt and I moved to California, I was already coming
from this mixed background. My mother had felt her-
self to be “white” in Peru, and she had her own racist
attitudes toward darker-skinned or more indigenous
peoples. So when we got to Anaheim, my mother told
me not to play with the “cholos” in our neighborhood.
She used this derogatory term until probably the 90s,
when, after working closely with Mexican women in
nursing homes for some time she finally developed
close relationships with them, received their generosity
and support, and started to unpack some of her own
bigotry. As I was trying to make my way through our
neighborhood and then through high school and on
through college, I always felt outside of any community,
I felt independent and tough and free. Coming into my
own bisexuality in college added to this sense of being
independent as, at least at the time, the gay and lesbian
folks I met were no more friendly or accepting of my
sexuality than the straight folks. So I went through this

11
youthful phase where I looked down my nose at those
who needed to identify fiercely with this or that com-
munity, I thought they were weak. Now that I’m older
I realize I was scared of feeling lonely and so I couched
this vulnerability in false bravado. Since forming a
partnership and having a child, I’ve come back around
to a deep appreciation of having a family, a tribe into
which our daughter can grow, a context from which
she can draw sustenance and against which she can
measure her own individuality. To get back around to
the poems, my suspicion of identity is still there, but
it’s tempered now with this desire for connection. So
you get a poem like “But Richard, Will You Show Me
an Ethic of Freedom?” that uses some lines from an
interview Richard Pryor gave in which he tried very
hard to make himself unlikeable and unavailable to
human connection. Pryor was doing this because he
recognized that his very existence as a black man, let
alone as a successful black man, was seen as a criminal
act by many, to have once come from the status of prop-
erty and now be free and have agency was and still is
deeply disturbing for many whites (hence you have the
corporate-prison complex that profits from the dispro-
portionate prosecution of drug crimes among blacks
today). He knew and he hated that it was his celebrity
and ability to turn a dime for studios that made a white
man interested in asking him questions. So he rejects
that moment of civility and acts like a jerk. I admire

12
deeply his ability to resist the ways that civil interac-
tion can actually be a means of coercion, a means to
make you validate narratives of normalcy. On the other
hand, his resistance seems ultimately so nihilistic, or at
least lonely. So, from the title on, this poem takes up a
dialogue with Pryor, alternating between questioning
the comedian and enacting his own rhetorical moves.
My sense of the work of Wallace Stevens is that he
oscillated between a feeling that the actual world was
never going to be accessible to us directly, that words
were only signs and not the things themselves, and yet,
he always acknowledged, as he says in one late poem,
that “a look or a touch reveals its sudden magnitudes.”
If I have a similar binary in my work it comes from
this issue of borders you raise and identity that, for
me, comes naturally out of any consideration of bor-
ders. It’s that identity seems like a trap, a thing used
to coerce or subjugate and that any pleasure that liber-
ates you from having to “be somebody” is something
worth pursuing. And, at the same time, understanding
that speaking subjects need to be recognized in the so-
cial exchange that is communication, you need to “be
somebody” even as that identity is porous and mortal.
This is probably why a lot of my poems work through a
self-awareness when it comes to narrative. Immigrants
know that much of life is lived in the stories we tell
ourselves and others about the way things were “back
home.” Losing my mom and my aunt in recent years

13
has also highlighted how dependent we are on narrative.
I think of that most starkly now when I think about being
the archive of my mother and aunt, I’m the one who will
represent them to my daughter because she’ll never have
anything else of her grandmothers on my side beside some
photos and my stories about them. Being stuck in this bi-
nary between absolute freedom from identity/community
and deep desire for identity/community doesn’t seem like
a problem to me any more, it makes an interesting tension
from which some poems came out, now those poems are
out there and may become important to other people the
way the poems of others are important to me.

