— They had star quality like Warhol.
— He was not an artist. He was a businessman like Madonna. Madonna is a thermometer. That’s what she does — measure the fever of society. A thermometer is not a work of art, but a very useful instrument.
— Your opinions have no bearing, no substance at all. Andy Warhol was one of the most influential, multitalented artists of our day.
— Artaud was a man of multiple talents.
— Too many.
— I adore Artaud, but he does not have a work like Rimbaud. Of course, I could say that Baudelaire was much more intelligent than Rimbaud, but I prefer Rimbaud’s poetry.
— You cannot measure IQ through poetry.
— What about essays and translations? He did Edgar Allen Poe, you know. Even Verlaine is more intelligent than Rimbaud. But I still prefer Rimbaud. Funny, we don’t think of Shakespeare as an intelligent man — we know him as genius. He never wrote on Chaucer or translated Boccaccio. We know Cervantes was a brilliant man. I have my doubts about Goya. Although all of them were men of passion.
— There is no competition. Genius is genius. Period. I have spoken. They can all exist together with plenty of room for the Jacksons and the Madonnas and the McDonalds and the Burger Kings and the Pizza Huts.
— Which is better: Chinese, Italian, or French food?
— Why do you always have to compare?
— Which is more universal? Spaghetti, pizza, fried rice, chow mien, even tacos and tortillas more than quiche. There’s not a universal French dish with mass appeal.
— I agree, the Chinese and the Italians reach the most people around the world. Like Jackson, but that doesn’t make him better than everyone else. Talent is so universal, it is common. After all, we are all dogs — Russian dogs, Cuban dogs or American dogs. We all bark. That’s what we have in common. And we should admit that all we can do is bark. I bark now, you later, why do you bark, how do you bark, what made you bark — cat, murder, rape, bone. How do we distinguish one barking from another barking if we are all barking, and we all like to bark, and none of us realizes that all we can do is bark — and none of us hears which is more potent or more piercing than the others. We all think we are special in our barking.
— The era of the generalist is coming back. The specialist is dated. The nose specialist, does he consider your eyes, your mouth, your aura, your personality, before he breaks your nose and turns you into another chiguagua. No, he goes cross-eyed staring at your nose. Jack of all trades—the specialist diminishes the value of knowing it all, or at least, trying to grasp it all, and adds—Master of none. Un especialista, just for discerning the details, is not un sabio. El sabio puede ser un necio. Mira lo que decía Alcibíades de Sócrates, borracho, en las tabernas, bebiendo vino, con los dientes podridos. Mistaken for a beggar. How can a wise man look so base? Las apariencias engañan.
— No engañan, my darling, confunden. If I say—here, pretzels, here, porn films, here, sexy bodies—then, they will flock to me — looking for cheap thrills, thinking I am another Madonna, but in the middle of my show, I’ll play a trick on them, as they have been playing tricks on me. Saying it’s great, when it tastes like shit. I’ll do the opposite. I’ll dress like a slutty punk, but I’ll give them the real thing, and I don’t mean coke. I’ll give them poetry.
— What kind of poetry do you write?
— What do you mean?
— I write sonnets, and you?
— I can’t fit life into rhyme scheme. It would be a strait jacket. Rhythm is free. How can I accept rhythms of ancient ages when I’m feeling my own rhythm. The velocity of cars — the engines of our time — concords, faxes, guns and subways. The way we talk and the way we commute. Do we have time to write novels. What is immortal in a novel is not the form which is long dead, but the context. And the same with poetry — what is said — that remains, the way we say things, changes.
— Which means, you write blank verse like Neruda.
— No verse.
— Like Rimbaud — or Baudelaire—Little Prose Poems?
— I do not write little poems. I write big books. Which is not to imply that I like everything in them.
— Then why do you publish them?
— Because it’s not a matter of liking. Because to tell you the truth, many times, I don’t like myself. What am I going to do? Kill myself because I don’t like myself. No, I exist. Those poems I do not like function in the whole work. And they work well. So, it’s not a matter of liking. I don’t like my nose, but it exists and it works well.
— You could also get a nose job.
— Why, I can breathe.
— Do you write every day?
— I don’t have something to say everyday.
— I always find something to say. I have the feeling we are very different poets. I’m sure Suzana told you that I won a poetry contest at the Poetry Society of America. It had an environmental theme. What do you write about?
— I don’t have themes. I have flavors like Bazooka. My favorite is the pink one. I love to suck all the sugar out of the pink one.
— Flavors don’t last, especially Bazooka. Poetry has a mission and I take my role very seriously.
— So do I. I want poetry to be a fashion show — to have a taste of frivolity — savoir faire — a taste of time at its peak — Kenzo, Gigli and Gaultier. I’m more excited by Bergdorf’s windows than the contemporary poetry I’ve read.
— Who have you read?
— I don’t read any of them.
— It shows. You must realize you’re limiting your audience by writing in both languages. To know a language is to know a culture. You neither respect one nor the other.
— If I respected languages like you do, I wouldn’t write at all. El muro de Berlín fue derribado. Why can’t I do the same. Desde la torre de Babel, las lenguas han sido siempre una forma de divorciarnos del resto de la humanidad. Poetry must find ways of breaking distance. I’m not reducing my audience. On the contrary, I’m going to have a bigger audience with the common markets — in Europe — in America. And besides, all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds. I feel like Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio, and I even feel like Garcilaso forging a new language. Saludo al nuevo siglo, el siglo del nuevo lenguaje de América, y le digo adiós a la retórica separatista y a los atavismos.
Saluda al sol, araña,
no seas rencorosa.
Un beso,
Giannina Braschi
— How do you sleep at night.
— I snuggle with the dead when I go to bed.
— You feel colonized.
— Totally colonized.
— You don’t feel cosmopolitan.
— Totally Cosmopolitan.
— That’s a contradiction in terms.
— My confusion is my statement of clarity. I live with plenty of identities within myself. And I want all of them to work. Poetry has been the useless art for too long. It’s been absent from life — history making — and The Daily News. It doesn’t matter how political it strives to be. To make a political statement is not to be politically alive. Poetry should jump out of the system like Tinguely’s machines — out of good and bad, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong. Poetry is fun. Poetry hasn’t been fun for ages. It should give pleasure. We’ve grown accustomed to unhappy poetry. My poetry is happy not to be sad. I steal pleasure from toys, movies, television, videos, machines, games — and put the fun back in function so the work runs like an engine that clinks and clanks, tingles and tangles, whirs and buzzes, grinds and creaks, whistles and pops itself into a catabolic Dämmerung of junk and scrap.