Interview with
Frank X. Gaspar By: Lynne Kemen Who is Frank X. Gaspar? What is it about your life that created you as a writer? As odd as this might sound, I think I was a “writer” from my very earliest childhood. I remember filling paper with scribbles before I knew any letters of the alphabet. There was something tactilely pleasing about moving the pencil over the pad. I wrote “stories” as soon as I learned to read. I read voraciously. I loved reading. Circumstances were not happy, and reading took me to marvelous places. As I got older I found that trying to write my own stories and poems, such as they were, gave me a similar feeling of liberation and possibility. The concentration required to make something—I think perhaps any art--is not unlike certain kinds of meditation. It heals and affirms.
Can you tell us your three favorite poets (living or dead) and why you chose them? I’ll stick with the dead ones (and the great dead poets are hardly dead, are they?). Emily Dickinson. She wrote under the straights of circumstance that would have crushed any lesser person. She moved language around with scalpel and forceps (and with a sledgehammer and wedge, too!). Her best poems are heartbreaking and yet fierce. It was Harold Bloom, I think, who said we are a hundred years away from coming to full terms with her. He speaks as a critic. She speaks to us as one of our greatest poets. Oh, this could go on forever. Well, Hart Crane. His instruments are not as fine as Dickinson’s, but he hurls language the way some abstract expressionist painters use paint. His poems overwhelm sometimes with the thickness of his language, and then you take a half-step back, and you see how perfect they are. I have read “Voyages” my whole adult life, and certain passages still take my breath away. He is wild and yet behind the wildness is his own kind of perfection. Poetry
Renata Ferreira’s poems were composed in the final years of Portugal’s fascist regime, exposing and subverting the government’s draconian edicts against women’s rights, sexual freedoms, political dissent, and progressive thought. She worked in the resistance passing hand-typed bulletins and banned literature throughout Lisbon, yet her poetry is unmistakably ardent, tender, fraught, erotic, and Sapphic. Presenting the poems of this Portuguese-American writer and detailing their surprising rediscovery in 2015, Frank X. Gaspar fuses genres, flouts borders, and brings to life a voice that had been silenced. As his inventive narrative unfolds, Ferreira emerges, whole and mysterious, offering up her history, her passions, and her art.
“In his unique fashion, Frank X. Gaspar draws the margins of Atlantic culture closer: Salazar’s politics and the Carnation Revolution flow onto the shores of the Portuguese community of Provincetown and Bohemian New York. Along with the foreword and poems, a welter of notes extends the fictional romp with riddles of identity, history, myth, and the untraveled territories of the mind. The Poems of Renata Ferreira is vintage Gaspar—a deft and intriguing performance.” Teresa alves “There are poems pulled from a well, others dropped from the sky. What fortune that Frank X. Gaspar was there with his basket to catch the poems of Renata Ferreira, work that through his fingers emerges as a meditation on eros as resistance, the dangers of country, and the ghost hand of artistic influence. A love story, an animal howl, The Poems of Renata Ferreira is a song of saudade that I never wanted to end.” lindsay Whalen
T h e P oe m s of
Renata Ferreira
Renata Ferreira
You have published several volumes of beautiful poetry, among them: A Field Guide to the Heavens, The Poems of Renata Ferriera, Night of 1,000 Blossoms.Which themes do you keep wanting to revisit? How have you changed, if you have, as a writer over time?
T he P oems of
“A fascinating saga weaving desire and memory, war and beauty, lies, truth, and the persistence of art. Fernando Pessoa and José Saramago are certainly among Gaspar’s kindred writers, but I’m also reminded of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet —I feel that same total immersion. I’m swept away. The Poems of Renata Ferreira is gorgeous and witty, wildly smart—even the end notes are pure poetry!” ellen Bass
frank X. Gaspar
I think I’d include Adrian Rich in this short list. She is someone, like the others, who you can go back to again and again. Her passion for social justice puts a finely-honed edge on her writing. Her poems can see and convey how our culture and the world can stray from virtue, but the poems give up nothing in doing this. Their beauty lies in her steady voice and the integrity of her sensations.
Transcribed and annoTaTed, wiTh a foreword by
frank X. Gaspar
FRANK X. GASPAR is a wonderfully gifted author who—luckily for us—happens to be Portuguese-American. The Poems of Renata Ferreira reminds me of the passion and outrage of Novas Cartas Portuguesas by the Three Marias. Like Novas Cartas, this is also a book that subverts genre, composed at it is of memoir, fiction, essay, notes, and, of course, Renata’s poetry. The result is a remarkable book that is sure to keep readers entertained for years to come. anTónio ladeira porTuGuese in The americas
Cover design by adam b. bohannon. Cover photo by Christopher Larkosh, Cravo vermelho/Red carnation, East Providence, RI, April 2019.
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I don’t ever think of themes. I have a sense that theme (in literature, anyway) is a way of naming what the poet’s psyche needs to express, and that poet is bound to return to his or her psyche’s demands. I mean to say that this is not always—maybe never is—a conscious decision. My later poems are shaped, I think, by imperatives of the psyche that I was unable to reach—did not have the skills to reach—when I first began writing seriously. Or I could say that I have changed and my deep self may have changed accordingly.
12/13/19 7:02 AM