“It is the job of writers to perceive and explain the truth. To get to the essence of things in this society is a monumental task of awareness.” – V. H. Cruz

Victor Hernández Cruz, born February 6, 1949 in Puerto Rico, grew up and went to school in Spanish Harlem New York. Cruz started writing at fifteen and his first chapbook, Papo Got His Gun! (Calle Once, 1966) was published when he was seventeen. His first collection, Snaps (Random House, 1969), was published three years later at the age of twenty. Cruz is known for blending English and Spanish into his spoken and written poetry (read about the Nuyorican Movement), and for writing about New York as a Puerto Rican. He writes as though he is a perpetual traveler, someone who has visited just long enough to feel at home in New York, California, Puerto Rico, Morocco, and Colorado.

When Urayoán Noel asked in an interview [published in the article “The Music That Is Yourself,” (T&W 38:2, 2007] about the effects of growing up with two languages, Cruz said, “It’s a limbo that I’ve learned to cultivate. I tell you, what’s more important is what I want to say. The question is, can I say it with more strength in English or in Spanish? I feel the subject itself, the content, will call forth the language it needs; the language chooses itself. …In my poetry I am also a student of history and, as I travel, I travel with that in mind. For me, traveling is just as important as investigation or reading texts because it’s seeing cultura viva (living culture)…You can see it in the kinds of food you eat, and in music influenced by this guitar or that melody.”  

In an interview with turnrow (2002), Cruz talked about how he became involved with Teachers & Writers Collaborative. “I met people [in 1968] who were important to me—Herbert Kohl, who I actually met in New York—he is an educator. … I met Ishmael Reed, the African-American novelist, who encouraged me and wrote about my early work. In California I was able to see New York from a distance, from a bird’s eye view. I usually write about places after I've left them.” In the interview with Urayoán Noel, Cruz elaborated on this:

“[Kohl] always tells me that I was one of the first poets to go into the schools—I suppose I should take his word for it. I met him when I went to high school in Spanish Harlem. I was at Benjamin Franklin High School and he was working with a group of people in an alternative school in a storefront in the neighborhood. They came looking for students who wanted to participate in these after-hours creative writing and drawing classes and I was very interested in all of that, so I started going there to take classes. After a while I started to lead little workshops and to talk to students about writing. And this all came about because of Herb Kohl’s encouragement. …It was a good experience: It gave me a connection with those first days of Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and experiences that helped develop my teaching skills.”

When Noel asked how teaching informs Cruz’s writing, he said “When you discuss the work of other people it makes you see your own work more clearly. You learn what other people see in your work, and how your own work can be misinterpreted. …When you’re teaching in a class and talking to students, what they get out of the poem helps you see if the spirit of what you were writing got through or not.”

“When you teach writing, it’s not like teaching how to fix an electric contraption, or teaching mechanics. You teach awareness, you make people aware of the subtleties of the written and phonetic aspects of a poem, the silent spaces and musical sounds.” –VHC, T&W, 38:2, 2007.

Cruz’s collections of poetry include Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Coffee House Press 2001), Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets (Cruz as editor, Persea Books 1995), and The Mountain in the Sea (Coffee House Press 2006). Cruz is also a founder of The Before Columbus Foundation. 

-Sally Stark

Sally is a recent graduate of English and Creative Writing at Coe College (Cedar Rapids, IA); she was an intern at Teachers & Writers Collaborative last winter and spring.

The Lower East Side
was faster than the speed
Of light
A tornado of bricks
and fire escapes
In which you had to grab
on to something or take
Off with the wayward winds—

from The Lower East Side of Manhattan -- Victor Hernández Cruz