Ahead of his upcoming 92NY reading with Quiara Alegría Hudes on May 4, we talked to 2021-2023 New York State Poet Laureate Willie Perdomo (Smoking Lovely: The Remix, The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon) on the porous relationship between writing and performance, infusing his poetry with dramatic dialogue, treating his audience to “the hottest set in New York City,” and much more.
Your poetry is rightfully celebrated for what it does on the page, and anyone who has seen you read knows that you generate a rare electricity when you inhabit it in a live setting — your readings are works of art in and of themselves. What is the relationship between writing and performance for you?
For me, it’s not a binary relationship. The writing comes first, but the poem becomes an extension of my body. The ear becomes a trusted reader. The poem and the so-called performance meet each other nicely on the same street. I was trained to write poetry and read poems aloud in a communal setting. I don’t read poems from memory — I read the words in the manuscript like musical notation. Because music is so prevalent in my work as subject matter, there’s a synchronicity there that is important to my delivery, which has become a kind of signature. You know it’s my poem when you hear it aloud, but you also know it’s my poem when you read it on the page.
Your books tend to focus on a character, or a group of characters, in a particular time and place — which is part of a poetic lineage that is as old as poetry itself, but which contemporary readers might associate more with novels, stories, or plays. What made you a poet, as opposed to a fiction writer or a playwright?
That’s a good question, because I’m moving into more dramatic writing at the moment. I’ve become invested in building narrative arcs with more than one voice. The Crazy Bunch was the first time I consciously tried to do that — that book chronicles a weekend in the lives of five young Black and Puerto Rican men in the ‘90s, at the dawn of the hip-hop era — it felt almost like a novella. I was trying to figure out what it was like to be young in the face of tragedy and loss, and I tried to synthesize some of my own specific memories that would not let go. It was a way of honoring a neighborhood, capturing its nuances and music. It meant moving away from the individual line as the vehicle for what I was trying to say — I’ve become more invested in dialogue, story and history. I often ask myself what it really means to put words down on the page as a form of expression. There are a thousand answers to that one question, but lately I’m thinking it has something to do with how we construct memory, and finding pockets of joy within trauma.
Smoking Lovely: The Remix is a radically revised new edition of your second book, which originally came out almost 20 years ago. What’s changed? And what inspired you to make this kind of innovative revision?
When I was approached by the publisher, I was a little tentative to do it at first. But I talked to a couple poet friends of mine, and they suggested that if I was going to put out a reissue, I may as well make it a new book. That made sense to me. It meant that I had a chance to play with the form — I wrote a short play, and I turned some of the older poems into prose poems, and I wrote an essay about my original misgivings and frustrations with the book. It was a risk, but it felt like a fresh start — it allowed me work with forms and genres that I’m now moving toward. It also allowed me to remember some of the fun things about publishing Smoking Lovely, like when I got a phone call from Gil Scott-Heron telling me he liked the book — that was a joy. And it was a joy to read the book at community centers, where people were really interested in the things I was writing about gentrification, and how it had affected the neighborhood. The reissue itself was like coming out with a new album, and I had a lot of fun with it.
You’ll be reading at 92NY with Quiara Alegría Hudes, a writer whose work is formally quite different from yours but with whom you share some core fascinations. I’m curious about your relationship to her writing.
I just did a dive back into her work, starting with the play Yemaya’s Belly. I was so excited, blown away, to rediscover what can be done with theater. She took huge risks early on, like having a scene that happens completely underwater — it’s like she wasn’t even worried if these plays would be produced or not. It still feels fresh to me. She’s inspiring.
What do you hope members of the audience will take with them after your reading?
That they just went to the hottest set in New York City [laughter]. No, for real, if they can carry one line with them and float on it a bit for the rest of the night, that’s great. And of course, I want them to come hang out with me north of 96th Street.
Willie Perdomo and Quiara Alegría Hudes read at 92NY on Thursday, May 4. Get your tickets today.