“Green plaintains and bananas, flying into town like projectiles” conjured a hurricane in a poem read by Victor Hernández Cruz (pictured left) at NCC’s first Len Roberts Poetry Day on April 10, in the David A. Reed Community Room.

Surprising, yet perfectly apt images-- “birds are in her lungs”--to depict Cuban singer La Lupe, vivify Cruz’s verse. Comparing his style to Cubist painting, in which seemingly disparate objects form a recognizable whole, the poet described how his work crosses and connects cultural, language and artistic frames.

Born in the small town of Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico in 1949, Cruz moved with his family to New York City’s Lower East Side when he was five. His experience as an immigrant and the son of immigrants, transplanted from the Caribbean to icy New York winters and “boxes of cement,” attuned him to the world’s blends and juxtapositions. Growing up, he lived in a “simultaneity of places and sounds.”

Cruz now divides his time between Puerto Rico and Morocco, the birthplace of his wife. In the Middle East, he sees parts of his own complex Hispanic heritage; North African Muslims populated Spain for centuries and lent their language, food, music, and outlook to Spanish culture. “The influences are potent,” Cruz said.

“My work is the study of the person within history,” Cruz said at the poetry reading and discussion that followed. “I am writing with and against history, imagining history.” History is fragmented, Cruz said, by conquest, migrations, different languages, and time. Languages build on each other, Cruz said. His own started with Spanish phonetics superimposed on English grammar, the first language he learned to read.

“My challenge is to express that which weaves through things and connects them,” the poet said.

Cruz called his process “planification,” a word he coined to mean that he investigates his subjects before writing his poems. “Poetry is an event, an experience that moves toward the future.”

Cruz’s work has received international recognition. As a teenager, he helped found the Nuyorican (New York-Puerto Rico) cultural movement of the 1970s. In addition to authoring numerous works of poetry and prose, Cruz has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Latin American Guggenheim Award and a New York Poetry Foundation Award. In 2002, he became a finalist for the international Griffin Poetry Prize. This year, he was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His latest poetry collection is The Mountain in the Sea, published by Coffee House Press.

NCC’s annual poetry day was started more than 25 years ago by Len Roberts, a beloved NCC professor of English from 1974 until his death in May 2007. He was an internationally-known poet and the recipient of numerous awards for writing and teaching.

On the Len Roberts Poetry Day, Professor of English James von Schilling remembered Roberts as a “vital, active colleague, friend and teacher.” Roberts, he said, was always excited about and proud of the College’s annual poetry day. Through Roberts’s connections in the poetry world, he brought prominent poets to campus, including some Pulitzer Prize winners. The poetry day, renamed for Roberts, is being continued through an endowment established in his memory. The reading and discussion by Victor Hernández Cruz was sponsored by the College Life Committee and organized by the Len Roberts Poetry Day Committee, including Professor of English James von Schilling, Assistant Professor of English Mary Mathis, Assistant Professor of English Randy Boone, and Associate Professor of English Javier Avila.

Two poems by Victor Hernández Cruz:

“Problems with Hurricanes”

A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it’s not the wind
or the noise or the water.
I’ll tell you he said:
it’s the mangoes, avocados
Green plaintains and bananas
flying into town like projectiles.

How would your family
feel if you had to tell
The generations that you
got killed by a flying
Banana.

Death by drowning has honor
If the wind picked you up
and slammed you
Against a mountain boulder
This would carry shame
But
to suffer a mango smashing
Your skull
or a plaintain hitting your
Temple at 70 miles per hour
is the ultimate disgrace.

The campesino takes off his hat—
As a sign of respect
toward the fury of the wind
And says:
Don’t worry about the noise
Don’t worry about the water
Don’t worry about the wind—
If you are going out
beware of mangoes
And all such beautiful
sweet things.

“Eisenhower”

How did the bold skull of Eisenhower enter my life,
his head like the moon inside the black-and-white
television sets of the tenements.

Caribbean mountain Spanish phonetics
came up with versions of his name,
who could pronounce such letters?
To some it sounded like “ice in shower” others
said “eye in hour” listening
to the English as if it were music you could see,
in the morning of immigration.
Simultaneously Trio Los Panchos lifted
curtains at the Teatro Puerto Rico in the Bronx.

His D-Day European theater performances
still lingering below and above the Popeye
cartoons.
Animation of bombs coming out of the
East River, newsreels of a recent past
Europe’s barbarous cold murder
at the same time my grandmother’s
brown hands spliced tobacco leafs
in the tropics.

In the apartments of the immigrants
Straw hat brown skeletons stood
next to wooden houses
Flamboyans in black and white
drooping into the zinc roofs framed in photos
upon shelves staring out the windows
at the snow.
I fancied missiles shooting out of
Hopalong Cassidy’s black sombrero,
Coco spilling out of an ink jar
onto the green lush forest of memory.

We materialized like wild calabaza
foliage into the urban sprawl.

Eisenhower was one of the first faces
we came upon beaming out of the
television.
The king of a new land
that did not feel like earth.
but like boxes of cement
Reaching into a dim gray sky,
We found so many people
already screwed and nailed
into the walls
Immigrants from holocaust
barbed wire
terror still in their eyes
and in the nervous lilt
of their fragmented inglish.

At first we saw the place without words
it was just image and sound,
not knowing the names of things
in their local whats,
We ate the scenery with our eyes
without pronouncing it.
Practicing the sensation of newly
occupied syllables.

What was Eisenhower saying
coming out of the radio,
A line of tanks lined up as words
splattering into our Caribbean ears
of amphibian melodies.
So many birds left their nest
falling into severe industrial
gravity.
Fruits showed up behind cellophane.

Along with the Koran War,
thick cans of Rheingold beer,
A chocolate syrup in a jar called Bosco,
Willie Mays in the outfield,
Juicy Fruit girls from the suburbs,
serial novellas through Spanish radio,
in the public schools we did
bomb drills,
Diving under the tables in tune
to the sirens from local fire stations.

It was the cinema of arrival
Eisenhower was the star of the movie,
As my English got better
the old bold man disappeared
we saw him no longer.
Parrots kept arriving from the tropics,
piece by piece colored feathers
into the northern drizzle.
Lizards came through bamboo shoots,
Seeds from the center of guavas
tamarind of abandoned soil.
The city skyline became melted
vocabulary
Reaching into the sky’s efforts
to become blue.