Both Exiliana and House rest on a solid personal voice. Are you looking forward to expanding beyond autobiographical wellsprings in your new works?

Autobiographical writing is a period in the life of a writer; I found that I woke up as a writer very late in life. I wrote extensively nonfiction, articles and essays. I do a lot of translation and only now, after fifteen years of writing, would I say I’m comfortable with writing fiction.

Sometimes I thought that I should have started with fiction long ago. Poetry was necessarily the first thing to come out of me; I don’t think I will ever stop writing poetry. My new poetry comprehends historical events. It is also more a product of imagination than autobiographical, unlike my first two books. I also commit to other projects such as anthologies, translations, and a novel in which I include other characters than myself.

How much of an uncompromised political voice can you appreciate in poetry aesthetics?

I happen to be one of those writers who believe that the role of a writer as politically neutral is nonexistent. At some point, any serious writer will be in the middle – whether deliberate or not – of a political dilemma.

I can appreciate good poetry from Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, or others who didn’t need to define themselves in terms of political standpoints… Ultimately, I would imagine that the quality of a writing will survive or surpass any past or current political need.

Whether apathetic or unfelt, an individual sensibility is necessarily molded by collectivity and history. Your thoughts? For someone like you who believes that writing can serve a community, how would you keep the strings between both ends delicate yet taut?

This is so simple. We are one, the collective consciousness and the individual. We are alone and create alone, but we go out into the world, and bring with us our own experience. We “stamp” it in our collectivity or community.

I believe a writer is an eye, a pervasive eye that sees the reality that surrounds us, as well as the impression it makes on our souls. It reacts — or does not react — by putting it on paper. Many may decide to take a step forward and become active in changing certain realities. Other writers withdraw themselves into isolation and writing. There they try to recapture some of the truth they have experienced.

Personally, I see myself as a part of a community. I like to be alone, too — I enjoy the music of the silence and the hours I spend alone in contemplation. But I do need an alternative, the noisy interaction with others — with a world that I can and sometimes cannot understand. We have discussed so much about art only for the sake of art, but I don’t believe that a person, who has a great amount of talent, can be unconscious of the responsibility for those talents. If talents can only be individuals’s hands, the collective consciousness would not be able to appreciate its truth. I don’t think we partake of community so as to avoid being alone, but rather to extend our reach — to return to ourselves as if to return to the primitive sense of ourselves. It is like a dance, some people know how to do it, some people don’t. Even if you master technical skills, you need a contact with the environment, just as you need contact with yourself.