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
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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.
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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.
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Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.
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The banner of the project is 'Casa de Colores.' Under that banner, I'm going to invite people to do a lot of good things. Perhaps working in groups, working on poetry.
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I know I'm representing the Library of Congress, all the people of the United States and, of course, the Latinos and Latinas as well.
people
I'm very grateful to all the people of Fresno, to Philip Levine and all the poets before me, and all the farmworkers. I didn't get here by myself.
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I'm a political poet - let us say a 'human' poet, a poet that's concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that's what I'm going to use.
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All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people - a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it - big questions.
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We went from crop to crop, field to field. And my father had that army truck, a 1940s army truck from Fort Bliss, El Paso.
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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.
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Perhaps, like the way these leaves spread out and the way they curl in many directions and how they have many features, I think that's how my road has been.
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San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High - it's all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from.
spanish verbs
Sometimes you can do things with Spanish - like verbs and genders - easier than you can in English.
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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.