Boricua! Yo soy Africano! I ain't/ lyin'. Pero mi pelo is kinky y curly y mi skin no es negro pero it can pass . . ."
– Willie Perdomo, from Nigger-Reecan Blues

Willie Perdomo is a poet who is one of the important voices to come out of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Willie is the author of WHERE A NICKEL COSTS A DIME (Norton). He has been featured on several PBS documentaries including WORDS IN YOUR FACE and THE UNITED STATES OF POETRY. His work has been included in BORICUAS: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Writing (One World/Ballantine) and LISTEN UP! A Spoken Word Anthology (Ballantine) and STEP INTO A WORLD (Wiley). He is also the author of VISITING LANGSTON, a picture book illustrated by Bryan Collier, published by Henry Holt/Books for Young Readers.)

He was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Grant and he co-wrote an episode for the HBO series, SPICY CITY.

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Interview with Willie Perdomo

Guy Lecharles Gonzalez: In early '95, there was a series at SOB's called "Flipping the Script" and that was the first time I had seen Willie Perdomo on stage, first time I heard "Nigger-Reecan Blues." Wow, I didn't know poetry could be like that, could speak to people in a different way than I'd been taught in high school.

It took a few years for it to turn into me writing my own stuff, but it gave me a totally different impression about what poetry was and what it could be and how it could connect to me where in the past, it had no reference to me at all. Let's start the discussion in terms of inspirations, where you first come into poetry, Let's talk about Ed Randolph.

Willie Perdomo: Ed Randolph was a receptionist at this prep school that I went to on 16th Street and he always wore dark glasses, but he saw everything. I experienced a lot of confusion and conflict coming from uptown, the cultures kind of threw me off. There was this kid who called me a "Puerto Rican bastard" and then he cursed my mother. Here it was, racism right up in my face and I couldn't believe it.

So, I was not the fighting kind uptown, but I brought uptown downtown and I beat this kid. I guess all the confusion and conflict that I was experiencing as a young man came out. So, Ed put me in this headlock, and he said, "You know you don't pay to go here. The kid pays to go here. Now if his father wants, he can have you thrown out of school. You've got to take your energy and redirect it."

Now, I didn't really know what that meant in 8th grade, I couldn't think abstractly. So two weeks later, he invited me to [a reading] and he read this beautiful poem about him and one of his boys and it took place in Harlem and the first half of the poem was the summer, and the second half was winter and his friend had just gone off to the Vietnam War and came back and Ed used to walk by him and his friend was on the corner mumbling to himself smoking cigarette butts and he didn't recognize Ed.

Now, I was sitting at the back of this Quaker meeting house and I was like, "Oh shit" and the tears just started coming down. I don't really know what happened to me.

The language was like, "I really really hear this," which is different from the Canterbury Tales. He made it real and it didn't dawn on me until years later when I sort of figured out this is what Ed does with his energy, he redirects it. So then I started trying and I became sort of an apprentice and he gave me "The World of Apples," by John Cheever and "Leaf Storm" by Marquez.

I started writing poems about trees and spring and I used to go to Ed like "Here check this out" and he said, "You know, I don't really like these poems." [laughter] I said, "Why not?" He said, "I want you to look at your mother when she's cooking a pot of rice and beans and tell me how you feel about her. I want you when you walk on 125th Street and Lexington to the train station, what you hear, what you see, what you smell. Process that and put it into words. And I came back with this little 8 line poem about el barrio and he was like, "Okay I like this one."

And I think the lesson there was to take what you have and go with it and then once you start learning how to write, then you can talk about spring, the trees, you know love poems are really hard to write. And Ed became my first mentor... [to be continued]

More of this interview will be available on-line soon