An Interview with Tino Villanueva
A watercolor by Tino Villanueva, “Flashpoints,” graces the cover of the Spring 2010 MELUS, which contains an excellent interview of Villanueva by A. Robert Lee, of Nihon University, Tokyo.
Lee writes: “’In my head / was a roaring of light.’ The phrase appears in “The 8 O’Clock Movie” (16), an opening poem in Tino Villanueva’s collection Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993). The speaker uses it to describe the 1973 experience of re-seeing a black-and-white television version of George Stevens’s 1956 Hollywood screen classic, with its sumptuous wide-screen portrait of Texas oil and a wildcatting dynasty, and its contrast of Anglo and Latino lives. The phrase could readily apply to almost all of Villanueva’s writings. Since he made his entrance with Hay Otra Voz Poems (1972), he has established himself as a frontline literary presence, adept in both English- and Spanish-language verse. Among his Latino/a literary generation—notably Bernice Zamora, Alurista, Martín Espada, Gary Soto, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Tato Laviera, and Carmen Tafolla—he is seen as a Chicano poet of bicultural word and history yet wholly endowed with his own rare gifts of voice.
“Villanueva has written a great deal from an awareness of struggle—rural and small-town poverty and discrimination based on ethnicity, identity, gender, and language politics. Yet important as these concerns have been, they by no means bespeak Villanueva’s whole repertoire. Hay Otra Voz Poems offers love poetry (‘I Saw The First Leaf Fall’), poetry of earth and space on the occasion of the Apollo 11 mission (‘Redeemed’), and existential reflections (‘Autolaberinto’); yet it also contains the sequence ‘Mi Raza,’ with its vistas of back-breaking migrant field labor and itinerancy in the Southwest. The opening pieces in Shaking Off the Dark (1984) take up the nature of creativity and writing. The collection also includes Villanueva’s taste for haiku in ‘Right on Time’—‘Together, all of / them coming out from behind / clouds: geese flying…’”
Click here to hear Villanueva read his poems at the Library of Congress.
Postscript, September 2010: Villanueva’s verse has been included in the newly issued monumental Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, edited by Ilan Stavans.