There’s at least one more way to think about borders and

that’s in terms of the borders of our bodies and the borders
of our perception. The poem “I remember voices saying
‘voda’…” that you ask about imagines itself as another
dialogue, this one with the artist Joseph Beuys. Beuys was
a guy fascinated with the physical nature of materials and
his art, it seems to me, proposed that we could find ways
to transfer “energies” across these materials. So he became
an interesting figure for me as I was working through what
I could call a “poetics of reception.” It’s this idea that the
poet tries to dampen intent and instead turns him or herself
into an instrument of reception. You try to receive images,
language, tones, energies from the outside world and then
organize them (you can never fully escape intent) in some
way that is interesting for the reader. This is by no means a

14
 new idea. From the Greeks and their muses to Surrealists to
West Coast poets influenced by Buddhism and haiku, poets
have long been trying to get out of the way of their own
ideas in order to bring readers closer to more elemental
forces.

4. Besides the texts which you reference in the “Notes” sec-

tion at the end of your book, are there any texts we should
consult to better understand where you are coming from
politically and artistically?

The cultural critics Hakim Bey and David Levi Strauss have
written beautifully about the art of Daniel Martinez. They
have some essays in two different monographs about Mar-
tinez, The Things You See When You Don’t Have a Grenade!
and Daniel Joseph Martinez: A Life of Disobedience. Their
reading of his work resonates a lot with my own curiosities
and perspectives. But this is a difficult question to answer
seriously because, really, there’s an entire library of stuff that
has influenced me and found its way into my poems. Just
in terms of style I’ve learned from the poets Charles Olson,
Robert Duncan, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, John Ash-
bery, Eileen Myles, Wallace Stevens, C.D. Wright, Claudia
Rankine, Ted Berrgian, and many, many others. The psy-
choanalytic philosopher, Jacques Lacan, taught an annual
seminar that was recorded and transcribed into books. His
Seminar VII: the Ethics of Psychoanalysis has been impor-
tant to me, thought I wouldn’t pretend to understand all of

15
 it. In terms of artists, besides Martinez, I’ve also been
struck by the work of Kara Walker, Adrienne Piper,
and William Pope L. Maybe the biggest influence on
me was a teacher, my mentor and friend Lindon Barret
who was, tragically, killed in the summer of 2008. He
insisted that pleasure and desire were the ground floor
of human existence, not the totality of who we are,
but a necessary base, and one that traditional Western
thought tries to avoid or deny. His books and articles
are very dense, but he taught me just as much by being
alive and present with me. We would read and cook
and eat and dance and cry all in the space of one night.
He was an immigrant himself, from Guyana to Canada
to the U.S. He lived without borders, or across them.
When he was killed a memorial blog was created and
the long list of testimonials show how he influenced
dozens of students in the same way. He was amazing; I
suppose he set many of us on our paths.

5. You include several pictures by the artist Daniel Jo-

seph Martinez and a picture by the artist Jeannie Simms
in your book. Why supplement your poetry with this
form of art? What is the role of other art forms in your
poetry?

Maybe I’m more interested in ideas and experiences (I

include the experience of being in the presence of art or
reading poetry) than I am in any one genre or mode. So

16
I’m drawn to visual art because it’s sometimes the best
way to create a powerful effect. That said, the art I’m
most often excited by draws on literary or rhetorical
elements. For example, that piece of Martinez’s from
which images were taken that now make up the cover
of my book and the first interior image is a “sculpture”
of sorts. It’s an anamatronic sculptural self-portrait of
the artist made to scale that wears one of the bejeweled
belt buckles that are on the cover. When you enter the
gallery, the anamatronic Martinez goes into a fit, that’s
what you see in that first interior picture, it’s shaking
violently. It’s a dead thing, but it’s now dying in front
of you. The primary reference for Martinez is the film
Blade Runner from the early 80s. Blade Runner offered
this vision of the future L.A. that was populated by cy-
borgs. When they turned off/died they went into those
fits. Anyway, the literary or rhetorical gesture in this
piece is that belt buckle. It references a book by the poet
Charles Olson called Call Me Ishmael. Olson’s book
was his take on Melville’s Moby Dick (the first sentence
of Moby Dick being, “Call me Ishmael”). The reference
predates Melville, of course. Ishmael is introduced in
Genesis as Abraham’s first son, but born to his second
wife, Hagar. It gets complicated. Hagar wasn’t really
a legit wife, she was Abraham’s wife’s maid, whom
Abraham’s wife gave to her husband as a vehicle for
a son, since Abraham’s wife was barren at the time.
Anyway, Abraham’s wife, Sara, later got pregnant with

17
Isaac. As a result, Sara kicks Hagar and Ishmael out.
Long story short, for Jews Ishmael became an outcast,
for Muslims he was a prophet, for Christians he was a
Jew. Martinez knows all this, and he’s invoking all of
it, the Biblical reference, the literary reference, and the
cinematic reference to explore how multiple traditions
can lay claim to a single identity (something about
which immigrants know plenty).

