I sense a vital longing that gives shape and life to your poems in The Portable Famine. Would you please say something about their impetus?

The Portable Famine consists of mainly "on the road" poems written as I traveled either for business or my annual vacations that I always take alone. I worked on these drafts of poems for about 5 years. This process allowed me to honor the spontaneity available in travel with the deliberateness of craft that I require of my work. There is indeed a sense of longing in this collection, a longing that will never be answered. The more I travel, the more conscious I’ve become of the fact that I don’t fit easily anywhere. It is like being homesick for an imaginary place.

Did you have a muse or a coterie of muses that accompanied you as you wrote and constructed this book?

Instead of muses, I have a coterie of ghosts. Some have appeared in other books (Uncle Rachel, my drag queen uncle, for example) and others startled me with their new presences (Mormon friends from my Utah years). Betsy Sandlin just recently wrote a scholarly paper on my being a "haunted" poet, even though she hadn’t yet read The Portable Famine. But my "invisible guests," as Czesław Miłosz writes in a poem, do not frighten me or arrive with messages or even tasks to complete to help them. My poems may help keep these ghosts from a final, even more profound death: They must not be forgotten.

Again, I like mixing things up—high culture and low culture, straight and gay, etc. The word "dreaming," in all of its forms, is a dangerous word. We use it in the expression, "The American Dream." We also tend to dismiss someone if "they’re only a dreamer." For me, in "Returning to Puerto Rico as a Stranger," I want to emphasize the need to value this reality, what is around us. I find nostalgia to be a very dangerous poison. Discovery (or curiosity) keeps us conscious of things and moments that can so easily be taken for granted. Creativity, sexuality, laughter, and associative-thinking are revealed only by the specifics (sometimes "gritty" details) of our shared lives and times.

In these poems do you feel as if you’re "hiding in plain sight"?

One can hide in a poem, but one cannot hide in a book of poems. Narratives emerge; ideas are echoed throughout the readings. Today’s poet and reader are living through the most dangerous times in American history. I know this is a radical claim, but I see proofs of this on a daily basis. I especially applaud librarians who well understand the evilness of the Patriot Act (what a great phrase). Now there are "minute men," once called vigilantes, patrolling American borders. Such activity is also occurring in the world of letters—who gets published, whose work is distributed, etc. Censorship works best as a preventive measure rather than after the fact of publication. Yet, here I am—a gay, Puerto Rican, and former working-class poet who has an audience. The gay world has always double-voiced, has understood the power of encoding and decoding. I see my work as working in many worlds at once.

Does your addiction to "dawn, to light, to vision" hint at prophecy? What role does the prophetic voice play in your poetry?

Unlike most of my friends, I write at dawn, the earlier the better. I get to see the world turn from darkness to light. This is also when my ghosts mostly visit; the grave does not have a sunrise or the colors yellow or blue. It’s easy being "prophetic" in this time of global homogenization for corporate profit. Being a prophet is another matter, as I learned from W.B. Yeats and Yannis Ritsos. It is only after a lifetime of poems, of difficult work, that a man or woman can be judged a prophet. I think of Emily Dickinson in her obscurity, of Frank O’Hara’s prolific body of work in an era of personal and public repressions, and of Pablo Neruda’s last years on an island as the world praised him. I never worry about publication for often I write to the future, to younger readers, and to those who only exist now as ideas.

The perception that you don’t belong to the country of your origin or the U.S. haunts your poetry with all of your ghosts. Where do you belong and where does that position your poetry? Is The Portable Famine, in its way, an attempt to create "a country that doesn’t exist"? What would be the salient characteristics of your "imaginary nation"?

What about Shelley makes him your beloved?

I’ve learned that one’s hunger(s) follows you from place to place. Learning how to ask real questions is everyone’s life’s work. Occasionally, real answers arrive. Most often, though, illusion (or the "mirage" from the earlier question) is a safer route, a less taxing choice. Yet, that is also the route of eventual suffering. Even though I’m not religious, I’m attracted to two religious figures: Isaiah of the Old Testament who knows about human ache and also the Laughing Buddha who knows of the curative powers of laughter and joy. Who knows more about place than the displaced? I crafted this book to be about feasts, famines, and to honor the art of thriving against all odds.