"The breath is alive / with the equal girth of words": Tino Villanueva in Interview

Abstract

my head / was a roaring of light. phrase appears in The 8 O'Clock (16), an opening poem in Tino Villanueva's collection Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993). speaker uses it to describe the 1973 experience of re-seeing a black-and-white television version of George Stevens's 1956 Hollywood screen classic, with its sumptuous wide-screen portrait of Texas oil and a wildcatting dynasty, and its contrast of Anglo and Latino lives. phrase could readily apply to almost all of Villanueva's writings. Since he made his entrance with Hay Otra Voz Poems (1972), he has established himself as a frontline literary presence, adept in both English- and Spanish-language verse. Among his Latino/a literary generation--notably Bernice Zamora, Alurista, Martin Espada, Gary Soto, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Tato Laviera, and Carmen Tafolla--he is seen as a Chicano poet of bicultural word and history yet wholly endowed with his own rare gifts of voice. Villanueva has written a great deal from an awareness of struggle--rural and small-town poverty and discrimination based on ethnicity, identity, gender, and language politics. Yet important as these concerns have been, they by no means bespeak Villanueva's whole repertoire. Hay Otra Voz Poems offers love poetry (I Saw First Leaf Fall), poetry of earth and space on the occasion of the Apollo 11 mission (Redeemed), and existential reflections (Autolaberinto); yet it also contains the sequence Mi Raza, with its vistas of back-breaking migrant field labor and itinerancy in the Southwest. opening pieces in Shaking Off the Dark (1984) take up the nature of creativity and writing. collection also includes Villanueva's taste for haiku in Right on Time--Together, all of/them coming out from behind / clouds: geese flying south. Across the poems, there can be no mistaking the irresistible press of memory. In Empezando a saber/Beginning to Know, in his Cronica de mis anos peores/Chronicle of My Worst Years (1987, 1994), the English version begins: I don't know what got me to open time's damn doors and see again the dusty, gravelly barrio where I learned to be less than I was. (13) Remembrances of Villanueva's hard-scrub, Presbyterian migrant family upbringing in Texas, looking back from his Boston University professorial life that is so different from that of his childhood and youth, have produced a treasury of imaginative dividends. Limited access to schooling, Army service in Panama from 1964 to 1966, college at Southwest Texas State University, and the draw of Chicano activism within a larger 1960s context of civil rights and the Vietnam War all helped shape Villanueva. In 1969 he enrolled for a master's degree at SUNY-Buffalo, and later for a PhD at Boston University. At both, and in both English and Spanish course work, his interest in poetry took on yet fuller energy, inspired by Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and the Beats, and the pan-Hispanic spectrum of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Ruben Dario, Jose Marti, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Cesar Vallejo. His 1981 doctoral dissertation, which he expanded for publication in 1988, studied the twentieth-century Peninsular poetry of Gabriel Celaya, Angel Gonzalez, and Jose Manuel Caballero Bonald. overall double focus was symptomatic. Given his historical cross-cultural milieu and legacy, how could Villanueva not write colinguistically, a poetry of landscapes lived in, and then inscribed in, the cadences of both English and Spanish? As for the roster launched with Hay Otra Voz Poems and continued through Shaking Off the Dark, Cronica de mis anos peores, Scene From the Movie GIANT, and the chapbook Primera causa/First Cause (1999), the judgments have rarely been less than favorable. Commentary understandably seizes upon Villanueva's unmistakable commitment. Certainly he has been no sentimentalist about Chicano history--poem after poem speaks of loss and breakage (my people's crippled history, he calls it in Cronica's History Class [5]) as much as the will to recognition and justice (Take this faith I've framed / so you can keep this picture he asks in Anointing By Words in Cronica [75]). …