Giannina Braschi - Yo-Yo Boing!

— 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. The Berlin Wall came down. Why can’t I do the same? Since the Tower of Babel, languages have always divorced us from the rest of humanity. 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, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and I even feel like Garcilaso forging a new language. I welcome the new century, the century of the new American language, and wave farewell to all the separatist rhetoric and atavisms.

Welcome the sun, spider,

Don’t be so spiteful.

A kiss,

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.

— Which one is the poet?

— They both are.

— Who’s reading tonight?

— The Rican.

— Poetry is a dead art, long dead. I want the here and now, Coke and pretzels, junk food, fast food. I have to ask myself what I am doing here, listening to a Rican who can’t speak English or Spanish.

— I can understand Spanish, but I can’t understand Puerto Ricans.

— We have a similar problem. I can understand English, but I cannot understand Americans.

— Scum of the earth. Banish them from the Republic. Sponges. Chameleons.

— So what. Zelig is a chameleon.

— Zelig is Woody Allen, and Woody Allen is a filmmaker, and filmmakers count and poets don’t.

— When do we eat?

— I’m nervous. Did you see him? Over there.

— Who?

— Scorsese. What is he doing here?

— Wassila invited him.

— I should have known. I would have worn my Armani suit. Why did you made me wear this Mao Tse-tung outfit? It doesn’t fit me. I don’t belong here. I’m scared. Why did you take me out of my closet? I’m going to be so famous I don’t even want to think about it. But I’m not ready to expose myself. How dreadful to be somebody. To know that I was nobody. To feel so hurt inside — knowing that I was somebody — inside. To know I was so shy — nobody knew I was somebody — except some nobodies. To know that I was neglected, unwanted, and to be here in front of Scorsese, who’ll recognize my talent and make me a movie star.

— We’ll worry about it after it happens. In the meantime, try to shine.

— I’m not Madonna. I want my closet back. Close my doors. Do you think they really want to know who I am?

— Of course not. Some are here for a taste of Suzana’s salmon mousse and high art. Others want her movie contacts and coconut rice.

— Oh, my God. Let’s go home. Robert De Niro. What am I doing here? With all these mafiosos. Al Pacino. I’m gonna die. The Godfather himself.

— Whatever you do, don’t sound lyrical. Grumble guttural, sardonic threats. I’m gonna crack ya mudda fuckin’ head open. Smash ya goddamn teef in. Mafia talk.

— Deny my culture.

— Mock it. Roll your r ’s rougher like you’re mad.

— I am mad. What am I doing here?

— Shhh. Remember, bring out the killer inside you.

— Macbeth has murdered sleep. I can’t remember my lines. My hands are bloody sleepy, bloody merry, Bloody Mary, with scotch on the rocks, and my heart just stands still for Al Pacino.

— I told you we had to practice.

— I don’t have to practice. I know it by heart.

— Don’t improvise like you did the last time, incorporating cheap shots into the text.

— You made me so angry I had to read what I was feeling inside, which was stormier than the way I wrote it. I wanted to see if you really felt the part. Don’t look offended by your lines. I didn’t invent these dialogues. They’re your words, Mr. Nice Guy. But you cringe with beet red shame whenever I quote you. I know it’s painful to be ashamed. We all feel ashamed sometimes. You thought we had it all rehearsed, but if I let you, you would steal the show.

— Steal the show! Everyone can tell you wrote it. You keep all the best lines for yourself.

— Everything is improvised one way or another. But all I see is one huge highway where cars don’t stop for anybody, and I’m waiting for a miracle or a solution to my dilemma — I have to cross the street, but there are no traffic lights — please, somebody, be kind enough to stop and let me cross, or everybody, please stop for a second to let me cross, or take me down the highway of destiny, where there is a lighthouse in the night, smoky air, and flickering candles — like a child lost in the night of a party, who sits in a crowd, wondering: Where am I? I look around. I am a child lost in the crowd of that party, showing his heart of music and pain. That’s me — drunk, wild and blue, always looking around the smoky air and flickering candles — like the child who, in the night of the party, feels lost in the cloud, the smoky air, and the flickering candles — showing his heart of music and pain.

I want to think the way men think when they’re tired of thinking. With dead eyes. I am dead. And it’s not a matter of surviving. I have survived. And I’m not proud that I’m one of the survivors. Survivors are not proud of having left the dead behind — they’re just as dead as the dead — and their smell stinks more than the stench of the dead. Just because you rise at dawn, and you walk, and talk — alive or dead — you’re more dead than alive. Stop talking about you — as if it were somebody else but you — me — myself — the dead — looking at the blank verse in a mirror every morning and brushing my teeth with the infamous cavity — right through the blank verse because it’s blank without verse or phrase or paraphrase — sound or mute — blank or empty — the eyes of the verse fill the blank verse and open each window of my verse, my veracity, my versatility.