I’m sorry, I realize this is a long answer. The point is

that the art extends the conversation I’m trying to have
with the reader, it’s one more way to clue the reader in
to what’s happening in the poems. I’d had each of those
epigraphs picked out for different sections of the book
for a while. When Martinez and Simms agreed to con-
tribute images, I had fun pairing epigraph and image.
So the animatronic sculpture going into death fits goes
with Ed Dorn’s bit about having been created by the
“Lengthening Day,” in other words, attributing one’s
source to something ephemeral, which, I guess I’m
claiming in much of the work, is ultimately what any
of our personal histories are, ephemeral. The sculpture,
with its overdetermined belt buckle, helps to point in
the same direction. Also, it must be said, I liked the
way the belt buckles are made to look very expensive,
hood rich or ghetto fabulous. That helps point to the
way I think our desires are the driving force of what
we do, of the ethnical choices we make or fail to make.

18
 We want that bling, we (meaning adults, specially your
teachers and parents) may dress that word, “bling,” up
in fancy and high-minded rhetoric (“a better life,” “op-
portunities,” “dignity,” “choices”), but at the end of
the day, it’s just bling, middle-class bling, upper-class
bling, a nice house bling, a nice car bling, a nice health
insurance plan bling, plastic surgery bling, laser hair re-
moval bling, yoga classes bling, personal trainer bling,
a comfortable retirement bling, the latest smart phone
bling, a lake house bling. There’s nothing wrong with
wanting shit, it’s just a bit self-deluding, and therefore
ethically problematic, when we think a middle-class
professional person’s high at buying the latest iPhone
is any different than the high some hood kid gets when
buying some outsized jewelry or big rims.

6. Your poems are packed with historical references,

particularly to historical figures that go as far back as
the Spanish invasions and as recent as Richard Pryor.
Are some of these figures influences? Why do you draw
so extensively from historical references?

Part of this gesture toward historical references is an

attempt to reclaim a history that doesn’t get acknowl-
edged enough- a history of violence and power. So from
rulers like Montezuma and Atahualpa (who were no
better than European conquistadors just because they
were indigenous) to the remarks of Mark Furhman on

19
Fox News, people in power are always trying to tell
a story of our experience that suits their interests. It’s
important, I think, for artists to tell a counter narrative
whenever possible. But, for me, that counter narrative
is never simple. It’s Joseph Beuys acknowledging he
was part of a culture that normalized hatred so much
that “everyone” went both to church and to the Hitler
Youth, and, at the same time, Joseph Beuys is this guy
who dedicates the rest of his life to an art practice that
I see as radically humane (and radically weird). It’s
Richard Pryor saying he himself is part of a “criminal
people,” which is just a bold and condensed statement
of how White folks thought of blacks for a long time
in this country (and still do, if you keep up with the
disparities in incarceration rates). And yet Pryor calls
himself a criminal in order to win some freedom for
himself, to negate the social niceties the white inter-
viewer is trying to get Pryor to acknowledge. Lastly,
history is as real and alive and contemporaneous with
us as you want to make it. I don’t presume to know
what you as young people have gone through. But if
you’ve lost someone you love, then you know what it
means to keep history alive. You become the archive
of that person’s time on this planet. You may already
be the one who tells your little cousin about her father
because her father is dead. You have to be the one
who remembers things her father used to always say,
funny things he did, you have to tell the stories. If you

20
haven’t lost anyone yet, you will, and you’ll know then
that history is just a longer chain of such moments of
responsibility. I trust you’ll tell my generation’s story
when we’re gone.

21