Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Martín Espada

Poetry Unbound

In this Poetry Unbound in Conversation episode, host Pádraig Ó Tuama speaks with National Book Award-winning poet Martín Espada about the intersection

Key takeaways

• Martín Espada won the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection Floaters, which directly confronts Border Patrol dehumanization of drowned migrants.
• Espada's poem Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World was written for Newtown, Connecticut, following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre to honor community resilience rather than rehash trauma.

Main topics

• Poetry as political imagination
• Immigration and border policy

Notable quotes

"Politics by themselves are necessary but not sufficient … poetry by itself is necessary but not sufficient. We must find a way to bring them together."

Conclusion

The episode offers listeners a profound look at how poetry can serve as

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Hi friends, Padraig O'Tooma here. Thanks very much for listening to Poetry Unbound. In between Poetry Unbound seasons, and we have season 11 that'll start later in 2026, we have a whole host of interviews that I've done with poets over the last two years. Poetry Unbound in conversation, we call them. I've loved the opportunity to talk to poets about their craft, how they see the world through the lens of poetry, and what this art form does for them. These... Poetry Unbound in Conversation episodes deepened my curiosity about language and art. I trust they will for you too. Speaker 1 (0:41) In this episode of Poetry Unbound in Conversation, you'll be hearing from Martín Espada. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Martín has written more than 20 books of poetry and on fiction and translation. His collection, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry, and Martín is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This conversation was part of the Greenbelt Festival, an annual festival for arts, activism and belief in England. Greenbelt has an online component too, and for this conversation, Martine joined us from Amherst while I was at the festival in England. A special thanks to Paul Northup, Jane Cookson, Joanna Booth, Stream 7, Christian Aid, and all the volunteers and staff and audience members at the Greenbelt Festival. And a thanks too to Garrett Sawyer and Jay Metcalf at Northfire Recording Studio in Amherst, Massachusetts, who hosted Martine for this conversation. Brand new episodes of Poetry Unbound will be back later on this year, and there are plenty of Poetry Unbound and conversation episodes until then, as well as a great archive. Here I am with Martine Espada. Speaker 1 (1:57) Good afternoon, everybody. It's so nice to see you. Let me check with everybody who is here at the moment. Can you hear me? You can? Great. My name is Padraig O'Toolema, and I am delighted to be in conversation today with Martín Espada. And I'm going to introduce Martín, and you, I know, will be moved by the scope and breadth and interests and artistry of his work. Martin has published more than 20 books as a poet and editor and essayist and translator. He won the US National Book Award for poetry in 2021. He's had books banned and outlawed because of their focus on justice and human rights. He is a former tenant lawyer, as we'll hear later on, from Greater Boston in the United States. And he works as a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Martine, you are so very welcome to Greenbelt. Speaker 2 (2:48) Thank you very much, Fon. Speaker 1 (2:51) I don't know where your camera is focused on at the moment, Martine, but there's about 100 people here, all in anoraks and waterproofs and umbrellas. Some, one or two are dry. Most people are not quite dry. And we will be broadcasting this as a podcast later on through Greenbelt and through Poetry Unbound as well. And you are among friends, Martine. Even if you haven't been to Greenbelt before, people are excited to hear your work. So I want to start off by asking you a couple of questions so folks can get to know you a little bit. We're going to be hearing a lot of your poems today from across four collections, but I'd love to hear first, when did you first hear poetry? Speaker 2 (3:32) I was not raised with poetry. I first heard poetry when an eighth grade English teacher forced me to recite the lyrics of the Mikado out loud. It was not an auspicious start. So that was the first time I heard it. Speaker 1 (3:52) And when did you think that you and poetry might have a longer conversation than that inauspicious start? Speaker 2 (3:59) It was very gradual. I did not study poetry in school and very much came to it on my own. I recall, in fact, that I was a terrible student. In fact, once flunked English in the eighth grade, and now I'm a professor of English, which only shows you the strange directions your life can take. Speaker 1 (4:25) Were there early poets who you turned to that surprised you about your connection with poetry? Or was it something that happened by yourself, just turning to poetry without having guides in the form of books or voices that helped? Speaker 2 (4:40) It really wasn't until I got to college and more to the point dropped out of college that I started to haunt the bookstores of Madison, Wisconsin. I would eventually get a bachelor's degree in history from University of Wisconsin. But first I got a degree in the bookstores of that town and began to stumble across poetry. and reinforced the idea that this was something for me. But even before that, there were attempts to introduce me to poetry, which in hindsight I realized meant a great deal. When I was about 20 years old, there was a family friend, a community organizer by the name of