Interview with Poet Willie Perdomo

THE CITY SUN

July19 — July 25, 1995

By Ericka Blount

Hey, Willie. What are you, man? Boricua? Morena? Que?

I am.

No, silly. You know what I mean: What are you?

I am you. You are me. We are the same. Can’t you feel our veins drinking the same blood?

-But who said you was a Porta Reecan?            -

-Tu  no eres Puerto Riqueno, brother

-Maybe Indian like Gandhi Indian.

-Is one of you parents white?

-You sure you ain‘t a mix of something like

-Cuban and Chinese?

-Naaaaaahhhh..You ain’t no Porta Reecan.

-I keep telling you: The boy is a Black man with an accent.

If you look closely you will see that your spirits are standing right next to our songs. Yo soy Boricua! Yo soy Africano! I ain’t lyin’..Pero mi pelo es kinky y kinky y mi skin no es negra pero it can pass..

-Hey, yo. I don’t care what you say—you Black…

--from Nigger-Reecan Blues, for Piri Thomas, by Wilie Perdomo

Writer and poet Willie Perdomo’s, poem, “Nigger Reecan Blues” was first published in The City Sun literary supplement in 1988 and marked Perdomo’s first-ever publication in the supplement. Now a widely-traveled poet at the age of twenty-seven, Perdomo is about to have his first volume of poetry published in Jan. 1996 and says that two incidents led him to begin writing.

“When I first got a scholarship to Friends Seminary in the eighth grade, I had a confrontation with a white boy who I had thought was a good friend and he called me a Puerto Rican bastard and cursed about my mother,” said Perdomo, “I had so much rage, I got pretty violent and beat him up pretty badly.”

“At the time there was a receptionist there named Ed Randolph, who was also like my guardian. He was watching out for me, and he happened to be a poet. He grabbed me and calmed me down and explained to me that I had to do something else with my energy.”

Two weeks later Randolph invited Perdomo to hear him read poetry. “He read this beautiful poem about his friend who had been in the Vietnam War and had come back mentally unstable and he didn’t recognize Ed as his friend,” Perdomo said, “It really evoked a lot of emotion. Then I realized that this is what creative people do with their energy, they redirect it.”

Perdomo said that another major influence on his work was Down These Mean Streets, the acclaimed autobiography of Piri Thomas. “He [Thomas] helped me visualize all of the stuff that I had been seeing in the street, but I really couldn’t describe,” said Perdomo, “The characters in the book had the same names as some of the people I had grown up with.”

With the emergence of hiphop music and many young African American poets and writers in the 80s and 90s, many young people are finding a voice in a language that is their own. Perdomo, who grew up and still lives in East Harlem, was also inspired by Langston Hughes’ work. His own writing, he says, is a fusion of hiphop and salsa music and Black English and Spanglish.

“Hughes’ language was true to the experience he had in the 1930’s—in Harlem—and it is still relevant,” said Perdomo, “I had wanted to write in the language that I was accustomed to hearing everyday. I realized that is was legitimate writing. I could be a poet in that language that was true to me.”

Other poets Perdomo admires include: Gwendolyn Brooks, in particular her book, Annie Allen, Langston Hughes; Pedro Juan Soto; and the Nuyorican Poets Café school of poets.

Culture Shock and Mentors

Growing up, Perdomo went to public schools in East Harlem and then transferred to Friends Seminary where he was a scholarship student. Perdomo describes this transition as a “culture shock,” but also as an opportunity to grow outside of his own environment. “But I always knew where I was from, because everyday I would get off at 125^th St, and go back home to where it all started,” he recalls.

Perdomo later went to Ithaca College for two years, where he served as a resident poet for the Afro-Latin community and performed for Martin Luther King’s birthday, and for all of the fraternities and sororities. He also produced and wrote plays, but left Ithaca before receiving his degree.

“At some point I got bored with school and decided that I didn’t want to go anymore, that I wanted to write. It was a rash decision, based on some romantic notions of what being a writer and a poet was all about, I will admit,” Perdomo explained, “But it was a good move because after that I came to New York and enrolled in the City College of New York. I met a professor named Raymond Patterson who was a writer from the 50s and 60s. He really took me under his wing and showed me another way of being a writer. He gave me confidence in my work, which is really important for any young writer to have — and to have somebody older give them that.’’

Becoming involved with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Perdomo won the grand slam of poetry in 1991. “The Nuyorican Poets Café is a good place for young poets to start these days,” said Perdomo. “You had a variety of people coming down there. There were a lot of voices, there were a lot of Latin and African American writers at the forefront of the spoken-word movement that emerged in the early 90’s.”

Make Them Feel It

Perdomo described one experience that let him know that writing was what he was destined to do:

“I had been reading for a friend of mine back in ‘88 or ‘89, James Hope — he was a 21-year-old young brother who had leukemia and one night there was a benefit for him,” Perdomo explained, “They invited me to come in and do some poems. At the time my personal life was in shambles. I had dropped out of school, I was in a job that I really didn’t like....so I went up there and read this letter that I wrote to him and about three-quarters down the letter, I threw down my hands and I sort of froze, I was in shock — I left.. There was a young sister outside that said ‘Willie, that was beautiful’.

“When I went back in there, people were standing up and drying their tears. I went inside and James Hope’s mother grabbed me and kissed me and said, ‘I love you. That was beautiful.’ And all that stuff that was going on in my personal life became irrelevant, it converged onto a point where everything was clear and I knew this is what I wanted to do: write and read poems. I wanted to read poems to make people cry, to make them laugh, make them happy, make them say thank you, make them say, ‘Damn, I never thought of it that way.’ So, after that my purpose was clear. It was not an obstacle anymore, it was not a job anymore, it was just something I had to do. I don’t have any doubt in my mind that I was put here to do that.”

Perdomo used to he an assistant to literary agent Marie Brown of Marie Brown Associates, where he helped to discover works by new authors. While there, he sold an anthology entitled, Boricua, influential writings edited by Roberto Santiago, which will be published by One World/Ballantine Books.

Perdomo’s work has appeared in PBS’s Alive From Off Center series entitled “Words in Your Face.” He will also be appearing in an upcoming series called,“The United States of Poetry” — a five-part series of poetry readings/spoken-word performances by poets like Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove and Pedro Pietri. Perdomo recently has been traveling across the country and parts of Europe, performing his poetry with the “Nuyorican Poets Cafe Live!”

For the future Perdomo says that he is working on a fiction novel, “I had always wanted to write my own Down These Mean Streets, I am also interested in writing a love story, and maybe another collection of poems. Basically, I want to just keep writing and leave a significant body of work behind.”

Perdomo has completed his first book of poems entitled, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, published by WW Norton, which will be released in Jan. 1996. His poems can also be found in the anthologies: Aloud:Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers., Young Tongues, and several foreign translations to be published in the future.

His advice to young poets: “Although poems are meant to be read aloud, it is still important that poets try to send out their poems to be published, because once they are published, there is a certain permanence that follows it’s publication, especially in this age where poets have become spoken-word artists.”