LatinosUSA

Juan Re Crivello: Poetry back in fashion?

Mark Statman:  I hadn’t known it was out of fashion! Or that that was an important thing about it. Remember Nehru jackets? Huk-A-Poo Polyester disco shirts? Maybe my question is with the word fashion (or is it in style or popular)? I don’t know. Back in NYC, where I was born and lived for 45 of my 67 years, when I told people who were not in the poetry world I was a poet, they would smirk-smile and ask me, seriously, what I really did. Here in southern Mexico, where I’ve lived for the last 9 years, they happy-smile and tell me how much they love poetry and then they begin to recite.

JRC: Do you write poetry daily, or do you write as ideas come to you?

M. S.: Yes. That is to say, I write daily because ideas always come to me. I do have a routine in which I write every morning. If the work goes well, I’ll continue as long as I feel like it. I also like to write in the afternoon, though usually my afternoons are when I work on translations.

JRC: What is your next publishing project? Could you tell us how it came about?

M. S.: I have four publishing projects happening right now. The first is my Poet in Mexico Substack. I started it early this year because I was getting out of the Meta/MAGA world of Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I wanted a way to stay in touch with folks and also to continue writing in prose about life here. Since starting it I’ve been publishing not only my poetry but the poetry of poets whose work moves me, which includes poetry in translation. And those are my next two projects, a translation of Araceli Mancilla Zayas’ collection La Casa del Ciervo and an as yet untitled collection by Efraín Velasco Sosa. These will both appear in the coming year or so. The last project is a New and Selected Poems scheduled to appear in 2028.

JRC: The city you live in, and a description of your favorite bar or café.

M. I.: I split my time between Oaxaca city and our rancho in a little colonia of San Pedro Ixtlahuaca. In Oaxaca centro, I have two favorite cafes: one is Cafe Bien, a small Greenwich Village ca.1970’s type cafe, where I often meet friends when we want to have more or less serious conversations; it’s where Efraín Velasco and I often meet to talk about poetry and work on my translations of his work and his of mine. The second cafe is called Cafe Boca del Monte; it has extraordinary views of Oaxaca and the surrounding mountains and maybe the best matcha latte in town—it’s a great place to bring friends visiting from out of town or country. Out in our little colonia, we really don’t have cafes or anything like it. There is a small comedor, Comedor Aly, run by my neighbor Aly (she took it over from my neighbor Sandy when it was Comedor Sandy). Aly makes wonderful breakfast and lunch dishes. Since the place only has three tables, more often than not I get our orders to go—I return the plates, etc. later in the afternoon when taking the dogs on our evening country walks. I don’t have any favorite bars because I’m in recovery but once upon a long time ago it would have been the kind here with swinging doors and lots of laughing and a guy on a guitar singing rancheras.

Sample Poem from Volverse/Volver

learning to speak

pine forests fire

works Candelaria

of return no return

the zopilotes of

infancy dogs scratch

behind their ears I

scratch the sky and

page there are

words which don’t

want to come like

love torn in rocks and

piled high barricades

our gravestones

surround us dream-

like birds call

alarm and distance

day’s end in the

not yet night we

drag ourselves

through sieve river

streets the woods full

of earthly creatures

earthworms fungus

reptiles fireflies

we spy constellations

in the dry

field water in the

well we’d need a

machine to pump it

out human effort

divine guidance

our endless resources

corn guayaba

platano clay and

diamonds

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Bio: Mark Statman has written fourteen books, most recently the poetry collections Volverse/Volver (Lavender Ink, 2025), Hechizo (Lavender Ink, 2022), and Exile Home (Lavender Ink, 2019). He has translated from Spanish to English three poetry collection, notably, with Pablo Medina, Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (Grove 2008). Statman is a dual national of the US and Mexico and lives in San Pedro Ixtlahuaca and Oaxaca de Juárez, MX.

Link to purchase Volverse/Volver

Volverse / Volver