Luis Cardenas Costa, who came to visit us, and he handed me an anthology. This anthology was called Latin American Revolutionary Poetry. It was bilingual. It was edited by Roberto Marquez, a Puerto Rican scholar. And I took the book with a loud grunt. Wasn't sure whether to read it or to eat it. But I instead opted to read it, and I discovered that I had a tradition, that I had a history, that I had a legacy, that I was not alone. And that, if we can pinpoint one moment where it started, maybe that's the place. Speaker 1 (6:08) Anthologies, I'm going to ask you about an anthology later on, but anthologies are an extraordinary way for people to enter into a broad field of poetry, I think. Speaker 2 (6:19) Oh, absolutely. If you are looking at an anthology and there are 50 poets in it, and let's say you only respond to 10, well, that's 10 books you should go out and get. Speaker 1 (6:30) Yeah, that's great. You studied law and worked as a tenant lawyer in Boston. Could you tell us a little bit about the interest in that and your curiosity and your focus on that? I'm tempted to say you're a fire for tenant law because it is such an alive energy in you. Speaker 2 (6:50) The interest, so to speak, was the interest of others. My father wanted me to go to law school. My primary mentor at the University of Wisconsin, Professor Herbert Hill, former National Labor Director of the NAACP, civil rights activist, wanted me to go to law school. Neither one of them had any concept of me being a poet or studying poetry. I was the first person in my family to go to college. I didn't have any concept of an MFA program or the idea of teaching poetry down the line. And in fact, my mother once took me aside and asked me, what's a graduate student? I thought once you graduate, you're not a student anymore. And that was the level of our approach to my future. So that's how I ended up in law school. I went to Northeastern University Law School in Boston, and I got my JD there. And I practiced in several areas, but I ended up focusing. On housing law, I represented tenants with a program called Subclinica Legal, a legal services program for low-income Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a tough little town right across the Tobin Bridge from Boston, Gateway City, a city of immigrants, always has been. Speaker 1 (8:24) I wonder if we could start off with hearing Speaker 2 (8:26) poems from you by hearing the poet's quote. Speaker 2 (8:31) Sure. Would you like me to say a few words about it? Speaker 1 (8:34) You can do that now or afterwards. I've got plenty of questions for you, Martin, about the poem. Okay. Speaker 2 (8:40) Okay. Well, simply put, this is a poem for a friend of mine, a poet and Vietnam veteran by the name of Jeff Mayle, who I knew through the William Joyner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass Boston. Speaker 2 (8:58) The poet's quote. Speaker 2 (9:01) For Jeff Mayle, 1946-2003. Speaker 2 (9:07) when I cough. people duck away afraid of the coal miners disease the imagined eruption of blood down the chin in the emergency room the doctor gestures at the x-ray where the lung crumples like a tossed poem you heard me cough slipped off your coat and draped it with ceremony across my shoulders so i became the king of rain and wind Keep it, you said. You are my teacher. Speaker 2 (9:45) I kept it, a trench coat with its own film noir detective swagger. Speaker 2 (9:52) The war in Vietnam snaked rivers of burning sandpans through your brain, but still your hands filled with poems gleaming like fish. The highways of Virginia sent Confederate ghost patrols to hang you in dreams. A black man with too many books, but still you tugged the collar of your coat around my neck. Speaker 2 (10:18) Now you are dead. your heart throbbing too fast for the doctors at the veterans hospital to keep the beat the pool bottles rattling maracas and a mambo for the doomed on the night of your memorial service in boston i wore your coat in a storm along the florida shore-line the wind stung my face with sand and with every slap I remembered your ashes. With every salvo of arrows in the rain, your coat Speaker 1 (10:49) became Speaker 2 (10:50) the armor of a samurai. On the beach I found the skeleton of a blowfish, his spikes and leopard skin eaten away by the conqueror salt. Your coat banished the conqueror back into the sea. soon your ashes fly to the veterans cemetery at arlington where once a confederate general would have counted you among his mules and pigs This poet's quote is your last poem. I want to write a poem like this coat with buttons and pockets and green cloth, a poem useful as a coat to a coughing man. Speaker 2 (11:41) Teach me. Speaker 1 (11:45) Thank you. Speaker 1 (11:49) I hope you can hear the applause from here, Martina. Speaker 2 (11:53) I'll have to take your word for it. Speaker 1 (11:56) Um... This poem, as you mentioned, is dedicated to Geoff Mayall, who died when he was about 56. Many of your poems either name people of your acquaintance or friendship or mentors or are deliberately addressed to them. And there's something, when I read your work, I always feel introduced to a community of people around you. And you said earlier on that, you know, your interest in law was about the interests of others. Could you tell us a little bit about the kind of social, almost the personal social interest that you bring to so many poems by introducing us to people, including the wonderful Jeff Mayall? Speaker 2 (12:39) Well, I've never quite heard it put that way before, but it's true. I do tend to think of poems, not all of them, but many, as providing a service. And sometimes it is quite literally having to do with a service. So this particular poem, I recall reading at a memorial for Jeff Mayle at the Joyner Center. for the study of war and