Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrerais a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera has been the United States Poet Laureate since 2015...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth27 December 1948
CountryUnited States of America
spanish verbs
Sometimes you can do things with Spanish - like verbs and genders - easier than you can in English.
change poem solar spanish totally versus
Sometimes it's like that. I go, 'You know what? I'm going to just change scales. I'm going to even change instruments. And I'm going to go into the chromatics of the Spanish language,' and I do. You know, the poem is totally different. It's like a lunar voice versus a day voice, a solar voice.
cleaned houses loved poetry texas
My mother was a washerwoman - or a woman that cleaned houses in Texas... in Plano, Texas - who always loved poetry and always loved stories.
felt
As a boy, I felt ashamed of being Mexican. I'd say I was Hawaiian.
education gifted high juvenile throughout worked worker
I've worked throughout California as a poet: in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms.
asking corner diego half hip people poems san sticking
I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.
bit grade hit learning second spoke third time
First grade was - I spoke only Spanish, and second grade - probably a bit more English. And by the time I hit third grade, I was learning, of course, much, much more English.
across fingers page pen sketch white work
A pen is different from the pad, the key, moving your fingers across a screen. I like both. I like to work on sketchbooks, big old white sketch paper. I like how that feels, and I like to put different media on it. Then there's the phone, smartphone, iPad: It's the new page, and it's not the same page anymore.
almost centuries difficult facing figure hard issue odd people poem poetry speak
Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.
change hankering musical
I'm usually writing in English, and then I'll get the hankering to change channels. And usually I'll do that when I want to try a whole new set of keys, like musical keys.
definitely
I am representing California, and all of California, definitely as a Mexicano, a Chicano, a Latino.
creating design sound workshop yourselves
I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'
bell closely looked second stop
Marvin Bell always looked very closely at how lines could break, how you could put over one line into the second line. How you could stop the line two or three times within the line: You could make it stop.
flexible
A poem is a flexible thing, and a poem is a poem.