Poetry Center Co-Director Ricardo Alberto Maldonado joined 92NY 16 years ago, and his contributions to our institution’s literary culture have been immeasurable — he’s served as a crucial force in the curation of our reading series, organized our writing workshops and literary seminars, administered the Discovery Poetry Contest, and much more. Maldonado leaves 92NY this week to become executive director of the Academy of American Poets. On the eve of his departure, he sat down with us to reflect on his time at 92NY, how literature has changed in the last 16 years, the value of diversity in public arts programming, why poetry matters, and more.
You’ve just completed an amazing 16-year run at the Poetry Center. From your perspective, how has contemporary literature changed during your time here?
There are readings from The 92nd Street Y that I grew familiar with long before I worked at the Poetry Center, and one of my favorites is George Oppen’s 1967 reading from Of Being Numerous, his great poem of human collectivity. He has a very potent and idiosyncratic reading style, but about halfway through, you begin to hear beyond that — audience members breathing and clapping, cars honking outside on the street. It’s an ambiance that Oppen seems to uncannily conjure with his poem. Every reading comes with that kind of ambiance. That crystallized for me as an audience member during the reading that Tyehimba Jess curated as part of our Tenth Muse series — featuring LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Tracie Morris, and Douglas Kearney. By bringing music and a non-traditional approach to sound to the fore, the poets that night made the audience hyper-aware that we were all part of that evening’s making. This illustrates the biggest change that I think has occurred during my 16 years at 92NY. Writers and readers have become more explicitly aware of what a readership or audience brings to the exchange — where the audience is coming from, and where writers might want to take them as a result.
Behind the scenes at 92NY, you are much beloved among your colleagues for your instinctive kindness, integrity, and good humor; you’ve handled a demanding job with a lot of grace. But your work here has long been undergirded by a set of fierce convictions: that writing matters, art matters, and public literary arts programming serves a vital function in our society. I wonder if you can speak to this.
I came to the Poetry Center at a time when I had lost a lot of faith in poetry, and in my own writing. I could not find a community that understood very basic things: that writers need support, time, and patience, because what we do is hard. We were talking about Oppen before in this regard — writers create a sense of collectivity. The Poetry Center gave me that. I believe the first reading I attended as an employee was for the winners of the Discovery Poetry Contest in 2007. It’s an award for emerging poets, and I could feel how honored they were — not only to take the stage, but just to be in the room with each other. When writers come here, they know that they are being greeted by a community that values what they do. It’s very powerful, and I’ve felt it since day one — not only as an administrator, but as a poet myself.
What do you view as your proudest accomplishment at 92NY?
The Young Writers’ Workshop is a program that I wish I had attended as a younger writer. It was humbling to have conversations with students as they were learning that their words were as valid as Walt Whitman’s. And I’m proud that Bernard [Schwartz] and Sophie [Herron] and I have programmed with diversity in mind since day one. Out of all the readings that I programmed, the one that spoke to me most directly was probably Willie Perdomo and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ reading from this past April, both making their Poetry Center debuts. For them to be celebrated as quintessential Puerto Rican writers and to be able to sing that salsa song in the introduction — that was icing on the cake.
You’re about to become the executive director of the Academy of American Poets, and you’re an accomplished poet yourself. To borrow a question beautifully posed by our good friends downtown at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project: what is poetry?
Jesus, really? [Laughter] That’s hard. But I think the best answer I can give is that we live in a world that’s saturated with language, and poetry helps us understand that world beyond its surface. One of my former colleagues introduced me to this quote from Louis Zukofsky: “Talk is a form of love. Let us talk.” That has informed my sense of what poetry can do.
Thousands upon thousands of people have attended the classes and readings that you’ve programmed over the last 16 years. What do you hope they’ve taken with them?
That they can and should come back. Literature requires indefatigable engagement and care. You do that with others — in the concert hall, in the classroom, and on the page.